Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  “That’s when things really got bizarre,” Horton said later.

  Bizarre wouldn’t even begin to describe what they found next.

  Taking the X ray took some time. But as the X rays came back from the lab and Dr. Wolf and Horton started going through them, they couldn’t believe their eyes.

  Buried inside Evans’s left nostril, up inside his sinus, was a handcuff key. About 1½ inches long, the loop end of the key was facing up, while the serrated end pointed down.

  Dr. Wolf, with a pair of tweezers, reached up, extracted the key and held it under the light.

  Obviously puzzled, Horton and Dr. Wolf looked at each other.

  “It was like everyone in the room, at that moment, said, ‘Why, that son of a bitch!’” Horton said later.

  Things began to make sense to Horton. The two sets of handcuffs, one of which was unattached from one of Evans’s wrist and the long pinkie fingernail.

  He hid that key and retrieved it while they were making their way across the bridge.

  Looking closer at the X ray, Dr. Wolf discovered something else. Underneath Evans’s palate, deep in his sinus, what appeared to be a piece of metal with some sort of string attached to it emerged. To get it, however, Dr. Wolf would have to do some internal probing.

  With a scalpel in hand, Dr. Wolf cut an incision along the top of Evans’s forehead and along both sides of his face, around the inside of his ears, leaving the area below his chin intact. She carefully peeled back his face and rolled it down off his skull as if it were a children’s rubber Halloween mask.

  Immediately, when the inner cavity of Evans’s sinuses was exposed, everyone took a step back because of the rancid stench.

  “It was the most profound and grotesque aroma I have ever smelled,” Horton said, “and I have been around a lot.”

  The smell was caused by the decaying and rusting metal buried underneath Evans’s palate. Dr. Wolf again took a pair of tweezers, sifted through the bloody tissue and extracted it.

  Sure enough, it was a small blade from a razor, about the size of a dime. Most interesting, though, was what Evans had done to the blade. He had drilled a tiny hole in one end and, after taking about fifteen of his hairs and braiding them into a piece of man-made rope, tied it to the blade. Apparently, he had shoved it so far up into his sinus that it forever became part of his body after tissue had entombed it.

  Up underneath the left side of his jaw, Dr. Wolf extracted another small blade that Evans had worked in between his jaw and gum, as if it were a piece of chewing tobacco.

  From there, Dr. Wolf cut the cap of Evans’s skull off and removed his brain. There were contusions and bruises on the right side, which had turned the white tissue red; the left side was still white, uninjured.

  “That’s what killed him,” someone said. “That piece of rebar that hit his head.”

  Over the next few hours, Dr. Wolf examined Evans’s entire body, taking it apart, piece by piece, and putting it back together again.

  Nothing else abnormal was uncovered. In the end, Dr. Wolf decided the cause of death was “blunt-force injuries of head and torso with basilar skull fracture,” the result of a “jump from [a] bridge.”

  CHAPTER 95

  The weekend of August 15 and 16 produced a torrent of newspaper and television reports of the Gary Evans saga. Horton and Jo Rehm refused to speak to anyone. They just wanted to let it all go, decide what to do with Evans’s body and try to move on.

  Well-wishers and old “girlfriends” of Evans’s seemingly came from everywhere to talk about their brush with him. Lisa Morris—confused, upset, angry—spoke to the press, and she used the interviews as a way to sort through her feelings. She was shell-shocked by the totality of what had taken place. Like Jo Rehm, she may have been told by Evans what was going to occur, but it didn’t mean she believed it, or had prepared a way to deal with it after it happened.

  By Saturday, August 15, Horton had received a letter in the mail from Evans. Quite matter-of-fact, the letter was devoid of any conscience or guilt. In large part, it was a detailed list of instructions for Horton to give to Doris Sheehan. Most compelling was what Evans, who referred to himself in the third person throughout much of the letter, wanted Horton to relay to Doris about his desire to commit suicide: It’s what he wanted, instead of suffering and dying every day. You know you wouldn’t want him to live in misery, you [Doris] know what [hell is] like.

