“What did he say, exactly?”
“He told me he had decided he needed to leave the area.”
“What happened throughout the day?”
“Gary left his truck in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx. About five or five-thirty, Gary and Tim returned to my apartment parking lot: Tim was driving his blue car, Gary his truck.”
“Did they come up?”
She said only Evans came inside. “You need to go into the bedroom,” he said in a rush of words as he walked in. “Me and my partner have to change clothes.”
So Lisa locked herself in her bedroom and waited. As she paced inside her bedroom, wondering what was happening, she glanced out the window. Evans’s truck had been parked below. She had a clear view.
She then watched as Evans grabbed some clothes out of the back of his truck and walked over to Tim’s car, sat down in the passenger seat and began talking. Tim, Lisa remembered with meticulous detail, looked like he was disagreeing with whatever Evans was telling him because he began to shake his head, indicating no.
Evans, who was raging mad by that point, then got out of the car and walked over to the driver’s side, where he began to pull Tim out of the car by his hair.
Tim resisted at first, but then got out.
Then Evans walked back up to the apartment and told Lisa his plans had changed. “We have to go do something,” he said.
“Where were they going?” Horton asked, amazed by how much Lisa knew, and the detail in which she remembered it.
“Gary didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”
Evans left her apartment at around 6:30 P.M. in Tim’s car, she said, but left his truck in the parking lot.
It made sense—because Tim’s car had been found at the Amtrak depot in Rensselaer.
A few hours after that, Evans called Lisa and told her that he’d had “major problems” with his “partner down south,” meaning south of Albany. Lisa said she then, under Evans’s direction, got into his truck, dropped Christina off at her grandmother’s house, drove back to her apartment and waited for Evans to call back. It was about 8:00 P.M. when she returned.
Evans ended up calling at 9:00. “I might need you to pick me up in Troy later tonight,” he said.
“Okay…”
“Don’t turn off the ringer and don’t screen any calls,” he added. Then, “Answer the fucking phone if it rings. You understand?”
“Yes, Gary.”
She said Evans never called back.
Many of the times Lisa provided during her interview were later verified, as closely as they could be, with phone records taken from Caroline Parker’s home phone and Evans’s cell phone. Horton had no reason to believe Lisa was making any of it up. It was all too detailed and time-sensitive. After all, Lisa had no idea what Horton knew. There was no way she could have coordinated a sequence of events to coincide with the times in question the Bureau had already nailed down.
What Lisa was about to say next, however, would give Horton a better indication as to what happened to Tim Rysedorph and, more important, when and where.
CHAPTER 18
The Bureau knew Tim had phoned Caroline from the Dunkin’ Donuts in Latham at 1:03 A.M. on Saturday, October 4, 1997. The Spare Room II storage facility was, Horton had timed himself, a two-minute drive from Dunkin’ Donuts. In between both places was Lisa Morris’s apartment.
It was all beginning to add up.
Many witnesses had verified Tim’s presence at Dunkin’ Donuts, and Caroline’s phone records reflected the fact that Tim had called from the phone booth outside the front door. At 1:33 A.M., Horton knew, someone had accessed Spare Room II using Evans’s code. About an hour later, at 2:30, that same number was used again to depart the facility.
By 2:45 A.M., Lisa was climbing the walls of her apartment with anxiety, wondering where the hell Evans was and what he was doing. Evans had said he would call, but never did. He told her to keep the phone line open, which she did, but the phone never rang.
Suddenly, at 3:00, Lisa heard a car screech its way into the parking lot outside her window. When she looked out her bedroom window, she spied Tim’s Pontiac Sunbird, which she immediately recognized. Moving swiftly over to the sliding door in her living room, she then watched as Evans got out of the Sunbird in a hurry and looked around to see if anyone was watching him. Then he ran toward her apartment.
Frightened he might catch her watching him, she rushed over to the couch and acted as if she had been there the entire time.
Evans was clean, she recalled to Horton and Sully, when he entered the apartment. He was wearing blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt and black sneakers. Tim, she realized, was not with him.
“I have a lot of important things to do in the morning,” Evans said in a mumble of words. “No matter what you hear this time, it doesn’t mean I did anything to your weasel boyfriend, Damien [Cuomo].”
If Evans had a vice besides carbohydrates and chocolate-chip cookies, it was sex. He liked to have it several times a day, Lisa claimed: once in the morning, once in the afternoon, once at night. Lisa had gotten used to having it all the time and, she said without embarrassment, expected it. When Evans showed up at her apartment in the early-morning hours of October 4, she immediately told him she wanted to “make love.” Evans, though, who hadn’t slept with her for a few days, said he couldn’t because he had an “upset stomach,” adding, “I have a lot on my mind.”
She was shocked.
“Gary never had any problems in the past which would preclude him from having sex with me,” she explained. “Basically, this was the first time Gary had ever said no to me.”
When Evans denied Lisa one of the only true innocent pleasures she had left in life, she began to cry.
“I’m leaving before Wednesday,” he said. “I’ll make sure I fuck you before then. I can’t even begin to tell you how bad things are this time. I can’t go back to prison for twenty-five years. I’m not doing that….”
