Every Move You Make (52 page)

Beginning on the top of the second page, Evans had circled an entire section and explained to Treece in a side note that he wanted it released to the media.

Paper and TV,
he wrote.
TV’s better, the papers lie a lot.

My lessons here are learned = on to a better place now. My friends are happy, and I’m already there. With Canis Minor and a beautiful blue moon. With a smile stars surround me and peace and love are mine. They can’t be taken or touched.

Lastly, he wrote,
I win.

He made a note on the bottom of the page:
Mail it to Jo Rehm…and tell her to give it to my girl I love.
Underneath that:
And my words to her [Doris] are: Be happy for me, don’t be sad. For you, us, I’m OK now.
He drew a smiley face. Then,
No drinking. I love you always. Live long, you’ll be an awesome mom. Hey Boogie! See ya next place.

Words he had spoken to Lisa Morris and Jim Horton merely days earlier were scattered, if only by impression, all over the letter: “If I die in here, they win. If I die out there, I win.”

CHAPTER 94

Kenneth Bruno released a statement only hours after Evans had made his fatal leap. After explaining what had happened in figurative detail, Bruno said that “although the criminal prosecution against Gary Evans is over, my office will continue to make ourselves available to” the families of his victims. He talked about “mixed emotions” during what was going to be a time of uncertainty. Finally, “No one celebrates the death of any individual, even if death would have been the appropriate consequence for his actions. That’s a decision that I won’t have to make in this case.”

What was, essentially, mere politically correct sentiment didn’t bode well with public opinion, however. One man told reporters that Evans had “saved the taxpayers a lot of money.” Another said, “I’m glad he’s dead.” Yet another commented, “I’m not an advocate of anyone dying, but you have to make an exception in this case.”

One of Michael Falco’s brothers told the
Times Union
, “I think there was a higher court looking to judge this one. His death, the way it all happened, it’s called ‘poetic justice.’”

Regardless of how people felt, Evans was dead. He wasn’t going to hurt anyone again. For Horton and his colleagues, though, they needed answers to several questions—one of which being, how in the hell did a prisoner who was considered an escape risk, to begin with, get out of his handcuffs and hurl himself over a bridge in broad daylight in the presence of four armed marshals?

None of it made sense.

Horton, Dr. Barbara Wolf and several Bureau investigators met at Dr. Wolf’s Albany office later that night to go through Evans’s body with a magnifying glass. Hopefully, they would find some answers. Dr. Wolf had done thousands of autopsies in a career that had spanned decades. She was appointed to collect forensic evidence after the ill-fated TWA Flight 800 crash off Long Island Sound. Well-respected, Wolf was known throughout the forensic community as someone who took her work seriously. If Evans’s body held secrets, Dr. Wolf would find them.

Almost immediately, Evans’s corpse yielded clues as to how far he was prepared to go in order to carry out his plan. After undressing him, Dr. Wolf made note of all his tattoos as Horton and the others looked on. Down near Evans’s Achilles’ heel, they found a paper clip and a blade from a razor taped to his leg underneath his sock. A quick search by anyone at the jail or courthouse would have found it easily.

Horton picked it up and looked at it. “What the hell? How did he get this? How come nobody found it?”

There were some who later insisted that it had to have been a guard at Rensselaer County Jail, but it would never be proven. While others swore it had been Horton, Lisa Morris or Jo Rehm.

The next order of business was to do a full-body X ray.

“That’s when things really got bizarre,” Horton said later.

Bizarre wouldn’t even begin to describe what they found next.

Taking the X ray took some time. But as the X rays came back from the lab and Dr. Wolf and Horton started going through them, they couldn’t believe their eyes.

Buried inside Evans’s left nostril, up inside his sinus, was a handcuff key. About 1½ inches long, the loop end of the key was facing up, while the serrated end pointed down.

Dr. Wolf, with a pair of tweezers, reached up, extracted the key and held it under the light.

Obviously puzzled, Horton and Dr. Wolf looked at each other.

“It was like everyone in the room, at that moment, said, ‘Why, that son of a bitch!’” Horton said later.

