On Friday, before Tim left for work, after reading the note Caroline had left, he sat down at the kitchen table and dashed off a note to Sean. He told him to have a “great day in school.” He wished him “luck” in his soccer game later that day, ending the brief note: Love, Dad.
Tim didn’t mention why, but he wasn’t going to make Sean’s soccer game on Friday night. With the wedding one day away, perhaps he felt he had too many things to do after work. After all, what was one game? Caroline and Sean could count on one hand the number of games Tim had missed over the years.
CHAPTER 2
Throughout the day on Friday, October 3, Caroline Parker, perhaps overjoyed and anxiety-ridden over her sister’s wedding the following day, left Tim numerous messages on his pager. Finally, at about 3:30 P.M., after not talking to her all day, Tim called home.
“I’m still running errands,” he said. “I’ll be home soon.”
Caroline had spent the day sewing a comforter for her bed. It was a way, one would imagine, to burn off all that wedding stress. Tim had promised to bring home dinner.
At around 7:00 P.M., Caroline, wondering what she, Sean and Tim were going to have for dinner, paged Tim again and left another digital message.
What’s for dinner? We’re still waiting.
After thirty minutes went by, getting no response, Caroline ordered takeout from a deli up the road. She was getting upset because Tim wasn’t home. The wedding was fewer than twenty-four hours away. She wondered if he had finished all the errands.
When Caroline and Sean finished dinner at 7:30, she paged him again.
Where are you? Call me…[Caroline].
“Where are you?” was the first thing out of her mouth when Tim called a few minutes later. Her aggravation had now turned to anger.
“Listen—” Tim said before Caroline cut him off.
“Forget dinner. We already ate.”
“I have a few more errands to run,” he said. “I’ll be home soon.”
Before Caroline put Sean to bed at 9:30, she sent Tim another message.
I need to talk to you right now! Call me.
When Tim failed to call back, she dozed off while lying on the couch watching the nightly eleven o’clock news to see what kind of weather to expect for the wedding.
By 11:30, she woke up and, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, walked downstairs into the bedroom to see if Tim had come home yet.
Near midnight, she paged him.
Call me right away….
Tim called back immediately.
In what Caroline later described to police as a “broken call,” she said she thought Tim had said he was “surrounded by the police,” but the line had gone dead midway through the call. Later, when police asked her to describe the call a second time, she said she wasn’t sure if she had been dreaming, watching something on television, or if it was, indeed, Tim.
After he told his wife he was surrounded by the police, Caroline recalled later, she said, “Now you won’t be able to get a suit for the wedding.” Then she said they argued about Tim’s having to wear an old suit.
“That’s the least of my worries,” she thought Tim said before the line went dead again.
An hour later, at about 1:03 A.M. the following morning, as Caroline tossed and turned on the couch worrying not only about her sister’s wedding but where in the hell her husband was, the phone rang.
“It’s me, Caroline,” Tim said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Latham. I’ll be home in forty minutes.”
A few hours after the sun broke over Tim Rysedorph and Caroline Parker’s Regent Street apartment on October 4, 1997, Caroline woke up and immediately realized that Tim hadn’t come home. After paging him—Where are you? Call me right now!—she walked up the stairs to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, threw some laundry in the washing machine and tried to sort out what was going on.
With no response to her first page, she sent another.
Tim, please call me now…. I need to speak to you now….
Fifteen minutes later: Tim, Sean has a soccer game soon, he can’t miss this one, too.
Sitting on the sofa, contemplating what to do next, the telephone startled her.
Tim!
When she answered, all she could hear were “Touch-Tone noises,” as if, she said later, “the call was being made from the outside. But I don’t know why I thought this. I assumed it was Tim, and he sounded like he was out of breath…that he was scared, or running.”
That’s when she said, “Tim? Tim? Is that you?”
Sean, who had been sleeping on the couch, got up when he heard his mother screaming and crying into the phone: “Tim? Tim? Speak to me?”
“Yes…,” the caller said quietly.
“Are you all right?”
“…call…not working…doesn’t work” was all Caroline remembered hearing before the line went dead.
When that happened, she sent him another digital page. Tim, I couldn’t make out anything you were saying…. Please call me.
For the next hour, Caroline paced in the living room…waiting, wondering. In her heart, she felt something was wrong—terribly wrong. Tim was not in the business of running off without telling her. They’d had problems in the past and Tim had slept at a friend’s apartment or his brother’s house for the night, but this was different. They hadn’t been fighting. Tim had promised to take care of several errands before the wedding.
Where the hell is he?
At some point before the wedding, after not hearing from Tim all morning, Caroline called her mother.
“Tim did not come home last night. He’s missing. I can’t find him.”
“What? Caroline, are you—”
“Don’t tell anyone in the family, Mom. I don’t want to ruin the day.”
“Okay.”
While Caroline was putting the finishing touches on her makeup after talking to her mother, the phone rang. Nearly jumping out of her dress to reach for it, she said in desperation, “Hello…hello?”
“Is Tim there?” a man’s voice asked.
“Who is this?”
“Lou.”