  For Evans, ending his life was the only way to quash the obvious suffering he felt in his soul. It was, like his life, all about him—egotism and selfishness to the umpteenth power. Evans was wielding his self-absorbed sword once more in death, as he had in life so many times before.

  He wanted Doris to know, he wrote, that he was counting on her to have a great life.

  As he had written to the world, Evans couldn’t resist the temptation to tell Horton the same thing: I win.

  The letter, one could argue, was Evans’s final move in a game of psychological chess he and Horton had played for almost thirteen years.

  Doris Sheehan had called Jo Rehm late in the day on Friday after Evans had committed suicide to “talk,” Jo later said. The conversation didn’t yield any breakthroughs in the sense of new information, but instead allowed the two women Evans loved the most to begin what would be a long process of mourning.

  “Every time I hear a helicopter, sirens or a train,” Jo said later, “I think of that day.”

  Evans told Jo just days before his death that he wanted to be cremated. “You don’t have to pay for any of it, either,” he added. “The state will pay for it.”

  At the time, Jo thought it surreal to be talking about cremation, but she listened.

  “I want you to give my ashes to Jim Horton,” Evans added. “You and [Doris] take some, too.”

  On Saturday, August 15, Jo went down to a local funeral parlor and explained the situation. “I don’t want anything in the newspapers,” she said. “I don’t want to be hounded.”

  “Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ll take care of everything.”

  Horton, Doris Sheehan, and Jo and Ed Rehm went down to the funeral parlor on Sunday to sit with Evans before his body was sent off to the crematorium. It wasn’t a formal wake or funeral service, but more of a way to say good-bye one last time.

  Doris and Jo ended up having “words,” Jo recalled. Doris wanted to “take photographs of Evans lying in his casket,” but Jo refused to allow it. Then Doris started asking about Evans’s possessions: jewelry, a mountain bike, gold, rings.

  She wanted it all.

  “It was odd, actually,” Horton said. “She was worried about material things while Jo and I were there to say good-bye. Her boyfriend was waiting for her in the car outside the funeral home. He had no business being inside, and he knew that. I was a bit wary about being there to begin with. Her odd behavior only made it all that more strange for me.”

  Back at home the following week, Horton sat down on his couch and poured himself a glass of scotch and began thinking about the past few weeks. How surreal it had all been. How much of a blur it seemed like now—almost as if it were some sort of dream.

  Sitting, sipping from his scotch, going through some of the paperwork connected to the case, Horton came across Evans’s death certificate. For a moment, he just stared at it, not reading it. Seeing it again brought back memories of the autopsy.

  “During the autopsy, I really felt a sense of relief,” Horton recalled. “It was truly over. Again, I had some ambivalence, but it was only because, with all the work I had done, I realized I would never get the opportunity to prosecute Gary—which was my main focus once I found out he was a serial murderer.”

  After placing the death certificate down, Horton picked up a book of autopsy photographs and began flipping through the pages.

  Not only were Evans’s eyes open during the autopsy, but—Horton noticed—he had a smirk on his face throughout the entire procedure, undoubtedly frozen in that position by the mere nature
and process of death as the body goes through it.

  “It almost looked like,” Horton said, “he was alive and was going to say something. Not unlike all the other times when he didn’t want to tell me something, but he couldn’t resist. I actually think he wanted to brag to me over the years about killing Michael Falco and Damien Cuomo, but couldn’t for obvious reasons.”

  That smirk, Horton concluded, was, at least at the core of all the sensationalism attached to the life of Gary Evans, perhaps Evans, one last time, saying, “I win.”

  As if the past thirteen years had been some sort of elaborate game of psychological chess, Horton raised his scotch in a mock salute to his twisted friend and opponent….

  Checkmate!

