The newspapers didn’t waste any time connecting the dots once word spread that Evans had been captured in Vermont. It had been rumored for years that Evans was responsible for the disappearances of Michael Falco and Damien Cuomo, and now sources inside the state police were telling reporters they were close to solving both cases. With Tim Rysedorph linked to Evans as a childhood friend and, later, what reporters and the Bureau were calling “a string of burglaries,” local media began competing to see who could come up with the most eye-catching headline.
The Albany Times Union kept it simple, but blunt: FRIENDS VANISH, QUERIES LINGER. The article was accompanied by a familiar photo of Evans, the subheadline a portent of things to come: A career thief arrested this week will be questioned in the disappearances of 3 associates.
The pressure was on Horton to produce some sort of confession out of Evans. There wasn’t an article written that didn’t mention the relationship between Horton and Evans, or the fact that Evans had been the last person to see Tim alive. Horton had made a “courtesy” call to Caroline Parker, keeping her up to speed as to what was going on and the legal issues surrounding how the state police would go about questioning Evans. It involved more than just popping in and asking him where Falco, Cuomo and Rysedorph were, and what, if anything, he had done to them. The legalities were far more complicated than anything Horton had come across in his twenty years as a cop. When it came down to it, besides a bit of chatter among townspeople, there was no evidence linking Evans to any of the disappearances—and no bodies to prove that all three men had been murdered.
In the state of New York, when a warrant is issued against a suspect, counsel automatically attaches to the warrant and a virtual attorney, so to speak, is created. If cops have enough evidence against a suspect to issue a warrant, the court views that suspect as someone who is in desperate need of legal representation. And, more important, if there is enough evidence to issue the warrant in the first place, the court believes law enforcement shouldn’t be speaking to that person. Thus, this was the main obstacle preventing Horton from talking to Evans.
In order to be able to discuss matters of any significance with Evans, Horton had to rely on the notion that Evans wanted to get out of Vermont and waive his right to an attorney once he was extradited back to New York State.
By Monday, June 1, 1998, five days after Evans had been captured, word was that he wanted out of Vermont as soon as possible, but the only person he said he wanted to talk to about it was Horton.
In turn, Horton spoke to Evans over the phone and reiterated his prior advice: “Waive extradition.”
U.S. Marshals transported Evans back to Albany on Wednesday, June 3. He was placed in custody as a federal prisoner at Albany County Jail—a familiar place he had grown to hate, for obvious reasons, throughout the years. Because of the federal warrants standing against Evans, Horton, a state police officer, still couldn’t mention Falco, Cuomo or Rysedorph. Anything they discussed would have to be personal, and Horton was strongly encouraged to stay the hell away from him.
Within a day of Evans’s return, Evans called Horton at home, crying. “I need to see you, Guy,” he said.
“All right. I’ll be over there tomorrow.”
Horton set it up where he could meet with Evans in a small, empty consultation room, alone.
Evans was crying as two corrections officers sat him down in a chair next to Horton. The room was noisy, echoey, and cramped. The first thing Horton noticed was how docile and depressed Evans had become. It was quite the change from the cocky, upbeat attitude he espoused in Vermont. The last time Horton had spoken to him, Evans was enthusiastic about the future. He had talked about seeing his nephew, and mentioned a woman in Troy who, he said, had literally raised him.
“Her name is Jo. I think of her as my mother.”
But here he was now, unshaven and dirty. He hadn’t showered in days. Had he given up?
“You smell. Do you know that?” Horton said as Evans sat down.
“I can’t do this,” he said through tears, “I can’t be locked up anymore. I need to take a fresh-air ride…. I need to spend some time with you.” He was holding a piece of paper, twisting it, folding it, fidgeting with it.
“We should talk, Gar.”
“Yeah, yeah…I need to tell you—”
“No!” Horton said. “Don’t say anything just yet, Gar. There are a few legal matters we have to take care of first.”
Evans had let two of his fingernails grow unusually long, and had sharpened them into points.
“What’s up with that?” Horton asked.
Looking down, sticking out his hand, Evans began whimpering. Horton recalled later that Evans was “like a baby, crying and breathing heavily. I had never seen him like this.”
“With these,” Evans said, staring at his fingernails, twisting his hand and curling his fingers up to his face, as if he were admiring a recent manicure. “I’m going to slit my wrists.”
