“Are you hungry, Gar?” Horton asked at one point.
Evans, shrugging, said, “I guess.”
“Good. Let me stop and get you something.”
After stopping at a convenience store to pick up a box of Freihofer’s chocolate-chip cookies and a gallon of milk, Horton brought Evans up into the “polygraph suite” on the second floor of Troop G, the same room where Lisa Morris had given her statement. There was only one way into the room, through a hallway door, yet two ways out: the door and window.
Playing it safe, Horton left Evans handcuffed.
Approaching a project of such magnitude, questioning Evans about several murders, could only be done in steps. Getting Evans back to Albany from Vermont had been the beginning; putting him before a judge to waive his rights was a good start; while getting him to confess, which could take days, maybe even weeks, was the pot of gold. Horton had waited eight months for this day.
As they were getting comfortable, Evans mentioned that he had one request, and he wasn’t prepared to talk about anything until it was granted.
“What’s that, Gar?”
“I want to see Doris.”
Horton, without showing Evans, smiled. Still, it wasn’t going be easy. Doris, Horton had found out, was herself doing time in a Troy, New York, jail for a DWI.
“Let me see what I can do,” Horton said, leaving the room for a moment.
Horton had to find a second judge, Pat McGrath, and get him to sign an order enabling Doris to leave the jail she was in.
Within a few hours, Horton received permission from Judge McGrath to transport Doris to Troop G, which only added to the public pressure he already faced regarding his getting a confession out of Evans.
Sully picked Doris up and brought her to Troop G, where Evans was now sitting, like a child on a snack break, dunking chocolate-chip cookies into a glass of cold milk.
Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, Doris looked as well as could be expected, considering she was doing time in one of the toughest jails in the Troy-Albany region. She had even managed to lose a bit of weight. Evans, when he first laid eyes on her, perked up.
Horton made it clear he would not allow them to touch each other. There was no way he was going to step out of the room and leave them alone, not with three murders hanging over Evans’s head.
After a brief hug, Doris pulled up a chair next to Evans and sat down.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Horton said, staring at them.
Evans began pleading with Doris not to worry about him. “I’ll be okay,” he kept repeating. “Don’t worry about me. Please don’t.”
Doris, who hadn’t said much of anything since entering the room, finally spoke up. “I’m not worried, Gary.”
“She was bland and kind of unemotional,” Horton said later. “I had always heard from various individuals that she was nothing but a gold digger and hung around with Gary only because he had always given her expensive gifts.
“I’m sitting there listening to Gary tell her how much he loves her…. He’s pleading with her, pouring his heart out, telling her not to worry about him. She just shrugged it off, like she didn’t give a shit. I’m thinking, ‘You bitch…at least pretend to be worried about him.’”
For the next three hours, Horton sat and watched Evans talk to Doris. At one point, they asked if Horton could take them outside so Doris could smoke. So he handcuffed them together and took them out behind the back of barracks near a grassy, picnic area. He had two investigators, sporting shotguns, stand nearby, but otherwise let them sit and enjoy what little sunshine was left to the day.
“I was chomping at the bit to get him to talk about Tim, Cuomo and Falco, but I had to play his game.”
CHAPTER 32
After Sully took Doris back to jail, Horton pulled up a chair next to Evans. As calmly as he could, he explained the situation. “Look, Gar, we’ve been here”—Horton glanced down at his watch—“for about seven hours now. We’ve talked old times…. We’ve had lunch, cookies and milk. I even got Doris in here to see you.” While Horton spoke, Evans would look up at him for a moment and then bring his eyes down toward the floor, as if he were being scolded. After mentioning Doris, Horton got up and walked over to the window. After pausing to look out at the setting sun, he said, “We have to talk about Sean, [Tim Rysedorph’s son] now, Gar. Do you understand that?”
Seemingly surprised by the name, Evans looked away and started crying.
