Every Move You Make (33 page)

As one might imagine, the Son of Sam was a target in prison. Because of his celebrity status, other inmates gunned for him, and he often described to Evans the notes and threats he would routinely receive.

Interestingly enough, in one letter, the Son of Sam wrote that he had run into “two Puerto Rican friends” of Evans’s and was
sending them over…a gift from Big Dave.

This wouldn’t mean much on the surface, but taken into context with what was later learned about Evans’s alleged attraction to transsexuals, one might wonder if the Son of Sam was acting as some sort of pimp, repaying debts of food and books with sexual favors?

One of Evans’s favorite books, he explained, was
Red Dragon
, by Thomas Harris, the prequel to Harris’s block-buster best-seller
The Silence of the Lambs
. Evans insisted the Son of Sam read the book. He did, he said, but didn’t much care for it. It was “fair.” Ironically, he said he didn’t “like psycho stories.”

The AIDS crisis had just been made public that year. The Son of Sam said it was “a lot of shit” and “media hype.” Evans, though, was worried about it affecting the world, while the Son of Sam said it would stay confined to the “inner cities…prostitutes and junkies….” He then went on to list which states had reported cases, along with how many in each state.

The Son of Sam continually fed Evans’s ego, complimenting him on his muscles and addressing him in a way he must have known would cater to Evans’s grandiose thoughts of himself. One time, he told Evans there were “lots of Little Gary’s,” yet “only one Big Gary.” He also called him the “Great Tricep King.”

Evans, at one point, told the Son of Sam how much he missed seeing him.
I miss visiting you, too,
the Son of Sam wrote back. In the same letter, he thanked Evans for supplying him with what was an endless array of fruit cocktail, juice and other snacks.

One note that somebody had slipped into the Son of Sam’s cell had frightened him, and he expressed to Evans that he was afraid to “go to sleep at night.” The guy had called him a “cheap cocksucker” for not having snacks in his cell to steal, then went on to say that if the Son of Sam didn’t fill his cell with doughnuts, oatmeal pies, nutty bars and chocolate, he was going to “rip” the “veins out of” his neck while he was sleeping.

Evans was totally absorbed by the stories. He felt important that
the
Son of Sam was sharing it all with him.

In his final few letters, before getting out of solitary, the Son of Sam talked about collecting mouse droppings on his cell floor. He’d shoot the “shit pellets,” he explained, using a slingshot, at people who walked by his cell. He promised to bring a bag of shit pellets with him so he could show Evans how to do it.

You’ll be impressed,
he wrote.

The Son of Sam had sent Evans a copy of
Muscle & Fitness
magazine one day, but Evans sent it right back. To Evans’s sheer horror, the editors had chosen to use an African American bodybuilder in an article, which turned him off.

I forgot,
the Son of Sam wrote,
how prejudiced you are.

According to Evans, the relationship he had with the Son of Sam ended when he called him “David Berserk-o-witz” one day while they were lifting weights together.
He got really
pissed, Evans wrote to Horton. Then Evans came up with a rather bizarre theory regarding the Son of Sam’s pedigree. He claimed a new article he’d read said the Son of Sam was really adopted:
His name at birth was…are you ready? Richard Falco, son of [Michael Falco’s parents]! I almost shit reading that!! I haven’t said anything to him because that’s personal and I don’t want him catching an attitude at me.

Asked later about the connection between Berkowitz and the Falcos, Horton said, “I do remember [Evans] telling me that. But I didn’t take it any further. I really had no reason to at the time. It was meaningless to what I was doing with Gary. And, to be honest, it was one of those Gary statements that just seemed to be so far out there, I didn’t put much credence into it.”

Certain people behind bars scared Evans, and he was quick to point out who they were:
Baby fuckers; half-man, half freaks; guys with tits and no balls who would be glad to give you AIDS in a minute; three big, black ugly fuckers…with big tits.
He was “scared one of them” would “beat the shit” out of him and “suck [his] dick!”

Horton would later speculate after learning of a proclivity Evans had for transsexuals that this was perhaps his way of further trying to disguise who he truly was. Otherwise, why mention it at all?

