Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  Then, in the same letter, That asshole in Troy…is doing eight months in the county jail, but he gets out in March. If I get free before him, I’m going to spend some time with his girlfriend, sell everything he owns, and visit him in the county jail.

  Later, So many people owe me money that haven’t done anything to help me out, they’re going to pay when I get in their face!

  Again, anyone who had ever crossed paths with Evans and not served his needs was to blame for his most recent incarceration. In his clouded mind, it had nothing to do with his own behavior: Sis, Do you think you can imagine how much I want those scumbag lowlifes in Troy who got me busted, beat me for my money? I get the chance right and I’m going to drink their blood, and I’ll take pictures when I’m doing it…. These people are paying!

  He went on to talk about a “shitlist” he had developed while isolated in his Attica cell. Some thirty-seven names were on the list, he wrote, but I left a lot off!

  Later, Horton would agree that as Evans sat isolated in Attica, he began talking himself into becoming something he hadn’t been up until that point in his life: a murderer. There he was—alone, angry, disconnected from the world—focusing on anyone who had ever looked at him the wrong way.

  I don’t think I can manage them all, he wrote, again referring to his “shitlist,” but the important ones will definitely see my smiling face some dark night, and there’s going to be some screaming, begging, crying snake bastards when that time comes…. I feel like making headlines as a vampire mass murderer. I feel like filling up a private graveyard.

  Then, Just six-and-a-half more months.

  CHAPTER 40

  Confined to his cell at Attica, counting the days until parole, Evans was living the life of a “hermit,” he opined in a letter to Robbie on September 29, 1982, merely a day after he had written his last letter. There were times when he was so lonely and unable to do anything else, that he would begin a letter in the morning and continue writing all day long. Some of the letters were set up in the form of a journal. Morning, noon, night. He would leave his cell to eat, then return and write to Robbie what had happened during dinner. A guard would come by and give him a hard time, and he would write about it.

  By this point, his beard had grown about eight inches below his chin. He had even drawn an “actual size” picture of it in one letter. The picture looked more like Jesus than perhaps Evans resembled, and what he wrote underneath it certainly didn’t have any pious connotations: I still want to fill a private graveyard.

  The more he wrote—almost daily—the more concerted an effort it became to plan his future. Job? Home? Going clean? None of it seemed to interest Evans. Moving out of the country? Hooking up with old crime cohorts? Finding those responsible for his latest incarceration? This was what fed his motivation to survive. He had lost a considerable amount of weight and had been skinnier than he had ever been in his life. Unable to lift weights and eat a regular diet of what he liked—cookies, cereal, milk, doughnuts, Twinkies—he was forced to eat loaves of bread and cake that “taste like shit.”

  In every letter he wrote from October to December, he insisted that it would only take “$200” to get him out of prison. He begged Robbie for the money. He was also furious, he said over and over, because she rarely wrote back. The parole board wanted to be certain, he explained, that he had money and a place to stay when he got out, or it wasn’t going to release him early. The $200 could pay off the debt he had accumulated while in prison and leave him enough cash to get on his feet. Every day, it seemed, became his last day behind bars.

  I should be out in a week!

  A week would go by.

  I should be out next week.

  Another week would pass.

  Maybe next week.

  In a November letter, he talked about Flora Mae for the first time since being behind bars: I don’t know, I think something happened to mom. I haven’t heard from her yet, and she was all happy that I let her visit me…1rst [sic] time in 5½ years, and I gave her a painting + she said she’d write.

  When Thanksgiving 1982 came around, he floated the idea of leaving Troy when he was released and never seeing “anyone” again: I know I cannot be around ANY people. I don’t need any girl around except rarely (and don’t really need them then); I’ve done without for six years now, 3 months in between. I don’t trust anyone, male or female…. I can go weeks without saying a word…. I’d make a good monk, wouldn’t I? Then he sketched out a plan for himself if he were to ever receive a sudden windfall of cash. The entire plan centered on material possessions: boats, cars, motorcycles, houses and land. Interesting enough, at the end of the list he indicated how, in fact, he might go about getting his hands on the cash: I also know [someone] that put a gun to [someone’s] head + took a few lbs. of coke…. There’s ways and ways and ways. A lot of things I won’t do but a lot I will do. I’d rip off a crook in a minute, that shouldn’t be illegal to do!!