Things began to make sense to Horton. The two sets of handcuffs, one of which was unattached from one of Evans’s wrist and the long pinkie fingernail.

He hid that key and retrieved it while they were making their way across the bridge.

Looking closer at the X ray, Dr. Wolf discovered something else. Underneath Evans’s palate, deep in his sinus, what appeared to be a piece of metal with some sort of string attached to it emerged. To get it, however, Dr. Wolf would have to do some internal probing.

With a scalpel in hand, Dr. Wolf cut an incision along the top of Evans’s forehead and along both sides of his face, around the inside of his ears, leaving the area below his chin intact. She carefully peeled back his face and rolled it down off his skull as if it were a children’s rubber Halloween mask.

Immediately, when the inner cavity of Evans’s sinuses was exposed, everyone took a step back because of the rancid stench.

“It was the most profound and grotesque aroma I have ever smelled,” Horton said, “and I have been around a lot.”

The smell was caused by the decaying and rusting metal buried underneath Evans’s palate. Dr. Wolf again took a pair of tweezers, sifted through the bloody tissue and extracted it.

Sure enough, it was a small blade from a razor, about the size of a dime. Most interesting, though, was what Evans had done to the blade. He had drilled a tiny hole in one end and, after taking about fifteen of his hairs and braiding them into a piece of man-made rope, tied it to the blade. Apparently, he had shoved it so far up into his sinus that it forever became part of his body after tissue had entombed it.

Up underneath the left side of his jaw, Dr. Wolf extracted another small blade that Evans had worked in between his jaw and gum, as if it were a piece of chewing tobacco.

From there, Dr. Wolf cut the cap of Evans’s skull off and removed his brain. There were contusions and bruises on the right side, which had turned the white tissue red; the left side was still white, uninjured.

“That’s what killed him,” someone said. “That piece of rebar that hit his head.”

Over the next few hours, Dr. Wolf examined Evans’s entire body, taking it apart, piece by piece, and putting it back together again.

Nothing else abnormal was uncovered. In the end, Dr. Wolf decided the cause of death was “blunt-force injuries of head and torso with basilar skull fracture,” the result of a “jump from [a] bridge.”

CHAPTER 95

The weekend of August 15 and 16 produced a torrent of newspaper and television reports of the Gary Evans saga. Horton and Jo Rehm refused to speak to anyone. They just wanted to let it all go, decide what to do with Evans’s body and try to move on.

Well-wishers and old “girlfriends” of Evans’s seemingly came from everywhere to talk about their brush with him. Lisa Morris—confused, upset, angry—spoke to the press, and she used the interviews as a way to sort through her feelings. She was shell-shocked by the totality of what had taken place. Like Jo Rehm, she may have been told by Evans what was going to occur, but it didn’t mean she believed it, or had prepared a way to deal with it after it happened.

By Saturday, August 15, Horton had received a letter in the mail from Evans. Quite matter-of-fact, the letter was devoid of any conscience or guilt. In large part, it was a detailed list of instructions for Horton to give to Doris Sheehan. Most compelling was what Evans, who referred to himself in the third person throughout much of the letter, wanted Horton to relay to Doris about his desire to commit suicide:
It’s what he wanted, instead of suffering and dying every day. You know you wouldn’t want him to live in misery,
you
[Doris] know what [hell is] like.

For Evans, ending his life was the only way to quash the obvious suffering he felt in his soul. It was, like his life, all about him—egotism and selfishness to the umpteenth power. Evans was wielding his self-absorbed sword once more in death, as he had in life so many times before.

He wanted Doris to know, he wrote, that he was
counting on her to have a great life.

As he had written to the world, Evans couldn’t resist the temptation to tell Horton the same thing:
I win.

The letter, one could argue, was Evans’s final move in a game of psychological chess he and Horton had played for almost thirteen years.

Doris Sheehan had called Jo Rehm late in the day on Friday after Evans had committed suicide to “talk,” Jo later said. The conversation didn’t yield any breakthroughs in the sense of new information, but instead allowed the two women Evans loved the most to begin what would be a long process of mourning.

