“When they saw him doing that,” Horton recalled, “we realized he was getting closer to doing what he did best: rape and murder. We knew he had killed before. So we grabbed him.”
Horton ended up interrogating Williams for seventeen hours that night. Taking three separate statements from him, Williams confessed to killing the Filipino girl, Rose Tullao, during his final statement.
“The second statement he gave me,” Horton said later, “showed more culpability on his part. An hour later, during his final statement, he admitted everything. He said he burglarized Tullao’s place. He piled some things up under a window to get in. Then he chased her throughout the home, tackled her, punched her, knocked her unconscious, knocking out several of her front teeth, put a pillowcase over her head and strangled her with a phone cord.” When Williams was finished killing Tullao, he told Horton, he had sex with her corpse.
Admitting to knocking her teeth out was important, Horton added, because only Tullao’s killer and the police could have known that detail.
After a lengthy trial, Williams was found innocent of murdering Tullao, but was convicted of stealing the rocking chair. When the jury read the “not guilty” verdict, Williams turned around and looked over at Horton, who was sitting in the back of the courtroom. Fuck you, Williams mouthed with a smile. Fuck you…Horton.
I beat you.
The smart judge, perhaps believing Williams was guilty, sentenced him under a persistent felon guideline to twenty-five to life for stealing the rocking chair, noting that Williams had “confessed to Horton that he had killed Tullao.”
“It kept him in prison until we could build our other murder cases against him,” Horton recalled. “Williams and his team of defense attorneys beat us fair and square. The jury was concerned about the seventeen-hour interrogation; Williams’s lawyers argued that I had ‘coerced’ a confession out of him by depriving him out of food and water and a bathroom. It wasn’t true. But the jury believed it was. In retrospect, seventeen hours was a long time to interrogate someone. But I was ordered to do that. The DA was there. The entire interrogation was bugged. Two-way mirrors.”
In the criminal justice system, Horton added, it is, at times, “a game of wins and losses. On that day, the bad guy won.”
Leaving the courtroom, Horton was conflicted, confused, angry and depressed. He questioned the criminal justice system, how it worked, how it protected criminals and his role in it all.
“I was so disappointed after that, I felt like quitting the job,” Horton remembered later. “I did everything by the book…everything I was told to do. The system let me down. I pushed the envelope a little, I suppose, with that seventeen-hour interrogation. But this guy was bad.”
Horton knew that not only had Williams murdered the forty-year-old Tullao, but he’d also murdered and possibly raped Karolyn Lonczak, who was only eighteen. To let a murderer like that go free, it was all too much for Horton to stomach.
A competitive person by nature, having competed as a downhill skier for years with a wall filled with medals and ribbons, Horton had never really been on the losing side of anything so important. It was his first major homicide case with the Bureau—and he lost.
To make matters worse, the rocking chair theft conviction was eventually overturned. Then Williams was released from jail for “time served,” but ordered by the court to wear an ankle bracelet and serve out the remainder of his sentence at home.
“I was devastated and embarrassed by the entire incident,” Horton said. “I couldn’t believe the jury let this guy get away with it. Some members of the jury were crying while walking out of the building. I hoped they were crying because they had made a huge mistake.”
What bothered Horton most was that Williams targeted truly innocent, defenseless females. They were powerless against him. He could strike now at any time. The judge had even called him a “walking time bomb.”
Horton didn’t know it in 1990, but Gary Evans would be one of the key factors involved in bringing down Jeffrey Williams—and the fact that Williams had chosen young women as his victims was the bait Horton would use to attract Evans.
CHAPTER 63
Damien Cuomo lived with his girlfriend, Lisa Morris, and their three-year-old daughter, Christina, on Industrial Park Road in South Troy. Taking a left off Spring Avenue, Industrial Park Road runs straight up a brief incline and turns into Colleen Road. On the left is the large apartment complex where Damien and Lisa lived.