“Are you a good friend of Tim’s?” Caroline couldn’t recall anyone by the name of Lou that Tim had ever known.
“Yeah. I’m a friend. I work with Tim.”
“Have you seen him lately…Have you seen him”—Caroline was jumpy, frenzied, barely able to get the words out fast enough—“he’s missing.”
“I’m just returning his call; he left me a message.”
Caroline couldn’t handle it; she started to cry. “I’m sorry. I…I…We need to find him.”
“Don’t cry,” Lou said. “Everything is going to be all right. I’ll make some phone calls around town and see what I can find out.”
“You will? Yes. Do that. Please.”
“Maybe he’s in a place where he can’t call you?”
“What…where? What do you mean by that?”
“Maybe he got into trouble and got picked up and is in jail.”
“I would have heard something.”
“Not necessarily.”
Confused, Caroline asked, “What do you mean?”
“Listen, don’t worry. I will try to find out what’s going on and call you back later.”
“Thanks.”
Before Lou hung up, he had one last bit of advice.
“Maybe you should call the police.”
CHAPTER 3
Minutes before Caroline left her apartment to make her sister’s wedding on time, she phoned the Saratoga Springs Police Department (SSPD). Hysterical, she asked the officer who picked up if he could find out if Tim had been involved in an auto accident, or if he had been arrested.
“No, ma’am, I don’t see anything,” the cop said a few moments later.
At 1:42 P.M., Caroline sent Tim a message.
It’s almost time to leave for the wedding, call now.
Two hours later, about twenty
minutes before the wedding, she sent Tim one last message: Emergency with wife, call home right away.
Tim never called.
The wedding obviously turned out to be an uncomfortable affair for Caroline, but she had to attend, nonetheless. Her sister counted on her.
Minutes after the wedding, she called the state police, the sheriff’s department and the Colonie Police Department, a nearby town Tim occasionally frequented. She asked the same set of questions she had posed to the SSPD earlier.
At the urging of the Colonie Police Department, the SSPD sent a uniformed officer to interview Caroline and write up an official missing person report. The SSPD’s initial thought was that the case would not amount to anything. So far, all they had was a husband missing fewer than twenty-four hours who had not shown up for his sister-in-law’s wedding.
It was hardly enough to panic.
Ed Moore had been a detective with the SSPD for the past twenty years. Promoted to chief later in his career, Moore knew his business as a cop perhaps better than a lot of his colleagues, and relied, like most cops, on his instincts.
When Caroline got home from her sister’s wedding early in the evening on October 4 and telephoned the SSPD, demanding it do something about what she insisted was her “missing husband,” Moore heard what he later said was genuine pain and anguish in her voice.
Moore spoke to Caroline briefly, trying to reassure her that he was going to do everything he could to find her husband.
After hanging up, weighing what she had told him, taking the sincerity she had displayed into account, Moore told himself something wasn’t right.
Tim Rysedorph had a good job, apparently loved his wife and son, had made specific plans to go to his sister-in-law’s wedding and rarely ever failed to come home from work—at least that’s what Caroline had claimed. To top it off, he had missed the wedding.
Something wasn’t adding up.
By Sunday morning, October 5, Caroline had called several of Tim’s friends to see if any of them had heard from him. She even had a friend page Tim and leave his phone number as a callback—just in case Tim had been screening his calls and, for whatever reason, didn’t want to talk to her.
Nothing.
At about noon, Lou called back. After hitting the streets and asking a few people about Tim’s whereabouts, he said he couldn’t offer much.
But Caroline, as worried as she appeared, began to float her own theory.
“Tim’s still not back, Lou,” she said in a rush. “I’m getting really scared…and, well, he’s probably dead because I haven’t heard from him yet.” Caroline was, she later told police, rambling on and on, just blurting out words as they passed through her mind, not thinking too much about what she was saying.
“What are you talking about?” Lou asked.
“They’re probably going to find him dead,” Caroline said, “in the trunk of my car at the bottom of the Hudson River.”
“Don’t say that,” Lou said. “That’s not going to happen. Or else, he’ll never be found—just like what happened to his friend Mike.”
Lou was referring to Michael Falco, who had been missing for about twelve years. Shortly after Falco introduced Caroline and Tim, he went out one night and never returned. It had been rumored that Tim and Michael Falco’s old friend Gary Evans, who had lived with them at the time, was responsible for Falco’s disappearance. Evans, who had been partners with Falco on a number of profitable jewelry heists, denied the stories, telling people Falco had gone “west.”
Caroline didn’t know what to say after Lou compared Tim’s situation to Falco’s.
“Like I said, maybe he’s in a place where he can’t call,” Lou told her.
“I called the police like you suggested and reported Tim missing.”
“Maybe you should call the police back and tell them you’ve heard from him?”
Caroline screamed, “No! I can’t do that! They will stop looking for him.”
“Calm down. Keep your chin up. Everything will be okay.” But Caroline could do nothing more than cry. “I’ll call you back at dinnertime,” Lou added, and hung up.
After that, Caroline began phoning the SSPD almost hourly, wondering what it was doing to find her missing husband. Tim had been gone for three days now.
Something’s wrong!
