On August 9, a Sunday, Evans wrote to Jo Rehm: My mind is screaming.
So many negative thoughts. So many strange ideas.
Not much time left.
Jo was a different person from the naive teenager Evans had known back on First Street in Troy when they were kids. After marrying at twenty, she had been through a divorce. She had worked hard all her life. She lived in Troy once again, but on the opposite side of town: a little house up on a hill, nearly overlooking the Troy-Menands Bridge that spanned the magnificent Hudson River leading into town. She had a dog, a garden, and a caring new husband, Ed, who adored her.
Evans was, perhaps, still that little boy she’d tried so desperately to shelter from abusive parents.
Over the next few days, Jo received several letters. In each one, Evans tried to convince her to stop blaming herself for the way things had turned out. Jo was still whipping herself with guilt.
Pick a date, he wrote, and [you and Doris Sheehan get together and] get rid of things about me: pix, etc, clothes…. Start fresh.
Oooo man my head is going back and forth so fast….Listen, you shit, that guilt nonsense you’re hammering yourself with has got to stop here and now.
A few days prior to receiving the letters, Jo had gone to see him. Robbie was there. It turned into a shouting match, Jo explained, between Evans and Robbie. If there wasn’t a glass partition in between them, Jo believed Evans would have strangled his half sister.
“You couldn’t believe how he was when I would go down there to see him,” Jo recalled. “I would come home crying. Because he was in such…mental…He was just so emotional. Crying and crying. Screaming. He wanted to kill Robbie that day. And would have if he wasn’t restrained.”
Robbie was supposed to bring Devan, Evans’s nephew. But she didn’t. Evans went “nuts,” yelling and screaming, carrying on about the way she had brought Devan up. He was upset, Jo recalled, because Robbie had given Devan to their mother, Flora Mae, at one time. Evans was scared Flora Mae had sexually abused Devan, Jo heard him yell, because, he said, she had done it to him. Robbie had also, Evans lashed out, went to a local bar the previous night, got drunk and talked about him. A few guards from the jail happened to be present and told Evans about it the next morning.
But there were also lighter moments, Jo explained. When she was with him alone one day, he held up his shackles, smiled and said, “Hey, you want to see me get out of these?”
“What?”
“Close your eyes,” Evans said, looking around to see if any of the guards were watching.
A moment later, as if he were Houdini, Evans was out of his shackles, waving his hands in the air. “See…”
In what seemed like only seconds later, without Jo even noticing, he was back in the cuffs.
The way Evans saw it during that second week of August, he wrote that Jo had it all backwards…. [Robbie,] the pig bitch, should have come crying to me, begging forgiveness for being rotten all her life to me….
He ended the letter with a poem, telling Jo not to come see him anymore.
It was all over. There was no reason to come back.
Later that night, however, he changed his mind and got word to Jo to come in on Monday, August 10, and Tuesday, August 11. There were some “last-minute” issues he needed resolved.
On Monday, when Jo showed up, he informed her that she would have power of attorney in all his affairs.
“Why, Gary? What’s going on?”
All the paperwork was done, Evans explained, and in the mail. He said he’d had everything notarized. “I am going to do something on Friday…,” he added in a stoic tone, as serious as he had ever been, Jo recalled.
“What, Gary?” she asked.
For the next few minutes, Evans laid out his entire plan, explaining every detail: when, where, how.
“I want you to stay home on Friday, Jo,” he added near the end of the conversation. “Don’t leave your house.”
By Wednesday, August 12, Evans was formally charged with eight counts of murder. The DA’s office promised it would decide within 120 days if he would be tried as a capital offender and face the possibility of death by lethal injection.
On Thursday, August 13, in Little Falls, New York, Evans was charged with Gregory Jouben’s murder. Inside of one week, the DA’s office promised that he would be charged with the murder of Douglas Berry in Watertown.
In a photograph taken by the Troy Record, Evans was shown walking down the Little Falls Courthouse stairs, smirking. While in court, facing the judge, he “smiled” and, some later said, acted like it was just another routine day in the life of Gary Evans. He had taken on an air of serenity, it seemed.
