As Horton began working his way out of Caroline Parker’s apartment, Sully by his side, he told himself that Caroline was never going to see her husband alive again. If he’s been with Gary Evans, he’s as good as dead.
CHAPTER 7
Horton and Sully figured there was only one reason Tim had been hanging around with Evans: burglary. There was no other purpose. Evans was a loner. He lived by himself. Traveled alone. And unless he needed a partner in crime, he never socialized with people.
From their brief conversation with Caroline, Horton and Sully knew she was either playing stupid, or was scared of aligning herself with stolen property, or she was in denial about her husband’s criminal activity.
When Horton explained to Caroline shortly before he and Sully left that there was a good chance Tim had been involved in some illegal activity with Evans, the relationship between him and Caroline “turned very sour,” Horton said later.
“No way would my Timmy do this!” Caroline had lashed out. “He’s a good father. He’s not a thief. He works his ass off.”
“Well,” Horton had replied, “if Tim has been hanging around with Gary Evans, he’s up to no good. Gary has never worked an honest job in his life. He’s a career thief. I don’t see Gary and ‘Timmy’ hanging out together, ma’am, if they’re not doing something illegal.”
As Horton and Sully approached Horton’s cruiser outside Caroline’s apartment, Horton, shaking his head in disgust, said, “Holy shit…here we go again with Gary.”
“What do you think?” Sully asked, opening the passenger-side door.
“We’ve got big problems. Gary’s gone, that’s for sure. He’s definitely left the area.”
Horton opened his door, sat down in the car and began to think.
There was a warrant out for Michael Falco’s arrest that had passed through several Bureau investigators’ hands over the years. Whenever Horton felt Evans was in the mood to talk about his crimes, he would ask him about Falco especially, seeing that they had grown up together in South Troy and were well-known partners in crime. Evans, though, had always denied any knowledge of Falco’s disappearance. In fact, he said, he was in prison when Falco disappeared. But a careful check of Evans’s record of incarcerations proved different. He had been incarcerated at Sing Sing prison, serving a two-to four-year bid for third-degree burglary, back on July 3, 1985. Falco had been reported missing about five months earlier.
But whenever Horton had questioned Evans about Falco, Evans would simply say, “Come on, Guy. I’m a thief, not a murderer.”
For years, Horton had no reason not to believe him, nor had he any evidence to prove otherwise.
“I can’t believe this motherfucker is back in my life, Sully,” Horton said as he started the car. “Tim Rysedorph is dead. Where the hell do we begin?”
“What makes you so sure he’s dead? He could just be off with Evans doing jobs.”
“Tim doesn’t have a record to speak of. Remember, we did a rap sheet on him. Gary always told me about liabilities. He doesn’t like them. He also told me one of the last times I spoke to him that he wasn’t going back to prison. Rysedorph—believe me when I say it, Sully—is dead.”
It was no secret that Horton had used Evans as confidential informant (CI) and kept in contact with him for the better part of the past thirteen years. Evans had even written Horton several letters throughout the years and Horton had, at times, written back. In those early letters, which Horton began to think about now more seriously as he and Sully batted around the possibility that Evans had murdered Tim Rysedorph, Evans had always made one thing perfectly clear: he hated prison.
Being a person who adored the outdoors, often sleeping in the woods and traveling on bicycle, being confined was the worst possible environment Evans could be placed in. He couldn’t take the discipline and conveyor-belt routineness of daily life behind bars. He needed to be out in the world, roaming, doing what he wanted.
Cops weren’t the only people Evans had to worry about. There were scores of local drug dealers and thieves who had it out for him because they knew he was a CI.
So with crooks and cops chasing Evans, Horton knew that finding him was going to be the biggest challenge. When Evans wanted to disappear, he did it with the ease of a snake in a cornfield. If he had indeed murdered Tim, there was a good chance he had left the country, or at least the Northeast. Disguises and obtaining false identification were two of Evans’s greatest skills while on the run. If Horton wanted to find him, he knew it was going to take some sort of mistake on Evans’s part.
CHAPTER 8
Tim’s car, a blue 1989 two-door Pontiac Sunbird, was found late in the day on Monday, October 6. By the sheer logic of basic police work—tracking down leads and following up on them—the Rensselaer Police Department (RPD) responded to a report of a car parked at the Rensselaer County Amtrak train depot about ten miles from Latham, New York, the last town in which Tim had been spotted. A car in the parking lot fit a description of Tim’s. Unlocked, the car had its parking lights on and driver’s-side window open when police arrived. The keys were under the driver’s-side floor mat, which, Caroline explained later, was totally out of character for Tim. What turned out to be a lead that would ratchet the investigation up a notch—a knapsack loaded with tools and some of Tim’s clothes—had been found in the trunk. When Horton got a chance to look through the knapsack, he concluded that Tim probably wasn’t carrying around pliers and glasscutters and other burglar tools because he was planning on doing some handyman work. Instead, as he had suspected all along, Tim had been pulling off burglaries with Evans.
