“They went to church all the time,” Robbie added. “They were always loving to us kids…[but] hypocrites at the same time.”
Leroy, Robbie claimed, was always treated like the “black sheep of the family.” His mother and father disowned him after he married Flora Mae.
Not too long after they were married and Leroy and Flora Mae set up a home in Troy on First Street, most of their new friends and neighbors, as well as the kids and Flora Mae, dropped the “Le” from his name and started calling him “Roy.” An army air corps pilot in the late ’40s and early ’50s, by 1957 Roy had grown into a scrappy man with skinny arms and legs, an oval face and patchouli oil slicked-back black hair that shone like chrome. He would later brag to anyone who would listen about his tail gunner days and how he was routinely shot at by the enemy. He had a hole in the side of his stomach, Robbie remembered, but was embarrassed and never talked about it.
The Evans family lived on the bottom floor of a three-story, red-brick-faced apartment building, merely a block from the Hudson. The building had one of those monument-like concrete stairways leading up to the front door from the sidewalk, much like a 1920s-era big-city library. Along First Street, in any direction, were run-down bars and saloons, butcher shops, markets and five-and-dimes. The streets were narrow. When cars parked on both sides, the roads became tunnellike. The street gutters were always full of garbage, cigarette butts, soda pop bottles, cans and dirt. Like most kids in the neighborhood, for Gary Charles and Robbie, summer days revolved around stickball and dodgeball games, hopscotch and jump rope, while winter involved snowball fights and sledding and skating in nearby Washington Park. In between the Evanses’ apartment building was an alleyway—or sandlot—where the kids could play tag or just hang out.
“We would just sit on the front porch,” Robbie remembered later, “and eat Fudgsicles and drink RC Cola. We’d play games in the alley.”
The late ’50s and early ’60s were prosperous times for Troy residents. With Uncle Sam murals spread about town, the city latched onto what had become an all-American relic and had become known as the birthplace of Mr. America. The city wasn’t necessarily devoid of any trouble or social suffering, but industry roared along. There was plenty of work at the oil refineries and steel mills. The schools were respectable. Taxes were fair. There was a sense of community. Neighbors helped one another. There were block parties, PTA meetings, cookouts. People, generally, cared about one another.
With the vast mountains of Rensselaer and Albany Counties a fifteen-minute drive from downtown Troy in any direction, and the abundance of fish in the Hudson, Roy and Flora Mae hunted and fished as often as they could. Roy was a man’s man; he liked guns and beer and all things masculine. Together, during the early years of their marriage, he and Flora spent time catching fish and shooting wild game, bringing it home to feed the family. The kids in the neighborhood, including Robbie and Gary Charles, would even get into the act. They’d use chicken scraps they found at the Chuckrow Chicken Plant on River Street, fasten them to safety pins and string and catch carp and eels out of the Hudson River. They would sell them, as Robbie later put it, to “the Jewish and Negro neighbors.”
There was one time when a chicken from the Chuckrow plant got loose, Robbie recalled, and ended up in the Evans backyard. In a flurry of physical strength and determination, Flora Mae chased the young bird, cornered it and grabbed it by the neck. After snapping its neck as if it were a brittle twig, she chopped the bird’s head off on the back porch in front of all the kids. “Chicken tonight!” she said, holding the headless bird in the air as if it were a trophy.
According to Robbie, life inside the home during those early years was, for the most part, normal and rather mundane. As long as, she was quick to point out, Flora and Roy were working and had money. When they didn’t, and they had to depend on free food from nearby churches and warehouses, trouble arose. Additionally, Roy demanded that the kids stay close to the apartment. Robbie and Gary Charles were allowed to ride their bicycles down the block, between Washington and Adams Streets and back, but that was it. If they went any farther, there would be a price to pay. The apartment had a large picture window in the front living room. Roy would sit, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, drinking Schaefer beer and listening to his police scanner. Every once in a while, he would get up from his chair and check on the children to see if they were abiding by his rules. It wasn’t about making sure they were safe, a family friend later said, because Roy never worried about the kids in that respect. It had to do with living under his reign of power. If the kids disobeyed him, as they often did, look out!