  EPILOGUE

  Avid chess players say that the most “obscure and least-used move” in the game is the En passant, which I used as a title for the third and final section of this book. Indeed, in keeping with the metaphorical nature of En passant, Gary Evans certainly used an obscure, if not bizarre, final move to avoid not only facing Jim Horton again, but one of his worst fears: spending his life behind bars. For me, writing about Gary Evans has been one of the most interesting and exciting experiences I’ve had as a writer. I could not have written a novel that—even remotely—compares to the life of Gary Evans.

  Since September 9, 1999, Jim Horton has been deputy chief investigator for the New York State Attorney General’s Office, Department of Law. Leaving the state police wasn’t something Horton wanted to do; he lived for the thrill of the chase and loves the idea, I’m convinced, of hands-on work out in the field. Today he is confined to an office, supervising investigations of a different kind, an environment that contains his obvious talents as an investigator. I believe the public is suffering a great loss because of that.

  “I didn’t even have a résumé when I got the call asking if I was interested in taking the job at the AG’s office,” Horton recalled later. “Hardest decision I ever had to make—leaving the troopers. It was a job that I loved and still do.”

  As one might guess, Gary Evans had a major impact on Horton’s life. There’s not a week that goes by where Horton doesn’t field some sort of question about Evans. Today he looks at it all as an anomaly; he couldn’t control Evans, he says, “only react to his behavior.”

  When I discovered that Evans was perhaps involved in a second life that may have included transsexuals, I posed a question we shall leave to the imagination to Horton, who was quite shocked—to say the least—by my findings.

  “He fooled me all those years,” Horton said, shaking his head. “I should have known!” Horton seemed disappointed in himself that he had allowed Evans—in death—to one-up him one last time. “I believe I made the most out of every bad situation in every instance where it pertained to Gary. It was always a bad situation with him: burglaries, arson, guns, stolen property, murder. People have (and will) criticize me for the relationship Gary and I had. I will only say that those people are small-minded; they don’t understand the facts. Police have to deal with the worst society has to offer—and dealing with Gary was part of that.”

  Throughout the many interviews, hundreds of e-mails and scores of phone calls with Horton, I got a sense that he would, occasionally, go out of his way to prove to me how compassionate he was to victims and their families. You see, there are some people who truly misunderstand Horton and the extent of his job, the people he deals with and the horrors he has seen human beings perpetrate against one another. Anyone who is not in his shoes cannot possibly comprehend the atrocities and violence and abuse he and his former Bureau colleagues dealt with every day. So it is easy for people to sit back, read newspaper accounts of Horton’s relationship with Evans, hear sound bites on radio, see clips on television and then judge him.

  At best, the disparaging comments regarding Horton’s integrity I heard from a few people as I conducted interviews were immature and slanderous; at worst, they undermine the character and integrity of a cop who, at least in my opinion, went above and beyond the call of duty whenever the circumstances warranted it. If you re-read the first section of the book with this dynamic in mind, you will see how Horton taught himself to think outside the box in order to make sure he put those he believed to be an immediate danger to society in jail, where they belonged. He empathized with the criminals he tracked in order to understand them better. If we go back and look at history, we will find that some of our greatest generals did the same thing during the bloodiest of wars.

  The USMS would not comment on whether or not procedures were changed as a result of Gary Evans’s escape. Yet, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that since Evans’s escape, policies have been changed regarding the way the USMS transports its prisoners—mainly, the vehicles they now use.

  Off the record, I was told by a source close to the USMS that because of Gary Evans the USMS now chooses to use those white trucks we see on our roads; trucks that, in fact, entomb prisoners in cages during transport.

  Regarding the USMS, Horton would only say this: “Gary Evans was going to do whatever he was going to do no matter who was transporting him. The individuals involved did everything and more as far as ‘official procedure’ was concerned, knowing full well about Gary and how dangerous he was. They [the marshals] were as white as ghosts when I saw them on the riverbank that day. I’m sure they changed their procedure, i.e., windowless vehicles or having a marshal in the seat with the prisoner. But I just don’t know for sure if it was because of Gary Evans.”

