Evans insisted he was going to stay in the Northeast when he got out of prison, because it was “where [he] wanted to be.” But in his next letter, he changed his mind and began talking about moving to West Virginia. Houses and land were cheap there, he said. Then, in typical Evans fashion, a week after that, he was thinking Connecticut, Maine or New Hampshire: I’m getting the hell out of New York.
Those last letters written before he was released were shrouded with paranoia: I think how easy it would be for a parole officer, a cop, or a Hell’s Angel [sic] to plant something on me and get me busted—like a gun or drugs…. It’d be my third felony, twenty-five to life. There was this nigger that had two felonies. The Angels were looking for him. So he started keeping a pistol in his car. They found out and told the cops, and the cops stopped his car. He got twenty-five to life.
Like he had in the past, Evans began setting goals for himself that were entirely unattainable. The amount of money, for example, it would take for him to give up burglarizing, he said, was an enormous figure he could not possibly have ever made. I figure if I make a minimum of $500,000 I won’t have to rip-off again.
During the summer of 1984, he began talking about someone he called his “best friend.”
He doesn’t do any criminal shit…. He’s like me, stays alone, no drugs or drinking. He’s just into bands.
It had to be, law enforcement later said, Tim Rysedorph. According to Evans’s letter, “Tim” had been laid off recently. This bothered Evans. He wrote if it had been him, he would have burn[ed] the place down after [stripping] it.
Evans’s developing psychosis of shedding blood when he got out of prison was, one might argue, directly related to his upbringing. The rage and anger he voiced in his letters had always been flavored with anecdotes about his childhood, interwoven with stories of getting back at those who, he believed, had turned on him.
For example, as he battled with himself, debating on paper whether to kill when he got out or not, throughout his prose were memories of the hell he had gone through as a child: I didn’t really grow up with anybody when I think of it. I never went outside thanks to that dead asshole [Roy Evans] who I plan blowing out of his grave sometime in the future. And it wasn’t enough for Evans that his father had died an early, horrible death; he wanted to kill him all over again. Maybe I can talk myself out of my bloody plans afterwards. I don’t know. Only time will tell. Probably can.
Doug Wingate, as he got to know Evans throughout the years, pointed out later that Evans’s father was, indeed, one of the main sources fueling Evans’s violent behavior.
Whenever Evans had been picked up, the police had always found several handcuff keys on him.
“I asked him one time why he carried all those handcuff keys,” Wingate recalled later.
Besides the obvious reasons, Evans said his motive was much deeper emotionally, and far more personal.
“He said to me,” Wingate added, “‘I was handcuffed long before I was ever arrested.’ So I questioned him about it. I wanted to know what he meant by that.”
Evans then began to talk about his childhood. He said his father would handcuff him to a post in the basement of their First Street apartment and savagely molest him in the most vile ways.
This deep-seated hatred for his father undoubtedly played a part in his behavior later on. In 1984, as freedom drew closer, he projected that “hatred” he often spoke of in his letters toward those people he thought had been responsible for his incarceration. I think sometimes if I could buy some land in the mountains and go away by myself for a long time I could get all the hate out of me, but now I know it’s too late.
A death wish began to materialize as the months and weeks until his release turned into days and hours.
As far as becoming a mellow old artist in a stone home in Vermont, which he had often written about, that’s a fairytale. I’ll never be old, and I really don’t care. I know who I am. I hate all authority. Respect none. I live for revenge and that’s all.
CHAPTER 45
Be it overcrowding, or the fact that Evans never caused that much trouble while in prison, he was set free on March 31, 1984. What he had dreamed of all along (getting out of jail without the umbra of parole hanging over him), however, wasn’t going to be a reality. Because he was being released early, he was placed on a “conditional release program,” which simply meant he was on parole until his sentence was exhausted. For the next nine months, he would have to be on his best behavior, once again reporting to a parole officer.
With no direction and absolutely no intervention with any sort of postrelease program to set him on the right track, Evans went back to committing burglaries right away.
On January 10, 1985, Evans’s conditional release expired. He was totally free now, unconstrained from any type of parole.
Since his release almost a year ago, he had again been living with Michael Falco and Tim Rysedorph. Although Tim had devoted himself to his music and rarely—if ever—participated in any of the jobs Evans had been doing at the time, Falco had become, in many respects, Evans’s partner.
Near the beginning of February, a friend of Evans’s told him about a flea market in East Greenbush, a little town just southeast of Albany, where there was a lot of “gold and valuables.” This interested Evans. He loved stealing gold and jewelry; both were easy to pawn and hard to trace.
A few days afterward, Evans confided in Damien Cuomo, a known thief in the neighborhood, someone with whom he had just met, and asked him if the flea market in East Greenbush was worth the effort.
Cuomo, Evans said later, agreed it was a good location to burgle. It was set back from the road and no one was ever around at night.
With that, Evans went to Falco and asked him if he wanted to do the job. “Go check it out first,” Falco suggested. “See if they have anything worth our time.”
