Every Move You Make (48 page)

Evans took the phone, sat back, stared at it and started crying.

“Call her!”

Evans slowly dialed the number.

“Lisa? That you?”

Lisa Morris’s life, by June 1998, had spiraled out of control. She was drinking heavily, abusing hard drugs and spending much of her time in local bars. She hadn’t worked in quite some time. Befriending Horton in 1997 and setting up Evans for his fall in Vermont had indeed taken its toll. She had loved Evans. She believed in her heart Damien had run out on her and Christina. Even with the latest news coverage, she still didn’t want to believe Evans had killed Damien.

“I was grief stricken about the whole thing,” Lisa said later. “Gary was my best friend. I had lost the love of my life when Damien disappeared. Gary filled that role. Regardless of what people have said, [Gary] was good for Christina. He loved her. When I saw in the newspaper that he was giving up bodies, I couldn’t believe what they were saying about him.”

Crying, Evans said, “I’m sorry….”

“What do you mean, you’re ‘sorry’?” Lisa asked.

“I gotta do this favor for these guys…. I didn’t mean to do this to you,” Evans said.

In the end, Evans refused to tell Lisa that he had killed Damien.

“But I knew,” she recalled later.

Horton sat there, watching, listening.

Lisa finally said, “Put Jim back on the phone.”

Evans handed Horton the phone and stared out the window.

Lisa couldn’t speak when Horton got on the phone.

“I’m very sorry, Lisa. I am,” Horton said. “I’ll call you later.”

CHAPTER 84

Dealing with Gary Evans over the past week had been exhausting for Jim Horton, physically and mentally. Evans had given up four bodies. He was manic: up one minute, down the next. He demanded Horton visit him in jail every day. In addition, Lisa Morris was now calling and asking questions that Horton didn’t have answers to.

And then there was the media.

“The press was on me like crazy,” Horton said later. “About five or six reporters suddenly wanted to be my best friends. Both television and print. Every day they wanted to talk directly to me to see what Gary had said.”

Horton couldn’t even go to the jails Evans was being shuffled in between, he said, without reporters knowing about it. He believed each jail had a guard feeding the media information about his movements.

“I needed a break from Gary Evans.”

Ever since Horton had worked himself into a bout with spinal meningitis back in the late ’80s, he had reassessed his life. He couldn’t work seventeen-, eighteen-, twenty-four-hour days without paying a price. He was forty-three years old now—same as Evans. The spinal meningitis had knocked him down for months. Doctors said a lot of it was due to the rigorous work schedule he kept.

This time, he wasn’t going to let the job—more specifically, Evans—ruin his health. He needed to stay focused and be ready when Evans was willing to talk about other murders. In all likelihood, Tim Rysedorph, Damien Cuomo, Gregory Jouben and Douglas Berry were only the beginning. There was no telling how many more bodies would turn up.

By June 24, a Wednesday, Horton had set two goals: One, he wanted Evans to give up Michael Falco; and two, he needed a long weekend away with his wife and children to regroup.

After a long discussion with Evans later that day, Evans admitted to Horton that he had killed Michael Falco and buried his body in Florida.

“Where?” Horton wanted to know.

“Near my sister’s house,” Evans said, “in Lake Worth.”

Horton immediately contacted the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) and informed them that the Bureau needed aerial photographs of an area in Lake Worth near a golf course. Evans told Horton he could pick out the spot where Falco was buried but, “I would rather you take me there so I can show you myself. I’m not positive I can find it on a map.”

An hour or so later, Horton went back and told Evans he had spoken to his boss about flying him down to Florida. “Having you travel in any fashion,” Horton said, “is out of the question. They just won’t okay it. Sorry, Gar. But I can’t do anything this time.”

Evans was an escape risk. He had been telling the people who were visiting him that he was going to escape. He was asking for razor blades. Nobody knew it, but he had swallowed a handcuff key when he was taken into custody in Vermont and had been recycling it while in jail. Throughout his years of incarceration, Evans had sometimes slept with his index finger lodged in his right nostril for the purpose of forging a tunnel in his sinus where he could hide a handcuff key.

