Evans was born on October 7, 1954 and worked as a burglar specialising in antiques, operating across upstate New York for two decades. He was physically formidable, obsessive about fitness, and for years an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and for a state police investigator, James Horton, with whom he had a long and much-written-about relationship.
Between 1985 and 1997 he killed five people: three men who had worked with him on burglaries, Michael Kelly, Damien Cuomo and Timothy Rysedorph, and two robbery victims. He shot them and concealed the bodies, and he continued to inform on other criminals throughout.
He was arrested on June 18, 1998 when Rysedorph's disappearance was traced to him. He confessed at length and gave the locations of the bodies.
On August 14, 1998, while being transported in a police van across the Troy-Menands bridge to a court appearance, he freed himself from his restraints, kicked out a window and jumped into the Hudson River. He died on impact. He was fifty-three days from trial.
The case is unusual for the informant relationship, which was the subject of a book by Horton and a journalist, and which raises a question the entry states plainly: for years he was useful to investigators while killing his own associates.