“Come on, Gar. Why would you want to do that?”
“I can’t do this. I can’t be locked up. I need to tell you—”
Horton interrupted again. “Whoa! Don’t tell me anything, Gar. Here’s what you have to do.”
New York had a strange law whereby a suspect with a warrant against him could not waive his right to an attorney and begin confessing to any crimes without an attorney present. It seemed almost ludicrous that a suspect couldn’t just sign a waiver and begin talking, but it was the law. Horton wasn’t about to waste what amounted to twelve years’ worth of work by overlooking it. He was too close. He could feel the energy bleeding out of Evans; he wanted to get things off his chest. He needed to talk. Whatever he was carrying around with him, Horton recognized, was destroying him physically, mentally, emotionally.
“If there was one part of being human that Gary Evans could never handle,” Horton observed later, “it was stress.”
So Horton explained, as plainly as he could, the law as it stood in Evans’s case. He told him he would call the district attorney’s office—“Only if you want me to?”—and set it all up on his behalf.
Evans, still crying, mumbling and fidgeting in his chair, began saying how he believed Horton was the only person he had left, the only person he felt comfortable talking to. He talked about Lisa Morris—“I don’t ever want to see that bitch again”—and how she had set him up. Then he went into a diatribe regarding Horton’s involvement in his Vermont capture. Yet he quickly changed subjects, saying, “You did a good job,” as if it were some sort of game between them that Horton had won.
Horton didn’t comment. Instead, he listened.
“Why couldn’t you have let someone else do it, or go work on another case?” Evans wanted to know at one point.
“Come on, Gar,” Horton said. Then he asked, changing the subject, “What should I do for you?”
“Do what you have to. Just get it done.”
Horton got up and began walking toward the door. “Hang on, Gar. Don’t worry about this. I’ll take care of it.”
“I won’t talk to anyone else,” Evans said. “Just you, Guy.”
From his cell phone in the parking lot of the jail, Horton called the Albany County District Attorney’s Office—specifically, ADA Paul Clyne. Horton and Clyne had worked together on cases in the past.
“Hey, Paul. It’s Jim. I’ve got Gary Evans.”
“I’ve heard, Jim. Good work. Congratulations.”
“Listen, he wants to talk to me. Obviously, we want to talk to him. But he has a few warrants on him. He’ll waive his rights, but I need a lawyer for him. We need to do it on the record.”
This was an unprecedented move all around. It shocked Clyne. Here was Evans, suspected of several murders, ready to waive his rights. In effect, he was signing and sealing a death sentence for himself.
Clyne, a baby-faced man of about five feet eight inches, 140 pounds, wore thick, wired-rimmed glasses. Academic-looking, he could have easily doubled for Ernie Douglas, a character on the hit television show My Three Sons. His father, John, was an Albany County Court judge and was commonly called the “hanging judge,” or “Maximum John,” because of his harsh attitude toward punishing convicted criminals. Clyne, as a prosecutor, had no trouble building the same type of reputation.
“Paul Clyne is honest to a fault,” a colleague later said. “Criminals try to stay out of the Capital District because of him.”
Clyne explained to Horton how they would have to go about the process of Evans legally waiving his rights to counsel. There would have to be a court date and a judge. Evans would show up with his lawyer and, basically, against everyone’s advice—with the exception of Horton, of course—waive his Miranda rights in an open courtroom. He would literally be giving Horton and the state police a free pass on questioning him about anything they wanted.
“Let’s get a judge then,” Horton said. “Like you said, get it on the record. We’ll get him a public defender.”
“How ’bout Joe McCoy?” Clyne suggested.
McCoy was a public defender Horton had known for some time. They had always worked well together. Horton would even send McCoy personal business from time to time. As defense attorneys go, cops don’t normally associate with them. But Horton trusted McCoy. There was no need getting some young, crass, eager-to-prove-himself lawyer in Evans’s camp. As Horton saw it, Evans was ready to admit to several murders. He wanted to talk. Horton needed answers. Family members of Tim Rysedorph, especially Caroline Parker, were back in the newspapers bad-mouthing the police, Horton in particular. Horton needed Evans to confess as soon as possible, before the press tagged him some sort of monster and scared him into silence.
