Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  Flora was on top of the three-story tenement across the alleyway, hanging her legs off the side of the building, indicating that she was ready to jump.

  As clichéd as it was, Flora chanted unassumingly, “No one loves me anymore. You will all be better off without me. I don’t want to live anymore.”

  Robbie eventually talked her down.

  “Mom would walk to the railroad tracks,” Robbie added, “and wait for the train to kill her. I had to tell her that Gary and I loved her very much and could not live without her [and] she would come back home.”

  CHAPTER 36

  According to some, Gary Charles began stealing comic books before he had even hit puberty—all with the blessing of his mother.

  “Flora Mae was a thief,” a close family friend said later. “That’s how Gary learned to steal. She taught him.”

  Jo Rehm recalled a day when Gary was eight and had brought home a “$1,000 ring” for her he had stolen while he was out with his mother. From there, it seemed stealing became an addiction. He started taking whatever he wanted. Neighborhood bicycles became a favorite target. Packs of gum. Food. Car stereos. It didn’t seem to matter. As time went on and he grew into a teenager, Evans would even play a Robin Hood role around the neighborhood by stealing jewelry and giving it to the girls. As he grew even older and began stealing from local thugs—drug dealers and other criminal types—the Robin Hood brand became even more pronounced. He wasn’t the “bad guy,” some said later, taking things that didn’t belong to him; he was stealing from “people who deserved it.”

  Flora Mae and Roy’s relationship had been set on a path of destruction, it seemed, since the day they had met back in the early ’50s. By the fall of 1967, as Gary Charles turned thirteen, the structure of the Evans household was in a constant state of chaos. The only positive aspect of it all for Gary was that he was getting older—and bigger. Robbie was a sophomore in high school by this point. Albany Business School was beginning to take up much of her thought. She was thinking about moving out and leaving the area, maybe starting her own business someday. While Gary, who was retreating more into a world of solitude and silence, was thinking about traveling the country and “living off the land.”

  At thirty-five, Flora was still young and attractive, considering the hell she had put her body through due to several suicide attempts and a savage alcohol addiction. If she wanted to, she could certainly leave Roy and start all over again.

  Jo Rehm, who had just turned twenty, moved to another neighborhood across town. Suddenly, Flora Mae, Gary Charles and Robbie’s life raft, whether they realized it or not, was gone. Jo continued to ride her bike down to First Street to check on the kids—Gary specifically—but she wasn’t there like she had been for most of Gary’s early life.

  “I loved him like a big sister. I worried sick about him and what Roy would do to him once I left.”

  However, Gary wasn’t the boy Roy could manhandle and keep confined inside the home anymore. He was growing into a man, quickly. Still scrawny and shorter than most kids, Gary’s body began to change remarkably. His arms and legs, for one, ballooned. He didn’t even have to work at it.

  Roy, at five feet five inches, about 140 pounds, hampered physically by his chronic use of alcohol and the car accident he had been in, was still a lot bigger and tougher than Gary. Yet Gary was becoming street-tough and fearless. Roy soon would have his work cut out for him if he challenged Gary in any way.

  While Gary’s body took shape, there were signs his mind was beginning to have trouble processing all the abuse he had been put through as a child. If throwing rocks at the neighborhood kids and beating them up once in a while wasn’t bad enough, true signs of the serial killer he would later become began to emerge.

  A former classmate and neighbor recalled how he had “been mean to cats.” One incident that stood out involved Gary and another neighborhood boy.

  “He tied the cat’s tail [and] burned him up.”

  Being mean to cats and neighborhood pets might be part of growing up for some children. But this former neighborhood friend described an utter hatred, which borderlined on psychotic, that Gary displayed for the neighborhood pets. He seemed to enjoy with a certain dark passion the torture he had perpetrated toward the cats and the power he could wield over smaller animals.

  For the past twenty-five years, psychologists, sociologists and criminalists have studied how being cruel to animals in childhood affects a person later in life. Many agree that a history of animal cruelty in childhood often leads to criminal problems in adulthood. The FBI, in the ’70s, began to recognize, after reviewing the lives of several serial killers, that “most had killed or tortured animals as children.”

