Gary Evans had always referred to Bill Murphy, a Troy native he had met in the fourth grade while they were classmates at School Ten in Troy, as the “only honest friend [he] ever had.” Throughout the years, Evans turned to a life of crime while Bill got married and divorced, remarried, worked an honest job in a factory and lived a secluded, family life in South Troy before moving to the country.
Evans would show up at Bill’s house at about 8:00 on some mornings and just shoot the shit with him over a workout. Bill had a gym in his house. He worked third shift. Evans would never tell Bill anything that would get him into trouble with the law or make him an accessory to a crime, but Bill had no trouble reading between the lines and drawing conclusions of his own.
Over the course of the past ten years—1985 to 1995—Bill had watched his childhood friend change from a hot-headed young kid who wasn’t afraid of anyone, someone who kept scores of girlfriends, to an introverted loner who became relentlessly paranoid and, Bill later admitted, strangely “afraid of people.”
There were times when Bill would complain to Evans about a boss or neighbor. Evans would get an evil look in his eye and say something frightening: “I’ll take care of it for you, Bill. Don’t worry about it.”
“No, Gary,” Bill would tell him, “don’t do anything! Let me live my life and deal with people my own way.”
Bill simply wanted to be there as a friend for someone he saw as never having had a chance in life.
“I don’t condone what he did,” Bill said later, “but I understand how he turned out the way he did.”
Bill had seen it firsthand. Evans’s father would beat Evans savagely and, after kicking Bill out of the apartment, stow Evans away in his room for days at a time.
“He would even take the lightbulbs out of Gary’s room so he couldn’t see anything. And he would starve the poor kid. That’s how Gary learned to be a sneak—he was forced into it.”
Bill also saw some of the violence Evans’s mother’s boyfriends and husbands seemed to direct toward Evans, who was much smaller than the other kids. Some of Flora Mae’s boyfriends and husbands used Evans as a whipping post, Bill recalled, often beating him for no particular reason in front of Bill and other neighborhood kids.
One of Evans’s favorite things to do as a thief, Bill recalled, was to “hit the same place twice.” Evans had done it several times. He relished the emotional high he got out of burglarizing an antique shop or jewelry store and then going back a few weeks later and hitting it again.
One time, Evans pulled up to Bill’s house with a load of bedding and large, bulky items in the back of his truck. Bill asked him what he was doing.
“I need it to cover me,” Evans said. He wanted to burglarize a particular jewelry store—he never told Bill the name or location—in broad daylight. He was excited. The thrill was in getting away with it in front of a crowd of people. He would hit the place on a Sunday afternoon while patrons in the bar across the street were getting drunk. He explained that the mattresses and bedding were going to block the view from the bar. He would park his truck in front of the building and be in and out within fifteen minutes.
At times, Evans would just stop showing up at Bill’s, and Bill understood that if he didn’t hear from him for a period of time, he was either on the run or in prison.
“Each time he came out of prison,” Bill explained, “he was harder.” Oddly, Evans had always told Bill he was terrified of growing old. “Old people creeped him out. He hated wrinkly skin and just about everything about them.” For that reason alone, whenever they’d discuss it, Evans would suggest that he would never make it beyond fifty.
There came a point during their relationship, however, when Bill became terrified of his longtime friend.
“Gary started to become more paranoid over the years. He began scaring me. Talking really crazy. He had always said he wanted to kill a ‘woman and a nigger.’ I don’t know that he ever did, nor did I want to [know]. I could have gotten him to open up more, but I just didn’t want to know about certain things. And he respected that.”
Bill was intrigued, he said, by the stories Evans would tell him. After a night of slaving in the factory, Bill would sit attentively and listen to Evans spin one yarn after the other. But as the years passed and Evans became more engrossed in a life Bill felt involved more than simple burglary, his behavior became more bizarre. Once, Bill went out into his barn and noticed several coffee cans along the side of the back wall. They were full of human fecal matter. It wouldn’t be until years later that Bill found out Evans was defecating in the cans so he could sift through the waste and find a handcuff key he had swallowed after the cops had pulled him over or he had spent the night in jail.
Yet, if that wasn’t strange enough, something Bill found one day inside a dollhouse Evans had been building in Bill’s garage affected Bill enough to where he began to put as much distance between him and Evans as he could without offending him.
Evans would stop by from time to time and work on the miniature dollhouse. Like his paintings and stained-glass designs, he relished the tranquillity of creating something from scratch. One day, though, when he wasn’t around, Bill went out into the garage just to take a look at the miniature house. Underneath it, he discovered a trapdoor. Inside the trapdoor was a smattering of rather odd items Bill would have never figured Evans to own: several transsexual and homosexual magazines, along with dildos and other sexual toys one might use for gay sex.
