Every Move You Make (40 page)

Evans would raise the subject once in a while, but Horton was careful about what he said. It was an ongoing investigation. Sharing information with anyone—better yet a convicted felon—would jeopardize the case.

“Let him [Jeffrey Williams] get out,” Evans said one day to Horton and Wingate, “and your worries are over!”

“You let us take care of Williams, Gar. Don’t worry about it,” Horton said.

This seemingly casual conversation planted a seed in Horton’s mind, however. “I knew then that the day would come where I could possibly use Gary to help me with Jeffrey Williams. We just didn’t know how at that point.”

The relationship between Horton and Evans began to work its way to the Horton family dining-room table.

“Jim and Gary’s relationship never bothered me,” Mary Pat Horton recalled later. “After all, Jim and I thought he was just a local thief—a guy, according to Jim, who didn’t have a favorable childhood or solid role models, a guy who ‘never had a chance.’ I knew Jim was developing a rapport with him and that Gary trusted him because Jim treated Gary like a human being during their encounters. I felt sorry for Gary—because of what I knew about his childhood. As the calls by Gary became more frequent, it just reinforced to me that this guy really had no one else he could turn to. The kids and I started to refer to him as ‘Uncle Gary,’ because he called the house much more often than any of our real uncles.”

CHAPTER 69

By Farmer’s Almanac standards, October 17, 1991, was a typical fall day in New England. In Albany, temperatures had hovered around fifty-nine degrees, while the sun set under the moon phase of Waxing Gibbons at 6:10
P.M
.

Moon phases were important to Evans; and he would make note of it later in his life. A lot of his paintings and drawings had always centered on the rise and fall of the moon. The Waxing Gibbons, which is nearly full, rises during the day when most people cannot see it. Some historians claim the Italians attacked the Albanians during World War II by the light of the Waxing Moon because it had illuminated the night sky as if it were daytime.

Evans would never say that he chose the night of October 17, 1991, to act out on his bloody impulses because he favored the Waxing Moon, but his love for astrology might make one wonder if, perhaps, like a wolf, he allowed the moon to guide him on that night.

Little Falls, New York, is a ninety-minute drive from Albany, conveniently located in the middle of the state. With a population of just over five thousand, Little Falls is about as “small town” as it gets in New York: old-fashioned cafés, low-rise commercial buildings, a few retail outlets and one small coin shop on Main Street, run by thirty-six-year-old Gregory Jouben, a black-haired, good-looking local who had worked hard most of his life trying to survive as a small business owner. Beside his coin shop, the seven-story office building where Jouben rented space was vacant.

Evans loved Jouben’s shop because it was far enough away from Albany where he could come and go without being noticed.

“I had brought some stolen property/jewelry there a couple of times and got to know [Jouben] a little bit,” Evans said later. “The first couple of times he didn’t ask for any ID or my name. But the last time I went there, he asked me to sign my name, so I made one up.”

Two weeks before Evans went into Jouben’s shop for the last time, on October 3, 1991, he began camping out on the top floor of the mostly abandoned building.

“I was short on money and was scoping out [Jouben’s shop] to later rob it,” Evans recalled.

Cops later found holes in the concrete walls where Evans had practiced shooting his .22-caliber pistol. He had even spray-painted graffiti messages on the walls:
This is my fucking bank!
and
Stay the fuck out of my bank!

The other reason for moving into the building two weeks prior to the night he chose to burglarize Jouben’s shop was that he wanted to watch Jouben’s movements, Evans said. He knew Jouben had some rather expensive jewelry, but he didn’t know exactly where he kept it, he said. So at night, shortly before Jouben closed the shop, Evans would watch him by crawling around the ceiling tiles and peering at him from above. Within a few days, he found out that he was putting all of his most expensive merchandise in a state-of-the-art floor safe. There was no way, Evans realized that night, he could get into the safe without the combination.

“But I thought I would watch him for a few weeks and pick a night when he forgot to lock the safe.”

By the end of the second week, he became frustrated; he later admitted he couldn’t wait any longer.