“Every time I hear a helicopter, sirens or a train,” Jo said later, “I think of that day.”

Evans told Jo just days before his death that he wanted to be cremated. “You
don’t
have to pay for any of it, either,” he added. “The state will pay for it.”

At the time, Jo thought it surreal to be talking about cremation, but she listened.

“I want you to give my ashes to Jim Horton,” Evans added. “You and [Doris] take some, too.”

On Saturday, August 15, Jo went down to a local funeral parlor and explained the situation. “I don’t want anything in the newspapers,” she said. “I don’t want to be hounded.”

“Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ll take care of everything.”

Horton, Doris Sheehan, and Jo and Ed Rehm went down to the funeral parlor on Sunday to sit with Evans before his body was sent off to the crematorium. It wasn’t a formal wake or funeral service, but more of a way to say good-bye one last time.

Doris and Jo ended up having “words,” Jo recalled. Doris wanted to “take photographs of Evans lying in his casket,” but Jo refused to allow it. Then Doris started asking about Evans’s possessions: jewelry, a mountain bike, gold, rings.

She wanted it all.

“It was odd, actually,” Horton said. “She was worried about material things while Jo and I were there to say good-bye. Her boyfriend was waiting for her in the car outside the funeral home. He had no business being inside, and he knew that. I was a bit wary about being there to begin with. Her odd behavior only made it all that more strange for me.”

Back at home the following week, Horton sat down on his couch and poured himself a glass of scotch and began thinking about the past few weeks. How surreal it had all been. How much of a blur it seemed like now—almost as if it were some sort of dream.

Sitting, sipping from his scotch, going through some of the paperwork connected to the case, Horton came across Evans’s death certificate. For a moment, he just stared at it, not reading it. Seeing it again brought back memories of the autopsy.

“During the autopsy, I really felt a sense of relief,” Horton recalled. “It was truly over. Again, I had some ambivalence, but it was only because, with all the work I had done, I realized I would never get the opportunity to prosecute Gary—which was my main focus once I found out he was a serial murderer.”

After placing the death certificate down, Horton picked up a book of autopsy photographs and began flipping through the pages.

Not only were Evans’s eyes open during the autopsy, but—Horton noticed—he had a smirk on his face throughout the entire procedure, undoubtedly frozen in that position by the mere nature and process of death as the body goes through it.

“It almost looked like,” Horton said, “he was alive and was going to say something. Not unlike all the other times when he didn’t want to tell me something, but he couldn’t resist. I actually think he wanted to brag to me over the years about killing Michael Falco and Damien Cuomo, but couldn’t for obvious reasons.”

That smirk, Horton concluded, was, at least at the core of all the sensationalism attached to the life of Gary Evans, perhaps Evans, one last time, saying, “I win.”

As if the past thirteen years had been some sort of elaborate game of psychological chess, Horton raised his scotch in a mock salute to his twisted friend and opponent….

Checkmate!

EPILOGUE

Avid chess players say that the most “obscure and least-used move” in the game is the
En passant
, which I used as a title for the third and final section of this book. Indeed, in keeping with the metaphorical nature of
En passant
, Gary Evans certainly used an obscure, if not bizarre, final move to avoid not only facing Jim Horton again, but one of his worst fears: spending his life behind bars. For me, writing about Gary Evans has been one of the most interesting and exciting experiences I’ve had as a writer. I could not have written a novel that—even remotely—compares to the life of Gary Evans.

Since September 9, 1999, Jim Horton has been deputy chief investigator for the New York State Attorney General’s Office, Department of Law. Leaving the state police wasn’t something Horton
wanted
to do; he lived for the thrill of the chase and loves the idea, I’m convinced, of hands-on work out in the field. Today he is confined to an office, supervising investigations of a different kind, an environment that contains his obvious talents as an investigator. I believe the public is suffering a great loss because of that.

“I didn’t even have a résumé when I got the call asking if I was interested in taking the job at the AG’s office,” Horton recalled later. “Hardest decision I ever had to make—leaving the troopers. It was a job that I loved and still do.”