Daniel Tavares Jr. has been convicted of killing four people in two states over nineteen years. In 1988 a neighbor in Fall River, Massachusetts, a mother of three named Gayle Botelho, vanished; her body lay in the backyard of the house where he lived until he told police where to dig, twelve years later. In 1991 he stabbed his mother to death and pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Released in 2007 at the end of that sentence, he flew to Washington State, married a woman he had met through a prison pen-pal service, and four months later shot and killed a young married couple who lived nearby, Brian and Beverly Mauck. He pleaded guilty to their murders and was sentenced to life without parole.
Two questions run through the case. The first is how a man with his prison record came to be free in 2007, a failure that drew criticism of the Massachusetts prison system and its courts during a presidential campaign. The second is how the Botelho killing, which prosecutors had declined to charge in 2000, was finally solved. The answer to the second lies partly in a book about the Mauck case, a note left in a prison library, and a woman who decided she would no longer give him an alibi.
Few details of Tavares's childhood appear in the sources. His parents separated in 1968, and his mother, Ann Marie Tavares, raised him and his three older sisters on her own; she worked as a laundromat manager, The Boston Globe reported in 2007. He was the youngest of the four children. According to the Globe, he suffered from bipolar disorder and anxiety attacks. He had served jail time for robbery and had entered drug rehabilitation to avoid more, but was expelled for stealing and drug use. The Seattle Times later reported that the program he was thrown out of was a drug-rehab center in Florida, and that the Pasco County Sheriff's Office in Florida had wanted him since September 1990 for contempt of court. His father, Daniel Tavares Sr., described him to reporters as a cocaine addict with a psychotic personality who had threatened to kill him.
Gayle Botelho was 32 in the fall of 1988. She had three young children and eight brothers and sisters. Her daughter Heather was four years old when she disappeared. Botelho lived on Prospect Street in Fall River with her boyfriend and his brother. Tavares lived across the street with his mother and a friend of hers, Richard Pires, in a house on June Street.
Her family would wait twenty-seven years for a verdict. Her mother died before anyone was charged. At the sentencing in 2015, one of her daughters, Tiffany Schneider, said her own children had missed out on knowing a grandmother who would have been among the most special people in their lives. Her sister Jocelyn Walton told the court that Gayle had been a human being who was loved.
On or about October 27, 1988, Botelho told her roommate she was stepping out of her apartment for a few minutes. She did not come back. With no body and no arrest, she was treated for years as a likely missing person, the Globe reported.
The account the jury eventually accepted came from Tavares himself, in confessions given in 2012 and 2013 and summarized by the Supreme Judicial Court. He said he had been angry because Botelho and others had stolen cocaine from him, and he wanted them to sell cocaine to repay the debt. He lured her to his bedroom. He tried to shoot her, but the gun jammed, and he stabbed her several times. He buried her in the backyard. He later told Richard Pires that he had stabbed her seven or eight times, removed her clothes, buried her face down and cut a section out of his bedroom rug. According to the court, those details had never been made public.
Other people saw signs at the time. Lori Moniz, then his girlfriend, later told police that in late October 1988 she saw him scrubbing blood from his bedroom rug; he told her it was fake blood for a Halloween joke. A man who was then his roommate told police he had seen blood on Tavares's shirt in the washing machine, a pool of blood on the basement floor, and a pitchfork and shovel by the basement door to the backyard, where he had never seen garden tools before.
On July 11, 1991, Tavares stabbed his mother, Ann Tavares, 46, at her home in Somerset, Massachusetts. The Globe reported that he stabbed her at least 15 times with a 12-inch knife; The Seattle Times described the weapon as a carving knife. A man from a nearby apartment who tried to intervene was also stabbed. He survived and is not named here. Tavares told police he "just started swinging." He said he had been hearing voices and had been drinking and taking LSD, and police found 14 vials of psychiatric medication in his room. James M. Smith, the former Somerset police chief, later told the Globe: "To me, it was definitely homicide."