Trouble—serious trouble—didn’t begin, Robbie said, until after Roy got into a car accident and lost his job.
“He went through the windshield,” she said. “Shortly after, he was diagnosed with epilepsy. He had seizures pretty often when he combined his medication with alcohol.”
By then, Gary Charles, who had turned ten, was a scrappy-looking kid who wore thick, black horn-rimmed Buddy Holly–style prescription glasses, like his mother and father. As with most boys during those days, he sported a buzz cut, much like the astronauts of the Apollo. Neighbors and former friends recall him being “lost and quiet” for the most part, never really saying too much unless he was asked to speak. During his grammar school days, Gary Charles excelled, generally garnering straight A’s across the board. He liked to read comic books in his second-story bedroom and watch Robbie and Flora dance around the living room while they listened to Mario Lanza, Hank Williams and Roy Rogers records. One of the more crowning moments in Gary Charles’s young life came when Robert Kennedy, on the campaign trail, stopped in Troy and Gary Charles was photographed shaking his hand. The look in young Gary’s eyes showed a boy who marveled at the prospect of being able to touch the hand of someone so powerful and famous. The photo appeared in a local Troy newspaper and brought him a meager brush of fame he enjoyed at home and school for days afterward.
Old photos of the family depict a child whose mother took pride in dressing her only boy. In particular, one photo that would resonate later with Gary Charles’s life of crime shows a little boy dressed down in a three-piece black suit, black tie and white shirt. He is wearing a fedora, like Dick Tracy or Frank Sinatra. Smirking modestly, Gary Charles is the spitting image of Chicago gangster Al Capone.
CHAPTER 35
Flora Mae Evans, with her bony shoulders and frail arms, large breasts and hourglass figure, had always been an attractive woman in a Jayne Mansfield sort of way. In those early days of her marriage to Roy Evans, she wore taut black dresses and elastic-tight blouses to accentuate her shape. She kept her black hair kinky, in curls. A noted lover of art, she had aspirations of being an artist, and had even displayed her artwork at a Greenwich Village art show one year. She loved to draw pen-and-ink sketches and freehand water-color paintings. She loved to dance and, at one time, had even wanted to pursue a career as a Rockette.
Former friends, neighbors and even Robbie later agreed, however, that an addiction to alcohol forever stood in Flora’s way of ever pursuing a true calling or dream. After she met and married Roy, what had been a mere happenstance relationship with alcohol took on a life of its own. She began going out to bars and drinking around the house. By the time Gary Charles was three, Flora had already made several dramatic attempts at killing herself in front of the kids. As one story went, she was in her bedroom one day cleaning a hunting rifle; Gary was riding his tricycle through the hallways of the apartment; Robbie was in the living room watching television. Roy, sitting in his favorite chair by the picture window, was drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.
“It’s hard to distinguish which happened first,” Robbie said later. “Either Gary fell off his tricycle and cried because he heard a gunshot, or [my mother] was distracted by Gary’s crying and she missed her mark.”
Either way, a shot rang out through the apartment and everyone hightailed it into the bedroom to see what happened.
&
nbsp; “I ran into my mother’s room,” Robbie said, “and saw her lying backward on the bed….”
There was blood sprayed all over the room. Flora had put the gun up to her chest but misfired and nearly blew her shoulder off.
A former neighbor, however, who was also there that day, recalled the incident much differently.
“Gary was all huddled up in the corner,” the neighbor said. “I was there…in [Robbie’s] room. I came out and heard Roy and Flora arguing. Roy shot her in the shoulder…nearly blew it off.”
Regardless of what happened, after all was said and done, the incident was ruled a “cleaning the gun” accident.