“Joe McCoy sounds good, Jim,” Clyne said.
“I’ll call him.”
“What do you expect to get out of Evans, anyway?” Clyne wanted to know.
“I really don’t know,” Horton said. “Anything I can, I guess.”
When Horton contacted McCoy by phone, he explained the predicament Evans was in, and asked him if he was interested in the case. McCoy, at first, couldn’t believe Evans was prepared to waive his rights. It was unheard of. No suspect in his right mind would want to waive his right to an attorney, sit down with a cop and begin admitting to murdering several people. The end result would not be anything that would ever help the suspect.
Despite an overflowing amount of cases on his plate already, McCoy agreed to represent Evans.
On Friday morning, June 19, 1998, in front of Judge Thomas Breslin, who himself couldn’t believe what Evans wanted to do, along with district attorneys Paul Clyne and Sol Greenberg, and public defenders Eugene Devine and Joe McCoy, Evans was brought before Albany County Court. Wearing a lime green jumpsuit, he was shackled from his wrists to his waist to his ankles. He looked tired and beaten down—empty. He had obviously been crying for much of the time he was back in the Capital District. The large bags under the lower portion of his eyelids looked as if they had been painted on with mascara. He sounded weak, frail and confused.
What no one knew at the time was that despite his gutless approach to saving himself and his unreserved “give up on life” attitude, Evans had a get-out-of-jail-free card: a handcuff key, either inside his stomach as he stood before Judge Breslin, or hidden somewhere in his cell.
Right off the bat, the judge asked Evans if he understood what he was doing. “It has been brought to my attention that you have sought an opportunity to speak to the New York State Police. Is that correct?”
In a whisper, Evans said, “Yes, sir.”
Horton sat in the back of the courtroom by himself, weighing what was taking place. Like a lot of people in the courtroom that day, he couldn’t understand why Evans was so eager to waive his rights, but he wasn’t going to argue with him about it.
“He didn’t have to do it,” Horton said later. “It was kind of surreal. He could have said nothing—and we would have never found anyone. But for some reason—which, of course, I, along with everyone else, would find out soon enough—he decided to make it easy for me.”
The judge then stressed the importance of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and how it was designed to protect people in Evans’s position. He wanted Evans to understand completely what he was doing.
“Yes…yes, sir,” Evans responded with assertion, as if he just wanted to get the proceedings over.
To clarify what role Evans would play in the coming weeks and months as he began to talk to the state police, as he so desperately wanted, the judge asked, “Just to put it into context, this isn’t…‘I want you to question me, members of the New York State Police.’ [But,] ‘I want to speak to you.’ Is that a fair statement?”
“Yes, sir.”
The judge sat back, looked down at the paperwork in front of him and thought for a moment about what was taking place. For everyone involved, this was the first time they had ever experienced such a thing.
McCoy had one demand. He wanted the court to understand he wasn’t going to be accompanying Evans, per Evans’s request, during his talks with, as McCoy put it, “Investigator Horton.” But if Horton eventually wanted Evans to sign a statement, McCoy wanted the court to recognize that it should first be faxed to him for review before Evans actually signed it.
“You’re saying to me, just so that’s clear, too,” Breslin said, looking up at Evans, “that you”—he looked directly into Evans’s eyes—“want to speak to members of the New York State Police in your attorney’s absence?”
“Right.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Yes, sir.”
With the legal wrangling out of the way, Horton now had the go-ahead to interrogate Evans about anything he wanted.
Still sitting in the courtroom as Evans was brought back to a holding cell in the same building, Horton began pondering what the next couple of days were going to be like. Once they got going, he expected a long interview session with Evans. Not only would Evans give up Rysedorph, Cuomo and Falco, Horton believed, but probably every other crime he’d ever committed. In the end, what mattered most to Horton was that, for the first time, he was going to hear what had happened to Rysedorph, Falco and Cuomo.
The truth was coming. He could feel it.
Getting up from where he sat in the courtroom, Horton felt a sense of achievement wash over him as he realized that, besides himself, family members of Rysedorph, Cuomo and Falco were finally going to get some answers after all this time. As an added bonus, the press, once he gave them one last good helping of meat to feed on, would get off his back. The Evans saga would be wrapped up, and he could move on to other cases that demanded the time and energy Evans had sapped out of him all these years.