Every Move You Make (43 page)

Generally speaking, if a thief smells something funny while meeting with a fence, he will take off and never contact the fence again. Evans, however, viewed the entire operation with the FBI as a challenge and yearned to see how far they would take it.

Ten minutes into the conversation, Evans decided he wasn’t interested in talking anymore. The FBI had nothing to arrest him on, so it had to let him go. He had never mentioned the book specifically, nor had he said he could get it. Even if he had, the book was nowhere in sight.

As he took off on foot, the FBI scrambled for position. With a plane already waiting, it was decided a tail would be put on him for the night to see where he went. Perhaps he would lead them to the book?

From there, Evans left in his truck and, realizing he was being followed the entire time, took the FBI on what he later called a “joyride” for the next six hours.

“All he did,” Horton said, “was drive around in a huge circle while twenty FBI agents wasted the night watching him. It was typical Gary Evans all the way…. He was in charge from the moment he set up the buy.”

CHAPTER 75

The FBI’s informant made contact with Evans a few days later and said he wanted to set up another meeting to discuss buying the book.

To make sure he had all bases covered, Evans had Lisa Morris, with whom he had been living on and off since killing Damien Cuomo, move the book from place to place while he dealt with the FBI. Before the meet at the hotel, Evans had driven up to the Canadian border to get the book, just in case the buyer was legit. But when he found out he was dealing with a snitch, he gave it to Lisa and had her move it from state to state while he met with the informant.

To say the least, the FBI highly underestimated Evans. And there was certainly some type of power struggle going on between it and the state police. Egos aside, if the FBI wanted the book back, they must have known there was only one cop who could get it for them.

Still, before handing the case to Horton, the assistant special agent-in-charge, Joe Flynn, whom Horton described later as “a good guy who knew his job,” decided to take one more chance with his informant, who was able to renegotiate another meeting with Evans in the parking lot of a restaurant in Lake George, New York.

The FBI decided to show up in Lake George in a recreational vehicle. A team of agents pulled up in an RV several hours before the meeting was to take place. At least this time they had taken some of Horton’s advice.

According to Evans, he had been camping out in the woods near the parking lot of the restaurant for three days. That morning, he later said, he looked through a set of binoculars as the RV “pulled into the parking lot and the agents got out, stretched and went into the restaurant to get breakfast and go to the bathroom.

“I watched the entire operation,” he added, “laughing my ass off.”

Around the time of the meet, with agents nestled in the RV waiting for Evans to show up, Evans got on his mountain bike, strolled into the parking lot and, he later claimed, approached the RV slowly. After scoping out where the informant was located, he then began circling the RV on his bicycle, knocking on the windows, banging on the sides. “I know you’re in there…. Come on out,” Evans said as he drove around the vehicle a few times.

Playing out his hand, he then rode up to the informant and told him to “go fuck himself.”

“He was lucky I didn’t kill him right there in the parking lot in front of all those federal motherfuckers,” Evans explained to Horton later.

“With their tail between their legs,” Horton said later, the FBI called after the incident in Lake George and “asked for my help in getting the book back.”

Horton told them, “I can get it back, but I really haven’t had much contact with Gary lately.” Then, without saying “I told you so,” Horton said he would do it, but it had to be done on his terms.

The FBI, perhaps just wanting to get the book back any way it could, agreed.

Months went by before Evans contacted Horton. And that’s the way it had to be, Horton said. “He had to come to me. It couldn’t be the other way around.”

Horton was already looking to rip into Evans because of the deal they had made after Evans made bail and said he would stay out of trouble so he could testify with a clean slate against Jeffrey Williams. Now Horton was looking at not only bringing a convicted felon into court to testify, but he would be dressed down in shackles and an orange jumpsuit.

The exact situation he wanted to avoid.

As patient as a fox, when it came to capturing criminals, Horton rarely gave up. His days as a polygraphist and interrogator had taught him that to try to predict a criminal’s behavior was impossible, but allowing him the space to conduct business his way was essential.