The Bristol County district attorney, Paul F. Walsh Jr., accepted a plea to manslaughter. Walsh explained that prosecutors would have had to prove that Tavares was of sound mind, and that his mental illness raised the possibility that a jury would find him not criminally responsible. Tavares pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 17 to 20 years. His sentence began in June 1992, according to the Associated Press.
Tavares's time in Massachusetts prisons was violent. The Globe counted more than 100 serious disciplinary complaints. Guards said he spat at them, threw feces and urine, and made violent threats. From 1999 until shortly before his release he was locked alone in his cell 23 hours a day, and he spent more than seven years in the Departmental Disciplinary Unit at MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole, a unit the Globe described as a prison within a prison. He was turned down for early release on June 28, 2002, and twice more by 2005. In 2006 he wrote threatening letters to Governor Mitt Romney, to his father and to others; State Police investigated, but prosecutors concluded he could not be charged because, as a prisoner, he had no means of carrying out the threats. His father said the threats stopped only after he complained to corrections officials. In a 2004 interview with the Globe, Tavares asked: "How many times can you kick a dog before he bites back?"
He lost more than 1,000 days of good-time credit for his conduct. He could have lost more. An Associated Press review after the Washington killings found that hearing officers had recommended stripping 780 days for six violent incidents between 1993 and 2005, but no paperwork explained why five of those cases were never acted on. In one, in 2003, officials recommended taking away 300 days after he was accused of threatening staff, but a prison superintendent missed the 60-day filing deadline and the request had to be rejected. Because of these lapses he kept nearly a year of good time and completed his sentence on June 14, 2007. Harold Clarke, who became correction commissioner that November, told the AP: "He would have still been incarcerated. We are very dismayed. He was violent."
In 2000, while serving the manslaughter sentence, Tavares offered police information about a body in exchange for a shorter sentence. He later said he had come forward because he had found God and wanted to clear his conscience. According to the Supreme Judicial Court, his sentence was never reduced and he was never paroled for the information.
His first account was that the brother of Botelho's boyfriend had stabbed her while Tavares was away, and that this man and a friend had buried her in the backyard of the June Street house. He said his girlfriend, Michelle Cardoza, had been with him outside for ten or fifteen minutes that night. In October 2000 police went to the house. They found a bloodstained section of floor in his old bedroom and a human skeleton in the backyard, which they identified as Gayle Botelho. The medical examiner found that she had died of homicidal violence, including stab wounds to the back. Tavares later described the night to police as a "wild party" at which she died.
Walsh declined to charge anyone. Tavares had named two other men, and there was no evidence to contradict him; Walsh did not charge them either, because the case would have rested on the word of a man who had already admitted a killing. "Your whole case is based on his words," Walsh told the Globe. He believed Tavares had not killed her. In 2002 Tavares changed his story, saying he had watched the other man stab her. That same year Cardoza told Detective John McDonald that she had lied about being with Tavares that night, at his request. Still no one was charged, and the case went cold again.
On June 11, 2007, days before Tavares was due to walk out, prosecutors filed charges accusing him of assaulting two prison guards. The Globe reported that on December 1, 2005, he had allegedly slammed a guard in the face with a cast on his hand, and that about three months later he had allegedly spat on another. A district judge set bail at $100,000. Tavares appealed. At a hearing on July 16, 2007, in Worcester Superior Court, Judge Kathe M. Tuttman released him on personal recognizance in less than ten minutes, according to the Globe, with his lawyer doing most of the talking. She required him to report to probation, which he did once. As a defendant on a pending charge, he was not supposed to leave Massachusetts. Corrections officials had also failed to transfer him to Florida on the outstanding warrant there.
On July 19 he flew from T.F. Green Airport in Rhode Island to Seattle. While at Walpole he had posted an advertisement on an internet prison pen-pal service, describing himself as a large, tattooed man who liked poetry, guitar and working out. Through it he met Jennifer Lynn Freitas. They married near Tacoma on July 30, 2007, and moved into a camper-trailer on her brother's property in Graham, a rural community in Pierce County, a few doors from Brian and Beverly Mauck. Massachusetts did not promptly tell Washington authorities that he had moved there, the Seattle Times reported.
