As they had planned earlier that week, Evans and Damien met in Troy on September 11, 1989, to decide what to do next. Damien had—as he promised he would—sold all of the merchandise stolen from Berry’s Watertown jewelry shop. “Here,” Cuomo said, handing Evans a wad of money. “There’s about fifteen grand there.”
Evans smiled. “Not a bad day’s work, Damien, huh?”
“I guess,” Cuomo said. He was still a bit shaky, Evans said later. Acting anxious. Not himself. Whereas Evans had killed before and the murder of Berry, an innocent victim, didn’t seem to matter much to him, Damien Cuomo was a burglar. The idea of killing a man had never been part of who he was or what he did.
“You can never tell anyone about that job, you fucking understand me?” Evans warned, changing his tone from casual to serious. “Never.”
“I know, Gar. I understand.”
Evans later explained to Horton what he was thinking as he and Damien parted ways after their brief conversation. “I really didn’t trust Damien. I knew that motherfucker had been ripping me off little by little the entire time I knew him.”
You’ll get yours, too, you little fucker, Evans thought as he watched Cuomo drive away. Real fucking soon.
Gary Evans and Lisa Morris, Damien’s longtime girlfriend, the mother of Damien’s child, had always hated each other, Morris explained later. “He took a lot of Damien’s time from me. They were always taking off.”
Sometimes it was a day, maybe two, perhaps even three or four. Damien would always return, though, bearing gifts for Lisa. But she still couldn’t stand to see Evans. Lisa had dreams of marrying Damien, she said. But at the same time never mentioned it to him for fear of scaring him off. “If it happened, great. I had my heart set on it. I loved Damien. He was a great father. He loved his daughter.”
Still, as well as Lisa and Damien were getting along, everything changed after Evans started showing up. Damien wasn’t focused on family as much. He became, Lisa insisted, more interested in “the next job” he was going to pull off with Evans.
There was one time when Evans showed up at the apartment after he and Cuomo had burgled the Square Lion, and Lisa told him to “stay the fuck away from Damien.” Evans had, as he often would, shown up out of the blue. Standing in front of Lisa on the second story of the apartment porch, listening to Lisa bellyache about taking Damien away so much, Evans stared at her and said, “You shut the fuck up or I will throw you off this balcony.”
“You don’t scare me,” Lisa said.
“Just tell your little fucking boyfriend that I was here.”
As Evans drove away, he began laughing. I’m going to fuck her someday, he told himself. She doesn’t know it yet, but I’ll have her wrapped around my finger.
As the weeks passed after the Watertown job, Evans began showing up at Cuomo’s nearly daily. He became like a stray cat they had fed one day, Lisa joked later. And because he was there so much when Damien wasn’t around, Lisa said she was forced to “leave Christina,” who was three years old at the time, with him. “I had been working two jobs,” Lisa recalled. “Because Damien was away so much doing his thing, I spent a lot of time with Gary. Although we didn’t like each other all that much then, I felt I could trust him with Christina. Damien felt the same way.”
Lisa began to drink much more heavily, she later said, around this same time. She had always indulged in “a joint once in a while and maybe a beer or two,” but now she was drinking and smoking pot almost daily. “It was Damien not being around and me knowing what he was doing.”
She later denied knowing anything about the Watertown job and murder, but she readily admitted that she knew Damien Cuomo and Gary Evans were burglars, and chose to look the other way.
By November 1989, Watertown detectives had a suspect in the murder of Douglas Berry. A “white male, age thirty-one,” with an “extensive arrest record in New York and New Jersey.” The guy was a Watertown loner who had, two years prior to Berry’s murder, “bragged about killing [Berry]…and taking his gold.”
When detectives tracked him down, he denied any involvement. Several days later, detectives asked him to take a polygraph.
“Sure,” the guy said, “I have nothing to hide.”
Most people, when faced with the grim prospect of a murder hanging over their heads, will, uncontrollably, harbor some sort of anxiety about the crime, even if they weren’t involved. It’s human nature. This particular guy had already bragged to his buddies at a local bar that he was going to kill Berry and rob him.
Faced with what was beginning to look like an entire town ready to tar and feather him, the man agreed to the polygraph, yet failed the test horribly. So, as the public demanded an arrest, he left the state.
Weeks later, detectives failed to put together enough evidence to prosecute him and the case was reopened and sent back to the state police.
It appeared that Evans had committed the perfect murder. As he watched from afar, keeping tabs on what was going on in Watertown, he realized how easy it was to get away with murder. He had killed two men with no ramifications.
Why not try it again?