After Sully took Doris back to jail, Horton pulled up a chair next to Evans. As calmly as he could, he explained the situation. “Look, Gar, we’ve been here”—Horton glanced down at his watch—“for about seven hours now. We’ve talked old times…. We’ve had lunch, cookies and milk. I even got Doris in here to see you.” While Horton spoke, Evans would look up at him for a moment and then bring his eyes down toward the floor, as if he were being scolded. After mentioning Doris, Horton got up and walked over to the window. After pausing to look out at the setting sun, he said, “We have to talk about Sean, [Tim Rysedorph’s son] now, Gar. Do you understand that?”
Seemingly surprised by the name, Evans looked away and started crying.
“Sean, Gar…the kid. Tim’s son.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s had his face pressed up against the glass on Christmas morning waiting for his father to come home,” Horton said loudly, walking now toward Evans, “but Tim hasn’t shown up, Gar. The kid still thinks his father is going to come walking through the door any day now. We need to give him a sense of closure.”
It was approaching five o’clock. Nearly eight hours had gone by since they had arrived at Troop G, almost eight months since Horton had been hunting for answers regarding Tim Rysedorph. Tough questions were coming. Evans couldn’t avoid the inevitable any longer
“I put Gary in an antisocial category,” Horton recalled later. “In other words, his rules count and mine don’t. One thing I knew I had to do was disassociate myself with the police: don’t talk police lingo. Don’t say ‘we,’ say ‘them.’ They were bad guys. I was a friend. He had to believe that, or I would have never gotten anywhere with him. When I brought Sean into the picture, I knew Gary would react to it. He loved children—or at least he said he did. Knowing that, I laid it on as thick as I could with Sean.”
After letting Evans have a good solid cry, Horton walked over to him, put his arm around his shoulder, and continued. “Gary, you had to kill Tim Rysedorph…right? It was either him or you? I understand that, man. Come on. This is Jim you’re talking to.”
Not everyone would have agreed with Horton’s tactics. But considering the amount of information and the seriousness of what he believed Evans was going to talk about, he felt the need to try to make Evans feel as comfortable as possible by making him think it was “okay to kill.” If Evans had indeed killed Tim, Horton believed he had justified it in his mind somehow.
“I didn’t want to sympathize with him,” Horton explained later. “Because that tends to put someone down a notch and make them feel like they are below me. It’s all technique when you’re trying to get information out of someone. Sympathizing with someone makes me sound like, ‘You poor son of a bitch. You are so fucked. But I’m not. You’re the loser, not me.’ It makes me sound as if I don’t have those problems and I am better off.”
Identification and common bonds are two other tactics interrogators use to extract information from suspects. One might say, “You fish? Great, I fish, too!”
“You had to kill Tim Rysedorph. I understand that.”
Empathy, however, always produced the best results.
“I would say something like, ‘I can feel how bad you feel. I don’t know how you feel, but I can sense how it is for you.’ In Evans’s case, I told him, ‘Gary, you’re in a hole right now. We agree upon that. I can’t jump in the hole with you because we’ll both be in the hole together. If I get in there with you, neither of us will get out. What I can do for you is, throw you a rope and help pull you out—but you have to grab the rope yourself. You have to help yourself first.’
“I couldn’t bullshit him and tell him everything was going to be all right…but I could let him know I was there to help. If that didn’t work, I’d try to distance myself from the cops as much as possible, even though I was a cop. I’d say, ‘I’m here to help you, Gary—not them,’ meaning the good guys on the other side of the door. ‘I’ll do whatever I can to make this easier for you.’ It’s about offering emotion.”
With that, Horton was hoping Evans might say to himself: I can trust Jim. If he leaves me, I’m stuck dealing with those other cops by myself.
Evans seemed to latch onto Horton’s offering.
“Listen, Gar,” Horton said, “I know you killed Timmy Rysedorph…and I understand why you did it. But I need to have his body. All you have to do is lead me to it or tell me where it is.”
“It’s going to be hard,” Evans said, bowing his head, talking through tears.
Horton thought about it for a moment: “It’s going to be hard?” What the hell could that mean?
“Why?” Horton asked. “You mean emotionally, or mentally?” He was confused. What could have been “hard” about it? The most recent, perhaps. But the hardest?
Evans didn’t say anything, but continued whimpering.
Handing him a tissue, Horton gave it a shot. “Jesus, Gar, what are you talking about?”
Evans shrugged; he seemed embarrassed.
“You didn’t cut him up, did you?” Horton asked out of the blue.
Evans looked up, smiled, and nodded his head up and down.
“Jesus. Is he in one location?”
Evans stuck up his finger: “One.”
“How ’bout Falco?”
“In Florida,” Evans whispered.
“Fucking Florida? What the hell—did you do him here, or down there?”
“I shot him here and brought him to Florida in the trunk of someone’s car.”
“Whose car? What kind of car?” Details made all the difference in the world. At this point, Horton wanted to be sure Evans wasn’t taking credit for crimes he didn’t commit.
“I don’t remember,” Evans said, losing his patience. “I don’t fucking remember. It’s confusing. I’m confused. It was…what…almost fifteen years ago.”
“Come on, Gar. Whose car? Tell me whose car? You don’t kill a guy, put him in someone’s car and drive his dead body to Florida without remembering whose fucking car it was.”
“Timmy’s car. Okay. Timmy let me use his car to transport Michael’s body to Florida.”
Then it all made sense. Tim had to go because he was, as Horton had thought all along, a liability.
To say the least, Horton was curious about many things now that he knew for certain Evans had murdered Tim Rysedorph and Michael Falco. For one: Damien Cuomo.
“I shot him in the back of the head,” Evans said without hesitation or emotion.
“Where is he?”
“Can’t tell you, Jim. I can’t let Lisa and Christina know any of this.” Evans didn’t want Christina to, of course, know that the same man she and her mother had befriended, the same man who basically moved into their apartment, was in fact the same man who had murdered her father.
“Is he in the Capital District?”
“Yes.”
Trying to put his arms around what Evans had just told him, Horton needed specifics before he would allow Evans to take credit for the murders. It was going to be a long, emotional night. Hell, the next few days, Horton understood, were going to be the most productive out of the thirteen years he had known Evans.
“Tell me, Gar, will you take me to where Timmy is buried?”
“Yes. Brunswick…Route 2…Eagle Mills.”
“Now, let me get this straight: you cut him up?”
“Yes.”
“With what?”
“A chain saw.”
Horton stopped for a moment and looked away. Jesus. “Let me get this straight, you cut Tim Rysedorph up with a fucking chain saw?”
Evans nodded.
“Okay, Gar, you’re going to tell me exactly what happened now…. I’m talking about Falco, Cuomo and Rysedorph. I want to know every detail. We’ll start from the beginning, Michael Falco, and then you can explain to me why you cut Tim Rysedorph up with a chain saw.”
Evans looked at Horton for a moment and didn’t say anything.
Some time later, Horton met with Evans again. They didn’t talk about much. But before Horton left, Evans kind of smirked at him, as if he wanted to say something.
“What is it?” Horton asked. “You’re holding out on me, Gar. What’s going on?”
“There are others, too,” Evans said.
Horton paused. Closed his eyes, dropped his head, and began rubbing his temples. “What do you mean: ‘others’?”