By Farmer’s Almanac standards, October 17, 1991, was a typical fall day in New England. In Albany, temperatures had hovered around fifty-nine degrees, while the sun set under the moon phase of Waxing Gibbons at 6:10 P.M.
Moon phases were important to Evans; and he would make note of it later in his life. A lot of his paintings and drawings had always centered on the rise and fall of the moon. The Waxing Gibbons, which is nearly full, rises during the day when most people cannot see it. Some historians claim the Italians attacked the Albanians during World War II by the light of the Waxing Moon because it had illuminated the night sky as if it were daytime.
Evans would never say that he chose the night of October 17, 1991, to act out on his bloody impulses because he favored the Waxing Moon, but his love for astrology might make one wonder if, perhaps, like a wolf, he allowed the moon to guide him on that night.
Little Falls, New York, is a ninety-minute drive from Albany, conveniently located in the middle of the state. With a population of just over five thousand, Little Falls is about as “small town” as it gets in New York: old-fashioned cafés, low-rise commercial buildings, a few retail outlets and one small coin shop on Main Street, run by thirty-six-year-old Gregory Jouben, a black-haired, good-looking local who had worked hard most of his life trying to survive as a small business owner. Beside his coin shop, the seven-story office building where Jouben rented space was vacant.
Evans loved Jouben’s shop because it was far enough away from Albany where he could come and go without being noticed.
“I had brought some stolen property/jewelry there a couple of times and got to know [Jouben] a little bit,” Evans said later. “The first couple of times he didn’t ask for any ID or my name. But the last time I went there, he asked me to sign my name, so I made one up.”
Two weeks before Evans went into Jouben’s shop for the last time, on October 3, 1991, he began camping out on the top floor of the mostly abandoned building.
“I was short on money and was scoping out [Jouben’s shop] to later rob it,” Evans recalled.
Cops later found holes in the concrete walls where Evans had practiced shooting his .22-caliber pistol. He had even spray-painted graffiti messages on the walls: This is my fucking bank! and Stay the fuck out of my bank!
The other reason for moving into the building two weeks prior to the night he chose to burglarize Jouben’s shop was that he wanted to watch Jouben’s movements, Evans said. He knew Jouben had some rather expensive jewelry, but he didn’t know exactly where he kept it, he said. So at night, shortly before Jouben closed the shop, Evans would watch him by crawling around the ceiling tiles and peering at him from above. Within a few days, he found out that he was putting all of his most expensive merchandise in a state-of-the-art floor safe. There was no way, Evans realized that night, he could get into the safe without the combination.
“But I thought I would watch him for a few weeks and pick a night when he forgot to lock the safe.”
By the end of the second week, he became frustrated; he later admitted he couldn’t wait any longer.
That afternoon, he went to a local hardware store and purchased an Open/Closed sign: orange lettering, black background, the same as any For Sale sign.
After returning to where he was living on the top floor, he stuffed the sign down the front of his pants, underneath his shirt, stuck his .22-caliber pistol in a bag—“I had the gun inside a bag secured with duct tape, so when I shot him, the brass shell casings would stay in the bag”—and put it, along with a few other items, in a large duffel bag. In his front pocket, Evans placed a gold medallion with the word “bitch” etched across the front of it.
By 5:00 P.M., he was ready to go to work.
At about the same time, Jouben closed his shop and set out across the street to make a deposit at the local bank. A local Watertown police officer even watched him make the drop.
The cop was traveling southbound on Ann Street, going toward East Main, when he saw Jouben heading back into his shop. “He was wearing light-colored clothing and…looked happy at the time,” the cop reported later.
Evans left the top floor at approximately 5:00 and worked his way downstairs to approach Jouben about buying the gold BITCH medallion.
Jouben was sitting at his jeweler’s table near the cash register when Evans walked through the front door, the bells hanging off the doorknob rattling as if it were Christmastime. Jouben couldn’t see Evans from where he sat. But by the time he got up to check who had walked in, Evans had already locked the door from the inside and placed the Open/Closed sign, with the Closed side facing out, in the window.
“Can I help you…?” Jouben asked as Evans approached him.
“How are you?” Evans said.
It took a moment, but Jouben recognized Evans. “Hey, how have you been? I’m closing in a few minutes.”
Evans reached into his pocket and pulled out the broach. “Can you check this out for me real quick?”
“Sure,” Jouben said as they walked back to his desk. Then, as he slipped on his eyepiece and jeweler’s lens, Evans reached into his bag and placed his hand on a .22-caliber pistol he had purchased recently.
“Greg [Jouben] took [the broach] from me, sat down at his desk,” Evans recalled later, “and began to look at the piece through his eyeglass.”
Viewing the piece, Jouben could tell immediately it was worthless. “The diamonds are ACZ…worth maybe ten dollars,” he said, still gazing at it.
Next, as Jouben lifted the piece up to the light for a better look, Evans shot him once in the back of the head.
Jouben then fell onto his desk, his body convulsing and shaking…. Blood ran down the back of his head, across his shoulder and onto his forearm and thigh.
Evans quickly walked to the front of the shop and checked to see if anyone had heard the shot. Confident no one had, he shut the lights off and grabbed a handful of diamond engagement rings—the items he’d had his eye on for the past two weeks—and put them into his duffel bag.
Jouben, however, wasn’t dead; Evans heard him stirring at his desk and immediately ran toward him.
Reaching him a few seconds later, Evans later said he saw Jouben, barely able to move, reaching for the phone.
Motherfucker…you’re still alive?
As Jouben, grunting and struggling to take a breath, lifted the phone receiver, Evans pumped two more rounds into the side of his head. At that point, blood splattered across Jouben’s desk, clothes and face as the shots tore through his skull. He fell back in his chair; his head hanging off the back headrest, a trail of blood dripping…pooling up on the floor.
Scared he had made too much noise, Evans then grabbed a few more items and took off. Inside the back of the shop was a door leading to other sections of the building. Knowing the layout of the building, he worked his way through the labyrinth of doors and hallways and found the main stairwell leading up to the roof.
Running up to the fourth floor, Evans fled out the door and ended up facing “a lower roof on an adjacent building.”
Like a teenager acting on a dare, he hopped from building to building, crossing over alleyways about fifty feet below. He had parked his truck just down the block earlier that day.
“As I was going out of the building and across several roofs, I heard stuff dropping out of the bag all the way.”
When he reached the fourth roof, he shinned down a set of drainpipes attached to the side of the building, like a fireman, and found himself standing in an alley staring at his truck.