Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  “Jim Horton. I will only speak to Horton.”

  He had run out of options. His deal-making days were over. Horton, who still hadn’t seen him by 4:00 P.M. that day, had one person on his mind as he contemplated when he was going to visit Evans—Tim Rysedorph.

  What Horton was about to hear from Evans in the coming weeks—crimes so horrible in their nature they were hard to fathom—would set Evans on a path of self-destruction, culminating in a series of events that, by midsummer 1998, would devastate anyone and everyone involved.

  Before contact with Evans could be established, Horton wanted to find out a few things. Part of figuring out what Evans had been up to for the past eight months while on the run entailed locating where he had been staying while in Vermont. Since he wasn’t talking and Horton didn’t want to go in and confront him just yet, it was a guessing game. The most logical conclusion was that he had camped somewhere in the woods near McDonald’s. So Horton had a team of troopers begin the time-consuming task of combing the woods. Horton figured if he didn’t go in and see Evans right away, Evans would possibly believe Horton hadn’t been involved in his capture.

  “I didn’t want to alienate him,” Horton said later. “I wanted him to open up to me when we met later on. I should have known he was a lot smarter than I gave him credit for.”

  After radioing for a team of troopers to begin searching an area outside of town, Horton and Lang, who were still at base camp, drove immediately to Troop B, where Evans was now chained to the wall, seething like a rabid raccoon.

  No one was pressuring him. “Good,” Horton said. “Just leave him be. Let him think about things.”

  “His mind was cranking,” Horton recalled. “He was thinking, ‘What the hell just happened? How in the hell am I going to get out of this?’”

  After Horton explained to Lisa that the wiretap he’d placed in her car was a ruse, she followed him and Lang back to Troop B and waited in the lobby while Horton met with his team. With any luck, Horton told her, she would get to see Evans later that night.

  From there, Horton and his team began to go through the items Evans had on him when he was captured. Most interesting was what appeared to be a small, handheld Tech-9 machine gun. At first, it looked as real as the $100 bills Evans had on him, yet ended up being nothing more than a child’s plastic toy. Several bus and plane receipts inside his backpack confirmed he had been to Oregon, Alaska, Washington, California, New Mexico, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

  Also inside his backpack were maps, brochures, hats, bandannas and several personal hygiene items. Inside his wallet was a stack of paperwork that explained just how far he had gone to conceal his identity. Traveling under the name “Louis William Murray III,” he had managed to obtain four different driver’s licenses—two sets under two different addresses—from the state of Washington. In each photo, Evans had altered his appearance just enough so as to look like a different person. In one, he wore glasses, had no facial hair and smiled into the camera; in another, he had a Fu Manchu mustache, wore no glasses and twisted his face muscles enough to appear more serious and academic. Under the Louis Murray name, he had even obtained a Social Security card and enrolled in a food stamp program in Seattle. A tattered and worn Certificate of Baptism, signed by what turned out to be a fictional reverend, was folded and stuffed deep inside a pocket in the bag. On it, he had written his birthplace as Latham, New York—the same town where Horton had lived for most of his life.

  Mixed in with a stack of business papers were several business cards from various commercial deep-sea fishing vessels. Later, Horton learned Evans had obtained a job aboard an Alaskan fishing boat that traveled from Alaska into the Bering Strait, finally making landfall in Russia. Evans said he had planned to defect to Russia once the boat arrived, but he had caused some trouble during the trip and ended up locked in the brig.

  The Timex Expedition watch he had been wearing when he was arrested had a handcuff key strapped to the back of it. It was a cheap, outdoorsy type of watch one could purchase (or steal) from any department store. As Horton picked it up, held it in his hand and looked at it more closely, he realized it was the exact same watch he had on.

  Rusted and slightly bent, a tad smaller than a house key, the handcuff key found strapped to the back of the watch served as peace of mind for Evans. He had escaped from custody before and later told Horton he was never without at least one handcuff key at all times. Yet, as investigators searched further, they found two more keys.

