Every Move You Make (45 page)

But that incident wasn’t what caused Horton and Murray to wonder what had gone on between the suspect and county jailers. Because while he was being prepped for surgery that day, the OR nurse discovered something no one could have predicted. As she was looking at his buttocks, she noticed what appeared to be a “tail sticking out of his rectum.” After he died later that day and the ME conducted an autopsy, a full-grown rat was found inside his bowels.

Apparently, someone had shoved a rat up his ass.

“He had been chained in a cell by his arms and legs,” Horton recalled. “Those Southern cops were jokingly upset that he had given us a confession. Who knows what happened? All I know is that the guy died with a rat up his ass.”

Flying back home after a trip he had taken, Horton gazed out the plane window at the land below and became lost in the quilted patterns of circles and squares below him. It had been an unusual year that seemed to gather momentum as each month passed. Evans was in federal prison, stewing over life behind bars, while Horton was trying to figure out a way to get him into a courtroom to testify against Jeffrey Williams—without being viewed as a discredited witness. Evans had done exactly what Horton had told him not to do: he commited a crime while waiting to testify.

There ultimately was no way to present a career criminal as anything but deceitful and dishonest.

“
What
was I thinking?” Horton acknowledged later. “That Gary Evans
wasn’t
going to commit a crime while out of jail? It was stupid of me to trust him.”

When Horton got back to New York, he went to see Evans. Someone had told him he wasn’t doing so well.

“Just hang on, Gar,” Horton told Evans. “It’s almost over.”

“I don’t think I can do the rest of the time, Guy.”

“Just relax and know that you’ll be out of here in a few months.”

The Major Crimes Unit of the Bureau had dealt with thirty-four homicides during the past year. With Evans taking up space and the Williams trial looming, Horton began to question how he was going to manage it all.

“Really, I was dealing with the worst society had to offer. It was like routine for me to go to work and find out that there was another beheading or dismemberment. Then I would turn around and have to deal with Gary and his whining about being in jail.”

Evans should’ve counted his lucky stars—because, in truth, he should have gotten twenty-five years to life for the theft of the James Audubon book. A reluctant judge who wanted the book back had worked it out so Evans could be paroled in twenty-seven months. If anything, he should be thanking Horton for sticking his neck out for him. There were several antique dealers in Vermont stirring up problems for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, writing letters and making calls, because they had been burgled by Evans. For them, twenty-seven months wasn’t enough.

Essentially, Evans had gotten a free pass on, basically, a life sentence—all because he had turned over a book and befriended a cop.

Prosecutor Paul Clyne, who had been looking to nail Jeffrey Williams for years, finally got his day in court in early May. The trial had been going well for Clyne by the time he was ready to call Evans to the stand on May 16, but Clyne and Horton were still a bit leery about how Evans would come across on the stand.

The one thing they didn’t want was about to happen: Evans would be showing up in court in an orange jumpsuit, paper slippers, shackled from waist to wrist to ankles. Williams’s defense team was going to have a field day.

Evans still hadn’t been officially sentenced for the James Audubon book theft and the $75,000 worth of antiques he had stolen from several antiques shops in Vermont. The federal system is a bogged-down conveyor belt of criminals waiting to be sentenced. Evans was in line, in prison for nearly a year waiting to be sentenced. Any time accrued over that period would be time served. But first, he had an obligation to testify in what amounted to be the biggest trial Albany had on its docket in several years. Williams had already escaped a guilty verdict once.

Early in the morning on May 16, Horton sent two troopers to fetch Evans at the federal Pennsylvania prison where he had been serving his time. “Buy him cookies, milk, whatever he wants,” Horton told the troopers before they left. “Coddle him if you have to. Just get him here in good spirits.”

Later that day, Clyne and Horton were waiting in Clyne’s office when they got word Evans had arrived.

Clyne was sitting behind his desk going through some paperwork and taking notes when the door to his office opened and Evans was escorted in, clanking and hopping due to the chains and shackles and handcuffs constraining him.

Horton stood up from the chair he was sitting in while Clyne looked up from his glasses.

“Give us a few minutes,” Horton told the troopers.

