At various times, Evans displayed all of them.
With parole less than a year away, it seemed—at least from the memories Evans was recalling about Stacy and their childhood romance—that perhaps he had reached a point of no return.
I drew a picture of [Stacy] on a stone bridge…. She lived in the country and we built a bridge over a stream out of old barn wood. She used to sit there playing melodie songs on her guitar and singing for me, and she used to wait there for me when I’d come through the woods to her house, he wrote.
This was, of course, a fantasy. It had a fable, visceral quality to it. The story lacked reality and resolve. He was picturing what the relationship could have been, not what it was. Because as quick as Evans could paint a picture of the perfect romance, he could, in the next sentence, turn vulgar and callous: The only thing I hate myself for is not putting all my efforts into finding her right away. Because she’s the most important thing in my life…. But there’s only one way to find her and that requires hurting 1 or 2 people and I was trying to avoid that. But now I see there is no other way.
He added, before ending the letter: As soon as I get released…I’m beginning. I know just what to do. And when I finally arrive at wherever she is, what a meeting that’ll be. It’s scary thinking about it.
In his next few letters, he didn’t let up about Stacy. In one sentence, he would say he had abandoned the idea of finding her, and in the next talk about how he was going to end up back in jail as he began trying to track her down by “making” certain relatives of hers talk: I fantasize talking to her. Seeing her smile at me…. And I know I am going to shoot every asshole that puts an obstacle in front of me. There’s an asshole in Troy that married her sister. They split to California. If he doesn’t know where [she] is, I’ll make him tell me where she is…. They were afraid of me when I was comparably harmless, wait till they meet me now. I’m through with these fools blocking my wishes, and for no reason except for they want to.
Evans could be melodramatic in his writing, especially when he allowed the more psychotic side of his character to take precedence over what amounted to superficial charm. I’m going to be all nice and humble and polite, he wrote, talking about when he showed up on the front doorstep of Stacy’s brother-in-law’s house to ask him where she was, and they’re going to give me that polite ‘no’ shit….
Then, as he began to talk about what he was going to do to Stacy’s brother-in-law, he related the situation to Hollywood. He said if her family gave him any trouble, they would be starring in a private Halloween, Friday the 13th Part 5, Nightmare on Elm Street movie and I’m the fucking producer and director.
Here was a maniac coming apart at the seams, centering his obsession on a group of people he hadn’t seen in well over fifteen years. These were harmless people going about their normal lives. Yet, unknowingly, they were the focus of a madman’s torment, lust and uncontrollable urge to blame anyone and everyone but himself for the life he had created.
As time moved forward, he became even more paranoid over the things in his life he had little control over. He believed, for example, “someone on the street was screwing” with his mail. He thought people he hadn’t seen or heard from in years were out to get him. He thought the prison guards were zeroing in on him and watching him because of what he “knew” about other inmates. And he wholeheartedly believed there was some sort of conspiracy between Stacy and her family to keep him locked up and away from her.
By Christmas, Evans was thinking seriously about his release date, which he had been told was now a little over a year away. Still, he continued planning what he was going to do when he got out. Thus, as the Christmas season approached, he started once again writing to Horton, all for the purpose of setting up a relationship with him he would need to cultivate and exploit once he was released. Indeed, a relationship that turned both bizarre and violent as the years passed.
CHAPTER 53
Entering the Capital District of New York from Massachusetts on Interstate 90, at times an eight-lane roadway that cuts a path through the Berkshire Mountains, one gets a sense of how vast, immense and spread out the land truly is. Homes are out there, nestled among the millions of pine, oak and maple trees, but they are hard to spot from the road, only their snowcapped roofs and smoking woodstove pipes visible from ground level. Along the edge of the interstate, deer graze in herds like cattle on the wild grass and berries, seemingly undisturbed by the noise pollution the interstate produces. Christmas season in the region, like much of the Northeast, is straight out of a Hallmark greeting card: lustrous, charming, elegant.
As Horton took in the 1986 holiday season surrounded by family and friends, he began thinking about how his career had progressed since he joined the state police back in 1978. Inside just eight years, he had accomplished more with the state police than most do during their entire careers. He had gone to interrogation school and ended up getting an offer for a job to teach; he had been one of the NYSP’s top divers; and now he was beginning a career in the Bureau that had already produced positive results as far as developing sources and arresting, as Horton liked to put it, plenty of “the bad guys.”
Shortly after Horton and Mary Pat sent family members packing after the holiday season, he received a letter from Evans. Looking at it as he walked from his mailbox down the long driveway to the spacious contemporary home he had built himself on family-owned land, he developed a feeling the letter was perhaps only the beginning of a relationship that might surpass any other cop-source relationship he’d had.
Well, guy, Evans opened the letter, I was…afraid mostly that the DA…had cooked up some bogus shit on me…. I really don’t know what to do when my release date comes, I can be set up so easily…. Even my release date I’m getting fucked out of: it’s supposed to be next December, but now they are saying it’s March of ‘88, which is bullshit.
Horton could only shake his head while reading the opening line.
