Every Move You Make (30 page)

“You treated me better than any other cop,” Evans said one day when Horton asked him why he was always calling and asking for him.

“I like to treat people as people,” Horton told Evans that day. “Without you, I wouldn’t have a job.”

For Horton, getting Evans to confess to the East Greenbush flea market burglary was a watershed moment in his career. He had been a new investigator and here he had solved a major burglary case. Evans had been, at the time, a Bureau target for years. The old-timers, Horton recalled, would always taunt him about getting Evans: “You’ll never catch him! He’s too good a thief.”

With Evans away in prison, Horton assumed he wouldn’t hear from him. By this point, Horton had been transferred from the Bureau’s East Greenbush barracks to the Loudonville Bureau, Troop G, which was closer to his home and more action-packed. The only reason he would have for contacting Evans would be if he had a case and wanted to use Evans as an informant. Other than that, he had little use for him.

On September 25, 1985, as Horton was working a murder case unrelated to Evans, he received a letter from him.

How many other S.P. do you know who get mail from Sing Sing?
Evans opened the letter with. Referring to Horton as “Guy,” a name he would commonly use as the years progressed, he began talking about the “fake” drug deal he had been involved in that had gotten him locked up this time around. He wrote:
Word is…[the drug dealer I ripped off] will get me killed when I get out (he’ll have to stand in line). I have thought a lot about how easily his brother…could do it. (And if he does, please try to get him for it, okay?)

There was a sense of camaraderie in the letter that struck Horton. He didn’t expect, for one, to ever hear from Evans again, nor did he imagine Evans to sound so calm and fixated on himself as a criminal who was, in his twisted mind, “working” with the state police.

“I think that first letter served two purposes for Gary,” Horton commented later. “One, I think he found a cop who he knew would treat him decently…. Remember, we had no idea he was a murderer. We believed he was a prolific burglar who could help solve an endless array of local burglaries. Two, he thought he had a cop he could bring in to his twisted fold and make him an ally.”

On the second page of the five-page letter, Evans began once again to dangle Michael Falco from a stick, rubbing Horton’s face in the deceitful fact that Falco was still alive and on the run. He talked about a guy he met in prison who knew Michael Falco:
I came upstate in August, but spent July in Rensselaer County Jail. While there, [a] weird guy that Mike Falco sold jewelry to came in for traffic or drunk or some bullshit. While there, he told me he talked to Mike at a concert. Said he kissed off [Tori Ellis] + kid. Which is typical Falco family sentiment, and went west again.

He next wrote he had spoken to Tori, too:
“Fuck Mike,”
[
he said she told him,
]
since he threw her away….

Throughout the letter, he gravitated toward giving Horton names of potential informants who could help him solve cases. Then he talked about the two drug dealers he had robbed, and ended up giving Horton several names connected to the main source of drugs in Troy. At the end of a long paragraph, after laying out the entire drug operation the two guys ran in Troy, he wrote:
You’re welcome!

It was as if Horton had thrown Evans a bone by treating him like a human being and now he was bringing it back.

Then it came time, in his characteristic way of just coming right out with it, to talk about payback.

Anyway…how can you guys sleep at night knowing I’m rotting in Sing Sing?! Clean up Troy, I won’t be back there but I’d like to see [the] hometown stand straight.

The very last line of the letter was, perhaps, Evans at his best, taunting Horton, as he would for the next thirteen years:
Write this infamous person at infamous Sing Sing. What the hell. It’ll look good if you ever write a book.

CHAPTER 50

During the early days after they first met, Evans saw Horton as an inexperienced investigator, still wet behind the ears. Horton was “the new guy” at the Bureau. Because of that, and the fact that he wholeheartedly believed he was smarter than Horton, Evans tried to shape and mold him into the type of cop he needed on his side. Horton, admittedly, was eager to prove himself as a young Bureau investigator. In a sense, he later said, he fell for Evans’s charm, at least in the beginning.

