Mortal Danger (19 page)

Were the younger Maucks afraid of anything? Allen Mauck said the only thing he could think of was the incident where Beverly’s cell phone and a gun had disappeared during a party. He thought the phone had been found in a nearby field. Allen was the one who had given Brian the Glock handgun after that theft, to keep in the house for protection.

But he didn’t think either Bev or Brian had been truly afraid; it was more that the area they lived in was somewhat isolated, and many of the newly constructed homes weren’t occupied yet.

Odd. Daniel Tavares had mentioned the party, too. It was Brian Mauck’s birthday party. Tavares thought he’d seen the suspicious Nissan truck parked outside their house during that party.

Detective Mark Merod talked with Beverly’s best friend, Lisa. She and her husband and Bev and Brian were all best friends, and Lisa said that Beverly
had
been afraid of two men; one was a stranger Daniel Tavares had brought over one day, and the other was the nephew of a neighbor. “Bev was sure he was the one who took her cell phone—and Brian’s handgun. She found her cell phone by calling
her own number and listening for the ring. Someone had tossed it all the way across the road—not the driveway—to where it landed in a field over there. In fact, Bev had to get
three
new cell phones this year!

“There was something about those guys—especially Billy Mack—that scared Bev. That’s why she wouldn’t stay alone when Brian was out of town,” Lisa continued. “She’d stay with us.”

On the night of the party at Brian and Bev’s where the thefts occurred, Lisa found that her new car had been deliberately keyed all the way along one side. Clearly, someone was jealous of the Maucks and their carefree friends.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Merod asked.

“Last Sunday. I’m pregnant and sick to my stomach. Bev worried about me, and she came over and cooked for us.”

Everyone detectives talked to that first day—from relatives to friends who had known the Maucks for many, many years—mentioned how much they loved each other. Their biggest arguments weren’t over anything more serious than who was going to take the garbage out. Did they have financial problems? detectives asked. No. In fact they were admired because they handled their money so well.

Everything had been perfect. But Beverly had been frightened of something…of
someone
.

When the news of Brian and Beverly Mauck’s violent deaths circulated around Graham, many of their peers broke into tears. The shock was palpable.

There were more than two hundred mourners at their memorial service.

Detective Sergeant Ben
Benson read over Daniel Tavares’s eyewitness description of the “killer or killers” and something jarred him: The distance from the travel trailer where Daniel and Jennifer lived was three hundred to four hundred yards from the Maucks’ home. That was three or four times the length of a football field! He tested himself to see how much he could see at that distance, and it wasn’t much more than vague shapes. How had the Tavarases—looking out of the little trailer window above their bed, in the darkness of a November morning—been able to describe the strangers in the Maucks’ driveway so precisely?

Even if they had binoculars—which they hadn’t mentioned—it was just too far between where they lived and where Beverly and Brian lived. And Daniel Tavares had gone so far as to describe the tires on the truck, and said the driver had had a “shady-looking face.”

“Shady?” Tate asked.

“Kind of like…pockmarked.”

“Pockmarked?”

“You know, when a face is all pocked up. Yeah.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, and I mean, I can see. I got real good vision. So yeah. He kind of looked like he had an acne problem, like red on his face. No beard, no mustache, no hair…that I could see. But it was like red.”

“Okay.”

Tavares seemed to be waiting for a compliment on his excellent vision, but he got nothing more.

“Maybe the color wasn’t red, but it was—certainly wasn’t a white skin color.”

Ben Benson didn’t say anything either. When he read over the transcript of this first questioning of Daniel Tavares, he thought that Daniel must have Superman’s amazing vision and marveled at the way he kept embroidering his story, adding a few more details than needed.

“We
knew
he could not have seen all that from his trailer,” Benson said later, “but we let him talk.”

Brian and Beverly hadn’t gone to the Roundup on Friday night, but Daniel Tavares had been there, and he’d made quite an impression.

When detectives asked the night manager of the Roundup if there had been a fight or an attack on Tavares on Friday night, he shook his head. However, he recalled that Daniel had appeared to be either drunk or on drugs and was talking loudly about using meth and marijuana. He was annoying regular customers and “didn’t fit in with the crowd.” The manager had considered calling the sheriff or kicking him out of the nightspot, but Tavares had left on his own. When he came back after midnight, he was re
fused entry. The manager promised to make his security camera videotapes of the crowd the night before available to the detectives.

Jason Tate interviewed a man who had been with Daniel—or at least sitting at his table—on Friday night: Carl Rider.* Rider said he had been there with his girlfriend about 7:00 p.m., and since it was karaoke night, he’d consumed several shots of whiskey quickly to get up his nerve to sing. It was about nine when he became aware of Daniel Tavares.

