Sully found out from the Sacramento Police Department (SPD) that on May 7 a man identifying himself as Jack Flynn had entered a Mail Boxes, Etc. in Sacramento. Pulling a $50 bill out of a “large wad of money,” the man paid $44.32 to send four packages to various cities around the country: Voorheesville, New York; Gainesville, Florida; Hoosick, New York; and, as they already knew, Latham, New York. The clerk at Mail Boxes, Etc., described the man as “stocky…[carrying] a large army-type duffel bag.” When Sacramento police showed the clerk a photo of Evans, he confirmed it was him.
The Florida address turned out to be that of Evans’s half sister, Robbie. She had lived in Florida since the early ’80s. The Hoosick and Voorheesville, New York, addresses belonged to former friends. Evans had sent them, like he had his sister, worthless books and jewelry. The Latham address was, of course, Jessica Stone’s.
It was clear Evans was unloading all of his material possessions so he could travel lightly en route back to the Northeast. Besides the letter to Lisa, the notes he sent along with the packages to his half-sister and friends were insignificant except for a stark and direct message of desperation and finality, as if he were never going to see any of them again.
CHAPTER 22
Lisa began stopping at Jessica Stone’s whenever she had a chance to see if Evans had tried to make contact again. For the past ten days, she hadn’t heard a peep: no phone calls, packages, letters. It was as if Evans had abandoned his entire plan—a possibility Horton had worried about all along.
Then, on Wednesday, May 27, after nearly two weeks of silence, Lisa walked into Jessica Stone’s and…
The bartender, a man who knew Evans because of his affection for Jessica’s French fries and the fact that he had been in the bar several times with Lisa, said he had taken a call earlier that day from a guy named Louis Murray. “It was Gary,” the bartender said, a smirk on his face, as if Lisa and Evans were trying to pull one over on him. “I recognized his voice, Lisa.”
“What did he say?”
“He said to be here at five o’clock tonight; he was going to call back.”
Lisa was, by this point, torn in many different directions. She still loved Evans and was beginning to feel as if she had let him down by “giving him up” to Horton. Nevertheless, she also had an understanding Evans had been responsible for the disappearance of her former boyfriend Damien Cuomo, the father of her child. Running on pure emotional adrenaline, medicating any anxiety she felt with booze and marijuana, Lisa began to turn to Horton for support. There was even a thought that Lisa was becoming attracted to Horton in a sexual manner because they had spent so much time together. Horton, of course, always kept the relationship professional, ignoring her advances, writing them off as a by-product of the rapport he had spent months building. Yet, anything could set Lisa off at this point in the game. Horton had to be careful. The stakes were as high as they were going to get—especially since Evans had called and given a specific time when he was going to call back. Everything had to synchronize perfectly. If one part of the plan went wrong, it would fail. If Evans was back in town doing countersurveillance on Lisa, he knew Horton was sniffing around, setting him up.
Leaving the bar and rushing home, Lisa called Horton and told him what had happened. “I’ll be there at five,” Horton said.
Throughout that afternoon, Horton had every available investigator find anyone named Louis Murray in the Sacramento, California, area. None of the Louis Murrays that Sacramento police found had any ties whatsoever to Evans. He likely had taken on an identity by random. Still, Horton now had a name to alert every law enforcement agency in the country. If anyone named “Louis Murray” was picked up for so much as spitting on the sidewalk, Horton would know about it.
When Horton showed up at Lisa’s apartment to meet her, he started talking about the past few weeks, briefing her on what was going to happen next. There wasn’t time to place a wiretap on Jessica Stone’s or Maxie’s. To get a judge to sign a warrant would take a day, maybe two or three. So he had to rely solely on the trust he had built with Lisa. He did, however, have Lisa sign a waiver, giving the state police permission to record any conversations she had over the telephone. Thus, Lisa was given a tape recorder she could easily hook up to any phone she would later use to talk to Evans.
