Every Move You Make. M. William Phelps
knew more than she was saying, a cop with Horton’s experience and nearly two decades of service knew better.
Late in the day on December 4, 1997, Horton picked Lisa up at her apartment and drove her to Bureau headquarters. “Trust me on this, Lisa,” he said as they made their way. “This will be liberating for you. You’ll feel better.”
When they arrived, Sully and Horton sat Lisa down in the interrogation room, read her her Miranda rights to her, and began to ask what she knew about Evans. She was fragile and scared, no doubt feeling like she was about to betray Evans.
Horton sat across from her during certain parts of the interview, but would get up occasionally and pace the floor in front of her, while Sully sat directly next to her and wrote down everything she said.
Lisa took sips of water in between talking about her relationship with Evans, and, surprisingly, everything she knew about his “business partnership” with Tim.
“So, you told me you last saw Gary,” Horton asked at one point, “on Sunday, October 5, 1997…right?”
Lisa looked away for a moment, paused and took out a cigarette. “I didn’t tell you everything I know about Gary,” she said. “I said I didn’t know Tim Rysedorph.”
“Go on.”
“I do know Tim.”
As Lisa spoke, it became apparent that Evans had given her just enough information regarding his latest string of burglaries to flavor what Horton and the Bureau already knew. For instance, they had suspected Evans of a break-in at Jennifer House Commons, an antique-store barn in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Sure enough, Lisa confirmed that Evans had done the job, but also, she said, burned the place to the ground before he left.
“Gary told me he did that job with his ‘partner,’” Lisa said, unwavering in her tone, “who I believe to be Tim Rysedorph.”
She was a bit angry with Evans, she continued, for burning the place down because she loved to go shopping there with him. They had frequently taken drives to Great Barrington to scope out antiques Evans would later steal for her. In what sounded like a scene out of a Hollywood movie, Evans told Lisa he simply burglarized the place, poured a few gallons of gasoline on the wooden floor of the barn, dropped a match, and walked away laughing. In minutes, it was engulfed in flames, burning like dry hay.
There was another job Evans admitted he had done by himself. In back of Jennifer House was a green building, sort of a secured storage area where antique dealers kept valuables they were either holding for a particular customer or didn’t want to sell. Evans had cased the place for months, trying to figure out how to get in.
The local police were baffled by the job. The thief had tunneled his way through the outside of the building and underneath one of the walls, only to come up on the inside of the building. After stealing the most expensive item he could find, he left a note in place of it: Thank you, The Mole.
Lisa confirmed it was Evans.
He had also pulled off a job in Margaretville, New York, near the Catskill Mountains, in late September, Lisa said. This time, instead of going in through a window or tunneling through the floor, he scaled the side of the building next door using a ladder a Chinese Restaurant had left out and entered the shop through an open window on the roof. He justified the robbery by saying it was the owner’s fault for leaving the window open.
Then she explained a burglary Evans had pulled off at an antique depot not too far away from the barn he had torched. During that job, he had located a “trapdoor” in the basement of the building and slipped right in one morning when nobody was around. Because there were people roaming around outside the place while he was inside, he said, he put an old phone booth door he had used to get into the building across the window, like a curtain, so no one could see him.
There was an old white house in Hyde Park, New York, Lisa explained, that had caused Evans some trouble. The day after the job, she said, he showed up at her apartment with a scratched-up, bloodied face.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asked.
“As I was going in through a basement window, I tripped an alarm system and took off. Right on the opposite side of the window was a pricker bush. I ran right through it, toward a bingo hall across the street where ‘my partner’ was supposed to be waiting for me in his car.”
“Was he there?”
“No. That fucking asshole split on me.”
Lisa said it was Tim. When he heard the alarm, he must have gotten scared and taken off, leaving Evans to fend for himself.
When Evans met up with Tim later that night in a motel room they’d rented, he punched him in the face for leaving him at the scene, screaming, “Don’t ever fucking do that to me again!”
Horton looked at Lisa as she told the story. Motive. Gary never forgets.
A narrative of certain burglaries Evans had pulled off was, most certainly, good information, and Horton was happy to have it. But as the interview progressed, he wanted Lisa to talk about the last few days she had spent with Evans. It was clear now Evans was the last person to see Tim.
Lisa had been chain-smoking since the interview began. Rubbing her eyes, stirring in her seat, she said she needed a break. So Horton told her to take a walk up and down the short hallway outside the room and use the bathroom if she needed. “But don’t get comfortable,” Horton warned, “because we still have plenty more work ahead of us.”
CHAPTER 17
The second-floor interrogation room inside Bureau headquarters was part of a brick building that looked like an old grammar school. Inside the cream-colored room Lisa was being questioned in was one small window, which looked out across the street at Siena College. Horton kept the shades closed so witnesses and suspects couldn’t let their minds wander. The walls were painted a calming hue of vanilla for ambience and mood. Besides a plain metal table and a few chairs, the room sat empty. The mirror on the wall was two-way. There were hidden cameras set up around the room in case the Bureau wanted to videotape an interview.
When Lisa returned from the bathroom, she appeared rejuvenated, refreshed.
“All set now, Lisa?” Horton asked.
“I guess so,” she said, running her hands through her hair.
“Tell us about October third. You said you saw Gary that day?”
“He stayed at my apartment the night before. I got up about six or six-thirty in the morning,” she said as she sat down, “and Gary was already awake, sitting in the living room playing Nintendo. He left about eight and returned about noon. He said he was meeting up with his ‘partner’ at twelve-thirty.”
It made sense that Evans would have waited until 12:30 P.M. to meet Tim, because Tim didn’t get out of work until noon. And if there was any doubt that Evans’s partner wasn’t Tim Rysedorph, Lisa cleared it up by providing details she couldn’t have known if she didn’t see him. For one, she said she watched Evans leave her apartment and walk over to T.J. Maxx and meet someone who was driving a “light blue two-door car,” but had sometimes shown up on a dark-colored motorcycle.
Tim drove both.
Second, Lisa described Tim as if she were looking at a photo of him in front of her: “Same height as Gary, but his build was smaller…had darker hair and it was shoulder-length.” Then the clincher: “Gary complained about his partner’s wife all the time. He called her a ‘bitch.’ He told me his partner had a job as a garbageman, but was complaining he was always broke because of his wife.”
What interested Horton even more, however, was that Lisa said Evans was “afraid” of Tim because Tim had been cashing checks recently, and if they ever got caught, Evans said he feared Tim would “roll over” on him because he had never spent time in prison.
“Gary went south to Wappingers Falls on that Friday,” Lisa continued.