  A fourth key, Horton would learn later, was never found.

  Whenever Evans went out in public or set out to do a “job,” he hid a handcuff key in his mouth, underneath his tongue. If he ever got caught, he swallowed it. Twenty-four hours later, while in custody, he could shit it out, clean it off and put it back in his mouth. No one knew it at the time, but it was likely that inside Evans’s stomach, as he sat chained to the cell wall inside Troop B, was that same handcuff key he had recycled numerous times throughout the years.

  Besides finding several more everyday household items, the most telling item investigators found was located in Evans’s wallet: a photograph.

  Nearly a week prior to his arrest in Vermont, the Albany Times Union, a local Albany newspaper, had run a story about cold case investigations. The photo that ran with the story showed Horton opening a filing cabinet. It was a good shot, taken from the waist up. Evans had cut out Horton’s photo, folded it neatly and kept it tucked away in a separate pocket in his wallet. If anyone had ever doubted how personal the connection between Evans and Horton was, here was proof: the villain, in all his narcissism, had been carrying around a photo of the cop who was hunting him.

  Horton, when confronted with the photo, looked at it and smiled.

  “Gary would, even if he was in Vermont, Maine or wherever, order the Albany Times Union newspaper so he could keep tabs on what was happening locally. Was I surprised when we found the photo? Of course. But when I sat down later and thought about it, I understood that Gary was, in his own way, trying to prove to himself how much he respected me. The only mistake he made, he told me later, was not leaving St. Johnsbury when he saw my photo in the Times Union. That was a sign for him to leave, he claimed, and he didn’t listen to it.”

  An off-duty VSP trooper, who had been out jogging in downtown St. Johnsbury during the morning hours of May 27, had come up on a section of woods outside of town near an underpass and had seen “a man on a bike come speeding out of a culvert” that led into the woods.

  Later that day, when the trooper showed up for work and saw Evans in lockup, he said, “I saw that guy this morning coming out of this culvert on the edge of town….”

  When Horton got wind of what the trooper said, he immediately ordered a team to the area. Near the culvert, as cops began to search, someone noticed a fresh break in the brush leading farther back into the woods; small trees and bushes had been matted down near freshly cracked twigs along what looked to be a man-made path.

  For a few hours, Horton and several troopers searched the area but found nothing. It was rough terrain. Lots of rock ledge. Thick green brush. Blooming wildflowers. Swampland. Hills. Evans’s camp could be anywhere inside a two-or three-mile radius.

  Realizing it was the perfect spot for Evans to camp, Horton called in a helicopter.

  Hours later, the helicopter search team spotted what looked like the top of a tent and directed Horton and his crew into the area.

  Sure enough, up in the most mountainous portion of the area, near a waterfall, hidden inside a band of densely overgrown bushes and oak trees, was Evans’s campsite.

  He had been smart enough to drape a dark green tarp over the top of the small, one-man tent. Not only for cover from the rain, but camouflage.

  They could tell he had been camped there for some time. The ground around the tent was worn and well-trodden. There was something about the place, when Horton first arrived, that struck him. It was serene. The air was crisp, fresh, like walkin
g into a greenhouse for the first time. He could understand why Evans chose it.

  The campsite itself was homey and peaceful. Evans had apparently planned on staying for quite some time. Throughout his life, one of Evans’s greatest pleasures was to camp by himself in conditions other human beings might view as severe. There was one time in 1976 when he camped up north near the Canadian border during winter. Temperatures had fallen beyond comprehension. Later, while in prison, Evans wrote about the experience:

  I remember in ’76 I was camping out alone in the snow…on this mountain. It said it was minus 54 [degrees] with the wind chill factor! I was wrapped in sheepskin, inside a down sleeping bag, in a mountaineer tent under a pine tree snow fort…. I was freezing!! But it was fun—and one of the last times of freedom I had.

