Mortal Danger (18 page)

She also had severe injuries to one elbow where she had fought her killer. Chances were that he—or she—would show bruises or cuts.

The video camera recorded sights and sounds; the photographer’s words were terse and organized. Benson had to maintain a certain emotional distance as he looked down at a very young woman who had perished in an “overkill” by someone she was fleeing from. The only thing he could do for her now was to find her killer and put him (or her) behind bars.

The dead man was young, too. Freitas had said that Brian was thirty and Beverly was twenty-eight. This victim appeared to have two gunshot wounds in the back of
his head and one in the right temple area—all fatal wounds. When the Pierce County medical examiner, Dr. Eric Kiesel, had finished his initial examination, his deputy ME, Bert Osborne, and Adam Anderson lifted the man to a litter. A gray cloth towel was revealed beneath where the victim’s chest had been. It had blood on it—but it also had four bullet holes and gunshot residue on one corner. It might very well have been used as a silencer.

At this point early in the murder probe, the investigators had to consider the possibility that this could have been a murder-suicide after a quarrel—but then they realized that it was impossible that
both
victims had been shot in the back. Nobody’s hands could bend and twist into a position that would allow that.

Almost all homicide detectives begin their investigation without knowing anything about the victims. When a superior detective winds up his case, he will know the dead better, perhaps, than he has known anyone in life. Ben Benson was fairly sure he knew the names of the people who had perished in this cozy home. An official identification lay ahead, but Jeff Freitas said they were Beverly and Brian Mauck, his neighbors and good friends.

The two vehicles parked outside belonged to them: a white Dodge 2500 Sprinter van that had
EMERALD AIRE
,
INC
. painted on both sides, and
HEATING AND AIR CONDITIONING REFRIGERATION CONTROLS
and a phone number beneath that. According to Freitas, Brian Mauck worked for that company as a technician. Beverly worked for Baydo’s Chevrolet, and her vehicle, a gray Chevrolet Suburban, was parked next to Brian’s van. Both vehicles were locked and didn’t appear to have been tampered with.

Ben Benson knew now that the Maucks were familiar residents of the area, and that they had numerous ties to friends and family. He glanced around the home that they had shared in the first year of their marriage. Their house was neat, if a little cluttered. There were several movies around the television set, a few popular titles, some X-rated and untitled, three stuffed animals, some Seattle Seahawks memorabilia, plants, a cat scratching post—now tipped over—and two cats hiding from all the strangers, and between the brown recliners, a cheese knife and tray, coasters, and three TV remote controls.

Bev and Brian Mauck weren’t teetotalers. The detectives had found champagne, raspberry coolers, and two six-packs of beer chilling on the rear porch. (They learned later that these were thank-you gifts for work Brian had done free for friends.) On an island in their kitchen, there was a nearly empty half gallon of vodka and a bottle of sour apple schnapps, the ingredients for an appletini. Two empty martini glasses rested on the island. There was a supply of liqueurs in a cabinet. Nevertheless, they didn’t appear to be heavy imbibers.

They were obviously athletes. In the garage, Benson and his team of investigators found motorcycle helmets and boots, an exercycle, golf clubs, skis, hiking and camping equipment, twin Harley-Davidson motorcycles, a treadmill, two Ski-Doos with a trailer, and all manner of scuba-diving equipment from dive suits and swim fins to air tanks.

Benson surmised that Brian and Beverly Mauck had been attacked unawares before they had much time to defend themselves, although it looked as though Bev had
gotten in some good licks before her killer shot her between the eyes. The couple had to have been in top physical condition. They had also clearly been enjoying their lives to the fullest. Probably they had been intimate the night before; their undergarments were tossed aside in their bedroom. He wondered if someone had been watching them through a window, someone overwhelmed with lust, enough to break in.

If Beverly Mauck had been sexually attacked by the killer, the postmortem examination and acid phosphotase and DNA tests could determine that.

As Benson and Tom Catey moved from room to room, they observed hundreds of articles. They would all be listed on the voice recorder of the video camera. All told, the detectives found six weapons: a .22 Beretta handgun (unloaded but with a fully loaded magazine next to it), a Buck knife, an aluminum baseball bat next to the bed in the master bedroom, a Glock .40-caliber handgun, and two rifles. Why hadn’t Brian Mauck reached for one of them—even the baseball bat—as he went to the door?

There were drops, smears, one fingerprint in blood, and small pools of blood all over the house. Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien took samples of all of it. They could see that someone had wiped down the light-switch plates with a bloody cloth, making an effort to erase any fingerprints left there.

