Every Move You Make (35 page)

In the back of the building, just below the window, was an office, Bear Construction Company. It was around 4:30
P.M
. when Evans and Cuomo began scheduling the break-in, they figured workers in the building would be gone by 5:00, 6:00
P.M
. the latest. They also knew from Cuomo’s informant that Berry generally closed the shop at about 6:00 and retreated to his loft after getting dinner.

Sitting in Damien’s Fifth Avenue later that evening, parked in the back parking lot, waiting for Berry to lock down the shop and turn off the lights, Evans noticed something while staring at the building.

“What is it?” Cuomo asked as Evans went quiet.

“I bet that motherfucker won’t even lock the window.”

CHAPTER 58

Contingencies are an unpredictable part of even the best-laid plans. Where burglary is concerned, the unexpected always happens. Throughout Evans’s career as a thief, whenever he set out to burgle, he rarely took into account the nature of the people he was stealing from. He generally took people for granted and believed he was smarter than everyone else—including law enforcement, Horton especially. Innocent people were, to Evans, merely obstacles. He believed he would always escape the jobs he did unblemished because he had thought every aspect through in detail. As for the Square Lion in Watertown, because of the uncontrollable greed he harbored, Evans was about to break one of his golden rules of never entering a building while someone was inside.

Douglas Berry, for some reason, still had the lights on in the Square Lion as 9:00 turned to 10:00
P.M
., and 11:00 crept up on midnight. He was either watching television or working late. Either way, as Evans and Damien waited patiently for the signal—lights out—to go in, they wondered whether the opportunity would ever arise.

“What the fuck is this guy doing?” Evans wondered out loud at one point.

Then, at about midnight, Berry emerged from the shop and walked up the street to Mr. Sub, a local grinder shop. Inside, he chitchatted with the girl behind the counter about collecting baseball cards. After about twenty minutes, the girl finished making Berry’s favorite grinder, a turkey sub, handed him an orange soda, and, after Berry paid, before he left, he said, “Stop by the shop tomorrow about ten
A.M
.”

“You’ll be there?”

“Yes, I’m sleeping there tonight.”

As Berry left, four white males, who had been hanging around inside the sub shop while he had been talking to the clerk, followed him out. The clerk recalled later that there were two more white males waiting outside. And they “might have overheard her conversation” with Berry about the baseball cards.

Seeing that Berry wasn’t going to be going to sleep any time soon, Evans and Damien decided to go out and get something to eat.

By 12:30
A.M
., September 8, Berry finished his grinder and nestled himself up in his loft to watch television and fall asleep.

At about 4:30
A.M
., nearly daylight, Evans recalled later, he made a decision that Berry had been sleeping long enough for them to get in without being heard. But there was a slight change of plans, he mentioned to Cuomo. Evans said he would now go in first, but he wanted Cuomo right behind him. As soon as Evans got inside, as Damien Cuomo crawled through the window, Evans explained, he was going to sneak up behind Berry while he slept, hold his .22-caliber pistol to Berry’s head and watch him until Damien zipped around the shop and collected what they wanted.

If Berry so much as twitched, Evans promised, he was going to shoot him in the back of the head.

“Sounds good, Gar,” Damien said.

With that, Evans remembered later, he “grabbed the fire escape and got a good hold…then reached down and pulled Damien up.” From there, they walked across the piping the electrical wire was housed in and made it to the window in under a minute.

Looking at the window, Evans whispered, “It’s fucking open! I told you.”

Not a few minutes after they had emerged from Damien’s Fifth Avenue, Evans and Damien were standing inside the Square Lion Coin and Jewelry, and no one—including Douglas Berry—had seen or heard a thing.

Once inside, Evans pointed to where he wanted Cuomo to begin. Then he sneaked up behind Berry, who had shuffled a bit as he approached but didn’t wake up, and knelt quietly behind him, the barrel of his .22 pointed directly at his head.

Don’t you fucking move a muscle, old man.

CHAPTER 59

Evans had always kept a copy of
Criminal Investigation: Basic Perspectives
throughout most of his criminal life. He valued greatly what the book offered him as a thief. If cops studied the book to learn more about their prey, Evans pointed out later, why couldn’t he study the book from a criminal’s standpoint? It seemed only logical that he could stay one step ahead of law enforcement if he knew what they were doing.

