Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  The exact situation he wanted to avoid.

  As patient as a fox, when it came to capturing criminals, Horton rarely gave up. His days as a polygraphist and interrogator had taught him that to try to predict a criminal’s behavior was impossible, but allowing him the space to conduct business his way was essential.

  After a few anxious months of not hearing from him, Evans finally called Horton at his home during midspring 1994. “It’s the Unabomber,” Evans said, laughing. “What the fuck is going on, Guy?”

  “How the hell did you get my phone number?” Horton asked right away. He had changed his phone number for about the third time in as many years because of Jeffrey Williams. Mary Pat had been getting hang-up calls. The press had been bothering him about Williams and Evans.

  Evans laughed. Then, “Your wife gave me the number.” He said he had followed Mary Pat into a local photo shop one day. While inside the store, he heard her tell the clerk her phone number.

  “You bastard,” Horton snapped. “You following my wife around now?”

  “I would never hurt her, Jim. You know that.”

  “You screwed me,” Horton said. “You promised me you would not get into any trouble. We have the Jeff Williams case coming up soon. I need you to testify.”

  Evans became quiet. “Sorry, Jim. I am what I am.”

  “Well, how are we going to fix this?”

  “I can’t go back to prison, Guy. I can’t. I’ll get twenty-five to life. No motherfucking way I am doing that.”

  “I need the book back. Where is it?”

  “What are you going to do for me?”

  Horton told Evans he would look into talking to the judge about going easy on him for the theft of the book if he turned it over, but it was going to be difficult. “You really pissed that judge off, Gar. He’s on the board of trustees of that library.”

  “Do what you can.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I can’t tell you that, come on. I should go now.”

  “You better call me back. You promised to help me out with Williams.”

  Evans said he would call back in a few weeks. Meanwhile, he suggested Horton talk to the judge and come up with some sort of deal. “See what you can work out.”

  The judge wanted Evans bad. It wasn’t only the book. But Evans had also burglarized several antique shops in Vermont around the same time. Local shop owners were calling for a stiff sentence. He was a repeat offender.

  Horton’s job, however, was to get the book back and prepare Evans for the Jeffrey Williams trial. So he and Wingate made several trips to Vermont to curry favor between U.S. attorneys from Vermont and New York and the federal judge. Evans said he would do two years at the most. The judge, after carefully analyzing the situation, perhaps realizing that if the library wanted the book back he was going to have to cave into Evans’s demands, made an offer of twenty-seven months. Looking back, Horton explained how it was the only way the feds could get the book back. Evans was in control of the situation; he could destroy the book and never set foot again in the Northeast.

  Of course, no one could have known it at the time, but they were cutting a deal with a serial killer.

  When Evans called Horton back, Horton explained the situation. Evans wasn’t all that thrilled—he had put a cap on twenty-four months—but agreed, nonetheless, to turn himself and the book in.

  The Monte Mario Motel, only one mile from Horton’s home in Latham, was a ramshackle, weekly rental that derelicts from all walks of life frequented. Weather-stained white stucco on the exterior bore traces of grime and dirt collected from the years of neglect, while the inside of the rooms would have likely offended homeless people. Evans had been staying at the hotel on and off for years.

  By the middle of June 1994, Horton and Wingate had made plans with Evans to meet at 8:00 one morning in the parking lot of the Monte Mario. Evans was reluctant, of course, but at the same time ready to go to jail and fulfill his obligation to Horton.

  “Just have the book!” Horton told him when they spoke a few days before the meet.

  CHAPTER 76

  As Horton and Wingate pulled into the Monte Mario, they saw Evans standing in the parking lot with a bag of toiletries in his hand, smiling.

  “What’s up, Gar?” Horton said as he and Wingate got out of the car.

  “We meet again….”

  “Listen, I have to search you. I’m not going to be made to look like a fool for turning you over to the FBI and you’re packing all kinds of ‘goodies.’”

  “Go for it.”