“I didn’t even broach the subject with my boss of Gary flying to Florida,” Horton recalled later. “But I lied to Gary and told him he had said no. Not that I didn’t trust Gary to a point, but something told me not to move him.”

A short while later, when Horton stopped in to see Evans, he found out how accurate his instincts were. Evans said, “I would have jumped out of the plane on the way back from Florida.”

“We would have been in a jet. I would have been sucked out as well.”

Evans shrugged his shoulders.

Horton assigned Sully to go to Florida with the Bureau’s ID Unit to oversee the search and excavation of Michael Falco’s body. But before Sully could leave, Horton wanted to introduce him to Evans so Evans could show Sully, using aerial photographs, where Falco was buried. Horton had made plans to leave for the weekend. He wasn’t breaking them.

“Gary didn’t want me to leave, nor did I want to go,” Horton recalled. “But I had to delegate some things. Gary felt comfortable with Sully, who has a calming, trusting nature.”

So, as Sully and the boys made preparations for a trip to Florida, Horton and his family drove east to spend the weekend at a family-owned cottage in Connecticut. “I had worked many days in a row,” Horton said. “Gary just gave up Falco. The guys were headed south. Even if Gary had another body to give me during the time I was away, there was really nobody available (that I wanted) to help me. He was becoming more depressed and just wanted to talk, but he also seemed to change and become clingier toward me. He wanted me to come to the jail just to be there. I was interested in more bodies, while he was turning to me as someone he could talk to, a father figure, a friend, means of support.”

As it turned out, while Horton was in Connecticut climbing the walls—calling work four, five times a day with the feeling that something was going to happen in his absence—Evans ended up phoning him several times.

“There wasn’t a vacation I ever took where I wasn’t like this. I would call work every day, which is probably not too healthy. But being away from Gary, especially, gave me a lot of anxiety. I knew he was planning something—I just didn’t know what.”

Indeed, there were only three people who later admitted that they knew what Evans was planning, but they either didn’t take him seriously enough to go to the authorities with the information, didn’t think he could pull it off or abetted him the entire way.

CHAPTER 85

Isn’t it a pity, isn’t it a shame

Evans plays a vicious game

And seeing how you like to tell people things

I wish you could tell me…is it dark in that hole?

Discovered years later, Evans had written a letter in verse from prison to one of his victims before he had killed him. He didn’t name the person, but it was clear years later that it was either Michael Falco or Damien Cuomo, both of whom had been buried in holes.

Today is so nice, it’s a shame to die on such a day. Now I’m wondering if you feel anything—can you feel your death coming to meet you? Did you ever think that I spent every day + night for years thinking of how you should die? I wonder what you gained when you told on me?

The 1½-page letter was unrelenting in its accusatory manner. Evans wanted his victim to know that because he had “told” on him, he had to die. In what had become his trademark throughout the years, he began the letter with a smiley face and ended it the same way, as if speaking of death and premeditated murder was what made him the happiest.

Letter writing had always been an outlet for Evans while he was incarcerated. He used letters to manipulate people, and each letter was methodically tailored to coddle each specific person’s character.

In early July, as prosecutors prepared what was shaping up to be a death penalty case against him, Evans began a letter-writing campaign to those people in his life he trusted the most. In a letter addressed to Horton on July 3, he spoke about their entire life of cat and mouse together, flavoring the letter with anecdotes from his childhood and teenage years of burglary:
I look at the things I’ve done and say in the mirror, “I did that?” And I know I did and I know it’s all over soon.

“The remorseful Gary Evans.”

Then he talked about his “magical princess,” Doris Sheehan, a woman he credited with getting him over the love of his life, Stacy.

Near the end of the letter, Evans reminisced about the “red light” he had run in Cohoes back in 1985 on the night he met Horton. As if fate were the driving force, he equated the meeting to some sort of astrological aligning of the stars.

