Every Move You Make (9 page)

October 31, 1997, Halloween, was a dreary day in the Capital Region. With cloudy skies, the temperature had hovered around forty-four degrees all day. There was some fog, but nothing that would hinder the unusual project Horton had on tap for the day. A plus was that it hadn’t been cold enough the past few weeks for the ground to freeze, and it hadn’t recently snowed or rained, so the ground was in prime condition for…well…

Digging.

Horton had called his team of investigators together the previous night, shortly before they were about to go home, and explained what they were going to be doing the following day, Halloween morning.

Evans had a fascination for historic graveyards and contemporary cemeteries, Horton explained. An outdoorsman, he would frequently sleep in cemeteries and just roam around at night after the groundskeepers had gone home. For the most part, his interest was criminal. He would study the different statues and headstones, writing down descriptions of them. Then he would go to the local library and look them up in books and magazines to see what they were worth. Then he’d make a few phone calls and find out what the black market was paying. If he found something worth his time and effort, he would steal it. A friend later claimed that at one time he wanted to steal the remains of “Uncle Sam,” who was born in Troy and buried in town, and hold them for ransom, but in the end Evans decided the risk was too high.

“Since Gary has a propensity to frequent graveyards,” Horton addressed his team, “I want to go to his favorite spot: Albany Rural Cemetery,” which was, ironically, only about two miles from Bureau headquarters, “and look up all the fresh graves.”

Digging up the fresh graves from the past few weeks and sifting through the tons of dirt and gravel would be time-consuming and expensive. What was the point?

Horton thought Evans might have waited until he saw that there had been a funeral during the day and, later that night, when no one was around, dig up the fresh grave and dump Tim’s body inside it. It was the perfect location. No one would ever look there.

To save time and money, Horton devised a plan whereby investigators would use steel rods about eight feet long to poke down into each new grave site to see if the rod, on its way down, was interrupted by an object in its path. If someone hit an object on the way down, Horton would call in a backhoe and, like an archaeologist, begin excavating the ground. They knew most caskets were, just like the cliché, set six feet underground. If Evans had buried Tim in one of the graves, he would have likely put him on top of the casket as opposed to inside it. One man by himself, Horton figured, couldn’t manage digging up hundreds of square feet of earth and then lift up the concrete outer box caskets are placed in. Even Evans, who was as strong as a bull, had his limitations.

When Horton approached the director of the cemetery with his idea, the man was bowled over by the thought, but could do little, in the end, to stop the exploration. It took a while, but after compiling a list of the most recent burials, Horton and his team had about a dozen graves to locate and search.

One grave after the other produced no results. Each time they sank a steel rod into the earth, it slipped through the freshly dug dirt easily, as if it were a bamboo skewer piercing a piece of fish.

“It was worth a shot,” Horton said later. “Gary had told me how much he loved cemeteries. I was trying to put myself in his shoes…trying to think like him. At the time, I thought if he had murdered Tim, he would put his body in the least possible place I was likely to look. When I found out later what he had actually done to Tim, believe me, it shocked the shit out of me. I thought I knew Evans better than I knew members of my own family—but I would have never guessed he would have taken things to the extreme he did with Tim Rysedorph.”

The month of November turned out to be uneventful as far as finding Evans. Cold leads were followed up and new leads were explored, but the sum total of what the Bureau found was zero. Horton continued to stop by and chat with Lisa and Christina, but Lisa continued to deny she knew anything more.

CHAPTER 16

On some days, Lisa emerged from the shadows of her living room looking weak and pale when she greeted Horton at the door. On others, she seemed flush with the color of life. Horton guessed it was the consequence of a hardened life of booze, poverty and single motherhood. Evans had affected her greatly—and it showed.

Horton was a human being who had feelings like most people, but he also had a job to do. It would have been simple for him to leave Lisa alone so she could work out whatever demons she was fighting. But Tim Rysedorph was still missing and a potential serial killer was on the loose—emotion couldn’t become part of it.

