Every Move You Make

by M. William Phelps

  Once they got back to town, they made a date to meet in three days. It was agreed that Damien would hold on to the stolen merchandise. He knew someone who would buy most of it, he said. “I’ll get rid of it,” he told Evans, “and pay you when I see you in three days.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  At about 10:00 A.M., on September 8, Shirley Berry, Douglas Berry’s wife, decided she’d drive down to the Square Lion after trying unsuccessfully to reach her husband by phone all morning. Something, Mrs. Berry thought, was wrong. It was out of character for Douglas not to answer the phone.

  When Shirley entered the shop at a few minutes after ten that morning, she saw a few of the jewelry cases opened. It appeared as though some items were missing, but she wasn’t sure. Confused, she said loudly, “Douglas?”

  After not getting an answer, Mrs. Berry then went up to the loft, where she found him lying on his cot, seemingly still asleep.

  Her first thought was that he’d had a heart attack in his sleep. He looked so peaceful just lying there. With a .22-caliber weapon, the hole it leaves in the human body is so small that if the wound isn’t on an easily accessible part of the body, it is almost impossible to see.

  With her husband dead, Mrs. Berry phoned the local Watertown Police Department (WPD) to report a possible break-in, and what she now believed was the murder of her husband. “It’s suspicious,” she told the dispatcher, “because I noticed diamonds and gold coins missing from one of the display cases.”

  By 2:20 P.M. that same day, state police investigator Keith Fairchild from Troop D in Oneida, New York, was on the scene. After some preliminary interviews with Shirley Berry, the medical examiner and a few other local law enforcement, all he could come up with was one .22-caliber spent projectile found near Berry’s head, a “fired bullet casing” by his right elbow, a crumpled pack of Canadian cigarettes and a size-ten “latent footprint” found on a piece of glass in the back of the shop.

  CHAPTER 60

  As they had planned earlier that week, Evans and Damien met in Troy on September 11, 1989, to decide what to do next. Damien had—as he promised he would—sold all of the merchandise stolen from Berry’s Watertown jewelry shop. “Here,” Cuomo said, handing Evans a wad of money. “There’s about fifteen grand there.”

  Evans smiled. “Not a bad day’s work, Damien, huh?”

  “I guess,” Cuomo said. He was still a bit shaky, Evans said later. Acting anxious. Not himself. Whereas Evans had killed before and the murder of Berry, an innocent victim, didn’t seem to matter much to him, Damien Cuomo was a burglar. The idea of killing a man had never been part of who he was or what he did.

  “You can never tell anyone about that job, you fucking understand me?” Evans warned, changing his tone from casual to serious. “Never.”

  “I know, Gar. I understand.”

  Evans later explained to Horton what he was thinking as he and Damien parted ways after their brief conversation. “I really didn’t trust Damien. I knew that motherfucker had been ripping me off little by little the entire time I knew him.”

  You’ll get yours, too, you little fucker, Evans thought as he watched Cuomo drive away. Real fucking soon.

  Gary Evans and Lisa Morris, Damien’s longtime girlfriend, the mother of Damien’s child, had always hated each other, Morris explained later. “He took a lot of Damien’s time from me. They were always taking off.”

  Sometimes it was a day, maybe two, perhaps even three or four. Damien would always return, though, bearing gifts for Lisa. But she still couldn’t stand to see Evans. Lisa had dreams of marrying Damien, she said. But at the same time never mentioned it to him for fear of scaring him off. “If it happened, great. I had my heart set on it. I loved Damien. He was a great father. He loved his daughter.”

  Still, as well as Lisa and Damien were getting along, everything changed after Evans started showing up. Damien wasn’t focused on family as much. He became, Lisa insisted, more interested in “the next job” he was going to pull off with Evans.

  There was one time when Evans showed up at the apartment after he and Cuomo had burgled the Square Lion, and Lisa told him to “stay the fuck away from Damien.” Evans had, as he often would, shown up out of the blue. Standing in front of Lisa on the second story of the apartment porch, listening to Lisa bellyache about taking Damien away so much, Evans stared at her and said, “You shut the fuck up or I will throw you off this balcony.”