Could Evans have been a closet bisexual? Bill never confronted him about it. He kept the information to himself, noting, “I am not a homosexual. I have nothing against homosexuals, but I cannot believe Gary was.”
An acquaintance, however, viewed the situation differently and believed from the first day she met Evans that he was gay, regardless of the women he bragged about having sex with. Evans never liked her, she said, and always seemed to avoid her. Perhaps, she later noted, it was his way of not wanting to be figured out.
Another close friend of Evans’s talked later in further detail about his paranoia, and how it had spiraled out of control during the same period. Evans would, according to this friend, sneak into the homes of people who spooked him just so he could go through their possessions. Sometimes he would go in at night while they were sleeping and just observe them. Once, while dating a young woman whom he had started to have feelings for, he broke into her home while she was gone so he could hide in the closet and later watch her. By mere habit, perhaps, he decided to bring along a .22-caliber pistol.
While in her bedroom, the woman came home. Evans heard voices, a male and female. So he ducked into the closet in her bedroom.
Standing in the dark, crossing his chest with the pistol as though he were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, his heart pounding in anxiety, Evans listened as the woman made love to the guy.
“He said he thought about breaking out of the closet and shooting them both,” the friend recalled later, “but he decided against it because she had a kid.”
Given that he had broken into so many homes throughout the years, many of which were people he knew, some believe he had also been sneaking around Horton’s house while Horton, his wife and kids were at home or away.
Faced with this prospect later, Horton said plainly, “If I would have ever caught Gary Evans in my home, I would have killed him…and he knew that—because I had warned him about it.”
Despite the horror Evans lived as a child of two alcoholics and the blame he later placed on his mother for picking such violent and abusive spouses, Evans loved the women in his life and showered them with gifts of jewelry and expensive vacations. His women throughout the years numbered in the dozens. From underage girls to overweight women, from nice-looking women to women who might have easily passed for men. It was true he didn’t discriminate when it came to choosing lovers, and there is no doubt he enjoyed having sex with many different partners.
Some of his women claimed he was a responsive lover who never wanted to do anything out of the ordinary. “Missionary style, that’s it!” said one woman. “The only odd thing he liked to do sexually,” said another woman, “was perform oral sex on me while I was menstruating. He said it was a natural thing and it didn’t bother him.”
Like a rock star, Evans took Polaroids of his women while he was having sex with them and kept the photographs in a scrapbook as souvenirs. The photos, scores of them, show Evans and his partners in various positions of sexual pleasure. Evans had even allowed someone close to him, a male, to have sex with some of his women while he participated.
One of his marks had been the daughter (who was underage at the time) of a woman he had dated for some time. The mother of the young girl later swore that Evans had never dated her daughter and that she kept her away from him because she and her daughter were terrified of him. But the Polaroids show a willing participant—the daughter—giving oral sex to Evans as both smile for the camera. It was all a challenge to him, some later claimed. He loved the idea of being able to show people the women he’d had sex with.
To further bolster the theory that Evans was perhaps confused about his sexuality, other Polaroids depict a man who was, at the least, experimenting. For one, Evans on occasion liked to dress in women’s clothes. Wearing a blond wig, makeup and lipstick, he embodied the persona of a female rather affably. Although many might have thought it was nothing more than a Halloween costume, there was also evidence that he had a penchant for transsexuals and dated one while in prison. Not only had he taken Polaroids of a man he had met while in prison who lived life as a female, but later, when she got out of prison and completed her transition to a female, Evans visited her and took more photos. One might ask, why would he visit a transsexual and keep transsexual magazines if, in his prison writings, he ridiculed those same types of people and carried on about how much he hated them?
“If it is true,” Horton said later, “he certainly had me and every other cop he had contact with fooled. I had no idea. I would have viewed our relationship entirely different if I would have known then what I know now. He acted like a tough guy and gave me no hint whatsoever that he was bisexual.”
Was Evans, when he wrote to Horton how much he envied him, actually showing an attraction for him?
“I felt that it was all business between us,” Horton added, “manipulation and a serious game of crime. I’ve always believed that he killed more than he had admitted to—and if Gary was, in fact, bisexual, well, that opens up an entire new pool of victims. If Gary had it in mind that someone would expose his ‘secret life,’ he would have killed them in a minute.”
Could Evans have been bisexual?
“I can definitely believe it,” Horton concluded. “Gary worked so hard to keep it from me that it’s most likely true.”