As much as he didn’t want to let her go off on her own—particularly on such an important mission—Horton had no choice but to let Lisa drive her own vehicle to Jessica Stone’s, while he and two other investigators, DeLuca and Sully, followed at a safe distance—just in case Evans was in town watching them watch her.
At around 4:55 P.M., Horton, DeLuca and Sully, sitting in their car across the street from Jessica Stone’s, watched Lisa drive into the parking lot and walk into the bar.
For a few minutes, she waited nervously at the bar, nursing a beer and smoking a cigarette. Evans, Horton knew, was, if nothing else, punctual. If he said he would call at 5:00, he wouldn’t make her wait.
At about 5:03, the barmaid, a woman Lisa knew, took a call on the bar phone. A moment later, she said, “Hold on,” handing Lisa the phone.
Just like that, Evans was back at the helm, calling the shots.
“Gary?” Lisa whispered.
“Go to Maxie’s right now…. I’ll call you in ten minutes,” he said quickly before hanging up.
Horton, Sully and DeLuca then watched Lisa run out of the bar in a hurry, get into her car and take off.
Follow me, she mouthed as she drove out of Jessica Stone’s and passed them.
“Go,” Horton ordered DeLuca. “Let’s go!”
As Lisa pulled into Maxie’s, Horton told DeLuca to park the car far enough away so they wouldn’t be made if Evans was there waiting for her.
While they waited, DeLuca and Sully told Horton they felt Lisa was nothing more than a barfly who couldn’t be trusted to walk someone else’s dog, better yet run the entire show, as she was clearly doing.
“Why are we playing this game with her?”
Horton had to depend on his instincts. “She’s all we have right now,” he said. “We have no choice but to trust her.”
Lisa was in Maxie’s fewer than five minutes. When she walked out, Horton motioned for her to come over to the car.
“What is going on?” he wanted to know.
Lisa was frazzled. Shaking. Anxious. Unsure of herself. “I don’t know what…the fuck he’s up to,” she blurted out.
“Start by telling us what he said.”
“Now he wants me to drive over to that Irish Pub in Albany. I don’t know,” she added, brushing her fingers through her hair, looking around the parking lot of the bar, “what the fuck he’s doing.”
“Let’s go,” Horton said. “Now.”
The Irish Pub was a twenty-minute drive across town. Horton told DeLuca, who was driving, to stay back even farther. “If Gary’s waiting for her there…Well, I don’t know…he’s…Just go.”
Lisa drove into the parking lot of the Irish Pub and, wasting little time, hopped out of her car and ran into the bar.
CHAPTER 23
Lisa was in the Irish Pub for only a few minutes when she came rushing back out in a hurry, jumped into her car and sped off.
Horton, parked about one hundred yards down the block, watching closely with DeLuca and Sully, told Sully not to move. “Stay back for a moment. Let her go for right now.”
Heading across town, Lisa didn’t seem to be driving any faster than she normally would.
“Wait until she gets a good lead on us, but don’t lose her,” Horton said.
As she worked her way onto the Interstate 787 on-ramp, heading back toward Latham, Sully followed close enough behind to keep tabs on her without making it appear as though they were tailing her.
“When you get an open stretch of road,” Horton said as they began to catch up, “pull her over.”
Lisa pulled over without incident and Horton rushed to the driver’s-side door and motioned for her to roll the win
dow down.
Sitting, staring down at the steering wheel, she didn’t say anything.
“What the fuck is going on, Lisa?” Horton asked, leaning down, looking into her eyes.
“Gary’s back east!” she said in a panic. “Holy shit. I don’t fucking believe this.” She started banging on the steering wheel with her fist.
“What makes you say that?”
“He just told me!”
“Okay, relax. Talk me through this. What did he say?” Horton couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Evans had not only surfaced, but he was back in the Northeast.
“Gary said he needed my car to do a ‘big job’ in Vermont because he needs the money. He talked about meeting me…having sex…some hotel…I don’t know.” At that point, Lisa started to cry. Frustrated and confused by the events of the past hour, she mumbled something, but Horton had a hard time understanding her.
“Come on, Lisa. Calm down. I need to know where he is now.”
