Every Move You Make (21 page)

Jo Rehm had been a skinny little girl, taller than the other kids, with platinum blonde hair, almost white, and the sharp facial features of a bird: pointy nose, thin, caved-in cheekbones and tiny, beady eyes that cut right through whoever got caught in their gaze. Living at 158 First Street, directly next door to the Evanses, Jo later recalled Gary Charles as being a “quiet child” who wasn’t allowed to have any friends or, like a prisoner, leave the confines of his bedroom.

“He was kept in the house most of the time,” Jo said later. “Locked in his room like an animal.”

One facet of Gary Charles’s life that became a signature as he grew older was his absolute revulsion toward any type of meat. He hated chicken, pork and beef with a fervor—but especially liver.

“His father,” Jo Rehm added, “would make him sit at the kitchen table for hours until he ate his liver. Gary hated liver…. We all hated liver.”

Jo was seven years older than Gary, and Gary Charles and Robbie looked up to her as a “big sister.” Jo said she would spend much of her time in the Evans household looking after the kids when Flora Mae and Roy were either too drunk, or had left the kids at home to go out to the bars. Jo’s parents were also heavy drinkers, she readily admitted, and often drank with Flora and Roy.

The drinking in the house became an ordinary part of each day as Gary Charles grew toward his teenage years. He and Robbie awoke each morning expecting Roy and Flora to either spend the day on the back porch getting drunk, or inside the apartment drinking and fighting. As long as the kids did what they were told and kept their mouths shut, there wouldn’t be any trouble.

But from an early age, Gary Charles was stubborn. He did things his way. And when it came to eating liver, he flat out refused to do it as he grew older. When he refused, Roy looked at it as a question of his authority: Gary was being disobedient. It wasn’t about the liver; it was about doing what the old man said.

“We used to try to hide the liver in the kitty litter box so Gary didn’t have to eat it,” Jo recalled.

When that didn’t work, and Roy found it, he would beat Gary Charles senseless while the others looked on in horror. Other times, Jo would eat the liver herself so Roy wouldn’t have an excuse to beat him.

Roy’s weapon of choice was a leather strap he had used to sharpen his straight razor. Whenever he pulled it out—whether to sharpen his razor or begin slashing it lightly in his palm, warming it up for a beating, taunting the kids—they would scramble around the house as if they were playing hide-and-seek, searching for some sort of shelter from the terror they knew was coming.

Despite the beating he knew he was going to get, Gary became steadfast in his decision not to eat the liver. Roy would then break out his strap and whip his son until welts swelled up on his tiny frame. Then he would throw him in his room and refuse to feed him until the next day.

Because the apartment buildings were built so close together, Jo said, she would often open the window in her apartment next door and feed Gary cereal and chocolate-chip cookies through the alleyway.

“Many times,” she said, “it was the only way he would get to eat.”

Roy—thank goodness—never knew.

Sending a child to bed without dinner was a common punishment parents doled out in the ’60s and ’70s. If a kid wouldn’t eat his peas or carrots, the mom or dad might give the entire plate to the dog and say to the child, “Go to your room!”

For Gary Charles, however, taking a beating and being starved for twenty-four hours for not eating his liver would have been a reprieve for what some later claimed was one of Roy’s most deplorable, violent punishments.

Using a piece of rope or a belt, Roy would strap Gary to a dining-room chair so he couldn’t move. When he had him secured in the chair, he would, in between his taking pulls from his seemingly bottomless can of Schaefer beer, shove the liver down his throat until Gary ate every last morsel. Jo Rehm recalled several times when Gary would try to fight off Roy’s force-feeding by squirming and twisting his head like a hooked fish. However, he would end up turning purple from choking on the meat and have to give in for the sake of being able to breathe.

“I went over there one time and Roy was nearly choking Gary with the meat, stuffing it down his throat,” Jo recalled. “The cops had been called that day because I had pushed Roy when I saw what he was doing to my Gary. They told me I had to go home…and didn’t even care about the fact that Roy was abusing him.”

Robbie, her memory perhaps tempered by time, said she never saw Roy force-feed her brother, but remembered how insistent Roy was regarding the kids eating their liver and “cow tongue.”

