As Evans continued to cultivate an intimate relationship with Lisa Morris, succeeding in convincing her that Damien Cuomo had been living large in South Carolina, basking in the sun, soaking up the good life without her and Christina, Horton and Wingate worked doggedly to build a case against Jeffrey Williams. They conducted interviews, tracked leads and kept a close eye on Williams as he finished his current sentence at home under the guard of a plastic anklet. For this simple reason, Horton and Wingate lost touch with Evans for a while, yet he still seemed to show up in their lives, Horton admitted later, to “keep an eye on us.”
By June, it was no secret around town that, although it had been only six months since Damien’s disappearance, Evans was shacking up with Lisa. According to an interview that the Troy PD gave to a local newspaper, they had interviewed “one hundred” of Damien’s closest “friends and acquaintances” and still couldn’t find him.
Since Damien had been gone, his father had taken very ill. The Troy PD assumed that “he would have come to see his father” if he was able to. On top of that, Cuomo had not tried to make contact with his daughter, Christina. This, particularly, seemed out of character for him.
Although Evans spent a considerable amount of his time at Lisa’s apartment, he kept a room at the Coliseum Hotel, which was—not by coincidence—only about a mile from Jim Horton’s home in Latham.
This was Evans’s office. He used it as a place to keep only certain items: his answering machine, a caller ID, phone and some toiletries. He would also keep an alarm system on the floor. So whenever he had the chance, he could dissect it and study how it worked.
For Evans, the past few months had become a constant routine of looking over his shoulder. Word around Troy was that he not only killed Michael Falco, but Damien Cuomo, too.
To keep on good terms with the Bureau, Evans would periodically stop by Troop G and offer up someone. At some point in 1990, he had convinced a local guy from Troy to sell him a .44 Magnum. After making arrangements with the guy to meet him, Evans called Horton and Wingate and told them about it.
“Gary Evans always claimed he wanted to get guns off the street,” Doug Wingate said later.
Later on, Horton and Wingate found out that it was all a ruse to keep them focused on anything besides Damien Cuomo and Michael Falco.
“I received a call from Damien,” Evans told Horton one day. “He wants me to go into his parents’ house and remove several boxes of stolen goods that he had hidden in an old shed behind the house. He told me he wanted me to move the boxes because he thought the police were onto him.”
“Sounds good,” Horton said. “Let’s do it.”
Evans drove up and got permission from Damien’s parents to go into the shed and retrieve the boxes. When state police opened the boxes, they found coins, stocks, bonds, passports, personal papers from several area homes Damien had burglarized and an empty bank bag from Capital Tractor. Tucked down underneath everything was a .22-caliber Ruger—the same gun that Evans had used to murder Douglas Berry.
Wingate and Horton weren’t naive, so they continued to question Evans about Falco and Cuomo.
“Gary weighed every word you said,” Wingate recalled later. “You couldn’t say a sentence where he didn’t see where every single word was going. If you don’t have Gary, you don’t have him!”
“The word is,” Evans said when they pressed him about Michael Falco, “he went to California. Damien went south.”
Horton was, many of his former colleagues said, an extremely “creative cop, who did whatever he had to do to get the job done.”
By the fall of 1990, at thirty-five, Horton was considered an experienced investigator who was going places in the Bureau. Most didn’t understand his profound desire to help Evans turn his life around. Of course, Horton had no idea Evans was a serial killer. He saw him as a career thief who needed some direction in life—maybe a guy who perhaps had a rough childhood, but could turn his life around if he only applied himself.
“The problem was,” Horton said later, “that every time I tried to help Gary, he let me down.”
Still, whenever Evans found himself in trouble with the law, he depended on Horton (or Wingate) to get him out of it.
There was one time when Evans needed to replace a mirror on his truck. Like any good thief, he decided there was no way in hell he was going to pay for it, so he drove up to Brunswick and found a car dealership.
While unscrewing the mirror off a brand-new truck, a security guard spied him on a television monitor and phoned police.
After being taken into custody by Brunswick State Police, Evans started barking Horton’s name to the judge during his arraignment. “I help Horton. He’s a state police investigator. I want to talk to him.”
Horton got a call from the judge, who happened to be a former trooper and one of his ex-bosses. “We’ve got Gary Evans on a petit larceny over here. He said he’ll ‘trade information…do something for you.’”
Horton, by mere happenstance, had just been promoted to the federal drug task force as supervisor.
“I’ll go over and see him,” Horton told the judge.
Later that day, Horton took a ride to Brunswick to see Evans. “What the hell, Gar,” he said, laughing, “you let some fat, five-dollar-an-hour security guard catch you? I thought you were better than that?”
“Fuckin’ shit…I can’t fucking believe that I got caught stealing mirrors by a motherfucking security guard.” If there was something in the room to destroy, Horton recalled, Evans would have probably given it a good beating.
Horton continued to laugh. He couldn’t get over it. Evans had broken into some of the most secure antique shops and jewelry stores in the Northeast without as much as disturbing a mouse, yet he had been caught by a security guard? It didn’t make sense.
“What are you, some petty thief?” Horton continued. “Are you going to start shoplifting candy bars next?”
“Fuck you! I’m a better thief than that. I just needed the stupid fucking mirror. Can you help me out of this, or what?”
“This is going to cost you,” Horton said with a quip of sarcasm. “You will owe me.”