As he celebrated yet another New Year holiday—1986—behind bars, Evans’s appearance began to change. He was losing his hair now by the handful and his teeth, which he blamed on the “fake Bangladesh” dentists in prison, were rotting because he was too afraid to get any work done. Nearly completely bald, except for a frayed ring of hair encircling the lower portion of his head, he yearned for contact lenses. Not only would he “look good,” he said, but he wouldn’t have to worry any longer about the guards who were teasing him because of his thick “Coke bottle” prescription glasses.
During the late seventies and into the early eighties, Evans could have cared less what his ZZ Top beard looked like. But now, he was obsessed about keeping it neatly groomed and much shorter. Instead of it reaching his belly button, he had groomed it only inches long, hugging his jawline.
Still, the most noticeable part of his transformation was his body. For years, he had fought with his weight, struggling to get above 175 pounds. But now, it seemed overnight, he had gained about ten pounds—all of which was, he claimed, lean muscle. Photos from that era show a massive man, bulky and wide; his shoulders seemingly ran from the top of his neck down below his biceps.
Although he still bounced back and forth between high and low moods, he was beginning to embrace the time in prison, saying that being incarcerated for so much of his life “would have killed your ordinary human being years ago!”
Taking responsibility for his actions, however, wasn’t on his agenda.
He wrote: Everything should’ve been so different. I should’ve had [Stacy], never came to prison.
He also talked about what he called a “major event that changed” his life. It was back in 1975 when he bought his first vehicle. He was twenty-one years old. He spent $700 on it—money, he said, he had earned from “working” a “real” job. Three days after he purchased the vehicle, though, while driving home from Stacy’s house, the engine blew.
Now that pissed me off. No money. No car. So I stole one just like it and painted it and put stickers and plates and [the] I.D. [tag from my other vehicle] on the engine. I was going to sell it fast but got stopped by the cops. I think someone told on me, he wrote.
This one event, he now insisted, was the turning point in his life. And it all revolved around his “precious” high school sweetheart, Stacy: People are going to pay for any obstacle placed in front of me when I get out and go find her. I am sick of “half-stepping.” That’s slang for not doing the full, complete act that should’ve been done…. I am going to see her again. Any fool who gets in the way to prevent that will get out of the way much faster.
Over the next few months, the tone of his letters varied among three main themes: revenge, racism and Stacy. He’d talk about a group he called the “White Survivalist Road Warriors.” They looked out for one another. If there was ever a “race riot” in prison, he said, the group was ready. Eating “no meat, fish, birds, eggs or vegetables” for “17½ years,” he claimed, had made him into a powerhouse of a human being. His biceps were seventeen inches in diameter now. He was solid as stone. Ready to take on anyone who “fucked” with him.
In early March, he wrote he had a visit from a guy in Troy—one of the [Harrington] twins [Steve & Bob]. [Steve] is an outlaw. His brother is a guard in a prison camp. They’re both okay. [Steve] is a friend (business acquaintance, I mean). He knows everything leading up to me getting busted. He did a few things for me.
Steve Harrington and Evans had a long history together, yet none of it could qualify as a friendship.
According to what Horton and Doug Wingate later found out, Evans and Steve hated each other.
“That’s probably why he never killed him,” Horton said later. “Because he talked so much about how he hated him all the time, we would have known right away who had killed him if he ever turned up dead.”
Knowing he could never kill Steve, Evans still felt the need to do something. So he tormented him. In some respects, Steve and Evans were partners. They didn’t commit burglaries together, but were involved in other illegal activities. One day, they bought a tractor trailer loaded with fireworks from out of state. Fireworks, in New York, are illegal. Evans would never say exactly what happened, but he ended up stealing the entire load from Steve, selling it and not sharing the money.
On different occasions, Evans and Steve would call Horton and other members of the state police and try to set each other up. Or, as Horton told it, they would “just provide intelligence on each other in an effort to get the other arrested. It got to the point where no matter what each one said, it was either not taken seriously or we knew what they were doing and disregarded it altogether.”
There was one time when Evans called Horton and said Steve had tried to kill him; and he wanted him arrested for attempted murder. So Horton ended up meeting Evans in an abandoned parking lot in Menands, near Troy. Evans was driving a Toyota pickup truck at the time.
