Mortal Danger (22 page)

“He actually said he did it?” she asked in disbelief.

“Yeah, he did. We knew he did it before we brought him in here; we had evidence that we collected from the house back there and that told us without a doubt that it was him. We didn’t need him to talk to us, but he was man enough
to do that, and that’s good for him to do that—that’s probably gonna help him out in the long run.”

“I’m trying to protect myself here. I’ve never been through this before—”

“I need you to tell me what you know,” Benson probed.

“I only know bits and pieces,” Jennifer said.

Jennifer Tavares had been fascinated with a man in prison, a man whose description of his assets was an “Albino gorilla with over forty real nice tattoos.”

“I met him on the Internet, about three years ago.”

“Did you ever go see him while he was in prison?”

“No,” she answered. “He was in Massachusetts.”

Perhaps it had never occurred to her that she could have flown to the East Coast and met Tavares before she invited him into her life, into her family. She was either artless or cunning—or stupid.

“Do you know what he was in prison for?”

“He was supposed to have killed two people that molested his daughter…. He said [it was] his stepmother and her boyfriend, but I didn’t think…he would, you know—somebody gets their daughter molested, you think, ‘Yeah that’s understandable,’ you know.”

Daniel had obviously lied about that to Jennifer Lynn. How she must have rationalized about everything she learned—which wasn’t that much—about Daniel. She had married him without ever having met him before. He had walked out of prison and immediately flown to Washington. Within a day or so, they were married.

Jennifer seemed never even to have thought about it.

How could she have expected to find “the prince” with
only that information? She hadn’t. She had aligned herself with evil, and now she was in danger of being sucked into the vortex of that evil.

Jennifer said that they had been very happy during the first few months. But things had started to go sour when Daniel went to a psychiatrist and walked away with prescriptions that changed him. Three days before the Maucks died, he’d been to his psychiatrist and received a new prescription.

Jennifer wasn’t sure what it was, but the word she stumbled on sounded like Klonipin or Colotapins; she thought it was some kind of antianxiety med. “He started taking them and he was eating them like candy, and it was just making him act different—real different. I kept telling him, ‘I don’t like these pills—I want to throw them away.’”

That had made Daniel more agitated. “He turned into someone I don’t even know, and he kept taking them and taking them.”

Whether he had told his psychiatrist about all the other pills he was taking, only Daniel knew. He certainly hadn’t confided about his alcohol and illegal drug use.

While her new husband had been a “real good” lover and companion right after they were married, he had become more “aggressive” and she felt he “manhandled” her the morning of the murders. Now she gave an accurate timetable.

Daniel hadn’t slept at all on Friday night. And he hadn’t come home at 8:30 either. He had called Jennifer to say he was on his way several times, but he hadn’t come home until 1:00 a.m., “raging” about being attacked by two of her ex-boyfriends. And that was odd because she had bro
ken up with Eddie twelve years earlier and almost as long ago with Todd.

She was angry with Daniel. He had promised to take her on Friday night to one of the many Indian casinos that abound in Washington.

Detective Mark Merod joined in the questioning of Jennifer Lynn Tavares. She was either being evasive or she had a terrible memory. At first she said she hadn’t learned that Daniel had killed Bev and Brian until later on Saturday. She didn’t know if she’d heard gunshots, but she’d heard “something” and peeked out her window around 7:00 a.m.

“I just looked and I didn’t see nothin’.”

“See Daniel?”

“Didn’t see Daniel, no,” she said. “I just kinda had this feeling, but then I was scared ’cause I met him when he was in prison, and I didn’t know what he was gonna be like. I believed he was a good person, didn’t think anything was gonna happen. And now this. I was scared. I was pretty much told by him not to say anything. I was afraid it would happen to me—like
them
.”

Daniel hadn’t told her what he had done—he’d said only that the Maucks were “gone.” She said she’d had no idea beforehand what he had planned to do. When he left their trailer just as the winter sun was giving off pale light at about 7:00 a.m., he’d said he was going out to use the “honey bucket.” He’d been gone awhile, but she hadn’t heard the door of the outhouse squeaking as it usually did.

“When he came back,” Jennifer said, “he acted real agitated and kinda freaky.”

She estimated he’d been gone for twenty minutes.

Jennifer recalled her husband saying something like, “They were running their mouths” and “They won’t do that anymore.” Then he had warned her not to call the cops on him, threatening her with reprisal if she did.

