Every Move You Make (7 page)

After a few simple questions, Horton understood Lisa’s role in Evans’s life. Gary Evans never considered Lisa to be anything more than a “quick lay.” He felt nothing for her emotionally. He liked Christina, as he did most kids, and treated her with respect, but Lisa was a mere stepping-stone along his path of crime.

“Can you tell me when you saw Gary last?” Horton asked, ratcheting his voice up a level, letting Lisa know he was serious. It was time for answers. He didn’t want to mention the stolen antiques in the house or the marijuana she was obviously smoking, but felt she wasn’t being totally honest with him and would use it if he had to.

“Sunday…I saw him on Sunday,” Lisa said, putting her palm under her chin, cradling her head, staring at the floor.

“This past week? Or last week?” Horton asked. He then pulled out a small calendar and pointed to the past two Sundays. “Which one?”

Lisa put her finger on October 5.

“What time?”

“About nine-thirty in the morning.”

Evans had stopped by for about twenty minutes, she said. He was driving his green Toyota pickup.

“How was he?”

“Very scared…pale-looking.”

There was more, of course, but Lisa paused, stood up and walked around the living room. She realized she was letting Evans down by saying things she shouldn’t. Evans had warned her that Horton would be coming around.

“What did he say?” Horton asked.

“He told me that he had done something he was going to get caught for and didn’t want to go to jail for twenty-five years.” She sat back down.

“Is there anything else you can think of, Lisa? This is
extremely
important.”

Neither Horton nor Lisa had mentioned Tim Rysedorph’s name, which was the main purpose of Horton’s visit.

Lisa then got up off the couch again and walked toward the door. As she opened it, suggesting it was time for Horton to leave, she said, “Gary told me he would contact me.”

“When?” Horton asked as he walked over the threshold.

Lisa smiled as she closed the door. “In a few years.”

CHAPTER 11

The fact that Lisa Morris knew Evans and Damien Cuomo were thieves told Horton that she knew a hell of a lot more than she was admitting. With certain sources, especially “key” sources, experience told Horton patience was his most productive asset. Lisa would come around. It would take time, but she would crack. All he had to do was continue pestering her: stopping by on his way home from work, and on his way to work, calling her and just keeping the pressure on. Establish a rapport, maybe even a personal relationship. He had to break that bond between Lisa and Evans and somehow make her trust him. Since Lisa was the last known person Evans had contacted before leaving the area, and had made a point of telling her he was going to get in touch with her, Horton felt she could ultimately be his “lady in red.”

Horton recalled later, “In thinking about how to handle Lisa Morris, I figured I had to become her Columbo. It wasn’t my style…bothering people like that until they just got sick of me. But Lisa knew something. She had been sleeping with Gary Evans.”

A day later, Horton popped in unexpectedly. “Can I do anything for you?” he asked.

“Come in,” Lisa said, opening the door.

She looked like she hadn’t slept. It was either that, Horton guessed, or she had been drinking most of the night.

“What’s up?”

“I wasn’t all that truthful with you yesterday,” she admitted.

Here we go…,
Horton thought as Lisa fired up a cigarette, took a deep pull from it and, while exhaling, ran her hands through her hair.

“Go ahead. I’m all ears, here, Lisa.”

“Gary showed up that Saturday morning, not Sunday. I don’t know, maybe nine or ten o’clock. He came to the door”—her hands were shaking—“and wanted to come in.”

“So you let him in?”

“Not at first. He was dirty…covered with mud. I told him to go hose off downstairs in the laundry room and come back up.”

“Relax, Lisa,” Horton said, trying to calm her. She was getting antsy, getting up and walking around the apartment, thinking about things before she spoke.

“He was sweaty and really scared,” she continued. “He kept some of his things here, so he had a change of clothes. ‘I have to leave town,’ he told me. He was nervous.”

“Did he leave right away?”

“I guess. He was jumpy, looking out the window while getting dressed. He didn’t want to hang around too long. He sensed you guys were on his trail.”

“He didn’t say anything else: where he was going, who he had been with, what happened?”

“No,” Lisa said. “He gave me a few hundred dollars and told me he’d be in touch with me in a few years.”

