Every Move You Make (38 page)

It seems a bit odd in retrospect, but on Super Bowl Sunday, 1990, a little over a month after Damien’s disappearance, Lisa had a Super Bowl party at the South Troy apartment she had shared with Damien. It wasn’t a large gathering of friends and family, but more of an intimate get-together among Lisa’s closest friends, which now included Evans.

By the end of the night, with everyone having gone their separate ways, Evans asked Lisa if he could stay.

“Sure,” she said.

Within an hour, Evans had Lisa in bed, on her back, she later recalled, having sex for “hours on end.”

From that day on, they were an item—at least in Lisa’s alcohol-induced, bereaved state of mind.

Evans had a crop of women he was bedding down at any given time. Each woman later had her own story to tell as far as what type of relationship she’d had with him. Where one woman might act as his friend, allowing him to talk about his childhood and how much he hated his parents, another might act as a mother figure, calming him, babying him, telling him everything was going to be all right. Evans would never, of course, tell his lovers about the murders he was committing. But he would divulge secrets about his life that he had told no one.

One woman Evans had carried on with for well over a decade was
Deirdre Fuller
, a New Hampshire native Evans had met during one of his many jaunts up north to burglarize, pillage and torment antique shop owners.

Deirdre was only sixteen when she met Evans in 1977. He had just gotten out of jail and went up north to do a job when they were introduced through a common friend.

Reared in a middle-class family, Deirdre saw Evans as a “quiet guy” who was, she said years later, “gorgeous and larger than life,” especially in her youthful eyes. She knew Evans had been in trouble and he never lied to her about his time in jail or problems with the law. Young and, perhaps, naive, she wanted to flirt with not always doing the right thing in life. Although her family shunned Evans, in the beginning she saw the relationship as nothing more than a way to rebel against what was expected of her.

Over the years, they developed a relationship that consisted of Evans showing up in her life when he felt like it. Deirdre even reckoned it was a “friendship” more than a relationship in terms of sexual intimacy. “I was less of a lover to him and more of a…Well, he became my family,” Deirdre said later. “He had nobody. I was very lonesome at that age. Although we were from entirely different worlds, we sort of found a common ground.”

Evans would call Deirdre. They would talk for hours. A good listener, she said she became his therapist in many ways, helping him sort through whatever quandary he found himself in at the moment. Other times, they would share the same dreams and goals and talk about the future.

Throughout their relationship, Deirdre had always had a boyfriend, a man whom she went out with, slept with, and considered her mate. Evans didn’t mind, she said. He even encouraged her to meet a good guy—a doctor, lawyer, some sort of professional. “Get married and have kids,” he’d say.

“Gary was an organic guy; he lived for camping and skydiving…. I had no idea the extent of his violent side; I never saw it.”

They liked to listen to classical music, she added, or maybe Elton John. To her, Evans was this “wonderful” person she felt safe and comfortable around. “He wasn’t my boyfriend; we connected on a deeper level than that.”

As the friendship grew throughout the years, Evans would make things for Deirdre and give them to her as gifts. Like with most of his women, he showered her with jewelry and gold, but she often pushed it aside, knowing where it had come from.

She couldn’t go out in public with Evans, she recalled, because he was like a “child in a man’s body.” There was one time when they had gone to a local retail store and Evans wanted to buy her something. He was so engrossed with the process of purchasing the gift, that when they got up to the cash register, it was as if no one else were in the store. He made a fool out of himself and Deirdre by pushing his way through an “old couple” who were in front of them in line.

They would go months without speaking or seeing each other. But Evans would always call and ask Deirdre whom she was dating. He was genuinely interested in how she was doing, she claimed. He wanted to be sure she was always taken care of.

As the summer of 1990 began, Evans and Lisa Morris were seeing each other almost daily, having sex as often as they could. Evans had even won Christina’s love by drawing her pictures and spending time coloring and playing with her. Lisa said later that Christina and Evans shared a genuine love for each other that no one could take away. Regardless of the person he was, he treated Christina, Lisa said, “like a queen.”