  Flora Mae finally got up the nerve to leave Roy in 1968. Within months after making the decision, Roy granted Flora a divorce and, just like that, she, Robbie and Gary had moved out of Troy and were living on their own just across the Hudson in Cohoes, New York. Gary had moved in with Jo Rehm for a brief period, but she was getting married. He had a home with Flora Mae in Cohoes. Why burden Jo with his problems?

  Robbie, now eighteen, had enrolled in Albany Business School after graduating high school. By June, she had married a local man, but quickly divorced him, she said, after the relationship became abusive. For a time, Gary moved in with her after realizing he didn’t want to live in Cohoes. Out on his own now, living in abandoned buildings and sleeping in abandoned cars and trucks, eating what little food he could scrounge up or steal, Gary developed a side business. He would do homework for nearby engineering students, providing they gave him a place to stay. When work became slow, however, he would break into Freihofer’s trucks and steal chocolate-chip cookies to feed himself.

  Flora Mae, as Gary and Robbie made a go of life on their own, married for a third time while living in Cohoes. But, according to some, her new husband was no better than Roy: an abusive alcoholic. After that brief marriage ended, she packed it up and moved to Astoria, Queens, New York, which was south, near New York City. Once there, she met “a man named Jim” and married for a fourth time.

  “[Jim] was another drunk,” Robbie later said.

  While Robbie was pregnant with her first child, she visited Flora Mae in Astoria. She recalled how Flora had taken her to Rockefeller Center to go ice-skating. Life seemed calm for Flora while she was in Astoria. She appeared content for the first time in years. She had even planted a garden in the back of her apartment and grew vegetables. There’s a startling image Robbie keeps of her and her mother during those years. They are standing next to a sunflower Flora Mae had cultivated that nearly reached the second story of the apartment complex. Flora appeared seemingly happy for perhaps the first time in her life.

  If Flora Mae seemed to be in good spirits and health while in Astoria, it was all a front. She had developed pleurisy. Causes for the disease include a “bacterial or viral infection of the lungs (such as pneumonia), tuberculosis, lupus, chest injury or trauma, a blood clot in the lung, or cancer.” An immediate cause, doctors say, is not always found. Generally, one can live a normal life as long as the condition is treated properly. Breathing becomes painful and sufferers complain of “sharp, stabbing” pains in the chest and stomach areas of the body. Flora Mae, who was never one to voice her ailments or problems, became “very ill” while living in Astoria, Robbie said later.

  The pleurisy would become, in the years that followed, a subtle premonition of where her life was headed and the tragic way it would soon end.

  By 1970, her fourth marriage had dissolved. So she moved north, to Pottersville. Within a year, she would give up on men entirely and begin a lesbian relationship with a woman who, some said later, was “the only person who had ever loved her unconditionally.”

  But regardless of the new love interest in her life, when Gary found out about the relationship, he disparaged her and told those around him she was “sick.” Gary’s bigotry was not confined to blacks and Jews and Puerto Ricans; he also claimed to
hate homosexuals—but doubts about his own sexuality would later surface and cause one to question whether he actually hated homosexuals or himself.

  By the time he turned seventeen, Gary was once again back in Troy, hanging around street corners, stealing food to feed himself, breaking into abandoned buildings to sleep and meeting up with old friends. It was the beginning of the seventies.

  Free love. Drugs. Music. Sexual freedom. Vietnam.

  Gary wanted nothing to do with any of it. He was a loner. He traveled by himself and worked by himself. He felt people pissed him off and let him down. Still, as he began to think about a career, there was only one vocation that interested him.

  “I think Gary had dollar signs in his eyes,” Jim Horton said later, “throughout his childhood and into his teen years. He always told me he wanted more than what he had. Instead of settling for what life brought him, he decided, from an early age, to take the ‘easy’ way out by getting more for less effort.”