  As I was finishing this book, I came across a few letters written by the Son of Sam to Gary Evans that I had not seen before. Mostly, the writing was that same dark, sarcastic nature I outlined in the book. Yet, in a few of the letters that the Son of Sam had written to Evans, he talked about the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. Apparently, Evans loved the book, had ranted and raved about it, and was trying to get the Son of Sam to read it. The Son of Sam ultimately wrote off Evans’s persistence and told him he had no interest in “those types of books.”

  I had always viewed the obvious parallels between Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, Harris’s follow-up to Dragon, and Gary Evans’s story as, at best, coincidental. Murder is murder. I’ve learned that killers will do the same things without even trying. Crime fiction is often based on real events. We all know that. Sure, there are certain elements of Evans’s story that one could easily argue he had pulled directly from the pages of Harris’s books. But is there a definitive connection?

  Evans, it seemed to me, wasn’t necessarily using the books as a script for life, but instead had perhaps subconsciously incorporated some of the same situations from the books into his life without trying to.

  After re-reading those letters between the Son of Sam and Evans, I decided to go back and re-read both books before I handed the manuscript of Every Move You Make into my editor. I wanted to be certain I wasn’t missing something obvious. It had been years since I had read both books; the images and characters I had in my mind were from film—hardly a way to make any comparison.

  I found several comparisons. Not exact, mind you. But strangely similar. I encourage readers to e-mail me or write to me and tell me what you think regarding the comparisons between Gary Evans and Hannibal Lecter. I can be reached by e-mail at mwilliamphelps@mwilliamphelps.com, or by snail-mail at P.O. Box 3215, Vernon, CT 06066.

  Amazing to me was that what started out as a journey to find a story that had certain elements I look for when choosing a true-crime story for a book then turned into a saga the best fiction writers of today couldn’t have dreamed up. Gary Charles Evans is probably the most interesting criminal I have ever had the opportunity to research and write about; he is the epitome of the criminal mastermind. There is a layer of his character no one will ever uncover; but I believe, in my fourteen months of full-time research and writing, interviewing dozens of people and spending, literally, hundreds of hours talking to Jim Horton, along with scouring thousands of pages of pub
lic records associated with the case, I’ve gotten to the core of who Gary Evans was as both a person and criminal.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been possible if Jim Horton hadn’t trusted me with all the information he had been harboring in his soul for years, waiting for the right writer to come along. I want to extend my gratitude and appreciation to Jim and all he has done to make this book what it is. The few people who truly know Jim Horton—of whom I can be added to that short list—understand that the humility he exudes is one of the most distinguishing and profound characteristics that sets him apart. He is extremely protective over his memories of Evans and the thirteen years he spent involved in his life. I want to thank Horton for allowing me into his world, and also Mary Pat, Alison and Jim for always being courteous and answering my questions. Horton’s career—of which only a small fraction was covered in this book—spans more than two decades and is heaving with bravery, honor, respect, dignity and, most important, integrity. Jim has made hundreds of arrests, all of them important.

  The psychotherapy checklists of Dr. H. Cleckley and Dr. R. Hare were very helpful to me as I studied Gary Evans. I quoted from those checklists in a few places throughout the book.

  I acquired a new literary agent shortly before beginning this book. Peter Miller (PMA Literary & Film Management, Inc.) has been a blessing to me at this point in my career. Like Peter, his entire staff has been kind, gracious and always available to take my calls. I thank all of you for that.

  There is no book I can write without thanking…William Acosta, J.G., A.R., R.K.

  Gregg Olsen, a brilliant author who has become an inspiration and mentor, thank you for your friendship.

  Johnny Crime and editor-in-chief Michaela Hamilton at Kensington have been superb people to work with. I am lucky to have such talented people in my corner. I also owe a considerable amount of gratitude and thanks to copyeditor Stephanie Finnegan, who was really helpful, not to mention instrumental, in shaping the book and making the final product what it is. Copyeditors are hard-working people; their work is often overlooked.