  “You don’t scare me,” Lisa said.

  “Just tell your little fucking boyfriend that I was here.”

  As Evans drove away, he began laughing. I’m going to fuck her someday, he told himself. She doesn’t know it yet, but I’ll have her wrapped around my finger.

  As the weeks passed after the Watertown job, Evans began showing up at Cuomo’s nearly daily. He became like a stray cat they had fed one day, Lisa joked later. And because he was there so much when Damien wasn’t around, Lisa said she was forced to “leave Christina,” who was three years old at the time, with him. “I had been working two jobs,” Lisa recalled. “Because Damien was away so much doing his thing, I spent a lot of time with Gary. Although we didn’t like each other all that much then, I felt I could trust him with Christina. Damien felt the same way.”

  Lisa began to drink much more heavily, she later said, around this same time. She had always indulged in “a joint once in a while and maybe a beer or two,” but now she was drinking and smoking pot almost daily. “It was Damien not being around and me knowing what he was doing.”

  She later denied knowing anything about the Watertown job and murder, but she readily admitted that she knew Damien Cuomo and Gary Evans were burglars, and chose to look the other way.

  By November 1989, Watertown detectives had a suspect in the murder of Douglas Berry. A “white male, age thirty-one,” with an “extensive arrest record in New York and New Jersey.” The guy was a Watertown loner who had, two years prior to Berry’s murder, “bragged about killing [Berry]…and taking his gold.”

  When detectives tracked him down, he denied any involvement. Several days later, detectives asked him to take a polygraph.

  “Sure,” the guy said, “I have nothing to hide.”

  Most people, when faced with the grim prospect of a murder hanging over their heads, will, uncontrollably, harbor some sort of anxiety about the crime, even if they weren’t involved. It’s human nature. This particular guy had already bragged to his buddies at a local bar that he was going to kill Berry and rob him.

  Faced with what was beginning to look like an entire town ready to tar and feather him, the man agreed to the polygraph, yet failed the test horribly. So, as the public demanded an arrest, he left the state.

  Weeks later, detectives failed to put together enough evidence to prosecute him and the case was reopened and sent back to the state police.

  It appeared that Evans had committed the perfect murder. As he watched from afar, keeping tabs on what was going on in Watertown, he realized how easy it was to get away with murder. He had killed two men with no ramifications.

  Why not try it again?

  CHAPTER 61

  Before the first major snowfall of the 1989 winter, Evans decided he needed to do something that would ultimately be of great importance to him in the coming weeks. Near the end of November, a day or two after Thanksgiving, he drove down to the local nursery in Troy and purchased three bags of topsoil and about nine feet of chicken wire fencing one might use to protect a small vegetable garden from rabbits.

  After grabbing a saw and shovel, Evans drove up in back of Damien Cuomo’s apartment on Industrial Park Road in Troy. Pulling up in the back of the apartment complex, he parked his truck off near a wooded area out of view. From there, he walked about a half-mile into the woods and began looking for an area less accessible from the apartment complex’s driveway.

  Walking up and down steep inclines and small hills, he located a young tree about four inches in diameter and began sawing away at t
he bottom of it. Sweating, stopping every so often to take a breather, in minutes the tree was lying on its side, on the floor of the woods. Heading north from where he was standing, Evans began walking in a straight line.

  “One…two…three…,” he said to himself as he counted off sixty paces. Once there, he began digging.

  After breaking through what amounted to an inch or two of frost, he hit sand and ended up digging out a three-foot-deep, three-foot-round hole. Then he lined the hole with the chicken wire so it wouldn’t cave in on him, placed the three bags of topsoil inside the hole and covered it with a piece of wood he found nearby.

  Walking away, he realized that if any of the neighborhood kids came up on the area, they might spot the piece of wood and, out of curiosity, lift it up to see what was underneath. So he grabbed as much mulch, leaves and whatever else he could find on the floor of the woods and spread it over the top.