After a few anxious months of not hearing from him, Evans finally called Horton at his home during midspring 1994. “It’s the Unabomber,” Evans said, laughing. “What the
fuck
is going on, Guy?”

“How the hell did you get my phone number?” Horton asked right away. He had changed his phone number for about the third time in as many years because of Jeffrey Williams. Mary Pat had been getting hang-up calls. The press had been bothering him about Williams and Evans.

Evans laughed. Then, “Your wife gave me the number.” He said he had followed Mary Pat into a local photo shop one day. While inside the store, he heard her tell the clerk her phone number.

“You bastard,” Horton snapped. “You following my wife around now?”

“I would never hurt her, Jim. You know that.”

“You screwed me,” Horton said. “You promised me you would not get into any trouble. We have the Jeff Williams case coming up soon. I need you to testify.”

Evans became quiet. “Sorry, Jim. I am what I am.”

“Well, how are we going to fix this?”

“I can’t go back to prison, Guy. I can’t. I’ll get twenty-five to life. No motherfucking way I am doing that.”

“I need the book back. Where is it?”

“What are you going to do for me?”

Horton told Evans he would look into talking to the judge about going easy on him for the theft of the book if he turned it over, but it was going to be difficult. “You really pissed that judge off, Gar. He’s on the board of trustees of that library.”

“Do what you can.”

“Where are you?”

“I can’t tell you that, come on. I should go now.”

“You better call me back. You promised to help me out with Williams.”

Evans said he would call back in a few weeks. Meanwhile, he suggested Horton talk to the judge and come up with some sort of deal. “See what you can work out.”

The judge wanted Evans bad. It wasn’t only the book. But Evans had also burglarized several antique shops in Vermont around the same time. Local shop owners were calling for a stiff sentence. He was a repeat offender.

Horton’s job, however, was to get the book back and prepare Evans for the Jeffrey Williams trial. So he and Wingate made several trips to Vermont to curry favor between U.S. attorneys from Vermont and New York and the federal judge. Evans said he would do two years at the most. The judge, after carefully analyzing the situation, perhaps realizing that if the library wanted the book back he was going to have to cave into Evans’s demands, made an offer of twenty-seven months. Looking back, Horton explained how it was the only way the feds could get the book back. Evans was in control of the situation; he could destroy the book and never set foot again in the Northeast.

Of course, no one could have known it at the time, but they were cutting a deal with a serial killer.

When Evans called Horton back, Horton explained the situation. Evans wasn’t all that thrilled—he had put a cap on twenty-four months—but agreed, nonetheless, to turn himself and the book in.

The Monte Mario Motel, only one mile from Horton’s home in Latham, was a ramshackle, weekly rental that derelicts from all walks of life frequented. Weather-stained white stucco on the exterior bore traces of grime and dirt collected from the years of neglect, while the inside of the rooms would have likely offended homeless people. Evans had been staying at the hotel on and off for years.

By the middle of June 1994, Horton and Wingate had made plans with Evans to meet at 8:00 one morning in the parking lot of the Monte Mario. Evans was reluctant, of course, but at the same time ready to go to jail and fulfill his obligation to Horton.

“Just have the book!” Horton told him when they spoke a few days before the meet.

CHAPTER 76

As Horton and Wingate pulled into the Monte Mario, they saw Evans standing in the parking lot with a bag of toiletries in his hand, smiling.

“What’s up, Gar?” Horton said as he and Wingate got out of the car.

“We meet again….”

“Listen, I have to search you. I’m not going to be made to look like a fool for turning you over to the FBI and you’re packing all kinds of ‘goodies.’”

“Go for it.”

The plan was, Horton and Wingate would arrest Evans and drive him to Rutland, Vermont, to meet with the FBI. Once there, he would become federal property.

As Horton went to pat Evans down, Evans handed over three handcuff keys: one underneath his watch, another in his shoe and a third tucked inside a hand-made seam in his belt. He had a fourth key, however, Horton never found. Years later, he explained how, as Horton and Wingate pulled into the parking lot, he swallowed the fourth key. He figured once he had a chance to get settled into his cell up north, he could recycle it through his body and hide it on his body or in his cell.