Brian Mauck was 30. He grew up in the Federal Way area, played football and baseball at Decatur High School, and went on to Pierce Community College and Western Washington University. He came home, served a refrigeration apprenticeship and became a journeyman refrigeration technician with Emerald Aire, an air-conditioning company in Auburn, where he worked for eight years. Friends remembered his loud voice, his smile and his appetite for adventure, and he held season tickets for the Seattle Seahawks.
Beverly Mauck was 28. Her family moved to the area when she was nine. As a girl she refused to wear dresses and played on boys' teams; as a teenager she worked at a skating rink, Pattison's West Skating Center, and hoped to become a competitive speed skater until a car accident injured her back. She worked at a car dealership. Her father said their relationship had begun as a teenage romance.
They married in May 2006 and honeymooned in the Turks and Caicos Islands. They spent their free time scuba diving, traveling and riding motorcycles. Friends called them "the great American couple." Her mother, Karen Slater, said later that her greatest regret was that they would never have the children they had hoped for.
On the evening of November 16, 2007, Tavares was twice thrown out of Ma and Pa's Roundup, a bar in Graham. The manager, Justin Greenwood, told the Globe that Tavares had bragged about crystal methamphetamine, ties to the Mafia and killing three people in Boston. "He didn't belong here," Greenwood said.
At about seven the next morning, a Saturday, Tavares went to the Maucks' house. He told investigators he went to collect $50 he believed Brian owed him for a tattoo. According to charging papers, he kicked in the door. Brian insulted him, and Tavares shot him with a .22-caliber handgun, using a hand towel to muffle the sound, then shot him again as he lay on the floor. Beverly tried to flee and was shot. Tavares covered both of them with a blanket; he later said he had done so because he "respected them."
Around 11 a.m. Jennifer Tavares's brother, Jeffrey Freitas, noticed that a large panel was missing from the Maucks' front door. When he could not reach the couple by phone he went in, found them and called police.
On November 18 Tavares and his wife went to the sheriff's office as witnesses. Investigators had found bloody shoe prints and a bloody palm print in the house, and detectives seized shoes from Tavares whose treads matched. He was booked into the Pierce County Jail early on Monday, November 19, and was charged the next day with two counts of aggravated first-degree murder, which could carry the death penalty in Washington, and one count of unlawful firearm possession as a felon. He admitted the killings but gave shifting reasons. "There will never be a motive. There is no reason behind it," said Ed Troyer, the sheriff's spokesman. The chief criminal deputy prosecutor, Gerald T. Costello, said the debt story was one of several and that he was taking Tavares's statements with a grain of salt.
Jennifer Tavares, 37, was charged with rendering criminal assistance for lying to investigators to protect him. She later admitted that she had also driven him to Point Defiance so he could get rid of the gun. She pleaded guilty and in March 2008 Judge Vicki Hogan of Pierce County Superior Court sentenced her to a year in jail.
Within days, Tavares's release became national news. Beverly's father, Darrel Slater, told the Boston Herald: "It's because of stupidity in Massachusetts that my daughter is dead." Romney, by then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, had appointed Tuttman to the bench, and he called on her to resign. She declined to comment. The chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, Margaret Marshall, and the chief justice for administration and management, Robert Mulligan, defended her in a joint statement, writing that "the public vilification of a conscientious and hardworking judge should have no place in our society." Two judges from other states, Steve Leben of Kansas and Kevin S. Burke of Minnesota, wrote in The Seattle Times that she appeared to have weighed the factors Massachusetts law required. A Seattle Times editorial reported that the prosecutor had chosen not to seek a hearing at which evidence of Tavares's dangerousness could be presented.
Worcester County's district attorney, Joseph D. Early Jr., said his office had not known of Tavares's threats. "We did our job," he said. The state's public safety secretary, Kevin Burke, said officials were appalled by the good-time lapses and would move to end the 60-day rule, and the state began reviewing the records of 750 prisoners admitted before 1994. Thomas Hodgson, the Bristol County sheriff, said the failures were systemic within the Department of Correction.
Pierce County prosecutors had a month to decide whether to seek death. Instead, in February 2008, Tavares pleaded guilty in Pierce County Superior Court in Tacoma to murdering the Maucks and to being a felon in possession of a firearm. He received two consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole and gave up his right to appeal. He did not speak in court. In his written plea he said he was "ashamed then and ashamed now."
