Every Move You Make (3 page)

At the urging of the Colonie Police Department, the SSPD sent a uniformed officer to interview Caroline and write up an official missing person report. The SSPD’s initial thought was that the case would not amount to anything. So far, all they had was a husband missing fewer than twenty-four hours who had not shown up for his sister-in-law’s wedding.

It was hardly enough to panic.

Ed Moore had been a detective with the SSPD for the past twenty years. Promoted to chief later in his career, Moore knew his business as a cop perhaps better than a lot of his colleagues, and relied, like most cops, on his instincts.

When Caroline got home from her sister’s wedding early in the evening on October 4 and telephoned the SSPD, demanding it do something about what she insisted was her “missing husband,” Moore heard what he later said was genuine pain and anguish in her voice.

Moore spoke to Caroline briefly, trying to reassure her that he was going to do everything he could to find her husband.

After hanging up, weighing what she had told him, taking the sincerity she had displayed into account, Moore told himself something wasn’t right.

Tim Rysedorph had a good job, apparently loved his wife and son, had made specific plans to go to his sister-in-law’s wedding and rarely ever failed to come home from work—at least that’s what Caroline had claimed. To top it off, he had missed the wedding.

Something wasn’t adding up.

By Sunday morning, October 5, Caroline had called several of Tim’s friends to see if any of them had heard from him. She even had a friend page Tim and leave his phone number as a callback—just in case Tim had been screening his calls and, for whatever reason, didn’t want to talk to her.

Nothing
.

At about noon, Lou called back. After hitting the streets and asking a few people about Tim’s whereabouts, he said he couldn’t offer much.

But Caroline, as worried as she appeared, began to float her own theory.

“Tim’s still not back, Lou,” she said in a rush. “I’m getting really scared…and, well, he’s probably dead because I haven’t heard from him yet.” Caroline was, she later told police, rambling on and on, just blurting out words as they passed through her mind, not thinking too much about what she was saying.

“What are you talking about?” Lou asked.

“They’re probably going to find him dead,” Caroline said, “in the trunk of my car at the bottom of the Hudson River.”

“Don’t say that,” Lou said. “That’s not going to happen. Or else, he’ll never be found—just like what happened to his friend Mike.”

Lou was referring to Michael Falco, who had been missing for about twelve years. Shortly after Falco introduced Caroline and Tim, he went out one night and never returned. It had been rumored that Tim and Michael Falco’s old friend Gary Evans, who had lived with them at the time, was responsible for Falco’s disappearance. Evans, who had been partners with Falco on a number of profitable jewelry heists, denied the stories, telling people Falco had gone “west.”

Caroline didn’t know what to say after Lou compared Tim’s situation to Falco’s.

“Like I said, maybe he’s in a place where he can’t call,” Lou told her.

“I called the police like you suggested and reported Tim missing.”

“Maybe you should call the police back and tell them you’ve heard from him?”

Caroline screamed, “No! I can’t do that! They will stop looking for him.”

“Calm down. Keep your chin up. Everything will be okay.” But Caroline could do nothing more than cry. “I’ll call you back at dinnertime,” Lou added, and hung up.

After that, Caroline began phoning the SSPD almost hourly, wondering what it was doing to find her missing husband. Tim had been gone for three days now.

Something’s wrong!

Although the SSPD is a full-service police department, fully capable of any type of investigation, Detective Ed Moore decided to call the New York State Police (NYSP)—if only to quell Caroline’s constant phone calls and inquiries. She was becoming quite the pain in the ass.

Established in 1917, the NYSP is one of the ten largest law enforcement agencies in the country, and the only police department in New York with statewide jurisdiction. The breakdown of troops within the structure of the department is rather extensive simply because New York encompasses some fifty thousand square miles of land. The division headquarters of the NYSP is located in Albany, with eleven separate troop barracks spread throughout the state. Since Tim Rysedorph lived in Saratoga Springs, Troop G, in Loudonville, had authority over the missing person report Caroline had filed.

