Next to the mystery of the mailbox, what bothered Butterfly Effect's Evan Treborn the most about his childhood was the question of what happened in the basement. He almost uses his journals to go back and find out, but hesitates. If indeed things happened as he thought, it will be very different if he does this as mentally twenty years old than it would have been for two seven-year-olds. Instead he visits Kayleigh, finding her working as a waitress in a lousy diner and trying to question her about it. She gets very upset, and this triggers her suicide; Tommy learns that they had some sort of discussion, and threatens Evan's life. Evan drops flowers on her casket when he is alone at the gravesite, along with the note promising to come for her. He now needs to fix this. Finding the journal from the making of the Robin Hood movie, he takes himself back to that basement.
This time, he quite intentionally alters time. He threatens George Miller and scolds him for ruining his daughter's life. The movie scene is never shot, and a frightened Miller treats his daughter Kayleigh remarkably well for the next thirteen years. Evan snaps back to the future.
He awakens in Kayleigh's bed in her sorority house on campus. They are very much in love, going to get married, and having a wonderful time. His former (in another timeline) punk-dressing roommate thinks he's fratboy scum, but all the girls love him and he's a BMOC at the frat house. He is no longer a star student, but he throws a wonderful date for Kayleigh.
We must digress at this point to recognize that under strict replacement theory Evan just created an infinity loop. There is no reason now for him to have traveled back to that basement to save Kayleigh; the montage of history undone and redone tells us that they grew up as childhood sweethearts. Yet if he never made that trip, he never threatened Mr. Miller, and never saved Kayleigh. We might argue that Kayleigh told him what happened, but he had her cover her ears. Tommy heard, but Tommy's relationship with Evan is not very good in this world--as we will see in a moment. It seems, though, that the writers are relying on some form of Niven's Law, that once the past has been changed it stays changed unless someone from the future goes back and changes it again. That's a difficult theory to defend, but it's not up to the movie to defend it, only to treat it consistently. It has not mattered to this point, because the changes he made would not have changed him making those changes; but this trip is different.
What Evan did not realize, not having memories from this history, is that Tommy got the brunt of Mr. Miller's problems, and still does not want Evan to touch Kayleigh (a strange detail, since this time Tommy witnessed Evan defending Kayleigh, but he is apparently a very sick boy). Further, Kayleigh neglected to mention that Tommy was just released from detention. Seeing the two of them together, Tommy attacks with a club. Evan disarms him and violently kills him.
Evan is now in prison. His mother is wrong about self-defense; the best he can expect is involuntary manslaughter. (His claim to self-defense ended the moment he was no longer in danger, which is arguably when Tommy was down and Evan had the club. Also, he should not be in prison--prisoners awaiting trial are held in jails, separate from those who have been convicted and sentenced.) He wants his journals, so he can change things yet again; but they are taken from him, and he gets only a few pages of them. Still he decides to trick his cell mate into helping him recover the journals. He does this by using the few pages he has to change history in a way that will appear to be a miracle; but this is inconsistent with what has happened before, and will have to be examined next time.
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