In his letters, Evans also claimed that Michael Falco was going to give him trouble when he got out of prison. Again, he was thinking ahead, subtly dropping Falco’s name to continue the facade of Falco’s being alive and well and hiding out.

Near the end of the letter, Evans asked Horton to voice his opinions:
Do you have any suggestions? Can you see any solution? You know my situation, what do you think?

Then came the same role-reversal ploy Horton had heard from scores of hard-core criminals over the years:
Your almost job of a criminal profiler sounds interesting! I wish I could’ve gone your way instead. I’d like hunting people down, surveillance, and the excitement involved, spying on shit and having access to all kinds of great stuff, and getting PAID for it! I’d shoot all the sex criminals, too, that’d be the best part.

It was almost too much for Horton to swallow. Evans was buddying up to him more than he ever had—something Horton had never seen from a hardened criminal in his nearly ten years behind the badge. He now felt Evans was going to be hard to get rid of once he was released. There was no way to avoid it.

Just before Christmas, 1988, merely weeks before his release, Evans had a brush with violence. He had gone into a child molester’s cell and, he claimed in a letter to Robbie,
body-slammed [him] all over…. Got some good shit off.[But] also got locked in for fifteen days (very lenient).

By Christmas, he had made a decision about what he was going to do when he got out:
I think I’m going to end up renting a room in Troy while looking for work/$/apt…. Yeah, right! I can see trouble coming. Scumbag Jew parole officers are waiting for me again.

Days before his release, he wrote one last letter. He seemed excited to be getting out. He was going on three years behind bars with this latest bid, and it was obviously wearing him down.
I have a ride out of here,
he wrote,
not a bus like a lowlife.
Then, in true Evans racist fashion, he took the opportunity to berate his parole officers at the expense of an entire race of people:
The 3 I’ve dealt with were all N.Y.C. Jews—the scumrace of the world, ranked right down with niggers!

Every day Evans spent behind bars seemed to harden him. Instead of teaching him the age-old lesson that crime didn’t pay, prison allowed him time to plan what crimes he was going to commit when he was released. Yet no one, perhaps not even Evans himself, could have foreseen the horror he was about to bestow on the people he saw as mere obstacles in his way toward a better life.

CHAPTER 55

The state of New York paroled Gary Evans, who was already a murderer, hell-bent on murdering again, on March 1, 1988. As Evans hit the street as a free man, Horton was digging his feet even deeper into his work at the Bureau, juggling no fewer than two hundred cases that year: murders, rapes, burglaries, drug deals and assaults—anything and everything.

In early March, Evans called Horton at his home to let him know he was out. “Hey, Guy! What’s going on?”

“How are things, Gar?”

Whenever he called Horton, Evans would open the conversation by telling him stories about prison life, which generally led into a rant, whereby he ridiculed every criminal in Troy whose name he had given Horton, always ending with the question: “Have you arrested any of those fucking assholes yet?”

He was frustrated with Horton for not going out and arresting people on every single piece of information he had given him. Although he never told Evans, Horton was fed up with a system that seemed to, at times, favor the criminal.

“Gar, I just can’t go out and arrest people on what you tell me,” Horton told him. “I need proof. I need a case.”

“You gotta arrest those motherfuckers, Guy. They’re bad people.”

“So, you want that job I promised you, or not?” Horton said, changing the subject. “Forget that criminal shit. Let’s focus on your life.”

“What is it?”

“I have a friend at a local nursery who needs help. Lots of heavy lifting. Meet some people. Show off your muscles. It’s perfect for you.”

“Sounds pretty good.”

In the course of a few months leading up to his release, Evans had turned the tables on Horton. “People ask me why I got him jobs and became what some said was ‘friendly’ with him,” Horton recalled later. “Well, when he befriended me, I believed, perhaps very naively, that I could change him. I tried to talk him into a life of good things because I saw good in him. He was smart. Articulate. Well read. I wanted to help him.”

A few days later, Horton met with Evans in the parking lot of Troop G. Evans seemed seriously interested in pursuing the nursery job. It was not only two city blocks from Horton’s home, but it was right around the corner from the motel where Evans had been living since getting out of prison.

