Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  He admitted he’d never seen his wife’s ex-boyfriend before, but he knew his name was Eddie. He thought he would recognize a photo of Eddie. Now he added another person on the scene of the attack. Some young kid from a bar had come over to ask if he was okay.

  “I’m like, ‘No, I’m all set,’ and he just got in his car and left.”

  His assailants had given him a message: “It would be good advice for you to leave Jennifer.”

  The more he talked, the more Daniel Tavares was making things worse for himself. He said he’d been attacked about eight to eight thirty, but Carl Rider had seen him last just after midnight on Friday night–Saturday morning and he had no bruises or cuts then. The details he kept inserting into his story warred with what he had told the sheriff’s staff and his brother-in-law earlier.

  Didn’t he know that every time he gave a statement it had been preserved either on tape or in investigative notes?

  Now, to add to the mysterious red truck, he recalled that a green and silver truck had been parked in the Maucks’ driveway when he drove past, heading up the road to the Freitas property at 8:40 p.m. on Friday, inching along on two flattened tires. He told Ben Benson that he had replaced the tires but thought he could find the slashed and punctured tires somewhere on Jeff’s acreage.

  “Okay,” Benson said. “This was about eight thirty. Did you leave again that night?”

  “No. My wife told me, ‘Look what I got,’ and she showed me she picked up a puzzle at Goodwill. So we started, and it was like, ‘Oh man, let’s do this.’ It was a real nice puzzle.”

  The puzzle that they’d allegedly worked on together was the image of a wolf. Except for the animal’s penetrating and unfathomable yellow eyes, the rest of the evening sounded as benign and cozy as newlyweds at home could be.

  Unless he was lying.

  Nothing matched the facts or Daniel Tavares’s earlier statements. He had said that the Mauck house was completely dark when he got home at 8:30 p.m., but both their cars were there so he knew they were home. Besides, the Freitas dogs always barked when someone outside the family drove up. And they hadn’t barked.

  Benson knew the Maucks weren’t home; they’d been out to dinner with Brian’s parents. Both of their vehicles could not have been there around 8:30 on Friday night.

  Daniel said that he and Jennifer had worked on the puzzle for a few hours. A few minutes later, he estimated they had gone to bed at three or four in the morning. That was six or seven hours after he said he came home. Another slip.

  Then he said they had had intercourse because they both wanted to have a baby. He’d gone to sleep about four and wakened shortly after seven when he heard the gunshots. One more slip. Both he and Jennifer had stated they were not asleep, but making love, when they heard the shots.

  And this time, Daniel remembered that the dogs had “gone crazy” at the same time…and that’s when he looked out and saw the “big, greasy-lookin’ dude” down at Brian and Bev’s.

  Now he gave an even more exact description of the driver. He’d had on a red hat, but it was a baseball cap. He “walked kind of funny. His shoulders were hunched up so high that it looked like he didn’t have a neck.”

  Daniel said he hadn’t called the sheriff because he wasn’t sure just where the gunshots were coming from, and Jennifer told him not to worry about it, that it was probably just duck hunters.

  He had rolled over and gone back to sleep for a couple of hours.

  Later that morning, he’d called the fire department because he’d had a fire under his fifth-wheel RV that was parked out in a nearby field. Daniel said he was repairing it for him and Jennifer to live in, and he’d accidentally set fire to the flashing near where part of the floor needed replacing. “I heated it a little too much, and it [the rubber flashing] caught on fire, and it dripped into the dry grass under the trailer. It just made a lot of smoke.”

  This was well before his brother-in-law had discovered the Maucks’ murders. Benson and Catey wondered what else Tavares might have been burning. Bloodied clothing? A weapon?

  Ben Benson asked about Daniel Tavares’s prison time, and he said he was in for manslaughter. At least that was the truth.

  “Somebody told me that they thought they saw that you’d been sentenced for fourteen years, but you served seventeen. So they thought maybe you had problems while you were in prison, ’cause your time had been extended?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Tavares said easily. “I lost good time. I lost statutory good time…for fighting.”

