Every Move You Make (49 page)

“Do they know you’re sick?” Jo understood him wrong; she thought he was physically ill. “The flu,” she later said, “or something.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Evans said, pointing to his head. “I’m sick here.”

For the next thirty minutes, they talked about old times. Then Evans launched into an attack against Robbie. He said he didn’t want to see her. He was mad at her, but he did want to see Devan.

The next day, Jo went back. Lisa Morris was there when she arrived. It was a short visit.

A few days after that, Horton called Jo after Evans asked him to, because Evans wanted to see Jo again, but said he was having trouble getting word to her.

Jo didn’t trust Horton. “I’ll pick you up,” Horton offered, “if you want me to?”

“No! I’ve read about you in the papers. I’ll take my own car, thank you.”

That day, when Jo saw Evans, she asked him about Horton.

“Jim is okay,” Evans said. “He’s my friend.” He paused for a moment, crying, “I…I love Jim Horton.”

Jo then thought,
If he’s good enough for Gary, he’s good enough for me.

“Make sure you keep in touch with Jim,” Evans said after collecting himself. “He’ll always be there for you.”

“Okay, Gary.”

From there, Evans started talking in a manner that led Jo to believe the end was near—not, specifically, that Evans was preparing himself emotionally for a death sentence, but that he was planning on doing something to himself. Something big, something people would remember him by.

As the days dragged on and a capital felony murder case was being built against him, Evans started writing to Jo and Horton nearly every day.

On Tuesday, July 28, he wrote to Horton:
It would have been nice to have you as a brother, growing up somewhere nice instead of the trolls that kidnapped me from nice people when I was a baby.
Then he described a scene from Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol,
comparing his life to the Ghost of Jacob Marley.

Next he initiated an attack on the justice system, pushing the blame for the murders he committed on a system, he said, that should allow a “thief to do a thief’s time” He wrote:
Nothing would have happened to
those
people [Falco, Cuomo, Berry, Jouben and Rysedorph] if I didn’t have to worry about getting life for stealing.

In other words, if the courts would have just allowed him the opportunity to be a serial burglar without serious punishment, he would not have killed anyone.

Don’t you see? It’s all their fault!
he was implying.

Near the end of the letter, he began to question whether what was happening had all been predetermined:
So was it fate [that] we met in a dingy little holding cell in Cohoes and thirteen years later [we] say good-bye here? Were we meant to learn something from our interaction as cops n’ robbers and more?

Reading the letter, Horton could only shake his head in disbelief. “Gary had an excuse for everything; he wanted to believe it wasn’t his fault.”

Days later, worried about his emotional state, Horton stopped in to see him. As they talked, Evans admitted he was planning an escape.

“You don’t want to do that, Gar,” Horton encouraged.

“I have to, Guy. I can’t die in here.”

A few days prior to Horton’s visit, Evans had told Lisa Morris nearly the same thing, adding, “If I die in here, they win…. If I die out there, I win.”

“Well,” Horton said, “if you do try something, all I ask is that you don’t hurt anyone…. And don’t do it while in state police custody. Don’t make me or the state police look like fools for trusting you.”

Evans said he understood.

Leaving the jail, Horton put in a call to the DA’s office and the Rensselaer County Sheriff’s Office, who were responsible for holding Evans. He told both that Evans was planning an escape attempt. “I don’t know how or when, but he told me he is going to try.” Like he had said numerous times throughout his career to many different law enforcement agencies, Horton ended the conversation with a familiar caveat: “He will crawl through a straw if he has to. Don’t underestimate him. To get away, he will do anything he has to. Remember, he has nothing to lose.”

Please believe what I am telling you,
Horton silently pleaded.

CHAPTER 87

Evans would write notes for Lisa Morris on the back of chewing-gum wrappers or small pieces of paper, roll them into tiny scrolls, stuff them up in his sinuses and, when no one was looking, slip them to Lisa when she visited him at Albany County Jail. In one, he explained how he wanted Lisa to find him a special handcuff key, and even drew a picture of it after explaining where she could find it. Although Lisa had turned Evans in and he had vowed never to see her again, the game, so to speak, was over. Lisa still loved Evans, she said later. She was one of only a handful of people he had left and she wasn’t about to turn her back on him now.