  Early in his life, Gary learned that crime did pay. He could get what he wanted and not have to give up forty hours of his week. No boss. No coworkers. No one telling him when to show up, when to leave, what to wear.

  After living on the street for what amounted to the summer of 1970, “stealing to survive,” he later said, it was around this time when Gary became involved in petit larceny. He had even spent ninety days in a county jail after being caught breaking into a house. The sheriff who had arrested him, perhaps feeling responsible, ended up getting Gary a job at a local cemetery digging holes after he got out of jail. But it lasted only a few days.

  “I, too, got him jobs over the years,” Horton recalled. “In the early days, when I first met him, I talked a local landscaper into hiring him. But Gary called one day and told me that it was ‘too hard’ for him. ‘I don’t like people telling me what to do,’ he said. ‘I can make more money stealing.’”

  By the mid-1970s, Gary hooked up with two old neighborhood friends, Tim Rysedorph and Michael Falco. They ended up sharing an apartment together on Adams Street, down a few blocks from Gary’s childhood home. Tim lived inside the apartment with Michael Falco, while Gary lived out back in an old abandoned shed before moving in. Tim, who had spent two years in a Catholic school, a family member later said, “didn’t care for Catholic school and went to public.” He was a good kid, that same family member insisted. He just happened to fall in with the wrong crowd.

  Michael Falco had a reputation around the neighborhood as being a troublemaker. He always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Family members and friends later claimed Falco’s troubles with the law didn’t start until he met Evans. But law enforcement confirmed that Falco had been arrested on numerous occasions before Evans emerged back in town. Born on February 3, 1959, Falco grew into a handsome kid: curly black hair, parted in the middle, a thin face, high cheekbones, olive skin. He was scrappy and petite, about five feet six inches, 140 pounds. He was streetwise and knew the neighborhood.

  Evans was four years or so older than Falco. They hadn’t really hung around together much as kids, but knew each other from the neighborhood.

  As Evans grew out of his teenage body and into his twenties, he became a rather large, muscular man that people around town feared. Because he was short, he was often compared to a wrestler. He began lifting weights obsessively and grew a long, square, wiry beard, much like that of ZZ Top frontmen Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill. He wore bandannas and large Elvis-type sunglasses. In photos, he rarely smiled. His hair was kept hippielike, par for the times, down to his shoulders. For years, he camped in the woods. But now he was living with Falco and Tim—and beginning to set his sights on the future.

  As a thief, Evans’s appetite was no longer whet by car stereos, five-and-dime rings and pendants for the neighborhood girls. While studying antiques—reading books, browsing local antique stores, pricing items, disguising himself as a dealer, comparing items with shop owners, learning about expensive artwork and rare prints—he saw a gold mine. It was big-ticket items for Evans now: jewelry, antiques, rare books and pricey artwork. If he was going to take the chance of getting caught during a robbery, it was going to be well worth his effort.

  CHAPTER 37

  By January 1977, Flora Mae was living in upstate New York with her lesbian lover in what could be called the first “healthy” relationship she had ever been involved in. Robbie, beginning a new life, had moved to Florida. With Roy still living in the Troy apartment by himself, visited rarely by anyone, and Gary pulling off burglaries and robberies with his new pals, Michael Falco and Tim Rysedorph, it seemed as though everyone in the Evans family had gone their separate ways for good this time.

  On January 13, Gary went through what can be called a “learning curve” in what had now become his sole passion in life. He had burgled a home in Lake Placid, New York, got caught in the act and was ultimately sentenced to four years in a state prison after being convicted of third-degree larceny. Even more brawny now, at about 155 pounds—all of which was lean, cut muscle—he was getting his first taste of hard prison time at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. It would be the first of almost two dozen serious arrests and the first of several prison bids.

  The prospect of being confined behind bars for so long scared Evans; it was apparent in some of the letters he later wrote to family and friends. The main focus of his insecurity came from doing his time with, he said, “those people: spiks, niggers, faggots and diddlers (child molesters).” Drug dealers were also on his list of “scourge.” If he had contained a seed of hatred for anyone he saw as being lower on the food chain than himself because of their color or creed, now he was being thrust into an environment where his life would be centered around those same people.