During pillow talk, Evans would open up and tell Lisa about certain apsects of his life. One of Lisa’s most vivid memories of that time, she recalled later, was a story about Stacy. One night, while they were in bed, Lisa noticed a tattoo on Evans’s left breast. In prison ink, Evans had Stacy’s name written in rather large font just above his nipple. After that day, Lisa added, Evans began to focus his energy on once again locating Stacy.

While doing his last bid in prison, he had pledged to Robbie several times that the day would come when he would set out to find Stacy and, if he had to, would convince her to love him again. It had been two years since he last spoke of Stacy, but he was ready now, he claimed, to fulfill all those promises he’d made of finding her, regardless of who stood in his way.

He had tracked down Stacy’s number, one former friend later said, by breaking into Stacy’s parents’ home in Long Island and rummaging through the family desk. But when he called her, she barely remembered who he was.

“We were kids,” Stacy said after Evans said hello and reintroduced himself. “I have my own family now. Why are you calling me?”

“I’d like to see you again.”

“I enjoyed the time we had together and respect you, Gary, but I can’t see you. I don’t know you.”

She lived, Evans soon found out, in California.

Hanging up, he became despondent and morose. He realized Stacy wanted nothing to do with him. His dream of the two of them riding off into the sunset together was nothing more than a fairy tale.

Days later, he confided in Lisa that he “had to see Stacy. I need to see her. If she gets alone with me, sees me again, maybe she’ll fall in love with me.”

Lisa told him that it wasn’t meant to be. “Leave it alone, Gar. Forget about it.”

A sociopath, by clinical definition, “feels entitled to certain things as ‘their right.’” Stacy was one of those “things” in Evans’s twisted mind. Sociopaths never “recognize the rights of others and see their [own] self-serving behaviors [as] permissible.”

It was obvious Evans was determined to put Stacy back in his life—whether she, or anyone else, agreed with his plan.

CHAPTER 65

Shortly after telling Lisa he was planning on kidnapping Stacy, Evans took off to California to find her. He had made up his mind. Stacy was his. No one could deny him that. He was going to rent a van, wait for her to walk out of her house and snatch her off the street. He had always prided himself in the fact that he would “never hurt a child or a woman,” but this was different, of course. It was about love. He hadn’t seen Stacy for nearly fifteen years, but she was going to love him again—she just didn’t know it yet.

Before he left for California, Evans called Deirdre Fuller and told her a similar story.

“Don’t go,” Deirdre pleaded with him. “Don’t do it.” Evans had told Deirdre about Stacy and had spared no detail regarding how much he loved her and why they had to be together. Deirdre, perhaps like Lisa, never thought he would act on his impulses, yet here he was focused now on the notion of taking her against her will.

“How did you get her address?” Deirdre asked.

Evans explained how he had burglarized Stacy’s parents’ house in Long Island. Then, “I’m going,” he said before hanging up.

A few days later, he called Deirdre again. This time, he said he was in California ready to carry out his plan. He had a pair of handcuffs, a rope and a van. Nobody was going to stop him.

“I’m going to force her to spend time with me,” he said. He had a place in “the mountains” all picked out. There was no one around for miles. He could tie Stacy up, feed her and convince her to love him again. “If I could persuade her to stay with me,” he insisted, “and get her away from her life, maybe she will fall back in love with me.”

While out west, Evans found out where Stacy worked and decided to show up unannounced. She spoke to him, Deirdre recalled him saying, and was rather courteous, but said she couldn’t see him. It had been too long. She had a life now—a life away from Troy that didn’t include him.

The following day, Evans drove to Stacy’s home and had words with Stacy’s husband. Stacy became upset and totally rejected him. Sensing how much she didn’t want to be with him, Evans abandoned his elaborate plan of kidnapping her and flew back to Albany.

After that call, Deirdre realized there was another side to Evans she had never really known throughout their many years together—and it scared her.

“I was frantic [when he called me from California]. What do I do?” Deirdre recalled later. “I think a crime might happen…and I don’t want to put my life in danger by reporting him. If I decide to turn on [him], maybe my life is in jeopardy.”