That afternoon, he went to a local hardware store and purchased an Open/Closed sign: orange lettering, black background, the same as any For Sale sign.

After returning to where he was living on the top floor, he stuffed the sign down the front of his pants, underneath his shirt, stuck his .22-caliber pistol in a bag—“I had the gun inside a bag secured with duct tape, so when I shot him, the brass shell casings would stay in the bag”—and put it, along with a few other items, in a large duffel bag. In his front pocket, Evans placed a gold medallion with the word “bitch” etched across the front of it.

By 5:00
P.M
., he was ready to go to work.

At about the same time, Jouben closed his shop and set out across the street to make a deposit at the local bank. A local Watertown police officer even watched him make the drop.

The cop was traveling southbound on Ann Street, going toward East Main, when he saw Jouben heading back into his shop. “He was wearing light-colored clothing and…looked happy at the time,” the cop reported later.

Evans left the top floor at approximately 5:00 and worked his way downstairs to approach Jouben about buying the gold
BITCH
medallion.

Jouben was sitting at his jeweler’s table near the cash register when Evans walked through the front door, the bells hanging off the doorknob rattling as if it were Christmastime. Jouben couldn’t see Evans from where he sat. But by the time he got up to check who had walked in, Evans had already locked the door from the inside and placed the Open/Closed sign, with the Closed side facing out, in the window.

“Can I help you…?” Jouben asked as Evans approached him.

“How are you?” Evans said.

It took a moment, but Jouben recognized Evans. “Hey, how have you been? I’m closing in a few minutes.”

Evans reached into his pocket and pulled out the broach. “Can you check this out for me real quick?”

“Sure,” Jouben said as they walked back to his desk. Then, as he slipped on his eyepiece and jeweler’s lens, Evans reached into his bag and placed his hand on a .22-caliber pistol he had purchased recently.

“Greg [Jouben] took [the broach] from me, sat down at his desk,” Evans recalled later, “and began to look at the piece through his eyeglass.”

Viewing the piece, Jouben could tell immediately it was worthless. “The diamonds are ACZ…worth maybe ten dollars,” he said, still gazing at it.

Next, as Jouben lifted the piece up to the light for a better look, Evans shot him once in the back of the head.

Jouben then fell onto his desk, his body convulsing and shaking…. Blood ran down the back of his head, across his shoulder and onto his forearm and thigh.

Evans quickly walked to the front of the shop and checked to see if anyone had heard the shot. Confident no one had, he shut the lights off and grabbed a handful of diamond engagement rings—the items he’d had his eye on for the past two weeks—and put them into his duffel bag.

Jouben, however, wasn’t dead; Evans heard him stirring at his desk and immediately ran toward him.

Reaching him a few seconds later, Evans later said he saw Jouben, barely able to move, reaching for the phone.

Motherfucker…you’re still alive?

As Jouben, grunting and struggling to take a breath, lifted the phone receiver, Evans pumped two more rounds into the side of his head. At that point, blood splattered across Jouben’s desk, clothes and face as the shots tore through his skull. He fell back in his chair; his head hanging off the back headrest, a trail of blood dripping…pooling up on the floor.

Scared he had made too much noise, Evans then grabbed a few more items and took off. Inside the back of the shop was a door leading to other sections of the building. Knowing the layout of the building, he worked his way through the labyrinth of doors and hallways and found the main stairwell leading up to the roof.

Running up to the fourth floor, Evans fled out the door and ended up facing “a lower roof on an adjacent building.”

Like a teenager acting on a dare, he hopped from building to building, crossing over alleyways about fifty feet below. He had parked his truck just down the block earlier that day.

“As I was going out of the building and across several roofs, I heard stuff dropping out of the bag all the way.”

When he reached the fourth roof, he shinned down a set of drainpipes attached to the side of the building, like a fireman, and found himself standing in an alley staring at his truck.

CHAPTER 70

The Little Falls Police Department (LFPD) received a call around 8:49
P.M
. from Constance Jouben, Gregory Jouben’s seventy-seven-year-old mother. She had been working with her son that day and left the shop, she said, at about 3:30
P.M
.