Found later, the copy Evans owned was marked up with notes he had handwritten. He had also highlighted portions of text he wanted to remember. The most tattered and worn pages were from a chapter titled “The Investigation of Burglary.” He had studied this section, obviously, more than any other. He wrote notes, circled phrases and words, underlined pieces of text.

The method Evans and Damien had used to gain entry into Douglas Berry’s coin shop, according to
Criminal Investigation: Basic Perspectives
, was called the “stepover or human fly move.”

Authors Paul Weston and Kenneth Wells wrote, “The burglar is an aerialist. The ‘stepover burglar’ steps from a fire escape, balcony, or other building to a nearby window….”

This was the exact procedure they had used to gain entry into Berry’s shop. In the book, Evans had underlined the passage, seemingly pushing down hard with his pen, indicating to himself, perhaps, that he would ultimately run across this exact situation at some point during his career.

“There is no doubt that Gary Evans was a professional thief, burglar, arsonist, murderer,” Horton recalled later. “He knew his ‘trade’ very well, and would tell me that he spent hours and weeks and months studying crime and how to be the most effective criminal he could be. But his weaknesses, in the end, overcame his strengths. I wouldn’t realize it until years later, but while committing that burglary in Watertown with Damien Cuomo, he crossed a line I never thought he would.”

Once Evans crossed that line, Horton acknowledged, there was nowhere left for him to go but further down.

Damien had taken an “army zip-up type of bag” with him into the Square Lion. He planned on filling the bag with as much jewelry, gold, coins and rare baseball cards as he could find while Evans watched over Berry.

“When we got into the place,” Evans said later, “we tried to be real quiet, but the floors were squeaky. Damien went toward the front of the store and started putting stuff in the bag.”

That was when, he added, things took an unexpected turn.

Evans had hopped up on top of a glass jewelry case to get up where Berry was sleeping in his loft. The jump up was noisy, but not enough to wake Berry.

Squatting at the “head end” of Berry’s cot, Evans held his .22-caliber pistol an inch or so from Berry’s head.

If the motherfucker moves, he’s done.

As Damien tried desperately to be quiet, the floorboards, squeaking and squawking, refused to cooperate. Every step produced a tired-sounding, slow and loud creak in the floor, like the whine of an old screen door closing.

As Berry snored, he began to shift in his cot as Cuomo moved about the shop.

“Keep fucking quiet,” Evans whispered.

Cuomo then took a tray of diamond rings, gold chains and necklaces and dumped it all at once into his bag. This startled Berry, Evans recalled later, and he “seemed to be waking up. He stopped snoring and started to move around a bit.”

After Cuomo finished dumping the load into his bag, he took another tray and did the same thing.

This time, Berry woke up and began looking around.

I had my gun pointed right at his head,
Evans wrote in chilling detail,
[when] the guy definitely woke up and picked his head up and turned towards me.

When Evans saw that Berry was slowly waking up and, perhaps still half-asleep, figuring out what was going on, he “shot him once in the head.”

There was no blood, struggle, or loud popping sound. After Evans fired the shot, Berry simply fell back down on his pillow, as if he had been knocked unconscious.

Even though Evans had equipped his .22 with a homemade silencer, the gun still produced a muffled sound that startled Damien.

Hearing a quick
pop
, Damien rushed toward the loft, looked up and said, “What the fuck was that?”

Evans didn’t say anything at first. Instead, he looked into Damien’s eyes and, ignoring what he asked, said, “Are you finished?”

“No. There’s more.”

“Fuck it, we’re leaving right now.”

By the time they were finished burglarizing the Square Lion, and Evans had murdered Douglas Berry, daylight had arrived. When they made it to the back window to get out, Evans spied a street sweeper working in the parking lot over near where Damien’s car had been parked. Lucky for them, the guy hadn’t heard a thing because the sweeper was so loud.

Before Evans and Cuomo sneaked out the window, Damien took the pack of Canadian cigarettes he and Evans had purchased in Canada out of his bag, crumpled it up and threw it near Berry’s body.

