The brilliant spring weather that had fallen on the Capital District during the first few weeks of May 1998 mattered little to Bureau investigators working day and night to find Gary Evans. To find Tim Rysedorph—who had been missing now for nearly seven months—Horton and his team needed to locate Evans. Every lead compiled during the past half-year had been followed up on, but nothing new turned up. Frustration was mounting.
Sitting at his desk one morning, staring out the window at the Siena College green across the street, Horton’s growing concern told him that if Evans didn’t come forward and contact Lisa soon, they were likely never going to see him (or Tim) again.
“Gary Evans could disappear and, if he wanted to, bleed into the countryside and live off the land forever,” Horton said later. “I was worried he had left the country. If he did, we were finished. Or if Lisa had tipped him off about what I was doing, he was long gone.”
The reality of police work, though, is this: just when a case seems to be running cold, a lucky break pops up—be it something investigators had missed all along, or a new lead.
The break Horton had been waiting for didn’t come in the form of someone spotting Evans and turning him in, or his getting “stopped somewhere by local cops for a bullshit traffic violation.” Instead, it came in an unceremonious phone call to a bar named Maxie’s in Colonie, New York. This would lead to a nondescript, small package delivery a few days later by an unwitting UPS driver to a second bar, Jessica Stone’s, a hole-in-the-wall not too far from Lisa’s apartment in Latham.
On May 12, 1998, Lisa was having a beer at Maxie’s when the barmaid took a call from someone named Louis Murray, who said he wanted to speak to Lisa. Murray, the barmaid said, had been calling the bar asking for Lisa for the past few days.
Lisa would drop by Maxie’s from time to time, usually in the afternoons. Apparently, Louis Murray knew that.
When she picked up the phone and said hello, she recognized Evans’s voice immediately.
First Lisa asked him how he had been traveling without getting caught.
Evans’s name and photo had been plastered all over the newspapers and on television. Missing person posters of Tim had been posted everywhere. The newspapers had made the connection between Evans and Tim only recently and were running stories about the Bureau’s interest in talking to Evans about Tim’s disappearance. Horton had even considered listing Evans on the FBI’s most wanted list and appearing on America’s Most Wanted, a nationally syndicated television show, after it called. However, the fallout from such widespread publicity, he decided, might beckon Evans to sink deeper into seclusion.
Evans admitted to Lisa that he had a full set of identification on him, but said he didn’t have a birth certificate.
“How are you traveling?”
“Rental cars. Things are going okay. I’m traveling the country.”
“Gary…”
“Just listen, Lisa,” Evans said at that point. “In a few days, you are going to receive a package at Jessica Stone’s from somebody named Jack Flynn. Make sure you get it.”
“What have you been doing?” Lisa asked, ignoring the package remark.
“The fucking package,” Evans screamed. “Make sure you get it!”
“Okay. Okay.”
Evans then talked about the places he had visited and how he had been financing his trip. But the conversation, at least to Lisa, took a turn for the more serious as he began to discuss a pickup truck he had tried to purchase along the way.
“I had a problem with some guy and a truck I wanted,” Evans said.
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say that that motherfucker will never give anybody a problem again.”
Lisa was mortified. There were so many thoughts rushing through her mind she didn’t know what to do or say next.
“You there, Lisa?”
“Yes, Gary, I’m here,” she answered in a broken tone, full of confusion, shock and worry.
“How’s that bitch Rysedorph doing?” Evans then asked in a mocking, condescending manner.
“I don’t know what you mean, Gary—”
“Has anyone been around…you know, cops? What about Horton?”
“No. I haven’t seen him for months.”
By that response, Lisa had, maybe without even realizing it, come to terms with the reality that she was totally committed to Horton now—frightened and scared to death of the same man she had slept with and let baby-sit her daughter.
Evans didn’t say much more during that first phone call, but insisted he would contact her again soon.
When Lisa called Horton shortly after speaking to Evans, she said, “Gary just called me at Maxie’s. I happened to be there having a drink.”
It’s about time, Horton thought.
This was the Gary Evans that Horton had known all those years: a criminal who just couldn’t let things be. “An egomaniac,” Horton said later. “Someone who loved to show you how smart and deceptive he could be if he wanted to. All he had to do was stay away [from the Albany region] and stay out of trouble. We would have never found him. But here he was calling the one person he must have known I would find sooner or later.”
Lisa explained how Evans had told her to “expect a package” delivered to Jessica Stone’s within the next few days.
“That’s good, Lisa. What else? Did he say where he was calling from?”
“Not sure…but he said he had gone to Alaska and found a job on a fishing boat…. He also said he went to South America. He was doing ‘small jobs,’ he said, you know, shoplifting.”
“Nothing else?”
“He said he was returning to Albany soon, and for me to expect the package to be sent by someone named Jack Flynn…from, I believe, Sacramento, California.”
“I need to be there to receive that package, Lisa,” Horton said.
