Mortal Danger

Judge Tuttman to resign and attempted to put as much distance between himself and his appointee as he could. He said he’d never really known her.
    Romney’s spokesman managed to put a spin on the devastating results of Daniel Tavares’s release. He cited the Tavares case as a reason for states that had abolished thedeath penalty to bring it back. “This is a dangerous man who killed his own mother,” Eric Fehrnstrom said. “He should have been held on bail, given his violent record, attacks on correction officers and a history of threats against public officials, including Governor Romney. It is because of monsters like Daniel Tavares that we need the death penalty.”
    Fingers were pointing in every direction, and no one involved, even in the slightest way, let any blame stick to him or her. Kathe Tuttman perhaps got the most abuse—even though she had been tough on violent criminals in the past. In a poll posted by the Boston Herald , asking if Judge Tuttman should resign, 85 percent of readers voted yes, 11 percent voted no, and only 4 percent were undecided.
    Darrel Slater, Bev Mauck’s father, was bitter and blamed Mitt Romney: “He was the governor—he picked the judge. He should be answering for what happened.”
    But Romney did not apologize or accept any blame. Either way, the kiss of political death marked his cheek. The killings in tiny Graham, Washington, may very well have been a deciding factor for the former governor to drop out of the presidential race.
    He still, however, had a chance to be nominated for vice president, depending on whom the Republicans chose as their presidential nominee. Almost to the time of the convention in St. Paul, Romney’s name remained on the short list. In the end, he could not lose the specter of Daniel Tavares, who clung to his coattails like a burr.
    John McCain bypassed Romney and chose Sarah Palin, a virtually unknown governor from the state of Alaska.
    Nothing is less forgiven than political missteps.
     
    Back in Pierce County, Sergeant Ben Benson and his team were tying up the ends of their tragic case. Daniel Tavares had confessed to murder, but Jennifer Lynn still insisted she had had nothing to do with the Maucks’ murders, before, during, or after. She had admitted that she suspected her husband of getting rid of a gun by throwing it off a cliff along Five Mile Drive and seemed willing to go with detectives to look for it.
    On Monday morning, November 19, Detective Elizabeth Lindt and Lieutenant Brent Bomkamp visited Jennifer in the Pierce County Jail and asked her if she would show them where she believed Daniel had disposed of the gun used in the murders—somewhere in Point Defiance Park. She agreed to accompany them.
    When they reached the park, Jennifer directed them to the area where she and Daniel had been married. It was gray November now, Thanksgiving week, and the sunshine of late July was long gone.
    “Daniel walked down this trail from the parking lot”—Jennifer pointed—“until he disappeared. He was gone for at least five minutes. He told me he went to a ledge over the water, and he threw the gun in. He told me that he was afraid the gun hadn’t made it to the water.”
    The parking lot where they stood started at the Vashon Island Viewpoint, and the northernmost trail, close by Commencement Bay, passed by a clearing. Beyond that a cliff overlooks Commencement Bay. About fifty feet down, there was a thick cluster of brushy vegetation before the land dropped off some forty feet into the bay.
    Lindt and Bomkamp scrambled down the path to the greenery that seemed to get its energy from the air itself; there was precious little dirt there. But they couldn’t find the gun. It might have been hidden among the Scotch broom and blackberry bushes, or it could have been on the bottom of the bay.
    Or maybe Tavares hadn’t thrown the weapon at all but only wanted Jennifer to think he had?
     
    Under the M’Naughton Rule, a killer who has made an effort to cover up his crime is deemed to be sane and cognizant of the difference between right and wrong. For the sadistic sociopath, the delineation between the two is perfectly clear; it just doesn’t matter to him because he answers only to himself. Daniel Tavares, who was fully aware that he had a history of reacting violently to heedless combinations of drugs and alcohol, might have seemed totally insane after he used them, but he knew full well that he was doing wrong. He made several