  Evans harbored such a hatred for African Americans that he couldn’t as much as look at a black person without saying anything hurtful. There was one time when he and Horton were driving back to his apartment after a meeting and Horton had driven by a few black guys who were walking down the street minding their own business.

  “Fucking niggers,” Evans said, staring them down as Horton drove by.

  “Come on, Gar,” Horton shot back. “There’s no reason for that shit.”

  “They are wasting my oxygen,” Evans said, shaking his head.

  It was, no doubt, a seed that had been planted by his father, who himself was an admitted racist.

  The Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, where Evans was being held, had a reputation as a no-nonsense maximum-security penitentiary where the state of New York sent some of its most hardened criminals. Considered a “super-max,” Clinton is the “largest and third oldest of New York’s seventy facilities.” More than 150 years old, it was built as a mining prison back in the 1800s. Located 350 miles north of New York City and seventy-five miles south of Montreal, Canada, it was known as “Little Siberia”—mainly, one would have to imagine, because of its close proximity to Russia, New York and the fact that northern New York generally enjoyed only two seasons: winter and fall.

  Not that it mattered to Evans, but six months into his bid at Clinton, his father, at fifty-five, lost a battle with throat cancer and died at an Albany veteran’s hospital.

  “Roy died a lonely old man,” Robbie Evans said later. “His family contacted me a month after his death; he said that’s what he wanted. I shed one tear and that was all. I did not mourn his death.”

  Whereas Robbie had acknowledged Roy’s death, Gary never mentioned it.

  While confined at Clinton, Evans began to lean on Robbie for support. The tall concrete walls, loud and crowded hallways, outside rifle towers and razor wire kept it real. This wasn’t the county jail. It was hard time in a setting Evans had never—and would never—consider himself a violent enough offender to be subjected to.

  There is a saying many inmates live by behind bars: “Don’t let the time do you; you do the time.” As Evans began to count the days until his release, he started writing lett
ers and sending drawings to Robbie. He talked about everything: from what he was going to do when he got out, to the filthy and vile behavior he was witnessing while locked up, to how and why his life had turned out the way it had.

  One of his favorite forms of writing became poetry:

  Sister Robbin,

  Thinking about yesterdays.

  Not every day was alone and gray.

  The times I wasn’t alone, a helper sometimes came to talk. And try to let some sunshine in.

  Named for a bird, [you] should’ve had my eyes.

  But brown isn’t bad.

  A little big sister golden hair.

  Nobody knows when nothing shows.

  Where will you go from there?

  Growing up and sometimes apart.

  Still she’s one of the few invited to my movie.

  Technicolor true-life now time.

  At the end of the letter, which was written entirely in verse, he finished by writing, Not a good time, but rainbows are coming!

  He soon started to include drawings with his poetry. He drew mountains and stars and landscapes. In one, he sketched a naked man sitting on the ledge of a cliff. The man had long hair brushing down his back. He was grabbing at the grass below him and throwing it off the cliff into the wind. Although he had denounced vehemently the lesbian relationship Flora Mae had been involved in now for a few years, the drawing and the accompanying poem had been addressed to her.

  I sing now with eyes that rain, Evans wrote. My freedom and I are back again. I sit on stone and sing of alone. Free.

  Convicts are transferred from one prison to another during their sentences for a wide variety of reasons, largely because of overcrowding. New York State, however, one of the more populated states in the country, had always been in the top five states for housing the most prisoners. Because of overcrowding, New York was constantly moving prisoners from one facility to the other so it could maintain open beds for the flood of inmates it processed each month. When a prisoner became too familiar with a certain facility, or a prison gang began to bulk up in size in one prison, certain inmates were transferred to discourage any behavior that might get out of hand. It is a common part of prison life to wake up one morning in one prison and go to bed that same night in another.