Brian's sister, Jennifer Heilbrun, told him she forgave him. "Today, sir, I forgive you, and may God have mercy on your soul," she said. Karen Slater said her family might push for a law requiring notice when dangerous offenders move across state lines, but that their first wish was to look at photographs and remember how happy the couple had been. Hundreds had attended the couple's memorial at the Federal Way Community Center, many wearing Seahawks jerseys for Brian. "They lived, they laughed and they loved," Heilbrun said.
The Mauck killings were written about in a true-crime book, Mortal Danger, by Ann Rule, which discussed his cooperation with police in the Botelho case. Tavares's appellate lawyer later told the Supreme Judicial Court that the book appeared in 2012 and was kept in the library of the Washington prison where Tavares was held, and that once it circulated, word spread that he was an informant.
In 2012 another prisoner told the Fall River police about a note that Tavares had left in a library book. In it, Tavares denied ever cooperating with police and called himself the only suspect, not a "rat." In the same year, according to the Bristol County district attorney, C. Samuel Sutter, a woman who had once given Tavares an alibi gave police a different account. Sutter did not name her, but he called her new account "the spark" for the work of his cold-case squad and the Fall River police.
In November 2012 Detective McDonald traveled to Washington to see Tavares. This time Tavares said he alone had killed Gayle Botelho, describing the stolen cocaine, the bedroom, the jammed gun, the stabbing and the burial. He said he blamed the other two men in 2000 because they had benefited from the stolen drugs. He said he was confessing only because of the book and because he did not want to be seen as a rat.
In February 2013 he confessed again, in writing, to Pires, to McDonald and to Cardoza. He told Pires he had to "take them out" and that he "did [the crime] alone." He wrote to Cardoza admitting that he had asked her to lie for him and telling her not to lie for him anymore. He also confessed to Moniz and to a neighbor.
A Bristol County grand jury indicted Tavares for murder on March 28, 2013, and Sutter announced the charge on April 8. Investigators had searched several states and Portugal for leads over the years without enough evidence to indict, he said. Heather Brogan, then 29, said she thought about her mother all the time. "I'm glad it's finally come," she said. Botelho's sister Beverly Sousa said she had always had hope.
Tavares was returned from Washington in September 2013. On September 9, appearing in shackles in Fall River Superior Court, he pleaded not guilty and was held without bail.
His trial began on November 16, 2015, before Judge Gary A. Nickerson. The defense did not dispute that Tavares was a dangerous man; his lawyer, Christopher Belezos, told the jury his client was not a good person. But Belezos argued that the confessions were false, made to escape the label of informant, and that Tavares had led police to the body in 2000 hoping to get out of prison early. "If it wasn't enough to charge him in 2002, it's certainly not enough to convict him in 2015," he said. The defense called an expert who testified about the danger of being seen as a rat in prison. Tavares had said he would testify, but when the time came he stayed in his seat.
The jury deliberated for about four hours over two days. On December 1, 2015, it found him guilty of first-degree murder on theories of deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty. The sentence was mandatory: life without parole, to begin after the Washington sentences. Tavares laughed when the verdict was read, Beverly Sousa said. When Heather Brogan called him a rat in her victim impact statement, he shouted back at her: "This rat let you know where she was, are you serious?" The district attorney, Thomas M. Quinn III, said he hoped the verdict gave the family some closure and that Tavares should never be released.
Tavares appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court. His lawyer, Theodore F. Riordan, argued in January 2020 that the jury should have been told more about why a prisoner might falsely confess. "It was the only way he could spare his life and not be killed in prison as an informant," Riordan said. He also argued that the judge should have instructed the jury that evidence equally consistent with guilt and innocence cannot prove guilt, and that the evidence was not enough to convict.