On December 26, 1989, Evans called Cuomo and told him he wanted to meet up with him to discuss “some things.” Damien had just spent a pleasant Christmas with his family.
“What’s up?” Cuomo wanted to know. “It’s the holidays, Gar.”
“I need to talk to you, Damien. It’s important.”
Evans had been upset for weeks over what he believed to be thousands of dollars Damien had kept from him after fencing the merchandise they had burgled from Douglas Berry’s Watertown shop. He couldn’t let it go. One day of anger turned into two, and before he knew it, his feelings of aggression became uncontrollable.
I have to act on them.
Lisa had, she recalled later, drunk heavily the night before, so she slept late on the morning Evans showed up at the apartment to pick Damien up. Christina was in the living room watching cartoons when Evans knocked on the door.
“Tell Mommy when she gets up,” Damien told his daughter, lifting her up and kissing her on the cheek, “that Daddy will be back in a half hour.”
Evans was waiting by the door, listening, watching.
“Where are we going?” Cuomo asked when they sat down in Evans’s car.
“Just up the road here…we need to talk privately.”
Evans took a left out of the parking lot and headed straight up Industrial Park Road toward a dirt parking area by the woods. The drive took all of about sixty seconds.
As soon as Evans pulled out of view near the edge of the woods, in one single motion he shut the car off, took out his .22-caliber pistol and pointed it at Damien’s temple. “You thieving…fuck! You stole from me? And you thought you…you could get away with it?” Whenever Evans got excited, friends later recalled, he spoke with a noticeable lisp and stumbled over his words.
Cuomo didn’t say anything, Evans explained later. He just sat there, “scared like the weasel fuck he was.”
Evans then got out of the car, keeping the pistol pointed at Cuomo the entire time as he walked around the front of the car over to the passenger side, where Damien was sitting. He then reached into his back pocket and took out a pair of handcuffs.
After handcuffing Damien’s hands behind his back, Evans, without saying a word, shot him three times—pop, pop, pop—in the back of the head. Then he took out a white plastic shopping bag and placed it over Damien’s head.
Asked later why he did that, he said, “‘Cause I didn’t want to look at his face after I killed him.”
With Damien Cuomo slumped over in the front seat of his car, Evans went inside the trunk and took out a shower curtain, blanket and some rope.
“I wrapped him in the shower curtain and blanket,” Evans described later, “and dragged him through the woods to the hole I had already dug.”
Once he arrived at the hole, he lifted the wooden make-shift door he had placed over it weeks before, removed the three bags of topsoil and dumped Damien headfirst into the hole. Then he covered him with topsoil, broadcasted some of the remaining soil over the top of the hole, shimmied some of the brush over it and drove back home.
Horton wouldn’t find Damien Cuomo’s body for ten years.
At about eleven o’clock on the morning of December 27, 1989, Evans called Damien’s apartment.
“Hello?” Lisa said in her smoker’s scratchy voice.
“Where’s that fucking weasel boyfriend of yours, Lisa? He’s supposed to take me to the airport.”
“I have no idea….”
“Well, he’s supposed to take me—”
Lisa cut him off. “I can take you, Gar.”
“No. Fuck it. I called a cab. But you tell that little fuck when I catch up with him, he owes me.”
Lisa said she would and hung up.
Whenever Damien left town—which he often did—he would always let Lisa know when he was coming back. There wasn’t a time Lisa could later recall when Damien had left without first giving her a date of his return.
Damien Cuomo was never known as a person to stay in one place for very long. His being gone, at least in the early part of 1990, didn’t exactly stir up any type of worry among his family or friends. But when he failed to contact anyone after a few months, rumor began to circulate that Evans, who had been overheard by several people saying he was going to kill Damien, had made good on his promise.
As for Lisa, she had heard that Damien had begun “ripping off” local drug dealers lately, so she surmised, when Damien never came back and never called, that he was “hiding out.”