The plan was to go through exactly what Evans would say when he sat in the witness chair. No surprises. No outbursts of narcissism. Just tell the jury what happened and leave it at that. Clyne and Horton explained to Evans that he would be under a blistering cross-examination from Williams’s defense attorney regarding his record.

Evans nodded. He seemed okay with it.

Horton could tell by looking at him that he was embarrassed. The chains and shackles and handcuffs made him feel as if he had let Horton down. He was pale. It was easy to suppose he hadn’t slept much.

Looking at Clyne and Horton, Evans said, “I wear the chains I forged in life” as he raised his hands and rattled the chains hanging from his handcuffs.

Clyne stopped what he was doing and just sat there for a moment. “Son of a bitch,” he said after a brief pause.

Horton, admittedly less educated than Clyne, didn’t recognize at first that the line was from Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol.
So he shook his head and wrote it off as another one of Evans’s moments of innate clarity.
That’s Gary
, Horton told himself,
always making things more dramatic than they actually are.

“Whatever, Gar…,” Horton finally said out loud to break the silence.

Clyne didn’t expect anything that dramatic out of Evans. He really didn’t know him that well, other than hearing about him from Horton and other cops. But the Dickens line impressed him.

A well-read con…what do you know!
Clyne thought.

Horton figured it out after Clyne made a reference to Dickens. “Cute, Gar,” he said. “Now, we have work to do here.”

Evans ultimately stood his ground and gave Clyne the entire summation of the conversation he’d had with Williams. He was on the stand for about a half hour. Williams’s defense attorney tried poking holes in his story by bringing up all of his prior convictions, but in the end it was one con’s word against another’s. From there, the jury could decide.

Four days after Evans testified, Williams was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering Karolyn Lonczak and later sentenced to twenty-five years to life. The conviction, many claimed, was supported by a medallion Williams had supposedly left at the murder scene on the night he purportedly had abducted Lonczak. Only later did Horton dig up a photo of Williams wearing the medallion.

Still, Horton and Clyne agreed, Evans’s testimony helped. It was one part of a package of evidence.

After the jury handed down its verdict, Horton telephoned Evans in prison and explained the verdict.

“Guilty,” Horton said. “Jeffrey Williams will spend the rest of his life behind bars.” Horton was excited. It had been a good day.

Evans didn’t say anything at first. Instead, he started crying.

“You all right, Gar?”

“Yeah…I’m okay. I’m just happy for you guys. Congratulate Paul and Doug [Wingate] for me, would you?”

“Sure, man, sure. I will. But listen, I need to talk to you about some things now that this Williams thing is behind us.”

Evans became quiet. “What’s up, Guy?”

“We’re through now, Gar. No more. I can’t do it any longer.” Horton hadn’t said it in any type of mean-spirited tone. He was simply relaying how he felt.

“I understand, Guy…I do.” Evans knew he had let Horton and Wingate down by stealing the book.

“You’re way too much of a fucking liability. I need to move on.”

“Okay, Guy.”

“You should think about leaving New York, Gar. Maybe leaving the Northeast. Consider landscaping or something else.”

Evans went silent. Horton told him to remember seriously what it was like in prison—especially the last time they had seen each other when Evans was crying and talking about suicide because he couldn’t stand doing any more time.

“I agree with you, Jim. I do,” Evans said as he continued to cry.

You’ll never do it
, Horton said to himself.

“I just need you out of my life, Gar. Take no offense, but you’re high maintenance.”

Evans was bawling now. “I wish we knew each other under different circumstances, Guy.”

“Just try to go straight, Gar. At least give it a chance. I have to go now.”

Dial tone.

CHAPTER 79

On June 9, 1995, Evans was formally sentenced to twenty-seven months for the theft of the James Audubon book. A little under a year later, on June 6, 1996, he was released from a federal prison in Vermont and placed on three years’ probation because of a time-served credit for spending all those months in prison before his sentencing.