East Greenbush, New York, a mostly white, middle-class suburb of Albany, presented Evans and Falco with a plethora of potential targets. Most notably, the large flea market on Route 9 that Damien Cuomo had sanctioned. Flea markets were a common faction of Albany County’s culture and economics. With large strip malls spread about East Greenbush, many antique dealers set up circuslike tents and offered customers a wide variety of items. From simple 99¢ knickknacks to $5,000 and $10,000 paintings and statues.
What interested Evans most as he walked around, casing the place one afternoon, was the setup of the place. He and Falco, he realized, could get in and out quickly, and take with them plenty of gold.
The East Greenbush Plaza Flea Market, as it was called, located at the intersection of Route 20 and Route 9, was always a favored spot for “antiquers.” A one–story building, antique dealers could rent out spaces along an arm of the mall. It was a fairlike atmosphere, vendors and customers bartering and trading, trying to get the best price.
On February 16, a Saturday, Evans and Falco loaded up Falco’s brown Plymouth Satellite with a rope ladder, some common burglar tools, two empty duffel bags and a police scanner.
“You ready, Mikey?” Evans said as they took off.
“Let’s do it.”
At thirty, Jim Horton was a young and eager Bureau investigator working for the East Greenbush division of Troop G. By February 1985, Horton had hit the year mark as a Bureau investigator. He had been married to his high school sweetheart, Mary Pat, for five years. His son, Jim, was four years old, and his daughter, Alison, had just been born on February 3.
Horton was hungry. He needed to make his mark as an investigator and prove himself worthy. For the past three years, he had been literally working double duty. For the most part, he was a “road trooper,” chasing speeders on the interstate. But on an “as needed” basis, he was also part of an elite team of troopers who had been chosen, after a rigorous set of tryouts, for the dive team. They were called out at various times to search lakes, ponds and rivers for dead bodies. It was rewarding, Horton, an admitted thrill seeker, said later, but at the same
time caused him some problems at home.
“My wife was against it because of the danger involved and the fact that our job centered on finding dead bodies.”
As the years passed, and Mary Pat realized how much it meant to her husband to be part of the group, she accepted it. Yet it still didn’t make it any easier.
“There is always some fear in the back of your mind when you are married to a cop,” Mary Pat recalled later. “You think of things like him being left bleeding on the side of the road after a routine traffic stop goes awry…. These images pop into your head. You can’t prevent them. But as an optimistic person, I have always felt we were decent people and that God wouldn’t let anything that horrible or tragic happen to us. Maybe that is naive. But it sure helped me get through each day.”
Since joining the Bureau, Horton hadn’t been involved in too many cases of any merit. He had investigated burglaries and robberies, larcenies, sexual abuse cases and rapes, but nothing that put what his superiors knew were his expert investigative skills to the test.
The East Greenbush Bureau didn’t operate as a twenty-four-hour, around-the-clock police force. Because of the type of work involved, investigators were split into two shifts: 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., 4:00 P.M. to midnight. Since the East Greenbush division didn’t have a cop at the station all the time, they would trade off on being what Horton later referred to as the “call guy.”
The call guy would take a beeper home with him and be on call for the night. If any crimes that needed intervention by the Bureau took place throughout the midnight to 8:00 A.M. hours when no one was around, the call guy would be asked to begin an investigation immediately, while the remainder of the shift showed up in the morning.
Evans and Falco took off at about 11:00 P.M. on February 16—Falco drove, Evans road shotgun—with the thought that the flea market in East Greenbush would be vacated for the night.
When they arrived, Evans suggested they park around in back of the building. It was dark. There were woods on the opposite side of the back of the building. For a person to see them, he or she would have to drive around back and literally look for them.
Evans, always thinking, noticed right away when they got out of the car that there was a portable toilet standing directly next to the building about one hundred yards from where they had parked.
“Let’s hop up on top of that,” he whispered to Falco. “It’ll put us right on the roof!”
“Looks good.”
The building they had climbed up on top of wasn’t the flea market section of the building, so they had to walk along the roof until they found what Evans described later as a “hatch door” leading down into the flea market section of the mall.
Within a few minutes, while Falco acted as lookout, Evans slipped the pins holding the hinges of the door out, lifted the door up and hung a rope ladder down into the building.
Just like that, they were staring at well over $30,000 in merchandise they could take without stirring a field mouse.
For the next fifteen minutes, smashing jewelry cases and breaking open boxes, they loaded up two large duffel bags with all the gold and jewelry they could find. Evans took one side of the building, while Falco took the other.
Back at Falco’s car a bit later, after getting out of the building the same way they had gone in, they piled the duffel bags into the trunk and took off slowly.
As Falco made his way around the back of the building toward Route 9, a local East Greenbush cop making his nightly rounds hit his lights and stopped them along a dirt road leading to the main road from the back of the building.
“Shit,” Evans said. “Just play it cool, Mike. He didn’t see anything.”
“What’s going on?” the cop asked as he approached Falco.
“Not much…,” Falco began to say.
