Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  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 bot
tle 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.

  Chapter Six

  Detective Sergeant John O’Neil of the Somerset Police Department and Detective Lorraine Levy of the Massachusetts State Police joined forces to try to find some motive for Danny Tavares to kill his mother.

  Surprisingly, he was calm and cooperative as he was questioned shortly after 1:00 a.m., although he breathed, “Oh, God,” when he was told his mother was dead.

  The Massachusetts investigators learned he had recently been a patient at the Corrigan Mental Health Center and that he was taking many drugs—both legal and illegal. He claimed to have heard voices in his head, telling him to kill. He thought that had happened because Heather Tavares had told him that her sister, Stephanie, had dropped three hits of LSD into his White Russian. “Halfway home, I lost it,” he said. “I just started flipping out.”

  Asked why, Danny said he had been sexually abused by his mother and both of her lovers, beginning when he was eleven, and that he just couldn’t take it any longer.

  “I was being raped constantly, constantly.”

  “Who was raping you?” O’Neil asked.

  “John Latsis. It went on for a long time, till I moved to California in eighty-eight. I stayed out there for almost one year and moved back and it started happening again. Then my mom met this new boyfriend—Kristos—and he was making me have sex with my mom and him.

  “He said, ‘Go upstairs, I have a surprise for you for your birthday.’ My mom was tied on my bed, and he pulled out a gun and told me that if I don’t do her, he was going to shoot us both. And I was scared—so I did.”

  “Okay,” O’Neil said. “You lost it tonight when you got home. How did you lose it?”

  “I walked in the house and I went up to my room and my mom came upstairs and said, ‘Kristos wants us downstairs, so come down and get undressed,’ and I said, ‘For what?’ She said, ‘What do you think?’ and I said, ‘He’s got the gun out, doesn’t he?’ and she said, ‘Yes.’

  “So I knew what was going to happen. It flipped me out. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take it, [so] I stabbed her up.”

  Neither of the two detectives believed him, particularly when he moved easily to the familiar excuse many murderers use: “I blacked out.”

  Blacking out at the peak moment of a homicide is a ploy that rarely convinces detectives, jurors, or judges.

  Danny Tavares said he had started a blank audiotape going when he arrived home from the Kokomo. He needed it for his job as a DJ. So he was sure that all of that conversation about weird sex with his mother and her lover would be found on the tape.

  Despite his instructions, detectives would never locate that tape, if, indeed, there ever was one.

  Danny said he’d slit his wrists in a recent suicide attempt and that he had no control over his thoughts. He might be fine one minute and then a voice would tell him to jump off a bridge the next. He admitted that he was a “recovered addict” who had used cocaine and lots of Valium.

  O’Neil tended to believe the “addict” part but not the “recovered.”

  The prisoner’s tales of kinky sex continued and became more bizarre. He tripped himself up often. Even though John O’Neil and Lorraine Levy told him that a blood test could substantiate his story of being slipped acid, he refused many times.

  Finally, he agreed to urine and blood tests.

  There was no LSD in his system at all.

  There were traces of cocaine, but not enough to have impaired most subjects’ judgment. He seemed obsessed with sex and drugs, but the rest of his conversation was normal enough.

  Twenty-five-year-old Danny Tavares was charged with murder (matricide) and attempted murder and booked into jail.

  Detectives O’Neil and Levy talked with Stephanie and Heather Tavares and asked about Danny’s allegations that Stephanie had slipped LSD into his White Russian.

  “No way!” Stephanie said. “We were friends. Why would I want to do that?”

  “Maybe you were angry because he stole money from your wallet?” O’Neil asked.

  “No way! I don’t do drugs—I don’t believe in them.”

  “Did you see Danny drinking a White Russian?”

  “I only saw him drinking a beer.”

  Heather chimed in. “I never told him that Stephanie put anything in his drink. He’s lying.”

  The Somerset cop and the Massachusetts State Police trooper talked next with John Latsis, the victim’s former lover. He admitted that he was bisexual, although he had had a number of heterosexual relationships, including one with Ann Tavares.

  “Danny told us that you raped him,” O’Neil said.

  “I don’t believe he brought that up!” Latsis said. “Are you kidding me? That was ten years ago. It happened around 1980. I ‘raped’ him twice, but it wasn’t rape—it was ‘fondling.’”

