Dealing with Gary Evans over the past week had been exhausting for Jim Horton, physically and mentally. Evans had given up four bodies. He was manic: up one minute, down the next. He demanded Horton visit him in jail every day. In addition, Lisa Morris was now calling and asking questions that Horton didn’t have answers to.
And then there was the media.
“The press was on me like crazy,” Horton said later. “About five or six reporters suddenly wanted to be my best friends. Both television and print. Every day they wanted to talk directly to me to see what Gary had said.”
Horton couldn’t even go to the jails Evans was being shuffled in between, he said, without reporters knowing about it. He believed each jail had a guard feeding the media information about his movements.
“I needed a break from Gary Evans.”
Ever since Horton had worked himself into a bout with spinal meningitis back in the late ’80s, he had reassessed his life. He couldn’t work seventeen-, eighteen-, twenty-four-hour days without paying a price. He was forty-three years old now—same as Evans. The spinal meningitis had knocked him down for months. Doctors said a lot of it was due to the rigorous work schedule he kept.
This time, he wasn’t going to let the job—more specifically, Evans—ruin his health. He needed to stay focused and be ready when Evans was willing to talk about other murders. In all likelihood, Tim Rysedorph, Damien Cuomo, Gregory Jouben and Douglas Berry were only the beginning. There was no telling how many more bodies would turn up.
By June 24, a Wednesday, Horton had set two goals: One, he wanted Evans to give up Michael Falco; and two, he needed a long weekend away with his wife and children to regroup.
After a long discussion with Evans later that day, Evans admitted to Horton that he had killed Michael Falco and buried his body in Florida.
“Where?” Horton wanted to know.
“Near my sister’s house,” Evans said, “in Lake Worth.”
Horton immediately contacted the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) and informed them that the Bureau needed aerial photographs of an area in Lake Worth near a golf course. Evans told Horton he could pick out the spot where Falco was buried but, “I would rather you take me there so I can show you myself. I’m not positive I can find it on a map.”
An hour or so later, Horton went back and told Evans he had spoken to his boss about flying him down to Florida. “Having you travel in any fashion,” Horton said, “is out of the question. They just won’t okay it. Sorry, Gar. But I can’t do anything this time.”
Evans was an escape risk. He had been telling the people who were visiting him that he was going to escape. He was asking for razor blades. Nobody knew it, but he had swallowed a handcuff key when he was taken into custody in Vermont and had been recycling it while in jail. Throughout his years of incarceration, Evans had sometimes slept with his index finger lodged in his right nostril for the purpose of forging a tunnel in his sinus where he could hide a handcuff key.
“I didn’t even broach the subject with my boss of Gary flying to Florida,” Horton recalled later. “But I lied to Gary and told him he had said no. Not that I didn’t trust Gary to a point, but something told me not to move him.”
A short while later, when Horton stopped in to see Evans, he found out how accurate his instincts were. Evans said, “I would have jumped out of the plane on the way back from Florida.”
“We would have been in a jet. I would have been sucked out as well.”
Evans shrugged his shoulders.
Horton assigned Sully to go to Florida with the Bureau’s ID Unit to oversee the search and excavation of Michael Falco’s body. But before Sully could leave, Horton wanted to introduce him to Evans so Evans could show Sully, using aerial photographs, where Falco was buried. Horton had made plans to leave for the weekend. He wasn’t breaking them.
“Gary didn’t want me to leave, nor did I want to go,” Horton recalled. “But I had to delegate some things. Gary felt comfortable with Sully, who has a calming, trusting nature.”
So, as Sully and the boys made preparations for a trip to Florida, Horton and his family drove east to spend the weekend at a family-owned cottage in Connecticut. “I had worked many days in a row,” Horton said. “Gary just gave up Falco. The guys were headed south. Even if Gary had another body to give me during the time I was away, there was really nobody available (that I wanted) to help me. He was becoming more depressed and just wanted to talk, but he also seemed to change and become clingier toward me. He wanted me to come to the jail just to be there. I was interested in more bodies, while he was turning to me as someone he could talk to, a father figure, a friend, means of support.”
As it turned out, while Horton was in Connecticut climbing the walls—calling work four, five times a day with the feeling that something was going to happen in his absence—Evans ended up phoning him several times.
“There wasn’t a vacation I ever took where I wasn’t like this. I would call work every day, which is probably not too healthy. But being away from Gary, especially, gave me a lot of anxiety. I knew he was planning something—I just didn’t know what.”
Indeed, there were only three people who later admitted that they knew what Evans was planning, but they either didn’t take him seriously enough to go to the authorities with the information, didn’t think he could pull it off or abetted him the entire way.