Lisa would never admit that she had fulfilled Evans’s request, but it would be clear in the coming days that Evans either had a handcuff key already, or obtained one from someone who visited him. When asked about it later, Horton said he believed Evans had smuggled a key into the jail by swallowing it in Vermont and kept it hidden inside his nose the entire time he was in jail.

Regardless, it was clear he was going to make an escape attempt. The questions were: when and how?

By August 3, a grand jury had convened to decide Evans’s fate. In all likelihood, he would be indicted by week’s end and charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. Would the case, in the end, meet the strict guidelines for capital punishment, which had been reinstated in New York on September 1, 1995? District Attorney Kenneth Bruno, who was in charge of prosecuting Evans, was doing his best to prove it did. The one item of importance, Bruno suggested, was the fact that Evans had killed Tim Rysedorph in an attempt to stop him from testifying against him for a string of burglaries they had committed together.

The death penalty issue only instigated a new wave of media coverage. Evans was being billed as a serial killer. To assuage his insecurities over being put into the same monstrous category as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and several other high-profile serial killers, Horton set up an exclusive interview between Evans and the
Albany Times Union
newspaper. The two-page interview, including photos of Evans behind bars, gave him the opportunity to explain himself. Like he had all along, he said he never wanted for his life to turn out the way it had. “The things I did,” he told the
Times Union
, “related to business.”

Evans looked tired in the photographs that ran with the article. He had bags under his eyes. His demeanor appeared dark. Cold. Vacant. Horton later said he had taken on an entirely new persona by this time: from remorseful and saddened over everything he had done, to an admitted killer, both terrified and paranoid of the future.

Meanwhile, family members of Evans’s many victims assailed him in the press. Caroline Parker, for one, was telling any reporter who would listen that Evans had chosen to kill, and for that reason he should die a horrible death like that of his victims.

With his first court appearance to face charges of murder only a week away, and the information Horton had provided to the DA regarding Evans’s desire to escape, Evans was placed in solitary confinement. With nothing left to do, he began to pen what would be his final two letters to Horton—letters that would, later, serve as a crystal ball.

On August 5, it appeared that he wanted to—if only half-heartedly—take responsibility for his actions. He wrote to Horton:
I fucked up my life repeatedly…my decisions, my fault. I thought I was too smart and I was, for a long time. But I got stupid and here I am. My fault.

He wrote he especially felt sorry for Christina Morris, Lisa Morris and Damien Cuomo’s daughter. He apologized for misleading Lisa all those years and, in turn, Lisa having to lie to Christina:
I wrecked lives. I was unfeeling toward survivors of victims…. It’s cold but true. So I deserve what’s coming. I got worse and worse and when the trap was coming I killed to avoid it. Cold bloodedly…. And I don’t want someone like me in society myself.

Two days later, another letter showed up on Horton’s desk, the most bizarre to date.

Evans’s handwriting fluctuated from steady and readable, to blurry and scribbled. He used large and small font. Cursive and print. A fan of haiku and poetry his entire life, he wrote in verse:

Many strange dark paths

led me to this place and time.

Sad I am I came.

Oh, buddy, y’know it’s hard to do a ‘no fear’ act when you’re a little, l-i-t-t-l-e bit scared.

I’m so far gone

I ain’t never comin’ back.

It’s getting hard to keep the head right.

Hey, does it snow?

Ha, ha, oh, man…I’m fucked up here.

Then he gave Robbie’s phone number in Florida to Horton, encouraging him to call her when “it” was “all over.”

“He was really breaking down,” Horton said later. “At that time, a lot of what he was saying and writing wasn’t making much sense. But, boy, did it all add up a week later.”