After talking to Evans several times throughout September after receiving that first letter, Horton went to his Bureau captain and told him what was going on. “Captain, I got this Evans guy talking about all kinds of burglaries and drug deals and—”

“Kid,” the captain said, interrupting, “leave it alone. Let Troy take care of those drug dealers. Worry about your job. Murders. The bigger fish.”

Horton felt discouraged. He thought he had accomplished what other Bureau investigators had tried for years to do but couldn’t: penetrate the armor of the abominable Gary Evans and get him to open up.

Horton would understand later that his captain knew a lot more about law enforcement than he let on.

“Gary Evans was playing me,” Horton said. “He was throwing me things: drug dealers, robbery suspects, et cetera. But he was also giving me bullshit names and crimes that never happened. My captain knew I was being played.”

Evans believed he was controlling Horton. He thought he could pull a string and Horton would rush right over to console him and grant his every wish.

But Horton was also using Evans. He knew Evans could further his Bureau career. He knew Evans would eventually cough up important names. And he knew he ran a risk by befriending Evans—that it could all backfire on his career if he wasn’t careful.

Throughout the remaining few months of 1985, and well into the beginning of 1986, as Evans continued to do his time at Sing Sing, he became one of Horton’s top CIs. Every cop has a few on a string—some with good information, some not. Most of the information Evans provided, Horton said later, was either impossible to back up, or totally spot on. Evans knew exactly what he was doing. In the years to come, Horton would realize that the main thrust fueling Evans’s desire to give up only certain bits of information was to throw Horton off the scent of Michael Falco. Evans would later admit he believed that if he kept Horton busy with other crimes and criminals, he would never suspect—and he didn’t until years later—that Evans was involved in Michael Falco’s disappearance.

Indeed, both men were using each other—and both thought he was smarter than the other.

In October, Evans sat down and sent his sister a letter and, with one stroke of his pen, explained how he’d figured out his life. He finally realized why he had spent the better part of the past ten years behind bars:
I can’t believe I’m here again. But I know what did it: that guy not wanting the painting and I was trying to get [my last girlfriend] as a replacement for [Stacy], which is impossible.

Evans had, during the first few months after he had been released from prison the last time, tried to sell some artwork he had made while in prison. But the first person he tried selling it to brushed him off. Then he went out and found a steady girlfriend. Because he had failed as an artist and tried to replace his beloved high school sweetheart with another woman, he now figured out that his way of dealing with those failures was to turn to a life of crime. It was as if he couldn’t look at his own behavior, and his refusal to admit the truth about his life was just too overpowering.

In that same letter, he talked about spending his entire twenties in prison. He didn’t recall much of it, he said, because most of it had been spent behind bars.

By December, Evan had been transferred to Dannemora. This didn’t sit well with him. He said he was “slowly and fastly going crazy.” What angered him most was that he was put in a cell next to the first cell he had spent time in back in 1977. It was a constant reminder of how his life had spiraled in a complete circle. With twenty-four months left on his most recent sentence, he realized, his life was heading nowhere…fast…and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Then something odd took place. Robbie wrote to him, explaining how she had received a phone call from someone who sounded like him. The person—and Robbie had wholeheartedly believed it was Gary—had mentioned something about a fetish with animals, bestiality. Someone had called and, disguising himself as Evans, bragged about having sex with animals, or something to that effect.

You’re fucking up my head saying somebody is doing my voice perfectly,
Evans wrote, the anger and hate evident in his penmanship, which was sharp, clear and direct. Evans generally had a soft approach to his writing: light and fluffy, sometimes cursive and other times print. He was always gentle in that respect. But this letter was all business.

Over the course of the next few weeks, his letters focused exclusively on the “caller.” He believed, about a week after the incident, he had figured out who it was and swore, even without any proof whatsoever, to wreak havoc on that person when he got out of prison:
And right now I want this motherfucker worse than I want [anyone, even those] who put me here.

