Every Move You Make (8 page)

It was the first time Horton had ever heard the name. “How was he when you saw him last?”

“He had a very explosive temper,” she continued, “and hated [Caroline].”

“What about where he is now; do you have any idea where we might find him?”

“I know Gary has a storage shed, but I don’t know where it is. I know he stores his ‘stuff,’ proceeds from burglaries, there.”

“What about Gary and Tim; how did they get along?”

“Gary was very angry with Tim. Whenever Gary was in a jam, he expected Tim to help him out. There was some car, drugs, Mike Falco…I’m not too sure what it all meant, but Gary never got over it.”

There was that name again: Michael Falco. It seemed synonymous with Evans’s name inside that small circle of old friends in Troy.

She went on to say she thought Tim’s disappearance may have been “revenge” on Evans’s part for something that happened a long time ago among Falco, Tim and Evans, but she didn’t know the entire story.

“Gary always told me,” she said, “that ‘people are very easy to get rid of and without a trace.’ He once told me, ‘Look what happened to Mike [Falco]…and there are a couple of other people still missing.’ I really feel Gary killed Mike by burying him alive or putting him in a place where he couldn’t get out.”

After explaining to Horton that Evans liked to confide in a tattoo artist in Troy, she got back on the subject of Tim and Evans’s soured relationship.

“Gary never really forgave Tim for being disloyal to him during a time when Gary felt he needed Tim. Gary told me Tim had called one day asking for money, about fifteen hundred dollars. So Gary told Tim he would ‘have to do some jobs’ with him if he wanted the money.”

“If there was one thing Evans was clear about when I interviewed him later,” Horton recalled, “it was that he favored working alone. He’d do his best work by himself, he’d tell me, and he wouldn’t have to worry about someone dropping a dime on him. He only took along a partner if that person owed him a favor or money. And he made this utterly clear to me: if that person even threatened to go to the cops, he had no choice but to kill him.”

A K-9 unit of cadaver-sniffing dogs from the state police searched the area surrounding the Spare Room II self-storage facility, where Evans and Tim had stored their stolen property. Horton felt if Evans had killed Tim, he might have buried him in close proximity of the storage facility.

After searching the perimeter of the facility and the storage units, the dogs found nothing. It was one more in a series of false predictions on Horton’s part. He was going on hunches, mostly. Without Evans—without a body—he had nothing but instinct. It was disheartening at times, but it was police work. Not everything worked itself out in sixty minutes, like a television sitcom, and not every lead produced another. Still, most cops believed it took only one arbitrary piece of information and a case could be broken.

Near the end of October, the manager of Spare Room II phoned Bureau headquarters with some rather odd news. He said Tim Rysedorph had called.

“He called you?”

“Yes. This morning.”

“What did he say?”

“He wanted information about how late the office was open so he could come in and pay for his unit. He asked if the billing for the month had been sent out yet. He said he wanted to pay his bill before the billing went out so his wife wouldn’t find out that he had been renting a unit.”

Could it be that simple?

A surveillance team was put together immediately. If Tim—or Evans posing as him—went to the Spare Room II to pay the bill, the Bureau would be there waiting for him.

Horton, however, warned everyone that Evans wasn’t that stupid. There was no way he was going to just march into Spare Room II after calling. It was some sort of trap. A way to throw off the scent.

At about 2:40
P.M
., as undercover officers from the Bureau, who had been there all day long, stood despondent around the Spare Room II gate thinking that the entire day had been a waste, a 1996 Ford Contour with New Hampshire license plates pulled up to the entrance gate. A female was driving. She was alone. She looked lost. Scared.

But also very familiar.

When officers approached the car and asked the woman to identify herself, she simply rolled the window down and said, “Lisa Morris.”