  “What do you mean by ‘fondling’?” Lorraine Levy asked.

  “I was just rubbing his penis. Danny’s never mentioned it since.”

  John Latsis said he had pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent assault and battery to save Danny from embarrassment and served forty days in Bridgewater Hospital/ Prison.

  As Latsis casually explained the household setup, it certainly didn’t sound like Father Knows Best.

  “We’re all as close as family,” he said. “We have all always stayed close friends. In fact, Ann, Kristos, and I have lived together for eight or ten years. The three of us bought the house together.

  “It was cocaine that made Danny do this. He’s been off it for a while, but I guarantee he’s shooting coke.”

  When Sergeant O’Neil asked Latsis if, to his knowledge, Danny ever participated in sexual acts with his mother and Kristos, Latsis suddenly erupted. “Oh, my God,” he burst out, “he said that about Kristos and his mother? I’ll never forgive him. That woman was not promiscuous; she could go twenty years without sex.”

  Apparently, she hadn’t, but O’Neil made no comment. The entire household was one of the most bizarre he’d ever encountered.

  John Latsis also denied that there were any guns in the house, and he had never seen Kristos Lilles with a gun.

  Although Latsis admitted that he had molested teenage Danny, how much damage he had done was an open question. Latsis himself tried to slough it off as almost “normal.”

  A dozen years later, it would appear that Danny was spouting his own fantasies about sex, and that they had little basis in reality. Psychiatrists had ventured that it was quite probable that Danny had an Oedipus complex, a sexual fixation on his mother. She had raised him alone and spoiled him since he was a toddler.

  Theirs had, indeed, been an unusual household, but apparently it had limped along for a decade. Whether Danny Tavares’s claims of parental abuse were true was questionable. The Massachusetts investigators already had a lot of medical background on him that indicated he was addicted to cocaine and perhaps other illegally obtained drugs. Bruce Jillson had gathered up fourteen vials of psychiatric medications as he processed Danny’s attic “apartment.”

  Bristol County District Attorney Paul Walsh Jr. felt that the State could not prove that Danny Tavares, at age twenty-five, had a “sound mind.” Therefore, his charges were reduced to manslaughter, and he was allowed to plead guilty to that. He was sentenced to seventeen to twenty years in prison and moved to MCI–Cedar Junction in Walpole, Massachusetts’s maximum-security prison.

  He was not the prison staff’s favorite inmate. He quickly gravitated to the white supremacist group, and one of the corrections officers referred to Tavares as a “cell warrior,” who was always making trouble from behind the bars of his cell. Full of hate, he spat at guards who walked
by his cell and threw his urine and even feces on them. He made violent threats.

  He wrote threatening letters to public officials and his own family members. The Massachusetts State Police investigated Daniel Tavares’s intimidating letters to his father in Florida. He hated the older man. “He threatened to kill me,” Tavares Sr. said. “He said he’d come down here when he got out and break all my ribs and maim me.”

  Finally, Daniel Tavares was placed in Cedar Junction’s Departmental Disciplinary Unit, a prison enclosed within another prison. He was housed there longer than any other inmate—more than seven years. And he lost “good time” again and again because of his refusal to abide by prison rules. In the end, he spent more time in isolation than all but a few convicts at Cedar Junction and lost a thousand hours of good time. He could have been released almost three years earlier than he was.

  But there was an instance when Daniel Tavares did cooperate with Massachusetts authorities. Ben Benson’s eyes widened as he read about another connection between Tavares and violent death.

  Two decades ago—in 1988—still unsolved cases of serial murder had occurred in and around New Bedford, Massachusetts. On July 3, a woman who had stopped to pick wildflowers along Route 140 stumbled over a skeleton in a woodland clearing. The desiccated remains were later identified as Debra Medeiros, twenty-nine, of Fall River. Over the next nine months, the bodies of eight more women were found alongside Bristol County highways. The serial murders became known as “the Highway Killings.”

  Like many other vulnerable targets who fall victim to serial killers, the dead women had all spent time in Weld Square, a section of New Bedford known for prostitution. Reportedly, they were all dependent upon illegal drugs.

  There have been a few prime suspects; one committed suicide three years after the first body was discovered, and another was charged with murder, but the charges were eventually dropped.

  Although the Highway Killings were never connected directly to Danny Tavares, the victims lived in the same area and shared the same addiction to drugs.