Every Move You Make. M. William Phelps
regard to some stolen property Gary had sold the guy in the past.” Without taking a breath, Lisa then said Evans seemed nervous that night for some reason, and mentioned how afraid he was of getting caught.
“What did he say, exactly?”
“He told me he had decided he needed to leave the area.”
“What happened throughout the day?”
“Gary left his truck in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx. About five or five-thirty, Gary and Tim returned to my apartment parking lot: Tim was driving his blue car, Gary his truck.”
“Did they come up?”
She said only Evans came inside. “You need to go into the bedroom,” he said in a rush of words as he walked in. “Me and my partner have to change clothes.”
So Lisa locked herself in her bedroom and waited. As she paced inside her bedroom, wondering what was happening, she glanced out the window. Evans’s truck had been parked below. She had a clear view.
She then watched as Evans grabbed some clothes out of the back of his truck and walked over to Tim’s car, sat down in the passenger seat and began talking. Tim, Lisa remembered with meticulous detail, looked like he was disagreeing with whatever Evans was telling him because he began to shake his head, indicating no.
Evans, who was raging mad by that point, then got out of the car and walked over to the driver’s side, where he began to pull Tim out of the car by his hair.
Tim resisted at first, but then got out.
Then Evans walked back up to the apartment and told Lisa his plans had changed. “We have to go do something,” he said.
“Where were they going?” Horton asked, amazed by how much Lisa knew, and the detail in which she remembered it.
“Gary didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”
Evans left her apartment at around 6:30 P.M. in Tim’s car, she said, but left his truck in the parking lot.
It made sense—because Tim’s car had been found at the Amtrak depot in Rensselaer.
A few hours after that, Evans called Lisa and told her that he’d had “major problems” with his “partner down south,” meaning south of Albany. Lisa said she then, under Evans’s direction, got into his truck, dropped Christina off at her grandmother’s house, drove back to her apartment and waited for Evans to call back. It was about 8:00 P.M. when she returned.
Evans ended up calling at 9:00. “I might need you to pick me up in Troy later tonight,” he said.
“Okay…”
“Don’t turn off the ringer and don’t screen any calls,” he added. Then, “Answer the fucking phone if it rings. You understand?”
“Yes, Gary.”
She said Evans never called back.
Many of the times Lisa provided during her interview were later verified, as closely as they could be, with phone records taken from Caroline Parker’s home phone and Evans’s cell phone. Horton had no reason to believe Lisa was making any of it up. It was all too detailed and time-sensitive. After all, Lisa had no idea what Horton knew. There was no way she could have coordinated a sequence of events to coincide with the times in question the Bureau had already nailed down.
What Lisa was about to say next, however, would give Horton a better indication as to what happened to Tim Rysedorph and, more important, when and where.
CHAPTER 18
The Bureau knew Tim had phoned Caroline from the Dunkin’ Donuts in Latham at 1:03 A.M. on Saturday, October 4, 1997. The Spare Room II storage facility was, Horton had timed himself, a two-minute drive from Dunkin’ Donuts. In between both places was Lisa Morris’s apartment.
It was all beginning to add up.
Many witnesses had verified Tim’s presence at Dunkin’ Donuts, and Caroline’s phone records reflected the fact that Tim had called from the phone booth outside the front door. At 1:33 A.M., Horton knew, someone had accessed Spare Room II using Evans’s code. About an hour later, at 2:30, that same number was used again to depart the facility.
By 2:45 A.M., Lisa was climbing the walls of her apartment with anxiety, wondering where the hell Evans was and what he was doing. Evans had said he would call, but never did. He told her to keep the phone line open, which she did, but the phone never rang.
Suddenly, at 3:00, Lisa heard a car screech its way into the parking lot outside her window. When she looked out her bedroom window, she spied Tim’s Pontiac Sunbird, which she immediately recognized. Moving swiftly over to the sliding door in her living room, she then watched as Evans got out of the Sunbird in a hurry and looked around to see if anyone was watching him. Then he ran toward her apartment.
Frightened he might catch her watching him, she rushed over to the couch and acted as if she had been there the entire time.
Evans was clean, she recalled to Horton and Sully, when he entered the apartment. He was wearing blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt and black sneakers. Tim, she realized, was not with him.
“I have a lot of important things to do in the morning,” Evans said in a mumble of words. “No matter what you hear this time, it doesn’t mean I did anything to your weasel boyfriend, Damien [Cuomo].”
If Evans had a vice besides carbohydrates and chocolate-chip cookies, it was sex. He liked to have it several times a day, Lisa claimed: once in the morning, once in the afternoon, once at night. Lisa had gotten used to having it all the time and, she said without embarrassment, expected it. When Evans showed up at her apartment in the early-morning hours of October 4, she immediately told him she wanted to “make love.” Evans, though, who hadn’t slept with her for a few days, said he couldn’t because he had an “upset stomach,” adding, “I have a lot on my mind.”
She was shocked.
“Gary never had any problems in the past which would preclude him from having sex with me,” she explained. “Basically, this was the first time Gary had ever said no to me.”
When Evans denied Lisa one of the only true innocent pleasures she had left in life, she began to cry.
“I’m leaving before Wednesday,” he said. “I’ll make sure I fuck you before then. I can’t even begin to tell you how bad things are this time. I can’t go back to prison for twenty-five years. I’m not doing that….”
Later that morning, Evans woke up and, over coffee, told Lisa that “things are really fucked up this time. I am going to be in the newspapers and they are going to say bad things about Falco and Damien. Jim Horton will be knocking on your door. Don’t mention T.J. Maxx parking lot, and don’t say anything about seeing my partner’s car in your lot or T.J. Maxx. Do you fucking understand me?”
Lisa said yes.
After that, they talked about where Lisa was going to spend her morning. Evans suggested she go to a friend’s house while he did “some things.”
“The worst is yet to come,” he added before they parted ways. “But I will tell you before I leave the area for good.”
Leaving, Lisa made a mental note of seeing Tim’s car in the adjacent parking lot. Evans’s truck, she remembered, was parked in front of her apartment.
Tim, of course, was nowhere to be found.
Horton had an admirable capacity for getting people to reveal their innermost secrets. Perhaps it came from his days as one of the NYSP’s top polygraphists, sitting all those hours behind a machine, watching a needle flicker back and forth like a metronome, asking questions of people while it judged truth and lies. Perhaps he acquired the skill as a hostage negotiator. Whatever the case, he had an extraordinary talent for empathizing with just about anyone.
There was one time in 1989 when he was asked to respond to the Twin