Evans, however, told Horton he wanted Bennett to know he was being set up. Horton didn’t have much of a problem with it. If Evans wanted to show Bennett he wasn’t scared of him, so be it. But Horton said they wouldn’t make an issue out of it; they just wouldn’t cuff Evans and lead him away with Bennett.
As Horton took a crunch out of a hot dog while standing in the window of the convenience store across the street, he watched as Bennett gave Evans a brown paper bag, which contained the money.
Within a few seconds, all of the agents “swooped in and grabbed Bennett.” Evans, turning to Bennett, mouthed, Fuck you, asshole, and walked away from the car.
As Bennett was being put into one of the cruisers, Evans began mumbling and skulking about, noticeably upset at something.
“What is it, Gar?” Horton asked.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Evans said. “Damn it all. Son of a bitch. Motherfucker.”
“What is it, Gar? Talk to me?”
“Bennett never even asked me to see the drugs!”
“Yeah, so. Big deal. We got him.”
“I could have pulled this shit off without you assholes and pocketed the thirty-four thousand myself. Motherfucker, I didn’t need you guys.”
Horton started laughing.
In the end, Evans received about $2,500 for his role. A confidential informant, under the federal system, is entitled to a percentage of any take he is involved in.
After working with Horton on nailing Bennett, who was basically given a slap on the wrist and released, Evans became engrossed in the excitement of working with Horton on that level. He envied Horton in many ways, and made no secret about telling him how much he wished he could have been more like him.
“My way of thinking was to always make Gary feel like he was doing a good thing by me,” Horton said. “He believed that I was totally taken with him—and that was part of my wanting to know things about him he just wouldn’t come out and tell me. I began to suspect that he’d had something to do with the disappearance of Damien Cuomo and Michael Falco, as we became closer. I still had no proof, of course, but I felt I was getting somewhere.”
Indeed, once Evans got a taste of police work, he wanted more—like an addict.
Months after the Bennett job, Evans phoned Horton and told him he needed to talk to him about another “job.” Horton was never one to pass up an opportunity to hear Evans out. So he agreed to meet him.
“We met in the parking lot of a grocery store in Watervliet, New York, across the Hudson River from Troy,” Horton recalled later. “I parked away from most of the shoppers, in an area where most people wouldn’t want to park.”
Evans showed up on foot, which was pretty standard for him whenever he and Horton met. “He had his vehicle parked nearby, but was probably doing counter-surveillance on me, like he always did.”
After sitting down in Horton’s car, Evans began to talk about an idea he had to purchase a few guns. As he talked, a car pulled up, nose to nose, to Horton’s.
“With all these places to park, this guy comes way over here?” Horton said aloud.
“That motherfucker,” Evans said in agreement. Then he opened a newspaper and pretended to read it to block his face so the people in the car couldn’t see him.
Within a few moments, a red Chevrolet Camaro pulled up next to the other car. Neither driver had noticed Horton and Evans sitting in front of them.
Horton couldn’t believe his eyes, but both men got out of their cars and began to make an exchange.
“Drugs for money,” Horton recalled. “Right in front of me. Gary and I couldn’t believe it. As the deal was going down, I’m laughing, explaining to Gary what I’m seeing because he’s still covering his face with the newspaper.”
“Look at these two guys,” Horton said to Evans. “I can’t believe it. They’re doing a drug deal not ten feet from me. Isn’t it obvious that I’m in a Bureau car?”
Evans couldn’t help himself. He had to peek around the newspaper to see it for himself.
“Motherfucker,” he said.
“Quick, get out of my car,” Horton said at that point. The men had completed the deal and were getting into their cars to leave.
“Let me go with you,” Evans pleaded. He had a noticeable hint of excitement in his voice.
“Get out of my car,” Horton said again, with a bit more authority.
Evans began begging. “Please let me go, Guy. I want to bust them with you. Come on, it’ll be fun. The two of us working together like cops.”
“Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of. My. Car.” Horton wasn’t kidding now. Both cars were approaching the parking lot exit. He had to take off at that moment or the chance of catching one of them was gone.
“Come on, Guy?” Evans asked again.
“I’ll physically throw you out of the car, Gar. Now get out.”
As Horton opened his door to walk around to the passenger side to pull Evans out, Evans took off.
“The cars went in different directions,” Horton added. “I chose to stop the first car, thinking that he was the buyer rather than the seller, because the seller would have more money. He ended up being the buyer. He had an ‘eight ball’ of cocaine on him. I had gotten the plate number off the Camaro and went and picked up the seller later that night. Gary called me the next day at my office and wanted to know what happened.”
“I wish I was a cop so I could do that,” Evans said before they hung up. “I wish I was like you, Guy.”
CHAPTER 68
Not long after Horton and Evans had worked together on the Archie Bennett drug bust, Evans began showing up, it seemed, wherever Horton went. By early 1991, Horton was bumping into Evans routinely in Latham. Near his home. At the market. The local sub shop. The diner. Wherever Horton went, Evans was right behind him.
“Hey, Guy,” Evans might say, coming up from behind. “What’s going on?”
“What are you doing here?” Horton would ask.
After Horton realized it wasn’t a coincidence, he started to turn the tables and “pop in” on Evans wherever he was living. Evans would be sitting on the floor in his hotel room, studying alarm system manuals, browsing through antique magazines, reading astrology books and true-crime books and magazines.
“What’s up, Guy? Come on in.”
Horton tried to center his conversations on why Evans couldn’t focus his passion on something legal. But Evans would always spin the discussion back to burglary, so Horton learned to play into it.
“Tell me about burglarizing homes, Gar? What is a good target?”
Evans perked up. “I would never hit a house with an alarm system sticker on it, or a house with a Beware of Dog sign.”
Horton made a mental note: Get alarm system stickers.
“What about those manuals…why study them?”
“Most antique shops have alarm systems; they help me understand how they work. I’ve never been caught inside while doing a job.”
Then Horton found out Evans had camped out in the woods in back of his house. “He was watching me watch him,” Horton recalled later. “Both of us had our own agendas by that point.”
It was no secret that Horton and Doug Wingate were investigating Jeffrey Williams. Local newspapers and television had covered the Williams case extensively.
Evans would raise the subject once in a while, but Horton was careful about what he said. It was an ongoing investigation. Sharing information with anyone—better yet a convicted felon—would jeopardize the case.
“Let him [Jeffrey Williams] get out,” Evans said one day to Horton and Wingate, “and your worries are over!”
“You let us take care of Williams, Gar. Don’t worry about it,” Horton said.
This seemingly casual conversation planted a seed in Horton’s mind, however. “I knew then that the day would come where I could possibly use Gary to help me with Jeffrey Williams. We just didn’t know how at that point.”
The relationship between Horton and Evans began to wor
k its way to the Horton family dining-room table.
“Jim and Gary’s relationship never bothered me,” Mary Pat Horton recalled later. “After all, Jim and I thought he was just a local thief—a guy, according to Jim, who didn’t have a favorable childhood or solid role models, a guy who ‘never had a chance.’ I knew Jim was developing a rapport with him and that Gary trusted him because Jim treated Gary like a human being during their encounters. I felt sorry for Gary—because of what I knew about his childhood. As the calls by Gary became more frequent, it just reinforced to me that this guy really had no one else he could turn to. The kids and I started to refer to him as ‘Uncle Gary,’ because he called the house much more often than any of our real uncles.”
CHAPTER 69
By Farmer’s Almanac standards, October 17, 1991, was a typical fall day in New England. In Albany, temperatures had hovered around fifty-nine degrees, while the sun set under the moon phase of Waxing Gibbons at 6:10 P.M.
