Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

  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 th
e 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.

  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.

  Chapter Three

  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 refused 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.