Later that morning, Evans woke up and, over coffee, told Lisa that “things are really fucked up this time. I am going to be in the newspapers and they are going to say bad things about Falco and Damien. Jim Horton will be knocking on your door. Don’t mention T.J. Maxx parking lot, and don’t say anything about seeing my partner’s car in your lot or T.J. Maxx. Do you fucking understand me?”
Lisa said yes.
After that, they talked about where Lisa was going to spend her morning. Evans suggested she go to a friend’s house while he did “some things.”
“The worst is yet to come,” he added before they parted ways. “But I will tell you before I leave the area for good.”
Leaving, Lisa made a mental note of seeing Tim’s car in the adjacent parking lot. Evans’s truck, she remembered, was parked in front of her apartment.
Tim, of course, was nowhere to be found.
Horton had an admirable capacity for getting people to reveal their innermost secrets. Perhaps it came from his days as one of the NYSP’s top polygraphists, sitting all those hours behind a machine, watching a needle flicker back and forth like a metronome, asking questions of people while it judged truth and lies. Perhaps he acquired the skill as a hostage negotiator. Whatever the case, he had an extraordinary talent for empathizing with just about anyone.
There was one time in 1989 when he was asked to respond to the Twin Bridges on I-87 near Albany. A nineteen-year-old kid had scaled a 180-foot trestle of a bridge and was sitting on the edge with one end of a rope tied around his neck and the other attached to the bridge.
He was threatening to jump.
After about ninety minutes of just talking to the kid about life, the kid looked at Horton and said, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be gay?”
“No,” Horton said. “But I can see how upset you are and feel your anger.”
The kid then admitted he had just told his family and friends he was gay, but they didn’t take it so well.
In the end, Horton talked him down.
Lisa Morris’s eye for detail, Horton acknowledged later, was exceptional. The last twenty-four hours she and Evans spent together had obviously affected her profoundly.
“Do you need something, Lisa?” Horton asked as they sat together and took a break from the interview. He could tell the past few hours had been emotionally taxing for her. Yet, with the amount of information she had already given up, he felt she knew more. Whether she realized it, Lisa was giving the Bureau a timeline to prove later that Evans was the last person to see Tim.
“You ready to continue?” Horton asked.
“I guess…”
At noon, on Saturday, October 4, Lisa said Evans finally called her.
“What did he say?” Sully asked.
“The worst is over. I’ll be up in a while.”
A short time later, she explained, he showed up at her front door wearing different clothes: jeans, a red shirt, white sneakers. But there was something else.
He was covered with mud.
“You’re not coming in here like that,” Lisa screamed at him as he tried to get into her apartment.
“What the fuck? Let me in!”
After washing himself off with a hose in the laundry room downstairs, she said, he returned.
The first thing Evans asked for, she recalled, was “cookies and milk,” as if he were a child who had just completed an enormous chore and wanted a reward.
“I remember,” she added, “his hands looking dirty—not greasy, but dirty.”
Although Evans didn’t believe in wearing cologne or deodorant, he was a fanatic when it came to hygiene. He hated any part of his body to be dirty. It was odd that he’d show up looking as if he’d just taken a swim in a mud puddle and it didn’t seem to bother him.
He was digging, Horton, pacing back and forth in front of Lisa as she told the story, realized. He buried Tim Rysedorph somewhere and then drove over to Lisa’s house and had milk and cookies. Jesus Christ.
CHAPTER 19
Cops are constantly put in the position of making moral decisions. Most are compelled, generally by their nature, to do the right thing. Yet the right thing doesn’t always produce the results they need—especially when it comes to catching murderers.
A few people would argue later that Horton put Christina and Lisa Morris in serious danger by not telling Lisa he believed Evans had murdered several people, especially Christina’s father, Damien Cuomo. Effectively, Horton allowed Lisa to think Evans was nothing more than a burglar, others claimed, when he had every reason to believe Evans was a vicious—and possibly desperate—serial killer who was on the loose.
Did Horton, simply to “get his man,” use Lisa and Christina as pawns in what amounted to a human game of chess he had been playing with Evans for well over a decade? In the process, did Horton knowingly endanger their lives by putting them in harm’s way in order to flush out Evans from wherever he was hiding?
In order to get Lisa finally to give a statement, on December 4, 1997, Horton later admitted, he had to “drive a wedge” between her and Evans, and make her understand that Evans had possibly killed Damien Cuomo. He did this, he claimed, so Lisa would trust him and begin to push Evans away.
One day shortly before Lisa ended up giving Horton and Sully a formal statement, Horton stopped by her apartment and explained that he honestly believed Damien Cuomo hadn’t come home because he couldn’t.
“I have a daughter, Lisa. You know that,” Horton said. “I don’t care who you are, a bad guy or a good guy, it doesn’t matter. You are going to try to reach out to your daughter—even if you’re on the run. Look at what Gary has done to you! He probably did something to Damien and, on top of that, moved in on you once Damien was out of the picture. He’s convinced you that Damien is a terrible father, telling you he took off on you without a word when there’s a good chance he killed him. Now Christina has no father. And you, you’re sticking up for him?”