Moon phases were important to Evans; and he would make note of it later in his life. A lot of his paintings and drawings had always centered on the rise and fall of the moon. The Waxing Gibbons, which is nearly full, rises during the day when most people cannot see it. Some historians claim the Italians attacked the Albanians during World War II by the light of the Waxing Moon because it had illuminated the night sky as if it were daytime.
Evans would never say that he chose the night of October 17, 1991, to act out on his bloody impulses because he favored the Waxing Moon, but his love for astrology might make one wonder if, perhaps, like a wolf, he allowed the moon to guide him on that night.
Little Falls, New York, is a ninety-minute drive from Albany, conveniently located in the middle of the state. With a population of just over five thousand, Little Falls is about as “small town” as it gets in New York: old-fashioned cafés, low-rise commercial buildings, a few retail outlets and one small coin shop on Main Street, run by thirty-six-year-old Gregory Jouben, a black-haired, good-looking local who had worked hard most of his life trying to survive as a small business owner. Beside his coin shop, the seven-story office building where Jouben rented space was vacant.
Evans loved Jouben’s shop because it was far enough away from Albany where he could come and go without being noticed.
“I had brought some stolen property/jewelry there a couple of times and got to know [Jouben] a little bit,” Evans said later. “The first couple of times he didn’t ask for any ID or my name. But the last time I went there, he asked me to sign my name, so I made one up.”
Two weeks before Evans went into Jouben’s shop for the last time, on October 3, 1991, he began camping out on the top floor of the mostly abandoned building.
“I was short on money and was scoping out [Jouben’s shop] to later rob it,” Evans recalled.
Cops later found holes in the concrete walls where Evans had practiced shooting his .22-caliber pistol. He had even spray-painted graffiti messages on the walls: This is my fucking bank! and Stay the fuck out of my bank!
The other reason for moving into the building two weeks prior to the night he chose to burglarize Jouben’s shop was that he wanted to watch Jouben’s movements, Evans said. He knew Jouben had some rather expensive jewelry, but he didn’t know exactly where he kept it, he said. So at night, shortly before Jouben closed the shop, Evans would watch him by crawling around the ceiling tiles and peering at him from above. Within a few days, he found out that he was putting all of his most expensive merchandise in a state-of-the-art floor safe. There was no way, Evans realized that night, he could get into the safe without the combination.
“But I thought I would watch him for a few weeks and pick a night when he forgot to lock the safe.”
By the end of the second week, he became frustrated; he later admitted he couldn’t wait any longer.
That afternoon, he went to a local hardware store and purchased an Open/Closed sign: orange lettering, black background, the same as any For Sale sign.
After returning to where he was living on the top floor, he stuffed the sign down the front of his pants, underneath his shirt, stuck his .22-caliber pistol in a bag—“I had the gun inside a bag secured with duct tape, so when I shot him, the brass shell casings would stay in the bag”—and put it, along with a few other items, in a large duffel bag. In his front pocket, Evans placed a gold medallion with the word “bitch” etched across the front of it.
By 5:00 P.M., he was ready to go to work.
At about the same time, Jouben closed his shop and set out across the street to make a deposit at the local bank. A local Watertown police officer even watched him make the drop.
The cop was traveling southbound on Ann Street, going toward East Main, when he saw Jouben heading back into his shop. “He was wearing light-colored clothing and…looked happy at the time,” the cop reported later.
Evans left the top floor at approximately 5:00 and worked his way downstairs to approach Jouben about buying the gold BITCH medallion.
Jouben was sitting at his jeweler’s table near the cash register when Evans walked through the front door, the bells hanging off the doorknob rattling as if it were Christmastime. Jouben couldn’t see Evans from where he sat. But by the time he got up to check who had walked in, Evans had already locked the door from the inside and placed the Open/Closed sign, with the Closed side facing out, in the window.
“Can I help you…?” Jouben asked as Evans approached him.
“How are you?” Evans said.