And that is how Evans worked. He scared people into being quiet. Not by making idle threats, but by taking action.

If the incident with Stacy wasn’t enough to prove to Deirdre how insane Evans truly was, at one point later in 1990, after what was almost thirteen years of seeing each other occasionally and speaking over the phone routinely, Evans and Deirdre’s relationship ended abruptly one afternoon.

Evans showed up at Deirdre’s apartment just to say hello—at least that’s what she thought initially. On her dining-room table was a tourist brochure for Belize, a popular vacation spot in the Caribbean.

“Oh, are you going away somewhere?” Evans asked, picking up the brochure, flipping through it.

“Yeah,” Deirdre said. She could tell something was wrong from the tone of his voice. He was digging for information.

“Where?”

“Belize.”

“Oh, who you going with?”

“A guy I’m dating.”

“Really,” Evans said. “How come you didn’t tell me about this guy before?”

“I don’t know…,” Deirdre said. She was being evasive, she recalled later. She could tell Evans already knew the answers to his questions.

“Why didn’t you tell me about him?”

“I don’t know.”

“What…Is he
black
?”

“Yeah, he is, Gar.”

“It’s over for us, you know that. As friends. Lovers.
Anything!
I don’t know you anymore.” Evans was fuming by this point. He began breathing heavily. Pacing. A lover had violated one of his most sacred rules. Deirdre had already lost a relationship with her father over the guy, an honorable man who attended medical school. He was going to become a doctor. Like Evans, her father had given her an ultimatum: the African American or me. But not quite in those words.

Evans then demanded she give him back every last item he had ever given her, dating back to 1977 when they first met. He wanted it all: the knickknacks, letters, cards, jewelry, jackets, antiques, a TV stand, chairs and desks. Everything. He said he would be back with his truck to pick it all up.

“If I can have it all,” she remembered him saying before he left, “I won’t hurt you.”

“Here was this ‘secret friend’ I had for thirteen years,” Deirdre said later, “and now I was
his
enemy. I was fearful that he was going to hurt the guy I was seeing.”

Evans’s face, while he was leaving, became “flat,” Deirdre recalled. He grew cold-looking. “…Like no expression at all. It was as if our relationship was a business transaction to him.”

Over the next two days, Evans filled his truck twice and brought the items to a friend’s house. Out in the parking lot, while loading things, he was “mumbling” to himself. “If there’s anything worse than a nigger,” the nosy neighbor upstairs heard him say just before he left, “it’s a nigger lover!”

Deirdre never saw or heard from him again.

CHAPTER 66

As Evans continued to cultivate an intimate relationship with Lisa Morris, succeeding in convincing her that Damien Cuomo had been living large in South Carolina, basking in the sun, soaking up the good life without her and Christina, Horton and Wingate worked doggedly to build a case against Jeffrey Williams. They conducted interviews, tracked leads and kept a close eye on Williams as he finished his current sentence at home under the guard of a plastic anklet. For this simple reason, Horton and Wingate lost touch with Evans for a while, yet he still seemed to show up in their lives, Horton admitted later, to “keep an eye on us.”

By June, it was no secret around town that, although it had been only six months since Damien’s disappearance, Evans was shacking up with Lisa. According to an interview that the Troy PD gave to a local newspaper, they had interviewed “one hundred” of Damien’s closest “friends and acquaintances” and still couldn’t find him.

Since Damien had been gone, his father had taken very ill. The Troy PD assumed that “he would have come to see his father” if he was able to. On top of that, Cuomo had not tried to make contact with his daughter, Christina. This, particularly, seemed out of character for him.

Although Evans spent a considerable amount of his time at Lisa’s apartment, he kept a room at the Coliseum Hotel, which was—not by coincidence—only about a mile from Jim Horton’s home in Latham.

This was Evans’s office. He used it as a place to keep only certain items: his answering machine, a caller ID, phone and some toiletries. He would also keep an alarm system on the floor. So whenever he had the chance, he could dissect it and study how it worked.

For Evans, the past few months had become a constant routine of looking over his shoulder. Word around Troy was that he not only killed Michael Falco, but Damien Cuomo, too.