Lisa didn’t fight the suggestion.
After Horton hung up, he called Sully into his office.
“I want you to find someone named Jack Flynn in Sacramento and see if he knows anything about this package. Who knows? Maybe he’s holing up with the guy?”
“Sure, Jim.”
“Send a Teletype to the Alaska State Police and let them know Gary might be there. It’s a long shot, but what the hell.”
When Horton finally had a chance to contain his adrenaline rush, and thought a moment about what Lisa had done, he recognized the fact that she trusted him now completely. If he had ever questioned her loyalty, this one phone call proved she was entirely on his team.
On May 14, the barmaid at Jessica Stone’s, a rather seedy little bar located directly next door to an off-track gambling parlor, called Lisa and told her the package she was waiting for had just arrived. It was a small box, the woman said, sent from someone named Jack Flynn. “I’ll hold it here at the bar for you.”
Jessica Stone’s was Evans’s favorite place in the Albany area to eat French fries, another favorite food in his strict high-carbohydrate diet. He loved the way Stone’s prepared the spuds. It only seemed fitting he would choose it as a place to make initial contact.
Lisa called Horton immediately. “I think that package from Gary is here.”
“Just wait. I’ll be right over.”
A ten-minute ride under normal circumstances, Horton couldn’t drive fast enough to Lisa’s apartment. From there, Jessica Stone’s was five minutes away.
Inside the bar, which smelled of stale beer and cigarette butts, it was dark and dingy. Horton took a look around and knew right away why Lisa liked it, but couldn’t picture Evans rubbing elbows with the barflies who frequented the place. With the exception of the women he dated, Evans hated people who drank alcohol and did drugs.
Observations aside, Horton walked over to the bar with Lisa and asked for the package.
Lisa looked at him as he held it in his hands for a moment and just stared at it. It was a cardboard box, about one foot square. Jack Flynn, Sacramento, California was written on the return address, just like Evans had promised.
Placing it on a table, Horton snapped on a pair of latex gloves and grabbed a steak knife from the table next to him to cut the box open.
Inside was a letter Evans had written on May 6, but, for whatever reason, had never sent. There were three small stuffed animals, several brand-new sets of Winnie the Pooh earrings, a few antique vases and a handful of photographs of Evans in various poses and places. In morbid fashion, one photograph showed Evans lying on his back inside a freshly dug grave, the photo of him taken from ground level, directly over him. His fists were clenched, yet both middle fingers were raised and pointed directly at the camera lens.
For everyone who wants me caged or dead, he wrote on the top of the photo. The free Gary Evans was scribbled across the bottom.
It was easy to tell he had visited Seattle, Washington, because there was a photo of a dedication that Bruce Lee, the late martial artist and actor, had written to his wife, Brenda, and son, Brandon—a photo that could have been only taken at Lee’s grave site in Seattle, where the dedication is set in stone at the foot of Brandon and Bruce’s headstones. Evans was consumed by celebrity status and had often talked about his absolute fascination with dead celebrities.
One of the other photos included in the package consisted of Evans sitting in a large tree. He was wearing a tank top T-shirt, his large biceps, triceps and chest muscles easily visible, while his muscular thighs, like ten-pound ham shanks, burst out of the cutoff shorts he was wearing. He was smiling, sporting a full beard and mustache. It was incredible to think he had been on the run for so long but had no trouble maintaining the chiseled physique of a professional bodybuilder.
Several other photos, it was clear, had been taken with a noticeable amount of precision and knowledge of photography. In one, Evans was photographed near a lighthouse Horton would later trace to California. The photos, Horton also discovered, were taken by Evans himself using a tripod and camera equipped with a timer. He had always expressed a love for photography to Horton and had stolen several different cameras throughout his life, and always traveled with them.
By far, the most interesting photo in the bunch turned out to be a headshot of a brown-and-white spotted dog, the eyes of the dog drawn in with pen to look as if they were popping out, large as cue balls. Below the photo, Evans had written: Lost dog!! Free dog!! Rude dog!!! Shocked and shocking dog!!! Arf, arf, woof and bark.
The only explanation that one could conclude from the writing was that Evans must have seen himself at the time as an escaped caged animal that had nowhere left to go, and was just wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out his next move. Add to it Evans’s monstrous ego, and it seemed that by sending the photo to someone who, he knew, would eventually crumble to Horton, he was making a mockery of the entire situation as if he had planned it all.
Oddly enough, the final photo depicted Evans on a bicycle, just standing, posing for the camera, one foot on a pedal, the other on the ground. Wearing a ball cap, he was half-smiling. On the surface, to anyone who would have crossed paths with him during his journey, he must have appeared to be nothing more than a harmless trail rider out for a pleasant afternoon bike ride. Little would anyone who happened to bump into him know they were staring at a wanted fugitive and dangerous, convicted felon, a man who was being sought for questioning about the deaths of several people.