“Here you have a repeat offender upset over the fact that he is going to do extra months on two years, when he should have been serving four years to begin with,” Horton said later.
In some ways, Horton wanted to scold Evans and tell him to wake up and do the time without bitching about it and blaming everyone else for the misfortune he had brought on with his own behavior. Yet, he knew Evans was—and would become—an asset to the Bureau. The situation had to be handled delicately. Unprecedented was the fact that here was a career criminal, which most cops in the Capital District wanted to put on the trophy stand, writing to him, giving up drug dealers and thieves. Horton couldn’t alienate Evans. He had to play the game, and make him believe he was on his side.
Since the last time they had spoken, Evans had been transferred to Clinton Correctional. He said he had been transferred because there were still a few Hells Angels after him. His counselor had put him under protective custody.
Someone was screaming at me out of the window…. Turns out it was [Michael Falco’s brother], Evans wrote. He had told scores of inmates that Evans was a snitch.
Then Evans applauded Horton for his efforts in keeping “quiet” about any leaks from developing about our talks. I was worried about that, he wrote.
Next he talked about allowing the Bureau to use him as an undercover to nail the same drug dealer in Troy he had himself robbed—the crime, in fact, for which he was doing his latest bid: I wouldn’t mind playing bait to the scumbag if I knew the Calvary [the Bureau] would prevent me from getting my head shot off. It’s something to think about, anyway, and I don’t have anything better to do.
Throughout the remainder of the three-page letter, Evans drew maps and pointed Horton to locations where he could find jewelry he knew other burglars in Troy had stolen and hidden. He also listed the names and places where Horton could find fenced jewelry: Anything I can ever do to aid in sweeping these people out—let me know.
There was Evans again trying to place himself morally above the same group of indi
viduals for whom he could have been considered their ringleader.
At the end of the letter, he focused his attention on the person he knew Horton would be asking questions about once they got a chance to sit down again and talk—Michael Falco: P.S.: I had [Tori Ellis’s] address but some of my papers got lost in this shuffle. If you have it and want to send it, I’ll write and ask for any info on Mike.
It was Evans’s way, he later admitted, of baiting the hook.
Evans viewed the dawn of the New Year, 1987, and all those years before it where he had spent his days and nights locked up, as “stolen from him.” It was the same old story. He wasn’t paying a debt to society or accepting responsibility; he was complaining that the system had been set up to “screw” criminals like him. He couldn’t decipher the difference between those who didn’t commit crimes and weren’t locked up and those—like himself—who were habitual offenders and locked up all the time. Any time taken off his sentences for good behavior or overcrowding wasn’t enough; he thought he deserved more, especially since he was now sending Horton a wealth of information regarding some of Troy’s most notorious offenders.
“Gary Evans was greedy,” Horton recalled later. “Even though he got caught and arrested many times throughout the years, those arrests pale in comparison to the number of crimes he committed. He worked his job—which was burglary and murder—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Whether casing a place to hit, committing the crime, fencing the merchandise or simply looking over his shoulder and planning ahead. There were even times when he was well off financially but would never turn down an opportunity to steal.”
Horton was an expert at profiling criminals. Perhaps as obsessively as Evans dedicated his life to crime, Horton spent his time studying people like Gary Evans, their movements, behaviors and minds.
“Gary was a classic antisocial personality. He took no responsibility for his actions. Our rules weren’t his rules.”
He was selfish, Horton added, and cared only about his own well-being. He had no close friends. He was lazy and flat out refused, under any circumstances, to take orders from anyone.
When it came to women, be it Stacy, Lisa Morris or even his own mother, he showed no respect and, some later claimed, despised their very existence.
“He hated my mother,” Robbie Evans recalled later, “for being such a weak person throughout her life and ours. He hated her lover, too. Gary thought all women were, in his own words, ‘snakes,’ and could not be trusted.”
In a certain way, Evans’s assumptions regarding the females in his life perhaps held some truth—because, in the end, it would be the one woman he put the most trust in who would ultimately turn on him.
CHAPTER 54
Throughout the next year, Evans obsessed over the same things he had focused on whenever he was in prison: Stacy, revenge against anyone he thought had ever crossed him and the status of his physique. He was lifting weights harder now than he ever had, getting results like never before. The more growth he saw, the more he wanted.
A recurring theme in his letters over the past ten years became clearer as he grew older: narcissism. The world revolved around him. Whether he was talking about his body or his crimes or why he was in prison, the center of the universe was Gary Charles Evans.
I’m getting so big! he wrote in late 1987. Biggest I’ve ever been. Hard as a rock!! He carried on about his arms, legs, biceps and triceps. Lots of people want to work out with me but I work alone. Everybody asks me for advice. I see guys copying exercises I made up!! I feel like a superstar.
The man was in prison—one of the toughest prisons in the country, no doubt—yet he felt “like a superstar” because other inmates were paying him a bit of attention by copying his exercises.
That being said, however, he felt life had been hard on him: I deserve such nice things.
He believed Stacy had tried to contact a former friend of his years ago, but that friend was part of a larger conspiracy to keep her from him.
