Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  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 parents 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 Daniel 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.

  “We need to get some palm prints,” Benson told Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien. “Let’s contact Jennifer and Daniel and Jeff and his wife, and tell them we need to get clearer prints. When we get there, we’ll find a way to get their palm prints, too.”

  Neither the Freitases nor the Tavareses objected to being fingerprinted. Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien was matter-of-fact as she daubed ink from their fingertips up halfway to their elbows. The subjects didn’t question her, and she and Ben Benson kept the conversation going, hoping they wouldn’t notice what she was doing.

  She pressed all of their fingertips to cards and labeled them. Then she pressed several sections of their palms to cards. Her eyes met Benson’s and he nodded slightly.

  Somewhere among those cards, Benson believed they had the print they needed to compare with the one on the doorjamb in the Maucks’ house.

  No one in the Freitas family seemed to know exactly what Jennifer’s new husband had been in prison for, or how much time he’d served. Maybe Jennifer didn’t really know. Daniel didn’t seem eager to talk about it, but who could blame him for that? He’d come out west to a new wife and a new life, and he probably wanted to forget the past.

  Although it was the weekend and many law enforcement records departments were closed, Benson contacted the Massachusetts State Police to check on what crime had sent Daniel Tavares to prison. He received word that it had been manslaughter in 1991. There was a warrant out for him for leaving New England without informing his parole officer or getting permission to cross state lines, but Massachusetts had declined to extradite him to their jurisdiction.

  Manslaughter can mean a lot of things: He might have been responsible for a car crash that had caused a death. It might have been involuntary—an unplanned—manslaughter. For the moment, Daniel Tavares didn’t come across as a dangerous felon.

  One of the other possible suspects was the neighbor’s nephew. But efforts to locate Billy Jack were fruitless. When detectives went to the last address given for him, they found that the building had been demolished. They eventually located him, jobless and living with his mother in a small town some miles away from Graham. He had an alibi for the early morning hours of November 17.

  Ben Benson asked Jennifer and Daniel to come into the sheriff’s offices to work with a police artist and attempt to come up with likenesses of the men they’d seen in the red truck. He would send an officer to pick them up. They agreed readily, saying they would be glad to help. Deputy Nick Hausner picked them up at their trailer at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday night.

  Benson didn’t believe there had been any strangers at the victim’s house the morning they died, but the police artist request gave him a reason to bring the Tavareses in.

  It was raining when Jason Tate followed Ben Benson and Daniel Tavares into the sheriff’s office for further questioning, and they had to walk through puddles. As they stepped onto a covered cement walkway, Tate happened to look down. There, just in front of him, were the wet shoe prints from Tavares’s shoes. All of the investigators who had seen the shoe prints in the victims’ blood had memorized the distinctive zigzag pattern of the killer’s shoes. Tate knew he was looking at the same pattern—not in blood, but in rainwater on a stretch of dry sidewalk.

  Ben Benson immediately contacted Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien and had her take digital photos of the prints Daniel Tavares had just made. It was essential to get clear photos before the ephemeral images dried and were lost.

  She responded at once, adding those digital images to the piles of evidence they already had. She had seen the bloody footprints at the murder scene, and these prints in rainwater looked the same to her, too. When she matched up the two images, they were as close to identical in their zigzag patterns as anything could be. She notified Ben Benson.

  Whatever Tavares had done in Massachusetts, he was looking more and more like a good suspect in Washington.

  Benson directed Daniel Tavares toward one interview room and Jennifer to another. Tavares was calm and cooperative; he actually seemed to enjoy answering Benson’s questions during the first part of their interview.

  Benson, with Detective Tom Catey looking on, began by asking Daniel Tavares when he had moved to Washington. It had been July and he’d moved from Massachusetts to meet Jennifer in person. “I met her online,” he volunteered.

  When they met in person, they had hit it off and were married on July 31. Daniel said he’d gone to work for Jeff, his new brother-in-law.

  Asked how he met Brian and Bev, he said Jeff had introduced them. “They go to Jeff’s house every Friday to play cards—so every Friday we used to get together to play cards. All of us—me, my wife, her brother, Jeff, and his wife, Kristel—and then two more friends, which is Pat and Marlene.”

