Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  Kill him.

  On October 3, 1997, Evans and Rysedorph hooked up at about 12:35 P.M. in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx in Latham, which was directly in front of the apartment complex Lisa Morris had moved into with her daughter, Christina, sometime after Damien Cuomo disappeared.

  The plan was, Evans told Tim, to drive over to the Spare Room II storage facility, where Evans and Rysedorph had both rented units, and go through the merchandise they had recently stolen.

  “We need to part ways, Timmy,” Evans said when he sat down in Tim’s car in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx. “It’s getting too hot right now.”

  The idea was to split up the merchandise and not see each other for a while.

  “Where are you going?” Tim asked.

  “Canada? The West Coast? Not sure,” Evans said. “Forget that shit. Follow me to the Spare Room. Okay?”

  The Spare Room II was about a two-minute drive from T.J. Maxx. By 12:50 P.M., Evans and Tim were at Spare Room II sifting through what little merchandise they had left.

  After they finished, both men drove to Lisa Morris’s apartment and had an argument outside in the parking lot as Lisa watched from her balcony.

  Lisa later said the argument was over checks Tim had cashed. Evans was upset about it. It was sloppy. They were going to get caught.

  “Tim will ‘roll over’ on me,” Evans later told Lisa, “because he has never been arrested before and he has a wife and kid.”

  Throughout the day, Tim and Evans showed up at various times and took several items from Lisa’s apartment. Lisa later said she saw them at about 5:00 P.M. in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx. Evans parked his truck, got into Tim’s car and they took off. But a half hour later, they returned to her apartment: Evans driving his truck, Tim his car. By 6:30, they left again in Tim’s car after another argument. At 9:00 P.M., Evans called Lisa. “I’m with my partner…. Can you pick me up in Troy if I need you to?”

  “Sure,” Lisa said.

  It was the last time Lisa could verify Tim Rysedorph’s whereabouts.

  As the night of October 3 wore on, Caroline Parker kept calling Tim, asking him when he was coming home. Evans later said it “pissed Tim off” that she wouldn’t leave him alone. At 1:03 A.M., on October 4, Tim finally called Caroline and told her he’d be home in forty minutes. He was at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Latham, not too far away from the Spare Room II.

  “I have to be home soon, Gar,” Tim said while getting back into his car. “I’ve been gone all day.”

  “One more trip to the storage shed,” Evans said. “Help me load up the rest of the shit.”

  Tim didn’t know it, but Evans had his .22-caliber handgun tucked inside the front of his pants.

  Back at the storage shed, as Tim was leaning down inside the shed to pick up a box of stolen merchandise, Evans quietly walked up from behind and shot him three times in the back of the head. It was over quickly: pop, pop, pop.

  With Tim Rysedorph lying dead on the concrete floor of the storage shed, Evans walked over to a box he had placed in the shed a few days earlier. After grabbing a rubber bib, much like what a fish monger might wear, and putting it on, he took out a chain saw and started it. While grabbing one of Tim’s legs, Evans later admitted, he began talking to himself: You motherfucker…you should have never ripped me off.

  Later, while telling the story to Horton, Evans said he “almost got sick at one point” as he proceeded to cut off Tim’s legs and arms. He had picked out a burial site in Brunswick days earlier, but it was a steep hill and the only way he could get Tim’s body up the hill in one trip was to cut it up and bag it.

  CHAPTER 80

  After changing clothes and washing the blood off his hands the best he could, Evans drove to the local supermarket and bought a box of plastic black garbage bags and a gallon of bleach. It was light out now. People were beginning to get up, have their morning coffee and head off to work.

  Evans, though, had a body—in five pieces—to bury, a weapon to get rid of and a bloody storage shed to clean up.

  As he sadistically chopped Tim’s body into pieces, blood and bone fragments had sprayed all over the place. Once the cops figured out that Tim had gone missing, Evans believed they would inevitably track down the storage unit Tim had rented and find his name and unit shortly afterward. The unit had to be spotless.

