CHAPTER 76

As Horton and Wingate pulled into the Monte Mario, they saw Evans standing in the parking lot with a bag of toiletries in his hand, smiling.

“What’s up, Gar?” Horton said as he and Wingate got out of the car.

“We meet again….”

“Listen, I have to search you. I’m not going to be made to look like a fool for turning you over to the FBI and you’re packing all kinds of ‘goodies.’”

“Go for it.”

The plan was, Horton and Wingate would arrest Evans and drive him to Rutland, Vermont, to meet with the FBI. Once there, he would become federal property.

As Horton went to pat Evans down, Evans handed over three handcuff keys: one underneath his watch, another in his shoe and a third tucked inside a hand-made seam in his belt. He had a fourth key, however, Horton never found. Years later, he explained how, as Horton and Wingate pulled into the parking lot, he swallowed the fourth key. He figured once he had a chance to get settled into his cell up north, he could recycle it through his body and hide it on his body or in his cell.

Horton and Wingate had such a respectful relationship with Evans that they decided against handcuffing him. It was a long, dull ride up to Rutland. Why make things more tense?

So, like three buddies on their way to a weekend of drinking and fishing, Horton, driving, Wingate, riding shotgun, and Evans, alone in the backseat unhandcuffed, began their journey up to Vermont.

“I wasn’t upset at the fact that he didn’t have the book on him,” Horton recalled later. “In fact, if he’d had it on him, I would have thought differently about him and even lost some respect for him.”

The drive was unremarkable. They talked about their lives, television, sports—and how Evans had let Horton down. Along the way, Horton stopped and bought Evans cookies and milk, doughnuts and potato chips.

“You are unbelievable,” Horton, shaking his head in disgust, said at one point after stopping at a rest stop. “You couldn’t just stay out of trouble until after the Jeffrey Williams trial?”

“I left the area, didn’t I? I didn’t do anything around here.”

“You didn’t go far enough away…. You really pissed that judge off. You are not going to be welcomed with open arms up there. I hope you realize that.”

At any point, Evans could have jumped out of the car, or taken off during one of their many stops.

“Doug and I figured that he had turned himself in and wasn’t interested in running.”

Horton had made earlier plans to meet several FBI agents at a local Denny’s restaurant in Rutland.

“We bought Gary breakfast, told him to be a good little boy for the feds, turned him over and drove back to Albany.”

The FBI then shackled Evans, put him in a cruiser and drove north to where he had hidden the book.

In true bureaucratic fashion, the FBI gave the New York State Police no credit for getting Evans to turn over the book. On June 22, 1994, the Rutland Herald, a local Vermont newspaper, ran the headline: FBI RECOVERS AUDUBON BOOK; MAN ARRESTED.

According to Evans later, not only did the FBI not want to admit that Horton and Wingate had been instrumental in the return of the book, but one agent mocked Evans’s relationship with them, saying, “You don’t have your ‘friends’ from the New York State Police here to protect you now.”

 

Evans hadn’t been locked up in nearly seven years. Now a product of the federal system, he was at the mercy of overcrowding and available bed space and thus shipped frequently around the Northeast, from prison to prison, like a box of documents.

Horton and Wingate went to see him when they could, but months would go by without any contact. When Evans felt they were blowing him off, he’d dash off a letter. It was clear that prison was turning an already paranoid deviant into an insolated sociopath who began to allow the demons that had controlled him periodically throughout the years take full control over him.

I hope you can come soon, Evans wrote to Horton in early 1995. I’m not doing too good…. I’m talking to a doctor here. Can someone talk to me?

The remainder of the letter, which was brief, consisted of Evans begging for some sort of attention from Horton. His handwriting had changed; it was unsteady, scribbled and almost unreadable.

After receiving the letter, Horton went to see him.

“All he did was cry,” Horton recalled later. “He was in the worst state of being I had ever seen him.”

The Jeffrey Williams trial was slated for summer. Horton needed Evans in good emotional health, but the next letter, written a week later, proved he was, perhaps, beyond that point now: I am very fucked up. I’m going to be OK for trial…. I’m just…I just get scared in these places. I’m not OK.

His sentences, at times, made little sense: I love [Doris Sheehan] so much everything gone I can’t I’m not doing good. Can you come and talk to me please or call me because I’m not doing good at all.

With the Jeffrey Williams trial looming, Horton once again went to see him.

“Gary Evans had turned into a different person…. He was losing his mind, literally,” Horton recalled. “His entire look had changed from bad to worse. He was now nearly completely bald. That bothered him. He wasn’t showering.”

Indeed, Evans had realized too little too late that it had been a mistake to turn over the book. Two years behind bars was like a life sentence.

The changes Horton had seen in Evans by the summer of 1995, however, were nothing compared to what Evans had been doing shortly before he had turned himself in to Horton and Wingate.