“Sean, Gar…the kid. Tim’s son.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s had his face pressed up against the glass on Christmas morning waiting for his father to come home,” Horton said loudly, walking now toward Evans, “but Tim hasn’t shown up, Gar. The kid still thinks his father is going to come walking through the door any day now. We need to give him a sense of closure.”
It was approaching five o’clock. Nearly eight hours had gone by since they had arrived at Troop G, almost eight months since Horton had been hunting for answers regarding Tim Rysedorph. Tough questions were coming. Evans couldn’t avoid the inevitable any longer
“I put Gary in an antisocial category,” Horton recalled later. “In other words, his rules count and mine don’t. One thing I knew I had to do was disassociate myself with the police: don’t talk police lingo. Don’t say ‘we,’ say ‘them.’ They were bad guys. I was a friend. He had to believe that, or I would have never gotten anywhere with him. When I brought Sean into the picture, I knew Gary would react to it. He loved children—or at least he said he did. Knowing that, I laid it on as thick as I could with Sean.”
After letting Evans have a good solid cry, Horton walked over to him, put his arm around his shoulder, and continued. “Gary, you had to kill Tim Rysedorph…right? It was either him or you? I understand that, man. Come on. This is Jim you’re talking to.”
Not everyone would have agreed with Horton’s tactics. But considering the amount of information and the seriousness of what he believed Evans was going to talk about, he felt the need to try to make Evans feel as comfortable as possible by making him think it was “okay to kill.” If Evans had indeed killed Tim, Horton believed he had justified it in his mind somehow.
“I didn’t want to sympathize with him,” Horton explained later. “Because that tends to put someone down a notch and make them feel like they are below me. It’s all technique when you’re trying to get information out of someone. Sympathizing with someone makes me sound like, ‘You poor son of a bitch. You are so fucked. But I’m not. You’re the loser, not me.’ It makes me sound as if I don’t have those problems and I am better off.”
Identification and common bonds are two other tactics interrogators use to extract information from suspects. One might say, “You fish? Great, I fish, too!”
“You had to kill Tim Rysedorph. I understand that.”
Empathy, however, always produced the best results.
“I would say something like, ‘I can feel how bad you feel. I don’t know how you feel, but I can sense how it is for you.’ In Evans’s case, I told him, ‘Gary, you’re in a hole right now. We agree upon that. I can’t jump in the hole with you because we’ll both be in the hole together. If I get in there with you, neither of us will get out. What I can do for you is, throw you a rope and help pull you out—but you have to grab the rope yourself. You have to help yourself first.’
“I couldn’t bullshit him and tell him everything was going to be all right…but I could let him know I was there to help. If that didn’t work, I’d try to distance myself from the cops as much as possible, even though I was a cop. I’d say, ‘I’m here to help you, Gary—not them,’ meaning the good guys on the other side of the door. ‘I’ll do whatever I can to make this easier for you.’ It’s about offering emotion.”
With that, Horton was hoping Evans might say to himself: I can trust Jim. If he leaves me, I’m stuck dealing with those other cops by myself.
Evans seemed to latch onto Horton’s offering.
“It’s going to be hard,” Evans said, bowing his head, talking through tears.
Horton thought about it for a moment: “It’s going to be hard?” What the hell could that mean?
“Why?” Horton asked. “You mean emotionally, or mentally?” He was confused. What could have been “hard” about it? The most recent, perhaps. But the hardest?
Evans didn’t say anything, but continued whimpering.
Handing him a tissue, Horton gave it a shot. “Jesus, Gar, what are you talking about?”
Evans shrugged; he seemed embarrassed.
“You didn’t cut him up, did you?” Horton asked out of the blue.
Evans looked up, smiled, and nodded his head up and down.
“Jesus. Is he in one location?”
Evans stuck up his finger: “One.”
“How ’bout Falco?”
“In Florida,” Evans whispered.
“Fucking Florida? What the hell—did you do him here, or down there?”