  It took about thirty minutes. Evans bagged and taped each part of Tim’s body in a separate garbage bag and put the bags into a cardboard box, along with the clothes he had worn while dismembering him. Then he began cleaning the walls and floor of the unit with bleach and paper towels.

  As he scrubbed and wiped up the blood, the bleach fumes began to overcome him and, he said later, he nearly passed out. So he walked over to the garage door and opened it about six inches to allow fresh air into the room.

  With bloody paper towels and smudged blood all over the floor, as he continued to clean, Evans then heard footsteps.

  What the fuck?

  Crawling over to the opening of the door, he watched as the manager of Spare Room II, who had been working in his office, began walking toward his unit.

  Shit.

  Evans then stood up. Ran over to where he had kept one of his shotguns, grabbed hold of it, and hurried back to the garage door.

  Standing, pointing the gun directly toward the door at eye level, the end of the barrel touching the inside of the door, he waited.

  “As soon as he lifted that door,” Evans told Horton later, “I was going to blow his fucking head off.”

  Oddly enough, however, something beckoned the manager back to his office. As he placed his hands on the bottom of the door to begin lifting it up, he stopped, turned and walked back to the office for some reason.

  “That is the luckiest motherfucker in the world,” Evans later told Horton. “He has no idea how close he came to being buried next to Tim Rysedorph.”

  When Evans finished loading Tim’s body parts into the cardboard box, he walked up to T.J. Maxx, got in his truck, drove back down to Spare Room II and loaded the box of body parts, the clothes he had worn while he dismembered Tim and the chain saw into the back of his truck. Before leaving, he drove over to the chain-link fence that corralled the grounds of Spare Room II and threw the .22-caliber handgun he had used to kill Tim Rysedorph over the fence and into a small gulch that ran along the interstate.

  “Gary drew me a map,” Horton said later, “and, unbelievable to us, months later we found the weapon.”

  After burying Tim’s body parts in several shallow graves just over the Troy city line in Brunswick, Evans drove down to a concrete plant on First Street in Troy located on the banks of the Hudson River (merely blocks from where he grew up). He tossed the chain saw and his clothes into the water. Watching the muddy water of the Hudson swallow the bag and chain saw, he decided to take off out west.

  Covered with mud from head to toe, he then drove over to Lisa Morris’s apartment in Latham, cleaned himself up and had a glass of milk and a box of Freihofer’s chocolate-chip cookies. He then went to sleep.

  When he awoke hours later, he packed a bag and took off.

  When Horton finally convinced Evans to confess to Tim Rysedorph’s murder late in the day on June 19, 1998, after the Bureau had captured Evans in Vermont based on a tip Lisa Morris provided, Evans started crying. “It’s going to be hard,” he said through tears.

  Because Horton had been involved in a number of dismemberment cases for a few years leading up to Evans’s capture and confession, he said later he “sort of knew what [Evans] meant” when he said “hard.” He had a hunch he was talking about the actual killing itself, not his emotional state at the time.

  Banking on his instinct, Horton then asked Evans, “What do you mean, ‘It’s going to be hard’…did you cut him up?”

  After Evans “regained his composure and stopped crying,” he looked up at Horton and smirked, as if to suggest he was proud of what he had done. In his mind, he had graduated: from common
murderer—if there ever was such a thing—to a sadistic sociopath who had put another feather in his cap of evil.

  Horton, a bit taken aback, then asked, “Did you cut him up or not?”

  “Yes,” Evans answered plainly, without emotion.

  “Did you cut his head off, too?” Horton asked next, realizing at that moment that the man he had been playing cat and mouse with for nearly thirteen years was a vicious serial killer he had not really known at all.

  Evans then stared at Horton with a “surprised” look on his face and, with an expression of seriousness only a multiple murderer could conjure, said, “What…Do you think I am sick—that I would cut someone’s head off? Jesus Christ, Guy!”

  Horton didn’t answer. It was time to find Tim Rysedorph’s body and return it to his family. Evans’s days of thinking he could control the situation were over.

