As the friendship grew throughout the years, Evans would make things for Deirdre and give them to her as gifts. Like with most of his women, he showered her with jewelry and gold, but she often pushed it aside, knowing where it had come from.
She couldn’t go out in public with Evans, she recalled, because he was like a “child in a man’s body.” There was one time when they had gone to a local retail store and Evans wanted to buy her something. He was so engrossed with the process of purchasing the gift, that when they got up to the cash register, it was as if no one else were in the store. He made a fool out of himself and Deirdre by pushing his way through an “old couple” who were in front of them in line.
They would go months without speaking or seeing each other. But Evans would always call and ask Deirdre whom she was dating. He was genuinely interested in how she was doing, she claimed. He wanted to be sure she was always taken care of.
As the summer of 1990 began, Evans and Lisa Morris were seeing each other almost daily, having sex as often as they could. Evans had even won Christina’s love by drawing her pictures and spending time coloring and playing with her. Lisa said later that Christina and Evans shared a genuine love for each other that no one could take away. Regardless of the person he was, he treated Christina, Lisa said, “like a queen.”
During pillow talk, Evans would open up and tell Lisa about certain apsects of his life. One of Lisa’s most vivid memories of that time, she recalled later, was a story about Stacy. One night, while they were in bed, Lisa noticed a tattoo on Evans’s left breast. In prison ink, Evans had Stacy’s name written in rather large font just above his nipple. After that day, Lisa added, Evans began to focus his energy on once again locating Stacy.
While doing his last bid in prison, he had pledged to Robbie several times that the day would come when he would set out to find Stacy and, if he had to, would convince her to love him again. It had been two years since he last spoke of Stacy, but he was ready now, he claimed, to fulfill all those promises he’d made of finding her, regardless of who stood in his way.
He had tracked down Stacy’s number, one former friend later said, by breaking into Stacy’s parents’ home in Long Island and rummaging through the family desk. But when he called her, she barely remembered who he was.
“We were kids,” Stacy said after Evans said hello and reintroduced himself. “I have my own family now. Why are you calling me?”
“I’d like to see you again.”
“I enjoyed the time we had together and respect you, Gary, but I can’t see you. I don’t know you.”
She lived, Evans soon found out, in California.
Hanging up, he became despondent and morose. He realized Stacy wanted nothing to do with him. His dream of the two of them riding off into the sunset together was nothing more than a fairy tale.
Days later, he confided in Lisa that he “had to see Stacy. I need to see her. If she gets alone with me, sees me again, maybe she’ll fall in love with me.”
Lisa told him that it wasn’t meant to be. “Leave it alone, Gar. Forget about it.”
A sociopath, by clinical definition, “feels entitled to certain things as ‘their right.’” Stacy was one of those “things” in Evans’s twisted mind. Sociopaths never “recognize the rights of others and see their [own] self-serving behaviors [as] permissible.”
It was obvious Evans was determined to put Stacy back in his life—whether she, or anyone else, agreed with his plan.
CHAPTER 65
Shortly after telling Lisa he was planning on kidnapping Stacy, Evans took off to California to find her. He had made up his mind. Stacy was his. No one could deny him that. He was going to rent a van, wait for her to walk out of her house and snatch her off the street. He had always prided himself in the fact that he would “never hurt a child or a woman,” but this was different, of course. It was about love. He hadn’t seen Stacy for nearly fifteen years, but she was going to love him again—she just didn’t know it yet.
Before he left for California, Evans called Deirdre Fuller and told her a similar story.
“Don’t go,” Deirdre pleaded with him. “Don’t do it.” Evans had told Deirdre about Stacy and had spared no detail regarding how much he loved her and why they had to be together. Deirdre, perhaps like Lisa, never thought he would act on his impulses, yet here he was focused now on the notion of taking her against her will.
“How did you get her address?” Deirdre asked.
Evans explained how he had burglarized Stacy’s parents’ house in Long Island. Then, “I’m going,” he said before hanging up.
A few days later, he called Deirdre again. This time, he said he was in California ready to carry out his plan. He had a pair of handcuffs, a rope and a van. Nobody was going to stop him.
“I’m going to force her to spend time with me,” he said. He had a place in “the mountains” all picked out. There was no one around for miles. He could tie Stacy up, feed her and convince her to love him again. “If I could persuade her to stay with me,” he insisted, “and get her away from her life, maybe she will fall back in love with me.”
While out west, Evans found out where Stacy worked and decided to show up unannounced. She spoke to him, Deirdre recalled him saying, and was rather courteous, but said she couldn’t see him. It had been too long. She had a life now—a life away from Troy that didn’t include him.
The following day, Evans drove to Stacy’s home and had words with Stacy’s husband. Stacy became upset and totally rejected him. Sensing how much she didn’t want to be with him, Evans abandoned his elaborate plan of kidnapping her and flew back to Albany.
After that call, Deirdre realized there was another side to Evans she had never really known throughout their many years together—and it scared her.
“I was frantic [when he called me from California]. What do I do?” Deirdre recalled later. “I think a crime might happen…and I don’t want to put my life in danger by reporting him. If I decide to turn on [him], maybe my life is in jeopardy.”
