Pestering Lisa Morris for information now became priority number one for Horton. She was the connection to Evans. It was clear by her showing up at Spare Room II, and then lying about it, that she was Evans’s puppet. Getting her to open up was the problem. Horton had been stopping by her apartment nearly every day, sometimes just to say hello. But she wouldn’t talk. Within the past few weeks, however, Lisa’s daughter, Christina, started warming up to Horton.
Christina said she trusted Evans. He had always treated her well and seemed to make time for her.
As Christina became closer to Horton, Lisa opened up more, too. Because of that, Horton said, he decided to finally explain to Lisa why he was so interested in finding Evans.
“Tim Rysedorph has been missing,” Horton told her one night. “We have reason to believe Gary is involved. We have a warrant for his arrest. If you know where he is, you need to tell me now.”
Lisa still wouldn’t confess to knowing any more than she had said already. But she began to talk in more detail about her relationship with Evans, which told Horton she was beginning to come around.
October 31, 1997, Halloween, was a dreary day in the Capital Region. With cloudy skies, the temperature had hovered around forty-four degrees all day. There was some fog, but nothing that would hinder the unusual project Horton had on tap for the day. A plus was that it hadn’t been cold enough the past few weeks for the ground to freeze, and it hadn’t recently snowed or rained, so the ground was in prime condition for…well…
Digging.
Horton had called his team of investigators together the previous night, shortly before they were about to go home, and explained what they were going to be doing the following day, Halloween morning.
Evans had a fascination for historic graveyards and contemporary cemeteries, Horton explained. An outdoorsman, he would frequently sleep in cemeteries and just roam around at night after the groundskeepers had gone home. For the most part, his interest was criminal. He would study the different statues and headstones, writing down descriptions of them. Then he would go to the local library and look them up in books and magazines to see what they were worth. Then he’d make a few phone calls and find out what the black market was paying. If he found something worth his time and effort, he would steal it. A friend later claimed that at one time he wanted to steal the remains of “Uncle Sam,” who was born in Troy and buried in town, and hold them for ransom, but in the end Evans decided the risk was too high.
“Since Gary has a propensity to frequent graveyards,” Horton addressed his team, “I want to go to his favorite spot: Albany Rural Cemetery,” which was, ironically, only about two miles from Bureau headquarters, “and look up all the fresh graves.”
Digging up the fresh graves from the past few weeks and sifting through the tons of dirt and gravel would be time-consuming and expensive. What was the point?
Horton thought Evans might have waited until he saw that there had been a funeral during the day and, later that night, when no one was around, dig up the fresh grave and dump Tim’s body inside it. It was the perfect location. No one would ever look there.
To save time and money, Horton devised a plan whereby investigators would use steel rods about eight feet long to poke down into each new grave site to see if the rod, on its way down, was interrupted by an object in its path. If someone hit an object on the way down, Horton would call in a backhoe and, like an archaeologist, begin excavating the ground. They knew most caskets were, just like the cliché, set six feet underground. If Evans had buried Tim in one of the graves, he would have likely put him on top of the casket as opposed to inside it. One man by himself, Horton figured, couldn’t manage digging up hundreds of square feet of earth and then lift up the concrete outer box caskets are placed in. Even Evans, who was as strong as a bull, had his limitations.
When Horton approached the director of the cemetery with his idea, the man was bowled over by the thought, but could do little, in the end, to stop the exploration. It took a while, but after compiling a list of the most recent burials, Horton and his team had about a dozen graves to locate and search.
One grave after the other produced no results. Each time they sank a steel rod into the earth, it slipped through the freshly dug dirt easily, as if it were a bamboo skewer piercing a piece of fish.
“It was worth a shot,” Horton said later. “Gary had told me how much he loved cemeteries. I was trying to put myself in his shoes…trying to think like him. At the time, I thought if he had murdered Tim, he would put his body in the least possible place I was likely to look. When I found out later what he had actually done to Tim, believe me, it shocked the shit out of me. I thought I knew Evans better than I knew members of my own family—but I would have never guessed he would have taken things to the extreme he did with Tim Rysedorph.”
The month of November turned out to be uneventful as far as finding Evans. Cold leads were followed up and new leads were explored, but the sum total of what the Bureau found was zero. Horton continued to stop by and chat with Lisa and Christina, but Lisa continued to deny she knew anything more.