On May 6, 2020, the court unanimously affirmed the conviction in Commonwealth v. Tavares, 484 Mass. 650, in an opinion by Justice David A. Lowy. It held that the rule Tavares relied on is a standard for judges deciding whether evidence is sufficient, not an instruction for juries. It found the evidence far from evenly balanced. Beyond the confessions, it pointed to the bloodstained bedroom floor, the burial in his own backyard, Moniz's account of the scrubbed rug, the roommate's account of the blood and the garden tools, and the details of the burial that only the killer could have known. "The weight of the Commonwealth's evidence in this case was overwhelming," Lowy wrote, adding that the jury "were free, but not required, to believe that the defendant truthfully confessed to murdering the victim." The court found no reason to reduce the verdict or order a new trial.
In May 2020 a Washington Department of Corrections spokeswoman told the Globe that Tavares was serving his sentence at the Monroe Correctional Complex's Washington State Reformatory Unit in Monroe, Washington. When the department's public search of people in its custody was checked on October 19, 2026, it did not list him. No court record, official release or news report found for this account explains whether he has been moved to another state's custody or what his status is now. He is serving three sentences of life without parole, two in Washington and one in Massachusetts.
Proven by final conviction: the murder of Gayle Botelho (jury verdict, affirmed on appeal), the manslaughter of his mother (guilty plea) and the murders of Brian and Beverly Mauck (guilty pleas, appeal waived).
Contested by Tavares: the Botelho conviction. His defense was that the confessions of 2012 and 2013 were false and given to protect himself in prison. The jury and the Supreme Judicial Court rejected that argument. The two other men he blamed in 2000 were never charged, and he later said he had named them falsely.
Motive: prosecutors said he killed Botelho over a cocaine debt owed to him, as his confessions described; a 2015 television report described the motive the other way around, as drug money he owed her. For the Mauck killings he gave shifting reasons, and investigators never settled on one beyond the $50 tattoo debt he described.
Unproven: his boast at a Graham bar in November 2007 of having killed three people in Boston. No source opened connects him to any killing other than the four for which he was convicted.
Details that vary between sources: the victim's first name (Gayle in the court opinion and most reports; one 2020 newspaper report calls her Debra); the spelling of her sister's surname (Sousa or Souza); the weapon used on his mother (a 12-inch knife or a carving knife); and the publication date of the Ann Rule book, which the defense gave as 2012.
1968: Tavares's parents separate; his mother raises him and his three older sisters.
About October 27, 1988: Gayle Botelho, 32, disappears in Fall River; she is killed in his bedroom and buried in the backyard on June Street.
Late October 1988: his girlfriend sees him scrubbing blood from his rug.
September 1990: a Florida warrant is issued for contempt of court.
July 11, 1991: he stabs his mother, Ann Tavares, 46, to death in Somerset and wounds a man who tries to help.
June 1992: his 17-to-20-year manslaughter sentence begins.
1999 to 2007: held alone 23 hours a day, including more than seven years in the Departmental Disciplinary Unit.
October 2000: he leads police to Botelho's remains, blaming two other men; no one is charged.
2002: he changes his account; his alibi witness tells police she lied for him.
June 11, 2007: charged with assaulting prison guards; bail set at $100,000.
June 14, 2007: completes his manslaughter sentence.
July 16, 2007: released on personal recognizance by Judge Kathe Tuttman.
July 19, 2007: flies to Seattle.
July 30, 2007: marries Jennifer Freitas near Tacoma.
November 17, 2007: shoots Brian and Beverly Mauck in their Graham home.
November 19 to 20, 2007: booked and charged with two counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
February 2008: pleads guilty; two consecutive terms of life without parole.
March 2008: Jennifer Tavares is sentenced to a year in jail for rendering criminal assistance.
2012: a prison library note and the alibi witness's new account revive the Botelho case.
November 2012: confesses to Detective John McDonald in Washington.
February 2013: confesses again in writing.
March 28, 2013: indicted for Botelho's murder; announced April 8.
September 9, 2013: pleads not guilty in Fall River Superior Court.
November 16, 2015: trial begins.
December 1, 2015: convicted of first-degree murder; life without parole.
January 6, 2020: appeal argued before the Supreme Judicial Court.
May 6, 2020: conviction affirmed.
October 19, 2026: not listed in Washington's public prison search; current location unconfirmed.