  Benson was just as casual. He knew Tavares had been inside the walls on a manslaughter charge, but he didn’t know who the victim was yet—or the circumstances of that crime back in 1991. He was waiting for Tavares’s complete case file to be sent from Massachusetts. Daniel volunteered that he’d lost his good time for assaulting a corrections officer.

  “Now you’re squared away—living a good life, huh?”

  “Trying. I mean, I’m sure you must know what I was in prison for?”

  “I just heard it was manslaughter,” Benson said. “What were you in prison for?”

  “I killed the person who molested my child.”

  “How’d you kill ’em?” Benson’s voice was calmer than he felt, but he didn’t want to put Tavares on guard.

  “Stabbed ’em. It was a her. Family member.”

  “What kind of a family member?”

  “My mother.”

  “You killed your mother?” For the moment, Ben Benson couldn’t hide his shock. This casual and cooperative man in front of him had just admitted killing his own mother! Benson regained his composure before Tavares even noticed how astounded he was.

  Daniel explained that he had killed his mother for molesting his daughter, back in 1991 in Massachusetts.

  “Well, that’s too bad,” Benson said carefully. “That’s not good for anyone to go through.”

  “Well, I made it through, you know. I made it.”

  He sounded as if he expected a medal for his bravery.

  Detective Tom Catey had a few questions to ask Daniel. The tattooed parolee had made it sound as if he and Brian Mauck were close friends, and that he and Jennifer and Brian and Beverly had often mingled socially. But, under Catey’s close questioning, he finally admitted that he had visited their home only three times—once when he and Jennifer were “invited down” to see the Maucks’ house, once to start work on Brian’s tattoo, and the third time when Brian asked him to ride motorcycles with him—lending one of his own bikes to Daniel.

  These visits had begun in mid-October, only a month before. Tavares insisted that he and Jennifer had been invited to Brian’s birthday party, but they’d had another engagement that night. All of the poker games had taken place at Jeff and Kristel Freitas’s home.

  Daniel and Jennifer lived in a cluttered, crowded little travel trailer with what looked like hand-me-down furniture, and they had to take showers at her brother’s or her parents’ mobile homes. Their only income was the hundred dollars a day that Jeff paid Daniel. Even though he didn’t say it, it was obvious that the ex-prisoner from Massachusetts was envious of the home the Maucks shared and the life they lived.

  But was it enough to spark murder?

  There in the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department interview room, the first tape ran out at a quarter to midnight. They took a break. Both Benson and Catey were stunned by the news that this seemingly easygoing man had stabbed his own mother to death. His affect and his attitude didn’t jibe with what he had done.

  If he could kill his mother, he probably was capable of killing neighbors he hardly knew.

  They had the matching shoe prints. They had the palm print that matched the print in blood on the interior door at the Maucks’ home. They had caught him in lie after lie, and they had witnesses who could refute his statements. In essence, they had him.

  Their main question was Why? And what, if any, was Jennifer’s part in the cruel crime? She appeared to be besotted with her tatto
oed bridegroom, and they suspected she would have done just about anything he asked of her.

  Ben Benson put in a fresh tape and they continued.

  “At this point,” Benson said to the man across the table from him, “we’ve got evidence to arrest you for the murder of Brian and Beverly.”

  “What?” Daniel Tavares had thought he was doing so well, completely snowing the two detectives.

  Benson continued. “And one of the reasons that we’ve talked to you kind of extensively here initially is because we know the answers to these questions that we’ve asked you, and we know that a lot of what you’ve told us are lies. Now, that being said, we’ve got some things here and hopefully you’re gonna be man enough to stand up here and talk to us. Do some damage control. Here’s what we think….”

  Benson told Daniel that he was going to be arrested for two murders, and, with his background, he was probably going to prison for the rest of his life.