  On December 13, 1982, he wrote what would end up being his last letter for a while. He seemed upbeat and happy. Parole was in reaching distance now, he had been told. Robbie had, after weeks of his begging and pleading, scrounged up the $200 he needed to pay off his debts. The only obstacle standing in his way now was where he would be going when he was released. His parole officer wanted him to go back to the Capital District, find a job and live at the Salvation Army until he could find a “room” of his own. He, in turn, said he couldn’t because there were Hells Angels “after him.” He wasn’t, he explained, going to get killed “that easy.”

  In any event, he promised he would move back to the Capital District. Once there, he figured he’d explain to his parole officer the dilemma he was in with the Angels and was convinced parole would allow him to move to Florida.

  Be it the elation he felt after hearing he was going to leave prison any day or the fact that he didn’t want to end up right back in prison, he wrote, I have thought more often of just leaving the assholes I don’t like alone. Not all of them, but most of them. I’ll just leave [them] to their shitty lives. But near the end of the letter, he couldn’t resist: I have to have a couple [of them], though.

  Many of Evans’s burglary victims would later pounce on the New York justice system for continually allowing him to walk away from his prison bids early. Some would even claim he was trading information about drug deals and weapons and other crimes he learned about while in prison for time.

  His letters, however, proved otherwise. According to his own words, Evans was merely a product of the DOC. He was just another number on a list of inmates who could get paroled early as long as they stayed out of trouble while in prison and told their parole officers what they wanted to hear.

  Hitting the brick on December 29, 1982, for the first time in nearly two years, Evans began looking up old friends immediately—specifically Michael Falco, who himself had just been released after doing a brief bid for burglary.

  Within weeks of hooking back up, Evans and Falco pulled a few small jobs together and then parted ways. By January 1983, Evans had found his way to Florida: the beach, the sun, the women.

  Robbie was living in Lake Worth, Florida. She had been doing pretty well for herself. Mainly spending time at a trucking business she had started, Gary was Robbie’s only connection to back home. Since his release, he had bulked up bigger than he had ever been in his life. Photos from that era show a man with legs like tree trunks, rippled with muscles. His arms were close to seventeen inches around. His neck and shoulder muscles bulged inside his clothing as if he had stuffed padding underneath. His ZZ Top beard, now nearly reaching the tip of his heart, was always groomed well. Obviously, he took pride in his body and loved to show it off.

  Flora Mae hadn’t been keeping in touch with her children all that much throughout the past few years. She was living in Pottersville, New York, with her lesbian lover, in a trailer owned by a bar that was also on the same premises. Her alcoholism had taken on new heights. She was drunk all the time.


  On February 6, 1983, Gary, Robbie, Devan and Robbie’s new husband took a drive from Lake Worth to Tampa to visit Robbie’s in-laws. It was a beautiful day: blue skies, turquoise water, lots of skin and sand.

  When they arrived back home later that day, the NYSP called to inform Robbie that Flora Mae had been found dead. Robbie, though, was too overtaken with emotion to continue the conversation, so she handed the phone to Gary.

  Flora Mae had, according to Robbie, cashed her Social Security check that day, paid what little rent she owed and then went to the bar to have a few drinks.

  “When she left the bar,” Robbie added, “she slipped on the ice as she was about to put her key into her car door…and hit her head on the bumper of her car.”

  Doesn’t make much sense, considering the bumper and the car door on any vehicle are at least five feet from each other. Nonetheless, because there was no one around—it was near midnight—Flora Mae, lying unconscious from the blow to her head, froze to death “in a fetal position” near her car.