“Listen, I appreciate what you’ve told me here. If Gary happens to call you or make contact with you in any way, just promise you’ll contact me.”

Horton gave Lisa his business card, flipped it over and wrote his cell phone and home number on the back. “If you need anything, Lisa, just call.”

Holding the card, Lisa stared at it for a moment. “I will, Jim. Thank you.”

A clearer picture of Caroline Parker’s relationship with Tim and his family began to emerge as Bureau investigators began talking to Tim’s siblings.

Molly Parish
, Tim Rysedorph’s sister, said she hadn’t seen Tim for almost a year, and no one in her family cared much for Caroline. “If Timmy left,” Parish said, “it was because of [Caroline] and his not being able to provide for her needs.”

According to Parish, the last time she saw Tim he had asked her to co-sign a loan so Sean, her nephew, could attend summer camp. She refused. When investigators asked whether Tim was inclined to do drugs, she said she’d never seen him under the influence and he never talked about it.

At one point during the interview, Parish offered one of her most vivid memories of Caroline. At Caroline and Tim’s wedding, she said, Caroline had rummaged through the wedding gift envelopes long before the wedding ended. When she finished, all she could do, Parish added, was complain about “not getting enough money” from guests.

For members of the Bureau, that telling little anecdote only added to how much they
didn’t
know about Tim and Caroline’s relationship—and maybe Caroline hadn’t been as forthcoming as she should have been about what else she knew.

Horton and his team of Bureau investigators sat around during late October and brainstormed over what they had learned the past week. Thus far, they had a wealth of information regarding Tim and the days before he went missing. They knew he had called Caroline at 1:03
A.M
. from the local Dunkin’ Donuts—which was the last time Caroline, or anyone else, had heard from him. They also knew Evans had shown up at Lisa Morris’s apartment later at 9:00
A.M
. He was dirty, gaunt, sweaty and scared. From there, they picked through the interviews they had done and pieced together the hours and days in between.

“With Tim not showing up for his sister-in-law’s wedding on that Saturday after he vanished, and Gary Evans,” Horton said later, “showing up disheveled at Lisa’s apartment on Saturday morning, Tim’s car abandoned at Amtrak, I knew for certain that Tim wasn’t being help captive somewhere against his will. He was definitely dead.”

CHAPTER 12

A search warrant for the two self-storage units at the Spare Room II that Evans and Tim had rented was issued on October 18, 1997. The goal was to obtain an arrest warrant for Evans, but the Bureau had to first find evidence of any burglaries he—and, possibly, Tim—had been involved in.

Inside the two small storage units Evans and Tim owned was nothing of any particular interest to Horton as members of the Bureau began to search them. There were some old books, a few collectors-edition Beatles records, several ceramic knickknacks and a few pieces of worthless jewelry. Essentially, the last person inside the storage units had, it looked like, taken what he wanted in a frenzy and left everything else scattered about.

Interestingly enough, though, Horton noticed, the unit reeked of stale bleach—and someone had recently cleaned a large patch of cement by the garage door.

Horton ordered everything in the unit bagged and tagged. “Get this stuff out of here,” he told several troopers, “and log it.”

The storage facility had video cameras set up near the entrance. It was an eight-second-delay device, so the quality wouldn’t be that good, but anyone who had entered or exited would be on videotape.

Horton ordered copies of the videotapes from October 3 through October 5.

A day later, after painstakingly watching hours of videotape, there he was, the man of the hour, entering the Spare Room II in his pickup truck. The video was cloudy and grainy, but Horton could see that the bed of Evans’s truck was full of items.

How did Horton know for sure it was Evans? For one, the license plate number matched. Second, Evans had a distinctive profile: the crown of his bald head was perfectly round, and he had distinguishable strands of frizzy hair protruding out from the sides of his head, much like Bozo the Clown. Additionally, Evans had shoulder and neck muscles so large they looked deformed. Most important, he had always told Horton he never allowed anyone to drive his truck.