“We just stopped to take a piss,” Evans said, leaning over to look at the cop. He had a police scanner hidden under his left leg. Most everything else was in the trunk. Falco had cut out the side panels near the backseat of the car so he could hide stolen merchandise down inside, and they had loaded some of the more expensive jewelry inside. Smart enough to know better, they had nothing in sight that would indicate they were burglars.
“What are you doing coming out from behind that building?” the cop wanted to know.
“Well,” Evans said, “we didn’t want to piss here…out in the open.”
By this time, Evans had his hand on the door handle. “I was ready to split at that moment,” he said later. But just as he was going to make a break for it, the cop said, “Okay, but just get the hell out of here. Don’t come back here again. Piss somewhere else.”
After writing down their names and addresses, the cop got back into his cruiser and took off.
CHAPTER 46
The owner of the East Greenbush Plaza Flea Market called the state police as soon as she opened the doors the next morning and realized it had been burglarized.
The trooper who showed up to take her statement figured out immediately that whoever was responsible had gained entry from the ceiling—the hatch door on the roof had been left pried open.
After surveying the point of entry, the trooper took a walk out back and noticed two sets of footprints in the dirt leading to a set of tire tracks.
Initially this ruled out drug addicts and amateurs. It was clear the job had been done by thieves who, at the least, knew something about burglary. Thus far, though, all the state police had were a few smudged footprints and a list of about one hundred missing items valued at approximately $15,000.
Not exactly a lot to go on.
A few days later, on Wednesday, February 20, the East Greenbush police officer who had stopped Evans and Falco back on the night of the burglary notified the state police what had happened and told the Bureau investigator working the case that he had written down Evans’s and Falco’s names and addresses.
Just like that, the Bureau had two suspects.
Bill Morris, a Bureau investigator with more than a decade on the job, kept a desk directly next to Jim Horton’s at the Bureau’s East Greenbush barracks. It was Morris who had been given the flea market case first. So on that Wednesday afternoon, after the East Greenbush police officer had come forward with information about stopping Evans and Falco, a Teletype went out explaining that the Bureau was looking to question Evans and Falco about their possible involvement in the burglary.
Now they were wanted men.
Approximately one week after Falco and Evans burglarized the East Greenbush flea market—Evans wasn’t sure of the exact date later when he explained the event—Tim Rysedorph told him that while Evans was in jail, Falco had “ripped him off” by taking some “jewelry they had hidden underneath the floorboards” in their apartment on Adams Street.
This infuriated Evans. There was nothing worse, he had always said, than one of his “partners”—and they were always referred to as partners, never friends—stealing from him.
When he confronted Falco about it later, Falco insisted they had lost the jewelry during the heist. “Where is it?” Evans asked. “Somebody said they saw you take it!”
Faced with that, according to Evans, Falco changed his story and said the jewelry had been stolen, but not by him. Evans then dropped the subject and walked away without saying another word.
“The old cliché,” Jim Horton said later, “is true: ‘Thick as thieves.’ But also thieves among thieves. There is no honor among thieves. They steal from one another as well as stealing from anyone else.”
As Evans stewed over the next few days about what Tim had told him, he became increasingly worried that Falco would give him up for the East Greenbush job if the cops questioned him. He knew that when people felt backed into a corner, they did things to protect themselves. Evans was sure Falco would “roll over” after he had accused him of stealing from him.
That fear of going back to prison for twenty-five years to life was driving Evans’s every move now. It was all he
thought about.
The next time he saw Falco, he confronted him about it again. They were loading clothes into the trunk of Tim’s car, which was parked in back of the apartment they shared.
At first, Evans offered Falco a chance to admit he had in fact stolen the jewelry from him. But Falco, Evans later said, wouldn’t go for it.
Tim was upstairs in the apartment. He had no idea what was going on.
After a few minutes of what Evans later described as typical yelling and screaming and threatening each other, the argument turned into finger-pointing and pushing.
“Calm the fuck down,” Falco said. “We’ll figure it out. Let it go. It’s only a fucking piece of jewelry.”
But Evans couldn’t. It wasn’t about the jewelry; it was about honor. He was full of rage. Someone had ripped him off—a partner, no less—and that person had to pay. Like he had written to his sister while doing his last bid in prison, it was payback time.
“Fuck you…,” Evans shouted as Falco was lifting a box of clothes, getting ready to put it into Tim’s car.
With Falco standing there, staring at him, Evans began breathing heavily, making loud grunting noises. He rarely carried a gun with him at any time. But tonight was different. He knew he’d need it. So as Falco turned and bent down to place the box of clothes into Tim’s trunk, Evans reached into his pants and took out a .22-caliber pistol that he’d already armed with a homemade silencer made from door screen and duct tape.
You son of a bitch! Evans raged.
Then, without warning, he placed the barrel of the gun to the back of Falco’s head as he leaned down into the trunk.
Pop.
It was over in a flash: one round fired into the back of Falco’s head at point blank range, by a man who acted with heartlessness, as if he had killed people professionally his entire life.
Every Move You Make Page 21