  As Horton began going through the inside of Evans’s tent, he uncovered all the basic necessities one might take on a camping trip: water, juice, food, shampoo and soap. Evans had kept several changes of clean clothes stacked neatly in one corner, a stack of books in the other. Among the many books was an old copy of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a few law enforcement handbooks, and Criminal Investigation: Basic Perspectives, a college-level textbook for wannabe cops.

  Looking further, Horton found a few rolls of film and a camera.

  “Take these down to the lab right away and get them developed,” he told one of the troopers.

  CHAPTER 29

  It had been two years since Evans and Horton had seen each other. The last time they spoke, Horton had told Evans he never wanted to see or hear from him again.

  The purpose of any interrogation, most law enforcement textbooks preach, is to “secure a confession of guilt” from a suspect. The notion that someone could be innocent of a crime is not something interrogations are designed to reveal.

  Whether it is a hostile—shine a light in the perpetrator’s face—type of interview, or a relaxed—“everything will be okay, we are here to help you”—situation, cops who have mastered the art view it the same way: “The better you know your subject, the more you will get out of him.”

  For Horton, all he wanted out of Evans at this point was the answer to one question: where was Tim Rysedorph?

  There was a major problem, however, and it occurred to Horton as he made his way down the long hallway and through the large steel doors that separated him from Evans: In no way could he discuss Tim Rysedorph, Michael Falco or Damien Cuomo, for that matter, with Evans. Studying case law, Horton realized that if Evans had in fact murdered all three men and wanted to admit to it, any tactic Horton now used to obtain those confessions would be scrutinized during trial later on.

  “I couldn’t blow the case by being overly ambitious. I knew Gary would be lawyered-up within days.”

  Evans was chained to the wall of his cell when Horton walked in.

  In a friendly, mocking tone, Horton said, “Hey, you fuck, what’s going on? What did you do now?”

  Evans, an embarrassed smile on his face, stuck his hand out, the chains hanging from his wrist clanking and echoing down the long corridor. “Can you believe this shit?” he said, looking at himself chained to the wall.

  “What’d you do now, Gar?” Horton was both frustrated and excited to see Evans. “This was a guy,” he recalled later, “many of my colleagues told me I would never catch again—especially the way we did. So, some of it was gloating. But my main focus, from the first moment I saw him again, was to get him to give up Falco, Cuomo and, especially, Rysedorph. Before that day in Vermont, I had always viewed Gary as a thief I could perhaps change. But now I saw him as a murderer. Things were different, to say the least.”

  A few minutes before Horton had seen Evans, he practiced the look and demeanor he was going to use once he got face-to-face with him. It had to be, he said, a “good to see an old friend” type of moment, “particularly for Gary. Any other way would jeopardize any future interviews I was going to do.”

  Indeed, one wrong move on Horton’s part and Evans might decide not to talk to anyone. As it was, he had requested Horton, and only Horton. Which meant he wanted to talk.

  “I was very nervous, thinking he would see right through me. Here we both were in a strange place (another state), under conditions as stressful to the both of us as they ever were. He is thinking about going back to jail forever. I need to get three bodies from him. There were a million things I could have said to blow it. In a way, that first meeting was phony; he knew I had been behind his capture and I was looking for Rysedorph, but neither of us would broach the subject. On the other hand, we were both, as strange as it may sound, glad to see each other.”

  Evans was looking at twenty-five to life. He wasn’t going anywhere. Horton, however, decided he wanted to have a current photo of Evans to distribute just in case something happened and Evans ended up on the loose again. So he asked if he could take his photo.

  “Sure, Guy, whatever you want,” Evans said.

  Sitting chained to the wall, Evans looked up and smiled as Horton snapped his photo.

  “Where ya been, Gar?” Horton asked, pulling the Polaroid from the bottom of the camera and setting it down to dry.

  “We meet again!”

  “We need to talk about what’s going on.”

  “What’s this shit?” Evans asked, lifting up the chains again and rattling them. “Why they got me tied up like an animal, Guy?”

