By January 1977, Flora Mae was living in upstate New York with her lesbian lover in what could be called the first “healthy” relationship she had ever been involved in. Robbie, beginning a new life, had moved to Florida. With Roy still living in the Troy apartment by himself, visited rarely by anyone, and Gary pulling off burglaries and robberies with his new pals, Michael Falco and Tim Rysedorph, it seemed as though everyone in the Evans family had gone their separate ways for good this time.
On January 13, Gary went through what can be called a “learning curve” in what had now become his sole passion in life. He had burgled a home in Lake Placid, New York, got caught in the act and was ultimately sentenced to four years in a state prison after being convicted of third-degree larceny. Even more brawny now, at about 155 pounds—all of which was lean, cut muscle—he was getting his first taste of hard prison time at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. It would be the first of almost two dozen serious arrests and the first of several prison bids.
The prospect of being confined behind bars for so long scared Evans; it was apparent in some of the letters he later wrote to family and friends. The main focus of his insecurity came from doing his time with, he said, “those people: spiks, niggers, faggots and diddlers (child molesters).” Drug dealers were also on his list of “scourge.” If he had contained a seed of hatred for anyone he saw as being lower on the food chain than himself because of their color or creed, now he was being thrust into an environment where his life would be centered around those same people.
Evans harbored such a hatred for African Americans that he couldn’t as much as look at a black person without saying anything hurtful. There was one time when he and Horton were driving back to his apartment after a meeting and Horton had driven by a few black guys who were walking down the street minding their own business.
“Fucking niggers,” Evans said, staring them down as Horton drove by.
“Come on, Gar,” Horton shot back. “There’s no reason for that shit.”
“They are wasting my oxygen,” Evans said, shaking his head.
It was, no doubt, a seed that had been planted by his father, who himself was an admitted racist.
The Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, where Evans was being held, had a reputation as a no-nonsense maximum-security penitentiary where the state of New York sent some of its most hardened criminals. Considered a “super-max,” Clinton is the “largest and third oldest of New York’s seventy facilities.” More than 150 years old, it was built as a mining prison back in the 1800s. Located 350 miles north of New York City and seventy-five miles south of Montreal, Canada, it was known as “Little Siberia”—mainly, one would have to imagine, because of its close proximity to Russia, New York and the fact that northern New York generally enjoyed only two seasons: winter and fall.
Not that it mattered to Evans, but six months into his bid at Clinton, his father, at fifty-five, lost a battle with throat cancer and died at an Albany veteran’s hospital.
“Roy died a lonely old man,” Robbie Evans said later. “His family contacted me a month after his death; he said that’s what he wanted. I shed one tear and that was all. I did not mourn his death.”
Whereas Robbie had acknowledged Roy’s death, Gary never mentioned it.
While confined at Clinton, Evans began to lean on Robbie for support. The tall concrete walls, loud and crowded hallways, outside rifle towers and razor wire kept it real. This wasn’t the county jail. It was hard time in a setting Evans had never—and would never—consider himself a violent enough offender to be subjected to.
There is a saying many inmates live by behind bars: “Don’t let the time do you; you do the time.” As Evans began to count the days until his release, he started writing letters and sending drawings to Robbie. He talked about everything: from what he was going to do when he got out, to the filthy and vile behavior he was witnessing while locked up, to how and why his life had turned out the way it had.
One of his favorite forms of writing became poetry:
Sister Robbin,
Thinking about yesterdays.
Not every day was alone and gray.
The times I wasn’t alone, a helper sometimes came to talk. And try to let some sunshine in.
Named for a bird, [you] should’ve had my eyes.
But brown isn’t bad.
A little big sister golden hair.
Nobody knows when nothing shows.
Where will you go from there?
Growing up and sometimes apart.
Still she’s one of the few invited to my movie.
Technicolor true-life now time.
At the end of the letter, which was written entirely in verse, he finished by writing, Not a good time, but rainbows are coming!
He soon started to include drawings with his poetry. He drew mountains and stars and landscapes. In one, he sketched a naked man sitting on the ledge of a cliff. The man had long hair brushing down his back. He was grabbing at the grass below him and throwing it off the cliff into the wind. Although he had denounced vehemently the lesbian relationship Flora Mae had been involved in now for a few years, the drawing and the accompanying poem had been addressed to her.
I sing now with eyes that rain, Evans wrote. My freedom and I are back again. I sit on stone and sing of alone. Free.
Convicts are transferred from one prison to another during their sentences for a wide variety of reasons, largely because of overcrowding. New York State, however, one of the more populated states in the country, had always been in the top five states for housing the most prisoners. Because of overcrowding, New York was constantly moving prisoners from one facility to the other so it could maintain open beds for the flood of inmates it processed each month. When a prisoner became too familiar with a certain facility, or a prison gang began to bulk up in size in one prison, certain inmates were transferred to discourage any behavior that might get out of hand. It is a common part of prison life to wake up one morning in one prison and go to bed that same night in another.