“All I could think of was, ‘Oh, my God, my whole family’s here; I can’t have something happen to them. My little nephews and everything, because I’m the stupid fucker that met him. And I believed he was so great…’”

Jennifer was either totally afraid of Daniel or pretending to be. She was definitely in shock to find herself at the sheriff’s office. When Ben Benson asked her why she hadn’t told the deputies or detectives what she knew on Saturday, she explained she knew Daniel could break out of jail and overcome cops.

He had threatened her and her family if she told anyone. Gradually, Jennifer modified her memories of Saturday, November 17. She admitted that she knew the Maucks were dead within fifteen minutes of the murders.

Daniel had been eager to leave the Freitas property. They couldn’t drive her red Ford Explorer because two tires on one side were flat, so they borrowed a car from Jeff and Kristel and drove to Point Defiance Park, along Five Mile Drive. They had been married there four months earlier in the summer sunshine in a sylvan setting at one of the turnoffs. That was a much happier day.

Point Defiance extends high above the Tacoma Narrows and Commencement Bay, and the cliffs are steep there. She was driving and followed his directions to turn into the spot where they’d promised to love and cherish each other. On this day, there was no sunshine, no romance, and the
wind carried sheets of rain over the cliffs. Daniel had told her that he needed to walk down a path to urinate. She watched as he disappeared into a thicket of evergreens. He was back within minutes and had seemed a little calmer.

Before going home, they’d gone shopping at Big Lots, a discount store, and eaten at a Mexican restaurant.

The two Pierce County detectives refused to believe that Jennifer had no idea what Daniel was doing when he walked down the trail to the cliffs. She finally said she had asked him if he had a gun with him, and he’d kept telling her not to worry about it.

“That told me that he did have a gun with him.”

It had also been very important to Daniel that the water far below was salt water. She didn’t know why, but the detectives did: If Tavares had thrown the death weapon into the sea, he would have hoped the metal would corrode rapidly.

Asked about what guns were in the travel trailer, Jennifer said she didn’t know where her .22 handgun was; she thought her mother had it. Daniel had owned an assault rifle until a few days before the double murder. She thought he’d sold it.

Benson and Merod shuddered at the thought of what a man like Daniel Tavares might have intended to do with an assault rifle. He could have taken out everyone in the neighborhood.

Now Ben Benson led Jennifer’s focus back to the murder site. He showed her photographs of fingerprints and palm prints in blood, and the ridges of shoes etched in the dried blood. One was Daniel’s; the other was from a smaller foot. She was adamant that she had not been in the
Maucks’ home with him. As Jennifer grew more anxious, her language became less than ladylike. She had an extensive vocabulary of four-letter words.

She accused Daniel of taking one of her shoes down to the murder site and deliberately making a bloody print with it—just to involve her in homicides she had no part in. The person who had vomited in the Maucks’ driveway had probably been Jennifer, but she stubbornly insisted that she had never, ever, walked down to their house—particularly not on the morning they were killed. If DNA tests linked that to her, it was because she’d gotten sick in her own trailer Friday night—into a paper bag—and Daniel must have taken it down there to try to make it look like she was there.

She had known some things, yes. She knew Daniel had been smoking meth on Friday night and admitted that she had joined him. She had had a problem with drugs sometime back, but she’d been clean for a while.

Jennifer said she was doing anything she could to calm her husband down. She’d kept working on her wolf puzzle, and they were having a “heart-to-heart talk.” That had led to sex—not in the morning but sometime in the middle of the night.

The detectives didn’t think she had accompanied her husband on his killing visit to Beverly and Brian Mauck’s home, but they did believe she had gone back there with him a short time later at his insistence that she help him clean up the death house. Maybe it had been Jennifer who
tried to sweep up the pools of blood, only to become violently ill at the smell of it.

The short honeymoon of the convict and the farm girl from Graham, Washington, seemed to be over.

Despite her protestations, Jennifer Lynn Tavares was charged with rendering criminal assistance and booked into the Pierce County Jail at around 2:00 a.m. on Monday, November 19.

Convinced that they
had the Maucks’ killer locked safely in jail, the investigators continued to assemble new information about Daniel Tavares’s behavior after the crimes and to learn more about his background.

Jeff Freitas had learned that Tavares had told a few people he was angry that Jeff had found the victims so soon after they were killed.

“Why was he angry?” Tom Catey asked Jeff.

“I guess he thought no one would check up on Brian and Bev until Monday, and he supposedly had planned to go down there and set their house on fire—destroy any evidence—before they were found.”

But Freitas wasn’t sure who had heard that information in the first few days after the murders. He thought that his mother had overheard it, and told his wife, Kristel. It was one of those rumors that seemed to make sense, and yet it was very difficult to track it back to its source.