“Whatever Jo says is…true,” Robbie said later. “She has a better recollection than I do. I guess my mind just blocks a lot out.”

As Gary began creeping up to his teenage years, he began to show an interest in the same things most other kids did: cartoons, comics, sports. Like his mother, he developed a passion for anything having to do with art: drawing, painting, sketching. Roy would quash any fleeting childhood moments of enjoyment for Gary by not allowing him to watch television and refusing to purchase art materials for him. Gary, perhaps beginning to develop a demon seed, began to take it all in and not say anything.

“I remember him lying on his stomach in his room,” Jo said, “with his head sticking out of the doorjamb. He was trying to catch a glimpse of television, while everyone else—including Robbie—sat and enjoyed it.”

As Jo saw it, Flora Mae was no better than Roy. “She was a whore. A drunk. She didn’t care about those kids.”

Another childhood friend, Bill Murphy, recalled stories Gary would tell him about Flora Mae taking him as a child to a local “doctor’s office,” and making Gary wait outside the room and listen to them moaning and groaning their way through an afternoon of adulterous sex. Additionally, while Roy sat at home during those days and drank himself silly, a former neighbor claimed, Flora was also being paid by the owner of a local X-rated cinema to have sex with him.

As the alcohol abuse became more profound as Flora and Roy began spending more time at home, Flora turned once again to suicide as an answer.

For as long as anyone who hung around the Evans household back then could remember, Flora had permanent scars on her wrists from trying to kill herself so many times. Still, whether she was screaming out for help with the failed attempts or not, she tried other means.

One day, Robbie was hanging clothes in the backyard when a neighbor called out, “Robbie! Robbie!” pointing up at the apartment complex next door.

Flora was on top of the three-story tenement across the alleyway, hanging her legs off the side of the building, indicating that she was ready to jump.

As clichéd as it was, Flora chanted unassumingly, “No one loves me anymore. You will all be better off without me. I don’t want to live anymore.”

Robbie eventually talked her down.

“Mom would walk to the railroad tracks,” Robbie added, “and wait for the train to kill her. I had to tell her that Gary and I loved her very much and could not live without her [and] she would come back home.”

CHAPTER 36

According to some, Gary Charles began stealing comic books before he had even hit puberty—all with the blessing of his mother.

“Flora Mae was a thief,” a close family friend said later. “That’s how Gary learned to steal. She taught him.”

Jo Rehm recalled a day when Gary was eight and had brought home a “$1,000 ring” for her he had stolen while he was out with his mother. From there, it seemed stealing became an addiction. He started taking whatever he wanted. Neighborhood bicycles became a favorite target. Packs of gum. Food. Car stereos. It didn’t seem to matter. As time went on and he grew into a teenager, Evans would even play a Robin Hood role around the neighborhood by stealing jewelry and giving it to the girls. As he grew even older and began stealing from local thugs—drug dealers and other criminal types—the Robin Hood brand became even more pronounced. He wasn’t the “bad guy,” some said later, taking things that didn’t belong to him; he was stealing from “people who deserved it.”

Flora Mae and Roy’s relationship had been set on a path of destruction, it seemed, since the day they had met back in the early ’50s. By the fall of 1967, as Gary Charles turned thirteen, the structure of the Evans household was in a constant state of chaos. The only positive aspect of it all for Gary was that he was getting older—and bigger. Robbie was a sophomore in high school by this point. Albany Business School was beginning to take up much of her thought. She was thinking about moving out and leaving the area, maybe starting her own business someday. While Gary, who was retreating more into a world of solitude and silence, was thinking about traveling the country and “living off the land.”

At thirty-five, Flora was still young and attractive, considering the hell she had put her body through due to several suicide attempts and a savage alcohol addiction. If she wanted to, she could certainly leave Roy and start all over again.

Jo Rehm, who had just turned twenty, moved to another neighborhood across town. Suddenly, Flora Mae, Gary Charles and Robbie’s life raft, whether they realized it or not, was gone. Jo continued to ride her bike down to First Street to check on the kids—Gary specifically—but she wasn’t there like she had been for most of Gary’s early life.