And that is how Evans worked. He scared people into being quiet. Not by making idle threats, but by taking action.
If the incident with Stacy wasn’t enough to prove to Deirdre how insane Evans truly was, at one point later in 1990, after what was almost thirteen years of seeing each other occasionally and speaking over the phone routinely, Evans and Deirdre’s relationship ended abruptly one afternoon.
Evans showed up at Deirdre’s apartment just to say hello—at least that’s what she thought initially. On her dining-room table was a tourist brochure for Belize, a popular vacation spot in the Caribbean.
“Oh, are you going away somewhere?” Evans asked, picking up the brochure, flipping through it.
“Yeah,” Deirdre said. She could tell something was wrong from the tone of his voice. He was digging for information.
“Where?”
“Belize.”
“Oh, who you going with?”
“A guy I’m dating.”
“Really,” Evans said. “How come you didn’t tell me about this guy before?”
“I don’t know…,” Deirdre said. She was being evasive, she recalled later. She could tell Evans already knew the answers to his questions.
“Why didn’t you tell me about him?”
“I don’t know.”
“What…Is he black?”
“Yeah, he is, Gar.”
“It’s over for us, you know that. As friends. Lovers. Anything! I don’t know you anymore.” Evans was fuming by this point. He began breathing heavily. Pacing. A lover had violated one of his most sacred rules. Deirdre had already lost a relationship with her father over the guy, an honorable man who attended medical school. He was going to become a doctor. Like Evans, her father had given her an ultimatum: the African American or me. But not quite in those words.
Evans then demanded she give him back every last item he had ever given her, dating back to 1977 when they first met. He wanted it all: the knic
kknacks, letters, cards, jewelry, jackets, antiques, a TV stand, chairs and desks. Everything. He said he would be back with his truck to pick it all up.
“If I can have it all,” she remembered him saying before he left, “I won’t hurt you.”
“Here was this ‘secret friend’ I had for thirteen years,” Deirdre said later, “and now I was his enemy. I was fearful that he was going to hurt the guy I was seeing.”
Evans’s face, while he was leaving, became “flat,” Deirdre recalled. He grew cold-looking. “…Like no expression at all. It was as if our relationship was a business transaction to him.”
Over the next two days, Evans filled his truck twice and brought the items to a friend’s house. Out in the parking lot, while loading things, he was “mumbling” to himself. “If there’s anything worse than a nigger,” the nosy neighbor upstairs heard him say just before he left, “it’s a nigger lover!”
Deirdre never saw or heard from him again.
CHAPTER 66
As Evans continued to cultivate an intimate relationship with Lisa Morris, succeeding in convincing her that Damien Cuomo had been living large in South Carolina, basking in the sun, soaking up the good life without her and Christina, Horton and Wingate worked doggedly to build a case against Jeffrey Williams. They conducted interviews, tracked leads and kept a close eye on Williams as he finished his current sentence at home under the guard of a plastic anklet. For this simple reason, Horton and Wingate lost touch with Evans for a while, yet he still seemed to show up in their lives, Horton admitted later, to “keep an eye on us.”
By June, it was no secret around town that, although it had been only six months since Damien’s disappearance, Evans was shacking up with Lisa. According to an interview that the Troy PD gave to a local newspaper, they had interviewed “one hundred” of Damien’s closest “friends and acquaintances” and still couldn’t find him.
Since Damien had been gone, his father had taken very ill. The Troy PD assumed that “he would have come to see his father” if he was able to. On top of that, Cuomo had not tried to make contact with his daughter, Christina. This, particularly, seemed out of character for him.
Although Evans spent a considerable amount of his time at Lisa’s apartment, he kept a room at the Coliseum Hotel, which was—not by coincidence—only about a mile from Jim Horton’s home in Latham.
This was Evans’s office. He used it as a place to keep only certain items: his answering machine, a caller ID, phone and some toiletries. He would also keep an alarm system on the floor. So whenever he had the chance, he could dissect it and study how it worked.
For Evans, the past few months had become a constant routine of looking over his shoulder. Word around Troy was that he not only killed Michael Falco, but Damien Cuomo, too.
To keep on good terms with the Bureau, Evans would periodically stop by Troop G and offer up someone. At some point in 1990, he had convinced a local guy from Troy to sell him a .44 Magnum. After making arrangements with the guy to meet him, Evans called Horton and Wingate and told them about it.
“Gary Evans always claimed he wanted to get guns off the street,” Doug Wingate said later.
Later on, Horton and Wingate found out that it was all a ruse to keep them focused on anything besides Damien Cuomo and Michael Falco.
“I received a call from Damien,” Evans told Horton one day. “He wants me to go into his parents’ house and remove several boxes of stolen goods that he had hidden in an old shed behind the house. He told me he wanted me to move the boxes because he thought the police were onto him.”
“Sounds good,” Horton said. “Let’s do it.”
Evans drove up and got permission from Damien’s parents to go into the shed and retrieve the boxes. When state police opened the boxes, they found coins, stocks, bonds, passports, personal papers from several area homes Damien had burglarized and an empty bank bag from Capital Tractor. Tucked down underneath everything was a .22-caliber Ruger—the same gun that Evans had used to murder Douglas Berry.