He was nearly forty-two years old. Still as buff as a competition bodybuilder, he had put on a little more weight, but in all the right places. Almost completely bald, he had been robbing people and burglarizing homes, jewelry stores and antique shops for the past twenty-five years. Since 1977, he had been in and out of prison, on average, every third year. Along the way, he had murdered four people, possibly more. He was tired. Beaten down by the system. Resentful of it. A career criminal, he had built his life around prison, killing people and burglary—and what did he have to show for it?

Nothing.

Shortly after he was released from prison, Evans hooked back up with his old friend Tim Rysedorph. Tim was working at BFI Waste Systems in Latham. He hadn’t really seen Evans too much over the years. They had exchanged hellos every once in a while and perhaps even turned a few small “jobs” together, but for the most part Evans hadn’t seen Tim since they lived together in Troy with Michael Falco back in the early ’80s.

Evans later claimed Tim would always call him when he was low on money and “his wife put pressure on him” to come up with some quick cash. But Evans hated Caroline Parker, and was usually reluctant to work with Tim because of her attitude.

Still, Rysedorph kept calling, Evans later said, looking to turn over quick jobs for quick money.

Throughout the winter of 1996 and summer of 1997, Evans went on a burglarizing binge, and when he could, Tim Rysedorph joined him. Scores of jewelry stores, homes and antique shops were hit. Gold. Diamond necklaces. Rare antiques. Baseball cards.

Anything of value.

But it was a pair of gold cuff links worth about $1,500 that would ultimately do Evans in. When he went to sell the cuff links to a local dealer, he signed his own name on the ticket—a mistake he had never made during the past twenty-five years of committing burglaries. Throughout that same period, some later reported, Tim was trying to sell rare coins and jewelry to anyone who could come up with the money. He’d even lugged around a big brass eagle he and Evans had stolen and tried selling it, too.

As they continued to burglarize throughout the fall, Evans grew increasingly more paranoid of Tim and what he would do if they ever got caught. Evans was looking at a life sentence if he ever got pinched again. To him, life in prison meant death.

“I had planned to kill [Tim] for a while,” Evans told Horton later, “because the heat was getting closer and he would have rolled on me in a second. He had also ripped me off when we lived in Troy.”

Justification—it was all Evans had left. For every person he murdered, he defended his right to do it without remorse. Here it was twelve years after the fact and he hadn’t forgotten how Tim Rysedorph had ripped him off and blamed Michael Falco for it. He said he knew the gold cuff links were going to come back to haunt him once the Bureau put Rysedorph in a chair and shone a light in his face. So, from his view of things, there was only one way to avoid such a disaster.

Kill him.

On October 3, 1997, Evans and Rysedorph hooked up at about 12:35
P.M
. in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx in Latham, which was directly in front of the apartment complex Lisa Morris had moved into with her daughter, Christina, sometime after Damien Cuomo disappeared.

The plan was, Evans told Tim, to drive over to the Spare Room II storage facility, where Evans and Rysedorph had both rented units, and go through the merchandise they had recently stolen.

“We need to part ways, Timmy,” Evans said when he sat down in Tim’s car in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx. “It’s getting too hot right now.”

The idea was to split up the merchandise and not see each other for a while.

“Where are you going?” Tim asked.

“Canada? The West Coast? Not sure,” Evans said. “Forget that shit. Follow me to the Spare Room. Okay?”

The Spare Room II was about a two-minute drive from T.J. Maxx. By 12:50
P.M
., Evans and Tim were at Spare Room II sifting through what little merchandise they had left.

After they finished, both men drove to Lisa Morris’s apartment and had an argument outside in the parking lot as Lisa watched from her balcony.

Lisa later said the argument was over checks Tim had cashed. Evans was upset about it. It was sloppy. They were going to get caught.

“Tim will ‘roll over’ on me,” Evans later told Lisa, “because he has never been arrested before and he has a wife and kid.”

Throughout the day, Tim and Evans showed up at various times and took several items from Lisa’s apartment. Lisa later said she saw them at about 5:00
P.M
. in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx. Evans parked his truck, got into Tim’s car and they took off. But a half hour later, they returned to her apartment: Evans driving his truck, Tim his car. By 6:30, they left again in Tim’s car after another argument. At 9:00
P.M
., Evans called Lisa. “I’m with my partner…. Can you pick me up in Troy if I need you to?”