Working off a lead he received from the Bureau, SSPD detective David Levanites was dispatched later that day to Nick DiPierro’s house, Tim’s ex-brother-in-law.
Although they had gotten along well throughout the years, Nick said his relationship with Tim had never been that close.
“What can you tell me about him?” Levanites asked.
“I know Tim is involved with criminal activity with someone else he hangs around with. He told me one time not too long ago that they—him and his partner—were committing burglaries in New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts.”
“Did he say anything else to make you believe this?”
“He asked me, well, I mean, he showed me some coins one day and asked me if I wanted to buy any of them. They were old, from the 1800s, I think.”
“What else?”
“I refused. But a little while later, I saw him again and he told me that he sold them for a thousand dollars.”
When Horton heard what Levanites had uncovered, it only solidified his theory that Evans was, most likely, the last person to see Tim alive.
“It was the coins; the merchandise had Gary’s mark all over it,” Horton recalled later. “One of Gary’s favorite items to steal was rare coins. He had stolen tens of thousands of dollars’ worth throughout the years.”
During the next few days, the Bureau kicked into high gear regarding their search for Tim and, now, Gary Evans. They knew if they found Evans, they would find Tim or his body.
Horton briefed his team several times throughout the week, mapping out a plan. There were leads to follow up on from the SSPD. People to interview. Background checks. Evans had a propensity to live in motels and hotels throughout the Capital District and was known to retreat into the woods when he felt the pressure was on. Part of his MO was to keep an apartment and a motel room at the same time so he could bounce back and forth.
“Finding Gary Evans if he didn’t want to be found,” Horton said later, “wasn’t easy. That much we knew. Yet, sooner or later, I knew Gary would make contact with whatever woman he was sleeping with at the time. The only problem I saw right away was locating his most recent girlfriend—I hadn’t seen or heard from Gary in almost two years.”
The last known contact Tim had with his wife was at 1:03 A.M. on Saturday, October 4. Horton assigned an investigator to go to the Dunkin’ Donuts in Latham t
o talk to anyone there who could identify him. A “lead desk,” an exclusive office inside the Bureau designed to generate leads, was immediately set up. Horton put all seven investigators he had available on the case.
While his investigators were off and running, tracking down people and finding out more about Tim, Horton put in a call to Ed Moore, the SSPD detective who had taken Caroline’s initial call.
“We’ve got a problem, Ed,” Horton told Moore. They had known each other for years, had worked cases together and respected each other immensely.
“What’s going on, Jim?”
“Well, I think we’ve got a homicide here with that Tim Rysedorph missing person case.”
Moore went quiet. Saratoga Springs, a twenty-five minute trip up Interstate 787 from Albany, was an artsy type of refuge that horse fans flocked to during racing season. It was spread out and rural, with thick wooded areas; homicides weren’t something the SSPD had to think about all that much.
“You’ve got to be kidding me?”
Horton gave Moore a quick rundown of his history with Evans, including his hunch that Evans might be involved with the disappearances of Michael Falco and Damien Cuomo. Moore said he’d put as many detectives as he could on the case, assisting the Bureau in any manner it needed.
Horton finished speaking to Moore and sat down at his desk, staring at a mugshot photo of Evans he had pulled from a file, contemplating his next move. Evans, Horton realized, was playing a game. Horton could sense it. Evans had always liked to be one step ahead of him. If he was responsible for Tim’s death, Horton knew he was gone; they were wasting their time looking in the Capital District.
As much as Horton didn’t want to admit it, having Evans back in his life was “exciting,” he later confessed.
“I had spent a lot of my time watching him watch me—and vice versa. Gary always made my job more interesting.”
By the same token, considering what Horton now knew, he didn’t view Evans as just another serial thief he had come to know throughout the years and developed a relationship with for the sake of the job.
“With Tim Rysedorph,” Horton added, “I knew it was going to be the last time Gary and I tangled. I really felt he had crossed a line at this point and was a murderer. The stakes were much different when Tim turned up missing. It wasn’t about a game of cat and mouse anymore; it was possible Evans was a serial murderer, which I took very seriously.”
Everything Horton had done for Evans (buying him food, stopping by his apartment just to say hello, getting him jobs) was done—ironically—with sincerity and deception. Horton cared about Evans, but he also kept tabs on him for law enforcement purposes.
“It was part of the game, yes—but also my job.”
Nevertheless, Horton knew Evans was a career criminal, and by nature would likely never change his ways. Ever since he suspected him of murdering Falco and Cuomo, Horton convinced himself that in order to get him to confess to everything—however horrific and brutal—he had to get into his head and gain his trust. There were even several unsolved murders in states Evans had visited that Horton had now suspected him of being involved in, but he had to play things out and allow Evans to admit to it all without being pressured.
“If I got him to like me, I knew one day he would confide in me and tell me everything. When Tim turned up missing and Gary’s name became part of the investigation, I knew it was the beginning of the end for Gary. How did I know that?”
Evans, Horton insisted, had warned him.