“I loved him like a big sister. I worried sick about him and what Roy would do to him once I left.”

However, Gary wasn’t the boy Roy could manhandle and keep confined inside the home anymore. He was growing into a man, quickly. Still scrawny and shorter than most kids, Gary’s body began to change remarkably. His arms and legs, for one, ballooned. He didn’t even have to work at it.

Roy, at five feet five inches, about 140 pounds, hampered physically by his chronic use of alcohol and the car accident he had been in, was still a lot bigger and tougher than Gary. Yet Gary was becoming street-tough and fearless. Roy soon would have his work cut out for him if he challenged Gary in any way.

While Gary’s body took shape, there were signs his mind was beginning to have trouble processing all the abuse he had been put through as a child. If throwing rocks at the neighborhood kids and beating them up once in a while wasn’t bad enough, true signs of the serial killer he would later become began to emerge.

A former classmate and neighbor recalled how he had “been mean to cats.” One incident that stood out involved Gary and another neighborhood boy.

“He tied the cat’s tail [and] burned him up.”

Being mean to cats and neighborhood pets might be part of growing up for some children. But this former neighborhood friend described an utter hatred, which borderlined on psychotic, that Gary displayed for the neighborhood pets. He seemed to enjoy with a certain dark passion the torture he had perpetrated toward the cats and the power he could wield over smaller animals.

For the past twenty-five years, psychologists, sociologists and criminalists have studied how being cruel to animals in childhood affects a person later in life. Many agree that a history of animal cruelty in childhood often leads to criminal problems in adulthood. The FBI, in the ’70s, began to recognize, after reviewing the lives of several serial killers, that “most had killed or tortured animals as children.”

Flora Mae finally got up the nerve to leave Roy in 1968. Within months after making the decision, Roy granted Flora a divorce and, just like that, she, Robbie and Gary had moved out of Troy and were living on their own just across the Hudson in Cohoes, New York. Gary had moved in with Jo Rehm for a brief period, but she was getting married. He had a home with Flora Mae in Cohoes. Why burden Jo with his problems?

Robbie, now eighteen, had enrolled in Albany Business School after graduating high school. By June, she had married a local man, but quickly divorced him, she said, after the relationship became abusive. For a time, Gary moved in with her after realizing he didn’t want to live in Cohoes. Out on his own now, living in abandoned buildings and sleeping in abandoned cars and trucks, eating what little food he could scrounge up or steal, Gary developed a side business. He would do homework for nearby engineering students, providing they gave him a place to stay. When work became slow, however, he would break into Freihofer’s trucks and steal chocolate-chip cookies to feed himself.

Flora Mae, as Gary and Robbie made a go of life on their own, married for a third time while living in Cohoes. But, according to some, her new husband was no better than Roy: an abusive alcoholic. After that brief marriage ended, she packed it up and moved to Astoria, Queens, New York, which was south, near New York City. Once there, she met “a man named Jim” and married for a fourth time.

“[Jim] was another drunk,” Robbie later said.

While Robbie was pregnant with her first child, she visited Flora Mae in Astoria. She recalled how Flora had taken her to Rockefeller Center to go ice-skating. Life seemed calm for Flora while she was in Astoria. She appeared content for the first time in years. She had even planted a garden in the back of her apartment and grew vegetables. There’s a startling image Robbie keeps of her and her mother during those years. They are standing next to a sunflower Flora Mae had cultivated that nearly reached the second story of the apartment complex. Flora appeared seemingly happy for perhaps the first time in her life.

If Flora Mae seemed to be in good spirits and health while in Astoria, it was all a front. She had developed pleurisy. Causes for the disease include a “bacterial or viral infection of the lungs (such as pneumonia), tuberculosis, lupus, chest injury or trauma, a blood clot in the lung, or cancer.” An immediate cause, doctors say, is not always found. Generally, one can live a normal life as long as the condition is treated properly. Breathing becomes painful and sufferers complain of “sharp, stabbing” pains in the chest and stomach areas of the body. Flora Mae, who was never one to voice her ailments or problems, became “very ill” while living in Astoria, Robbie said later.