By the time Evelyn Stevens stepped through the ropes in 1961, women’s wrestling was still considered a sideshow — somewhere between midget matches and bear wrasslin’. But she wasn’t interested in playing the novelty act. She had sharp elbows, a heel’s sneer, and a willingness to bleed for the business, even when the audience didn’t care to clap.
Stevens, born Evelyn Jardine Riegle in Tampa, Florida, was raised on the hard soil of Nashville, Tennessee. That combo of palm trees and honky-tonks must’ve done something to her bloodstream, because she was as unpredictable as she was underestimated. Standing just 5’4″ and weighing a buck and change, she didn’t look like much — until she had your face grating against the canvas like cheese on a Sunday salad.
She debuted in 1961 at age 23, just as the golden age of wrestling was giving way to the wild-eyed territorial explosion. This was no neon-lit WrestleMania era. There were no pyros, no action figures, no “WWE Universe.” It was smoke-filled VFW halls and high school gyms where the hot dog water was older than the turnbuckles. And Evelyn thrived in it.
Wrestling under the ring name Evelyn Stevens, she became a heel’s heel. The kind of woman Cornette would’ve called “a she-devil in a spandex wrap.” She worked the Great Plains, Midwest, and Missouri territories, gaining a reputation for being as stiff in the ring as she was in a bar booth.
Fans didn’t boo her because she was a woman—they booed her because she was vicious. She once cracked an opponent’s nose with a forearm so loud it echoed louder than the ring bell. Bobby Heenan would’ve said, “She didn’t wrestle, she assaulted people on schedule.”
By the late ’60s, Evelyn Stevens had made her way to Texas, that godforsaken playground of barbed-wire brawls and blood feuds. That’s where her legend truly grew, holding the NWA Texas Women’s Championship five times — and not in some hand-me-down sense. She earned them in matches that often ended in missing teeth and referees with concussions.
In 1969, she even traveled to Australia, wrestling under the banner of World Championship Wrestling—long before Eric Bischoff ever had a bad idea in a boardroom. She was an American export who treated the Aussies to a brand of in-ring cruelty they hadn’t seen since the last convict transport.
But the jewel in her crooked crown came in October 1978, in Dallas, when she did the unthinkable: beat The Fabulous Moolah.
Yeah, that Moolah.
It was booked by the infamous Gary Hart, who had a knack for giving audiences the unexpected — and boy did they get it. Evelyn pinned Moolah and held the NWA World Women’s Championship for two whole days. That’s not a reign, that’s a long layover. But still, it happened. And in a business where history is as scripted as it is rewritten, a two-day title reign over the most protected woman in wrestling meant you were either really good, or really connected, or both.
Stevens wrestled until 1984, dipping briefly into Jim Crockett Promotions territory in the Carolinas in 1982. By then, her body had more road miles than a used Buick. The wrestling world was shifting, becoming more showbiz, more style, less shoot. There wasn’t much room left for women who weren’t poster-ready or lingerie-friendly. Evelyn Stevens was neither.
But her story didn’t fade with the ring lights. In fact, it gets darker from there.
After her wrestling career ended, Evelyn’s name stopped appearing in the sports pages and started showing up in court documents. She had been romantically tied to fellow wrestler Wahoo McDaniel, and later married “The Spoiler” Donald Jardine, whose masked antics in the ring were only slightly less frightening than Evelyn’s barefaced intensity.
But that marriage didn’t last. She later married a bodybuilder and gym owner named Frank Riegle. That, too, ended—this time with three bullets.
In December 1986, Evelyn shot and killed Riegle in their San Antonio home. Three times. In the face and chest. This wasn’t some lovers’ quarrel or Hallmark-movie-gone-wrong. This was cold, calculated, and — if you asked anyone who had seen her in the ring — oddly consistent.
She was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years. But in one final swerve that would make Vince Russo blush, she was pardoned after serving just five.
Five years. For killing her husband.
Even in the justice system, Evelyn Stevens didn’t job clean.
Today, she’s largely forgotten. Her name doesn’t pop up in WWE retrospectives. She’s not in any Hall of Fame, not on any action figure shelf. She’s one of those names that historians whisper when talking about the dark edges of wrestling’s past — a talented heel whose life became a real-life crime noir.
In her prime, she was the blueprint for the no-frills villainess. No catwalks, no Instagram filters, no high-flying moonsaults. Just fishhooks, stomps, and that stare—the kind of cold glare that could frost over a Texas summer.
There are no modern equivalents to Evelyn Stevens because the industry no longer allows that kind of chaos to roam unbranded. In today’s wrestling world, everything is polished, monetized, corporately approved. Evelyn? She was raw steak on a dirty plate.
As for that two-day reign as Women’s Champion? Most fans never heard about it. Maybe that’s fitting. Evelyn Stevens didn’t do it for the glory. She did it because pain was a language, and she was fluent in it. She did it because in a world of lipstick and lockups, she chose fists over flirtation.
And when the ring got too quiet, she took the violence home.