By October 19, 1997, Bureau investigators had interviewed several of Tim’s siblings, trying to substantiate what they already knew and, hopefully, develop a few new leads. The case seemed to be running in circles. Every time they thought they were onto something, it turned into a dead end. Sooner or later, someone was going to talk and the case would bust wide open. It was a matter of finding that person and asking the same repetitive questions.
Molly Parish, Tim’s sister, had always been someone that interested Horton. When he saw her name on a list of follow-up interviewees, he decided to go see her himself.
A school bus driver and mother of four daughters ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-three, Parish told Horton she hadn’t seen Tim since April 1997 when she had stopped at a bar where his band was playing. About three weeks later, however, in May, she said she saw Evans.
Son of a bitch.
“Go on, tell me about Mr. Evans,” Horton encouraged, without letting her know why the name meant so much to him.
She explained that Evans had shown up at her trailer unannounced one day. They argued over what they were going to have for dinner and some lottery tickets she had purchased. She said that although she never lived with Evans, she did have “relations” with him from time to time. They had grown up together in the same Troy neighborhood and dated on and off. But whenever she wanted to contact him, she said she would have to page him under the code name “Red.”
It was the first time Horton had ever heard the name. “How was he when you saw him last?”
“He had a very explosive temper,” she continued, “and hated [Caroline].”
“What about where he is now; do you have any idea where we might find him?”
“I know Gary has a storage shed, but I don’t know where it is. I know he stores his ‘stuff,’ proceeds from burglaries, there.”
“What about Gary and Tim; how did they get along?”
“Gary was very angry with Tim. Whenever Gary was in a jam, he expected Tim to help him out. There was some car, drugs, Mike Falco…I’m not too sure what it all meant, but Gary never got over it.”
There was that name again: Michael Falco. It seemed synonymous with Evans’s name inside that small circle of old friends in Troy.
She went on to say she thought Tim’s disappearance may have been “revenge” on Evans’s part for something that happened a long time ago among Falco, Tim and Evans, but she didn’t know the entire story.
“Gary always told me,” she said, “that ‘people are very easy to get rid of and without a trace.’ He once told me, ‘Look what happened to Mike [Falco]…and there are a couple of other people still missing.’ I really feel Gary killed Mike by burying him alive or putting him in a place where he couldn’t get out.”
After explaining to Horton that Evans liked to confide in a tattoo artist in Troy, she got back on the subject of Tim and Evans’s soured relationship.
“Gary never really forgave Tim for being disloyal to him during a time when Gary felt he needed Tim. Gary told me Tim had called one day asking for money, about fifteen hundred dollars. So Gary told Tim he would ‘have to do some jobs’ with him if he wanted the money.”
“If there was one thing Evans was clear about when I interviewed him later,” Horton recalled, “it was that he favored working alone. He’d do his best work by himself, he’d tell me, and he wouldn’t have to worry about someone dropping a dime on him. He only took along a partner if that person owed him a favor or money. And he made this utterly clear to me: if that person even threatened to go to the cops, he had no choice but to kill him.”
A K-9 unit of cadaver-sniffing dogs from the state police searched the area surrounding the Spare Room II self-storage facility, where Evans and Tim had stored their stolen property. Horton felt if Evans had killed Tim, he might have buried him in close proximity of the storage facility.
After searching the perimeter of the facility and the storage units, the dogs found nothing. It was one more in a series of false predictions on Horton’s part. He was going on hunches, mostly. Without Evans—without a body—he had nothing but instinct. It was disheartening at times, but it was police work. Not everything worked itself out in sixty minutes, like a television sitcom, and not every lead produced another. Still, most cops believed it took only one arbitrary piece of information and a case could be broken.
Near the end of October, the manager of Spare Room II phoned Bureau headquarters with some rather odd news. He said Tim Rysedorph had called.
“He called you?”
“Yes. This morning.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted information about how late the office was open so he could come in and pay for his unit. He asked if the billing for the month had been sent out yet. He said he wanted to pay his bill before the billing went out so his wife wouldn’t find out that he had been renting a unit.”
Could it be that simple?
A surveillance team was put together immediately. If Tim—or Evans posing as him—went to the Spare Room II to pay the bill, the Bureau would be there waiting for him.
Horton, however, warned everyone that Evans wasn’t that stupid. There was no way he was going to just march into Spare Room II after calling. It was some sort of trap. A way to throw off the scent.
At about 2:40 P.M., as undercover officers from the Bureau, who had been there all day long, stood despondent around the Spare Room II gate thinking that the entire day had been a waste, a 1996 Ford Contour with New Hampshire license plates pulled up to the entrance gate. A female was driving. She was alone. She looked lost. Scared.
But also very familiar.
When officers approached the car and asked the woman to identify herself, she simply rolled the window down and said, “Lisa Morris.”