Mortal Danger

a friendly conversation. He’d had no concern about Ann’s going upstairs to talk to her son.
    Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Bruce Jillson processed the crime scene. It began on the stairs leading up to Danny’s room, where he found a hypodermic needle on a step. In the room itself, he found signs of a struggle. Plants were overturned, a stuffed raccoon had been knocked from its mounting, furniture was out of place, and there were holes in the plasterboard. A spoon with white powder residue and a plastic baggie with a small amount of the same powder and the missing top of the syringe on the stairway rested on a wicker love seat.
    There was an empty six-pack of ale, a bottle of mezcal, and a wood-handled carving knife with a twelve-inch blade. It was smeared with blood.
    Ann Tavares’s body still lay spread-eagled in the middle of the room in her own blood. Dr. William Zane arrived just before Jillson pronounced her dead. The two men counted approximately fifteen separate wounds to her neck, face, arm, abdomen, and back.

Chapter Six
    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 toCalifornia 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 attempt 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