With the front door now open and cops wandering around everywhere, Constance Jouben walked in and followed one of the officers toward the back.
“Someone killed him,” she blurted out when she walked around the corner and saw her son sprawled out on the chair, blood all over his face, clothes and floor. “Why did they have to do this? He’s dead….”
Evans left Little Falls and drove directly back to his motel room at the Coliseum Hotel in Latham. The following day, he boarded a bus to Colorado and met up with a fence he had used from time to time.
The total tally from the Little Falls job was just a hair over $60,000.
Blood money—all of it.
When he returned to Latham two days later, Evans buried the gun he had used to kill Gregory Jouben, along with a second gun he had been carrying with him, in a metal box in the back of Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands.
The LFPD, along with the local state police, conducted an investigation into Gregory Jouben’s murder and immediately found several items that Evans had left behind. In all of the planning he had done, Evans had forgotten to clean up the abandoned section of the building where he had been living. Cops found an “oily rag” he had used to keep his gun from rusting, empty water and juice bottles, various snack wrappers, the graffiti on the walls and one size-8½ sneaker footprint.
None of it would be enough to connect Evans to the crime, or even send cops in his direction, but all of the evidence would later place him at the scene and confirm his statements.
Although Horton was working officially for the DEA, part of the deal between the feds and the state police was that he could also be used for homicides. Busting drug dealers and drug addicts wasn’t exactly how Horton preferred to spend his time. By 1992, he had put together nearly fourteen years with the state police, and his record spoke for itself. He felt his talent for catching murderers, thieves and rapists was not being utilized in the DEA.
“I was a polygraphist, a homicide cop…. I did not care for narcotics,” Horton recalled. “The honest truth is, arresting dope dealers wasn’t a challenge. Some guys are very good at narcotics. Undercovers, especially. I wasn’t an undercover. It didn’t do anything but discourage me. We’d get a guy for selling dope, roll him; then we get the next guy, roll him, and he’d give us another name. It was a cycle.”
The relationship between Horton and Evans had become more personal and regular by 1993. Evans continued showing up around town wherever Horton was and Horton continued to “pop in” on Evans at the various hotel and motel rooms he rented around the neighborhood. Horton knew Evans was burglarizing the entire time, but he never caught him with any stolen property or burglar tools. Evans was smart to burglarize businesses and homes outside Albany, for fear of Horton.
“He would never, in all the years I knew him, shit in his own backyard,” Horton said later. “He knew I wasn’t only stopping by his room to talk. He never lost sight of the fact that I was a cop doing my job.”
Throughout the entire time Evans was burglarizing and murdering people under Horton’s nose, he had lifted weights religiously. Bigger now than he had ever been, Evans would flaunt his muscles in front of Horton whenever they saw each other. Horton would flatter Evans by commenting on how good he looked.
“He would even pose for me,” Horton said, “and allow me to take Polaroids of him. He’d flex his muscles, screaming like the Hulk, and I would take photos of him.”
Part of it, Horton admitted, was to feed Evans’s immense ego; but much of it had to do with keeping tabs on his different appearances.
“I would leave his hotel room after taking five or ten Polaroids of him and drive back to the office and fax the photos to every law enforcement agency in the Capital Region. Gary liked to wear disguises. Having an up-to-date photo of him was helpful to everyone.”
Early in 1993, Evans took off to Vermont to go live in the woods for a while. He had yearned to buy some land and build his dream home. But the money he had been making off burglaries wasn’t enough. There were several antique shops in Vermont he had been eyeing for years. The time was right, he decided, to pillage them all.
Back home, Horton and Wingate had their hands full with Jeffrey Williams, who had recently tried to pry off his court-appointed anklet. A judge, realizing how dangerous Williams was, put him back in prison to serve out the remaining portion of his sentence. Yet as Horton and Wingate continued to build a case against him for the murder of Karolyn Lonczak, the clock ticked. He would be out of prison a free man in a matter of weeks. They were sure he would kill again.
CHAPTER 71
At thirty-one, Kathy Alexander was a young and eager entrepreneur looking to fulfill a dream of owning her own antique shop. She had been around the business since the early ’80s. Her parents had owned shops all over the Northeast. By 1991, armed with what she saw as enough experience to make a go of it, Kathy opened the Thompson Mills Antique Center in downtown Bennington, Vermont, with the notion of living a carefree, quiet life in what is essentially the epicenter of New England antiquing.
The Thompson Mills Antique Center housed tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of antiques, fine china and other valuable collectibles. Vermont is “antique central.” People come from all over the country to drive around the state in search of that special something. Kathy felt she had a little slice of heaven, which was all she had ever really wanted.
Evans walked into Kathy’s shop, she later recalled, only a few weeks after she opened. “He came into my shop under the guise of being a collector,” she said, “and became a friendly repeat customer.”
Kathy saw this “nice-looking guy” in great physical shape. At about 350 pounds herself, Kathy had battled a weight problem much of her adult life. What struck her right away about Evans was that he treated her as if she were a runway model. Evans always wore tight-fitting shirts and tank tops, Kathy said, to show off his muscles. Befriending him immediately, she fell for that charm Evans could lay on people with flawless ingenuity. At one point, she had even floated the idea of fixing him up with her girlfriend, but she decided against it after he walked in one afternoon with Lisa Morris on his arm.
