Flora Mae Evans, with her bony shoulders and frail arms, large breasts and hourglass figure, had always been an attractive woman in a Jayne Mansfield sort of way. In those early days of her marriage to Roy Evans, she wore taut black dresses and elastic-tight blouses to accentuate her shape. She kept her black hair kinky, in curls. A noted lover of art, she had aspirations of being an artist, and had even displayed her artwork at a Greenwich Village art show one year. She loved to draw pen-and-ink sketches and freehand water-color paintings. She loved to dance and, at one time, had even wanted to pursue a career as a Rockette.
Former friends, neighbors and even Robbie later agreed, however, that an addiction to alcohol forever stood in Flora’s way of ever pursuing a true calling or dream. After she met and married Roy, what had been a mere happenstance relationship with alcohol took on a life of its own. She began going out to bars and drinking around the house. By the time Gary Charles was three, Flora had already made several dramatic attempts at killing herself in front of the kids. As one story went, she was in her bedroom one day cleaning a hunting rifle; Gary was riding his tricycle through the hallways of the apartment; Robbie was in the living room watching television. Roy, sitting in his favorite chair by the picture window, was drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.
“It’s hard to distinguish which happened first,” Robbie said later. “Either Gary fell off his tricycle and cried because he heard a gunshot, or [my mother] was distracted by Gary’s crying and she missed her mark.”
Either way, a shot rang out through the apartment and everyone hightailed it into the bedroom to see what happened.
“I ran into my mother’s room,” Robbie said, “and saw her lying backward on the bed….”
There was blood sprayed all over the room. Flora had put the gun up to her chest but misfired and nearly blew her shoulder off.
A former neighbor, however, who was also there that day, recalled the incident much differently.
“Gary was all huddled up in the corner,” the neighbor said. “I was there…in [Robbie’s] room. I came out and heard Roy and Flora arguing. Roy shot her in the shoulder…nearly blew it off.”
Regardless of what happened, after all was said and done, the incident was ruled a “cleaning the gun” accident.
As Flora Mae and Roy struggled to make ends meet, social and domestic pressure to feed the kids and keep the alcohol flowing began to manifest into anger, resentment and violence inside the home. With Roy out of work and home all day long, collecting disability because of the car accident he had been in, Flora had to carry the load. For the most part, she did odd jobs: manufacturing, garment, retail. Her longest run was at a Troy clothing manufacturer, Tiny Town Togs Girl’s Dresses. She worked long days in an unair-conditioned sweat-shoplike atmosphere, sweating profusely during summer over the shirts she pressed, and freezing in winter. When Tiny Town Togs didn’t have work, she would scrub floors and toilets, along with pots and pans, for Jewish families in the neighborhood. Her one source of comfort after a long day of work became Thunderbird wine. The kids would find bottles of it in back of the toilets and in the “wringer washer,” hidden from Roy.
“She had to hide [her booze] from Roy,” Robbie recalled, “because if he found it, he would pour it down the drain.”
Regardless of the chaos that was seemingly getting worse with each passing day, Flora would take Gary Charles and Robbie to the First Presbyterian Church, just down the block. Both kids were often awarded “perfect attendance” pins for showing up at church so regularly. They also attended Sunday school and looked forward to placing their envelope—all ten cents of it—in the offering basket each week.
As the ’60s crept along and Roy became more complacent with life due to his being out of work and drinking every day, government assistance became a means of survival.
In his letters to Jim Horton many years later, Gary Charles wrote of a mother and father he utterly despised, and spoke of a childhood rife with violence and abuse of all kinds. Later, he hinted at being abused sexually by Roy, but would never go into too much detail with Horton for fear of, perhaps, having to relive the cruelty all over again.
“My father did things to me,” he told Horton through tears, “that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
Evans had also told friends that Flora Mae had abused him sexually for years.
The more time Roy spent out of work—he would sometimes work as a bartender, but it would never last—the more despondent he became. He would sit for hours, on the back porch or in the living room, drinking, smoking and not saying much of anything. When he did speak, a neighbor later recalled, the loudness would seemingly shake the whole apartment complex. When he got mad at Flora Mae, he would chase her around the apartment and lash out at her violently with his hands or his favorite leather strap. Knowing how much Flora enjoyed listening to records, one day he destroyed her record player in front of everyone—possibly just to take away the one last bit of sanity and enjoyment she had left in life.
Jo Rehm had been a skinny little girl, taller than the other kids, with platinum blonde hair, almost white, and the sharp facial features of a bird: pointy nose, thin, caved-in cheekbones and tiny, beady eyes that cut right through whoever got caught in their gaze. Living at 158 First Street, directly next door to the Evanses, Jo later recalled Gary Charles as being a “quiet child” who wasn’t allowed to have any friends or, like a prisoner, leave the confines of his bedroom.
“He was kept in the house most of the time,” Jo said later. “Locked in his room like an animal.”
One facet of Gary Charles’s life that became a signature as he grew older was his absolute revulsion toward any type of meat. He hated chicken, pork and beef with a fervor—but especially liver.
“His father,” Jo Rehm added, “would make him sit at the kitchen table for hours until he ate his liver. Gary hated liver…. We all hated liver.”