As Flora Mae and Roy struggled to make ends meet, social and domestic pressure to feed the kids and keep the alcohol flowing began to manifest into anger, resentment and violence inside the home. With Roy out of work and home all day long, collecting disability because of the car accident he had been in, Flora had to carry the load. For the most part, she did odd jobs: manufacturing, garment, retail. Her longest run was at a Troy clothing manufacturer, Tiny Town Togs Girl’s Dresses. She worked long days in an unair-conditioned sweat-shoplike atmosphere, sweating profusely during summer over the shirts she pressed, and freezing in winter. When Tiny Town Togs didn’t have work, she would scrub floors and toilets, along with pots and pans, for Jewish families in the neighborhood. Her one source of comfort after a long day of work became Thunderbird wine. The kids would find bottles of it in back of the toilets and in the “wringer washer,” hidden from Roy.
“She had to hide [her booze] from Roy,” Robbie recalled, “because if he found it, he would pour it down the drain.”
Regardless of the chaos that was seemingly getting worse with each passing day, Flora would take Gary Charles and Robbie to the First Presbyterian Church, just down the block. Both kids were often awarded “perfect attendance” pins for showing up at church so regularly. They also attended Sunday school and looked forward to placing their envelope—all ten cents of it—in the offering basket each week.
As the ’60s crept along and Roy became more complacent with life due to his being out of work and drinking every day, government assistance became a means of survival.
In his letters to Jim Horton many years later, Gary Charles wrote of a mother and father he utterly despised, and spoke of a childhood rife with violence and abuse of all kinds. Later, he hinted at being abused sexually by Roy, but would never go into too much detail with Horton for fear of, perhaps, having to relive the cruelty all over again.
“My father did things to me,” he told Horton through tears, “that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
Evans had also told friends that Flora Mae had abused him sexually for years.
The more time Roy spent out of work—he would sometimes work as a bartender, but it would never last—the more despondent he became. He would sit for hours, on the back porch or in the living room, drinking, smoking and not saying much of anything. When he did speak, a neighbor later recalled, the loudness would seemingly shake the whole apartment complex. When he got mad at Flora Mae, he would chase her around the apartment and lash out at her violently with his hands or his favorite leather strap. Knowing how much Flora enjoyed listening to records, one day he destroyed her record player in front of everyone—possibly just to take away the one last bit of sanity and enjoyment she had left in life.
Jo Rehm had been a skinny little girl, taller than the other kids, with platinum blonde hair, almost white, and the sharp facial features of a bird: pointy nose, thin, caved-in cheekbones and tiny, beady eyes that cut right through whoever got caught in their gaze. Living at 158 First Street, directly next door to the Evanses, Jo later recalled Gary Charles as being a “quiet child” who wasn’t allowed to have any friends or, like a prisoner, leave the confines of his bedroom.
“He was kept in the house most of the time,” Jo said later. “Locked in his room like an animal.”
One facet of Gary Charles’s life that became a signature as he grew older was his absolute revulsion toward any type of meat. He hated chicken, pork and beef with a fervor—but especially liver.
“His father,” Jo Rehm added, “would make him sit at the kitchen table for hours until he ate his liver. Gary hated liver…. We all hated liver.”
Jo was seven years older than Gary, and Gary Charles and Robbie looked up to her as a “big sister.” Jo said she would spend much of her time in the Evans household looking after the kids when Flora Mae and Roy were either too drunk, or had left the kids at home to go out to the bars. Jo’s parents were also heavy drinkers, she readily admitted, and often drank with Flora and Roy.
The drinking in the house became an ordinary part of each day as Gary Charles grew toward his teenage years. He and Robbie awoke each morning expecting Roy and Flora to either spend the day on the back porch getting drunk, or inside the apartment drinking and fighting. As long as the kids did what they were told and kept their mouths shut, there wouldn’t be any trouble.
But from an early age, Gary Charles was stubborn. He did things his way. And when it came to eating liver, he flat out refused to do it as he grew older. When he refused, Roy looked at it as a question of his authority: Gary was being disobedient. It wasn’t about the liver; it was about doing what the old man said.
“We used to try to hide the liver in the kitty litter box so Gary didn’t have to eat it,” Jo recalled.