There was a two-page addendum attached to the letter: a drawing and more verse-like musings. The drawing was of a man breaking through a piece of glass, flying through the air while holding on to what looked like a surfboard. Evans drew shards of broken glass and clouds all around the man:
Turning and bending and all I can hear is the wind—even. That is trying to push me off and my hold keeps crumbling away. If I look up, I get dizzy and lose my balance, so I can’t look up or I’ll fall. I can’t shut my eyes because I have to watch which way it’s going to turn. And I’m getting tired.

CHAPTER 88

On August 9, a Sunday, Evans wrote to Jo Rehm:
My mind is screaming.

So many negative thoughts. So many strange ideas.

Not much time left.

Jo was a different person from the naive teenager Evans had known back on First Street in Troy when they were kids. After marrying at twenty, she had been through a divorce. She had worked hard all her life. She lived in Troy once again, but on the opposite side of town: a little house up on a hill, nearly overlooking the Troy-Menands Bridge that spanned the magnificent Hudson River leading into town. She had a dog, a garden, and a caring new husband, Ed, who adored her.

Evans was, perhaps, still that little boy she’d tried so desperately to shelter from abusive parents.

Over the next few days, Jo received several letters. In each one, Evans tried to convince her to stop blaming herself for the way things had turned out. Jo was still whipping herself with guilt.

Pick a date,
he wrote, and
[you and Doris Sheehan get together and] get rid of things about me: pix, etc, clothes…. Start fresh.

Oooo man my head is going back and forth so fast….Listen, you shit, that guilt nonsense you’re hammering yourself with has got to stop here and now.

A few days prior to receiving the letters, Jo had gone to see him. Robbie was there. It turned into a shouting match, Jo explained, between Evans and Robbie. If there wasn’t a glass partition in between them, Jo believed Evans would have strangled his half sister.

“You couldn’t believe how he was when I would go down there to see him,” Jo recalled. “I would come home crying. Because he was in such…mental…He was just so emotional. Crying and crying. Screaming. He wanted to kill Robbie that day. And would have if he wasn’t restrained.”

Robbie was supposed to bring Devan, Evans’s nephew. But she didn’t. Evans went “nuts,” yelling and screaming, carrying on about the way she had brought Devan up. He was upset, Jo recalled, because Robbie had given Devan to their mother, Flora Mae, at one time. Evans was scared Flora Mae had sexually abused Devan, Jo heard him yell, because, he said, she had done it to him. Robbie had also, Evans lashed out, went to a local bar the previous night, got drunk and talked about him. A few guards from the jail happened to be present and told Evans about it the next morning.

But there were also lighter moments, Jo explained. When she was with him alone one day, he held up his shackles, smiled and said, “Hey, you want to see me get out of these?”

“What?”

“Close your eyes,” Evans said, looking around to see if any of the guards were watching.

A moment later, as if he were Houdini, Evans was out of his shackles, waving his hands in the air. “See…”

In what seemed like only seconds later, without Jo even noticing, he was back in the cuffs.

The way Evans saw it during that second week of August, he wrote that Jo
had it all backwards…. [Robbie,] the pig bitch, should have come crying to me, begging forgiveness for being rotten all her life to me….

He ended the letter with a poem, telling Jo not to come see him anymore.

It was all over. There was no reason to come back
.

Later that night, however, he changed his mind and got word to Jo to come in on Monday, August 10, and Tuesday, August 11. There were some “last-minute” issues he needed resolved.

On Monday, when Jo showed up, he informed her that she would have power of attorney in all his affairs.

“Why, Gary? What’s going on?”

All the paperwork was done, Evans explained, and in the mail. He said he’d had everything notarized. “I am going to do something on Friday…,” he added in a stoic tone, as serious as he had ever been, Jo recalled.

“What, Gary?” she asked.

For the next few minutes, Evans laid out his entire plan, explaining every detail: when, where, how.

“I want you to stay home on Friday, Jo,” he added near the end of the conversation. “Don’t leave your house.”