By the end of the letter, it didn’t matter to Evans that he had no evidence to support his claim of who it was, but he had made a decision, nonetheless. There would be no more discussion about it:
He’s my pick for the guy behind this shit. And that’s enough for me.

On January 2, 1986, he wrote again and, after talking to Robbie earlier that day by telephone, convinced himself to drop his pledge to destroy the guy he “thought” had made the call. Robbie had, apparently, figured out through phone bill records that the guy Evans had suspected couldn’t have been the person who made the call. It was impossible.

I thought I had it solved. I don’t know any other asshole that you know, so you’ll have to figure it out!
And just like that, as quick as he was to put the guy on his grand hit list, he let it go and never brought it up again.

CHAPTER 51

As he celebrated yet another New Year holiday—1986—behind bars, Evans’s appearance began to change. He was losing his hair now by the handful and his teeth, which he blamed on the “fake Bangladesh” dentists in prison, were rotting because he was too afraid to get any work done. Nearly completely bald, except for a frayed ring of hair encircling the lower portion of his head, he yearned for contact lenses. Not only would he “look good,” he said, but he wouldn’t have to worry any longer about the guards who were teasing him because of his thick “Coke bottle” prescription glasses.

During the late seventies and into the early eighties, Evans could have cared less what his ZZ Top beard looked like. But now, he was obsessed about keeping it neatly groomed and much shorter. Instead of it reaching his belly button, he had groomed it only inches long, hugging his jawline.

Still, the most noticeable part of his transformation was his body. For years, he had fought with his weight, struggling to get above 175 pounds. But now, it seemed overnight, he had gained about ten pounds—all of which was, he claimed, lean muscle. Photos from that era show a massive man, bulky and wide; his shoulders seemingly ran from the top of his neck down below his biceps.

Although he still bounced back and forth between high and low moods, he was beginning to embrace the time in prison, saying that being incarcerated for so much of his life “would have killed your
ordinary
human being years ago!”

Taking responsibility for his actions, however, wasn’t on his agenda.

He wrote:
Everything should’ve been so
different.
I should’ve had [Stacy], never came to prison.

He also talked about what he called a “major event that changed” his life. It was back in 1975 when he bought his first vehicle. He was twenty-one years old. He spent $700 on it—money, he said, he had earned from “working” a “real” job. Three days after he purchased the vehicle, though, while driving home from Stacy’s house, the engine blew.

Now that pissed me off. No money. No car. So I stole one just like it and painted it and put stickers and plates and [the] I.D. [tag from my other vehicle] on the engine. I was going to sell it fast but got stopped by the cops. I think someone told on me,
he wrote.

This one event, he now insisted, was the turning point in his life. And it all revolved around his “precious” high school sweetheart, Stacy:
People are going to pay for any obstacle placed in front of me when I get out and go find her. I am sick of “half-stepping.” That’s slang for not doing the full, complete act that should’ve been done…. I am going to see her again. Any fool who gets in the way to prevent that will get out of the way much faster.

Over the next few months, the tone of his letters varied among three main themes: revenge, racism and Stacy. He’d talk about a group he called the “White Survivalist Road Warriors.” They looked out for one another. If there was ever a “race riot” in prison, he said, the group was ready. Eating “no meat, fish, birds, eggs or vegetables” for “17½ years,” he claimed, had made him into a powerhouse of a human being. His biceps were seventeen inches in diameter now. He was solid as stone. Ready to take on anyone who “fucked” with him.

In early March, he wrote he had
a visit from a guy in Troy—one of the [Harrington] twins [Steve & Bob]. [Steve] is an outlaw. His brother is a guard in a prison camp. They’re both okay. [Steve] is a friend (business acquaintance, I mean). He knows everything leading up to me getting busted. He did a few things for me.

Steve Harrington and Evans had a long history together, yet none of it could qualify as a friendship.

According to what Horton and Doug Wingate later found out, Evans and Steve hated each other.

“That’s probably why he never killed him,” Horton said later. “Because he talked so much about how he hated him all the time, we would have known right away who had killed him if he ever turned up dead.”