He admitted he “looked up” to Horton, “because I can’t look down on you.”

Finally at peace, no more pain—that’s freedom. It’s over finally. Thank you Jim for being Jim. You’re a great guy and my friend.

He lastly told Horton he didn’t want him to love him:
I’m that much better off.

On July 10, as the Bureau began looking for Michael Falco’s remains in Florida, Evans penned a letter to Bill Murphy, the only “true friend in the world” he claimed he ever had.

He begged Bill to come to the jail:
It’s safe now, no filming, etc, no publicity…. Boy did I fuck up.
He wrote he needed to say
some serious things—views of life from the Evans observatory.

“The feel-sorry-for-me Gary Evans.”

He then explained how regretful he was for the reporters who had been bothering Bill at work. Then:
I made mistakes and it’s almost finishing time.

Bill, he said, had been his friend longer than anyone:
I hope you come see me soon, it’s almost too late already. Please come, I need to…say good-bye.

CHAPTER 86

Jo Rehm had been Evans’s baby-sitter, surrogate mother, friend and protector. As kids growing up in Troy during the late ’60s, Evans and Jo Rehm were inseparable. Jo took care of little Gary while Flora Mae and Roy Evans drank themselves silly. Years later, when Jo got married and moved away, she took Evans in for a summer after he had run away from home. After he left Jo’s home later that year, however, she never really saw him again—that is, until Evans was facing the end of his life and wanted to let her know how much she had meant to him all these years.

The letter Evans wrote to Jo was drenched with “don’t blame yourself” rhetoric that only Evans could dish out with his usual saccharine cadence. Jo had written to Evans and explained how she had been hard on herself for not taking better care of him when he was a child.

It was nonsense. Jo was just a kid herself, looking to get the hell out of Troy and begin a life of her own.

And listen,
Evans wrote after demanding Jo stop beating herself up,
this is important, I’m OK. I’m at peace with myself. I accomplished a very important thing. And when my time is up, I’ll laugh….

He wrote fervently that he
never hurt a girl or innocent person ever. Every one of them was a criminal that did at least as bad as me—and a couple were worse.

“Gary Evans, the justifier.”

Apparently, he had forgotten the heartless fact that he had murdered one shop owner while he was asleep and another while he was viewing a piece of jewelry. Both were hard-working family men who never bothered anybody.

No more mail,
Evans ended the letter with.
I get too sad, OK?

Horton received another letter from Evans, on July 11.

Times running, Guy. I feel very sad and a little bit scared, too…. Lotta bullshit in the paper. I hope you’ll always be OK, I know you will. I’m so sorry about my life.

“The concerned Gary Evans.”

The local newspapers had been running daily stories about Evans and Horton now for the past three weeks. People were beginning to call Evans a “monster,” a term that infuriated him. He was worried that Robbie and his nephew, Devan, would get caught in the whirlwind of press reports. He didn’t want the media bothering them. And Lisa Morris, well:
Can you figure out a way to get [her] in line?
he asked.

Lisa was giving the press photographs of Evans and telling stories about her life with him. He wanted Horton to collect all of his personal items from her.

Major Bart R. Johnson, commander of Troop G, released a formal statement explaining how, on July 14, 1998, Michael Falco’s remains had been found in Florida and, with the help of dental records, positively identified.

With the death toll now at five and rising, when Horton asked Evans about the trip he took out west after murdering Tim Rysedorph, Evans said he was “finished giving up bodies.”

Horton figured when the time was right, he would start talking again.

Jo Rehm hadn’t seen Gary Evans for almost twenty-five years. They had bumped into each other at a local retail store back in 1995, but beyond that two-minute encounter, Jo hadn’t spoken to him.

When Jo read about how depressed he was, she picked up the phone, called the jail and made arrangements to go see him.

As soon as they made eye contact a day later, they started crying. It had been a long road. Yet here they were now at what seemed like the end trying to figure out what had happened and where everything had gone so horribly wrong.

“I’ve done a lot of bad things, Jo,” Evans said. “I’m sick.”