  Later, Evans explained to Horton that he believed Cuomo had shorted him on the Watertown job. He thought Damien had sold the merchandise for far more money than he had claimed and pocketed the extra cash. Plus, he added, “I had an arrest record. Damien didn’t. That made it easier. He would roll over on me in a minute. He had a wife and kid. It was time for him to go. That little weasel fuck was the hillside burglar and they arrested some nigger for it who probably did one or two burglaries in his life while Damien was laughing his ass off.”

  When Gary Evans made up his mind, facts didn’t matter. If he believed Damien Cuomo had ripped him off, in his mind it had happened.

  It was time for Damien to go.

  PART 3

  EN PASSANT

  CHAPTER 62

  Gary Evans wasn’t the only full-time criminal Jim Horton had been investigating since his arrival at the Bureau in 1984. By the end of 1989, Horton was quickly rising up through the ranks of the Bureau, well on his way to becoming one of its coveted senior investigators. During each year, he and other Bureau investigators had worked dozens of murder cases, often juggling many of them at the same time. As a father and husband, the cases that haunted Horton most involved young women and children: sexual molestation, rapes, abuse and murder. He brought that type of work home with him and spent many nights tossing and turning, trying to figure out that one missing link in the chain of evidence that could solve a particular case.

  One case in particular that bothered Horton and his longtime partner, Doug Wingate (who was, in many ways, Horton’s mentor), involved a local Filipino housekeeper, Rose Tullao, who had gone missing in early 1986.

  Horton and Wingate had it on good information that a local repeat sexual offender, Jeffrey Williams, a bushy-haired loner who “liked to hurt women,” was responsible for Tullao’s disappearance and, ultimately, had murdered her in an act of evil so chilling it was hard to stomach, even for two seasoned cops.

  In October 1987, Tullao’s skeletal remains were found in a park in Cohoes. As soon as Horton and Wingate learned the details of the crime, they saw Jeffrey Williams’s trademark all over it.

  “A pillowcase was involved,” Horton noted. “Jeff Williams had used a pillowcase before to subdue and sodomize a woman.”

  What’s more, two local cops had spotted a car late one night down by Peebles Island State Park in Cohoes and went down to check it out. Touching the hood of the car, it was warm. After observing Williams walking out of the woods near the car, one of the cops asked him what he was doing.

  “Taking a piss,” Williams said.

  The cops then took his name, wrote down his license plate number and let him go.

  Two years later, when Horton found out that someone fitting Williams’s description had been questioned by local cops down by “a wooded area” in Cohoes, he ran the plate number of the car. When it turned out to be Jeffrey Williams’s car, Horton knew he was close to getting him.

  By the end of the day, they had found was left of Tullao’s decomposed body.

  “He must have just finished killing her,” Horton recalled later, “when those local cops spotted him emerging from the woods. Doug Wingate and I had made it a priority to keep Jeff Williams on our radar. We knew he had killed Tullao, and suspected he killed others.”

  Born on July 8, 1960, Jeffrey Williams, with his boyish-looking face, thick, dark black eyebrows and bone white, perfectly straight teeth, could have doubled for Peter Brady, one of the characters on the popular ’70s sitcom The Brady Bunch. Yet, at six feet five inches, nearly 235 pounds, the women Williams preyed upon were no match for what was a monster of a human being. His criminal background dated back to his early teens when he was arrested for stealing a car. A few years after that, at nineteen, he was arrested for “sodomy, robbery and burglary” after he attacked a Clifton Park, New York, woman who later identified him. Realizing prosecutors had a rock-solid case against him, Williams pleaded guilty to “attempted sodomy” and ended up with a two-to six-year sentence.

  “That first woman Williams raped, he didn’t kill her and she identified him,” Horton said later. “That’s what these rapists learn—that killing their victims is the only way to be certain they won’t be identified.”

  After serving time on the sodomy and assault conviction, shortly after being released from prison in 1983, Williams pleaded guilty to shoplifting, which placed him under what New York State called its “second felony offender” status. He ended up doing almost three years for, essentially, no more than lifting a pack of gum.