When the Bureau matched up the codes Tim and Evans had been issued by Spare Room II for gaining entrance through the main gate, they found both code numbers had been used throughout the day and night of October 4. But the following Sunday morning, at some point after 2:00
A.M
., Tim’s code number had stopped being used. Only Evans’s number had been accessed after that.

As the reports filed in, it was clear that Tim and Evans had been partners in crime for at least the past seven or eight months and had pulled off several major jobs together. A Bureau investigator in Dutchess County, New York, reported that his team had been looking at Tim and Evans for some time regarding a heist in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The stolen property had turned up in an antique shop in Cold Spring, New York, and the person who purchased it picked out both Tim and Evans from a photo lineup as being the sellers. A bank video had placed both Evans and Tim in an Albany bank that same day, cashing three checks written out to Tim Rysedorph from the owner of the same antique shop.

When Evans’s probation officer called the Bureau with the news that Evans had failed to report for his weekly probation visit, a judge believed it was enough, along with all the thefts Evans and Tim were now suspected of, to issue an arrest warrant.

Horton then called Evans’s probation officer. Evans had shown up for his previous appointment on September 30, the probation officer said (which was a week before Tim had gone missing), but looked totally different than he had the week prior.

“How do you mean…different?” Horton asked.

“He was clean shaven.” Evans had usually donned a Fu Manchu mustache and goatee. Horton had even photographed him with it. At times, it was hard to keep up with Evans and his subtle disguises, so Horton would “pop in” on him and ask to take his photo. Evans, an “egomaniac,” always obliged. Horton would comment on how large his muscles were getting. “You working out hard or what, Gar?” he’d say. “Yeah,” Evans would answer, his eyes lighting up.

“He was amazed that someone was paying attention to him,” Horton recalled later. “I fed that ego, and by the time I was breaking out the camera, he was happy to strike a pose.”

For obvious reasons, Evans hated his probation officer. Whenever he talked to Lisa about him, he always referred to him as “the prick.” He also said he was nervous the last few times he had seen him. He talked about a “job” he and Tim had done down in Wappingers Falls, New York, and said he was scared they’d get caught. Being a habitual offender, convicted of several felonies already, he knew the next time he got caught he was facing possibly twenty-five years to life behind bars—which, he said, there was no way he would do.

A wanted man, there was a bull’s-eye now on Evans’s back. Multiple photos of him, along with his rap sheet, were sent over the wires to every police department and law enforcement agency in the country. He was considered armed, dangerous and capable of doing anything to avoid capture. Horton had written the Teletype himself:

Gary C. Evans, 5' 6"—180 pounds, bald, piercing blue eyes, goes by numerous disguises and aliases, likes to hide handcuff keys all over his body, will try to escape by any means necessary, could be armed and very dangerous.

It was the beginning of a manhunt for a notorious burglar Horton believed—but didn’t tell anyone—was going to be impossible to catch. Additionally, for the first time in the thirteen years since Horton and Evans had begun their game of cat and mouse, Horton believed firmly that Evans was also a serial murderer, which changed everything.

CHAPTER 13

By October 19, 1997, Bureau investigators had interviewed several of Tim’s siblings, trying to substantiate what they already knew and, hopefully, develop a few new leads. The case seemed to be running in circles. Every time they thought they were onto something, it turned into a dead end. Sooner or later, someone was going to talk and the case would bust wide open. It was a matter of finding that person and asking the same repetitive questions.

Molly Parish, Tim’s sister, had always been someone that interested Horton. When he saw her name on a list of follow-up interviewees, he decided to go see her himself.

A school bus driver and mother of four daughters ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-three, Parish told Horton she hadn’t seen Tim since April 1997 when she had stopped at a bar where his band was playing. About three weeks later, however, in May, she said she saw Evans.

Son of a bitch
.

“Go on, tell me about Mr. Evans,” Horton encouraged, without letting her know why the name meant so much to him.

She explained that Evans had shown up at her trailer unannounced one day. They argued over what they were going to have for dinner and some lottery tickets she had purchased. She said that although she never lived with Evans, she did have “relations” with him from time to time. They had grown up together in the same Troy neighborhood and dated on and off. But whenever she wanted to contact him, she said she would have to page him under the code name “Red.”