  CHAPTER 81

  Jim Horton had spent the better part of eight hours with Gary Evans in the interrogation suite at Bureau headquarters in Loudonville on June 19, 1998, finally getting him to confess to murdering Tim Rysedorph. It had been one of the most labor-intensive and emotionally draining interrogations Horton had ever done in his twenty years of police work. Things were different now. Evans was no longer the criminal he was trying to get to go straight by setting him up with jobs, or helping him get time chipped off a sentence for setting up a dope dealer or returning a book.

  “I wasn’t one hundred percent sure Gary had actually murdered Michael Falco and Damien Cuomo until that point,” Horton recalled later. “I had no idea, of course, that he had taken a chain saw to one of his victims. It was as shocking to me as it would be to the community in the days and weeks to come.”

  For Evans, there would be no more deals. No more midnight snacks of cookies and milk. No more trading information for prison time. Indeed, no more freedom.

  After Evans gave up Tim, he began to descend into a depression that he had never before experienced. He went from “bad to worse” in a matter of minutes while in Horton’s company. The circles underneath his eyes had seemingly turned from gray to brown to black in just a few hours. He hadn’t shaved for some time, and his face, sunken and seemingly skeletal-looking, took on an entirely new persona.

  “He wasn’t,” Horton recalled, “the Gary Evans I had known all those years. He looked, physically, much different after he admitted murdering Timmy Rysedorph.”

  Horton didn’t want to waste any time. If he had to, he would get the floodlights out and dig up Tim’s body parts in the middle of the night. The only thing standing in his way now was the location.

  Evans wanted to stay at Troop G and talk about Michael Falco and Damien Cuomo, but Horton kept him focused on Tim Rysedorph. Once he had Tim’s body, he could begin talking about the others.

  One at a time.

  Some of the longest days of the year in the Northeast are in June. Sunset on June 19, 1998, wasn’t until 8:36 P.M., which would make it light out until at least 9:00.

  With Horton driving and Chuck DeLuca, a Bureau investigator, sitting directly behind him, investigator Jack Murray riding shotgun, a sober-looking, shackled and handcuffed Gary Evans sat quietly behind Murray. A posse of vehicles—the CSI and MCU—followed as they all headed for Brunswick to exhume Tim Rysedorph’s body.

  This was what Evans enjoyed more than anything. He was in charge, whether Horton wanted to admit it or not. Here they were en route to find Tim’s body parts and Evans was calling the shots once again: “Turn here. No, take a right there. Go up that hill. Stop. No, this isn’t it. Maybe it’s up there somewhere?”

  A true indication of a sociopath is his “callousness” and “lack of empathy for his victims.” Instead of empathy, he shows “contempt for others’ feelings of distress and readily takes advantage of them.”

  This description would never fit Evans more perfectly than in the coming days and weeks as the Bureau uncovered body after body. While Evans began talking, explaining where he had buried bodies, he started to realize more and more how in control he was of the situation, and thus began using it to work on Horton and those few other people he allowed into his life. Essentially, he had nothing left to bargain with. He knew he was going to prison now for life, and perhaps, since New York had reinstated the death penalty in 1995, he would even get the chair.

  What, really, did Evans have to lose?

  As they drove, Evans began to say he wasn’t exactly sure where the location was.

  “Don’t fuck with me now, Gar,” Horton said as he drove through downtown Troy into Brunswick.

  Evans didn’t answer.

  Jack Murray, sitting in front of Evans, kept turning around and looking at him. Murray was a bit on edge, wondering if Evans was going to reach over the seat and strangle him. DeLuca, sitting beside Evans, had a good bead on the situation. If Evans so much as moved, he would feel the cold steel barrel of DeLuca’s 9mm Glock poking at his temple.

  “I wasn’t screwing around any longer,” Horton said. “This was serious.”

  As they passed a sign welcoming them to Brunswick, Evans began breathing heavily, almost hyperventilating. “Put my window down…. Roll my window down,” he started yelling. “I need some air…motherfucker, I need air.”