“I shot him here and brought him to Florida in the trunk of someone’s car.”
“Whose car? What kind of car?” Details made all the difference in the world. At this point, Horton wanted to be sure Evans wasn’t taking credit for crimes he didn’t commit.
“I don’t remember,” Evans said, losing his patience. “I don’t fucking remember. It’s confusing. I’m confused. It was…what…almost fifteen years ago.”
“Come on, Gar. Whose car? Tell me whose car? You don’t kill a guy, put him in someone’s car and drive his dead body to Florida without remembering whose fucking car it was.”
“Timmy’s car. Okay. Timmy let me use his car to transport Michael’s body to Florida.”
Then it all made sense. Tim had to go because he was, as Horton had thought all along, a liability.
To say the least, Horton was curious about many things now that he knew for certain Evans had murdered Tim Rysedorph and Michael Falco. For one: Damien Cuomo.
“I shot him in the back of the head,” Evans said without hesitation or emotion.
“Where is he?”
“Can’t tell you, Jim. I can’t let Lisa and Christina know any of this.” Evans didn’t want Christina to, of course, know that the same man she and her mother had befriended, the same man who basically moved into their apartment, was in fact the same man who had murdered her father.
“Is he in the Capital District?”
“Yes.”
Trying to put his arms around what Evans had just told him, Horton needed specifics before he would allow Evans to take credit for the murders. It was going to be a long, emotional night. Hell, the next few days, Horton understood, were going to be the most productive out of the thirteen years he had known Evans.
“Tell me, Gar, will you take me to where Timmy is buried?”
“Yes. Brunswick…Route 2…Eagle Mills.”
“Now, let me get this straight: you cut him up?”
“Yes.”
“With what?”
“A chain saw.”
Horton stopped for a moment and looked away. Jesus. “Let me get this straight, you cut Tim Rysedorph up with a fucking chain saw?”
Evans nodded.
“Okay, Gar, you’re going to tell me exactly what happened now…. I’m talking about Falco, Cuomo and Rysedorph. I want to know every detail. We’ll start from the beginning, Michael Falco, and then you can explain to me why you cut Tim Rysedorph up with a chain saw.”
Evans looked at Horton for a moment and didn’t say anything.
Some time later, Horton met with Evans again. They didn’t talk about much. But before Horton left, Evans kind of smirked at him, as if he wanted to say something.
“What is it?” Horton asked. “You’re holding out on me, Gar. What’s going on?”
“There are others, too,” Evans said.
Horton paused. Closed his eyes, dropped his head, and began rubbing his temples. “What do you mean: ‘others’?”
PART 2
TWENTY-FIVE TO LIFE
CHAPTER 33
Troy, New York, an industrial town of fifty-five thousand, is located along the Hudson River, which cuts a path through the city near downtown, about fifteen miles north of Albany. For the most part, Troy is a lower-middle-class haven known for the steel mill factories and oil refineries that had, during the 1950s and 1960s, dotted the banks of the river and thrived. Stove manufacturers, textile mills, stagecoach and carriage builders, breweries, bell builders, iron, steel and ore manufacturers, and even the detachable shirt collar were Troy’s chief source of pre–Civil War employment up until the 1960s and 1970s. The old saying went, “When the streets [of Troy] are filled with smoke, jobs abound.” Today, those same steel mills and factories are desolate and vacant, mere dwellings for rats and homeless people.
Most famously, Clement Moore’s “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” was first published in a Troy newspaper in the early 1800s. Since then, controversy has surrounded who actually wrote the familiar story. Yet Troy natives cling to the fame the story has brought them for close to two hundred years.
