Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  Horton and his team of Bureau investigators sat around during late October and brainstormed over what they had learned the past week. Thus far, they had a wealth of information regarding Tim and the days before he went missing. They knew he had called Caroline at 1:03 A.M. from the local Dunkin’ Donuts—which was the last time Caroline, or anyone else, had heard from him. They also knew Evans had shown up at Lisa Morris’s apartment later at 9:00 A.M. He was dirty, gaunt, sweaty and scared. From there, they picked through the interviews they had done and pieced together the hours and days in between.

  “With Tim not showing up for his sister-in-law’s wedding on that Saturday after he vanished, and Gary Evans,” Horton said later, “showing up disheveled at Lisa’s apartment on Saturday morning, Tim’s car abandoned at Amtrak, I knew for certain that Tim wasn’t being help captive somewhere against his will. He was definitely dead.”

  CHAPTER 12

  A search warrant for the two self-storage units at the Spare Room II that Evans and Tim had rented was issued on October 18, 1997. The goal was to obtain an arrest warrant for Evans, but the Bureau had to first find evidence of any burglaries he—and, possibly, Tim—had been involved in.

  Inside the two small storage units Evans and Tim owned was nothing of any particular interest to Horton as members of the Bureau began to search them. There were some old books, a few collectors-edition Beatles records, several ceramic knickknacks and a few pieces of worthless jewelry. Essentially, the last person inside the storage units had, it looked like, taken what he wanted in a frenzy and left everything else scattered about.

  Interestingly enough, though, Horton noticed, the unit reeked of stale bleach—and someone had recently cleaned a large patch of cement by the garage door.

  Horton ordered everything in the unit bagged and tagged. “Get this stuff out of here,” he told several troopers, “and log it.”

  The storage facility had video cameras set up near the entrance. It was an eight-second-delay device, so the quality wouldn’t be that good, but anyone who had entered or exited would be on videotape.

  Horton ordered copies of the videotapes from October 3 through October 5.

  A day later, after painstakingly watching hours of videotape, there he was, the man of the hour, entering the Spare Room II in his pickup truck. The video was cloudy and grainy, but Horton could see that the bed of Evans’s truck was full of items.

  How did Horton know for sure it was Evans? For one, the license plate number matched. Second, Evans had a distinctive profile: the crown of his bald head was perfectly round, and he had distinguishable strands of frizzy hair protruding out from the sides of his head, much like Bozo the Clown. Additionally, Evans had shoulder and neck muscles so large they looked deformed. Most important, he had always told Horton he never allowed anyone to drive his truck.

  When the Bureau matched up the codes Tim and Evans had been issued by Spare Room II for gaining entrance through the main gate, they found both code numbers had been used throughout the day and night of October 4. But the following Sunday morning, at some point after 2:00 A.M., Tim’s code number had stopped being used. Only Evans’s number had been accessed after that.

  As the reports filed in, it was clear that Tim and Evans had been partners in crime for at least the past seven or eight months and had pulled off several major jobs together. A Bureau investigator in Dutchess County, New York, reported that his team had been looking at Tim and Evans for some time regarding a heist in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The stolen property had turned up in an antique shop in Cold Spring, New York, and the person who purchased it picked out both Tim and Evans from a photo lineup as being the sellers. A bank video had placed both Evans and Tim in an Albany bank that same day, cashing three checks written out to Tim Rysedorph from the owner of the same antique shop.

  When Evans’s probation officer called the Bureau with the news that Evans had failed to report for his weekly probation visit, a judge believed it was enough, along with all the thefts Evans and Tim were now suspected of, to issue an arrest warrant.

  Horton then called Evans’s probation officer. Evans had shown up for his previous appointment on September 30, the probation officer said (which was a week before Tim had gone missing), but looked totally different than he had the week prior.

  “How do you mean…different?” Horton asked.