About midway through his sentence at Clinton, Evans was transferred to Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Washington County, New York, southeast of Lake Placid. It wasn’t because Evans had become unruly or had joined a gang. In fact, he had done everything by the book and became known, as the cliché goes, as a “model prisoner.”
Great Meadow was a facility geared more toward helping inmates acquire an education and deal with the many social and mental problems they either had before they became part of the system or developed as a prisoner. In terms of getting closer to freedom, Great Meadow was a stepping-stone; getting transferred to Great Meadow meant Evans was on his way out the door.
While at Clinton, Evans had developed such a respectable reputation as an artist that inmates began commissioning greeting cards from him. He would draw cards for birthdays, Mother’s and Father’s Day, along with other holidays and special events, dotting them with an incredible artistic hand that he had likely gotten from his mother. Making just $7 per week working, he would trade the greeting cards for commissary items: Twinkies, doughnuts and cookies.
On the street after serving two years out of a four-year bid, Evans wasted little time going back to his old behavior. Burglary was about the only thing he knew how to do, he would say years later. Burglarizing homes and antique stores came easy to him and he was good at it.
Since his release on March 31, 1980, he went back to living with Michael Falco and Tim Rysedorph. Run-down, seedy and unkempt, the apartment became more of a place to crash during the day rather than anything else. At night, Falco and Evans would go out and commit burglaries—either separately or together—and use the apartment as a place to store their stolen property and set up other jobs. Tim, who, some later claimed, was only dipping his toes into the pond of thievery his roommates were swimming in, began to focus more on his music. Tim, many claimed, was never a guy who had planned any of the crimes; he more or less went along for the ride, at times, to make some extra cash.
Evans and Falco fell into a routine: stealing and fencing stolen property. Day in and day out, they were either working on a score or setting one up. They had a “fence” in Troy who could turn stolen property over for them quickly, so it became a matter of “don’t shit in your own backyard” that initially drove them to commit burglaries in other parts of the state. They would bring the merchandise back to Troy to sell, but would rarely steal anything in town.
In the spring of 1980, Evans was caught with a few hundred dollars’ worth of stolen property he had lifted from an antique store in upstate. Already on parole, finishing two years of a previous two-to four-year bid, he was sent directly back to jail to await a court hearing to decide where he would serve the remainder of his previous sentence, along with any additional time from his most recent possession charge.
By May, Falco, now twenty-one, was sentenced to three years’ probation for his role in a local bookstore robbery in 1979.
For the time being, their burglary run was over.
Old Rensselaer County Jail, in downtown Troy, where Evans was being held awaiting sentencing, was a nondescript, two-story, white-brick building that took up an entire block. Out in back of the building was a steep incline. The city, on a weekday, bustled with the ebb and flow of daily life around the jail as if it weren’t even there. There was a large courtyard on the west side of the building with about a ten-foot-high barbed wire fence surrounding it.
For Evans, doing time in county jails was like living at a shelter, a dormitory atmosphere he could handle. Within days of being at Old Rensselaer County Jail, he befriended several members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, who had a large clubhouse in town. The Angels liked Evans. He kept his mouth shut, worked hard behind bars and never gave anyone any serious problems.
Sitting in his cell on Thursday morning, June 12, 1980, Evans came up with a rather unique—if not ambitious—idea. Because of his size, he figured that if he got together enough Angels—who were big, like NFL linemen—they could hoist him over the fence outside in the courtyard during “rec time” when the guards weren’t watching. Two Angels would start a ruckus in one area of the yard, while two others would literally throw him to freedom.
The plan couldn’t miss.
Like anything else Evans had ever set his mind to do, he proceeded to wait for the right moment. At about 10:30 A.M., while two Angels began to brawl on the north side of the yard, two other Angels, swinging Evans like a pendulum (one holding his arms, the other his legs), rocked his small body back and forth a few times. With one gust of strength, they heaved him over the fence as if he were nothing more than a fifty-pound sack of potatoes.
Just like that, Evans was on the other side of the fence, a free man.
During roll call later that morning, prison officials realized Evans was gone. Once word spread that he had taken off, guards sent word out and soon a posse of law enforcement was scouring the area.
About five hours later, he was spotted atop the Troy Public Library on Second Street, standing by the ledge.
“I’m not coming down,” he yelled as police, armed with shotguns, moved in on him.
“There is no possible way you can get away, Mr. Evans,” someone yelled up to him. Onlookers cheered him on as the fire department moved in with a cherry picker.
After an hour-long standoff, cops wrestled Evans to the ground by his hair and brought him back to Old Rensselaer County Jail, where he was put in solitary confinement.
When he was placed back into the prison population some time later, Evans would go on a rant, bragging how he had made a mockery of the guards and local police.
“It was all a joke to him,” Horton recalled later. “Gary told me about that day and remembered it with vivid precision. He knew he wasn’t going to get far—especially seeing that he had climbed to the top of the library. All he wanted to do was make a laughingstock out of all of them…and, in many ways, I guess he did.”