Every Move You Make. M. William Phelps
dust like hundreds of others.
As Horton began working his way out of Caroline Parker’s apartment, Sully by his side, he told himself that Caroline was never going to see her husband alive again. If he’s been with Gary Evans, he’s as good as dead.
CHAPTER 7
Horton and Sully figured there was only one reason Tim had been hanging around with Evans: burglary. There was no other purpose. Evans was a loner. He lived by himself. Traveled alone. And unless he needed a partner in crime, he never socialized with people.
From their brief conversation with Caroline, Horton and Sully knew she was either playing stupid, or was scared of aligning herself with stolen property, or she was in denial about her husband’s criminal activity.
When Horton explained to Caroline shortly before he and Sully left that there was a good chance Tim had been involved in some illegal activity with Evans, the relationship between him and Caroline “turned very sour,” Horton said later.
“No way would my Timmy do this!” Caroline had lashed out. “He’s a good father. He’s not a thief. He works his ass off.”
“Well,” Horton had replied, “if Tim has been hanging around with Gary Evans, he’s up to no good. Gary has never worked an honest job in his life. He’s a career thief. I don’t see Gary and ‘Timmy’ hanging out together, ma’am, if they’re not doing something illegal.”
As Horton and Sully approached Horton’s cruiser outside Caroline’s apartment, Horton, shaking his head in disgust, said, “Holy shit…here we go again with Gary.”
“What do you think?” Sully asked, opening the passenger-side door.
“We’ve got big problems. Gary’s gone, that’s for sure. He’s definitely left the area.”
Horton opened his door, sat down in the car and began to think.
There was a warrant out for Michael Falco’s arrest that had passed through several Bureau investigators’ hands over the years. Whenever Horton felt Evans was in the mood to talk about his crimes, he would ask him about Falco especially, seeing that they had grown up together in South Troy and were well-known partners in crime. Evans, though, had always denied any knowledge of Falco’s disappearance. In fact, he said, he was in prison when Falco disappeared. But a careful check of Evans’s record of incarcerations proved different. He had been incarcerated at Sing Sing prison, serving a two-to four-year bid for third-degree burglary, back on July 3, 1985. Falco had been reported missing about five months earlier.
But whenever Horton had questioned Evans about Falco, Evans would simply say, “Come on, Guy. I’m a thief, not a murderer.”
For years, Horton had no reason not to believe him, nor had he any evidence to prove otherwise.
“I can’t believe this motherfucker is back in my life, Sully,” Horton said as he started the car. “Tim Rysedorph is dead. Where the hell do we begin?”
“What makes you so sure he’s dead? He could just be off with Evans doing jobs.”
“Tim doesn’t have a record to speak of. Remember, we did a rap sheet on him. Gary always told me about liabilities. He doesn’t like them. He also told me one of the last times I spoke to him that he wasn’t going back to prison. Rysedorph—believe me when I say it, Sully—is dead.”
It was no secret that Horton had used Evans as confidential informant (CI) and kept in contact with him for the better part of the past thirteen years. Evans had even written Horton several letters throughout the years and Horton had, at times, written back. In those early letters, which Horton began to think about now more seriously as he and Sully batted around the possibility that Evans had murdered Tim Rysedorph, Evans had always made one thing perfectly clear: he hated prison.
Being a person who adored the outdoors, often sleeping in the woods and traveling on bicycle, being confined was the worst possible environment Evans could be placed in. He couldn’t take the discipline and conveyor-belt routineness of daily life behind bars. He needed to be out in the world, roaming, doing what he wanted.
Cops weren’t the only people Evans had to worry about. There were scores of local drug dealers and thieves who had it out for him because they knew he was a CI.
So with crooks and cops chasing Evans, Horton knew that finding him was going to be the biggest challenge. When Evans wanted to disappear, he did it with the ease of a snake in a cornfield. If he had indeed murdered Tim, there was a good chance he had left the country, or at least the Northeast. Disguises and obtaining false identification were two of Evans’s greatest skills while on the run. If Horton wanted to find him, he knew it was going to take some sort of mistake on Evans’s part.
CHAPTER 8
Tim’s car, a blue 1989 two-door Pontiac Sunbird, was found late in the day on Monday, October 6. By the sheer logic of basic police work—tracking down leads and following up on them—the Rensselaer Police Department (RPD) responded to a report of a car parked at the Rensselaer County Amtrak train depot about ten miles from Latham, New York, the last town in which Tim had been spotted. A car in the parking lot fit a description of Tim’s. Unlocked, the car had its parking lights on and driver’s-side window open when police arrived. The keys were under the driver’s-side floor mat, which, Caroline explained later, was totally out of character for Tim. What turned out to be a lead that would ratchet the investigation up a notch—a knapsack loaded with tools and some of Tim’s clothes—had been found in the trunk. When Horton got a chance to look through the knapsack, he concluded that Tim probably wasn’t carrying around pliers and glasscutters and other burglar tools because he was planning on doing some handyman work. Instead, as he had suspected all along, Tim had been pulling off burglaries with Evans.
Working off a lead he received from the Bureau, SSPD detective David Levanites was dispatched later that day to Nick DiPierro’s house, Tim’s ex-brother-in-law.
Although they had gotten along well throughout the years, Nick said his relationship with Tim had never been that close.
“What can you tell me about him?” Levanites asked.
“I know Tim is involved with criminal activity with someone else he hangs around with. He told me one time not too long ago that they—him and his partner—were committing burglaries in New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts.”
“Did he say anything else to make you believe this?”
“He asked me, well, I mean, he showed me some coins one day and asked me if I wanted to buy any of them. They were old, from the 1800s, I think.”
“What else?”
“I refused. But a little while later, I saw him again and he told me that he sold them for a thousand dollars.”
When Horton heard what Levanites had uncovered, it only solidified his theory that Evans was, most likely, the last person to see Tim alive.
“It was the coins; the merchandise had Gary’s mark all over it,” Horton recalled later. “One of Gary’s favorite items to steal was rare coins. He had stolen tens of thousands of dollars’ worth throughout the years.”
During the next few days, the Bureau kicked into high gear regarding their search for Tim and, now, Gary Evans. They knew if they found Evans, they would find Tim or his body.
Horton briefed his team several times throughout the week, mapping out a plan. There were leads to follow up on from the SSPD. People to interview. Background checks. Evans had a propensity to live in motels and hotels throughout the Capital District and was known to retreat into the woods when he felt the pressure was on. Part of his MO was to keep an apartment and a motel room at the same time so he could bounce back and forth.
“Finding Gary Evans if he didn’t want to be found,” Horton said later, “wasn’t easy. That much we knew. Yet, sooner or later, I knew Gary would make contact with whatever woman he