Undoubtedly, Troy’s most famous former resident isn’t a politician, writer, actor or sports figure—but a meatpacker. Samuel Wilson, the story goes, moved to Troy in 1789 with his brother and got a job at a local slaughterhouse. During the War of 1812, when Sam stamped the meat he packed with the phrase “U.S. Beef,” soldiers receiving it began referring to the “U.S.” portion of his stamp as “Uncle Sam.” Still, contrary to the image most Americans have today of Uncle Sam, and the commercialism his likeness has taken on—the cotton white goatee and star-spangled three-piece suit—Samuel Wilson was a plain-looking man, clean-shaven and a bit on the homely side. In his day, Americans paid him little attention.
The buildings in Troy haven’t changed much over the course of the past century; the same redbrick 18th-and 19th-century buildings reminiscent of Victorian England still stand tall on city streets and manage to embrace, with a bit of nostalgia, a town that has grown isolated and abandoned throughout the years. Entering Troy from the Village of Menands, the Troy-Menands Bridge, constructed in 1932, crosses the Hudson River at about sixty-two feet above the waterline. About ten minutes from downtown Albany, the bridge, painted a pukey green pastel color with horizontal steel girders and vertical steel beams, looks like a half-circle laid on its side. Traffic moves fast over the bridge that separates Rensselaer County from Albany County. On most mornings, the fog coming up from the river is so thick one might believe the old abandoned oil refineries along the riverbank below the bridge have been fired up again, or the steel mills are once again melting molten ore into bells and iron plates for Civil War ships.
But the reality is, the Troy of today, like a lot of East Coast American steel mill cities, is struggling in a difficult economy, trying to stretch what little work is available and convince people to stay.
CHAPTER 34
The year 1954 was a banner year in American pop culture history. Both McDonald’s and Burger King opened their first fast-food restaurants. Sports Illustrated hit newsstands. M&M’s were launched. Bazooka Joe comics were introduced, as was Trix cereal and Play-Doh. More seriously, Dr. Sam Sheppard was accused of murdering his wife, proclaiming his innocence by telling police a “bushy-haired man” broke into his home and committed the crime. In what would become an issue of heated debate some fifty years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, changing the popular school morning ritual from “one nation, indivisible,” to “one nation, under God, indivisible.”
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court weighed in on its ruling regarding what would turn out to be a landmark case in the civil rights movement. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the court agreed that “segre
gation in public schools [was] unconstitutional,” which, some say, “paved the way for large-scale desegregation.”
For a man who would later develop a deep-seated hatred for African Americans—and have no trouble voicing his bigotry and disdain, routinely calling blacks “niggers” and Puerto Ricans “spicks”—1954 was, ironically, the same year he had been brought into this world. On October 7, 1954, twenty-two-year-old Flora Mae Flanders Evans, who had lived in and around the Capital District her entire life, gave birth to her second child, a blue-eyed, pudgy little boy of about eight pounds she named Gary Charles. Five years prior, in 1949, Flora Mae had given birth to a girl, Robbie, fathered by her first husband, Ross Edmonds. Ross had abandoned Flora Mae shortly after Robbie was born so he could travel with the carnival. Leroy Evans, Gary Charles’s father, came into their lives a few years later and, at the beginning, seemed to be a lifesaver.
Leroy’s family of devout Catholics did not approve of the relationship between Flora Mae and Leroy. They felt debased by anyone who didn’t follow the family’s same strict set of religious guidelines, which Leroy had been set on a path toward from his birth in March 1932. Going to church wasn’t an option; it was family law. Like many households back in those days, balancing the effects of the Depression and the fallout of two world wars, life for Leroy became pious, regimented and, in many ways, simple: attend school, church, study the Bible, never miss Sunday school. Poverty wasn’t something families complained about; it was a way of life.
Because they had grown accustomed to a hard-knock life, the Evans family ran a tight ship and shunned those who weren’t like them.
“We were not really welcomed into Leroy’s family,” Gary Charles’s half sister, Robbie, recalled years later, “because my mom was divorced, already had a child and was Protestant.”
Indeed, in the eyes of Leroy’s family, Flora Mae was an outcast. If her first husband had left her with a child, there must have been a good reason behind it.
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