On June 9, 1995, Evans was formally sentenced to twenty-seven months for the theft of the James Audubon book. A little under a year later, on June 6, 1996, he was released from a federal prison in Vermont and placed on three years’ probation because of a time-served credit for spending all those months in prison before his sentencing.
He was nearly forty-two years old. Still as buff as a competition bodybuilder, he had put on a little more weight, but in all the right places. Almost completely bald, he had been robbing people and burglarizing homes, jewelry stores and antique shops for the past twenty-five years. Since 1977, he had been in and out of prison, on average, every third year. Along the way, he had murdered four people, possibly more. He was tired. Beaten down by the system. Resentful of it. A career criminal, he had built his life around prison, killing people and burglary—and what did he have to show for it?
Nothing.
Shortly after he was released from prison, Evans hooked back up with his old friend Tim Rysedorph. Tim was working at BFI Waste Systems in Latham. He hadn’t really seen Evans too much over the years. They had exchanged hellos every once in a while and perhaps even turned a few small “jobs” together, but for the most part Evans hadn’t seen Tim since they lived together in Troy with Michael Falco back in the early ’80s.
Evans later claimed Tim would always call him when he was low on money and “his wife put pressure on him” to come up with some quick cash. But Evans hated Caroline Parker, and was usually reluctant to work with Tim because of her attitude.
Still, Rysedorph kept calling, Evans later said, looking to turn over quick jobs for quick money.
Throughout the winter of 1996 and summer of 1997, Evans went on a burglarizing binge, and when he could, Tim Rysedorph joined him. Scores of jewelry stores, homes and antique shops were hit. Gold. Diamond necklaces. Rare antiques. Baseball cards.
Anything of value.
But it was a pair of gold cuff links worth about $1,500 that would ultimately do Evans in. When he went to sell the cuff links to a local dealer, he signed his own name on the ticket—a mistake he had never made during the past twenty-five years of committing burglaries. Throughout that same period, some later reported, Tim was trying to sell rare coins and jewelry to anyone who could come up with the money. He’d even lugged around a big brass eagle he and Evans had stolen and tried selling it, too.
As they continued to burglarize throughout the fall, Evans grew increasingly more paranoid of Tim and what he would do if they ever got caught. Evans was looking at a life sentence if he ever got pinched again. To him, life in prison meant death.
“I had planned to kill [Tim] for a while,” Evans told Horton later, “because the heat was getting closer and he would have rolled on me in a second. He had also ripped me off when we lived in Troy.”
Justification—it was all Evans had left. For every person he murdered, he defended his right to do it without remorse. Here it was twelve years after the fact and he hadn’t forgotten how Tim Rysedorph had ripped him off and blamed Michael Falco for it. He said he knew the gold cuff links were going to come back to haunt him once the Bureau put Rysedorph in a chair and shone a light in his face. So, from his view of things, there was only one way to avoid such a disaster.
Kill him.
On October 3, 1997, Evans and Rysedorph hooked up at about 12:35 P.M. in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx in Latham, which was directly in front of the apartment complex Lisa Morris had moved into with her daughter, Christina, sometime after Damien Cuomo disappeared.
The plan was, Evans told Tim, to drive over to the Spare Room II storage facility, where Evans and Rysedorph had both rented units, and go through the merchandise they had recently stolen.
“We need to part ways, Timmy,” Evans said when he sat down in Tim’s car in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx. “It’s getting too hot right now.”
The idea was to split up the merchandise and not see each other for a while.
“Where are you going?” Tim asked.
“Canada? The West Coast? Not sure,” Evans said. “Forget that shit. Follow me to the Spare Room. Okay?”
The Spare Room II was about a two-minute drive from T.J. Maxx. By 12:50 P.M., Evans and Tim were at Spare Room II sifting through what little merchandise they had left.
After they finished, both men drove to Lisa Morris’s apartment and had an argument outside in the parking lot as Lisa watched from her balcony.
Lisa later said the argument was over checks Tim had cashed. Evans was upset about it. It was sloppy. They were going to get caught.
“Tim will ‘roll over’ on me,” Evans later told Lisa, “because he has never been arrested before and he has a wife and kid.”
Throughout the day, Tim and Evans showed up at various times and took several items from Lisa’s apartment. Lisa later said she saw them at about 5:00 P.M. in the parking lot of T.J. Maxx. Evans parked his truck, got into Tim’s car and they took off. But a half hour later, they returned to her apartment: Evans driving his truck, Tim his car. By 6:30, they left again in Tim’s car after another argument. At 9:00 P.M., Evans called Lisa. “I’m with my partner…. Can you pick me up in Troy if I need you to?”
“Sure,” Lisa said.
It was the last time Lisa could verify Tim Rysedorph’s whereabouts.
As the night of October 3 wore on, Caroline Parker kept calling Tim, asking him when he was coming home. Evans later said it “pissed Tim off” that she wouldn’t leave him alone. At 1:03 A.M., on October 4, Tim finally called Caroline and told her he’d be home in forty minutes. He was at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Latham, not too far away from the Spare Room II.
“I have to be home soon, Gar,” Tim said while getting back into his car. “I’ve been gone all day.”
“One more trip to the storage shed,” Evans said. “Help me load up the rest of the shit.”
Tim didn’t know it, but Evans had his .22-caliber handgun tucked inside the front of his pants.
Back at the storage shed, as Tim was leaning down inside the shed to pick up a box of stolen merchandise, Evans quietly walked up from behind and shot him three times in the back of the head. It was over quickly: pop, pop, pop.
With Tim Rysedorph lying dead on the concrete floor of the storage shed, Evans walked over to a box he had placed in the shed a few days earlier. After grabbing a rubber bib, much like what a fish monger might wear, and putting it on, he took out a chain saw and started it. While grabbing one of Tim’s legs, Evans later admitted, he began talking to himself: You motherfucker…you should have never ripped me off.
Later, while telling the story to Horton, Evans said he “almost got sick at one point” as he proceeded to cut off Tim’s legs and arms. He had picked out a burial site in Brunswick days earlier, but it was a steep hill and the only way he could get Tim’s body up the hill in one trip was to cut it up and bag it.