It took a moment, but Jouben recognized Evans. “Hey, how have you been? I’m closing in a few minutes.”
Evans reached into his pocket and pulled out the broach. “Can you check this out for me real quick?”
“Sure,” Jouben said as they walked back to his desk. Then, as he slipped on his eyepiece and jeweler’s lens, Evans reached into his bag and placed his hand on a .22-caliber pistol he had purchased recently.
“Greg [Jouben] took [the broach] from me, sat down at his desk,” Evans recalled later, “and began to look at the piece through his eyeglass.”
Viewing the piece, Jouben could tell immediately it was worthless. “The diamonds are ACZ…worth maybe ten dollars,” he said, still gazing at it.
Next, as Jouben lifted the piece up to the light for a better look, Evans shot him once in the back of the head.
Jouben then fell onto his desk, his body convulsing and shaking…. Blood ran down the back of his head, across his shoulder and onto his forearm and thigh.
Evans quickly walked to the front of the shop and checked to see if anyone had heard the shot. Confident no one had, he shut the lights off and grabbed a handful of diamond engagement rings—the items he’d had his eye on for the past two weeks—and put them into his duffel bag.
Jouben, however, wasn’t dead; Evans heard him stirring at his desk and immediately ran toward him.
Reaching him a few seconds later, Evans later said he saw Jouben, barely able to move, reaching for the phone.
Motherfucker…you’re still alive?
As Jouben, grunting and struggling to take a breath, lifted the phone receiver, Evans pumped two more rounds into the side of his head. At that point, blood splattered across Jouben’s desk, clothes and face as the shots tore through his skull. He fell back in his chair; his head hanging off the back headrest, a trail of blood dripping…pooling up on the floor.
Scared he had made too much noise, Evans then grabbed a few more items and took off. Inside the back of the shop was a door leading to other sections of the building. Knowing the layout of the building, he worked his way through the labyrinth of doors and hallways and found the main stairwell leading up to the roof.
Running up to the fourth floor, Evans fled out the door and ended up facing “a lower roof on an adjacent building.”
Like a teenager acting on a dare, he hopped from building to building, crossing over alleyways about fifty feet below. He had parked his truck just down the block earlier that day.
“As I was going out of the building and across several roofs, I heard stuff dropping out of the bag all the way.”
When he reached the fourth roof, he shinned down a set of drainpipes attached to the side of the building, like a fireman, and found himself standing in an alley staring at his truck.
CHAPTER 70
The Little Falls Police Department (LFPD) received a call around 8:49 P.M. from Constance Jouben, Gregory Jouben’s seventy-seven-year-old mother. She had been working with her son that day and left the shop, she said, at about 3:30 P.M.
“My son,” Constance told police over the phone, “failed to come home from work at his usual time. I’ve called and called over there…but haven’t gotten an answer.”
“Okay, ma’am,” the dispatcher said. “And you’re worried about him?”
“Yes. I don’t know. This is unlike Gregory. He’s usually home by seven.”
“We’ll check it out.”
Within minutes, three Little Falls patrolmen were dispatched to the scene.
One of the officers tried the front door, but it was locked. Evans had locked it himself. Walking around to the side-street entrance, where a window looked into the shop, the cop then tried the side door, but it, too, was locked. Peering into the shop through the window, the cop could see Jouben slumped over backward in his chair, in front of his desk.
“Hey, can you hear me?” the cop yelled, banging on the window to see if he could get Jouben’s attention.
After walking around and kicking open the bottom portion of the front door, the same cop crawled in and found Jouben’s “stiff and rigid [body]…. He had blood on his face and all over his body…a pool of blood on the floor.”
A fourth cop had been dispatched to the scene while the others were already inside. When he arrived minutes later at the front door, he saw Constance Jouben milling about, wondering what was going on.
Two “young girls” were outside the building on Ann Street, around the corner. As the cop approached them, one of them said, “You can see him. He’s slumped over.”
Every Move You Make Page 31