Every Move You Make. M. William Phelps
screamed, “No! I can’t do that! They will stop looking for him.”
“Calm down. Keep your chin up. Everything will be okay.” But Caroline could do nothing more than cry. “I’ll call you back at dinnertime,” Lou added, and hung up.
After that, Caroline began phoning the SSPD almost hourly, wondering what it was doing to find her missing husband. Tim had been gone for three days now.
Something’s wrong!
Although the SSPD is a full-service police department, fully capable of any type of investigation, Detective Ed Moore decided to call the New York State Police (NYSP)—if only to quell Caroline’s constant phone calls and inquiries. She was becoming quite the pain in the ass.
Established in 1917, the NYSP is one of the ten largest law enforcement agencies in the country, and the only police department in New York with statewide jurisdiction. The breakdown of troops within the structure of the department is rather extensive simply because New York encompasses some fifty thousand square miles of land. The division headquarters of the NYSP is located in Albany, with eleven separate troop barracks spread throughout the state. Since Tim Rysedorph lived in Saratoga Springs, Troop G, in Loudonville, had authority over the missing person report Caroline had filed.
NYSP troops, like in most states, provide “primary police and investigative services across the state.” Any cases requiring “extensive investigation or involving felonies” are referred to the NYSP’s principal investigative arm—the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI). In house, investigators call it “the Bureau.” The Major Crimes Unit (MCU), a separate division of the Bureau, is used for homicides and high-profile cases.
As far as Tim Rysedorph’s disappearance, the Bureau from Troop G in Loudonville, despite its reluctance of getting involved in a case of a married adult missing only three days, was brought in to assist the SSPD. Following up on a missing person report wasn’t what Bureau investigators liked to spend their time doing. But most investigators agreed it was part of the job. People went missing, for any number of reasons, all the time. Generally, the Bureau could come into a case and—with its manpower and carefree access to the latest, top-notch technology—solve it quickly.
Although missing person cases came in on a regular basis, the Bureau dealt mostly with narcotics cases, violent and serial crimes, child abuse and sexual exploitation matters, computer and technology-related offenses, bias-related crimes, auto theft, consumer product tampering and organized crime. Murder cases, Bureau investigators have said, are one of its foremost priorities, taking precedence over just about any other cases that don’t involve missing or exploited children.
Little did anyone involved in Tim Rysedorph’s disappearance know then that within twenty-four hours of Ed Moore’s call to the Bureau, every available Major Crimes Unit investigator from Troop G in Loudonville would be working on the case.
CHAPTER 4
SSPD detective Ed Moore contacted Senior Investigator Jim Horton from the Troop G Bureau on Monday, October 6, regarding Tim’s disappearance. Known as “Big Jim” to his Bureau brethren, Horton stood about six feet, 180 pounds. He had been on the job since February 20, 1978—almost nineteen years now—and had been promoted to senior investigator back in 1990, a job, colleagues later said, he took more seriously than life itself. The oldest of four siblings, Horton kept what little hair he had left parted to one side, blade-of-grass straight, always well-manicured. He wore a scraggly mustache that he had been contemplating shaving lately.
More of an athlete than a student, growing up in the Capital District area, Horton didn’t have aspirations of becoming a cop, but instead wanted to be a physical education teacher. It wasn’t until a friend from high school had mentioned one day he was taking the state trooper exam that the seed was planted in Horton. But when he came home that afternoon and told his mother about becoming a cop, she blasted him.
“No son of mine is going to be a pig!” she said. Horton’s father, standing next to him in utter shock at the prospect, just shook his head and walked away.
In 1975, two years out of high school, Horton decided to take the state police entrance examination and, surprising everyone in his family, did extremely well on the test and was accepted into the academy right away.
“Up until then,” Horton noted later, “I worked construction. I had grown up in a blue-collar family. My brother became a professor. My sister Pam has a master’s degree in education, two kids, and was very influential in helping and looking out for our baby sister, Kathy, who is deaf. My father was a mechanic and my mom grew up with a silver spoon, rebelling against her mother by marrying my motorcycle-/stock car-driving dad. To me, they were hippies. My mom marched on Washington, DC, did the Woodstock thing, and smoked pot.”
The State Police Academy was, when Horton entered it in 1978, run like a paramilitary camp. Cadets marched like soldiers and were mandated to salute higher-ranking officers. After graduating, disappointedly, just below the top 10 percent in his class, Horton excelled as a trooper. By 1981, he was being asked to go back to the academy to train recruits, but refused, vowing never to “treat people the way [he] had been treated in the academy.” An admitted type A personality, he had bigger plans, which didn’t include spending his days on the interstate chasing drunk drivers and speeders. He wanted that coveted gold shield, to become an investigator. Wayne Bennett, Horton’s supervisor at the time, encouraged him to apply to the Bureau when he had three years on the job. To be accepted, a trooper needed four years. But Bennett, who would later become the superintendent of the state police (the top cop, if you will), told Horton to apply anyway.
As senior investigator of the Bureau, investigating and solving nearly two hundred homicides throughout his career, Horton thought he had seen it all by the time Tim Rysedorph’s name crossed his desk on October 6, 1997. In the latter stages of what amounted to a stellar career that included solving some of New York’s most famous murder cases, Horton was a celebrity of sorts in the Capital District. There were countless stories written about him in the newspapers, and he seemed to enjoy the notoriety it brought him. Two of his cases had even been featured on renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden’s popular cable television show, Autopsy, and Horton gladly appeared on the show to discuss both cases.
Throughout his career, certain cases haunted Horton. One in particular involved the death of several children in upstate New York. Horton, who had married his high school sweetheart, Mary Pat, and quickly had two children, a boy, Jim, and a girl, Alison, had little tolerance, like most cops, for criminals who targeted women and children.
“The cases I remember most,” Horton recalled later, “are the ones where children were murdered…truly innocent victims, as opposed to people who put themselves in a position of danger by flirting with drugs and hard-core drug dealers.”
Horton wasn’t a fan of spending his time on the job tracking down husbands who had been missing for what amounted to, in Tim Rysedorph’s case, seventy-two hours. But he decided to take along one of seven investigators he supervised, a cop he had been working with a lot lately, Chuck “Sully” Sullivan, and head over to Caroline Parker’s apartment to ask her a few questions.
“With these types of cases,” Horton said later, “you generally have a husband who has run off with his girlfriend. We knew Tim Rysedorph had been in a band. It wasn’t a stretch to think that he had met another woman and had just up and taken off somewhere.”
Caroline Parker called one of Tim’s ex-brothers-in-law, Nick DiPierro, who had also worked with Tim at BFI, on Monday. The first question out of her mouth was “Do you know someone named Lou who works with Tim?”
“No,” DiPierro said.
“Are you sure? This is really important.”
“Well, there’s this guy named Louis, but I don’t know his phone number.”
Caroline looked in Tim’s personal address book for anyone named Lou and found “Louis.” Instead of making the call herself, she called Nick back and gave him the phone number.
“You