“I didn’t know if he robbed a drug dealer or whacked a drug dealer,” Lisa later said. “I thought maybe he did a burglary and the cops knew about it, so he took off.”
At one point, Lisa called Damien’s brother and mentioned that she thought something was wrong. It was unlike Damien to run off without any word whatsoever. She wanted to know if the Cuomo family had heard anything.
Damien’s brother said he knew nothing.
Then Damien’s car turned up.
“People started blaming Gary when Damien’s car showed up abandoned,” Lisa recalled. “But I thought then, as I did for a long time, that [an old neighbor of Damien’s] had something to do with [his disappearance].”
After murdering Damien, Evans headed south to Florida so he could “lay low for a while.” He had been sleeping with Lisa’s neighbor for a few weeks by then, so he brought her along to make it seem as normal as possible, like he wasn’t running from anything.
After two days, Evans said later, “she ended up getting on my nerves, so I left her ass there and took off to my sister’s.”
He wasn’t gone long—because by the middle of January he was back in town, beginning what would end up being a full-time job of working to convince Lisa that Damien was still alive; that he was nothing more than a deadbeat dad who had taken off on his family.
As soon as Evans got back, he called Lisa. “Have you heard anything? What’s going on? Is he back yet? How are you holding up?”
By this point, Lisa was a mess. Crying all the time. Thinking the worst. She was drinking heavier, knocking back vodka by the glassful to deal with what she firmly believed was the loss of her boyfriend, whom she had dreamed of “marrying and having five kids with,” she later said through tears.
On the other end, Evans was plotting and planning his every move where Lisa was concerned, setting up not only an alibi for himself, but for Damien Cuomo, too.
On January 25, Evans went down to the post office in Troy and changed Damien’s address. He didn’t invent some address in another state, but simply filled out a change of address form and put down Damien’s mother’s address in Troy and signed Damien’s name.
With that done, he began working on Lisa.
Showing up at her apartment nearly every day, Evans began telling her that he believed Damien had taken off to North Carolina to live with one of his brothers.
“He left you and Christina,” Evans would say. “He’s not coming back.”
One day, Lisa had overdosed on “some pills and alcohol” and ended up in the hospital. The thought, she said later, of not having Damien around any longer was too much. The pills and alcohol helped her forget.
When she got out of the hospital and returned home, she found a note on the door to her bedroom, which was locked: I’ll be back to talk to you tomorrow…the babysitter.
“It looked like Damien’s handwriting,” Lisa said later. “I believed it was.”
Note in hand, Lisa ran to the phone and called her neighbor. “The little bastard is here. I just found a note,” she said frantically.
“Gary’s here,” her neighbor said, handing him the phone.
“Don’t go in the bedroom,” Gary said. “I’ll come over and check it out.”
Cuomo had installed a special door to his bedroom. It was solid oak, designed to keep people out. He generally kept all of his stolen merchandise in the bedroom.
Lisa knew Damien wasn’t inside the bedroom, she recalled. “But I thought he had come home and was trying to keep me out of the bedroom for some reason.”
So Evans came over and kicked the door open. Inside the room, she and Evans found a suitcase of Damien’s spread out on the bed, clothes hanging out of it, a sweater of Damien’s on the bed beside it. The window in the room was open. There was a balcony and staircase just outside the window leading to the street.
“It looked like Damien had come home and was packing,” Lisa said. “When he heard me come in the apartment, he left abruptly.”
Watching Lisa looking over the suitcase and staring at the window, Evans cracked a devious smile behind her back.
“Jesus,” Evans said, looking at everything, “he was here, wasn’t he, Lisa?”
Lisa started crying.
CHAPTER 64
Weeks prior to what had now been a month since anyone had seen or heard from Damien, January 27, 1990, he had made plans with a few friends to fly out to Nevada for a few days of skiing. The Troy Police Department, however, after a preliminary investigation into his whereabouts, figured out that the tickets they had purchased were never used.