By early December, with pressure mounting from the Rysedorph family and Horton at a complete loss for where Evans might be holing up, Horton stopped by Lisa’s to explain to her that she needed to come with him to Bureau headquarters to give a formal written statement. Their relationship the past six weeks had been building. They were beginning to trust each other. Horton wasn’t denying that. Still, he needed to have most of what they had talked about down on paper in case Evans was picked up. There was no way to know what kind of spell Evans had cast on Lisa and how it would play out if Evans was ever arrested. Moreover, Horton wasn’t all that sure Lisa hadn’t been in contact with Evans all along. Once the courts got involved and lawyered Evans up, Lisa would be considered a witness. Getting her to agree to give a written statement now would secure her testimony, or at least get her to admit to some things on paper so prosecutors could call her on them later.

There were times when Lisa had been picked up by the local police for getting drunk and harassing old boyfriends with threatening phone calls. Horton had used his pull to bail her out of trouble a number of times. He had even been giving her money out of his own pocket when she had little food in the house for Christina. But those days were over. It was time she came clean with exactly what she knew—no more excuses, no more playing stupid, no more acting as though she were the innocent girlfriend. She knew more than she was saying, a cop with Horton’s experience and nearly two decades of service knew better.

Late in the day on December 4, 1997, Horton picked Lisa up at her apartment and drove her to Bureau headquarters. “Trust me on this, Lisa,” he said as they made their way. “This will be liberating for you. You’ll feel better.”

When they arrived, Sully and Horton sat Lisa down in the interrogation room, read her her Miranda rights to her, and began to ask what she knew about Evans. She was fragile and scared, no doubt feeling like she was about to betray Evans.

Horton sat across from her during certain parts of the interview, but would get up occasionally and pace the floor in front of her, while Sully sat directly next to her and wrote down everything she said.

Lisa took sips of water in between talking about her relationship with Evans, and, surprisingly, everything she knew about his “business partnership” with Tim.

“So, you told me you last saw Gary,” Horton asked at one point, “on Sunday, October 5, 1997…right?”

Lisa looked away for a moment, paused and took out a cigarette. “I didn’t tell you everything I know about Gary,” she said. “I said I
didn’t
know Tim Rysedorph.”

“Go on.”

“I
do
know Tim.”

As Lisa spoke, it became apparent that Evans had given her just enough information regarding his latest string of burglaries to flavor what Horton and the Bureau already knew. For instance, they had suspected Evans of a break-in at Jennifer House Commons, an antique-store barn in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Sure enough, Lisa confirmed that Evans had done the job, but also, she said, burned the place to the ground before he left.

“Gary told me he did that job with his ‘partner,’” Lisa said, unwavering in her tone, “who I believe to be Tim Rysedorph.”

She was a bit angry with Evans, she continued, for burning the place down because she loved to go shopping there with him. They had frequently taken drives to Great Barrington to scope out antiques Evans would later steal for her. In what sounded like a scene out of a Hollywood movie, Evans told Lisa he simply burglarized the place, poured a few gallons of gasoline on the wooden floor of the barn, dropped a match, and walked away laughing. In minutes, it was engulfed in flames, burning like dry hay.

There was another job Evans admitted he had done by himself. In back of Jennifer House was a green building, sort of a secured storage area where antique dealers kept valuables they were either holding for a particular customer or didn’t want to sell. Evans had cased the place for months, trying to figure out how to get in.

The local police were baffled by the job. The thief had tunneled his way through the outside of the building and underneath one of the walls, only to come up on the inside of the building. After stealing the most expensive item he could find, he left a note in place of it:
Thank you, The Mole
.

Lisa confirmed it was Evans.

He had also pulled off a job in Margaretville, New York, near the Catskill Mountains, in late September, Lisa said. This time, instead of going in through a window or tunneling through the floor, he scaled the side of the building next door using a ladder a Chinese Restaurant had left out and entered the shop through an open window on the roof. He justified the robbery by saying it was the owner’s fault for leaving the window open.