An older uncle who lived on Freitas’s land reported that Daniel Tavares had come to his home and asked for some bleach. He had then poured bleach over some jeans he carried. But detectives hadn’t found any bloody or bleach-
stained clothing in the fire that occurred shortly after the murders. They had seen the phantom blank spot image on the dining room wall and believed that the clothes Tavares wore during the shootings had to be speckled with back-spatter blood from his victims’ wounds.

But they hadn’t been able to find them.

On Monday morning, Ben Benson received an overnight package from the Massachusetts State Police. A mug shot included in the file was of a much younger Daniel Tavares. He appeared to be in his early twenties and had only one tattoo—the one of Pegasus, with “Danny” written above it. His facial expression was one of anxiety, even fear. It was the same man, all right—but the young Daniel had been fairly attractive at six feet tall and 180 pounds; now he weighed sixty pounds more than that, and he had aged significantly. At forty-one, he looked well over fifty.

As Benson perused the file, he saw that Daniel had indeed killed his mother, forty-six-year-old Ann Tavares, in their home in Somerset, Massachusetts—just a stone’s throw from Fall River, the city where Lizzie Borden had gone on trial for the murder of her father and stepmother ninety-nine years earlier.

Lizzie resided at 92 Second Street and Daniel at 31 Winslow. Both crimes happened on blistering hot days; August 4, 1892, for the Borden hatchet murders, and July 11, 1991, for Ann Tavares’s homicide by kitchen knife. Most people believe that Lizzie, twenty-four, was found guilty, but she wasn’t. She was acquitted after a sensational trial and died at age sixty-seven in 1927.

Ann Tavares’s crime scene was just as full of scarlet
liquid as the Borden bloodbath. Or, Benson thought, as the Maucks’ home.

Daniel Tavares was the youngest child of four born to Ann and Daniel Tavares Sr., joining three older sisters. He was spoiled and indulged by his mother, a Laundromat manager, who doted on him, particularly after she and her husband split up when Danny was less than two years old. In his early twenties, he often found work as a disc jockey at local clubs and for weddings and other festive occasions. He was a minor local celebrity.

He was also a drug addict and a mental patient who mixed alcohol with physician-prescribed antipsychotics, mood elevators, and even drugs to help with some of the side effects of the former. He added cocaine, Valium, and almost anything else he could get his hands on. He took Prolixin, an antipsychotic drug designed for bipolar patients; doxepin, an antidepressive; and Artane, to alleviate uncontrollable trembling caused by the other two drugs.

Given that, it was difficult to know which came first: his bizarre behavior after ingesting drugs or his mental illness, which he compromised by his illegal drug addictions and heavy drinking.

He apparently hadn’t changed his dangerous ways in two decades. And it was almost impossible to know whether to believe
any
of his wild stories. Even so, he hadn’t had much trouble getting dates, as rude as he could sometimes be, or as peculiar as his behavior was. There were young women in Massachusetts who had found him exciting.

On Thursday, July 11, 1991, Somerset, Massachusetts, smelled of honeysuckle, melting asphalt, and the sea wind that blew off the bays, rivers, and ponds that snaked from the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast corner of the state. As the sun began to set, shade trees would become cooling canopies, and weathermen promised the temperature would drop to the upper sixties and clouds would overcast the area by midnight.

Daniel Tavares asked two sisters who shared his surname—but to whom he was not related—to go to the Kokomo Club in Tiverton, Rhode Island, just across the state line. Stephanie and Heather Tavares agreed to go with him. Stephanie had known him for two months, but she’d dated him for only a week before she heard that he had two children by two different young women. Stephanie thought a romantic relationship with Danny would be too complicated so they’d agreed to remain only friends.

When Daniel arrived at Heather’s apartment, her babysitter, Joey Lynn, noticed that “he didn’t look good.” Heather snatched off his sunglasses and saw that his eyes were red and the pupils were dilated.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“I’ve been drinking and I took nine Valiums,” he said, “because Tracy [an ex-girlfriend] is taking me to court, and I won’t be able to see my son anymore.”

The sisters noted that he was acting strange and that he wasn’t “walking right.”

At least he wasn’t driving—Danny didn’t drive. He said a friend was picking them up.

While Heather and Stephanie were in the bathroom fixing their hair and putting the final touches on their makeup,
Joey Lynn watched Danny reach into Stephanie’s and Heather’s purses and count out money from their wallets, and then stick it into various sections of his own billfold. When the Tavares sisters checked, Stephanie found that nine dollars was gone, and Heather was missing thirteen dollars.