Nathan “Bud” York, a Bureau investigator, found out on October 7, Tuesday, that the Wappingers Falls, New York, division of the Bureau had been involved in an investigation with the Massachusetts State Police (MSP) regarding a burglary. The theft had taken place at the Emporium, an antique shop in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, about an hour’s drive over the New York state line. Nine thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry, antique vases, ceramic plates, statues, paintings and other assorted items had been reported stolen back in March 1997.
When Bud York explained to Horton what he had found, Horton knew right away it was another one of Evans’s jobs. Evans was so renowned and feared on the antique circuit, his photo had been published in several antique magazines throughout the Northeast. There wasn’t an antique dealer in the tristate region—New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts—who hadn’t heard of the notorious Gary Evans. Shops as far away as Maine, New Hampshire, Delaware and New Jersey even knew of Evans.
As new leads poured into the Bureau, it became pretty clear Evans had been on a serial robbery spree for about the past eighteen months. With that in mind, if there was one thing Horton was sure of, it was that Evans, over the years, liked to keep his stolen merchandise hidden in self-storage units.
Armed with that knowledge, he called two of his investigators into his office. “Track down all the storage units in the Capital District and find out if Gary rented a unit recently.”
In the meantime, he sent a pair of investigators in search of a visitor’s list for Evans’s most recent stay in federal prison. It would take some time, but if they could find out who was on the list and track down any names Horton didn’t recognize, they might get lucky.
In the federal system, inmates are allowed to compile a list of visitors. If someone isn’t on the list, that person is not allowed in to visit an inmate.
What turned out to be a laugh riot around the office was when the list came back, Horton’s name was at the top of Evans’s list.
After everyone had a good laugh, Horton pointed to a name on the list right below his. The name looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it: Lisa Morris, a woman who, ultimately, would end up breaking the Tim Rysedorph missing person case wide open.
CHAPTER 9
When Horton found Lisa Morris on October 15, 1997, she was living at Rolling Ridge Apartments in Latham, a mere stone’s throw from the Spare Room II self-storage facility on Watervliet-Shaker Road, where Evans and Tim Rysedorph, the Bureau found out, had rented two self-storage units, eight feet by ten feet, to house their stolen property.
Getting Lisa to open up about Evans, Horton realized quickly, was not going to be easy.
Like Damien Cuomo, Michael Falco and Tim Rysedorph, Lisa grew up in Troy. A bit on the “rough” side, she’d had her share of problems with alcohol and drugs throughout the years, but had no real rap sheet to speak of. A plain-looking woman with easy brown eyes, large shoulders over a medium build, long brown hair and a quiet demeanor, Lisa’s pale-white skin gave away her full-blooded Irish heritage. She had met Evans in 1988—to no one’s surprise later on—a few months before Damien Cuomo, her common-law husband, turned up missing. As calculating and manipulative as Evans was, he had moved in with Lisa after Cuomo disappeared. Shortly before moving in, he was showing up at her apartment, telling her that Cuomo had “run off” after committing several burglaries with him.
“He’s not coming back,” Evans said one day. “He told me to tell you that.”
In the beginning, the relationship between them wasn’t sexual, Lisa said later. Evans would stop by her apartment just to talk, “like friends,” and, at Cuomo’s request, “keep her company.”
As the months passed, he began giving her money, as if paying off a debt. When he stopped by her apartment with the cash, he would tell her that he’d heard from Damien, saying things like, “He’s hiding out down south. Write him off. Forget about him. He’s not coming back.”
In 1996, after Evans finished a two-year bid for burglary in Sing Sing, he began a more concerted effort to win Lisa’s affection.
“Gary and I became very close,” Lisa said later, “when he got out of prison. He would often stay with me.”
As she and Evans described it later, they began having what Lisa termed “marathon sex” around this same time—and Lisa, then a thirty-two-year-old single mother, said she couldn’t get enough of it as she began to fall in love with Evans.
During the week of October 15, Sully and Ed Moore
took one more stab at interviewing Caroline Parker. They needed Caroline to sit down and write out a formal statement. Tim’s photo had been all over the television news lately and missing person posters had been hung around the Capital Region. His siblings were pleading for his return. Caroline and Sean, devastated, had given interviews to local reporters, hoping, naturally, it would help.
Ed Moore, Sully and other members of the Bureau felt different, though. They knew if Evans was involved with Tim, it wasn’t going to be good news. Keep the faith and hope for the best, but understand it may not turn out so pleasant at the end of the day.
When Moore and Sully first arrived at Caroline’s apartment, they explained how Tim had been involved in the trafficking of stolen property. They needed Caroline to fess up to what she knew about Tim’s criminal behavior. It had been weeks now. No more bullshit. It was time to talk truth.
Caroline was taken aback by their candor. “I know of no criminal activity that Tim was involved in and do not believe he would do anything illegal like that,” she said with stern assertion.
After a bit more prodding, however, she finally admitted that she and Tim’s relationship hadn’t been as trouble-free as she might have first let on. Tim had left in 1996 for a period of time, she explained. They fought. They had financial problems. But Tim, she insisted, was a family man all the way. “I believe our lifestyle does not reflect Tim having a lot of money from illegal activity….”
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