Wingate and Horton weren’t naive, so they continued to question Evans about Falco and Cuomo.
“Gary weighed every word you said,” Wingate recalled later. “You couldn’t say a sentence where he didn’t see where every single word was going. If you don’t have Gary, you don’t have him!”
“The word is,” Evans said when they pressed him about Michael Falco, “he went to California. Damien went south.”
Horton was, many of his former colleagues said, an extremely “creative cop, who did whatever he had to do to get the job done.”
By the fall of 1990, at thirty-five, Horton was considered an experienced investigator who was going places in the Bureau. Most didn’t understand his profound desire to help Evans turn his life around. Of course, Horton had no idea Evans was a serial killer. He saw him as a career thief who needed some direction in life—maybe a guy who perhaps had a rough childhood, but could turn his life around if he only applied himself.
“The problem was,” Horton said later, “that every time I tried to help Gary, he let me down.”
Still, whenever Evans found himself in trouble with the law, he depended on Horton (or Wingate) to get him out of it.
There was one time when Evans needed to replace a mirror on his truck. Like any good thief, he decided there was no way in hell he was going to pay for it, so he drove up to Brunswick and found a car dealership.
While unscrewing the mirror off a brand-new truck, a security guard spied him on a television monitor and phoned police.
After being taken into custody by Brunswick State Police, Evans started barking Horton’s name to the judge during his arraignment. “I help Horton. He’s a state police investigator. I want to talk to him.”
Horton got a call from the judge, who happened to be a former trooper and one of his ex-bosses. “We’ve got Gary Evans on a petit larceny over here. He said he’ll ‘trade information…do something for you.’”
Horton, by mere happenstance, had just been promoted to the federal drug task force as supervisor.
“I’ll go over and see him,” Horton told the judge.
Later that day, Horton took a ride to Brunswick to see Evans. “What the hell, Gar,” he said, laughing, “you let some fat, five-dollar-an-hour security guard catch you? I thought you were better than that?”
“Fuckin’ shit…I can’t fucking believe that I got caught stealing mirrors by a motherfucking security guard.” If there was something in the room to destroy, Horton recalled, Evans would have probably given it a good beating.
Horton continued to laugh. He couldn’t get over it. Evans had broken into some of the most secure antique shops and jewelry stores in the Northeast without as much as disturbing a mouse, yet he had been caught by a security guard? It didn’t make sense.
“What are you, some petty thief?” Horton continued. “Are you going to start shoplifting candy bars next?”
“Fuck you! I’m a better thief than that. I just needed the stupid fucking mirror. Can you help me out of this, or what?”
“This is going to cost you,” Horton said with a quip of sarcasm. “You will owe me.”
CHAPTER 67
After Horton spoke to the judge on Evans’s part, Evans was given a $240 fine and cut loose. Not two hours after he was released, he called Horton at home. “Let’s go. What can I do for you?”
“That was fast.”
“I pay my debts. I don’t go back on my word.”
“Well, Gar, you’re famous for ripping off drug dealers…. Why don’t we try to figure something out.”
In the federal system, a CI can do what is called a “reversal.” Simply put, the cops can have the drugs and the bad guy can have the money; thus, a CI can solicit the dope deal. In the state system, this can’t be done; it is considered entrapment.
Horton continued: “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll assign you to an agent. We’ll provide you with a thirty-pound bale of marijuana. Who can you get to buy it from
you?”
Evans shot right back without missing a beat. “Archie Bennett.”
Bennett was a neighbor of Damien Cuomo’s, known around town as a “big-time” drug dealer. Evans had always hated him. He said he would enjoy “fucking him” and not lose a minute’s sleep over it.
A few days later, Evans called Bennett and told him he had robbed a drug dealer in New York City and wanted to dump a bale of pot as soon as possible. “I want thirty-four thousand.”
Bennett said he would get back to him.
Within days, Bennett called to say he had the money.
“Good,” Evans said. “Meet me at the parking lot near the Laundromat by the river.” It was a popular spot in Troy down the street from Bennett’s house. Bennett knew exactly where Evans was talking about.
He and Evans then set up a time for the following day.
Evans called the agent Horton had assigned him and explained what was going on. When Horton heard, he immediately began wondering if Evans was telling the truth. It seemed too easy.
“I need to be there,” Horton told the agent. “Nobody knows Gary like me. I trust him, but I don’t trust him.”
In all, there were about ten agents set up in every nook surrounding the area near the parking lot. Horton stationed himself in a convenience store diagonally across the block.
Evans pulled up about 1:30 P.M. An agent met with him and gave him the bale of dope while Horton sneaked around to the front of his car and unhooked the coil wire so Evans couldn’t act on any strange impulses he might have of taking off.
At 2:00 P.M. sharp, Bennett walked into the parking lot and sat in Evans’s Saab.
Under normal circumstances, a CI would be arrested along with the target to make it look like a normal grab. That way, the buyer wouldn’t suspect—at least not right away—a setup.
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