There promised to be a lot of physical evidence; the challenge was to connect the most telling evidence to a suspect. In the end, the Pierce County investigators would have 190 separate items of physical evidence, from bedding and blood samples to .22-caliber spent rounds (slugs)
and towels with gunshot residue burns to hairs and fibers and DVDs and underwear and apparently untouched ammunition.

Better to preserve too much than not enough.

When the forensic investigators lifted the bloodstained blankets and sheets from the entry hall so they could be dried and then tested in the police lab, Ben Benson saw more broom or drag marks beneath them. He caught his breath as he saw tread patterns from shoes in the midst of the streaks. They had come from both a large shoe—surely belonging to a male—and a much smaller shoe. The large print was well defined, with a sharp zigzag pattern; even the worn marks on the sole left a distinct imprint.

Who had left them there? The best physical evidence is a fingerprint left in blood; the bottom of a shoe in blood is almost as good. Beyond the pattern itself, there are signs of wear, cuts, and damage done by rocks and pebbles.

Any halfway intelligent killer would know that and throw away the shoes he’d worn as he committed his crime(s).

Ben Benson was hoping for a dumb murderer, or at least an overconfident one. But he knew that Brian Mauck himself could have left those marks if he’d been wearing shoes when he opened his front door to murder. And if he had lived long enough to walk a few feet through his own life’s fluid.

But Brian was barefoot. It had to be his killer who left the prints.

It was close to two in the morning when Benson, the CID investigators, and the forensic criminalists cleared the murder scene. They carried with them innumerable con
tainers and plastic baggies filled with what might be vital evidence, all sealed, dated, and initialed. They’d spent almost twelve hours processing it, and they had learned a great deal—but not enough.

The death house was locked and
CRIME SCENE—DO NOT ENTER
tape was posted.

Deputies would stand by to watch it overnight.

Ben Benson and
the criminalists were back the next morning—Sunday. This time, in the daylight, they could see vomit in the gravel portion of the driveway.

That, too, would be tested for DNA.

Twenty-four hours after Jeff Freitas’s desperate call to 911, they had so far: photos of two shoe prints in blood and what appeared to be a fingerprint on a doorjamb, a fingerprint on the outside of a sliding glass door, some prints Hanson-O’Brien had lifted from a faucet in a bathroom sink, a broken front door, a mound of vomit, a towel that had been used as a silencer, and an initial sense of the makeup of the neighborhood where the Maucks had lived.

There would be all manner of forensic science tests ahead, autopsies, a canvass of the area for possible witnesses, and a search to determine if anyone had a grudge against the young couple.

The neighborhood along 70th Avenue East was home to all kinds of people, some well-to-do, some enjoying a comfortable living, and some barely making it. Beverly and Brian Mauck had had two salaries and no children yet;
they had intended to take just one more scuba-diving trip to Turks and Caicos before they concentrated on becoming parents. They weren’t rich, but they had enough disposable income to buy all the “toys” that detectives had noted as they walked around their home. Anyone could have seen that this had been a happy couple who shared almost everything. There were
two
of all their sports equipment. Two cozy brown chairs in the great room. Benson and his crew would have to talk to many more people to verify their impression of this marriage, but it seemed to have been a good one, over far too soon.

On the day after the double murder, Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien took digital images of more possible evidence: hairs and fibers, and other items that hadn’t been visible in the darkness of the night before. She covered the door frame that had a bloody print on it with plastic while Lieutenant Brent Bomkamp sawed away that portion of the jamb. It might be an extremely valuable exhibit in a trial.

She collected the Buck knife, a digital camera that held photographs of Brian Mauck in the process of being tattooed, a bloodied paper towel, and a roll of paper towels.

Beverly had been very popular in high school at Mt. Rainier High in Des Moines, Washington. Some of her adventures were legendary among her peers. Bev was most memorable for falling out of the back of a truck in full clown makeup and costume. She loved to laugh and her sense of humor was infectious. She and Brian enjoyed popular comedians’ CDs and Bev insisted that her friends
and siblings listen to them when they were riding in her car. “Listen,
listen!
” she’d command her friend Jenny—who was as close as a sister—hitting her on the arm.

“I knew she’d heard it so many times before,” Jenny recalled, “and she was funnier than any of the comedians she made us listen to.”

Brian was mischievous and his voice could drown out anyone else in the room. His friends called him a “wild stallion,” and he would try just about anything. He’d been fearless almost since he was born. When he was three, he slipped out of his house and headed for the 7-Eleven to buy candy. He got there, but it was almost a miracle because he had to cross two four-lane highways to reach the convenience store. Beverly was just as fearless, a tomboy who refused to wear dresses when she was a child and played on the boys’ teams in high school. She’d grown up with two brothers, and she’d learned how to keep up with them.

If they had to die young, those who knew them would have expected it to be in a diving accident or a motorcycle crash.

