“Gar, you in there?” Horton said while knocking on the door. Wingate stood on the opposite side of the doorway. Both men had their weapons drawn.
“Who is it?”
“Gar, it’s Jim and Doug.”
Evans, without hesitating, opened the door and invited them in. The apartment, Horton and Wingate noticed, was completely empty except for a phone, answering machine and caller ID.
Horton walked over to the picture window and looked down. “We were on the third story,” he recalled later. “It got pretty heated right away. Doug and I thought for sure we were going to tussle with him.”
Evans later told Horton he was thinking of fighting his way out. Wingate said he and Horton would have “kicked Gary’s ass all over the apartment.”
Horton disagreed. “Gary, at that time, was fighting for his life. We were merely doing our jobs. When you look at it from the standpoint of a fight, Gary had nothing to lose.”
Finally, after some small talk, Horton said, “Gar, listen, we’re here to arrest you for the marble bench.”
Evans stared at Horton and then looked toward the window. There was a good two-foot cushion of snow on the ground. Evans later said he thought seriously about diving out of the window and taking off, but decided against it only because he knew it would cause a lot of problems for Horton and Wingate, two cops he respected probably more than anyone else in his life at the time.
“Knowing Gary,” Horton said, “if he jumped, he would have landed on the ground like a cat and disappeared.”
Evans was facing some serious time for the theft of the marble bench. A repeat felon, he was looking at likely two years, maybe more depending on the judge.
“Let’s see if Gary,” Horton said to Wingate one day shortly after they arrested him, “will agree to befriending Jeffrey Williams. Maybe he can get us something?”
Wingate smiled.
Since trying to cut his anklet off, Jeffrey Williams had been locked up in Albany County Jail, yet he was going to be released in a matter of weeks. In the interim, Wingate and Horton had gotten lucky when two inmates came forward and claimed Williams had admitted that he had “fucked up and left a medallion [of his]” on Karolyn Lonczak’s body. With that new information, Horton and Wingate reinterviewed dozens of people involved in the case and ended up getting enough information to send the case to a grand jury.
As Williams sat in jail under the notion that he was going to be getting out in days, the grand jury returned two indictments: second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping.
With Williams set to get out of jail at midnight, Wingate and Horton showed up at the prison unannounced with a new arrest warrant.
“The jailers called up to the tier,” Horton recalled later, “for Williams to be sent down. Doug and I stayed out of sight, but could see him coming.”
Williams believed he was being released. But when he reached the lobby, Horton stepped out and said, “Remember me?”
Horton recalled that “he turned grayish white. I actually remember the color draining out of his face at the moment when I said, ‘You’re under arrest for the murder and kidnapping of Karolyn Lonczak.’ I then read him his Miranda rights out loud in front of the jailers so there would be witnesses.”
While Horton finished reading Williams his rights, Wingate cuffed him at his wrists. Horton then bent down to put leg shackles on him.
“He must have literally shit his pants,” Horton said, “because I nearly passed out from the smell when I bent over. I wanted to be as professional as possible, so I didn’t say anything.”
Horton and Wingate’s case centered on, basically, circumstantial evidence. They needed more to seal the deal—ideally, a confession.
Evans was thrilled at the prospect of helping Horton nail Williams. Williams preyed on children and women. Evans said he hated that about him.
“Will you help us?” Horton asked.
Evans stroked his chin and thought about it for a moment. “You want me to kill him for you…. I’ll strangle the motherfucker!”
“No, no, no!” Horton said. “That is not what I am asking you to do, Gar. Come on, let’s be serious here.”
A moment later, Wingate came into the room and they explained to Evans what they wanted him to do. “We’ll put you in a cell next to him,” Wingate said. “Just talk to him. Maybe he’ll tell you things about any crimes he committed…just anything he would say.”
It didn’t take long for Evans to realize that, either way, whether Williams coughed up any information or not, he could manipulate the situation in his favor.
“Let’s do it,” Evans said. “I’ll get the motherfucker.”