CHAPTER 14

Throughout the years, Evans had juggled scores of women. He liked to brag to Horton about all the women he had slept with. Most of them, he said, were nothing but “whores”—a “piece of ass” he could call every once in a while for some fun. Bedding down with women was a game to Evans, a challenge. There was one time Horton stopped at a hotel room Evans had been renting and Evans handed him a photo of himself and a rather good-looking blonde. They were blasting around the ocean on Jet Skis. “I had that photo taken two days ago,” Evans boasted, “in Florida!” He seemed proud of the fact that he could pick up a woman on a Friday night, fly down to Florida for the weekend, “bang her a few times” and return home the following Monday—an all-expense-paid weekend vacation, courtesy of whichever antique shop owner—who had undoubtedly spent his life building his business—Evans had pillaged.

Other times, Evans would show Horton photos of different women and his demeanor would change entirely. He sometimes became docile, as if he had invested his emotions in the woman and she had let him down. One of those women was
Doris Sheehan
, a twenty-six-year-old brunette Evans had dated throughout the years. In one of his letters to Horton, Evans talked about Sheehan as though she had been the only woman he had ever loved. A bit on the chunky side at five feet three inches, 140 pounds, Sheehan’s blue eyes accentuated the beauty of her pudgy yet cute face. She had been arrested for a few DWIs, but other than that she was just a young and naive local girl Evans had won over with his charm and his showering of stolen jewelry.

A local Troy woman who knew Sheehan later said she was “all about material things. She never loved Gary, but loved what Gary could provide her with.”

When Horton found Sheehan in late October, after locating her through Evans’s prison visiting list, she was apprehensive and unresponsive to most of his questions. She had obviously been trained by Evans to keep her mouth shut if the cops ever came knocking.

“I haven’t seen Gary,” she said when Horton asked, “since before summer. But,” she added, “I spoke to him a few weeks ago.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. I told him to pay me the five hundred he owed me for back rent. He said he was leaving. He told me I could have his truck. A day later, it was parked in my driveway.”

Evans had lived with Sheehan in her trailer for a brief period. When Horton found her, she had already hooked up with another man whom she referred to as her “fiancé.” They were preparing to move to Florida.

Sheehan had also rented a unit at the Spare Room II back on September 19, 1996, but when the Bureau checked it out, it was empty.

In the end, Doris Sheehan could offer only one more false glimmer of hope.

There was a name on that same prison visitor’s list that had been bothering Horton ever since he had seen it. A young kid in his twenties with no criminal record had visited Evans a few times during his last stay in prison. When the Bureau tracked the kid down, he said Evans had recently been to his house in upstate New York to pay him and his father a visit. The connection between the kid, his father and Evans, Horton soon found out, was work-related. Evans had done some tree work for the family at one time and the three of them had been friends ever since. They liked Evans, the kid and his father said. “He was pleasant. Nice guy. Never bothered anyone. He worked hard.”

According to the kid, Evans could scale a tree like a squirrel.

“When he came over the last time, what did he say?”

“Well, he just wanted to stop by to say that he had always liked us and that we would probably never see him again.”

“That was it?”

“Yeah. Then he left.”

Horton continued to work on Lisa, stopping by her apartment when he could to see if she would willingly volunteer any new information about Evans’s whereabouts. When he saw her after she had been identified at Spare Room II during the Bureau’s surveillance, he wondered why she had gone there and what her purpose was. Undoubtedly, Evans had put her up to it.

“Were you going to pay Tim Rysedorph’s bill?” Horton asked. “I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

“No. I was going to rent a space.”

“All right, Lisa, tell me what’s going on here. I’m not an asshole.”

Lisa paused. Then, “Gary sent me to pay the bill. But he asked me to do it
before
he left. It’s not like he called and ordered me to do it.”

“That’s it? Nothing else?” Horton knew she was lying. He sensed Evans was pulling her strings, like maybe he was monitoring the entire situation from afar.

“Well, I did want to rent a space for myself—I’m cramped here in the apartment, as you can see.”

Lisa’s apartment was always neat and clean. She had some junk piled in a spare bedroom, but it was nothing overwhelming. What was more, she could barely scrape together eight dollars to buy a six-pack and a pack of cigarettes, better yet come up with $65 or $70 every month for a storage space.