Beverly Slater and Brian Mauck had known each other for years, and had dated steadily for four years before their wedding on May 5, 2006. And what a wedding it was. Held on Cinco de Mayo—the riotous Mexican holiday—it was fitting that they had chosen an island off Mexico for the ceremony. Their guests flew down to join them as they were married on a white sand beach. One of their neighbors said they had honeymooned on Turks and Caicos, their favorite spot for scuba diving.

Bev and Brian lived their lives full out; they worked hard and played harder. The young couple went bowling
with old friends, and dancing, and usually went out on Friday nights, often to Ma’s and Pa’s Roundup, a restaurant/ lounge/tavern near their home. When the University of Washington Huskies football team had a home game, they were there. Between the Huskies and the Seahawks, they had a lot of tailgate barbecues. Brian had season tickets to the Seattle Seahawks’ games. All things being equal, he should have been sitting in his brown recliner watching the Huskies on the date of his incomprehensible death.

Brian was as strong as a young bull. On Friday he had carried a tall Christmas tree into the company where he worked so the staff could decorate it.

To someone looking on who didn’t live the kind of life the Maucks did, jealousy was a possibility. It would have been easy for someone like that to dismiss how hard they worked and view them as privileged by fate and luck.

Word of the double murder quickly spread around Graham, and to friends in Tacoma. Everyone seemed to have a theory on the motivation for their deaths and some called the sheriff’s office.

One of Beverly’s coworkers at Baydo’s Chevrolet contacted deputies to tell them that Beverly had been frightened by the nephew of a neighbor. He was in his early twenties, a huge man standing six foot three and weighing close to 300 pounds. Bev believed he was the one responsible for the theft a month ago when a number of things were stolen from her house, including her cell phone, some documents, and a .357 Magnum. “But she didn’t want to report the gun theft because she and Brian hadn’t gotten around to registering it. Later, she found the papers ripped up in her yard.”

Even though the man no longer lived in the neighborhood, Beverly had become afraid lately to be alone in her house, and that wasn’t like her. Her friends assumed that it was the man she believed was a burglar who still frightened her.

A male coworker at Baydo agreed. “Seven of us went out to eat at Mazatlan in Spanaway last Friday night—November ninth,” he said, “and Bev didn’t want to go home when we left at 10:00 p.m. Brian was gone all weekend to the NASCAR races, and the nearest house with anyone living in it was three hundred feet away; she just wasn’t comfortable staying in her own house at night without him. She wanted us to drive her to her brother’s house in Lynnwood, but that was over sixty miles away, and we’d been drinking during the evening. It just wasn’t possible. We drove to her house instead, but she made us wait until a friend came to get her and take her to
her
house. Bev called me the next day to thank me for dinner. She said she was ‘terrified’ to be home by herself.”

The car salesman didn’t know exactly what—or who—was scaring her, and she hadn’t said.

Those who loved them could not believe that Beverly and Brian were gone. They had been brimming over with life on Friday night when they met Brian’s parents for dinner to celebrate his mother’s birthday.

At a quarter to four on Saturday afternoon, after Ben Benson’s crew of forensic investigators and detectives set to work on the crime scene inside the Maucks’ home, Benson, Tom Catey, Bill Ruder, and Jason Tate talked to a few close neighbors of the two victims.

Among the have-nots in the Maucks’ neighborhood were
Jeff Freitas’s sister, Jennifer, thirty-seven, and her new husband, Daniel Tavares, forty-one. While Jeff and his wife lived in a large, modern mobile home, and Jeff and Jennifer’s parents lived in a smaller—but very nice—mobile on Jeff’s land, the Tavareses resided on Jeff’s acreage in a very small travel trailer with no bathroom, a lean-to attached to it, and a Porta Potti or, as they called it, a “honey bucket.”

Jennifer was a pretty but very overweight woman with long blond hair who resembled the late Anna Nicole Smith. She was rumored to have met Daniel through some kind of pen-pal connection, either on the computer or through ads in a tabloid. They had moved into the tiny trailer in July, four months earlier.

Tavares was apparently working with his brother-in-law as a logger. A powerfully built man at six feet and 225 pounds, he looked a good deal older than his age. It appeared that he and Jennifer might be the only ones who had any eyewitness observation of activity around the Maucks’ home during the early morning hours of November 17.

Jennifer Tavares volunteered that she and Daniel knew Bev and Brian Mauck well. “They party a lot,” she said, “and they usually play cards with my brother Jeff on Friday nights.”

Jason Tate asked Jennifer about the man in his twenties whom Beverly was rumored to be afraid of. She nodded. “That’s Billy Jack.* We’re all related to him.”

“Has he been around lately?” Tate asked.