  “I’d just as soon not see Jennifer go down with you,” he continued. “I think we’ve also got evidence that she was in the house—”

  “We were all in the house,” Daniel blurted. “That day when I tattooed—”

  “Like I said, we’ve got evidence that you were in the house when the murders happened.”

  “That’s impossible. I was in bed.”

  Chapter Four

  Daniel Tavares protested that he had never kicked the door panel in, or done anything with the front door’s locks. Then he added that he really had seen a red truck there, and he thought the occupants had kicked the door in. His next fantasy lie was that he’d met someone to whom he was to give the gun back, and that man had been driving a small white truck! That made a red truck, a white truck, and a green truck that were allegedly involved in the execution of the Maucks.

  If it hadn’t been so tragic, his rambling lies might have been funny. But the detectives knew far too much for Daniel Tavares to be a convincing liar. They had the tapes from Ma’s and Pa’s Roundup, showing him in the crowd. They knew he’d joined up with Carl Rider, and that they’d smoked marijuana and meth. They knew when the tires of Jennifer’s Ford Explorer had been slashed, and they knew that there had never been any trucks with chrome roll bars in the Maucks’ driveway.

  It was Daniel Tavares’s turn to be shocked. “Things are out of control here,” he protested, as Benson and Catey pointed out the physical evidence they had that placed him inside the Maucks’ home when they were killed.

  Benson asked again if Jennifer was involved.

  “She’s not involved. Jennifer’s not involved at all.”

  “Okay,” Benson said. “Tell us what happened.”

  “It was a hired thing,” Tavares said faintly.

  “Who hired you?”

  “Somebody that don’t like them.” Their subject was obviously scurrying frantically around his brain, trying to find something that would convince them he’d acted under duress, something that would save him from facing the death penalty. He insisted he couldn’t tell them who had hired him to kill the Maucks. “My whole family would be killed. I can’t do that.”

  Since his mother was already dead—thanks to him—the detectives wondered what family he was talking about. Jennifer? Jeff and Kristel Freitas, who were already scared to death of him?

  He was slowly beginning to confess, but he couldn’t recall when he’d gone over to the Maucks’ house. He’d been high “on weed.” He refused to discuss exactly what had happened, but he was adamant that Jennifer “didn’t have nothing to do with it. Nothing.”

  “Does she know? Did you tell her what happened?”

  Tavares refused to answer. He changed the subject to say he was supposed to get paid $20,000 to carry out the double murder.

  “Did you get money up front?” Benson asked.

  “No.”

  “What kind of hit man doesn’t get something up front?”

  “A stupid one,” Tavares answered glumly. And he might have been right on target there. No, he hadn’t taken any pictures of the bodies to show to the people who had hired him.

  There had been two shoe prints in blood. One matched Daniel’s shoes, and the other was a mystery. They thought it could be Jennifer’s—but her husband kept insisting she’d never been to the death site. He was trying to protect her and to build on his story of being a gun for hire—but the people behind it all were the ones who gave him the gun and the ammunition. He couldn’t recall what kind of gun it was, not even the caliber. No, he didn’t know where Jennifer’s .22 handgun was.

  “We know you left after you shot Brian,” Ben Benson said. “And that you came back at some point later on?”

  He admitted that he’d been away from the Maucks’ home for only five minutes—he’d gone up near the barn to wash his hands. But he’d always been alone. After the shooting, he said he’d given the gun back to those conspiring to kill Brian and Beverly Mauck.

  The detectives had tended to believe that the young couple were killed sometime in the wee hours of Friday night–Saturday morning. But Daniel Tavares said he had gone to their house in the morning, after it was light out. Brian had been sitting on the couch, and Daniel said he’d told him what the “people” wanted him to say:

  “‘Brian, listen,’ I said. ‘You owe a lot of money and this has to be done.’ That was it. I shot him.”

  The confessed murderer said that he’d shot Brian in the side of the head first, and then again when he slumped over and fell onto the floor.

