Every Move You Make. M. William Phelps
other attached to the bridge.
He was threatening to jump.
After about ninety minutes of just talking to the kid about life, the kid looked at Horton and said, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be gay?”
“No,” Horton said. “But I can see how upset you are and feel your anger.”
The kid then admitted he had just told his family and friends he was gay, but they didn’t take it so well.
In the end, Horton talked him down.
The next day, he visited the kid in the psychiatric ward and reinforced the advice he had given him the previous day. For years after, the kid called Horton periodically to thank him. The following year, Horton received the Brummer Award, the highest award for bravery a state cop can get.
Lisa Morris’s eye for detail, Horton acknowledged later, was exceptional. The last twenty-four hours she and Evans spent together had obviously affected her profoundly.
“Do you need something, Lisa?” Horton asked as they sat together and took a break from the interview. He could tell the past few hours had been emotionally taxing for her. Yet, with the amount of information she had already given up, he felt she knew more. Whether she realized it, Lisa was giving the Bureau a timeline to prove later that Evans was the last person to see Tim.
“You ready to continue?” Horton asked.
“I guess…”
At noon, on Saturday, October 4, Lisa said Evans finally called her.
“What did he say?” Sully asked.
“The worst is over. I’ll be up in a while.”
A short time later, she explained, he showed up at her front door wearing different clothes: jeans, a red shirt, white sneakers. But there was something else.
He was covered with mud.
“You’re not coming in here like that,” Lisa screamed at him as he tried to get into her apartment.
“What the fuck? Let me in!”
After washing himself off with a hose in the laundry room downstairs, she said, he returned.
The first thing Evans asked for, she recalled, was “cookies and milk,” as if he were a child who had just completed an enormous chore and wanted a reward.
“I remember,” she added, “his hands looking dirty—not greasy, but dirty.”
Although Evans didn’t believe in wearing cologne or deodorant, he was a fanatic when it came to hygiene. He hated any part of his body to be dirty. It was odd that he’d show up looking as if he’d just taken a swim in a mud puddle and it didn’t seem to bother him.
He was digging, Horton, pacing back and forth in front of Lisa as she told the story, realized. He buried Tim Rysedorph somewhere and then drove over to Lisa’s house and had milk and cookies. Jesus Christ.
CHAPTER 19
Cops are constantly put in the position of making moral decisions. Most are compelled, generally by their nature, to do the right thing. Yet the right thing doesn’t always produce the results they need—especially when it comes to catching murderers.
A few people would argue later that Horton put Christina and Lisa Morris in serious danger by not telling Lisa he believed Evans had murdered several people, especially Christina’s father, Damien Cuomo. Effectively, Horton allowed Lisa to think Evans was nothing more than a burglar, others claimed, when he had every reason to believe Evans was a vicious—and possibly desperate—serial killer who was on the loose.
Did Horton, simply to “get his man,” use Lisa and Christina as pawns in what amounted to a human game of chess he had been playing with Evans for well over a decade? In the process, did Horton knowingly endanger their lives by putting them in harm’s way in order to flush out Evans from wherever he was hiding?
In order to get Lisa finally to give a statement, on December 4, 1997, Horton later admitted, he had to “drive a wedge” between her and Evans, and make her understand that Evans had possibly killed Damien Cuomo. He did this, he claimed, so Lisa would trust him and begin to push Evans away.
One day shortly before Lisa ended up giving Horton and Sully a formal statement, Horton stopped by her apartment and explained that he honestly believed Damien Cuomo hadn’t come home because he couldn’t.
“I have a daughter, Lisa. You know that,” Horton said. “I don’t care who you are, a bad guy or a good guy, it doesn’t matter. You are going to try to reach out to your daughter—even if you’re on the run. Look at what Gary has done to you! He probably did something to Damien and, on top of that, moved in on you once Damien was out of the picture. He’s convinced you that Damien is a terrible father, telling you he took off on you without a word when there’s a good chance he killed him. Now Christina has no father. And you, you’re sticking up for him?”
They were rough words, and perhaps Horton had crossed a line by making a personal plea to Lisa. But he felt he had to do whatever it took to find Evans.
Crying, Lisa seemed to understand for the first time that Evans had been fooling her for the past eight years.
With Lisa in a vulnerable state, Horton took it a step further just to send his point home.
“We think he’s killed Timmy Rysedorph, too, Lisa.”
A week later, prepared to talk about everything she knew, Lisa agreed to give a statement.
“Timing was not only crucial, but a huge gamble,” Horton said later, referring to the reason why he waited so long to tell Lisa he had a pretty good idea Evans had killed Damien and Tim.
“If I told her too much too soon, I could have blown the entire case. I needed to gain her confidence. She needed to trust me. If she had talked to Gary and he asked if I was coming around mentioning Falco and Tim, he would have had Scotty beam him up…. We would have never seen him again, ever. I was sure of that. Throughout the years, he had made me well aware of what would make him disappear forever. And I surely wasn’t worried about him coming back and doing something to endanger Lisa or Christina. He was not coming back to the area. Period.”
Part of Horton’s job was to read people and tweak his style according to the situation.
“I taught ‘Interview and Interrogation’ in several police academies,” he said, “the state police, FBI and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I had time on my side, so I was able to play Lisa with whatever I wanted. Did I use her? Absolutely. Did I use Christina? In a way, I guess I did. I was very attentive to her when I had the chance—i.e., asking her about school, boys, hobbies—without sounding like a parent. I wanted her to like and trust me so Lisa would, too. People won’t tell you anything if they don’t like you.”
How did Horton figure out Lisa knew more than she was saying?
“Gary trusted her enough for him to go there in the first place with Tim. Why wouldn’t he trust her with more intimate knowledge? We were beginning to make a circumstantial case against Gary regarding Tim, even though we had no body. Lisa, as far as we could tell, was one of the last locals not only to see and talk to Gary, but she was sleeping with him and living in between Dunkin’ Donuts and the Spare Room Two. Because of what we saw as pillow talk, not to mention the logistics, we felt she had to know more.”
And she certainly did.
After Evans washed himself off and returned to Lisa’s apartment on Saturday, she said, he sat down on her couch with a bag of chocolate-chip cookies and a glass of milk. As he snacked, she asked him how long he was going to be around.
“I have a lot of things to do,” Evans responded.
A moment later, after finishing his cookies, he left.
At about 10:30 that same night, he called.
“I