  “Let me explain,” Horton said, pulling up a chair, taking a seat in front of him. “There’s a federal warrant for violation of probation out there for you. You weren’t supposed to leave the state of New York, Gar. You know how that shit works. You’re a wanted fugitive, for Chrissakes.”

  The last state Evans should have been in was Vermont. The judge overseeing Evans’s last court case for the theft of a rare book of antique bird prints had warned Evans about ever setting foot in Vermont again, or committing any crimes in the state.

  “Well…,” Evans began to explain.

  “Let me finish. Jesus! Of all places, Gar. Why Vermont again? They want your balls here, man.” Evans shook his head in agreement. “We’ve also got a warrant for you in Albany for a pair of cuff links stolen from a shop in New Scotland.” Evans bowed his head. “You signed your name, Gar, when you pawned them. You gettin’ sloppy in your old age or what?”

  “Holy fuck,” Evans said, looking directly into Horton’s eyes: “What is wrong with me, Guy? I must have been brain-dead on that one.”

  The one item Horton had promised himself he wouldn’t mention was a warrant in Cold Spring, New York. Tim Rysedorph’s name was connected to it. He didn’t want the initial meeting to be negative right from the start. Thinking Evans had killed Tim, Horton didn’t want to bring up his name. He had to convince Evans he was going to be there for him, like he had been in the past.

  “Here’s what we have to do, Gar. You can come back to New York…waive extradition…or fight it here. It’s going to take ninety days just to fight it, and you know as well as I do you’ll lose.”

  Evans seemed to lighten up. He didn’t want to stay in Vermont; he had no one there. Once Horton went back to New York, Evans knew he was on his own. Additionally, any time Evans spent in jail in Vermont wouldn’t count against the time he was subsequently going to get down the road.

  Horton got up from his chair, slid it back over near the table in the room and began walking toward the door. “Maybe I’ll see you in New York next week, Gar?”

  Evans looked at him, but said nothing. His face, however, told Horton he would be screaming to go back to New York by the end of the night.

  CHAPTER 30

  The newspapers didn’t waste any time connecting the dots once word spread that Evans had been captured in Vermont. It had been rumored for years that Evans was responsible for the disappearances of Michael Falco and Damien Cuomo, and now sources inside the state police were telling reporters they were close to solving both cases. With Tim Rysedorph linked to Evans as a childhood friend and, late
r, what reporters and the Bureau were calling “a string of burglaries,” local media began competing to see who could come up with the most eye-catching headline.

  The Albany Times Union kept it simple, but blunt: FRIENDS VANISH, QUERIES LINGER. The article was accompanied by a familiar photo of Evans, the subheadline a portent of things to come: A career thief arrested this week will be questioned in the disappearances of 3 associates.

  The pressure was on Horton to produce some sort of confession out of Evans. There wasn’t an article written that didn’t mention the relationship between Horton and Evans, or the fact that Evans had been the last person to see Tim alive. Horton had made a “courtesy” call to Caroline Parker, keeping her up to speed as to what was going on and the legal issues surrounding how the state police would go about questioning Evans. It involved more than just popping in and asking him where Falco, Cuomo and Rysedorph were, and what, if anything, he had done to them. The legalities were far more complicated than anything Horton had come across in his twenty years as a cop. When it came down to it, besides a bit of chatter among townspeople, there was no evidence linking Evans to any of the disappearances—and no bodies to prove that all three men had been murdered.

  In the state of New York, when a warrant is issued against a suspect, counsel automatically attaches to the warrant and a virtual attorney, so to speak, is created. If cops have enough evidence against a suspect to issue a warrant, the court views that suspect as someone who is in desperate need of legal representation. And, more important, if there is enough evidence to issue the warrant in the first place, the court believes law enforcement shouldn’t be speaking to that person. Thus, this was the main obstacle preventing Horton from talking to Evans.

  In order to be able to discuss matters of any significance with Evans, Horton had to rely on the notion that Evans wanted to get out of Vermont and waive his right to an attorney once he was extradited back to New York State.