Evans had what Horton later called “prison muscles.” He was extremely beefy, and wasn’t afraid to show it off by wearing tank tops and tight-fitting shirts. When he walked into the nursery around mid-March, the owner saw someone who could possibly lift shrubs and small trees onto customers’ vehicles without any help.

When it came down to it, however, Evans was never one to be bossed around by anyone; he just couldn’t stand someone telling him what to do. On top of that, his boss at the nursery turned out to be a female, who managed the place, and not the person who had hired him, a male.

After two weeks, he called Horton and told him that “it was way too hard. Anyway, I can’t work for a dyke,” he added. “It’s too busy a place. They push me and push me to do more.”

“Come on, Gar. Tough it out.”

Evans paused. Then, “I can make more money doing what I do!”

Horton wasn’t going to give up on Evans that quick, however. So he called a good friend who managed a local depot in town.

“Listen, I have this buddy of mine who needs a job,” Horton told the guy. “He’s a hell of a worker. He’s big, muscular. He can be a loader.”

At the time Horton was working to find Evans a job and keep him focused on an honest life, Horton’s family—his wife, Mary Pat, and kids, Jim and Alison—began to get to know Evans more personally. Evans would call and say hello to anyone who answered the phone. He would carry on conversations with Mary Pat as if they were old friends.

As Horton continued to work on his friend at the warehouse to hire Evans, he came up with an idea. “Listen,” he said to his friend one day, “Gary is a convicted felon. I know it’s hard to trust someone like that. But why don’t we have him act as an undercover while he’s working? He can keep an eye out for those workers who are robbing you.” There had been a rash of larcenies at the plant in recent months. Horton knew Evans would jump at the opportunity to act as a cop.

“Okay,” Horton’s friend reluctantly agreed. “That might work.”

Because Evans was a felon, the warehouse agreed to hire him—but only under a pseudonym.

It had taken Horton three weeks to convince his friend at the warehouse to hire Evans. It took Evans three days to decide that the work wasn’t for him. Again, he went back to his old way of thinking, and spared no words when giving Horton an explanation.

“You fuck,” Horton said when he found out Evans had quit, “you screwed me!”

“Come on, Guy, that shit was rough. Lifting boxes, loading trucks under the crack of a whip. It’s too hard. I’m not taking orders from those fuckers. I can make better money and not break a sweat doing what I do.”

Point in fact, he had never stopped stealing. Although Evans was complying with Horton’s suggestion to try out the high road, Evans was committing more burglaries during that time than he ever had, Horton found out later.

CHAPTER 56

Gary Evans had heard the name Damien Cuomo in the past and had run into him once in a while, but he had never considered working with him. During the early part of the summer of 1988, Damien was living in an apartment on Industrial Park Road in Troy with his longtime girlfriend, Lisa Morris, and their daughter, Christina. Damien loved the place, mostly because it was located just behind the old-fashioned red-brick home where he grew up.

Around town, Damien was known as a “good thief,” a former friend later said. He was small—“about 130 pounds soaking wet”—and could scale walls and fences like a cat. As a teenager and into his early twenties, he would show off by shinning his way up two adjacent walls as if he were Spider-Man. He could get in and out of houses quickly, without waking anyone up. For years, police had suspected an African American man of being what locals had dubbed “the hillside burglar,” because several burglaries had been committed in one “hillside” neighborhood in Troy. But Horton and friends of Damien’s later said the hillside burglar was Damien Cuomo.

Born on September 10, 1961, Damien was almost seven years younger than Evans. When they hooked up in 1988, Damien had just turned twenty-two. At five feet six inches, he was nearly as tall as Evans, but Evans had close to sixty pounds—all muscle—on him. Standing next to Evans, Damien looked scrawny, frail.

Where Evans excelled at burglarizing antique stores and jewelry stores, slipping in and out seemingly at will, Damien was a professional residential burglar. He had broken into homes since he was a teenager, some claimed. It started, according to an old family friend, with bicycles.

“As a kid,” a friend later recalled, “Damien would steal bicycles in the neighborhood. His parents were really strict. His father, who went to church, I think, every single day of his life, would lock him in a back barn whenever Damien got into trouble.