After killing Falco, Evans pushed his body into the trunk and ran upstairs to get Rysedorph.
In the apartment a minute later, out of breath, Evans said, “Come with me. I need your car.”
After grabbing a sleeping bag from his room, Evans bolted back downstairs, Rysedorph right behind him.
Looking to see if anyone was around, Evans opened the trunk and pointed to Falco’s body.
“What the fuck?” Tim screamed, looking away.
“You shut your mouth,” Evans said, waving his gun in the air. “Or you’re fucking next.”
Evans then grabbed the sleeping bag and ordered Tim to help him wrap Falco’s body in it.
When they were finished, Evans said, “I’m taking your car.”
Evans later claimed he had planned the murder days ahead of time. He knew he was going to kill Michael Falco that night, he said, and he knew he was going to take Tim’s car to dispose of the body. It was never a spur-of-the-moment crime. He had planned it the moment after Tim had told him Falco had ripped him off.
But Rysedorph’s entire story was a lie.
Some time later, Evans ran into a woman he, Tim and Falco knew fairly well. While they were talking, Evans noticed she was wearing the infamous missing piece of jewelry he had stolen during the job with Falco.
“Nice necklace,” Evans said in a patronizing tone.
The woman looked down at it, then lifted it up off her chest and stared at it. “Yeah…it’s beautiful,” she said. “Tim gave it to me.”
Evans paused for a moment. “You mean Timmy Rysedorph?”
“Yes!” the woman said, smiling.
Evans didn’t say anything. Instead, he walked away mumbling to himself. That lying motherfucker.
For two months, Bureau investigator Bill Morris had searched the entire Albany region for any sign of Evans or Falco. Every lead Morris followed turned up nothing. He would get what appeared to be a break and it would turn cold. He would hear from a source that Evans had been seen around town, but Morris always seemed to be one step behind him. Finally, word on the street was that Falco and Evans had split up and taken off: Evans to Colorado; Falco to California.
CHAPTER 47
Evans left Troy immediately after wrapping Michael Falco’s body in a sleeping bag and placing it, he later claimed, with the help of Tim Rysedorph, in the trunk of Tim’s car. At that point, as Rysedorph and Evans loaded Falco’s body into the trunk, Tim wasn’t going to argue with Evans about anything. In fact, when Evans told Rysedorph he was taking his car to dump Falco’s body, Tim said, “Hey, man, whatever the fuck you want.”
From there, Evans took off to the one place where he thought he was safe from the world: Lake Worth, Florida, where his half sister, Robbie, lived.
The one aspect of the trip that interested Jim Horton later when Evans sat down and recounted the entire ordeal was how Evans hid out while transporting the body. Along the way, Evans would stop at a rest stop every ten hours or so, park Tim’s car near the woods and camp out about two hundred yards away from the car in the deep brush.
“Why would you do that?” Horton wanted to know.
“Just in case,” Evans said, “the cops were watching me. If they had ever searched the car while I was sleeping in the woods, they would have nailed Timmy Rysedorph”—Evans began laughing at this point—“for the murder. That’s why I took his car to begin with.”
As to why he would bury the body only miles from Robbie’s house, Evans said he knew the area. Florida seemed like the logical next place to go. He could bury Falco and then go visit Robbie, his nephew and her new husband.
Evans lasted about six weeks in Florida and decided to drive back to Troy to face his demons. No more running. No more hiding. If the cops had anything on him, he surmised, they would have shaken down Rysedorph and eventually found him.
While in prison, Evans had learned that the best marks to rob were drug dealers. They always carried a lot of cash and were reluctant about calling the cops if they had been robbed.
Trying to lay off burglaries for a while, Evans hatched a plan when he got back to Troy in April 1985 to rob one of the most notorious drug dealers in town.
If there was one mistake Gary Evans continually made throughout his prolific career as a professional thief, it was thinking that he could get away with almost anything and, while doing it, rub the noses of the cops who were chasing him in the muck he left behind. He constantly put himself in a position to get caught—especially when he knew the cops were already after him.
Just about every investigator who had ever crossed paths with Evans said the same thing about him: “He liked to mess with your head and believed, without a doubt, he was smarter than anyone.”
“And in many ways,” Horton recalled later, “he was—but only up to a point.”
On April 21, 1985, Evans set out for the night with his latest plan to score a large amount of cash. He had managed to convince a local drug dealer he had stolen some marijuana from another drug dealer. He said he wanted to turn it over as soon as possible. The drug dealer, after listening to Evans, said he would pay him $12,000 for it, and they set up a meet that same night at a local commuter parking lot by the Hudson River in downtown Troy.
It was about 10:30 P.M. when Evans showed up in his Saab. The other guy, along with a friend, showed up minutes later. After the guy showed Evans the $12,000, counting it in front of him, Evans took the cash and said, “We have to do this fast. It’s in my trunk.”
While the two men got out of their car and walked over to Evans’s Saab, Evans took off down a nearby alley.
Both men, as they realized what was happening, started chasing him—one of them, according to Evans, had even fired several shots at him as he ran away.