They were angry and decided not to go to the club. Danny lied and said he hadn’t taken the money; the babysitter had. “We suspected he’d taken it, but what were we going to do?” Stephanie asked. “We decided to go and have a good time—Danny said he’d pay for us.”

They arrived at Kokomo at ten minutes after nine, and Danny bought them each a beer and two for himself before he left them at the bar and started shooting pool.

“We kept watching Danny,” Stephanie said, “because he’d taken the ‘V’s’ and we had no money to buy drinks or anything. He came over to our table around eleven, bought us each another beer, and danced one fast song with Heather. Not too long after that, we noticed he was gone.”

As far as she knew, Danny drank just two beers in the ninety minutes he was at the Kokomo. She had no idea how many he’d had before he arrived at her sister’s apartment.

Heather said Danny had spent only ten or fifteen minutes with them all evening. They were stuck without a ride home, and with no money. He’d bailed on them a few weeks before, too, and they were chagrined that they had trusted him again.

Ben Benson read on. Danny Tavares and his mother had had an unusual living situation: Ann Tavares, her current
boyfriend of seven years, and her former boyfriend each owned a third interest in the house on Winslow. Apparently there were no bad feelings between the men in Ann’s life.

John Latsis,* the former lover, lived in a basement apartment, Ann and Kristos Lilles* lived on the main floor, and Danny had his own attic apartment.

Sometime after eleven on Thursday night, July 11, Danny Tavares had called his mother and told her that someone had put three tablets of LSD in a White Russian he was drinking, and he was afraid of the effect it might have on him. Since he didn’t drive, his mother was used to picking him up from one club or another. She and Kristos drove to the Kokomo to get him, and the three of them got home about midnight.

What happened after that was almost inexplicable. Kristos was tired and went to bed. After driving Danny and the two young women to the Kokomo earlier that night, John Latsis had returned home. When Ann, Kristos, and Daniel returned, he and a male friend were visiting in the lower apartment when they heard screaming and shouting from somewhere upstairs. With Latsis in the lead, they sprinted up the steps. They saw an out-of-control Danny Tavares with a large butcher knife in his hand, and Kristos Lilles struggling with him.

They had no idea what had happened but were relieved when Kristos managed to disarm Danny. Told to calm down, Danny yelled, “Get back or I’ll fucking kill you!”

John shouted at his friend, “Run downstairs and call 911. Ann needs help!”

John Latsis was bleeding from the right side of his
chest. Danny Tavares banged his own head so hard against the wall that it burst through the attic ceiling, as he cried, “Mama! Mama!”

At nine minutes after midnight, Somerset patrol officers W. E. Caravallo and Peter Massa were dispatched to the house on Winslow by radio: “Domestic dispute—involving a mental party. Possible stabbing.”

As they ran up the stairs, they observed Sergeant John Solomito leading a zombielike handcuffed prisoner down. There was such chaos in the house that it was impossible to tell what had happened.

They were stunned to see how bad it was in Danny Tavares’s room. An attractive woman in blue shorts and a white T-shirt lay on her back in the center of the room, bleeding profusely from her chest, belly, and face. The two officers knelt to administer first aid and CPR to the victim. It was all in vain. Caravallo tried one compression on her sternum and saw blood squirting out of her left side. Somerset Fire Department EMTs had entered the room, and after four compressions, they touched Caravallo on the shoulder and shook their heads.

Ann Tavares was dead. It would take an autopsy to determine how many times she had suffered what were obviously deep penetrating wounds.

John Latsis was hospitalized for his chest wound; he couldn’t remember whether Danny had stabbed him deliberately or if it happened during the struggle to get him off of his dying mother.

Kristos was in shock and baffled. The ride home from the Kokomo had been completely uneventful, and the three
of them had carried on a friendly conversation. He’d had no concern about Ann’s going upstairs to talk to her son.

Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Bruce Jillson processed the crime scene. It began on the stairs leading up to Danny’s room, where he found a hypodermic needle on a step. In the room itself, he found signs of a struggle. Plants were overturned, a stuffed raccoon had been knocked from its mounting, furniture was out of place, and there were holes in the plasterboard. A spoon with white powder residue and a plastic baggie with a small amount of the same powder and the missing top of the syringe on the stairway rested on a wicker love seat.

There was an empty six-pack of ale, a bottle of mezcal, and a wood-handled carving knife with a twelve-inch blade. It was smeared with blood.

Ann Tavares’s body still lay spread-eagled in the middle of the room in her own blood. Dr. William Zane arrived just before Jillson pronounced her dead. The two men counted approximately fifteen separate wounds to her neck, face, arm, abdomen, and back.