Damien Cuomo lived with his girlfriend, Lisa Morris, and their three-year-old daughter, Christina, on Industrial Park Road in South Troy. Taking a left off Spring Avenue, Industrial Park Road runs straight up a brief incline and turns into Colleen Road. On the left is the large apartment complex where Damien and Lisa lived.
On December 26, 1989, Evans called Cuomo and told him he wanted to meet up with him to discuss “some things.” Damien had just spent a pleasant Christmas with his family.
“What’s up?” Cuomo wanted to know. “It’s the holidays, Gar.”
“I need to talk to you, Damien. It’s important.”
Evans had been upset for weeks over what he believed to be thousands of dollars Damien had kept from him after fencing the merchandise they had burgled from Douglas Berry’s Watertown shop. He couldn’t let it go. One day of anger turned into two, and before he knew it, his feelings of aggression became uncontrollable.
I have to act on them.
Lisa had, she recalled later, drunk heavily the night before, so she slept late on the morning Evans showed up at the apartment to pick Damien up. Christina was in the living room watching cartoons when Evans knocked on the door.
“Tell Mommy when she gets up,” Damien told his daughter, lifting her up and kissing her on the cheek, “that Daddy will be back in a half hour.”
Evans was waiting by the door, listening, watching.
“Where are we going?” Cuomo asked when they sat down in Evans’s car.
“Just up the road here…we need to talk privately.”
Evans took a left out of the parking lot and headed straight up Industrial Park Road toward a dirt parking area by the woods. The drive took all of about sixty seconds.
As soon as Evans pulled out of view near the edge of the woods, in one single motion he shut the car off, took out his .22-caliber pistol and pointed it at Damien’s temple. “You thieving…fuck! You stole from me? And you thought you…you could get away with it?” Whenever Evans got excited, friends later recalled, he spoke with a noticeable lisp and stumbled over his words.
Cuomo didn’t say anything, Evans explained later. He just sat there, “scared like the weasel fuck he was.”
Evans then got out of the car, keeping the pistol pointed at Cuomo the entire time as he walked around the front of the car over to the passenger side, where Damien was sitting. He then reached into his back pocket and took out a pair of handcuffs.
After handcuffing Damien’s hands behind his back, Evans, without saying a word, shot him three times—pop, pop, pop—in the back of the head. Then he took out a white plastic shopping bag and placed it over Damien’s head.
Asked later why he did that, he said, “‘Cause I didn’t want to look at his face after I killed him.”
With Damien Cuomo slumped over in the front seat of his car, Evans went inside the trunk and took out a shower curtain, blanket and some rope.
“I wrapped him in the shower curtain and blanket,” Evans described later, “and dragged him through the woods to the hole I had already dug.”
Once he arrived at the hole, he lifted the wooden make-shift door he had placed over it weeks before, removed the three bags of topsoil and dumped Damien headfirst into the hole. Then he covered him with topsoil, broadcasted some of the remaining soil over the top of the hole, shimmied some of the brush over it and drove back home.
Horton wouldn’t find Damien Cuomo’s body for ten years.
At about eleven o’clock on the morning of December 27, 1989, Evans called Damien’s apartment.
“Hello?” Lisa said in her smoker’s scratchy voice.
“Where’s that fucking weasel boyfriend of yours, Lisa? He’s supposed to take me to the airport.”
“I have no idea….”
“Well, he’s supposed to take me—”
Lisa cut him off. “I can take you, Gar.”
“No. Fuck it. I called a cab. But you tell that little fuck when I catch up with him, he owes me.”
Lisa said she would and hung up.
Whenever Damien left town—which he often did—he would always let Lisa know when he was coming back. There wasn’t a time Lisa could later recall when Damien had left without first giving her a date of his return.
Damien Cuomo was never known as a person to stay in one place for very long. His being gone, at least in the early part of 1990, didn’t exactly stir up any type of worry among his family or friends. But when he failed to contact anyone after a few months, rumor began to circulate that Evans, who had been overheard by several people saying he was going to kill Damien, had made good on his promise.
