Every Move You Make. M. William Phelps
the caller said quietly.
“Are you all right?”
“…call…not working…doesn’t work” was all Caroline remembered hearing before the line went dead.
When that happened, she sent him another digital page. Tim, I couldn’t make out anything you were saying…. Please call me.
For the next hour, Caroline paced in the living room…waiting, wondering. In her heart, she felt something was wrong—terribly wrong. Tim was not in the business of running off without telling her. They’d had problems in the past and Tim had slept at a friend’s apartment or his brother’s house for the night, but this was different. They hadn’t been fighting. Tim had promised to take care of several errands before the wedding.
Where the hell is he?
At some point before the wedding, after not hearing from Tim all morning, Caroline called her mother.
“Tim did not come home last night. He’s missing. I can’t find him.”
“What? Caroline, are you—”
“Don’t tell anyone in the family, Mom. I don’t want to ruin the day.”
“Okay.”
While Caroline was putting the finishing touches on her makeup after talking to her mother, the phone rang. Nearly jumping out of her dress to reach for it, she said in desperation, “Hello…hello?”
“Is Tim there?” a man’s voice asked.
“Who is this?”
“Lou.”
“Are you a good friend of Tim’s?” Caroline couldn’t recall anyone by the name of Lou that Tim had ever known.
“Yeah. I’m a friend. I work with Tim.”
“Have you seen him lately…Have you seen him”—Caroline was jumpy, frenzied, barely able to get the words out fast enough—“he’s missing.”
“I’m just returning his call; he left me a message.”
Caroline couldn’t handle it; she started to cry. “I’m sorry. I…I…We need to find him.”
“Don’t cry,” Lou said. “Everything is going to be all right. I’ll make some phone calls around town and see what I can find out.”
“You will? Yes. Do that. Please.”
“Maybe he’s in a place where he can’t call you?”
“What…where? What do you mean by that?”
“Maybe he got into trouble and got picked up and is in jail.”
“I would have heard something.”
“Not necessarily.”
Confused, Caroline asked, “What do you mean?”
“Listen, don’t worry. I will try to find out what’s going on and call you back later.”
“Thanks.”
Before Lou hung up, he had one last bit of advice.
“Maybe you should call the police.”
CHAPTER 3
Minutes before Caroline left her apartment to make her sister’s wedding on time, she phoned the Saratoga Springs Police Department (SSPD). Hysterical, she asked the officer who picked up if he could find out if Tim had been involved in an auto accident, or if he had been arrested.
“No, ma’am, I don’t see anything,” the cop said a few moments later.
At 1:42 P.M., Caroline sent Tim a message.
It’s almost time to leave for the wedding, call now.
Two hours later, about twenty minutes before the wedding, she sent Tim one last message: Emergency with wife, call home right away.
Tim never called.
The wedding obviously turned out to be an uncomfortable affair for Caroline, but she had to attend, nonetheless. Her sister counted on her.
Minutes after the wedding, she called the state police, the sheriff’s department and the Colonie Police Department, a nearby town Tim occasionally frequented. She asked the same set of questions she had posed to the SSPD earlier.
At the urging of the Colonie Police Department, the SSPD sent a uniformed officer to interview Caroline and write up an official missing person report. The SSPD’s initial thought was that the case would not amount to anything. So far, all they had was a husband missing fewer than twenty-four hours who had not shown up for his sister-in-law’s wedding.
It was hardly enough to panic.
Ed Moore had been a detective with the SSPD for the past twenty years. Promoted to chief later in his career, Moore knew his business as a cop perhaps better than a lot of his colleagues, and relied, like most cops, on his instincts.
When Caroline got home from her sister’s wedding early in the evening on October 4 and telephoned the SSPD, demanding it do something about what she insisted was her “missing husband,” Moore heard what he later said was genuine pain and anguish in her voice.
Moore spoke to Caroline briefly, trying to reassure her that he was going to do everything he could to find her husband.
After hanging up, weighing what she had told him, taking the sincerity she had displayed into account, Moore told himself something wasn’t right.
Tim Rysedorph had a good job, apparently loved his wife and son, had made specific plans to go to his sister-in-law’s wedding and rarely ever failed to come home from work—at least that’s what Caroline had claimed. To top it off, he had missed the wedding.
Something wasn’t adding up.
By Sunday morning, October 5, Caroline had called several of Tim’s friends to see if any of them had heard from him. She even had a friend page Tim and leave his phone number as a callback—just in case Tim had been screening his calls and, for whatever reason, didn’t want to talk to her.
Nothing.
At about noon, Lou called back. After hitting the streets and asking a few people about Tim’s whereabouts, he said he couldn’t offer much.
But Caroline, as worried as she appeared, began to float her own theory.
“Tim’s still not back, Lou,” she said in a rush. “I’m getting really scared…and, well, he’s probably dead because I haven’t heard from him yet.” Caroline was, she later told police, rambling on and on, just blurting out words as they passed through her mind, not thinking too much about what she was saying.
“What are you talking about?” Lou asked.
“They’re probably going to find him dead,” Caroline said, “in the trunk of my car at the bottom of the Hudson River.”
“Don’t say that,” Lou said. “That’s not going to happen. Or else, he’ll never be found—just like what happened to his friend Mike.”
Lou was referring to Michael Falco, who had been missing for about twelve years. Shortly after Falco introduced Caroline and Tim, he went out one night and never returned. It had been rumored that Tim and Michael Falco’s old friend Gary Evans, who had lived with them at the time, was responsible for Falco’s disappearance. Evans, who had been partners with Falco on a number of profitable jewelry heists, denied the stories, telling people Falco had gone “west.”
Caroline didn’t know what to say after Lou compared Tim’s situation to Falco’s.
“Like I said, maybe he’s in a place where he can’t call,” Lou told her.
“I called the police like you suggested and reported Tim missing.”