  The plan was, Horton and Wingate would arrest Evans and drive him to Rutland, Vermont, to meet with the FBI. Once there, he would become federal property.

  As Horton went to pat Evans down, Evans handed over three handcuff keys: one underneath his watch, another in his shoe and a third tucked inside a hand-made seam in his belt. He had a fourth key, however, Horton never found. Years later, he explained how, as Horton and Wingate pulled into the parking lot, he swallowed the fourth key. He figured once he had a chance to get settled into his cell up north, he could recycle it through his body and hide it on his body or in his cell.

  Horton and Wingate had such a respectful relationship with Evans that they decided against handcuffing him. It was a long, dull ride up to Rutland. Why make things more tense?

  So, like three buddies on their way to a weekend of drinking and fishing, Horton, driving, Wingate, riding shotgun, and Evans, alone in the backseat unhandcuffed, began their journey up to Vermont.

  “I wasn’t upset at the fact that he didn’t have the book on him,” Horton recalled later. “In fact, if he’d had it on him, I would have thought differently about him and even lost some respect for him.”

  The drive was unremarkable. They talked about their lives, television, sports—and how Evans had let Horton down. Along the way, Horton stopped and bought Evans cookies and milk, doughnuts and potato chips.

  “You are unbelievable,” Horton, shaking his head in disgust, said at one point after stopping at a rest stop. “You couldn’t just stay out of trouble until after the Jeffrey Williams trial?”

  “I left the area, didn’t I? I didn’t do anything around here.”

  “You didn’t go far enough away…. You really pissed that judge off. You are not going to be welcomed with open arms up there. I hope you realize that.”

  At any point, Evans could have jumped out of the car, or taken off during one of their many stops.

  “Doug and I figured that he had turned himself in and wasn’t interested in running.”

  Horton had made earlier plans to meet several FBI agents at a local Denny’s restaurant in Rutland.

  “We bought Gary breakfast, told him to be a good little boy for the feds, turned him over and drove back to Albany.”

  The FBI then shackled Evans, put him in a cruiser and drove north to where he had hidden the book.

  In true bureaucratic fashion, the FBI gave the New York State Police no credit for getting Evans to turn over the book. On June 22, 1994, the Rutland Herald, a local Vermont newspaper, ran the headline: FBI RECOVERS AUDUBON BOOK; MAN ARRESTED.

  According to Evans later, not only did the FBI not want to admit that Horton and Wingate had been instrumental in the return of the book, but one agent mocked Evans’s relationship with them, saying, “You don’t have your ‘friends’ from the New York State Police here to protect you now.”

  Evans hadn’t been locked up in nearly seven years. Now a product of the federal system, he was at the mercy of overcrowding and available bed space and thus shipped frequently around the Northeast, from prison to prison, like a box of documents.

  Horton and Wingate went to see him when they could, but months would go by without any contact. When Evans felt they were blowing him off, he’d dash off a letter. It was clear that prison was turning an already paranoid deviant into an insolated sociopath who began to allow the demons that had controlled him periodically throughout the years take
full control over him.

  I hope you can come soon, Evans wrote to Horton in early 1995. I’m not doing too good…. I’m talking to a doctor here. Can someone talk to me?

  The remainder of the letter, which was brief, consisted of Evans begging for some sort of attention from Horton. His handwriting had changed; it was unsteady, scribbled and almost unreadable.

  After receiving the letter, Horton went to see him.

  “All he did was cry,” Horton recalled later. “He was in the worst state of being I had ever seen him.”

  The Jeffrey Williams trial was slated for summer. Horton needed Evans in good emotional health, but the next letter, written a week later, proved he was, perhaps, beyond that point now: I am very fucked up. I’m going to be OK for trial…. I’m just…I just get scared in these places. I’m not OK.

  His sentences, at times, made little sense: I love [Doris Sheehan] so much everything gone I can’t I’m not doing good. Can you come and talk to me please or call me because I’m not doing good at all.

  With the Jeffrey Williams trial looming, Horton once again went to see him.

