Before he put a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger, Richard Marc Evonitz told his sister he was a killer, Richland County, S.C., Sheriff Leon Lott said yesterday.

"He told her he'd done more crimes than he could remember," Lott said. "Now we're going to try and track his movements from the moment he was born to the day he died."

As part of that task, local investigators yesterday searched the Massaponax home where Evonitz lived from 1996 to 1999. Members of the Lisk-Silva Task Force scoured the house on South Fork Court in hopes of finding hairs, fibers or other evidence linking Evonitz to the unsolved slayings of three Spotsylvania County girls.

Sofia Silva, 16, vanished from her front yard the afternoon Sept. 9, 1996. Her body was later found wrapped in a blanket in a King George County creek.

Eight months later, 15-year-old Kristin Lisk and her 12-year-old sister, Kati, were kidnapped from their front yard after school; their bodies were found five days later in the South Anna River.

DNA evidence showed the same man killed all three girls.

Evidence collected yesterday from the the white, colonial-style house where Evonitz once lived was sent to the FBI lab in Washington for analysis, Spotsylvania sheriff's Maj. Howard Smith said. They join 200 or so items seized from Evonitz's apartment in Richland County, S.C.

Evonitz, 38, shot himself Friday after a high-speed chase by police in Sarasota, Fla. He was wanted for the gunpoint kidnapping and rape of a 15-year-old girl in South Carolina last Monday.

Smith said there's no way to know if anything found yesterday will prove valuable to the investigation until the samples are tested.

He said the current residents at the home, Christopher and Elissa Parks, gave investigators permission to search without having to obtain a warrant. "They've been nothing but cooperative," Smith said.

The FBI, state police and officers from the Spotsylvania and King George sheriff's offices participated in the search.

Meanwhile, teams of FBI agents went door-to-door in the South Oaks subdivision questioning former neighbors about Evonitz.

Investigators also have talked to his 19-year-old wife, who was in Florida on vacation with his mother when the 15-year-old was abducted last week.