Mortal Danger (23 page)

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 at
tempt 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.

Another unsolved murder case in the Fall River–New Bedford area in 1988 has so many connections to Tavares that it is almost incomprehensible that he was not charged with murder.

On October 27, 1988, pretty, dark-eyed Gayle Botelho, thirty-two, vanished from her home. Hers was the kind of disappearance that couldn’t have happened—and yet it did.

Gayle lived at 114 Prospect Street in Fall River with her fiancé and one of her three children. At 4:30 p.m., she answered a knock on the door of their second-floor apartment
and called back to her boyfriend that she was leaving to talk to someone (a man) and she’d be gone about five minutes.

She didn’t come back.

Seeing that she had left behind her purse, money, all of her sweaters and jackets, her fiancé was concerned. It was close to Halloween, and the weather was chilly at night. When she didn’t return for several hours, he called the police. Everyone in the Fall River area was jittery because of the Highway Killer’s victims, and although Gayle really didn’t fit the victim profile, her case was treated seriously from the beginning.

Gayle was the middle child among seven sisters and two brothers in a family that had lived in Fall River for generations, and they missed her dearly. Waiting year after year for Gayle or her body to be found was agonizing for them.

Danny Tavares had been in prison for nine years in early September 2000, when he sent a kite (a prison note) to the Massachusetts State Police telling them that he could locate Gayle Botelho’s body. It was probably a ruse, or possibly he was planning an escape once he got outside the walls.

Nevertheless, the state police paid attention.

In mid-October, Gayle’s onetime neighbors noticed police detectives going in and out of the basement of a large two-story house across from her old apartment. They were there for hours, and when they left quietly, they carried a number of articles. That didn’t seem like prime gossip, but what happened next did.

The residents on Prospect Street watched curiously as
state troopers and deputies from the state medical examiner’s office erected a tent in the backyard of the two-story house at 314 June Street. Although the houses fronted on different streets, the tent where the troopers were digging was directly across the street from the apartment where Gayle Botelho had last been seen.

The crew from the state police had a dog with them—a necrosearch dog trained to sniff out human remains.

What no one knew at the time was the identity of the tipster who had told the troopers where to dig: Daniel Tavares. Furthermore, in 1988, the house on June Street had been the home of Ann and Danny Tavares, and Kristos Lilles. This was where they lived just before they bought the house with John Latsis in Somerset. Gayle vanished almost exactly three years before Danny stabbed his mother to death.

With the necrosearch dog’s signals, they focused their digging next to a brick outdoor barbecue that was built against a wall that separated the Tavareses’ former backyard from the driveway of the house next door.

They were extremely careful as they dug. It had been a dozen years, and they used small tools, their gloved hands, and brushes to remove soil. If Gayle lay near the outdoor hearth, her body would have long since gone back to earth, leaving only delicate bones. They hoped to find other items and artifacts in the ground, too—perhaps some they could connect to a killer.

She was there, not far at all below the surface. For all those icy Northeast winters and simmering summers, Gayle Botelho had lain within seventy feet of where her fiancé waited for her to come home.

An autopsy and X-rays officially identified her body. The cause of death? Stab wounds. There were enough defects on her bones to indicate where a knife had plunged in, even though her soft tissue had disappeared many years earlier.

At the time Gayle’s fate was discovered, Bristol County District Attorney Paul Walsh—the DA who had accepted Danny’s plea bargain to have his mother’s stabbing death lowered from murder to manslaughter—did not reveal who the tipster was.

Danny told investigators that he, Gayle, and two “acquaintances” of his had attended “some wild party.” He said the other two men had stabbed Gayle to death, while he was only an observer.

At the time, he would have been twenty-one or twenty-two, and he already had a history of drug use and theft.

Given his tendency to embroider the truth, most detectives would have suspected Tavares of Gayle’s murder, as well as those of the other nine victims of the Highway Killer
and
two subsequent suspicious deaths of similar female victims that had come to light.