  “Gary Evans had turned into a different person…. He was losing his mind, literally,” Horton recalled. “His entire look had changed from bad to worse. He was now nearly completely bald. That bothered him. He wasn’t showering.”

  Indeed, Evans had realized too little too late that it had been a mistake to turn over the book. Two years behind bars was like a life sentence.

  The changes Horton had seen in Evans by the summer of 1995, however, were nothing compared to what Evans had been doing shortly before he had turned himself in to Horton and Wingate.

  CHAPTER 77

  Gary Evans had always referred to Bill Murphy, a Troy native he had met in the fourth grade while they were classmates at School Ten in Troy, as the “only honest friend [he] ever had.” Throughout the years, Evans turned to a life of crime while Bill got married and divorced, remarried, worked an honest job in a factory and lived a secluded, family life in South Troy before moving to the country.

  Evans would show up at Bill’s house at about 8:00 on some mornings and just shoot the shit with him over a workout. Bill had a gym in his house. He worked third shift. Evans would never tell Bill anything that would get him into trouble with the law or make him an accessory to a crime, but Bill had no trouble reading between the lines and drawing conclusions of his own.

  Over the course of the past ten years—1985 to 1995—Bill had watched his childhood friend change from a hot-headed young kid who wasn’t afraid of anyone, someone who kept scores of girlfriends, to an introverted loner who became relentlessly paranoid and, Bill later admitted, strangely “afraid of people.”

  There were times when Bill would complain to Evans about a boss or neighbor. Evans would get an evil look in his eye and say something frightening: “I’ll take care of it for you, Bill. Don’t worry about it.”

  “No, Gary,” Bill would tell him, “don’t do anything! Let me live my life and deal with people my own way.”

  Bill simply wanted to be there as a friend for someone he saw as never having had a chance in life.

  “I don’t condone what he did,” Bill said later, “but I understand how he turned out the way he did.”

  Bill had seen it firsthand. Evans’s father would beat Evans savagely and, after kicking Bill out of the apartment, stow Evans away in his room for days at a time.

  “He would even take the lightbulbs out of Gary’s room so he couldn’t see anything. And he would starve the poor kid. That’s how Gary learned to be a sneak—he was forced into it.”

  Bill also saw some of the violence Evans’s mother’s boyfriends and husbands seemed to direct toward Evans, who was much smaller than the other kids. Some of Flora Mae’s boyfriends and husbands used Evans as a whipping post, Bill recalled, often beating him for no particular reason in front of Bill and other neighborhood kids.

  One of Evans’s favorite things to do as a thief, Bill recalled, was to “hit the same place twice.” Evans had done it several times. He relished the emotional high he got out of burglarizing an antique shop or jewelry store and then going back a few weeks later and hitting it again.

  One time, Evans pulled up to Bill’s house with a load of bedding and large, bulky items in the back of his truck. Bill asked him what he was doing.

  “I need it to cover me,” Evans said. He wanted to burglarize a particular jewelry store—he never told Bill the name or location—in broad daylight. He was excited. The thrill was in getting away with it in front of a crowd of people. He would hit the place on a Sunday afternoon while patrons in the bar across the street were getting drunk. He explained that the mattresses and bedding were going to block the view from the bar. He would park his truck in front of the building and be in and out within fifteen minutes.

  At times, Evans would just stop showing up at Bill’s, and Bill understood that if he didn’t hear from him for a period of time, he was either on the run or in prison.

  “Each time he came out of prison,” Bill explained, “he was harder.” Oddly, Evans had always told Bill he was terrified of growing old. “Old people creeped him out. He hated wrinkly skin and just about everything about them.” For that reason alone, whenever they’d discuss it, Evans would suggest that he would never make it beyond fifty.

  There came a point during their relationship, however, when Bill became terrified of his longtime friend.