  Bev had come running from some room in the back of the house. He had shot her “at close range” as she ran toward the front door.

  She had almost made it.

  “Okay,” Benson said evenly. “Did you physically grab her?”

  “Yeah. By the hair.”

  “Did you rape her?”

  “No.”

  “’Cause you know, we’re gonna find that out.”

  “No.”

  “There was no sexual assault?”

  “No.”

  It was clear that Bev Mauck had tried desperately to get away from Daniel Tavares, to get outside where she could hide or scream for help. But she was a very small woman and he was the “gorilla.” How many times he’d shot her, he didn’t know. He remembered grabbing her by the foot—after he shot her—and dragging her over near Brian’s body. He also recalled that she was nude. He didn’t know why, but he’d covered them both up with the blue blankets.

  Sometime later he had come back to the house to make sure that nothing was out of place.

  Everything was out of place, and the two murder victims lay in their own blood. Benson thought he had covered them up so he wouldn’t have to look at what he had done.

  For some bizarre reason, Daniel said he had attempted to sweep up the blood. They already knew that.

  “Were you trying to get rid of your shoe prints?”

  “No,” Tavares answered. “I didn’t even know I left shoe prints.”

  The suspect said he’d felt as if he “wasn’t really there.” He blamed it on the antipsychotic meds that he’d just begun taking again: Buspar, Klonopin, Effexor, and Seroquel.

  (Pill bottles with prescription labels would be found when a search warrant gave detectives permission to go into the Tavareses’ small trailer. One was to treat seizures, and the rest were for anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder.)

  Add alcohol, marijuana, and meth, and the detectives saw why he might have felt as if he wasn’t there. But that didn’t make him innocent. Diminished capacity doesn’t fly as a defense. Daniel Tavares had used illegal drugs along with prescribed antipsychotic drugs and alcohol of his own free will. And his brain had spun evil scenarios.

  But why?

  He still claimed he’d been hired to carry out two hits. Somehow, Jennifer had known what happened, but he couldn’t remember how she knew.

  Ben Benson pointed out that it didn’t make him less guilty because he’d been hired to kill, and he agreed that he knew that. He had
n’t returned the gun to the actual conspirators but had given it to a mutual friend. “I was told I’d be getting a call. And I haven’t got no call—”

  “I don’t believe that happened,” Benson interrupted. “You’ve been to prison. You’ve been around the block.”

  The detective sergeant suggested once again that “an obvious smart guy” like Tavares wouldn’t carry out a hit without having some money up front and without getting a guarantee that he was going to get more money. “You’re not gonna go kill two people and then sit around and wait for the phone to ring…. That doesn’t make sense,” Benson said. “I don’t know if Brian owed you money for the tattoo and he didn’t pay. What was the real reason?”

  “I wouldn’t do that for a hundred-dollar tattoo.”

  Daniel finally admitted that he had told Jennifer what he had done, and that she “kind of freaked out.”

  But she definitely hadn’t helped him clean off his shoes or wash his clothing. He’d been wearing a gray hoodie with Sylvester, the cartoon cat, on it, and a pair of jeans. They wondered how he could have walked away from the Maucks’ home without blood on his clothes or himself.

  They didn’t believe him. There was too much bloodshed in the house for him to have escaped getting it splashed on himself. But they hadn’t located any bloody clothing. Somehow, he had to have gotten rid of it.

  Tom Catey had some questions of his own, wondering just where Daniel had met the person who wanted Brian Mauck killed. Tavares continued to be cagey, insisting that he had shot Brian only because he owed “some guy” a lot of money over gambling. He’d met a friend of the real instigator at the Roundup; the arrangements for cold-blooded murder had all taken place through him.

  The in-between man had recognized that Tavares had several prison tattoos and questioned him about his past. The stranger then mentioned that a man who owed big gambling debts lived close to Tavares. He named Brian Mauck as the man who hadn’t paid the loan shark. That had been about six weeks before.