On May 27, 1998, Gary Evans walked into the police station in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and said he had committed several murders. He was forty-three, a lifelong thief from Troy, New York, who specialized in antiques and was wanted in New York for violating his parole. He told investigators he had come in because of guilt, and in particular because of Tim Rysedorph's nine-year-old son, who had grown angry and withdrawn since his father disappeared. On June 24 he described each killing in detail and told police where to dig. In July they found the bodies of two of his former partners exactly where he said.
He was born in Troy on October 7, 1954, to Roy and Flora Mae Evans, and grew up with his sister in a violent house; his father beat the children and their mother, his mother tried more than once to kill herself, and Evans later said his father raped him when he was eight. He was stealing by the same age, drawn from the start to art and expensive things. After his parents divorced in 1968 he moved with his mother to Cohoes, did three months in juvenile detention at sixteen for breaking and entering, dropped out of school and drifted. In the mid-1970s he shared an apartment in Troy with two childhood friends, Michael Falco and Tim Rysedorph, and the three of them went into business stealing.
Prison was part of the business. A 1977 conviction in Lake Placid sent him to Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora, and later to Great Meadow and Attica. In 1980 he broke out of the old Rensselaer County Jail with the help of some Hells Angels and was caught five hours later. For years he was also a source for investigators, and James Horton, a New York State Police investigator who had known him since he first looked into Evans's burglaries in the 1970s, developed a long and unusual relationship with him.
The first killing came in late July 1985, weeks after he had been released on probation promising to go straight. Rysedorph had told him that Falco was secretly selling their loot for himself; in fact, it was Rysedorph who had been doing it. Evans built a silencer for his pistol, shot Falco in their Troy apartment and cut up the body with a chainsaw. Rysedorph helped him drive it in a sleeping bag to his sister's house near Lake Worth, Florida, where they buried it in the backyard. Evans then served another sentence, at Sing Sing, where he befriended David Berkowitz over weightlifting.
Released in March 1988, he teamed up with a twenty-seven-year-old thief, Damien Cuomo. On September 8, 1989, robbing a store in Watertown, Evans shot dead the sixty-three-year-old secondhand dealer Douglas Berry, and the two men left with about $15,000 in goods and no trace behind them. On December 29 of that year, afraid that Cuomo, who had started to suffer from depression, would talk, he killed him too. On October 17, 1991, he killed Gregory Jouben, a thirty-six-year-old secondhand dealer, and sold what he took for about $60,000, then buried the gun in Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, where he also took apart and sold a marble tombstone. In 1994, in Vermont, he was caught trying to sell a copy of Audubon's Birds of America stolen from the Norman Williams Library in Woodstock; because he returned it intact, he got two years.
Paroled in June 1996, he went back into partnership with Rysedorph, the one man alive who knew about Falco. On October 3, 1997, he shot Rysedorph, cut up his body and buried it in woods, and fled New York.
On August 12, 1998, he was arraigned in Rensselaer County and charged with three of the murders. Two days later, being driven to Troy in manacles and chains, he used a key he had hidden in his nose to free himself as the van crossed the Menands Bridge, smashed a window and jumped out. Police cornered him, and he ran to the rail and leaped into the Hudson, striking the shallows below. The head injuries killed him, and his death was ruled a suicide. Horton and others who knew him said afterward that he had planned it; he had sent them letters expressing remorse and saying he could not bear the isolation of prison. Friends described a vegetarian who never drank or smoked and liked to talk philosophy.