Mortal Danger

are many: Prison Pen Pals, Friends Behind the Walls, and the one Jennifer selected, Inmate.com. Freitas estimated that Jennifer had been writing to Daniel for two or three years before he was paroled.
    Why so many women choose to find love with prisoners is a question difficult to answer. Some may not be able to attract men in the free world; some find dangerous men—“bad boys”—sexy. There are women who really don’t want to live with a man or participate in sex, so a man locked behind bars in a prison with no conjugal visits is ideal. They can have a husband to talk about, but they don’t have to be intimate. And there is the fame factor. While those convicted of major crimes net more infamy than fame, women with no particular accomplishments—good or bad—align themselves with men whose names have beenin the headlines and on TV. It makes them feel important to be known as the love interest of an infamous criminal, and they bask in his reflected—if suspect—glory.
    Possibly the most deluded prison sweethearts are those who convince themselves that all the man behind bars needs “to go straight” is the love of a good woman. And, of course, a woman with this delusion is sure that she will be the one person who can effect a complete change in a felon’s personality. Oddly, it never seems to occur to these rescuers that they could become the next victims, or that they may be inviting chaos and disaster into their lives.
    Jennifer Lynn Freitas had answered an ad that probably wouldn’t appeal to most women. Daniel Tavares had listed his finer points: “Six-foot, 235 pound, Albino gorilla with over forty real nice tattoos. Can I get a li’l bit of love from a lonely female?”
    She apparently found this description intriguing.
    Her older brother, Jeff, wasn’t very happy about her long-distance romance with a convict, although he gave her and her new husband a place to live and offered Daniel a job logging evergreen trees when he was paroled.
    Now Jeff Freitas was a mighty nervous man the day after his neighbors were shot to death. He called Pierce County Deputy Bill Ruder, a longtime friend, to tell him that he was afraid of someone who was staying on his property and asked Ruder if he had “anything to worry about.”
    Ruder explained that he couldn’t discuss the murder probe with him. They both knew they were talking about Daniel Tavares, who was the unknown quantity in the tight family group that lived on Jeff’s property. His elderly parents lived there with an uncle, and so did his sister Jennifer, along with Jeff, his wife, Kristel, and their small children.
    “What’s your gut feeling about Daniel?” Ruder asked him.
    “I feel like I have lots to be worried about,” Freitas said. “Frankly, I’m scared to death of him.”
    He went on to say that Daniel had been acting bizarrely ever since the double murder was discovered. “He’s just out of it,” Freitas said, “and the more I think about his story, none of it makes any sense.”
    He had noticed the bruises on Daniel’s face that made him look as though he’d taken a punch or two.
    “He told me that he was driving home from picking up a printer at one of our cousins’ house. He stopped at 304th and the Mountain Highway to check his lug nuts. He said when he bent over, a car stopped and two guys got out. He recognized one as Jennifer’s old boyfriend, who ran up and kicked him in the head,” Freitas said. “So he said he got that guy down on the ground and was punching him—and even broke his false teeth—and then the other guy took a pipe and began bashing Daniel with it.”
    The two men had slashed Tavares’s vehicle’s tires before they drove off.
    “I asked him how he got home, and he said he drove home on the flat tires, going about two miles an hour—it’s only a little over a mile.”
    It was eating at Jeff Freitas that when he’d left to go hunting at around 5:00 a.m. on Saturday, he’d glanced at Daniel and Jennifer’s vehicle and it didn’t seem to be leaning on one side. Of course he hadn’t been looking at thetires—he hadn’t heard Daniel’s story of the assault at that point. But there were no marks or gouges in the gravel and dirt driveway. He was sure of that.
    Jeff’s wife, Kristel, had seen Daniel walking past their mobile home about 8:00 a.m., and he’d had a towel over his arm. When she opened her blinds, he’d been standing on the porch of the Freitases’ mobile home. Shortly after