Every Move You Make. M. William Phelps
not only said yes, but encouraged it.
When Evans returned, he had a box of Freihofer’s chocolate-chip cookies—his favorite brand—and a gallon of milk.
“He was clean when he came back; he looked like himself,” Lisa explained. “He apologized for having to leave so abruptly earlier that night, and said he was sorry for being in trouble. He wanted to relax. So we watched a movie. True Romance.”
The next morning, she got up early, about 4:30, and made coffee. Evans, waking up to the smell of the brewing coffee, ran out of her bedroom and yelled at her for stinking the place up. Then he poured the pot of coffee down the drain and sat down on the couch.
Minutes later, after getting dressed, he ran down to T.J. Maxx. On his way out the door, he said, “I have to make a call.” When he returned ten minutes later, he seemed fine, more relaxed.
But fifteen minutes after that, he got up and went back to T.J. Maxx to make what he said was “a second call.” When he returned this time, however, he was “pale, panicked…and visibly shaken. The conversation had gotten him very upset.”
“They’re already looking for my partner,” Evans said, pacing back and forth in Lisa’s living room. “I’ve got to go do something.” It is almost certain to assume that the calls Evans made were to Caroline Parker.
An hour later, he returned with a duffel bag and a bag of dirty clothes. His shoes and pants were filthy, Lisa said. “There was dirt and mud in his shoes and on his pants.”
Evans then gave Lisa two cell phones and told her to throw them in the Dumpster when he was gone. Then he said he wanted her to drive his truck—“with gloves on”—to a local VFW bar around the corner, leave it and take a cab home.
Before walking out the door, he handed her $300 in twenties. “That’s pocket money for you,” he said. “I love you. I’ll keep in touch with you as much as I can for the next few days. I’m gone for good now.” Hesitating, his voice cracked. “You won’t see me for a few years.”
Taking off down the steps that led up to Lisa’s apartment, walking toward Tim’s blue Pontiac Sunbird, Evans turned and yelled out for Lisa to come to the balcony.
“Throw me some spray cleaner,” he said.
With that, he got into Tim’s Sunbird with the spray cleaner and a roll of paper towels and drove off.
Throughout the month of December 1997 and into January 1998, the Bureau followed up on whichever lead it could regarding all the new information Lisa had provided. To no one’s surprise, much of what Lisa had said turned out to be 100 percent true.
The one thing that bothered Horton most, despite all the information Lisa had given him, was the fact that Evans hadn’t contacted her yet. Evans had said “years,” but Horton thought for sure he would have surfaced by the end of January or February. But thus far, at least according to Lisa, she hadn’t heard from him.
Because Evans was officially running from the law and considered armed and dangerous, Horton began showing up at Lisa’s apartment more frequently and stationed a cruiser nearby whenever the state police could spare one. During some weeks, he’d pop in three, four, even five times, at various intervals throughout the day.
“I knew we had gotten everything we were going to get out of Lisa by that point,” Horton later said. “However, I needed to stay in her face and keep reminding her that I wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to believe Gary was going to call her sooner or later and emerge from wherever he had been hiding. I could feel it. I knew Gary. He wouldn’t disappear entirely without first rubbing it in my face.”
CHAPTER 20
The brilliant spring weather that had fallen on the Capital District during the first few weeks of May 1998 mattered little to Bureau investigators working day and night to find Gary Evans. To find Tim Rysedorph—who had been missing now for nearly seven months—Horton and his team needed to locate Evans. Every lead compiled during the past half-year had been followed up on, but nothing new turned up. Frustration was mounting.
Sitting at his desk one morning, staring out the window at the Siena College green across the street, Horton’s growing concern told him that if Evans didn’t come forward and contact Lisa soon, they were likely never going to see him (or Tim) again.
“Gary Evans could disappear and, if he wanted to, bleed into the countryside and live off the land forever,” Horton said later. “I was worried he had left the country. If he did, we were finished. Or if Lisa had tipped him off about what I was doing, he was long gone.”
The reality of police work, though, is this: just when a case seems to be running cold, a lucky break pops up—be it something investigators had missed all along, or a new lead.
The break Horton had been waiting for didn’t come in the form of someone spotting Evans and turning him in, or his getting “stopped somewhere by local cops for a bullshit traffic violation.” Instead, it came in an unceremonious phone call to a bar named Maxie’s in Colonie, New York. This would lead to a nondescript, small package delivery a few days later by an unwitting UPS driver to a second bar, Jessica Stone’s, a hole-in-the-wall not too far from Lisa’s apartment in Latham.
On May 12, 1998, Lisa was having a beer at Maxie’s when the barmaid took a call from someone named Louis Murray, who said he wanted to speak to Lisa. Murray, the barmaid said, had been calling the bar asking for Lisa for the past few days.
Lisa would drop by Maxie’s from time to time, usually in the afternoons. Apparently, Louis Murray knew that.
When she picked up the phone and said hello, she recognized Evans’s voice immediately.
First Lisa asked him how he had been traveling without getting caught.
Evans’s name and photo had been plastered all over the newspapers and on television. Missing person posters of Tim had been posted everywhere. The newspapers had made the connection between Evans and Tim only recently and were running stories about the Bureau’s interest in talking to Evans about Tim’s disappearance. Horton had even considered listing Evans on the FBI’s most wanted list and appearing on America’s Most Wanted, a nationally syndicated television show, after it called. However, the fallout from such widespread publicity, he decided, might beckon Evans to sink deeper into seclusion.
Evans admitted to Lisa that he had a full set of identification on him, but said he didn’t have a birth certificate.
“How are you traveling?”
“Rental cars. Things are going okay. I’m traveling the country.”
“Gary…”
“Just listen, Lisa,” Evans said at that point. “In a few days, you are going to receive a package at Jessica Stone’s from somebody named Jack Flynn. Make sure you get it.”
“What have you been doing?” Lisa asked, ignoring the package remark.
“The fucking package,” Evans screamed. “Make sure you get it!”
“Okay. Okay.”
Evans then talked about the places he had visited and how he had been financing his trip. But the conversation, at least to Lisa, took a turn for the more serious as he began to discuss a pickup truck he had tried to purchase along the way.
“I had a problem with some guy and a truck I wanted,” Evans said.
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say that that motherfucker will never give anybody a problem again.”
Lisa was mortified. There were so many thoughts rushing through her mind she didn’t know what to do or say next.
“You there, Lisa?”
“Yes, Gary, I’m here,” she answered in a broken tone, full of confusion, shock and worry.
“How’s