  “He was clean shaven.” Evans had usually donned a Fu Manchu mustache and goatee. Horton had even photographed him with it. At times, it was hard to keep up with Evans and his subtle disguises, so Horton would “pop in” on him and ask to take his photo. Evans, an “egomaniac,” always obliged. Horton would comment on how large his muscles were getting. “You working out hard or what, Gar?” he’d say. “Yeah,” Evans would answer, his eyes lighting up.

  “He was amazed that someone was paying attention to him,” Horton recalled later. “I fed that ego, and by the time I was breaking out the camera, he was happy to strike a pose.”

  For obvious reasons, Evans hated his probation officer. Whenever he talked to Lisa about him, he always referred to him as “the prick.” He also said he was nervous the last few times he had seen him. He talked about a “job” he and Tim had done down in Wappingers Falls, New York, and said he was scared they’d get caught. Being a habitual offender, convicted of several felonies already, he knew the next time he got caught he was facing possibly twenty-five years to life behind bars—which, he said, there was no way he would do.

  A wanted man, there was a bull’s-eye now on Evans’s back. Multiple photos of him, along with his rap sheet, were sent over the wires to every police department and law enforcement agency in the country. He was considered armed, dangerous and capable of doing anything to avoid capture. Horton had written the Teletype himself:

  Gary C. Evans, 5' 6"—180 pounds, bald, piercing blue eyes, goes by numerous disguises and aliases, likes to hide handcuff keys all over his body, will try to escape by any means necessary, could be armed and very dangerous.

  It was the beginning of a manhunt for a notorious burglar Horton believed—but didn’t tell anyone—was going to be impossible to catch. Additionally, for the first time in the thirteen years since Horton and Evans had begun their game of cat and mouse, Horton believed firmly that Evans was also a serial murderer, which changed everything.

  CHAPTER 13

  By October 19, 1997, Bureau investigators had interviewed several of Tim’s siblings, trying to substantiate what they already knew and, hopefully, develop a few new leads. The case seemed to be running in circles. Every time they thought they were onto something, it turned into a dead end. Sooner or later, someone was going to talk and the case would bust wide open. It was a matter of finding that person and asking the same repetitive questions.

  Molly Parish, Tim’s sister, had always been someone that interested Horton. When he saw her name on a list of follow-up interviewees, he decided to go see her himself.

  A school bus driver and mother of four daughters ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-three, Parish told Horton she hadn’t seen Tim since April 1997 when she had stopped at a bar where his band was playing. About three weeks later, however, in May, she said she saw Evans.

  Son of a bitch.

  “Go on, tell me about Mr. Evans,” Horton encouraged, without letting her know why the name meant so much to him.

  She explained that Evans had shown up at her trailer unannounced one day. They argued over what they were going to have for dinner and some lottery tickets she had purchased. She said that although she never lived with Evans, she did have “relations” with him from time to time. They had grown up together in the same Troy neighborhood and dated on and off. But whenever she wanted to contact him, she said she would have to page him under the code name “Red.”

  It was the first time Horton had ever heard the name. “How was he when you saw him last?”

  “He had a very explosive temper,” she continued, “and hated [Caroline].”

  “
What about where he is now; do you have any idea where we might find him?”

  “I know Gary has a storage shed, but I don’t know where it is. I know he stores his ‘stuff,’ proceeds from burglaries, there.”

  “What about Gary and Tim; how did they get along?”

  “Gary was very angry with Tim. Whenever Gary was in a jam, he expected Tim to help him out. There was some car, drugs, Mike Falco…I’m not too sure what it all meant, but Gary never got over it.”

  There was that name again: Michael Falco. It seemed synonymous with Evans’s name inside that small circle of old friends in Troy.

  She went on to say she thought Tim’s disappearance may have been “revenge” on Evans’s part for something that happened a long time ago among Falco, Tim and Evans, but she didn’t know the entire story.

  “Gary always told me,” she said, “that ‘people are very easy to get rid of and without a trace.’ He once told me, ‘Look what happened to Mike [Falco]…and there are a couple of other people still missing.’ I really feel Gary killed Mike by burying him alive or putting him in a place where he couldn’t get out.”