With over $30,000 worth of jewelry, baseball cards, coins and gold loaded in Cuomo’s bag, he and Evans drove back to Troy without a problem.

Once they got back to town, they made a date to meet in three days. It was agreed that Damien would hold on to the stolen merchandise. He knew someone who would buy most of it, he said. “I’ll get rid of it,” he told Evans, “and pay you when I see you in three days.”

“I’ll be there.”

At about 10:00
A.M
., on September 8, Shirley Berry, Douglas Berry’s wife, decided she’d drive down to the Square Lion after trying unsuccessfully to reach her husband by phone all morning. Something, Mrs. Berry thought, was wrong. It was out of character for Douglas not to answer the phone.

When Shirley entered the shop at a few minutes after ten that morning, she saw a few of the jewelry cases opened. It appeared as though some items were missing, but she wasn’t sure. Confused, she said loudly, “Douglas?”

After not getting an answer, Mrs. Berry then went up to the loft, where she found him lying on his cot, seemingly still asleep.

Her first thought was that he’d had a heart attack in his sleep. He looked so peaceful just lying there. With a .22-caliber weapon, the hole it leaves in the human body is so small that if the wound isn’t on an easily accessible part of the body, it is almost impossible to see.

With her husband dead, Mrs. Berry phoned the local Watertown Police Department (WPD) to report a possible break-in, and what she now believed was the murder of her husband. “It’s suspicious,” she told the dispatcher, “because I noticed diamonds and gold coins missing from one of the display cases.”

By 2:20
P.M
. that same day, state police investigator Keith Fairchild from Troop D in Oneida, New York, was on the scene. After some preliminary interviews with Shirley Berry, the medical examiner and a few other local law enforcement, all he could come up with was one .22-caliber spent projectile found near Berry’s head, a “fired bullet casing” by his right elbow, a crumpled pack of Canadian cigarettes and a size-ten “latent footprint” found on a piece of glass in the back of the shop.

CHAPTER 60

As they had planned earlier that week, Evans and Damien met in Troy on September 11, 1989, to decide what to do next. Damien had—as he promised he would—sold all of the merchandise stolen from Berry’s Watertown jewelry shop. “Here,” Cuomo said, handing Evans a wad of money. “There’s about fifteen grand there.”

Evans smiled. “Not a bad day’s work, Damien, huh?”

“I guess,” Cuomo said. He was still a bit shaky, Evans said later. Acting anxious. Not himself. Whereas Evans had killed before and the murder of Berry, an innocent victim, didn’t seem to matter much to him, Damien Cuomo was a burglar. The idea of killing a man had never been part of who he was or what he did.

“You can never tell anyone about that job, you fucking understand me?” Evans warned, changing his tone from casual to serious. “Never.”

“I know, Gar. I understand.”

Evans later explained to Horton what he was thinking as he and Damien parted ways after their brief conversation. “I really didn’t trust Damien. I knew that motherfucker had been ripping me off little by little the entire time I knew him.”

You’ll get yours, too, you little fucker
, Evans thought as he watched Cuomo drive away.
Real fucking soon.

Gary Evans and Lisa Morris, Damien’s longtime girlfriend, the mother of Damien’s child, had always hated each other, Morris explained later. “He took a lot of Damien’s time from me. They were always taking off.”

Sometimes it was a day, maybe two, perhaps even three or four. Damien would always return, though, bearing gifts for Lisa. But she still couldn’t stand to see Evans. Lisa had dreams of marrying Damien, she said. But at the same time never mentioned it to him for fear of scaring him off. “If it happened, great. I had my heart set on it. I loved Damien. He was a
great
father. He loved his daughter.”

Still, as well as Lisa and Damien were getting along, everything changed after Evans started showing up. Damien wasn’t focused on family as much. He became, Lisa insisted, more interested in “the next job” he was going to pull off with Evans.

There was one time when Evans showed up at the apartment after he and Cuomo had burgled the Square Lion, and Lisa told him to “stay the fuck away from Damien.” Evans had, as he often would, shown up out of the blue. Standing in front of Lisa on the second story of the apartment porch, listening to Lisa bellyache about taking Damien away so much, Evans stared at her and said, “You shut the fuck up or I will throw you off this balcony.”