I want to drink his blood, the piece of shit, he wrote. He is VERY high on the list. Number 4, in fact, but maybe number 1, depending on the circumstances.
Evans’s sexuality had never been disputed among certain friends, relatives, the females he dated or even Horton, who had been trained to dissect criminals’ deepest secrets. Evans, though, would drop faint hints every now and then of what could be considered, at the least, a sexual confusion on his part. For example, he drew a picture of himself as a female, yet he wrote, But love you [Stacy] underneath where he placed the name Gary next to the drawing. It was on a scrap of paper he meticulously used to count the number of days he had left behind bars using straight lines and X’s, as if he were on a deserted island.
It was apparent, too, that he was more fixated on celebrities than he had ever been. But instead of admiring them from afar, he felt a desire to get closer to them, and often kicked himself for not acting on his impulses: I saw Joan Jett a couple of weeks before I got busted [the last time]. I wish I could’ve kidnapped her. There’s a girl back home who looks like her.
Robbie had offered to help him find work if he moved to Florida after his release, and for a fleeting moment, he seemed to float the idea: Hey, the nursery thing you mentioned sounds good. If it’s going to happen, let me know. The guy may just be talking. I’ve seen so much bullshit, I don’t deserve anymore.
As the notion of being around other people began to fester in him, even as a truck loader at a Lake Worth nursery, he couldn’t help but put the focus back on himself. Within the next paragraph of the same letter, some fifty words long, he had written the pronoun “I” ten times. It was all about Gary Evans.
He often compared Stacy to the other females he’d dated, and none measured up: Even someone as beautiful as [Deirdre, a former girlfriend] couldn’t get [Stacy] out of my mind. I want her too much! And knowing she’s somewhere is ruining my every day and night….
By October, with only months to go on his sentence, the focal point was back on Horton, whom he had recently described to a friend as his “puppet.” He was trying desperately to convince Horton to believe that he was going to be a huge asset to the state police when he got out. He talked about death threats made against him by several people in Troy. He named five people who were involved in the fencing of stolen goods and the drug trade in Troy. He even mentioned Michael Falco’s name in terms of his being part of the same group.
But the most telling part of the letter to Horton came in the form of the punishment those people he was giving up deserved: I’m in favor of the death penalty. I’ve seen some truly evil people who should be executed. I can’t understand New York not having it.
The most famous person he had met while behind bars, he said, was David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz: I lifted weights with [him] for about a year. I never used to go near him because that’s fucked up, killing innocent girls….
But as quick as Evans tagged the Son of Sam a psychopath, he changed his opinion and described him as “a likable guy, really”: He never talked about the killings. I used to kid him that he should’ve shot niggers or rapists and he’d laugh. I had a brief look at that new book about him, The Ultimate Evil, by Maury Terry, and the guy was claiming Berkowitz was with a satanic cult and he had proof. I asked Dave and he laughed it off.
By the end of the letter, he promised Horton he would send copies of the letters between him and the Son of Sam. Horton eagerly waited, of course, but never received them.
Instead, Evans sent them to a childhood friend.
His relationship with the Son of Sam was far more personal—not to mention bizarre—than he had explained to Horton. Throughout their friendship, Evans and the Son of Sam wrote dozens of letters. The Son of Sam would get sent to solitary confinement and he and Evans would swap letters via another inmate as if they were e-mailing each other.
The language was quite cryptic. At times, they wrote in medieval dialect: Take care, White Knight of the Dunes, the Son of Sam would
sign off, or Dear, The Barbarian…Sir Gary or Sir Lancelot Evans. It was as if they had their own language. For the most part, the Son of Sam thanked Evans for sending him magazines, books, tapes—he favored Bob Dylan over Loggins and Messina, he said—and food. Other times, they discussed weight lifting and general life behind bars.
As one might imagine, the Son of Sam was a target in prison. Because of his celebrity status, other inmates gunned for him, and he often described to Evans the notes and threats he would routinely receive.
Interestingly enough, in one letter, the Son of Sam wrote that he had run into “two Puerto Rican friends” of Evans’s and was sending them over…a gift from Big Dave.
This wouldn’t mean much on the surface, but taken into context with what was later learned about Evans’s alleged attraction to transsexuals, one might wonder if the Son of Sam was acting as some sort of pimp, repaying debts of food and books with sexual favors?
One of Evans’s favorite books, he explained, was Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris, the prequel to Harris’s block-buster best-seller The Silence of the Lambs. Evans insisted the Son of Sam read the book. He did, he said, but didn’t much care for it. It was “fair.” Ironically, he said he didn’t “like psycho stories.”
The AIDS crisis had just been made public that year. The Son of Sam said it was “a lot of shit” and “media hype.” Evans, though, was worried about it affecting the world, while the Son of Sam said it would stay confined to the “inner cities…prostitutes and junkies….” He then went on to list which states had reported cases, along with how many in each state.
The Son of Sam continually fed Evans’s ego, complimenting him on his muscles and addressing him in a way he must have known would cater to Evans’s grandiose thoughts of himself. One time, he told Evans there were “lots of Little Gary’s,” yet “only one Big Gary.” He also called him the “Great Tricep King.”
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