NYSP troops, like in most states, provide “primary police and investigative services across the state.” Any cases requiring “extensive investigation or involving felonies” are referred to the NYSP’s principal investigative arm—the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI). In house, investigators call it “the Bureau.” The Major Crimes Unit (MCU), a separate division of the Bureau, is used for homicides and high-profile cases.

As far as Tim Rysedorph’s disappearance, the Bureau from Troop G in Loudonville, despite its reluctance of getting involved in a case of a married adult missing only three days, was brought in to assist the SSPD. Following up on a missing person report wasn’t what Bureau investigators liked to spend their time doing. But most investigators agreed it was part of the job. People went missing, for any number of reasons, all the time. Generally, the Bureau could come into a case and—with its manpower and carefree access to the latest, top-notch technology—solve it quickly.

Although missing person cases came in on a regular basis, the Bureau dealt mostly with narcotics cases, violent and serial crimes, child abuse and sexual exploitation matters, computer and technology-related offenses, bias-related crimes, auto theft, consumer product tampering and organized crime. Murder cases, Bureau investigators have said, are one of its foremost priorities, taking precedence over just about any other cases that don’t involve missing or exploited children.

Little did anyone involved in Tim Rysedorph’s disappearance know then that within twenty-four hours of Ed Moore’s call to the Bureau, every available Major Crimes Unit investigator from Troop G in Loudonville would be working on the case.

CHAPTER 4

SSPD detective Ed Moore contacted Senior Investigator Jim Horton from the Troop G Bureau on Monday, October 6, regarding Tim’s disappearance. Known as “Big Jim” to his Bureau brethren, Horton stood about six feet, 180 pounds. He had been on the job since February 20, 1978—almost nineteen years now—and had been promoted to senior investigator back in 1990, a job, colleagues later said, he took more seriously than life itself. The oldest of four siblings, Horton kept what little hair he had left parted to one side, blade-of-grass straight, always well-manicured. He wore a scraggly mustache that he had been contemplating shaving lately.

More of an athlete than a student, growing up in the Capital District area, Horton didn’t have aspirations of becoming a cop, but instead wanted to be a physical education teacher. It wasn’t until a friend from high school had mentioned one day he was taking the state trooper exam that the seed was planted in Horton. But when he came home that afternoon and told his mother about becoming a cop, she blasted him.

“No son of mine is going to be a pig!” she said. Horton’s father, standing next to him in utter shock at the prospect, just shook his head and walked away.

In 1975, two years out of high school, Horton decided to take the state police entrance examination and, surprising everyone in his family, did extremely well on the test and was accepted into the academy right away.

“Up until then,” Horton noted later, “I worked construction. I had grown up in a blue-collar family. My brother became a professor. My sister Pam has a master’s degree in education, two kids, and was very influential in helping and looking out for our baby sister, Kathy, who is deaf. My father was a mechanic and my mom grew up with a silver spoon, rebelling against her mother by marrying my motorcycle-/stock car-driving dad. To me, they were hippies. My mom marched on Washington, DC, did the Woodstock thing, and smoked pot.”

The State Police Academy was, when Horton entered it in 1978, run like a paramilitary camp. Cadets marched like soldiers and were mandated to salute higher-ranking officers. After graduating, disappointedly, just below the top 10 percent in his class, Horton excelled as a trooper. By 1981, he was being asked to go back to the academy to train recruits, but refused, vowing never to “treat people the way [he] had been treated in the academy.” An admitted type A personality, he had bigger plans, which didn’t include spending his days on the interstate chasing drunk drivers and speeders. He wanted that coveted gold shield, to become an investigator. Wayne Bennett, Horton’s supervisor at the time, encouraged him to apply to the Bureau when he had three years on the job. To be accepted, a trooper needed four years. But Bennett, who would later become the superintendent of the state police (the top cop, if you will), told Horton to apply anyway.

As senior investigator of the Bureau, investigating and solving nearly two hundred homicides throughout his career, Horton thought he had seen it all by the time Tim Rysedorph’s name crossed his desk on October 6, 1997. In the latter stages of what amounted to a stellar career that included solving some of New York’s most famous murder cases, Horton was a celebrity of sorts in the Capital District. There were countless stories written about him in the newspapers, and he seemed to enjoy the notoriety it brought him. Two of his cases had even been featured on renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden’s popular cable television show,
Autopsy,
and Horton gladly appeared on the show to discuss both cases.