By all accounts, Evans seemed like the perfect gentleman. There was one time when Kathy sold a rather large bookcase to a woman while Evans was browsing the store, and he ended up loading it into the woman’s car without being asked. He’d always ask intelligent questions about antiques, Kathy said, and make idle conversation about news-worthy topics.
It was, however, all part of a sociopathic magnetism Evans had developed and cultivated throughout the years to get what he wanted. He was playing Kathy from the moment he met her—and she never had a clue.
Within months, Kathy had moved her shop up the road from where she had first opened. Unlike her former shop, she didn’t install an alarm system, however. Bennington, Vermont, didn’t seem like the typical mark for thieves. Very rare was it that a shop was burglarized. An alarm system was just one more nuisance, she insisted. Another hassle she didn’t need while struggling to make a living.
In March 1993, Evans started showing up at Kathy’s shop more frequently. He and Kathy would chat for longer periods. She trusted him. He gave her no reason not to.
After opening the shop one morning in late March, Kathy noticed that a few items had been moved around, but not really disturbed. Taking a closer look, she realized someone had broken in through the bathroom window and stolen what amounted to approximately $20,000 of her most valuable merchandise. The thief, she figured out, had handpicked the items he stole: priceless diamonds, some gold and a rare pocketbook (handbag) collection.
When she got over the shock of being violated, Kathy sat down and told herself that whoever had broken into the shop “had been nice about it. I knew that whoever it was would end up being someone I knew.” Not once, though, did Evans’s name ever cross her mind. “I just never considered him. He didn’t seem like that type of person.”
A few days later, after Kathy h
ad phoned police and an investigation was launched, Evans dropped by to say hello. “Hey, Kathy,” he said with a touch of concern in his voice, “I heard you were broken into.”
“Yes,” Kathy said. “It’s devastating.”
“I bet. I heard that there were other break-ins, too.”
Evans knew firsthand, of course, because he had hit three other shops in Vermont besides Kathy’s that same week for a grand total of about $85,000. All of the merchandise was sitting safely in the woods where he had been camping for the past month.
“I know that whoever broke in,” Kathy continued, “liked me.”
“Really…you really think that?”
“Yes. The place was undisturbed, except for the missing merchandise. The thieves were actually neat about it.”
The other shops had been trashed from top to bottom. Evans had ransacked one place after pillaging it and smashed a bunch of items in another. For some reason, he left Kathy’s shop clean except for what he took.
“So you have any suspicions about who did it?” Evans asked.
“I had gotten into an argument with another local antique dealer,” Kathy explained. “Some people around town say that I had something to do with it for insurance reasons.”
She laughed. Evans laughed. It was an absurd accusation.
“Good luck,” Evans said, leaving the shop. “I’m sorry about what happened.”
It would be two years before Kathy found out that it was Evans who had burgled her shop. While talking to him during the afternoon of the burglary, Evans had asked Kathy if he could use her bathroom. Once inside, he simply unlocked the window in the bathroom and literally crawled in through it later that same night.
When Evans arrived back in Albany, he kept a low profile, while managing to pull off a few residential burglaries. But as the weeks and months wore on, he began running low on cash and needed to pull off what he later called a “big score.”
Where had all his money gone?
“Gary loved to spend it as soon as he got it,” Horton said later. “He showered the women in his life with gifts and trips and anything else they wanted. I also believe he bought some land in Vermont right around this same time.”
In any case, Evans was broke. So he camped out at the Albany Rural Cemetery on Route 378 in Menands, just a few miles from the Troop G barracks in Loudonville. Horton, who was finishing up his stint with the DEA and also working homicide cases for the Bureau, and Wingate were hoping to secure a new arrest warrant for Jeffrey Williams. Neither Horton nor Wingate had seen Evans all that much over the past year.
That night, Evans slept in the cemetery near a marble bench he’d had his eye on for quite some time. A rare piece of art, a bit smaller than a casket, the bench weighed about one thousand pounds. Evans had already lined up a buyer for it in New York City—that is, if he could find a way to hoist the granite relic onto the bed of his truck by himself in the middle of the night without getting caught.
Mr. Ingenuity, Evans went out and obtained an engine hoist and hooked it up to the bed of his Toyota pickup truck. Back at the cemetery hours later, he had no trouble strapping a rope around the bench and lifting it onto the bed of his truck without being seen or heard.
Within three hours after stealing it, he was in New York City unloading it.
Horton or Wingate had no connection to the marble bench theft. They worked homicide. But a Bureau investigator working on the case, by the end of March, had enough evidence against Evans to pull him in for questioning. Evans’s fence apparently had sold the piece to a legitimate antique dealer and the guy traced it back to Albany. Scared he had purchased stolen property, the guy made a few calls. When the fence was brought in, he gave up Evans right away.
Any Bureau investigator knew that there was only one cop who could find Evans. So the investigator contacted Horton and told him what was going on.
“Let me and Doug take care of it,” Horton said. “We’ll find him.”