  “Gary started to become more paranoid over the years. He began scaring me. Talking really crazy. He had always said he wanted to kill a ‘woman and a nigger.’ I don’t know that he ever did, nor did I want to [know]. I could have gotten him to open up more, but I just didn’t want to know about certain things. And he respected that.”

  Bill was intrigued, he said, by the stories Evans would tell him. After a night of slaving in the factory, Bill would sit attentively and listen to Evans spin one yarn after the other. But as the years passed and Evans became more engrossed in a life Bill felt involved more than simple burglary, his behavior became more bizarre. Once, Bill went out into his barn and noticed several coffee cans along the side of the back wall. They were full of human fecal matter. It wouldn’t be until years later that Bill found out Evans was defecating in the cans so he could sift through the waste and find a handcuff key he had swallowed after the cops had pulled him over or he had spent the night in jail.

  Yet, if that wasn’t strange enough, something Bill found one day inside a dollhouse Evans had been building in Bill’s garage affected Bill enough to where he began to put as much distance between him and Evans as he could without offending him.

  Evans would stop by from time to time and work on the miniature dollhouse. Like his paintings and stained-glass designs, he relished the tranquillity of creating something from scratch. One day, though, when he wasn’t around, Bill went out into the garage just to take a look at the miniature house. Underneath it, he discovered a trapdoor. Inside the trapdoor was a smattering of rather odd items Bill would have never figured Evans to own: several transsexual and homosexual magazines, along with dildos and other sexual toys one might use for gay sex.

  Could Evans have been a closet bisexual? Bill never confronted him about it. He kept the information to himself, noting, “I am not a homosexual. I have nothing against homosexuals, but I cannot believe Gary was.”

  An acquaintance, however, viewed the situation differently and believed from the first day she met Evans that he was gay, regardless of the women he bragged about having sex with. Evans never liked her, she said, and always seemed to avoid her. Perhaps, she later noted, it was his way of not wanting to be figured out.

  Another close friend of Evans’s talked later in further detail about his paranoia, and how it had spiraled out of control during the same period. Evans would, according to this friend, sneak into the homes of people who spooked him just so he could go through their possessions. Sometimes he would go in at night while they were sleeping and just ob
serve them. Once, while dating a young woman whom he had started to have feelings for, he broke into her home while she was gone so he could hide in the closet and later watch her. By mere habit, perhaps, he decided to bring along a .22-caliber pistol.

  While in her bedroom, the woman came home. Evans heard voices, a male and female. So he ducked into the closet in her bedroom.

  Standing in the dark, crossing his chest with the pistol as though he were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, his heart pounding in anxiety, Evans listened as the woman made love to the guy.

  “He said he thought about breaking out of the closet and shooting them both,” the friend recalled later, “but he decided against it because she had a kid.”

  Given that he had broken into so many homes throughout the years, many of which were people he knew, some believe he had also been sneaking around Horton’s house while Horton, his wife and kids were at home or away.

  Faced with this prospect later, Horton said plainly, “If I would have ever caught Gary Evans in my home, I would have killed him…and he knew that—because I had warned him about it.”

  Despite the horror Evans lived as a child of two alcoholics and the blame he later placed on his mother for picking such violent and abusive spouses, Evans loved the women in his life and showered them with gifts of jewelry and expensive vacations. His women throughout the years numbered in the dozens. From underage girls to overweight women, from nice-looking women to women who might have easily passed for men. It was true he didn’t discriminate when it came to choosing lovers, and there is no doubt he enjoyed having sex with many different partners.

  Some of his women claimed he was a responsive lover who never wanted to do anything out of the ordinary. “Missionary style, that’s it!” said one woman. “The only odd thing he liked to do sexually,” said another woman, “was perform oral sex on me while I was menstruating. He said it was a natural thing and it didn’t bother him.”

  Like a rock star, Evans took Polaroids of his women while he was having sex with them and kept the photographs in a scrapbook as souvenirs. The photos, scores of them, show Evans and his partners in various positions of sexual pleasure. Evans had even allowed someone close to him, a male, to have sex with some of his women while he participated.