  After explaining to Horton that Evans liked to confide in a tattoo artist in Troy, she got back on the subject of Tim and Evans’s soured relationship.

  “Gary never really forgave Tim for being disloyal to him during a time when Gary felt he needed Tim. Gary told me Tim had called one day asking for money, about fifteen hundred dollars. So Gary told Tim he would ‘have to do some jobs’ with him if he wanted the money.”

  “If there was one thing Evans was clear about when I interviewed him later,” Horton recalled, “it was that he favored working alone. He’d do his best work by himself, he’d tell me, and he wouldn’t have to worry about someone dropping a dime on him. He only took along a partner if that person owed him a favor or money. And he made this utterly clear to me: if that person even threatened to go to the cops, he had no choice but to kill him.”

  A K-9 unit of cadaver-sniffing dogs from the state police searched the area surrounding the Spare Room II self-storage facility, where Evans and Tim had stored their stolen property. Horton felt if Evans had killed Tim, he might have buried him in close proximity of the storage facility.

  After searching the perimeter of the facility and the storage units, the dogs found nothing. It was one more in a series of false predictions on Horton’s part. He was going on hunches, mostly. Without Evans—without a body—he had nothing but instinct. It was disheartening at times, but it was police work. Not everything worked itself out in sixty minutes, like a television sitcom, and not every lead produced another. Still, most cops believed it took only one arbitrary piece of information and a case could be broken.

  Near the end of October, the manager of Spare Room II phoned Bureau headquarters with some rather odd news. He said Tim Rysedorph had called.

  “He called you?”

  “Yes. This morning.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted information about how late the office was open so he could come in and pay for his unit. He asked if the billing for the month had been sent out yet. He said he wanted to pay his bill before the billing went out so his wife wouldn’t find out that he had been renting a unit.”

  Could it be that simple?

  A surveillance team was put together immediately. If Tim—or Evans posing as him—went to the Spare Room II to pay the bill, the Bureau would be there waiting for him.

  Horton, however, warned everyone that Evans wasn’t that stupid. There was no way he was going to just march into Spare Room II after calling. It was some sort of trap. A way to throw off the scent.

  At about 2:40 P.M., as undercover officers from the Bureau, who had been there all day long, stood despondent around the Spare Room II gate thinking that the entire day had been a waste, a 1996 Ford Contour with New Hampshire license plates pulled up to the entrance gate. A female was driving. She was alone. She looked lost. Scared.

  But also very familiar.

  When officers approached the car and asked the woman to identify herself, she simply rolled the window down and said, “Lisa Morris.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Throughout the years, Evans had juggled scores of women. He liked to brag to Horton about all the women he had slept with. Most of them, he said, were nothing but “whores”—a “piece of ass” he could call every once in a while for some fun. Bedding down with women was a game to Evans, a challenge. There was one time Horton stopped at a hotel room Evans had been renting and Evans handed him a photo of himself and a rather good-looking blonde. They were blasting around the ocean on Jet Skis. “I had that photo taken two days ago,” Evans boasted, “in Florida!” He seemed proud of the fact that he could pick up a woman on a Friday night, fly down to Florida for the weekend, “bang her a few times” and return home the following Monday—an all-expense-paid weekend vacation, courtesy of whichever antique shop owner—who had undoubtedly spent his life building his business—Evans had pillaged.

  Other times, Evans would show Horton photos of different women and his demeanor would change entirely. He sometimes became docile, as if he had invested his emotions in the woman and she had let him down. One of those women was Doris Sheehan, a twenty-six-year-old brunette Evans had dated throughout the years. In one of his letters to Horton, Evans talked about Sheehan as though she had been the only woman he had ever loved. A bit on the chunky side at five feet three inches, 140 pounds, Sheehan’s blue eyes accentuated the beauty of her pudgy yet cute face. She had been arrested for a few DWIs, but other than that she was just a young and naive local girl Evans had won over with his charm and his showering of stolen jewelry.