After talking with a former girlfriend of Lisa’s, the police in Troy found out that Damien and Lisa didn’t have the perfect relationship Lisa might have led them to believe. Damien was, the police reported, having “problems with Lisa” and had even talked about leaving her.
When police dragged Lisa in to ask her about it, she said she wouldn’t “sign a statement until she talked with a lawyer.” A friend of Damien’s family had told police she had overheard Lisa talking on the phone one day asking someone “how much it would cost to kill Damien.”
In his report, the Troy cop noted that Lisa had become “very upset” when he approached her with that specific bit of information. The cop claimed he had never told Lisa who had given him the information, but that Evans and Lisa showed up at the woman’s house the following day demanding she never speak to the police again.
I wanted to arrest [Lisa] and Gary [Evans], the cop reported, but [the friend] did not follow up. I tried to make an arrest, but [the friend] refused to prosecute because she is afraid (harassment).
It seems a bit odd in retrospect, but on Super Bowl Sunday, 1990, a little over a month after Damien’s disappearance, Lisa had a Super Bowl party at the South Troy apartment she had shared with Damien. It wasn’t a large gathering of friends and family, but more of an intimate get-together among Lisa’s closest friends, which now included Evans.
By the end of the night, with everyone having gone their separate ways, Evans asked Lisa if he could stay.
“Sure,” she said.
Within an hour, Evans had Lisa in bed, on her back, she later recalled, having sex for “hours on end.”
From that day on, they were an item—at least in Lisa’s alcohol-induced, bereaved state of mind.
Evans had a crop of women he was bedding down at any given time. Each woman later had her own story to tell as far as what type of relationship she’d had with him. Where one woman might act as his friend, allowing him to talk about his childhood and how much he hated his parents, another might act as a mother figure, calming him, babying him, telling him everything was going to be all right. Evans would never, of course, tell his lovers about the murders he was committing. But he would divulge secrets about his life that he had told no one.
One woman Evans had carried on with for well over a decade was Deirdre Fuller, a New Hampshire native Evans had met during one of his many jaunts up north to burglarize, pillage and torment antique shop owner
s.
Deirdre was only sixteen when she met Evans in 1977. He had just gotten out of jail and went up north to do a job when they were introduced through a common friend.
Reared in a middle-class family, Deirdre saw Evans as a “quiet guy” who was, she said years later, “gorgeous and larger than life,” especially in her youthful eyes. She knew Evans had been in trouble and he never lied to her about his time in jail or problems with the law. Young and, perhaps, naive, she wanted to flirt with not always doing the right thing in life. Although her family shunned Evans, in the beginning she saw the relationship as nothing more than a way to rebel against what was expected of her.
Over the years, they developed a relationship that consisted of Evans showing up in her life when he felt like it. Deirdre even reckoned it was a “friendship” more than a relationship in terms of sexual intimacy. “I was less of a lover to him and more of a…Well, he became my family,” Deirdre said later. “He had nobody. I was very lonesome at that age. Although we were from entirely different worlds, we sort of found a common ground.”
Evans would call Deirdre. They would talk for hours. A good listener, she said she became his therapist in many ways, helping him sort through whatever quandary he found himself in at the moment. Other times, they would share the same dreams and goals and talk about the future.
Throughout their relationship, Deirdre had always had a boyfriend, a man whom she went out with, slept with, and considered her mate. Evans didn’t mind, she said. He even encouraged her to meet a good guy—a doctor, lawyer, some sort of professional. “Get married and have kids,” he’d say.
“Gary was an organic guy; he lived for camping and skydiving…. I had no idea the extent of his violent side; I never saw it.”
They liked to listen to classical music, she added, or maybe Elton John. To her, Evans was this “wonderful” person she felt safe and comfortable around. “He wasn’t my boyfriend; we connected on a deeper level than that.”
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