“My son,” Constance told police over the phone, “failed to come home from work at his usual time. I’ve called and called over there…but haven’t gotten an answer.”

“Okay, ma’am,” the dispatcher said. “And you’re worried about him?”

“Yes. I don’t know. This is unlike Gregory. He’s usually home by seven.”

“We’ll check it out.”

Within minutes, three Little Falls patrolmen were dispatched to the scene.

One of the officers tried the front door, but it was locked. Evans had locked it himself. Walking around to the side-street entrance, where a window looked into the shop, the cop then tried the side door, but it, too, was locked. Peering into the shop through the window, the cop could see Jouben slumped over backward in his chair, in front of his desk.

“Hey, can you hear me?” the cop yelled, banging on the window to see if he could get Jouben’s attention.

After walking around and kicking open the bottom portion of the front door, the same cop crawled in and found Jouben’s “stiff and rigid [body]…. He had blood on his face and all over his body…a pool of blood on the floor.”

A fourth cop had been dispatched to the scene while the others were already inside. When he arrived minutes later at the front door, he saw Constance Jouben milling about, wondering what was going on.

Two “young girls” were outside the building on Ann Street, around the corner. As the cop approached them, one of them said, “You can see him. He’s slumped over.”

With the front door now open and cops wandering around everywhere, Constance Jouben walked in and followed one of the officers toward the back.

“Someone killed him,” she blurted out when she walked around the corner and saw her son sprawled out on the chair, blood all over his face, clothes and floor. “Why did they have to do this? He’s dead….”

Evans left Little Falls and drove directly back to his motel room at the Coliseum Hotel in Latham. The following day, he boarded a bus to Colorado and met up with a fence he had used from time to time.

The total tally from the Little Falls job was just a hair over $60,000.

Blood money—all of it.

When he returned to Latham two days later, Evans buried the gun he had used to kill Gregory Jouben, along with a second gun he had been carrying with him, in a metal box in the back of Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands.

The LFPD, along with the local state police, conducted an investigation into Gregory Jouben’s murder and immediately found several items that Evans had left behind. In all of the planning he had done, Evans had forgotten to clean up the abandoned section of the building where he had been living. Cops found an “oily rag” he had used to keep his gun from rusting, empty water and juice bottles, various snack wrappers, the graffiti on the walls and one size-8½ sneaker footprint.

None of it would be enough to connect Evans to the crime, or even send cops in his direction, but all of the evidence would later place him at the scene and confirm his statements.

Although Horton was working officially for the DEA, part of the deal between the feds and the state police was that he could also be used for homicides. Busting drug dealers and drug addicts wasn’t exactly how Horton preferred to spend his time. By 1992, he had put together nearly fourteen years with the state police, and his record spoke for itself. He felt his talent for catching murderers, thieves and rapists was not being utilized in the DEA.

“I was a polygraphist, a homicide cop…. I did not care for narcotics,” Horton recalled. “The honest truth is, arresting dope dealers wasn’t a challenge. Some guys are very good at narcotics. Undercovers, especially. I wasn’t an undercover. It didn’t do anything but discourage me. We’d get a guy for selling dope, roll him; then we get the next guy, roll him, and he’d give us another name. It was a cycle.”

The relationship between Horton and Evans had become more personal and regular by 1993. Evans continued showing up around town wherever Horton was and Horton continued to “pop in” on Evans at the various hotel and motel rooms he rented around the neighborhood. Horton knew Evans was burglarizing the entire time, but he never caught him with any stolen property or burglar tools. Evans was smart to burglarize businesses and homes outside Albany, for fear of Horton.

“He would never, in all the years I knew him, shit in his own backyard,” Horton said later. “He knew I wasn’t only stopping by his room to talk. He never lost sight of the fact that I was a cop doing my job.”

Throughout the entire time Evans was burglarizing and murdering people under Horton’s nose, he had lifted weights religiously. Bigger now than he had ever been, Evans would flaunt his muscles in front of Horton whenever they saw each other. Horton would flatter Evans by commenting on how good he looked.