But Horton didn’t want to press her. Over the next week, he pestered her about it, but she stuck to her story. He left the subject alone because he didn’t want to jeopardize the rapport he had already spent weeks building.

“I wanted her to find Gary for me,” Horton said later. “I was using her for that purpose only. The money I was giving her out of my own pocket, the conversations I had with her, acting sympathetic to her situation, was all part of my strategy.”

Bureau investigators Chuck DeLuca and Bud York had been on pawnshop detail for a few days trying to locate any stolen property in the region that had been sold recently. Pawnshops were one of the most frequent places Evans liked to fence stolen property. Pawnshop detail included a biweekly filtering of the pawnshops in the area to see if any known stolen items had been bought or sold. Pawnshop owners—although many often find ways to get around the system—are mandated by New York state law to fill out a form for each item they buy or sell. Local police stop by periodically to see if any items on the list match any items reported stolen. All of that information is then keyed into a main database.

Under Horton’s direction, DeLuca and York took a ride to the Albany Police Department (APD) to see what they could find out. The APD had a large database of pawnshop information.

With the tap of just a few key strokes, they turned up two names inside the first few minutes of their search: Tim Rysedorph and Gary Evans.

Bingo.

What Horton couldn’t believe—when he found out—was that Evans had used his
real
name to sell a pair of gold cuff links to a local Albany pawnshop. Throughout the years, Horton knew of no fewer than ten aliases Evans had used, along with four or five different disguises. But here he was now, just months ago, using his own name to sell stolen property in, basically, his hometown?

It didn’t make any sense.

“Later,” Horton said, “when I asked Gary about it, he said, ‘I can’t fucking believe I made that one mistake—I used my own name.’”

Indeed, Evans had never, in about 2½ decades of committing burglaries and selling stolen merchandise to pawnshops, used his real name.

Why now?
Horton wondered.

“What I think happened,” Horton added, “was that Gary was losing his mind at that point…. That certainly became clear after we found out what happened to Tim Rysedorph. But those cuff links were what got the ball rolling for us.”

Evans had sold the cuff links, valued at about $1,500, which had been reported stolen from a place called New Scotland Antiques, back on July 18, 1997. He had used his given name when he filled out the paperwork. On top of that, Tim had sold a total of thirty-eight Hummels (extremely expensive statuettes) between April 1997 and August 1997 to the same shop.

The connection between Evans and Tim, it seemed, ran deeper with every stone the Bureau turned. It certainly wasn’t a stretch now to believe Evans had felt at some point that Tim had ripped him off or was going to turn him in.

“And if Gary felt threatened,” Horton said Evans had told him on numerous occasions, “he said he would have to kill that person. He couldn’t risk jail time, he’d say, for what he called ‘scumbag criminals worse than [he] ever was.’”

If nothing else, the Bureau now had enough evidence to issue a second “local” arrest warrant for Evans, which would secure his return back to Albany if he was picked up outside the state or county. Troop K in Cold Spring, New York, had already issued a warrant, but, as Horton put it later, “that was two hours away. We wanted Gary here in Albany because, ultimately, we knew we weren’t going to find Tim without him.”

CHAPTER 15

Pestering Lisa Morris for information now became priority number one for Horton. She was the connection to Evans. It was clear by her showing up at Spare Room II, and then lying about it, that she was Evans’s puppet. Getting her to open up was the problem. Horton had been stopping by her apartment nearly every day, sometimes just to say hello. But she wouldn’t talk. Within the past few weeks, however, Lisa’s daughter, Christina, started warming up to Horton.

Christina said she trusted Evans. He had always treated her well and seemed to make time for her.

As Christina became closer to Horton, Lisa opened up more, too. Because of that, Horton said, he decided to finally explain to Lisa why he was so interested in finding Evans.

“Tim Rysedorph has been missing,” Horton told her one night. “We have reason to believe Gary is involved. We have a warrant for his arrest. If you know where he is, you need to tell me now.”

Lisa still wouldn’t confess to knowing any more than she had said already. But she began to talk in more detail about her relationship with Evans, which told Horton she was beginning to come around.