“He was asking people if they wanted to buy drugs,” and then he walked out the front door. Rider had walked out a short time later and seen Tavares in a red Ford Explorer (Jennifer’s car) with Rider’s girlfriend’s son. They were smoking marijuana. His inhibitions lessened by the whiskey, Rider accepted some marijuana from Tavares and smoked it outside the Roundup. Then the party had continued after Tavares had asked Carl Rider if he wanted to “get high,” and the three men had headed southbound on the Mountain Highway. “We were smoking marijuana
and
meth,” Rider said.

Daniel Tavares had dropped Carl Rider off at Johnson’s Corner, and he’d walked to where his fuming girlfriend was waiting for him. He himself was full of regret because he hadn’t smoked meth in five or six years, and he had let Tavares talk him into it.

Whatever else he was, Daniel Tavares was a bad influence on those around him, a man seemingly without much moral fiber.

Rider was positive that Tavares hadn’t had any cuts or bruises when he’d last seen him after midnight.

But deputies questioning him near four the next afternoon had seen injuries on his face. Where had he been between leaving the Roundup the previous night and when they interrogated him on Saturday?

The homicide investigation into the deaths of Beverly and Brian Mauck was just a little more than twenty-four hours old on this gloomy Sunday, November 18. As expected, a number of people called the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, with tips they thought might be important, or theories on the case.

A woman who worked at Baydo Chevrolet with Beverly called to say that Bev had been afraid of some man who had come to her home. “I don’t know Brian, but she said he was getting a tattoo from someone, and the tattoo artist had brought along another man. That’s the one who gave her the creeps.”

The caller didn’t know the name of either man. But Ben Benson thought the tattoo artist had to be Daniel Tavares, who was a living advertisement for the art of tattooing.

Ben Benson had been feeling more and more hinky about Daniel Tavares, and so had several of the other detectives. Tavares had a number of very professional tattoos on his body, many of them hidden by his clothing. Even in clothes, the tattoos on his neck showed—a snorting bull on the right side and “Jennifer Lynn” on the left. When he was bare from the waist up, Pegasus (the flying horse of Greek mythology), a clown wearing a hat, two angels lifting a chained body out of a hole in a brick wall, a baby on a cloud, a female face atop a prison tower wrapped in barbed
wire and a pig head below, two masks—one happy and one sad—a castle with a mountain road, a genie coming out of a bottle, and some older, less expert ink tracings were visible.

Tavares even had a pig’s head tattooed on his penis. Some of his tattoos seemed to have been designed to obliterate previous ones. Some were surely prison artwork by somewhat clumsy practitioners who had worked under less than optimal conditions.

They’d all noticed that Daniel Tavares was inordinately proud of his body enhancements and of his own skill as a tattoo artist. Apparently his bride had also been attracted to his illustrated skin.

Jeff Freitas thought that his sister had met Daniel Tavares through an online matchmaking service that hooked up convicts with women on the outside. There are many: Prison Pen Pals, Friends Behind the Walls, and the one Jennifer selected, Inmate.com. Freitas estimated that Jennifer had been writing to Daniel for two or three years before he was paroled.

Why so many women choose to find love with prisoners is a question difficult to answer. Some may not be able to attract men in the free world; some find dangerous men—“bad boys”—sexy. There are women who really don’t
want
to live with a man or participate in sex, so a man locked behind bars in a prison with no conjugal visits is ideal. They can have a husband to talk about, but they don’t have to be intimate. And there is the fame factor. While those convicted of major crimes net more infamy than fame, women with no particular accomplishments—good or bad—align themselves with men whose names have been
in the headlines and on TV. It makes them feel important to be known as the love interest of an infamous criminal, and they bask in his reflected—if suspect—glory.

Possibly the most deluded prison sweethearts are those who convince themselves that all the man behind bars needs “to go straight” is the love of a good woman. And, of course, a woman with this delusion is sure that
she
will be the one person who can effect a complete change in a felon’s personality. Oddly, it never seems to occur to these
rescuers
that they could become the next victims, or that they may be inviting chaos and disaster into their lives.

Jennifer Lynn Freitas had answered an ad that probably wouldn’t appeal to most women. Daniel Tavares had listed his finer points: “Six-foot, 235 pound, Albino gorilla with over forty real nice tattoos. Can I get a li’l bit of love from a lonely female?”

She apparently found this description intriguing.

Her older brother, Jeff, wasn’t very happy about her long-distance romance with a convict, although he gave her and her new husband a place to live and offered Daniel a job logging evergreen trees when he was paroled.

Now Jeff Freitas was a mighty nervous man the day after his neighbors were shot to death. He called Pierce County Deputy Bill Ruder, a longtime friend, to tell him that he was afraid of someone who was staying on his property and asked Ruder if he had “anything to worry about.”

Ruder explained that he couldn’t discuss the murder probe with him. They both knew they were talking about Daniel Tavares, who was the unknown quantity in the tight family group that lived on Jeff’s property. His elderly par
ents lived there with an uncle, and so did his sister Jennifer, along with Jeff, his wife, Kristel, and their small children.

“What’s your gut feeling about Daniel?” Ruder asked him.