“He told me to meet him at the McDonald’s in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Tomorrow at one. I don’t even know where the fuck that is.”
“That’s it? He said nothing else?”
“He said he wasn’t going back to jail”—Lisa paused for a moment to light a cigarette—“He also said he wasn’t going to be taken alive.” She took a hard pull from her cigarette. “He’s got two guns, he said. I fucking believe him, too. He felt you guys were closing in on him. What the fuck am I supposed to do now, Jim? Huh? Tell me.”
Without a second thought, Horton said, “You’re going to meet him tomorrow. Go home right now. I’ll call you later tonight. If he calls you at home, call me immediately.”
“What am I supposed to do, Jim?” Lisa asked again. “I’m scared to death.”
When it came down to it, Lisa was setting Evans up. If he had ever found out what was going on, there was nothing stopping him from using her as a hostage to negotiate his release. Was he waiting for her at her apartment? Was he in town? Or was he actually in Vermont?
Nobody knew for certain.
Standing there next to her car, all Horton could think about was the photograph of Evans lying in a grave, sticking both of his middle fingers up.
“For everyone who wants me caged or dead…the free Gary Evans.”
When Evans told Lisa he wasn’t going to be taken alive, Horton knew, perhaps now more than ever, he meant it. Evans had never been known to carry guns. Suddenly he was saying he was armed. Any cop knows a criminal can become the antithesis of his prior behavior; he will do whatever he needs to do to survive; his crimes increase in severity if he feels the jaws of law enforcement clamping down on him. Evans, it was clear in his last letter, had been in “survival mode” for several weeks, trekking across country while thinking of what he was going to do when he got back east. There was no reason to second-guess how serious his intentions were. Horton had to believe he was prepared to do anything.
During a phone call with Horton later that night, Lisa talked about how long a drive it was to Vermont, and the fact that she didn’t have any money for gas. Horton promised he would send someone over to her apartment with gas and food money.
“I need to see him, Jim,” she said at some point during the conversation. Horton could tell she had been drinking. “I need to have sex…. It’s been a long time. Let me just meet him and have sex and then you guys can do whatever you want?”
“Lisa,” Horton said, “I can’t let you do that. Come on. Let’s be serious.”
Horton had no idea what he was going to do the following day. Here was Lisa worried about getting laid. Was she out of her fucking mind?
“Just go meet him where he said to meet him, Lisa. I need you to do that for me.”
“What are you guys going to do?”
“Nothing.”
As Horton hung up, he questioned what he was about to do. Was it safe sending Lisa off to meet someone he presumed to be in a desperate frame of mind? Of course not. “It was such a big decision to make,” Horton recalled later, “and there I was, making it in what seemed like seconds. Why did I do it? I went through several scenarios later: should I have told her we were going to send a female trooper in her place instead? I realized after hanging up with her that night, I had to truly think things through. In context, I had just sent a woman to meet up with a man I believed to be a serial killer.”
The next several hours were filled with making plans and securing the proper permissions from the white shirts in Albany. Horton needed to put together a team of cops to head up to Vermont. Slapping together an undercover operation at the last minute was hard enough, under these conditions nearly impossible. In actual fact, Evans was exhausted. Broke. He had been on the run for months. Now he was back in the Northeast looking to hook up with Lisa so he could pull off one more “huge” score. Horton believed Evans was trying to finance the run of his life. One mistake on Horton’s part and people were going to get hurt.
One of the first things Horton did was have Sully secure an order for permission to go out of state. He had to follow procedure by the book. The fallout, after catching Evans, was going to be enormous. There wasn’t room for failure. Everything had to go smoothly or it wouldn’t work. St. Johnsbury, Vermont, was near the Canadian border heading north. Two hundred miles from Albany, it was a solid four-hour drive. Much of the night would be spent driving.