If there was anyone in Troy who knew the neighborhood, its back alleyways and hiding places, it was Evans. As a young boy, to hide from his abusive father, he would take off and hop from rooftop to rooftop, sometimes even camping out on the roofs of abandoned buildings.
After he ran through what he later said were “gangways and backyards,” he found himself back at the same commuter lot where he had started. He had lost both drug dealers during his getaway and was now staring at the drug dealer’s “brand-new car,” which, he said later, he “hopped in…and got away.”
The drug dealer and his partner then walked to the Troy Police Department and reported that they had picked up “a guy named Gary Evans” hitchhiking and, as they were driving around town, he carjacked them and robbed $12,000 in cash.
The Troy PD immediately sent out an all points bulletin with a description of Evans, his arrest record and a description of the car he had “stolen at gunpoint.”
Meanwhile, Evans had driven from Troy to Cohoes, a little mill town just outside of Latham.
According to police, as Evans pulled into town, he ran a red light.
A Cohoes police officer, just bouncing around town patrolling the same neighborhood, spied Evans as he ran the light, popped his lights on and began to pull him over.
Evans panicked. Thinking he was being stopped for the robbery, he decided to try to outrun the cop. As he was driving speedily through town, he started throwing things out the window: his fake identification, the gun and anything else he thought might be used against him. The only thing he didn’t toss, however, was the cash.
After being cornered near the edge of town by several Cohoes police officers, Evans stopped his car and gave himself up without a fight. As one of the police officers was handcuffing him, reading him his Miranda rights, another cop told several of the other officers that Evans had been throwing various items out his window as he was being chased. A few cops soon retraced the route and ended up finding the gun and his fake identification.
With Evans locked up in a three-by-six steel cell in the basement of the Cohoes Police Department (CPD), awaiting arraignment on several charges, including resisting arrest, possession of a weapon and first-degree armed robbery (two felonies), h
is name turned up on a state police register as “wanted in questioning for a burglary in East Greenbush in February 1985.”
Cohoes Police, not having any choice in the matter, then put in a call to the Bureau, alerting them that they had Evans in custody.
At about 2:00 A.M., on April 22, Horton received a call at home from the state police dispatcher. “Cohoes PD has a guy named Gary Evans in custody,” she said. “He’s wanted for one of your burglaries.”
Horton was the call guy that night, responsible for answering any calls that came in during off-shift hours. Evans was, of course, Bureau investigator Bill Morris’s man. But since Morris had already gone home for the night and Horton was on call, it was his responsibility to head over to Cohoes to speak with Evans.
Evans had developed a rather unique relationship by this point with Bureau investigator Doug Wingate. They had seen each other on numerous occasions, not always in connection with crime. Evans would even stop by Wingate’s house when he was in the neighborhood just to say hello. He would stop by Troop G in Loudonville, whether he had information or not, just to, Wingate said later, “shoot the shit” and talk about life.
So when Evans found himself locked up in Cohoes, he knew his only chance of leniency from the DA’s office was to begin talking to the Bureau.
At this point, Horton had never met Evans. He’d heard about him around the office and had, like a lot of cops, developed an impression of him, but he had never actually taken part in anything the Bureau was doing with Evans.
Cohoes was about three miles from Horton’s home in Latham. It was late. Horton had been called out at all hours of the night in the past for various reasons, so it was no surprise. Nonetheless, a call in the middle of the night from a local police department regarding a burglary was, he said, “a pain in the ass.”
As he drove, Horton mulled over what he had heard about Evans. He had convinced himself that he was going to interview some sort of cultish icon of a criminal who had a reputation as a notorious thief of antiques. Evans was, if nothing else, infamous around the Capital Region. He was viewed as a hardened, seasoned ex-con other criminals feared. This all weighed on Horton as he contemplated what he would say to Evans and, better yet, how Evans might react when he arrived.
The CPD holding cell, which Horton had never seen before, was dank and dark, and smelled of bodily fluids and mold. The paint on the walls of the cells was chipping off in sheets. The beds were nothing more than a thick, mattress-less sheath of steel with a hard pillow no thicker than a pack of cigarettes. The toilet, set in the corner of the cell, visible by anyone from anywhere, was stainless steel, even the seat.
Cohoes, nicknamed the “Collar City” because it was, at one time, the top manufacturer of shirt collars in the region, had run itself down throughout the years. The police department was a brick-and-mortar building in the center of town that included the city’s only court. Driving into town, Horton could have easily looked around and thought, Mayberry, R.F.D. Smalltown, USA: a general store, post office and diner. Not much else.
In Horton’s opinion, the state police, especially the Bureau, were pretty well-respected throughout the state by local police departments. Members of the Bureau usually got the “royal treatment” when they showed up at a local PD to interview a suspect, he said. Even being new to the job, having only logged about six months by this point with the Bureau, Horton knew that local cops looked up to Bureau investigators. Evans would even say later that he would “never fuck with members of the state police or the BCI—you guys don’t mess around.”
“That’s not the case,” Horton said later. “But if people think that, what the hell. We’re no better than anybody else. But local police and criminals see us as the ‘big shots,’ so to speak.”
The anticipation Horton felt as he drove into town seemed to build as he parked his cruiser downtown and walked into the CPD.