“I feel like I have lots to be worried about,” Freitas said. “Frankly, I’m scared to death of him.”

He went on to say that Daniel had been acting bizarrely ever since the double murder was discovered. “He’s just out of it,” Freitas said, “and the more I think about his story, none of it makes any sense.”

He had noticed the bruises on Daniel’s face that made him look as though he’d taken a punch or two.

“He told me that he was driving home from picking up a printer at one of our cousins’ house. He stopped at 304th and the Mountain Highway to check his lug nuts. He said when he bent over, a car stopped and two guys got out. He recognized one as Jennifer’s old boyfriend, who ran up and kicked him in the head,” Freitas said. “So he said he got that guy down on the ground and was punching him—and even broke his false teeth—and then the other guy took a pipe and began bashing Daniel with it.”

The two men had slashed Tavares’s vehicle’s tires before they drove off.

“I asked him how he got home, and he said he drove home on the flat tires, going about two miles an hour—it’s only a little over a mile.”

It was eating at Jeff Freitas that when he’d left to go hunting at around 5:00 a.m. on Saturday, he’d glanced at Daniel and Jennifer’s vehicle and it didn’t seem to be leaning on one side. Of course he hadn’t been looking at the
tires—he hadn’t heard Daniel’s story of the assault at that point. But there were no marks or gouges in the gravel and dirt driveway. He was sure of that.

Jeff’s wife, Kristel, had seen Daniel walking past their mobile home about 8:00 a.m., and he’d had a towel over his arm. When she opened her blinds, he’d been standing on the porch of the Freitases’ mobile home. Shortly after that, he came to her door and asked if he could take a shower. She told him he could, but when he didn’t come back in an hour, she told Jennifer Tavares that her husband would have to come back around ten—Kristel wanted to take a shower, and it would take that long for the water to heat up again for Daniel.

Asked if Daniel had a gun, Freitas hesitated. “Well, Jennifer had this twenty-two pistol that our mother had given her. With Daniel due to arrive this last summer, she told Jennifer she would have to get the gun out of the house before he got here because he was a convicted felon. I have no idea where that gun is now.”

The Maucks had been shot with a .22-caliber gun.

Saturday, November 17, was a crazy and disjointed day. On the morning of the murder, Daniel had told Kristel Freitas that he needed to go down to Brian and Beverly’s house and finish the tattoo he was doing for Brian, saying that he really needed the fifty dollars that Brian still owed him for the tattoo because he wanted to buy gas. But he didn’t accompany Jeff when he headed down the slope to see why the Maucks hadn’t responded to his knocks or his phone calls.

And then there had been the fire. Jeff was especially worried because he’d spotted flames near the rear of Dan
iel and Jennifer’s fifth-wheel RV earlier Saturday morning. Daniel told him he’d been making repairs on it and a welding torch had accidentally ignited a rubber gasket.

Jeff said he’d wondered then if Daniel was on drugs. He didn’t seem to grasp the urgency of getting the burning material out from under the fifth wheel before the whole thing went up. When Jeff ran for water, he shouted to Daniel, “Get a rake! Get a rake!”

Daniel had just stood there at first, and then complained that he didn’t want to be “treated like a child.” But he was acting like a child, or like someone who was in a drug stupor.

Motorists driving by had seen the smoke billowing, and they rushed up the road to Jeff’s acreage to help. They were followed by the fire department and some Pierce County deputies’ units. The fire had soon been put out completely.

With no thanks to Daniel Tavares.

It was then that Jeff Freitas had begun to worry in earnest about Brian and Bev. How could they have slept through all the commotion so close to their house?

To his sorrow, he’d found out that they weren’t sleeping.

When Jeff came back after finding that his neighbors were dead, Tavares was still standing in his living room. “I didn’t say a word to him about what I’d found, but it was like [he knew] and was expecting me to call 911. Just the expression on his face. When I told my wife what I’d just seen, Daniel acted shocked and kept saying, ‘Oh my God,’ over and over. That didn’t sound like him, and I found it odd and phony.”

Jeff Freitas now believed that his brother-in-law had murdered Beverly and Brian, and he was afraid for himself and his whole extended family. He said he was doing all he could not to let Daniel know he suspected him. He was afraid to leave his wife and children and his parents alone.

Deputy Ruder typed up a report of his phone conversation with Freitas and gave it to Sergeant Ben Benson.

Benson wondered if the motive for double murder could possibly be a paltry fifty-dollar debt. Freitas was correct that Daniel Tavares seemed to have many different explanations for his injuries, tailoring them to fit whomever he was talking to. He was blabbing continually, with first slight and then outlandish adjustments to his story.

Benson and his crew of investigators were gathering information and trying to lock in physical evidence. The fingerprint on the doorjamb in the Maucks’ house proved not to be a fingerprint at all; it was a section of a palm print, caught in fresh, wet blood, and then it had dried. There wasn’t much of the palm that had connected, and it had been natural that they thought it was a fingerprint.