Throughout his career, certain cases haunted Horton. One in particular involved the death of several children in upstate New York. Horton, who had married his high school sweetheart, Mary Pat, and quickly had two children, a boy, Jim, and a girl, Alison, had little tolerance, like most cops, for criminals who targeted women and children.

“The cases I remember most,” Horton recalled later, “are the ones where children were murdered…truly innocent victims, as opposed to people who put themselves in a position of danger by flirting with drugs and hard-core drug dealers.”

Horton wasn’t a fan of spending his time on the job tracking down husbands who had been missing for what amounted to, in Tim Rysedorph’s case, seventy-two hours. But he decided to take along one of seven investigators he supervised, a cop he had been working with a lot lately, Chuck “Sully” Sullivan, and head over to Caroline Parker’s apartment to ask her a few questions.

“With these types of cases,” Horton said later, “you generally have a husband who has run off with his girlfriend. We knew Tim Rysedorph had been in a band. It wasn’t a stretch to think that he had met another woman and had just up and taken off somewhere.”

Caroline Parker called one of Tim’s ex-brothers-in-law, Nick DiPierro, who had also worked with Tim at BFI, on Monday. The first question out of her mouth was “Do you know someone named Lou who works with Tim?”

“No,” DiPierro said.

“Are you sure? This is really important.”

“Well, there’s this guy named Louis, but I don’t know his phone number.”

Caroline looked in Tim’s personal address book for anyone named Lou and found “Louis.” Instead of making the call herself, she called Nick back and gave him the phone number.

“You call Louis,” she said, “and call me right back. Ask him if he called the house this past weekend.”

Within ten minutes, Nick called back. “Louis said he never called the house.”

A few minutes later, Louis called Caroline and repeated what he had told Nick.

“I could tell that it wasn’t the Louis who called me those few times,” Caroline recalled later, “because of his voice. Louis stuttered. He spoke very differently.”

Horton had found out from several of Tim Rysedorph’s eight siblings that Tim and Caroline, at times, hadn’t gotten along as well as Caroline had said. There were several instances, family members told Bureau investigators, when Tim had taken off for periods of time to get away from Caroline.

While the Bureau continued questioning Tim’s family members, SSPD detective Ed Moore took a ride to Caroline’s apartment to see if there was anything else she could add. Maybe she had overlooked something important.

Caroline told Moore she and Tim had a loving relationship and Tim would not “do this to us,” adding, “I don’t know of any reason Tim would leave without first telling me, or at least calling me to let me know he’s okay.”

“What else can you tell me?” Moore asked. “I feel like we’re missing something here.”

“I think something bad has happened to Tim,” Caroline said. “Someone is making him do something he does not want to do. Either that, or somebody is after him.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I think he witnessed a crime, or knew something about someone. Maybe they’re after him for it and he’s running from them.”

This was an interesting development. It appeared Caroline knew more, but was obviously holding back.

Caroline then explained Tim’s relationship with Michael Falco. She said Falco had been missing for many years. “Tim and Michael were good friends.”

Was there a connection?

After leaving Caroline’s with a sour taste in his mouth, Moore suggested the Bureau begin interviewing Caroline to see what else she knew. If there was one cop who could get her to open up, Moore knew it was Jim Horton. He was considered one of the top interrogators the NYSP employed. If Caroline knew more than she was offering, Horton was the man to get it out of her.

CHAPTER 5

When it came to police work, Jim Horton was a pragmatist. He knew more about homicide investigations, larcenies and missing person cases than most cops with the same time on the job put together—and there weren’t many who would argue that fact. Working in Major Crimes for the past decade or so, however, had hardened Horton. He knew firsthand what human beings were capable of doing to one another. On some nights, he would arrive at home docile and withdrawn, beaten down by the violence he had witnessed that day, wrestling with the disgust he felt for certain criminals and the crimes they committed.