“No,” she said. “Several weeks ago he stopped by Bev and Brian’s house to watch my husband give Brian a tattoo—Daniel’s very talented—but Billy Jack only stayed for one drink, and he left right after.”

“Any problems between the Maucks and Billy Jack?”

“Not that I know of. Someone stole Bev’s cell phone, and maybe a gun, from them when they had a party last month. There were lots of suspects, I guess, but I don’t know who. I really haven’t spent much time with Brian and Bev in the last few months.”

“Did you hear anything early this morning?” Tate asked. “Gunshots, screaming, anything like that?”

Jennifer told the detectives that she and Daniel were “fooling around” in bed about 7:00 a.m. and they’d heard a “pop” in the distance. They thought that it was probably a hunter, but then they had looked out the back window of their trailer and saw a “big guy with long hair.”

Daniel had asked Jennifer who he was, but she hadn’t recognized him. Immediately after that, they heard a vehicle’s engine rev up and saw a small red truck driving northbound on 70th Avenue East. They hadn’t been able to see inside the truck, however, and couldn’t say who was driving it, or if there was a passenger.

Daniel Tavares’s memory was more precise. He hastened to explain that he and Jennifer had been “trying to make a li’l one,” that morning when they heard “several” gunshots and looked out to see a red Nissan pickup with a chrome roll bar and a chrome bumper in the Maucks’ driveway. He described the driver as a fairly big man with shoulder-length hair pulled back into a ponytail. “He walked up to the door, but I couldn’t see if he went in or not.”

Tavares said another man, who appeared to be bald, was waiting in the red truck. The first man, who Tavares now recalled wore a red hat, returned to his truck in a couple of
minutes, backed out of the driveway, and continued backing until he reached the next residence a block south. The truck stopped for a few seconds, then returned to the driveway of the Maucks’ gray and white house. Thirty seconds later the driver put it into reverse and sped north on 70th Avenue.

“How many shots did you hear?”

“About five…. There was a pause of a few seconds after the first shot.”

“How well do you know the victims?”

“I visit them often,” Tavares said. “I met them through Jeff. I do tattoos as a sideline and I was doing a large one on Brian. I was almost finished with it. Just had to add color in a few spots.”

The investigators noticed that Tavares had injuries on his face, including a bruised and swollen left eye and a cut through his right eyebrow.

Detective Jason Tate asked Daniel how he had received those cuts, bruises, and scratches.

“Jennifer’s ex-boyfriend did it,” Tavares said. “I was changing a flat tire at the Johnson’s Corner Market, and he just drove up and started whaling away at me.”

Tate and Ben Benson made a note to find the ex-boyfriend to check his version of any encounter, and, if there had been a fight, to determine if there were any witnesses to it.

The investigators had to consider that the Maucks had been the victims of home-invasion robbers, something that was becoming more prevalent all over the country. Maybe someone thought they had money or drugs, or had other reasons to break in.

Not drugs. Beverly’s and Brian’s families had come to the young couple’s home and stood outside in shock and grief as detectives continued to work the crime scene. They were invited to the sheriff’s office, but they didn’t want to go there until all of their close family members had arrived. Brian Mauck’s parents—Allen and Pamela—said that their son and daughter-in-law didn’t use drugs, nor did they keep large amounts of money in their house. Their marriage was very happy, they had no financial problems, or any other problems, for that matter. As far as their close relatives knew, they had no enemies.

“We were with them just last night,” Brian’s mother said in disbelief. “It was my birthday.”

Bev and Brian had gone out to dinner with his parents to celebrate Pamela’s birthday. It had been a pleasant and uneventful evening. After dinner, they’d gone back to the elder Maucks’ home and talked until Allen fell asleep. Paula had talked a little more with Brian and Beverly, and she’d offered them her old television set. Brian had carried it out to their car. He and Beverly were thinking about spending the night, but when Pamela too fell asleep, they had tiptoed out at some point and gone home to Graham.

From the look of their great room, they had apparently listened to music, watched a movie, and drunk appletinis as they wound down from a week’s work.

Allen Mauck had called his son at 1:30 on Saturday afternoon and been surprised when he didn’t answer; he expected to find him at home, watching the Huskies game on TV. At 5:00 p.m., he had received a call from the Slaters, Bev’s parents, saying that Bev and Brian were dead—that they had been murdered.

It was the end of serenity for two extended families, just when they had all had happy endings. Bev had played cupid, introducing her divorced mother, Karen, to her soon-to-be stepfather. She and her mother were very close, as she was with her two brothers. Her brother Steve, particularly, adored Bev. Like everyone who loved the young couple, the shock of this tragedy had stunned both the Maucks and the Slaters. They had a difficult time believing it was true.