They were rough words, and perhaps Horton had crossed a line by making a personal plea to Lisa. But he felt he had to do whatever it took to find Evans.
Crying, Lisa seemed to understand for the first time that Evans had been fooling her for the past eight years.
With Lisa in a vulnerable state, Horton took it a step further just to send his point home.
“We think he’s killed Timmy Rysedorph, too, Lisa.”
A week later, prepared to talk about everything she knew, Lisa agreed to give a statement.
“Timing was not only crucial, but a huge gamble,” Horton said later, referring to the reason why he waited so long to tell Lisa he had a pretty good idea Evans had killed Damien and Tim.
“If I told her too much too soon, I could have blown the entire case. I needed to gain her confidence. She needed to trust me. If she had talked to Gary and he asked if I was coming around mentioning Falco and Tim, he would have had Scotty beam him up…. We would have never seen him again, ever. I was sure of that. Throughout the years, he had made me well aware of what would make him disappear forever. And I surely wasn’t worried about him coming back and doing something to endanger Lisa or Christina. He was not coming back to the area. Period.”
Part of Horton’s job was to read people and tweak his style according to the situation.
“I taught ‘Interview and Interrogation’ in several police academies,” he said, “the state police, FBI and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I had time on my side, so I was able to play Lisa with whatever I wanted. Did I use her? Absolutely. Did I use Christina? In a way, I guess I did. I was very attentive to her when I had the chance—i.e., asking her about school, boys, hobbies—without sounding like a parent. I wanted her to like and trust me so Lisa would, too. People won’t tell you anything if they don’t like you.”
How did Horton figure out Lisa knew more than she was saying?
“Gary trusted her enough for him to go there in the first place with Tim. Why wouldn’t he trust her with more intimate knowledge? We were beginning to make a circumstantial case against Gary regarding Tim, even though we had no body. Lisa, as far as we could tell, was one of the last locals not only to see and talk to Gary, but she was sleeping with him and living in between Dunkin’ Donuts and the Spare Room Two. Because of what we saw as pillow talk, not to mention the logistics, we felt she had to know more.”
And she certainly did.
After Evans washed himself off and returned to Lisa’s apartment on Saturday, she said, he sat down on her couch with a bag of chocolate-chip cookies and a glass of milk. As he snacked, she asked him how long he was going to be around.
“I have a lot of things to do,” Evans responded.
A moment later, after finishing his cookies, he left.
At about 10:30 that same night, he called.
“I can’t stay at my apartment,” he said in a whisper, as if someone were listening in on the call. “I feel like I am going to be ambushed any moment. Can I come back and stay there?”
Lisa not only said yes, but encouraged it.
When Evans returned, he had a box of Freihofer’s chocolate-chip cookies—his favorite brand—and a gallon of milk.
“He was clean when he came back; he looked like himself,” Lisa explained. “He apologized for having to leave so abruptly earlier that night, and said he was sorry for being in trouble. He wanted to relax. So we watched a movie. True Romance.”
The next morning, she got up early, about 4:30, and made coffee. Evans, waking up to the smell of the brewing coffee, ran out of her bedroom and yelled at her for stinking the place up. Then he poured the pot of coffee down the drain and sat down on the couch.
Minutes later, after getting dressed, he ran down to T.J. Maxx. On his way out the door, he said, “I h
ave to make a call.” When he returned ten minutes later, he seemed fine, more relaxed.
But fifteen minutes after that, he got up and went back to T.J. Maxx to make what he said was “a second call.” When he returned this time, however, he was “pale, panicked…and visibly shaken. The conversation had gotten him very upset.”
“They’re already looking for my partner,” Evans said, pacing back and forth in Lisa’s living room. “I’ve got to go do something.” It is almost certain to assume that the calls Evans made were to Caroline Parker.
An hour later, he returned with a duffel bag and a bag of dirty clothes. His shoes and pants were filthy, Lisa said. “There was dirt and mud in his shoes and on his pants.”
Evans then gave Lisa two cell phones and told her to throw them in the Dumpster when he was gone. Then he said he wanted her to drive his truck—“with gloves on”—to a local VFW bar around the corner, leave it and take a cab home.
Before walking out the door, he handed her $300 in twenties. “That’s pocket money for you,” he said. “I love you. I’ll keep in touch with you as much as I can for the next few days. I’m gone for good now.” Hesitating, his voice cracked. “You won’t see me for a few years.”
Taking off down the steps that led up to Lisa’s apartment, walking toward Tim’s blue Pontiac Sunbird, Evans turned and yelled out for Lisa to come to the balcony.
“Throw me some spray cleaner,” he said.
With that, he got into Tim’s Sunbird with the spray cleaner and a roll of paper towels and drove off.
Throughout the month of December 1997 and into January 1998, the Bureau followed up on whichever lead it could regarding all the new information Lisa had provided. To no one’s surprise, much of what Lisa had said turned out to be 100 percent true.
Every Move You Make Page 8