  In 1987, the Bureau began focusing on Williams in the disappearance of Diane Deso, a local girl whose body was found washed up on the banks of the Hudson River that summer. She had been strangled and possibly raped. There was also Karen Wilson, a twenty-two-year-old local girl who had been missing for years but whose body had never been found; and a seventy-eight-year-old woman who had been raped and robbed in 1986.

  Horton and Wingate felt Williams was responsible for all three crimes.

  “He’s an animal,” Horton said later. “He hates certain types of women.”

  Indeed, somewhere along his sociopathic jaunt through life, Williams had, according to Horton and Wingate, developed a burning hatred toward a certain cluster of females. In a statement to police, Williams once said he “had problems with women” and admitted there were “certain types” he despised and, more important, “there were certain types…[he] wished to injure.” Reading aloud the police report during one of Williams’s many court proceedings, Justice Joseph Harris added that Williams especially hated women with “large buttocks, women who wore short skirts, women who were old or over forty years of age and women who tried to look young.”

  This didn’t sit well with Horton, whose wife, Mary Pat, at a mere five feet, one hundred pounds, couldn’t, in any way, be put into Williams’s “big butt” category (nor was she over forty at the time), but she liked to “dress young” and fashioned her clothes by trends set by younger women.

  Perhaps more frightening than that, though, was the hatred Williams harbored for Horton himself, who, with Doug Wingate, had pursued him vigorously since 1987. It was no secret Williams had told other inmates that Horton was enemy number one on his list. And some prison rumors had it that he had even mentioned Mary Pat and Alison, Horton’s daughter, on occasion, threatening to grab one of them as soon as he had the chance.

  Obviously, this scared Mary Pat, seeing that Williams lived five miles from Horton’s home. At one time, they changed their phone number because they thought Williams was calling the house.

  “I knew he didn’t live far from us,” Mary Pat recalled later. “I knew he was a really big guy. I knew he once said he didn’t like women who tried to dress ‘young.’ I almost always shop in the junior department. I’m petite. I like to wear current fashions. I knew he could easily overpower me. I asked Jim to show me pictures of him. I wanted to know exactly what he looked like. I wanted to study his face.”

  Mary Pat, a dental hygienist, described Williams as having a “big lower jaw, like Jay Leno,” a feature she wou
ld notice right away on any person.

  “If he ever came to our door, or approached me in a parking lot, I wanted to know that it was him…. I was worried he would try to ‘get even’ with Jim by raping and then killing me or Alison, our daughter. I felt this was a real possibility. He was huge, frightening, and he had killed before and gotten away with it.”

  After Williams’s release from prison in 1986, he met—and eventually married—a local girl, who was only sixteen when they met, while he was twenty-six. When they married the following year, the girl became pregnant and ended up having the child while Williams was in Albany County Jail waiting to go to prison on a twenty-five to life bid for, of all things, stealing a rocking chair out of a garage. Shortly before that, on January 23, 1988, Karolyn Lonczak, a beautiful eighteen-year-old from Cohoes who worked as an “overnight monitor” for Residential Opportunities Inc., a group home in Cohoes for mentally challenged adults, was abducted in the middle of the night from the living room inside the group facility. Two months later, her nude body was discovered about twenty miles north of Cohoes on the banks of the Tomhannock Reservoir. She had been strangled and stabbed several times. Because her body was so decomposed, an autopsy failed to determine if she had been raped.

  At the time, Williams had lived only blocks from the group home. Needless to say, he became one of Horton and Wingate’s main suspects.

  After Lonczak’s body was found, Horton and Wingate decided to put Williams under a twenty-four-hour surveillance. There were too many girls turning up dead. Too many attempted abductions. And way too many pieces of evidence pointing directly at him.

  One night, two Bureau cops tailing Williams spied him breaking into a garage and stealing a rocking chair. A day or so later, he was seen peeping into a window, watching a young woman while she readied herself for bed.