Although the SSPD is a full-service police department, fully capable of any type of investigation, Detective Ed Moore decided to call the New York State Police (NYSP)—if only to quell Caroline’s constant phone calls and inquiries. She was becoming quite the pain in the ass.
Established in 1917, the NYSP is one of the ten largest law enforcement agencies in the country, and the only police department in New York with statewide jurisdiction. The breakdown of troops within the structure of the department is rather extensive simply because New York encompasses some fifty thousand square miles of land. The division headquarters of the NYSP is located in Albany, with eleven separate troop barracks spread throughout the state. Since Tim Rysedorph lived in Saratoga Springs, Troop G, in Loudonville, had authority over the missing person report Caroline had filed.
NYSP troops, like in most states, provide “primary police and investigative services across the state.” Any cases requiring “extensive investigation or involving felonies” are referred to the NYSP’s principal investigative arm—the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI). In house, investigators call it “the Bureau.” The Major Crimes Unit (MCU), a separate division of the Bureau, is used for homicides and high-profile cases.
As far as Tim Rysedorph’s disappearance, the Bureau from Troop G in Loudonville, despite its reluctance of getting involved in a case of a married adult missing only three days, was brought in to assist the SSPD. Following up on a missing person report wasn’t what Bureau investigators liked to spend their time doing. But most investigators agreed it was part of the job. People went missing, for any number of reasons, all the time. Generally, the Bureau could come into a case and—with its manpower and carefree access to the latest, top-notch technology—solve it quickly.
Although missing person cases came in on a regular basis, the Bureau dealt mostly with narcotics cases, violent and serial crimes, child abuse and sexual exploitation matters, computer and technology-related offenses, bias-related crimes, auto theft, consumer product tampering and organized crime. Murder cases, Bureau investigators have said, are one of its foremost priorities, taking precedence over just about any other cases that don’t involve missing or exploited children.
Little did anyone involved in Tim Rysedorph’s disappearance know then that within twenty-four hours of Ed Moore’s call to the Bureau, every available Major Crimes Unit investigator from Troop G in Loudonville would be working on the case.
CHAPTER 4
SSPD detective Ed Moore contacted Senior Investigator Jim Horton from the Troop G Bureau on Monday, October 6, regarding Tim’s disappearance. Known as “Big Jim” to his Bureau brethren, Horton stood about six feet, 180 pounds. He had been on the job since February 20, 1978—almost nineteen years now—and had been promoted to senior investigator back in 1990, a job, colleagues later said, he took more seriously than life itself. The oldest of four siblings, Horton kept what little hair he had left parted to one side, blade-of-grass straight, always well-manicured. He wore a scraggly mustache that he had been contemplating shaving lately.
More of an athlete than a student, growing up in the Capital District area, Horton didn’t have aspirations of becoming a cop, but instead wanted to be a physical education teacher. It wasn’t until a friend from high school had mentioned one day he was taking the state trooper exam that the seed was planted in Horton. But when he came home that afternoon and told his mother about becoming a cop, she blasted him.
“No son of mine is going to be a pig!” she said. Horton’s father, standing next to him in utter shock at the prospect, just shook his head and walked away.
In 1975, two years out of high school, Horton decided to take the
state police entrance examination and, surprising everyone in his family, did extremely well on the test and was accepted into the academy right away.
“Up until then,” Horton noted later, “I worked construction. I had grown up in a blue-collar family. My brother became a professor. My sister Pam has a master’s degree in education, two kids, and was very influential in helping and looking out for our baby sister, Kathy, who is deaf. My father was a mechanic and my mom grew up with a silver spoon, rebelling against her mother by marrying my motorcycle-/stock car-driving dad. To me, they were hippies. My mom marched on Washington, DC, did the Woodstock thing, and smoked pot.”
The State Police Academy was, when Horton entered it in 1978, run like a paramilitary camp. Cadets marched like soldiers and were mandated to salute higher-ranking officers. After graduating, disappointedly, just below the top 10 percent in his class, Horton excelled as a trooper. By 1981, he was being asked to go back to the academy to train recruits, but refused, vowing never to “treat people the way [he] had been treated in the academy.” An admitted type A personality, he had bigger plans, which didn’t include spending his days on the interstate chasing drunk drivers and speeders. He wanted that coveted gold shield, to become an investigator. Wayne Bennett, Horton’s supervisor at the time, encouraged him to apply to the Bureau when he had three years on the job. To be accepted, a trooper needed four years. But Bennett, who would later become the superintendent of the state police (the top cop, if you will), told Horton to apply anyway.
As senior investigator of the Bureau, investigating and solving nearly two hundred homicides throughout his career, Horton thought he had seen it all by the time Tim Rysedorph’s name crossed his desk on October 6, 1997. In the latter stages of what amounted to a stellar career that included solving some of New York’s most famous murder cases, Horton was a celebrity of sorts in the Capital District. There were countless stories written about him in the newspapers, and he seemed to enjoy the notoriety it brought him. Two of his cases had even been featured on renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden’s popular cable television show, Autopsy, and Horton gladly appeared on the show to discuss both cases.
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