Horton quickly collected a team of investigators he thought would best suit his needs. Evans was considered armed and dangerous. “I have two guns…. I am not going to be taken alive…. I am not going back to prison for twenty-five years.” Horton needed experience—yet he also needed cops Evans had never seen before. Most Bureau investigators had, at one time or another, spoken to Evans, bumped into him, or arrested him. Moreover, it occurred to Horton that Evans would most likely be at McDonald’s in St. Johnsbury by early morning, surveying the layout, conducting countersurveillance. There was also a good chance he would spend the morning traveling around town, looking for recognizable faces.
Horton had DeLuca and Sully already on the team, but he needed two undercover officers who could blend in with the general public in Vermont and walk around town unnoticed, preferably as close to McDonald’s as possible.
Undercover officers John Couch and Mary DeSantis had filled a variety of different positions throughout their careers in the NYSP. The one role, however, they fit into like a pair of custom-made shoes was that of Mr. and Mrs. Harley-Davidson. Couch had waist-long hair, a greasy-looking, unkempt beard and mustache, several large tattoos on his arms, and was tall and skinny; Mary, an average-looking gal, could doll herself up in a minute to look like a “biker chick.” Horton envisioned them trolling up and down the street in front of McDonald’s, holding hands. No one would give them a second look.
A Vermont State Police (VSP) trooper would be the designated walker, pacing up and down the street in front of McDonald’s with his dog, a K-9 German shepherd trained to attack on command. He would be dressed in sweats, sneakers, headphones, sweatband. A few local VSP Bureau investigators would be stationed inside McDonald’s acting as patrons, reading the newspaper and eating. Since Evans might recognize Chuck DeLuca, he would be set up in a local hair salon next door, while Sully, whom Evans also knew, would be stationed in the bank across the street.
Both would have good views of McDonald’s. And both would have shotguns.
Because of his relationship with Evans throughout the years, Horton would have to stay behind—miles away—out on the edge of town near the local VSP barracks. Everyone would be wired with a hidden walkie-talkie device so they could communicate stealthily with one another and Horton. From base camp, Horton would call the shots. No one would move without his order.
Before taking off to Horton’s house in Latham to meet before heading up to Vermont, at about 7:30 P.M., Horton called his team together at Bureau headquarters and gave a short briefing.
This was it. It seemed that the past thirteen years had led up to this
one chance to grab Evans, bring him in and get him to talk about, most important, Tim Rysedorph. Once Horton found out where Tim was, he could question Evans about Michael Falco and Damien Cuomo.
It was never clearer to Horton as he sat in his office preparing for the briefing that Tim Rysedorph was dead. Evans, certainly, wouldn’t travel to the other side of the country with a partner and, most definitely, would have mentioned to Lisa if Tim had been with him. But he never did. Instead, he mocked Tim: “How’s that bitch Rysedorph doing?”
“Go home,” Horton told his investigators, “grab a change of clothes, and meet me at my house. We’re leaving in about an hour. Don’t be late. We’ve got a hell of a long drive ahead of us. We need to get up there tonight.”
In the interim, DeLuca and Sully had booked a hotel in downtown St. Johnsbury, and had called the VSP to notify them what was going down. Because it was after business hours, Horton had trouble getting cash to finance the trip, and had an even tougher time finding unmarked cruisers.
“I’ll fix our cars at my house to look as undercover as I can,” Horton said. “I’ll go to the ATM and finance the trip myself.”
Staring down at his notes, Horton paused before releasing everyone. He wanted to be sure he didn’t cause alarm, but he had to make his investigators realize how serious the next twenty-four hours were going to be.
“Everything has to go perfectly,” he concluded, “there can be no mistakes.”
CHAPTER 24
While on the run, Evans had celebrated his forty-third birthday on October 7, 1997. At that age, he was still, Horton and his team were about to find out, in better physical shape than most twenty-year-olds. Living off Twinkies, one of his favorite foods, Freihofer’s chocolate-chip cookies, potato chips, doughnuts, bread, orange juice and milk, one might wonder how he kept himself so fit. To anyone who had known him throughout his life, they were amazed by how bad his diet was but how chiseled he kept his body. It was as if he could eat whatever he wanted and it had no effect on his weight or physique.
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