Mortal Danger

Gayle Botelho.
    And so the story of Daniel Tavares may be far from over.

IF I CAN’T HAVE YOU…

 
    It has been said—and often—that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. I suspect there is a fury that far exceeds that of a woman rejected by her man, and that is the rage of a cuckolded male, or one who believes that his mate has been unfaithful. Every day I get at least one e-mail from a woman somewhere in the world who is struggling to be free of her “prison of love.”
    Most days, I get three or four.
    As we’ve seen in the first case in this book, it is far easier to fall in love than it is to abandon a love that is not what it seemed to be. Many men still consider that a woman, once pledged to him, is his personal property, his chattel and possession forever. He would rather see her dead—violently dead—than picture her making love with someone else.
    In one Seattle homicide, a fifty-three-year-old man proved once again that some men cannot let go gracefully. His name was Melvin, and his former wife, Kathryn, was fifteen years younger than he was. He’d always believed that she would leave him one day, and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. His jealousy and suspicion ruined hismarriage. Kathryn had tired of him long before their divorce decree was final.
    She moved forward in her life, and some months later, she had a new love whom she hoped to marry. Melvin was enraged when he learned that.
    In the fall of 1976, he lay in wait and shot and wounded Kathryn’s lover. The wounds weren’t critical, and Melvin received little more than a slap on the hand and a suspended sentence from the judge. Although Kathryn was still afraid of him, no one else involved—except for her lover—believed that Melvin would act out violently again.
    Within days of his release from jail, Melvin decided to break up Kathryn’s romance in a most final way.
    On February 5, 1977, he loaded his shotgun and carried it stealthily up the alley behind his ex-wife’s home. He then dragged a garbage can beneath the kitchen window so he could look inside. What he saw seared an unforgettable image in his brain. Why his wife and her lover weren’t more afraid is puzzling. They should have moved into a bedroom, or at least pulled the blinds—but they didn’t.
    Unaware that they were being watched, his wife and her lover were making love on top of the dining room table.
    Melvin leveled his weapon on the windowsill and called out, “Move—and you’re dead!”
    Involuntarily, the lover drew back and Melvin’s slender, beautiful ex-wife started to sit up. Had she remained still, she might have lived.
    The shotgun blast reverberated throughout the house, its full force piercing the helpless woman in one breast and tearing completely through her body, taking out her heartand both her lungs in its lethal course. She was dead instantly, senselessly, forever.
    Seattle homicide detectives had no trouble locating Melvin; neighbors who ran out of their homes at the sound of the shotgun had spotted his car license as he drove away. And, of course, many of them recognized him and his vehicle.
    Booked into jail, Melvin had very little to say. He seemed oddly satisfied that Kathryn was dead and no longer in the arms of another man. If he thought at all of their three children who were now virtually orphaned, he didn’t comment on it to the detectives. In his mind, Kathryn had been his to do with as he saw fit, and he saw fit to destroy her.
    But he also destroyed what was left of his own life. Tried and convicted, Melvin was sentenced to serve a hundred years in prison for murder in the first degree, plus another twenty years for assault against his rival, who lived.
     
    Melvin’s motivation was not unlike that behind another tragedy brought about by suspicion, jealousy, and a sense of possession of another human being. This murder occurred four months after Melvin shot his ex-wife’s boyfriend, and eight months before he killed the woman he swore he loved more than anything.
    Although it’s been thirty-two years since I first wrote about the case of Amelia Jager, her story is one of a small percentage that refuses to leave my conscious memory. Cruel fate somehow brought the principals together, and it was a sorry thing that they ever met at all.

 
    Amelia Jager, twenty-seven, was a flowerlike Eurasian woman, a small and fragile brunette with lovely eyes whose beauty combined the best of both the East and West. She weighed barely