Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

  “So that was about the time you were doing the tattoo [on Brian]?” Catey asked.

  “Yes,” Daniel answered, but he knew nothing about where Brian had gambled, how much he owed. In fact, he’d never discussed gambling with Brian. None of the other investigators he had talked to had mentioned that Brian Mauck had a gambling problem (which he did not).

  “Okay,” Catey said. “Why would you agree to do this?”

  “For the money. To get a place to live.”

  It was obvious that Tavares was making things up as he went along. He’d already admitted to two murders, but he was trying to protect Jennifer. He insisted that he was hired to kill both of the Maucks for ten thousand dollars apiece, but Jennifer hadn’t known about it.

  “Did you use anything to muffle the sound of the gun going off?”

  “Yeah, a towel.” He believed he’d found it right there in his neighbors’ house.

  Brian had come to the door about seven and let him in. He hadn’t been upset about having such an early visitor, Daniel said, and he hadn’t argued with him. Tavares said he was totally focused on his mission to kill Brian, and he admitted he hadn’t even tried to discuss ways Brian could pay the money he allegedly owed.

  He’d simply carried out his orders, shooting Brian and then Beverly. He said he’d been “so med-ed out” that he was “in a fog.” He told Tom Catey he didn’t know why he had pulled Beverly over by Brian.

  “How come you covered them up—took the time to put the blanket over them?” Catey asked the question again.

  “Respect.”

  Both Ben Benson and Tom Catey were struck speechless for a moment. This was a man who seemed to have no empathy for others. He had taken two lives for no good reason they could see, and now he was talking about “respect.”

  He just didn’t get it. It was almost like talking to a robot.

  Lieutenant Brent Bomkamp walked into the interview room. He was a new factor in the dialogue. First, he complimented Tavares on being a stand-up guy who had basically told them the truth about the Maucks’ murder. Tavares preened.

  But then Bomkamp accused him of lying about part of his story.

  “We know it, you know it, and what’s gonna happen is these guys [who] have been working their asses off for the last two days are gonna have to go out and try to follow these little threads you’re laying down. And you know they will end in nothing that fits with what you’re telling us.

  “These are smart guys,” Bomkamp said, pointing to Ben Benson and Tom Catey. “These are my best guys. We’ve put you at the scene. We’ve got other physical evidence that’s not matching what you’re saying. You’ve shown you’re willing to be a stand-up guy. You’ve been honest. Just tell the whole frickin’ truth.”

  Tavares was off balance, going from Bomkamp’s compliments to his accusations, and he protested weakly. Bomkamp assured him that his detectives would find out the whole truth, but they would have to search all of Tavares’s property, question his wife, and it would take weeks before the case moved ahead.

  “Nobody hired you to do this,” Bomkamp asked flatly. “Did they?”

  “No.” Tavares admitted that he had lied to save face. He said that Brian Mauck had insulted him, calling him a “fucking punk,” and that Bev had said even worse things about Jennifer Lynn, calling her the c word. Maybe Brian was mad because he’d gone down to his home so early in the morning to ask about the tattoo, Daniel allowed, but Brian’s insults had just been too much for a man who’d spent so much time in prison. Being called a “fucking punk” had deeply insulted him.

  Although the three detectives in the room doubted that either Brian or Bev Mauck had ever used those epithets, they didn’t argue with Tavares.

  Now, finally, he had told as much of the truth as he probably ever would. Transcribed, his lies and his slow revelation of what had really happened took a hundred and twenty-five pages.

  The confession by Daniel Tavares proved once again that a well-trained and experienced detective knows he must avoid tunnel vision. Beverly Mauck had had reason to be afraid, but she’d been afraid of the wrong person. Billy Mack, who had probably stolen from their house more than once, had scared her, certainly, but this misfit neighbor she’d scarcely noticed, a man she had once fixed dinner for, who had left his mark on her husband’s back, the man she and Brian tolerated because they felt kind of sorry for him, was far more dangerous than anyone in the neighborhood could have imagined.

  It was very late on Sunday night, November 18, and Ben Benson next turned his attention to Jennifer Tavares. He was curious to find out if she truly knew her husband’s background, and more curious to know if she had returned to the Maucks’ house with him after the murder to help him “clean up.” She might well have been an accomplice to murder before, during, or after the fact.

  Benson was inclined to think that Jennifer had probably helped Daniel after the fact. She listened to her Miranda rights and was very concerned. She debated phoning an attorney but realized that might mean she would have to stay in jail overnight. When Benson mentioned that she might face time in prison, Jennifer was horrified. Apparently, that had never occurred to her. She wanted to go home, but Ben Benson explained that her trailer would have to be searched thoroughly, and she could not go home until that was done. She asked then if she could go home to her brother’s mobile home.

  That would depend on her attitude and her willingness to tell him the truth, Benson said. He explained that her husband had just confessed to killing Brian and Beverly.

  “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 broken 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.

  Chapter Five

  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.”

&nb
sp; 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.