  The next morning, a neighbor found her. Only a few months before her fifty-first birthday, Flora Mae Flanders Evans was dead.

  Later, as the years wore on, the story behind her death took on a life of its own. “She was a drunk,” some said, “who passed out in a snowbank and froze to death.”

  There was even one story that tagged Gary as her killer. Yet it was impossible, unless he flew to Buffalo, New York, early that day, drove to Pottersville, murdered his mother and flew back to Florida that same day.

  Gary and Robbie took a train to Albany the same day they got the call and had Flora Mae cremated so they could “take her with them always,” Robbie said. Gary didn’t want anything to do with his mother’s ashes. Robbie scattered some of the ashes in a reservoir where Flora Mae liked to fish and threw some on a parkway in North Carolina “so she could fly with the birds and be at peace with nature.”

  CHAPTER 41

  As the lilacs began to bloom and the ground thawed in the Capital Region during spring 1983, Evans was back on the streets of Troy running with his old “business partners,” looking to set up a few jobs. It had been only months since Flora Mae’s death. But Evans was never one to dwell on pain. His mother and father were gone. His sister lived in Florida. Alone now, he pondered his own misconstrued notion of what the future held. He didn’t want to find a “real” job, or even begin to think about going straight. He had made quick money in the past burglarizing homes, businesses, antique shops and jewelry stores. He had done hard time in the nation’s toughest prisons and survived. All he wanted now was the perfect score. Once he had enough money, he was taking off on what he referred to as a “tour.”

  Still, there were some loose ends in Troy he had to clear up. Either while in prison or shortly after he had been paroled, it was never made clear, Evans found out that a few Angels had roughed up a judge’s son pretty bad. They broke his face…, he later wrote.

  Because of what he knew about the incident, a district attorney in Troy had been encouraging him to testify before a grand jury. His testimony could help put the perpetrators behind bars for a long time.

  For Evans, nothing he ever did came without a price. In fact, in some of his later letters to Robbie, he claimed that the DA’s office in Troy had even promised to trade his testimony for a few charges he was facing regarding a “market [he] tried to hit.”

  There was one problem, however. Word among criminals on the street traveled like junior high gossip. No sooner had Evans begun talking to the DA’s office, then he developed a reputation on the street for being an informant. Interestingly, he had chastised and threatened some of his old business partners in letters to his sister for the same reason, yet here he was doing it himself.

  On another level, Evans looked at the Hells Angels situation as a “get out of jail free” card. He felt that if he got caught doing another burglary, he could simply float his grand jury testimony and walk—that is, providing the Angels didn’t get him first.

  With Easter, 1983, fast approaching, Evans was back in Troy living with Tim Rysedorph and Michael Falco on Adams Street. Since Evans’s departure, the apartment had become, not only a place to sleep, but a storage facility for stolen merchandise, according to law enforcement. A favorite spot was in the floorboards.

  Evans’s latest run with Rysedorph and Falco, however, wouldn’t last long, because on April 22 he was picked up for burglarizing a home. While out on bail for that charge, he was picked up again on May 10 for grand larceny and burglary.

  At the time, he still owed the New York parole department sixteen months from his previous two-to four-year bid, for which he had been released twenty-four months early. Even if, by some mere happenstance, he beat the latest charges, he was still looking at a year or more for violating his parole.

  After he spent a few days behind bars in Saratoga County Jail, where he had been picked up, Evans’s court-appointed attorney visited him to discuss what—if any—options he had.

  “You can’t beat this case,” his attorney insisted.

  “I’ll plead guilty to two misdemeanors,” Evans said, “as long as I get sentenced to sixteen months and do the time here!” He could have agreed to a lesser sentence of twelve months, but the time would have to be served in a state prison, something he wasn’t prepared to do. The last bid had broken him. State prisons were “hell,” he said later. They hardened people.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Evans was always thinking ahead. In Saratoga, a county jail that generally held people awaiting sentencing, he knew he was safe from the Angels. Out in the state prison system, there was no telling where he would end up, or who he would run into. Doing an extra four months in a county jail would be far easier than facing a pack of Hells Angels in Attica or Clinton.