Jo was seven years older than Gary, and Gary Charles and Robbie looked up to her as a “big sister.” Jo said she would spend much of her time in the Evans household looking after the kids when Flora Mae and Roy were either too drunk, or had left the kids at home to go out to the bars. Jo’s parents were also heavy drinkers, she readily admitted, and often drank with Flora and Roy.
The drinking in the house became an ordinary part of each day as Gary Charles grew toward his teenage years. He and Robbie awoke each morning expecting Roy and Flora to either spend the day on the back porch getting drunk, or inside the apartment drinking and fighting. As long as the kids did what they were told and kept their mouths shut, there wouldn’t be any trouble.
But from an early age, Gary Charles was stubborn. He did things his way. And when it came to eating liver, he flat out refused to do it as he grew older. When he refused, Roy looked at it as a question of his authority: Gary was being disobedient. It wasn’t about the liver; it was about doing what the old man said.
“We used to try to hide the liver in the kitty litter box so Gary didn’t have to eat it,” Jo recalled.
When that didn’t work, and Roy found it, he would beat Gary Charles senseless while the others looked on in horror. Other times, Jo would eat the liver herself so Roy wouldn’t have an excuse to beat him.
Roy’s weapon of choice was a leather strap he had used to sharpen his straight razor. Whenever he pulled it out—whether to sharpen his razor or begin slashing it lightly in his palm, warming it up for a beating, taunting the kids—they would scramble around the house as if they were playing hide-and-seek, searching for some sort of shelter from the terror they knew was coming.
Despite the beating he knew he was going to get, Gary became steadfast in his decision not to eat the liver. Roy would then break out his strap and whip his son until welts swelled up on his tiny frame. Then he would throw him in his room and refuse to feed him until the next day.
Because the apartment buildings were built so close together, Jo said, she would often open the window in her apartment next door and feed Gary cereal and chocolate-chip cookies through the alleyway.
“Many times,” she said, “it was the only way he would get to eat.”
Roy—thank goodness—never knew.
Sending a child to bed without dinner was a common punishment parents doled out in the ’60s and ’70s. If a kid wouldn’t eat his peas or carrots, the mom or dad might give the entire plate to the dog and say to the child, “Go to your room!”
For Gary Charles, however, taking a beating and being starved for twenty-four hours for not eating his liver would have been a reprieve for what some later claimed was one of Roy’s most deplorable, violent punishments.
Using a piece of rope or a belt, Roy would strap Gary to a dining-room chair so he couldn’t move. When he had him secured in the chair, he would, in between his taking pulls from his seemingly bottomless can of Schaefer beer, shove the liver down his throat until Gary ate every last morsel. Jo Rehm recalled several times when Gary would try to fight off Roy’s force-feeding by squirming and twisting his head like a hooked fish. However, he would end up turning purple from choking on the meat and have to give in for the sake of being able to breathe.
“I went over there one time and Roy was nearly choking Gary with the meat, stuffing it down his throat,” Jo recalled. “The cops had been called that day because I had pushed Roy when I saw what he was doing to my Gary. They told me I had to go home…and didn’t even care about the fact that Roy was abusing him.”
Robbie, her memory perhaps tempered by time, said she never saw Roy force-feed her brother, but remembered how insistent Roy was regarding the kids eating their liver and “cow tongue.”
“Whatever Jo says is…true,” Robbie said later. “She has a better recollection than I do. I guess my mind just blocks a lot out.”
As Gary began creeping up to his teenage years, he began to show an interest in the same things most other kids did: cartoons, comics, sports. Like his mother, he developed a passion for anything having to do with art: drawing, painting, sketching. Roy would quash any fleeting childhood moments of enjoyment for Gary by not allowing him to watch television and refusing to purchase art materials for him. Gary, perhaps beginning to develop a demon seed, began to take it all in and not say anything.
“I remember him lying on his stomach in his room,” Jo said, “with his head sticking out of the doorjamb. He was trying to catch a glimpse of television, while everyone else—including Robbie—sat and enjoyed it.”
As Jo saw it, Flora Mae was no better than Roy. “She was a whore. A drunk. She didn’t care about those kids.”
Another childhood friend, Bill Murphy, recalled stories Gary would tell him about Flora Mae taking him as a child to a local “doctor’s office,” and making Gary wait outside the room and listen to them moaning and groaning their way through an afternoon of adulterous sex. Additionally, while Roy sat at home during those days and drank himself silly, a former neighbor claimed, Flora was also being paid by the owner of a local X-rated cinema to have sex with him.
As the alcohol abuse became more profound as Flora and Roy began spending more time at home, Flora turned once again to suicide as an answer.
For as long as anyone who hung around the Evans household back then could remember, Flora had permanent scars on her wrists from trying to kill herself so many times. Still, whether she was screaming out for help with the failed attempts or not, she tried other means.
One day, Robbie was hanging clothes in the backyard when a neighbor called out, “Robbie! Robbie!” pointing up at the apartment complex next door.
Flora was on top of the three-story tenement across the alleyway, hanging her legs off the side of the building, indicating that she was ready to jump.
As clichéd as it was, Flora chanted unassumingly, “No one loves me anymore. You will all be better off without me. I don’t want to live anymore.”
Robbie eventually talked her down.
“Mom would walk to the railroad tracks,” Robbie added, “and wait for the train to kill her. I had to tell her that Gary and I loved her very much and could not live without her [and] she would come back home.”