Because Horton was busy working a case for the DEA, Wingate decided to start looking for Evans himself. If he found him, he would call Horton and the two of them, together, would question him.
Evans had not only rented hotel rooms and slept in the woods, but he also kept an apartment in Troy.
In 1814, the Emma Willard School, on Pauling Avenue in the north end of Troy, opened. It was the first school in the Northeast to offer the same curriculum for females as it did for males. More than 175 years later, Hollywood used it as a location to film portions of Scent of a Woman, starring Al Pacino. Three houses away from Emma Willard, on the same side of the street, Evans rented an apartment on the third floor of a two-family house. He had always loved the idea of being around famous people or places. Living on Pauling Avenue, on the grounds of Emma Willard, as he later explained, gave him a narcissistic satisfaction of being able to touch the hand of fame. Although it wasn’t much of a big deal to anyone else, he felt as if he, too, was famous in some way for living on the same grounds that Hollywood had chosen to shoot a film.
It didn’t take Wingate long to find Evans. But instead of confronting him, he shared the information with Horton and they decided to wait until they knew for certain Evans was going to be home.
Wingate lived only a few miles from the apartment. Every day, on his way to work, he would drive by to see if Evans’s Saab or truck was parked out front.
Finally, on the third day, he radioed Horton.
“He’s there!”
That year had been one of the worst on record for snowfall in the Northeast. Certain parts of New York had logged several feet by Christmas.
After hearing from Wingate, Horton said, “Wait for me, Dougie. I’ll be right there.”
Trekking through the waist-high snow out front, Horton and Wingate noticed one set of footprints leading up to Evans’s apartment, but none going out.
“He’s in there,” Horton whispered as they approached the door.
Days before, they had been given some information that Evans was telling people he was not going to be taken alive again by the cops. Regardless of the close relationship they’d had with him over the years, they assumed he meant business. It wasn’t going to be a friendly visit. Evans had grown considerably more paranoid since killing Douglas Berry, Damien Cuomo and Gregory Jouben. Unbeknownst to Horton, back in the late ’80s Evans had what looked like a prehistoric pterodactyl tattooed on about 85 percent of his back. Throughout the tattoo he’d had skulls etched inside the animal’s wings and body. He had been telling people the skulls represented “notches in [his] belt.”
He was keeping a tally of the people he had murdered.
CHAPTER 72
“Gar, you in there?” Horton said while knocking on the door. Wingate stood on the opposite side of the doorway. Both men had their weapons drawn.
“Who is it?”
“Gar, it’s Jim and Doug.”
Evans, without hesitating, opened the door and invited them in. The apartment, Horton and Wingate noticed, was completely empty except for a phone, answering machine and caller ID.
Horton walked over to the picture window and looked down. “We were on the third story,” he recalled later. “It got pretty heated right away. Doug and I thought for sure we were going to tussle with him.”
Evans later told Horton he was thinking of fighting his way out. Wingate said he and Horton would have “kicked Gary’s ass all over the apartment.”
Horton disagreed. “Gary, at that time, was fighting for his life. We were merely doing our jobs. When you look at it from the standpoint of a fight, Gary had nothing to lose.”
Finally, after some small talk, Horton said, “Gar, listen, we’re here to arrest you for the marble bench.”
Evans stared at Horton and then looked toward the window. There was a good two-foot cushion of snow on the ground. Evans later said he thought seriously about diving out of the window and taking off, but decided against it only because he knew it would cause a lot of problems for Horton an
d Wingate, two cops he respected probably more than anyone else in his life at the time.
“Knowing Gary,” Horton said, “if he jumped, he would have landed on the ground like a cat and disappeared.”
Evans was facing some serious time for the theft of the marble bench. A repeat felon, he was looking at likely two years, maybe more depending on the judge.
“Let’s see if Gary,” Horton said to Wingate one day shortly after they arrested him, “will agree to befriending Jeffrey Williams. Maybe he can get us something?”
Wingate smiled.
Since trying to cut his anklet off, Jeffrey Williams had been locked up in Albany County Jail, yet he was going to be released in a matter of weeks. In the interim, Wingate and Horton had gotten lucky when two inmates came forward and claimed Williams had admitted that he had “fucked up and left a medallion [of his]” on Karolyn Lonczak’s body. With that new information, Horton and Wingate reinterviewed dozens of people involved in the case and ended up getting enough information to send the case to a grand jury.
As Williams sat in jail under the notion that he was going to be getting out in days, the grand jury returned two indictments: second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping.
With Williams set to get out of jail at midnight, Wingate and Horton showed up at the prison unannounced with a new arrest warrant.
“The jailers called up to the tier,” Horton recalled later, “for Williams to be sent down. Doug and I stayed out of sight, but could see him coming.”
Williams believed he was being released. But when he reached the lobby, Horton stepped out and said, “Remember me?”
Horton recalled that “he turned grayish white. I actually remember the color draining out of his face at the moment when I said, ‘You’re under arrest for the murder and kidnapping of Karolyn Lonczak.’ I then read him his Miranda rights out loud in front of the jailers so there would be witnesses.”
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