EXCLUSIVE: Shannon Evangelista was fascinated by the story of Benjaman Kyle, who was diagnosed with amnesia after being found naked and hurt besides a dumpster behind a Burger King in Richmond Hill, Georgia in 2004.
Ten years later, the co-founder of production company Hot Snakes Media, was standing next to him at the top of a hill in Colorado.
“He turns to us and says ‘This would be a really good place to get rid of a body, wouldn’t it?’,” she told Deadline.
Evangelista believes that Kyle, otherwise known as William Burgess Powell, may never have actually had amnesia, but instead was allegedly involved in a crime syndicate and was close with George Keck, a man who was one of the prime suspects in the 1977 killing of Kristine Kozik, a 19-year-old Purdue University freshman, whose decomposed body was founded in a field six miles south of Lafeyette.
All of this forms part of an untitled series that Evangelista, who co-founded her company with her husband Eric, is producing for Investigation Discovery.
It marks a major step change for Evangelista, who is used to being behind the camera, producing series such as Netflix’s DeafU and TLC’s long-running franchise Breaking Amish.
“I actually hate being on camera,” she said. “That being said, [Kyle] pulled me into the story in such a major way that it just started to organically unfold like that. I’m a private person, I’m not an extrovert or narcissist, I don’t want to be in front of the camera. But when I get into the zone of solving a crime, I forget that there’s a camera there because I’m wearing a different hat.”
This, however, is not Evangelista’s first dalliance with the criminal underworld. She started her career as a criminal defense attorney specializing in organized crime and later served as assistant district attorney in Orange County before moving to New York to become a prosecutor in the Special Narcotics Division of the DA’s office.
Kyle’s implied threat against Evangelista is not even the most terrifying encounter that she had on camera in the four-part series.
Evangelista interviewed Keck a couple of years before he died in 2020 at his trailer in Indiana.
“It’s not the most comfortable thing knowing I’m going to speak with the prime suspect, whose wife said he did it. I’ll do it but I’m not happy about it. I hope I don’t end up in a ditch,” she says on camera.
After admitting she’s “f*cking nervous”, she brings up Kozik’s death. “On that one there, in fact, they wanted me as a suspect, and I failed a lie detector because I did know more than I was letting on,” he tells her. “I knew she was killed accidentally because I was told straight from the horse’s mouth.”
Evangelista keeps him talking. “I can’t [tell you who did it]. [The killer] tried to get her to go down on him and she didn’t want to. Then, she got out of the car and he got out of his side and for some reason, she swung at him. He hit her, she fell and she hit her head on a rock. Now, I didn’t see a rock or anything else there, but that’s what I was told,” he adds.
West Lafayette Police now consider his line “I didn’t see a rock” as a slip up by Keck, similar to the one that Andrew Jarecki managed to record of Robert Durst in HBO’s The Jinx, a comment that ultimately led to a murder conviction.
Keck has also been also linked to two other suspicious deaths: the 1977 abduction and killing of his Linda Ferry, a woman who also worked as a janitor at Purdue University, who was found strangled in the trunk of her car, and the abduction of college student Jennifer Smith.
Evangelista has been helping police crack the case. She was able to get Keck’s DNA by stealing a straw and a fork that he used at a diner while eating with her. As a result of her work, police in Lafayette reopened these cases, as well as one involving the 1978 murder of Tracy Walker.
Keck’s story is also being shared in the ID series, but the focus is on Kyle. “It’s a crazy cat and mouse story that unfolds on camera,” she added.
Evangelista recently delivered rough cuts to the network, but she’s far from finished with these cases and is continuing to investigate. She’s going public with this story, before the Warner Bros. Discovery cable network has even announced the show, because she wants to put up a website asking the public if they recognize Kyle. “Because he was not himself and lived off the grid between 1981 and 2004,” she said. “I know why he left and why he fled. I know where he went for the most part but I don’t know who he was and what he was like and I want to know all of it.”
It’s all part of her company’s brand of taking a “deep dive into the darkness” with stories that are “so crazy, they’re hard to believe”.
Hot Snakes Media was also behind one of ID’s most recent smash hits – The Curious Case of Natalia Grace. The series, which ran for 16 episodes across three seasons, tells the story of a Ukrainian girl who was adopted by an American family but abandoned by them two years later.
That story is just as wild as the Kyle and Keck cases with Natalia confronting crazy accusations made by her adoptive parents Michael and Kristine Barnett. The Curious Case of Natalia Grace and its follow up Natalia Speaks reached more than 10M viewers across linear and HBO Max.
Evangelista said that she can’t imagine there’s any more story to tell in the Grace case. But she added, “There’s still a lot of secrets and things I don’t know about.”
She praised Jason Sarlanis, President of TNT, TBS, TruTV, ID & HLN, Linear and Streaming at Warner Bros. Discovery for ordering both of these projects. “I love and adore him. He lets you take chances, he doesn’t dumb you down, like so many networks. He is so fearless in terms of saying it doesn’t have to fit into some formulaic box, it can be crazy, it can be what it is.”
Whether on camera or off, Evangelista is continuing to search for more wild stories. She said, “Straightforward is boring, you’ve got to mix it up sometimes. That’s how I feel about TV. I’ve had straightforward crime shows before and that’s not exciting. It’s exciting when it’s like Natalia or Benjamin.”
The post Shannon Evangelista Produces True-Crime Shows. Now She’s In Front Of The Camera Solving Them appeared first on Deadline.