“He was livid,” Horton recalled. “He gave me a three-foot piece of heavy-gauge pipe that was about two-and-a-half inches in diameter. It was huge, and capped at each end with a fuse coming out of it. It was a serious-looking bomb, but a shitty try at the fuse. Evans told me he had come out of his motel room and found it wired up under his truck with hanger wire. The ‘fuse’ was wrapped around the exhaust. He said it was full of gunpowder, which he had emptied prior to meeting me.”
Horton checked inside the pipe and found remnants of gunpowder on the inside walls.
There was another time when Evans said there was an aluminum packet of cocaine hidden in the door of the gas cap of his truck.
“I quickly realized,” Horton said, “after a few weeks of this, that it was a personal battle between them and I didn’t want to get involved unless it became criminal. I took the pipe bomb from him. Mostly so he wouldn’t use it against [Steve] himself. I know he could go buy the same ingredients, but took it anyway. I didn’t log it in as evidence because there was no case.”
At one point, the feud between them had become so heated and routine, they had run out of ways to attack each other. So Evans decided to begin messing with Steve’s head, in a psychological manner.
Back when Jason, the mass murderer from the Friday the 13th movies, was popular, Evans went out and bought a white hockey goalie mask. At the time, Steve lived on top of a mountain on the New York–Massachusetts border. Some people later claimed Steve had put surveillance cameras along his driveway and in the woods around his house because, for one, “he was dealing drugs,” and two, he was scared shitless of Evans. At night, Evans would skulk around the woods in back of Steve’s house with the Jason mask on and make howling noises. One night, feeling brave, Evans placed the mask on a tree branch along Steve’s driveway so it would spook him when he drove up the driveway. Apparently it worked—because a few days later, Steve ran into Evans and threatened to kill him if he continued to “fuck with” him. He was raging mad and embarrassed, but wouldn’t say why.
A short while later, Evans sneaked up behind Steve’s house as Steve was lying in his bedroom, and began tossing stones at the side of the house. Fed up, Steve took out his gun and emptied it through the wall of his bedroom.
Evans said later he took cover on the ground, but couldn’t stop laughing because he had gotten Steve to “shoot up” his own house, which was what he had planned.
“I verified all of this,” Horton said later, “because I had interviewed [Steve]. He was truly paranoid of Evans. He had a legitimate pistol permit and carried it everywhere he went in a shoulder holster. He even told me that he slept with it, fucked his girlfriend with it on, and even went to the bathroom with it—all because of Gary Evans.”
Whenever Evans did something—be it burglary, lifting weights, not eating certain foods, obsessing over Stacy—he took it to extreme levels. There was no middle ground or “happy medium” that could ever satisfy him.
By all accounts, Steve, Horton said later, wasn’t the type of guy cops cared all that much about. “He was a scumbag, to be honest.”
Although Steve had never been arrested for any major crimes, Horton and Wingate later said they knew he was involved in everything from drugs to robbery to the disposal of a body.
Two guys from Troy had killed, in savage fashion, a sixteen-year-old pregnant girl by cutting off her arms, legs and head. They knew Steve and got the bright idea to take the body parts out to his mountaintop home and dispose of them in the woods. It was winter. The ground was frozen and covered with snow. So instead of digging a ditch and burying the body parts, they put the girl into Hefty bags and threw her over a snowbank along Steve’s driveway. Afterward, they went up to Steve’s house, told him what they had done and, according to Horton, “had a party.”
Steve never called the police. But Horton and Doug Wingate, who were investigating the disappearance of the girl, were told by an informant that the body “may be up there in the woods near” Steve’s house.
After the Bureau caught the killers and located the body, Steve was never charged. Instead, the state decided to use him as a witness in the murder trial against the killers.
With news of the arrests and upcoming trial in all the area newspapers, Evans figured out Steve was going to testify and devised a plan to mess with him one last time.
While Steve was on the stand testifying, Evans showed up in the courtroom and sat directly in his line of sight. “Steve went bullshit on the stand while Evans just sat in the courtroom and smiled at him,” Horton said later. “At one point, Steve began screaming, ‘I can’t concentrate with him here!’ pointing at Evans. ‘Get him the fuck out of here.’”
The judge ultimately had to stop the trial and have Evans removed from the courtroom. For years afterward, Evans bragged about how screwed up Steve had become after the incident. To top it off, months later, Steve’s father died, and Evans sat out in front of the funeral parlor in his truck smiling and staring down mourners as they entered and exited.