I was able to fix this problem however I'm still not entirely sure why this was a problem in the first place.
After running strace, I saw open("/usr/local/lib/libfreetype.so.6", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
which doesn't quite make sense since other programs (without sudo powers) which depended on libfreetype were able to run, and the permissions are set for read/write for all, also running evince under sudo didn't help either.
My apt-get of libfreetype placed the library in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6 but for some reason evince wasn't checking that folder (even though it was added to LD_LIBRARY_PATH). However I created a symbolic link to a folder which it does check sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6.10.1 /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6
and now evince runs fine.