  Within a week, his lawyer returned with some good news. The DA agreed to the sixteen months in county. He ran the risk of getting transferred, but he would never see a state prison, at least that’s what the DA promised.

  According to Evans, he had set up his latest burglary so he could secure enough money for a piece of property he wanted to buy in his sister’s name in upstate New York or Vermont. Sitting in jail once again, counting the days until his release, he realized his dream would have to wait for at least one more year.

  You were almost a property owner in N.Y.! Evans jokingly wrote to Robbie on May 10, 1983, just days after he began serving his sentence. I thought I’d be making some decent money…. Oh, well, have to cancel that one for a while.

  Talking about an appearance he had made in court to seal the deal with the DA’s office, Evans carried on about the behavior of some members of the state police he had witnessed while in court: You wouldn’t believe the way [they] were lying. Under oath even. And trying to look all righteous and truthful. Man it got me pissed.

  It was around this same time that members of the Bureau began showing up at the jail to talk to Evans. They were fishing, trying to see what he knew about certain people. Evans had no trouble giving up information when it served him. There were times when he would brag about major drug deals he had heard about in Troy and Albany on “such and such” a day. He hated drug dealers. He believed a drug dealer was no better than a child molester or rapist. Stealing from them, in his mind, wasn’t a crime; he was doing the public a service. Furthermore, giving up information about drug deals was a bartering tool. He could have cared less if word ever got out and he became a target.

  By July, he had been given a release date: September 16, 1984. What made this date special was that not only would he become a “free man” once again, but he would no longer be on parole. To Evans, parole was bondage. It was like being held hostage by the system. It had nothing to do with his paying back society for his crimes; to him, it was “the man” holding him down. In September 1984, he would be clear to go wherever he wanted, do whatever he wanted, without being tied to a parole officer.

  A short time before the Fourth of
July holiday, 1983, Evans penned a succinct letter to let Robbie know where he was. After explaining briefly that he was clear of any “problems” with the state police, he wrote, A guy I do things with got busted and bought his way out by telling on me. He knew about music equipment I got because he helped me sell it—guns also….

  A few weeks later: The State Police brought a fed to see me. I arranged to have my nice gun dropped off. No charges against me. No problems. My whole troubles started when a guy I have known for years, and have done a lot of things with, got caught in Vermont. He started telling on me to get out of charges he had here in New York.

  Members of the Bureau later confirmed that the “guy” Evans was referring to in that letter was Michael Falco: Anyway, I gave back my gun and a $900 power saw I got for cutting safes.

  Regardless of how hard he tried, Evans couldn’t get over the fact that he was playing a game of “you tell on me/I tell on you”—a game he and Falco had been ostensibly playing with each other for years. The old cliché, Bureau investigators later acknowledged, was true: “There is no honor among thieves.” They give up one another on a routine basis. It’s just part of who they are.

  The DA in Troy who had been pursuing a case against a few Hells Angels had begun to finalize his plans for putting Evans in front of the grand jury. The pressure was on. A judge’s son had been beaten severely. Someone was going to pay. In August, Evans would be expected to tell the grand jury everything he knew about the assault.

  But first [the DA’s office] had to agree not to try to charge me, Evans wrote, with the market I tried to hit.

  Once again, Evans had escaped any real hard time behind bars. He would be out of jail in September 1984 and, most important, totally liberated from parole. Nevertheless, with two felony convictions under his belt already, if he got caught and convicted of a third felony (any serious crime punishable by more than one year in prison), it was possible he would be branded a persistent felon and face twenty-five years to life. This scared Evans. The thought of being locked up that long shook him up. Still, as he began to make plans for his release, he couldn’t comprehend that it was his own behavior that had put him behind bars to begin with. He repeatedly blamed anyone but himself for being locked up—and continually vowed to pay each and every one of them back after he got out.