As for Lisa, she had heard that Damien had begun “ripping off” local drug dealers lately, so she surmised, when Damien never came back and never called, that he was “hiding out.”
“I didn’t know if he robbed a drug dealer or whacked a drug dealer,” Lisa later said. “I thought maybe he did a burglary and the cops knew about it, so he took off.”
At one point, Lisa called Damien’s brother and mentioned that she thought something was wrong. It was unlike Damien to run off without any word whatsoever. She wanted to know if the Cuomo family had heard anything.
Damien’s brother said he knew nothing.
Then Damien’s car turned up.
“People started blaming Gary when Damien’s car showed up abandoned,” Lisa recalled. “But I thought then, as I did for a long time, that [an old neighbor of Damien’s] had something to do with [his disappearance].”
After murdering Damien, Evans headed south to Florida so he could “lay low for a while.” He had been sleeping with Lisa’s neighbor for a few weeks by then, so he brought her along to make it seem as normal as possible, like he wasn’t running from anything.
After two days, Evans said later, “she ended up getting on my nerves, so I left her ass there and took off to my sister’s.”
He wasn’t gone long—because by the middle of January he was back in town, beginning what would end up being a full-time job of working to convince Lisa that Damien was still alive; that he was nothing more than a deadbeat dad who had taken off on his family.
As soon as Evans got back, he called Lisa. “Have you heard anything? What’s going on? Is he back yet? How are you holding up?”
By this point, Lisa was a mess. Crying all the time. Thinking the worst. She was drinking heavier, knocking back vodka by the glassful to deal with what she firmly believed was the loss of her boyfriend, whom she had dreamed of “marrying and having five kids with,” she later said through tears.
On the other end, Evans was plotting and planning his every move where Lisa was concerned, setting up not only an alibi for himself, but for Damien Cuomo, too.
On January 25, Evans went down to the post office in Troy and changed Damien’s address. He didn’t invent some address in another state, but simply filled out a change of address form and put down Damien’s mother’s address in Troy and signed Damien’s name.
With that done, he began working on Lisa.
Showing up at her apartment nearly every day, Evans began telling her that he believed Damien had taken off to North Carolina to live with one of his brothers.
“He left you and Christina,” Evans would say. “He’s not coming back.”
One day, Lisa had overdosed on “some pills and alcohol” and ended up in the hospital. The thought, she said later, of not having Damien around any longer was too much. The pills and alcohol helped her forget.
When she got out of the hospital and returned home, she found a note on the door to her bedroom, which was locked: I’ll be back to talk to you tomorrow…the babysitter.
“It looked like Damien’s handwriting,” Lisa said later. “I believed it was.”
Note in hand, Lisa ran to the phone and called her neighbor. “The little bastard is here. I just found a note,” she said frantically.
“Gary’s here,” her neighbor said, handing him the phone.
“Don’t go in the bedroom,” Gary said. “I’ll come over and check it out.”
Cuomo had installed a special door to his bedroom. It was solid oak, designed to keep people out. He generally kept all of his stolen merchandise in the bedroom.
Lisa knew Damien wasn’t inside the bedroom, she recalled. “But I thought he had come home and was trying to keep me out of the bedroom for some reason.”
So Evans came over and kicked the door open. Inside the room, she and Evans found a suitcase of Damien’s spread out on the bed, clothes hanging out of it, a sweater of Damien’s on the bed beside it. The window in the room was open. There was a balcony and staircase just outside the window leading to the street.
“It looked like Damien had come home and was packing,” Lisa said. “When he heard me come in the apartment, he left abruptly.”
Watching Lisa looking over the suitcase and staring at the window, Evans cracked a devious smile behind her back.
“Jesus,” Evans said, looking at everything, “he was here, wasn’t he, Lisa?”
Lisa started crying.