Security had been more visible during both court appearances. With the Little Falls City Hall completely evacuated, the street near the courthouse had been cordoned off. There was a shotgun-toting trooper walking out in front of the building and several troopers with police dogs roaming around the area. In both instances, Evans wore leg chains and wrist shackles, both of which were connected to a waist chain. Apparently, the local authorities weren’t taking any chances; Horton’s constant beating of his “he will crawl through a straw” drum had worked.
The authorities were, obviously, listening.
Horton decided to visit Evans at Rensselaer County Jail after his court date on August 13. He sensed time was short, but insisted later that Evans had “never told [him] what he was going to do beyond ‘an escape attempt,’” which Horton had reported to all of the appropriate authorities. Because of all the press coverage and the constant bombardment of requests for interviews, and Evans calling his home several times a day, Horton had sent Mary Pat and the kids to Connecticut to get away from it all. Friends and coworkers were badgering Mary Pat for the “inside story,” and she found herself having to retell various news accounts of Jim’s involvement.
When Horton arrived at the jail, he was given a private room to meet with Evans. The door to the room had a window, and Horton made sure he and Evans were always in full view of the guards. “Not for my protection,” Horton recalled, “but so there would be no question as to any collusion between us.”
There they were once again in a jail, whispering to each other, just like that first meeting in Cohoes.
“There were a couple of uniform guards right outside the door trying to hear what we were saying so they could go run to the newspapers, I suspect. They were also curious to see this infamous guy and me—the only person, besides Jo Rehm and Lisa Morris, he would really talk to.”
Evans was depressed. He began to cry. He said he was scared. With that, Horton saw a vulnerability. Maybe he wants to talk?
“Tell me about those other murders you mentioned,” Horton threw out, hoping to get Evans to admit to what he believed were four more murders.
The recent Times Union article, at least in Evans’s mind, had branded him a “monster.” Because of that, he said, “No more. I’m finished giving up bodies.”
“He was saying things about our friendship and how much he admired me,” Horton said later. “He would laugh and cry in the same breath. It was like he had been sentenced to death already and was saying his good-byes to me.”
Evans talked about the first time he and Horton had met, mentioning again his belief that it had been fate that had brought them together.
“I tried being a good listener. Believe it or not, it was sad to me. When I left, we hugged. I told the guards we were done. When Gary walked away, he kept looking back at me, saying things. ‘Take care of [Doris]. Be careful. Thanks for trying.’”
“Gary,” Horton said at one point, “whatever it is you are going to do, please, please, do not hurt anyone.”
“Well, Guy, this is it. But don’t worry. I won’t hurt anyone.”
Horton believed Evans was going to hang himself or slit his wrists. He had warned everyone that he was suicidal and an “extreme” escape risk. Beyond that, he didn’t know what else to do.
Finally, before the steel doors closed behind him, Evans looked back at Horton one last time and mouthed, I love you.
Outside the jail, Horton sat in his car and began “feeling very strange, not knowing exactly how he should feel.” While Evans, he learned later, was in his cell whimpering.
“I knew at that moment our relationship had ended and I was relieved by that,” Horton said later. “I also knew that there would never be a trial for Gary…. He was going to see to it that it never came to that. That being said, I also had empathy for him. Even though he was a cold-blooded multiple murderer, we spent a significant amount of time together. By that I mean, most of our time was high intensity and high pressure. Our conversations and time together was never a chitchat, walk-in-the-park type of thing. We were feeling each other out constantly. Spending time with someone, no matter what they are, can cause you to do strange things. In this case, Gary and I were brought together not as a normal friendship would begin, but because we were ‘natural enemies.’ I was, basically, even from 1985, there to take away all of his freedoms. But here we were…friends.”
Later that same night, Evans sat in his cell and wrote two letters: one to Horton and another addressed to nobody in particular—although it would be perfectly clear within the next twenty-four hours for whom that second letter was meant.
Horton left the jail and drove to Doris Sheehan’s trailer in upstate New York. Evans had asked him to give Doris some letters he had written to her over the past few weeks.
While Horton was at Doris’s, talking to her over a beer, the phone rang.
“Gary was crying and somewhat incoherent,” Horton remembered. “He basically repeated everything he had said to me earlier at the jail. I knew I would never see or hear from him again. When he told me about what he was going to do during the plane ride to Florida if we had taken him along, he said he would have a smile on his face the whole way down…screaming at the world with his middle fingers both up, indicating what he thought of everyone: ‘Fuck you.’”