  Tavares said that he and Jennifer did more than play cards with their neighbors. He made it sound as if they were close friends. They always stopped and talked when they met on the private road between their residences, especially about Brian’s motorcycles. “One time we went for a Harley ride—me and him—for about an hour.”

  “How about the tattoo stuff?” Benson asked.

  “He knew I was doing tattoos, and he wanted one…what do you call it? Your sign, like a Taurus, Scorpion—your birth sign—so he wanted a scorpion. I told him that I’d draw him up one, and if he liked my drawing and wanted it, I’d have no problem doing it for him. I did that for him.”

  “Did you just put one tattoo on him?”

  Daniel Tavares nodded. “And his initials: B.A.M. Brian—I forgot his middle name, but it was a scorpion with ‘B.A.M.’ above it. That’s the first tattoo he has, I think.”

  He said that Bev had shown interest in having a tattoo, too. She was drawing up an angelfish she wanted. “’Cause they scuba dive.”

  Ben Benson noted that Daniel spoke of the dead couple as if they were still alive.

  “So what was the agreement about the tattoo?” Benson asked. “Just doing it because you were a buddy of his?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Or was he paying you to do it?”

  “No, he paid me a hundred bucks to do it.”

  There was no money paid up front, according to Daniel, but he had been paid in full after he’d tattooed the whole outline and colored it in. He had wanted to “soup it up” a little by adding more red after it had healed enough, but Brian said he was happy the way it was. He’d finally agreed to have more color as Daniel recommended. That was to cost another fifty dollars.

  “When was the last time you saw Bev or Brian, or both of them?”

  “God, let me see—it’s been a few days.”

  “Try and think for me,” Benson urged. “See if you can pin it down.”

  Finally, Tavares said he thought it must have been in the middle of the preceding week. He and Brian had spoken as he turned into the driveway leading up to his trailer. “I asked him when he wanted to do the rest, but he told me he was so busy, had things to do. He was going to a birthday party, and maybe going hunting. He would call me and let me know.”

  Daniel said he hadn’t seen Bev for more than a week.

  Daniel Tavares was speaking in a more agitated way, his words tumbling over Ben Benson’s before the detective sergeant could complete his questions.

  Asked to describe the Maucks, he said, “Nice people. Good people. Good people. Good, good people. Drunks.”


  “They like their alcohol?” Benson asked, surprise in his voice.

  “Oh, they love their alcohol.”

  Tavares paused, and with a sanctimonious expression on his face, he offered that Bev often started fights in taverns and could be wild. That didn’t fit with what others had said about Bev Mauck.

  With what the Pierce County investigators had learned so far about Tavares’s drug and alcohol usage, he hardly seemed in a position to be painting the dead couple as “drunks” and worse. By now, the detectives had discovered that Tavares had bought at least four hits of meth within hours of the murders.

  Still, Ben Benson said nothing, more than “um-humm.” He could see that his subject believed that he was the one controlling the interview. That was fine with Benson.

  “Did Bev ever flirt with you—or anything like that?”

  “No…no.” Tavares seemed taken aback by the question. He was in full saintly mode, but Benson wondered if he had had lustful feelings for the pretty bride.

  Now Benson asked Tavares to go over his activities on Friday night, November 16. He had told other detectives that he and Jennifer were doing a puzzle together in their trailer. Yes, that was true, he said—but earlier on Friday evening they had been in Tacoma at a friend’s house.

  “Your wife was with you?” Ben Benson caught the disparity in Daniel’s story. She hadn’t been with him at the Roundup or when he took Carl Rider for a drive to smoke meth.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he lied now. “Well, she drives everywhere. I mean we are always together. So, yeah.”

  Tavares had talked his way into a dead end, and he struggled now to break out. He remembered that Jennifer wasn’t with him on Friday night, but he’d had to call her on his cell phone to ask where the spare tire to her Ford Explorer was after he discovered a flat tire. He’d struggled with the lug nuts, and that’s when he’d been attacked by her ex-boyfriend and another man, bruised and cut, and had another tire slashed.