SERIAL killer survivor Kara Robinson Chamberlain said she swept floors and kept notes on her abductor before escaping and helping police find him.

Kara was just 15 when a man in Trans Am van pulled up in her friend's driveway in West Columbia, S.C., and snatched her away.

It was the afternoon of June 24, 2002, and Kara had been watering the plants in her friend's front yard when a man in his late 30s, dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt and baseball cap, got out to offer her some "pamphlets".

They struck up a conversation and the man appeared friendly, Kara told PEOPLE, saying she was asked if her parents were home that fateful day.

"Well, this isn't my house. This is my friend's house," Kara responded.

"And he said, 'Okay, well what about her parents, are her parents home?' And I said, 'No, her mom's not home right now.'"

And that's when Richard Evonitz, later identified as the serial killer behind the murders of three young girls, pulled out a gun and pressed it against her neck, throwing her into a large storage bin stowed on the back seat of his car.

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'FEAR BARELY EVEN KICKED IN'

Kara recalled what happened next with crystal-clear clarity.

As they drove towards Evonitz's apartment, Kara began counting the turns he made in the hopes of maybe finding her way back home.

She picked up other details, like the classic rock station her captor was listening to and the Marlboro red cigarette he was smoking.

She even memorized the serial number on the inside of the plastic container she was held in.

"My survival mechanism said, 'All right, let's gather as much information as we can,'" she said.

"Fear barely even kicked in … the human will to survive and the survival mechanism really just can't be underestimated."

Kara was handcuffed and gagged and dragged into Evonitz's messy apartment where he assaulted her for 18 hours.

Despite being terrorized, she tried to find ways to identify her abductor, such as memorizing the names of his doctors and dentist on his fridge and even offered to sweep his kitchen when he tried to feed her.

And it's that kind of manipulation that may have saved her life.

"She was just putting him at ease and making him feel comfortable, gaining his trust. And that's what police negotiators do," Sheriff Leon Lott of Richland County told PEOPLE.

"She controlled her emotions to the point where she was able to develop a plan."

In the early hours of the following morning, while Evonitz slept, Kara was able to wriggle one hand free from the handcuffs and unclipped a leg restraint and quietly tiptoed to the front door to make her escape.

LUCKY ESCAPE

Kara threw herself at a vehicle in a parking lot and asked the two people inside to take her to the police station, where she told cops what had happened.

Thanks to her keen powers of observation, police were able to find Evonitz's apartment but by the time they arrived, he had already fled.

What later ensued was a high-speed police chase through Sarasota, Florida, that ended with Evonitz being attacked by a police dog before shooting himself dead.

Inside Evonitz's apartment, police found a locked foot-locker with newspaper clippings about the unsolved murders of three girls: Sofia Silva and sisters Kati and Kristin Lisk, who had all gone missing in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, five years earlier.

For her help in cracking the murders, Kara received a $150,000 award and was able to meet the victims' families.

"It was one of the most important things that's ever happened to me," she said.

"Because it brought home the importance of what I did. Because I felt like, 'Wow, I'm actually giving these families something that they never would've gotten without me.'

"Just the closure of knowing that the person responsible for their daughters' death is no longer here."

Fear barely even kicked in … the human will to survive and the survival mechanism really just can't be underestimated.

Kara's ordeal inspired her to become a resource officer for child and sexual abuse victims at Richland County Sheriff's department until she left to have her own two boys years later.

Now, Kara is working hard to help other kidnapping survivors and has teamed up with consultants to improve the way victims are represented by the media.

She even appeared in a 90-minute documentary with five other survivors to lend support to Jayme Closs, a Wisconsin teen who escaped her captor in 2019.

"I sat down on a couch with Elizabeth [one of the survivors] and five other women who had survived kidnappings and sexual assaults. And that was the moment that I realized that I really had a bigger purpose.

"I knew that I could find a reason for what happened. And I always knew that what happened to me was something that happened so that I could help other people.

"I was healed on that couch, sitting there talking to those women, in a way that I didn't even realize I was hurting."

She's evening using TikTok and Instagram to spread the word and says one in three women experience sexual assault but may not get the opportunity to chat to someone who understands what they've been through.

"If I can do that, if I can bring that to other women in some way, shape or form, that would just be the epitome of my purpose, if I could just help other people."

Kara has started up a website to tell her story and worked with fellow survivors to make a documentary about her escape called Escaping Captivity: The Kara Robinson Story, for Oxygen, that was released last year.

She is also in the process of writing a book.

Kara hopes more people can tell their stories.

"I think that it can be so empowering when we just speak to someone who understands what we've been through.

"I would love to help them tell their stories in a way that really lets them take ownership of the story and really empowers them to take back the power."

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