Confined to his cell at Attica, counting the days until parole, Evans was living the life of a “hermit,” he opined in a letter to Robbie on September 29, 1982, merely a day after he had written his last letter. There were times when he was so lonely and unable to do anything else, that he would begin a letter in the morning and continue writing all day long. Some of the letters were set up in the form of a journal. Morning, noon, night. He would leave his cell to eat, then return and write to Robbie what had happened during dinner. A guard would come by and give him a hard time, and he would write about it.
By this point, his beard had grown about eight inches below his chin. He had even drawn an “actual size” picture of it in one letter. The picture looked more like Jesus than perhaps Evans resembled, and what he wrote underneath it certainly didn’t have any pious connotations: I still want to fill a private graveyard.
The more he wrote—almost daily—the more concerted an effort it became to plan his future. Job? Home? Going clean? None of it seemed to interest Evans. Moving out of the country? Hooking up with old crime cohorts? Finding those responsible for his latest incarceration? This was what fed his motivation to survive. He had lost a considerable amount of weight and had been skinnier than he had ever been in his life. Unable to lift weights and eat a regular diet of what he liked—cookies, cereal, milk, doughnuts, Twinkies—he was forced to eat loaves of bread and cake that “taste like shit.”
In every letter he wrote from October to December, he insisted that it would only take “$200” to get him out of prison. He begged Robbie for the money. He was also furious, he said over and over, because she rarely wrote back. The parole board wanted to be certain, he explained, that he had money and a place to stay when he got out, or it wasn’t going to release him early. The $200 could pay off the debt he had accumulated while in prison and leave him enough cash to get on his feet. Every day, it seemed, became his last day behind bars.
I should be out in a week!
A week would go by.
I should be out next week.
Another week would pass.
Maybe next week.
In a November letter, he talked about Flora Mae for the first time since being behind bars: I don’t know, I think something happened to mom. I haven’t heard from her yet, and she was all happy that I let her visit me…1rst [sic] time in 5½ years, and I gave her a painting + she said she’d write.
When Thanksgiving 1982 came around, he floated the idea of leaving Troy when he was released and never seeing “anyone” again: I know I cannot be around ANY people. I don’t need any girl around except rarely (and don’t really need them then); I’ve done without for six years now, 3 months in between. I don’t trust anyone, male or female…. I can go weeks without saying a word…. I’d make a good monk, wouldn’t I? Then he sketched out a plan for himself if he were to ever receive a sudden windfall of cash. The entire plan centered on material possessions: boats, cars, motorcycles, houses and land. Interesting enough, at the end of the list he indicated how, in fact, he might go about getting his hands on the cash: I also know [someone] that put a gun to [someone’s] head + took a few lbs. of coke…. There’s ways and ways and ways. A lot of things I won’t do but a lot I will do. I’d rip off a crook in a minute, that shouldn’t be illegal to do!!
On December 13, 1982, he wrote what would end up being his last letter for a while. He seemed upbeat and happy. Parole was in reaching distance now, he had been told. Robbie had, after weeks of his begging and pleading, scrounged up the $200 he needed to pay off his debts. The only obstacle standing in his way now was where he would be going when he was released. His parole officer wanted him to go back to the Capital District, find a job and live at the Salvation Army until he could find a “room” of his own. He, in turn, said he couldn’t because there were Hells Angels “after him.” He wasn’t, he explained, going to get killed “that easy.”
In any event, he promised he would move back to the Capital District. Once there, he figured he’d explain to his parole officer the dilemma he was in with the Angels and was convinced parole would allow him to move to Florida.
Be it the elation he felt after hearing he was going to leave prison any day or the fact that he didn’t want to end up right back in prison, he wrote, I have thought more often of just leaving the assholes I don’t like alone. Not all of them, but most of them. I’ll just leave [them] to their shitty lives. But near the end of the letter, he couldn’t resist: I have to have a couple [of them], though.
Many of Evans’s burglary victims would later pounce on the New York justice system for continually allowing him to walk away from his prison bids early. Some would even claim he was trading information about drug deals and weapons and other crimes he learned about while in prison for time.
His letters, however, proved otherwise. According to his own words, Evans was merely a product of the DOC. He was just another number on a list of inmates who could get paroled early as long as they stayed out of trouble while in prison and told their parole officers what they wanted to hear.
Hitting the brick on December 29, 1982, for the first time in nearly two years, Evans began looking up old friends immediately—specifically Michael Falco, who himself had just been released after doing a brief bid for burglary.
Within weeks of hooking back up, Evans and Falco pulled a few small jobs together and then parted ways. By January 1983, Evans had found his way to Florida: the beach, the sun, the women.
Robbie was living in Lake Worth, Florida. She had been doing pretty well for herself. Mainly spending time at a trucking business she had started, Gary was Robbie’s only connection to back home. Since his release, he had bulked up bigger than he had ever been in his life. Photos from that era show a man with legs like tree trunks, rippled with muscles. His arms were close to seventeen inches around. His neck and shoulder muscles bulged inside his clothing as if he had stuffed padding underneath. His ZZ Top beard, now nearly reaching the tip of his heart, was always groomed well. Obviously, he took pride in his body and loved to show it off.
Flora Mae hadn’t been keeping in touch with her children all that much throughout the past few years. She was living in Pottersville, New York, with her lesbian lover, in a trailer owned by a bar that was also on the same premises. Her alcoholism had taken on new heights. She was drunk all the time.
On February 6, 1983, Gary, Robbie, Devan and Robbie’s new husband took a drive from Lake Worth to Tampa to visit Robbie’s in-laws. It was a beautiful day: blue skies, turquoise water, lots of skin and sand.
When they arrived back home later that day, the NYSP called to inform Robbie that Flora Mae had been found dead. Robbie, though, was too overtaken with emotion to continue the conversation, so she handed the phone to Gary.
Flora Mae had, according to Robbie, cashed her Social Security check that day, paid what little rent she owed and then went to the bar to have a few drinks.
“When she left the bar,” Robbie added, “she slipped on the ice as she was about to put her key into her car door…and hit her head on the bumper of her car.”
Doesn’t make much sense, considering the bumper and the car door on any vehicle are at least five feet from each other. Nonetheless, because there was no one around—it was near midnight—Flora Mae, lying unconscious from the blow to her head, froze to death “in a fetal position” near her car.
The next morning, a neighbor found her. Only a few months before her fifty-first birthday, Flora Mae Flanders Evans was dead.
Later, as the years wore on, the story behind her death took on a life of its own. “She was a drunk,” some said, “who passed out in a snowbank and froze to death.”
There was even one story that tagged Gary as her killer. Yet it was impossible, unless he flew to Buffalo, New York, early that day, drove to Pottersville, murdered his mother and flew back to Florida that same day.
Gary and Robbie took a train to Albany the same day they got the call and had Flora Mae cremated so they could “take her with them always,” Robbie said. Gary didn’t want anything to do with his mother’s ashes. Robbie scattered some of the ashes in a reservoir where Flora Mae liked to fish and threw some on a parkway in North Carolina “so she could fly with the birds and be at peace with nature.”