When that didn’t work, and Roy found it, he would beat Gary Charles senseless while the others looked on in horror. Other times, Jo would eat the liver herself so Roy wouldn’t have an excuse to beat him.
Roy’s weapon of choice was a leather strap he had used to sharpen his straight razor. Whenever he pulled it out—whether to sharpen his razor or begin slashing it lightly in his palm, warming it up for a beating, taunting the kids—they would scramble around the house as if they were playing hide-and-seek, searching for some sort of shelter from the terror they knew was coming.
Despite the beating he knew he was going to get, Gary became steadfast in his decision not to eat the liver. Roy would then break out his strap and whip his son until welts swelled up on his tiny frame. Then he would throw him in his room and refuse to feed him until the next day.
Because the apartment buildings were built so close together, Jo said, she would often open the window in her apartment next door and feed Gary cereal and chocolate-chip cookies through the alleyway.
“Many times,” she said, “it was the only way he would get to eat.”
Roy—thank goodness—never knew.
Sending a child to bed without dinner was a common punishment parents doled out in the ’60s and ’70s. If a kid wouldn’t eat his peas or carrots, the mom or dad might give the entire plate to the dog and say to the child, “Go to your room!”
For Gary Charles, however, taking a beating and being starved for twenty-four hours for not eating his liver would have been a reprieve for what some later claimed was one of Roy’s most deplorable, violent punishments.
Using a piece of rope or a belt, Roy would strap Gary to a dining-room chair so he couldn’t move. When he had him secured in the chair, he would, in between his taking pulls from his seemingly bottomless can of Schaefer beer, shove the liver down his throat until Gary ate every last morsel. Jo Rehm recalled several times when Gary would try to fight off Roy’s force-feeding by squirming and twisting his head like a hooked fish. However, he would end up turning purple from choking on the meat and have to give in for the sake of being able to breathe.
“I went over there one time and Roy was nearly choking Gary with the meat, stuffing it down his throat,” Jo recalled. “The cops had been called that day because I had pushed Roy when I saw what he was doing to my Gary. They told me I had to go home…and didn’t even care about the fact that Roy was abusing him.”
Robbie, her memory perhaps tempered by time, said she never saw Roy force-feed her brother, but remembered how insistent Roy was regarding the kids eating their liver and �
�cow tongue.”
“Whatever Jo says is…true,” Robbie said later. “She has a better recollection than I do. I guess my mind just blocks a lot out.”
As Gary began creeping up to his teenage years, he began to show an interest in the same things most other kids did: cartoons, comics, sports. Like his mother, he developed a passion for anything having to do with art: drawing, painting, sketching. Roy would quash any fleeting childhood moments of enjoyment for Gary by not allowing him to watch television and refusing to purchase art materials for him. Gary, perhaps beginning to develop a demon seed, began to take it all in and not say anything.
“I remember him lying on his stomach in his room,” Jo said, “with his head sticking out of the doorjamb. He was trying to catch a glimpse of television, while everyone else—including Robbie—sat and enjoyed it.”
As Jo saw it, Flora Mae was no better than Roy. “She was a whore. A drunk. She didn’t care about those kids.”
Another childhood friend, Bill Murphy, recalled stories Gary would tell him about Flora Mae taking him as a child to a local “doctor’s office,” and making Gary wait outside the room and listen to them moaning and groaning their way through an afternoon of adulterous sex. Additionally, while Roy sat at home during those days and drank himself silly, a former neighbor claimed, Flora was also being paid by the owner of a local X-rated cinema to have sex with him.
As the alcohol abuse became more profound as Flora and Roy began spending more time at home, Flora turned once again to suicide as an answer.
For as long as anyone who hung around the Evans household back then could remember, Flora had permanent scars on her wrists from trying to kill herself so many times. Still, whether she was screaming out for help with the failed attempts or not, she tried other means.
One day, Robbie was hanging clothes in the backyard when a neighbor called out, “Robbie! Robbie!” pointing up at the apartment complex next door.
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