Then she explained a burglary Evans had pulled off at an antique depot not too far away from the barn he had torched. During that job, he had located a “trapdoor” in the basement of the building and slipped right in one morning when nobody was around. Because there were people roaming around outside the place while he was inside, he said, he put an old phone booth door he had used to get into the building across the window, like a curtain, so no one could see him.

There was an old white house in Hyde Park, New York, Lisa explained, that had caused Evans some trouble. The day after the job, she said, he showed up at her apartment with a scratched-up, bloodied face.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked.

“As I was going in through a basement window, I tripped an alarm system and took off. Right on the opposite side of the window was a pricker bush. I ran right through it, toward a bingo hall across the street where ‘my partner’ was supposed to be waiting for me in his car.”

“Was he there?”

“No. That fucking asshole split on me.”

Lisa said it was Tim. When he heard the alarm, he must have gotten scared and taken off, leaving Evans to fend for himself.

When Evans met up with Tim later that night in a motel room they’d rented, he punched him in the face for leaving him at the scene, screaming, “Don’t
ever
fucking do that to me again!”

Horton looked at Lisa as she told the story.
Motive. Gary never forgets.

A narrative of certain burglaries Evans had pulled off was, most certainly, good information, and Horton was happy to have it. But as the interview progressed, he wanted Lisa to talk about the last few days she had spent with Evans. It was clear now Evans was the last person to see Tim.

Lisa had been chain-smoking since the interview began. Rubbing her eyes, stirring in her seat, she said she needed a break. So Horton told her to take a walk up and down the short hallway outside the room and use the bathroom if she needed. “But don’t get comfortable,” Horton warned, “because we still have plenty more work ahead of us.”

CHAPTER 17

The second-floor interrogation room inside Bureau headquarters was part of a brick building that looked like an old grammar school. Inside the cream-colored room Lisa was being questioned in was one small window, which looked out across the street at Siena College. Horton kept the shades closed so witnesses and suspects couldn’t let their minds wander. The walls were painted a calming hue of vanilla for ambience and mood. Besides a plain metal table and a few chairs, the room sat empty. The mirror on the wall was two-way. There were hidden cameras set up around the room in case the Bureau wanted to videotape an interview.

When Lisa returned from the bathroom, she appeared rejuvenated, refreshed.

“All set now, Lisa?” Horton asked.

“I guess so,” she said, running her hands through her hair.

“Tell us about October third. You said you
saw
Gary that day?”

“He stayed at my apartment the night before. I got up about six or six-thirty in the morning,” she said as she sat down, “and Gary was already awake, sitting in the living room playing Nintendo. He left about eight and returned about noon. He said he was meeting up with his ‘partner’ at twelve-thirty.”

It made sense that Evans would have waited until 12:30
P.M
. to meet Tim, because Tim didn’t get out of work until noon. And if there was any doubt that Evans’s partner wasn’t Tim Rysedorph, Lisa cleared it up by providing details she couldn’t have known if she didn’t see him. For one, she said she watched Evans leave her apartment and walk over to T.J. Maxx and meet someone who was driving a “light blue two-door car,” but had sometimes shown up on a dark-colored motorcycle.

Tim drove both.

Second, Lisa described Tim as if she were looking at a photo of him in front of her: “Same height as Gary, but his build was smaller…had darker hair and it was shoulder-length.” Then the clincher: “Gary complained about his partner’s wife all the time. He called her a ‘bitch.’ He told me his partner had a job as a garbageman, but was complaining he was always broke because of his wife.”

What interested Horton even more, however, was that Lisa said Evans was “afraid” of Tim because Tim had been cashing checks recently, and if they ever got caught, Evans said he feared Tim would “roll over” on him because he had never spent time in prison.

“Gary went south to Wappingers Falls on that Friday,” Lisa continued. “He was trying to sell some jewelry with Tim to a dealer he had dealt with before. When he came back later that day, he told me the dealer had tipped him off that the police had been at the shop in regard to some stolen property Gary had sold the guy in the past.” Without taking a breath, Lisa then said Evans seemed nervous that night for some reason, and mentioned how afraid he was of getting caught.