“Here was the ‘infamous’ Gary Evans,” Horton recalled. “He had escaped from jail. He was a notorious burglar. He was this and that…. As a cop, you get a picture in your mind of this monster figure.”
More than that, though, this was one of the first times Horton had been called out as a Bureau investigator to interview a suspect in the middle of the night.
“I was thinking, ‘Should I call Bill Morris?’ It was kind of his case. ‘What am I going to say to him (Evans)?’ I was green. I just didn’t know what to expect.”
When Horton walked into Evans’s cell, he was shocked to see this “small” man with a beard and thick glasses staring back at him. Horton was, then, at thirty, in perfect physical shape, having just come from the diving team after spending years as a trooper. He was young. Strong. Much taller than Evans.
That first meeting between the two men was rather cordial, Horton explained later. There was no strong-arming or pushy talk on Horton’s part; it was more of a “how can I help you?” meeting.
If Horton had one skill as a cop that not many other cops could match up against, it was his ability to talk to people rationally, without being an overbearing authority figure. He never talked above anyone, nor did he ever make a suspect feel like he or she was below him.
“I’m Investigator Jim Horton from the Bureau,” Horton said nonchalantly as he walked into Evans’s cell and stuck out his hand.
“Glad to meet you,” Evans said, extending his hand.
It was the beginning of a relationship that would last almost thirteen years.
CHAPTER 48
The uniform cops hanging around the CPD holding cell area while Horton was inside Evans’s cell were beside themselves, Horton said later, with what he believed was “envy and fascination” as he began talking to Evans about his role in the East Greenbush burglary. Evans’s reputation had seeped down into local police departments all over the Capital District. He was, to many cops, “the catch.” The Cohoes PD had scored a home run in nabbing him, even if it was by Evans’s own doing.
So as Horton and Evans talked, the local cops paced outside Evans’s cell, making snide remarks and staring at them as if they were zoo animals on display.
Horton became increasingly uncomfortable as he and Evans talked. Immediately he felt there was some sort of connection between him and Evans; perhaps a sense of comradeship, as if they had known each other for years.
“Listen,” Horton whispered at one point, “you’re going to be shipped over to Albany County Jail in the morning after seeing a judge here in Cohoes. Let’s talk there,” he added, looking at the Cohoes cops peering into Evans’s cell, “we’ll have more privacy.”
“Sounds good,” Evans said.
“I’ll see you there tomorrow.”
As Horton left, he glanced over at the table on the opposite side of the holding cell area and saw Evans’s belongings sitting on a table. Stopping for a moment, he took a look at the money Evans had stolen from the drug dealer, which had been spread out on the table in piles of $1,000.
Without making too much of it, Horton then walked slowly by the table and, perhaps out of sheer police instinct, counted the piles.
Twelve, he told himself as he left. Twelve thousand dollars.
At one o’clock in the afternoon on April 22, 1985, Horton, after not sleeping much, kept his promise to Evans and drove to Albany County Jail to sit and talk with him. Before they got started, Horton said later, he wanted to make it clear to Evans that this was going to be a formal interview. He told him he needed to get a written statement regarding anything he knew about the East Greenbush burglary. It wasn’t a courtesy call, or a friendly visit to find out whom he was going to give up to save his own ass; it was an interrogation about a burglary the Bureau suspected Evans had been involved in.
Without balking one bit, Evans agreed to cooperate.
So Horton took out a notepad and began what would turn out to be the first written confession Evans had ever given to police.
Evans, who had blasted his crime partners in letters to his sister over the years for rol
ling over on him, marked Damien Cuomo and Michael Falco right away as Horton began asking questions about East Greenbush. He gave Horton a detailed, step-by-step account of how the job was set up, by whom and how it had been carried out. He acted as if he were enjoying snitching on his colleagues.
Because Falco hadn’t been heard from in months, and every source the Bureau contacted on the street claimed he had taken off out west, Horton posed the question to Evans to see what he knew.
“I think he’s in California,” Evans said without hesitation, “using the name Ian Patrick Phibes.”
“Thanks. We’ll check it out.”
Shortly before the end of the interview, Evans indicated he had one more important statement to put on record.
“What’s that?” Horton asked while packing up his things.
“Me and Mike [Falco] were tipped off about how to enter the flea market from the roof by a guy Mike knows whose father works at the flea market.”
“This was,” Horton said later, “a significant day for Gary Evans and me. He had never given a confession to anyone in law enforcement before. For some reason, he latched onto me that day and began trusting me. I had no idea what this one ‘chance’ meeting would end up becoming in the end. But it was clear to me on that particular day that Gary thought of himself as better than all the criminals he had ever known or given up. In his criminal mind, he justified his crimes by noting that the guys he was giving up were ten times worse than he ever was.”
When it came time for Evans to sign the confession and date it, he looked at Horton and said, “I can’t believe I am signing up for prison.”
While Evans awaited a court date on several charges, which now included criminal possession of a weapon, first-degree armed robbery, grand larceny and burglary of a jewelry store, he began doing what he had always done when he found himself, in his words, “caged up, like an animal”: he wrote to his sister.
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