  A local Troy woman who knew Sheehan later said she was “all about material things. She never loved Gary, but loved what Gary could provide her with.”

  When Horton found Sheehan in late October, after locating her through Evans’s prison visiting list, she was apprehensive and unresponsive to most of his questions. She had obviously been trained by Evans to keep her mouth shut if the cops ever came knocking.

  “I haven’t seen Gary,” she said when Horton asked, “since before summer. But,” she added, “I spoke to him a few weeks ago.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much. I told him to pay me the five hundred he owed me for back rent. He said he was leaving. He told me I could have his truck. A day later, it was parked in my driveway.”

  Evans had lived with Sheehan in her trailer for a brief period. When Horton found her, she had already hooked up with another man whom she referred to as her “fiancé.” They were preparing to move to Florida.

  Sheehan had also rented a unit at the Spare Room II back on September 19, 1996, but when the Bureau checked it out, it was empty.

  In the end, Doris Sheehan could offer only one more false glimmer of hope.

  There was a name on that same prison visitor’s list that had been bothering Horton ever since he had seen it. A young kid in his twenties with no criminal record had visited Evans a few times during his last stay in prison. When the Bureau tracked the kid down, he said Evans had recently been to his house in upstate New York to pay him and his father a visit. The connection between the kid, his father and Evans, Horton soon found out, was work-related. Evans had done some tree work for the family at one time and the three of them had been friends ever since. They liked Evans, the kid and his father said. “He was pleasant. Nice guy. Never bothered anyone. He worked hard.”

  According to the kid, Evans could scale a tree like a squirrel.

  “When he came over the last time, what did he say?”

  “Well, he just wanted to stop by to say that he had always liked us and that we would probably never see him again.”

  “That was it?”

  “Yeah. Then he left.”

  Horton continued to work on Lisa, stopping by her apartment when he could to see if she would willingly volunteer any new information about Evans’s whereabouts. When he saw her a
fter she had been identified at Spare Room II during the Bureau’s surveillance, he wondered why she had gone there and what her purpose was. Undoubtedly, Evans had put her up to it.

  “Were you going to pay Tim Rysedorph’s bill?” Horton asked. “I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

  “No. I was going to rent a space.”

  “All right, Lisa, tell me what’s going on here. I’m not an asshole.”

  Lisa paused. Then, “Gary sent me to pay the bill. But he asked me to do it before he left. It’s not like he called and ordered me to do it.”

  “That’s it? Nothing else?” Horton knew she was lying. He sensed Evans was pulling her strings, like maybe he was monitoring the entire situation from afar.

  “Well, I did want to rent a space for myself—I’m cramped here in the apartment, as you can see.”

  Lisa’s apartment was always neat and clean. She had some junk piled in a spare bedroom, but it was nothing overwhelming. What was more, she could barely scrape together eight dollars to buy a six-pack and a pack of cigarettes, better yet come up with $65 or $70 every month for a storage space.

  But Horton didn’t want to press her. Over the next week, he pestered her about it, but she stuck to her story. He left the subject alone because he didn’t want to jeopardize the rapport he had already spent weeks building.

  “I wanted her to find Gary for me,” Horton said later. “I was using her for that purpose only. The money I was giving her out of my own pocket, the conversations I had with her, acting sympathetic to her situation, was all part of my strategy.”

  Bureau investigators Chuck DeLuca and Bud York had been on pawnshop detail for a few days trying to locate any stolen property in the region that had been sold recently. Pawnshops were one of the most frequent places Evans liked to fence stolen property. Pawnshop detail included a biweekly filtering of the pawnshops in the area to see if any known stolen items had been bought or sold. Pawnshop owners—although many often find ways to get around the system—are mandated by New York state law to fill out a form for each item they buy or sell. Local police stop by periodically to see if any items on the list match any items reported stolen. All of that information is then keyed into a main database.