  “What the hell?” Horton said.

  “Roll it down, Guy. Come on….”

  Horton gave in, but only rolled it down about six inches. Evans, like a dog, stuck his face out the window and took in what little air he could get.

  “Gar, where are we going?”

  “Keep driving…keep driving.”

  Horton looked at Jack Murray, then into his rearview mirror at DeLuca. They didn’t say anything to one another. It was more of an eye gesture and a subliminal agreement among them: You had better not be fucking with us.

  Brunswick is extremely wooded and rural—the perfect spot, in other words, to bury someone.

  As Horton came up to a small stream near Shippey Lane, Evans told him to pull over. “Right there. That dirt patch. Hurry up….”

  He was about to get sick.

  “Don’t puke in the car, Gar. Hold on,” Horton said.

  As the car came to a stop, Evans opened the door and began vomiting.

  Horton whispered to Murray and DeLuca, “We must be close.”

  After Evans finished, he said, “Hey, Guy, I need to talk to you.”

  “What is it, Gar? Come on. We need to find that body.”

  Evans made it clear that he wanted to talk to Horton alone. A bit hesitant, Horton asked Murray and DeLuca to excuse themselves for a moment.

  “We had come so far up to this point,” Horton recalled later. “But without a body, we might as well have been at square one. It was very tense. We were worried that at any second Gary would say, forget it.”

  The rest of the crime scene entourage had pulled over a few hundred yards behind, waiting for word to continue.

  “I need to call [my nephew],” Evans said in a whisper.

  “You what?”

  Evans wanted to talk to his half-sister Robbie’s son, Devan.

  Without asking why, Horton handed Evans his cell phone. “Take your time, Gar. We can wait.”

  Robbie answered. “It’s me, sis. I need to tell you some things,” Evans said immediately.

  “It was hard to hear him very well,” Robbie recalled later. “I kept telling him to ‘speak up.’ His voice was very soft. He was crying.”

  Evans wanted to explain to the only family he had left what was going to happen over the next few days. He knew once the newspapers got hold of the story, it would turn into a media circus, and he wanted to prepare Robbie and Devan for what was going to happen.

  “Sis,” Evans continued, “I’ve done some bad stuff and I don’t want you to know all about it. Please don’t hate me for what I have done. I had to take care of myself. I never wanted it to end this way. Don’t read the papers or get on the Internet. I don’t want you to know all the details.”

  Evans had a
lways been, Robbie said, “protective of her” and Devan. He wanted to shelter them now more than ever. The horror of who he truly was hadn’t even been made public, yet he was already beginning to rationalize his behavior.

  “I haven’t hurt any children or women,” Evans added, “only bad people.” Again, more justification for the terror he had perpetrated on five victims, two of whom were innocent jewelry shop owners. “Don’t hate me for what I’ve done. I’m not a monster. I just have to get this over.”

  Horton stood by and tried to give Evans what privacy he needed.

  “I’m with Jim,” he continued. “I’m okay. He’s taking good care of me…. I love you.” By this point, Robbie recalled later, “he was really sobbing and very pensive.”

  “Have a good life,” Evans then said. “I wish I could have been more, but I am not to be in this world. I chose this life. I’m at peace with myself. I just need to get the pain out of my heart and be done with it all. I’m tired. I want out of this life.”

  Then, as if he wanted to prove that he could be remorseful, he said, “I wanted to protect the children,” meaning the children of his victims. “I go in peace now, whenever that may be. I learned some really hard lessons. I learned a lot I wish I never knew. I did this. Of course, everything has been affected by the things that happened to me as a child—but I still had free choice. I chose my way.”

  After a brief pause to collect his composure, Evans said, “I hate the world.”

  “You okay, Gar?” Horton asked.

  “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 82

  About one hundred yards from where Horton and his entourage had pulled off Route 2 to allow Evans a place to vomit and call Robbie, there were large power lines cutting across Route 2, near the corner of Shyne Road.