After changing clothes and washing the blood off his hands the best he could, Evans drove to the local supermarket and bought a box of plastic black garbage bags and a gallon of bleach. It was light out now. People were beginning to get up, have their morning coffee and head off to work.
Evans, though, had a body—in five pieces—to bury, a weapon to get rid of and a bloody storage shed to clean up.
As he sadistically chopped Tim’s body into pieces, blood and bone fragments had sprayed all over the place. Once the cops figured out that Tim had gone missing, Evans believed they would inevitably track down the storage unit Tim had rented and find his name and unit shortly afterward. The unit had to be spotless.
It took about thirty minutes. Evans bagged and taped each part of Tim’s body in a separate garbage bag and put the bags into a cardboard box, along with the clothes he had worn while dismembering him. Then he began cleaning the walls and floor of the unit with bleach and paper towels.
As he scrubbed and wiped up the blood, the bleach fumes began to overcome him and, he said later, he nearly passed out. So he walked over to the garage door and opened it about six inches to allow fresh air into the room.
With bloody paper towels and smudged blood all over the floor, as he continued to clean, Evans then heard footsteps.
What the fuck?
Crawling over to the opening of the door, he watched as the manager of Spare Room II, who had been working in his office, began walking toward his unit.
Shit.
Evans then stood up. Ran over to where he had kept one of his shotguns, grabbed hold of it, and hurried back to the garage door.
Standing, pointing the gun directly toward the door at eye level, the end of the barrel touching the inside of the door, he waited.
“As soon as he lifted that door,” Evans told Horton later, “I was going to blow his fucking head off.”
Oddly enough, however, something beckoned the manager back to his office. As he placed his hands on the bottom of the door to begin lifting it up, he stopped, turned and walked back to the office for some reason.
“That is the luckiest motherfucker in the world,” Evans later told Horton. “He has no idea how close he came to being buried next to Tim Rysedorph.”
When Evans finished loading Tim’s body parts into the cardboard box, he walked up to T.J. Maxx, got in his truck, drove back down to Spare Room II and loaded the box of body parts, the clothes he had worn while he dismembered Tim and the chain saw into the back of his truck. Before leaving, he drove over to the chain-link fence that corralled the grounds of Spare Room II and threw the .22-caliber handgun he had used to kill Tim Rysedorph over the fence and into a small gulch that ran along the interstate.
“Gary drew me a map,” Horton said later, “and, unbelievable to us, months later we found the weapon.”
After burying Tim’s body parts in several shallow graves just over the Troy city line in Brunswick, Evans drove down to a concrete plant on First Street in Troy located on the banks of the Hudson River (merely blocks from where he grew up). He tossed the chain saw and his clothes into the water. Watching the muddy water of the Hudson swallow the bag and chain saw, he decided to take off out west.
Covered with mud from head to toe, he then drove over to Lisa Morris’s apartment in Latham, cleaned himself up and had a glass of milk and a box of Freihofer’s chocolate-chip cookies. He then went to sleep.
When he awoke hours later, he packed a bag and took off.
When Horton finally convinced Evans to confess to Tim Rysedorph’s murder late in the day on June 19, 1998, after the Bureau had captured Evans in Vermont based on a tip Lisa Morris provided, Evans started crying. “It’s going to be hard,” he said through tears.
Because Horton had been involved in a number of dismemberment cases for a few years leading up to Evans’s capture and confession, he said later he “sort of knew what [Evans] meant” when he said “hard.” He had a hunch he was talking about the actual killing itself, not his emotional state at the time.
Banking on his instinct, Horton then asked Evans, “What do you mean, ‘It’s going to be hard’…did you cut him up?”
After Evans “regained his composure and stopped crying,” he looked up at Horton and smirked, as if to suggest he was proud of what he had done. In his mind, he had graduated: from common murderer—if there ever was such a thing—to a sadistic sociopath who had put another feather in his cap of evil.
Horton, a bit taken aback, then asked, “Did you cut him up or not?”
“Yes,” Evans answered plainly, without emotion.
“Did you cut his head off, too?” Horton asked next, realizing at that moment that the man he had been playing cat and mouse with for nearly thirteen years was a vicious serial killer he had not really known at all.
Evans then stared at Horton with a “surprised” look on his face and, with an expression of seriousness only a multiple murderer could conjure, said, “What…Do you think I am sick—that I would cut someone’s head off? Jesus Christ, Guy!”
Horton didn’t answer. It was time to find Tim Rysedorph’s body and return it to his family. Evans’s days of thinking he could control the situation were over.