Horton and Wingate had such a respectful relationship with Evans that they decided against handcuffing him. It was a long, dull ride up to Rutland. Why make things more tense?

So, like three buddies on their way to a weekend of drinking and fishing, Horton, driving, Wingate, riding shotgun, and Evans, alone in the backseat unhandcuffed, began their journey up to Vermont.

“I wasn’t upset at the fact that he didn’t have the book on him,” Horton recalled later. “In fact, if he’d had it on him, I would have thought differently about him and even lost some respect for him.”

The drive was unremarkable. They talked about their lives, television, sports—and how Evans had let Horton down. Along the way, Horton stopped and bought Evans cookies and milk, doughnuts and potato chips.

“You are unbelievable,” Horton, shaking his head in disgust, said at one point after stopping at a rest stop. “You couldn’t just stay out of trouble until
after
the Jeffrey Williams trial?”

“I left the area, didn’t I? I didn’t do anything around here.”

“You didn’t go far enough away…. You really pissed that judge off. You are not going to be welcomed with open arms up there. I hope you realize that.”

At any point, Evans could have jumped out of the car, or taken off during one of their many stops.

“Doug and I figured that he had turned himself in and wasn’t interested in running.”

Horton had made earlier plans to meet several FBI agents at a local Denny’s restaurant in Rutland.

“We bought Gary breakfast, told him to be a good little boy for the feds, turned him over and drove back to Albany.”

The FBI then shackled Evans, put him in a cruiser and drove north to where he had hidden the book.

In true bureaucratic fashion, the FBI gave the New York State Police no credit for getting Evans to turn over the book. On June 22, 1994, the
Rutland Herald
, a local Vermont newspaper, ran the headline:
FBI RECOVERS AUDUBON BOOK
;
MAN ARRESTED
.

According to Evans later, not only did the FBI not want to admit that Horton and Wingate had been instrumental in the return of the book, but one agent mocked Evans’s relationship with them, saying, “You don’t have your ‘friends’ from the New York State Police here to protect you now.”

Evans hadn’t been locked up in nearly seven years. Now a product of the federal system, he was at the mercy of overcrowding and available bed space and thus shipped frequently around the Northeast, from prison to prison, like a box of documents.

Horton and Wingate went to see him when they could, but months would go by without any contact. When Evans felt they were blowing him off, he’d dash off a letter. It was clear that prison was turning an already paranoid deviant into an insolated sociopath who began to allow the demons that had controlled him periodically throughout the years take full control over him.

I hope you can come soon,
Evans wrote to Horton in early 1995.
I’m not doing too good…. I’m talking to a doctor here. Can someone talk to me?

The remainder of the letter, which was brief, consisted of Evans begging for some sort of attention from Horton. His handwriting had changed; it was unsteady, scribbled and almost unreadable.

After receiving the letter, Horton went to see him.

“All he did was cry,” Horton recalled later. “He was in the worst state of being I had ever seen him.”

The Jeffrey Williams trial was slated for summer. Horton needed Evans in good emotional health, but the next letter, written a week later, proved he was, perhaps, beyond that point now:
I am very fucked up. I’m going to be OK for trial…. I’m just…I just get scared in these places. I’m not OK.

His sentences, at times, made little sense:
I love [Doris Sheehan] so much everything gone I can’t I’m not doing good. Can you come and talk to me please or call me because I’m not doing good at all.

With the Jeffrey Williams trial looming, Horton once again went to see him.

“Gary Evans had turned into a different person…. He was losing his mind, literally,” Horton recalled. “His entire look had changed from bad to worse. He was now nearly completely bald. That bothered him. He wasn’t showering.”

Indeed, Evans had realized too little too late that it had been a mistake to turn over the book. Two years behind bars was like a life sentence.

The changes Horton had seen in Evans by the summer of 1995, however, were nothing compared to what Evans had been doing shortly before he had turned himself in to Horton and Wingate.