Mortal Danger

traces of cocaine, but not enough to have impaired most subjects’ judgment. He seemed obsessed with sex and drugs, but the rest of his conversation was normal enough.
    Twenty-five-year-old Danny Tavares was charged with murder (matricide) and attempted murder and booked into jail.
    Detectives O’Neil and Levy talked with Stephanie and Heather Tavares and asked about Danny’s allegations that Stephanie had slipped LSD into his White Russian.
    “No way!” Stephanie said. “We were friends. Why would I want to do that?”
    “Maybe you were angry because he stole money from your wallet?” O’Neil asked.
    “No way! I don’t do drugs—I don’t believe in them.”
    “Did you see Danny drinking a White Russian?”
    “I only saw him drinking a beer.”
    Heather chimed in. “I never told him that Stephanie put anything in his drink. He’s lying.”
    The Somerset cop and the Massachusetts State Police trooper talked next with John Latsis, the victim’s former lover. He admitted that he was bisexual, although he had had a number of heterosexual relationships, including one with Ann Tavares.
    “Danny told us that you raped him,” O’Neil said.
    “I don’t believe he brought that up!” Latsis said. “Are you kidding me? That was ten years ago. It happened around 1980. I ‘raped’ him twice, but it wasn’t rape—it was ‘fondling.’”
    “What do you mean by ‘fondling’?” Lorraine Levy asked.
    “I was just rubbing his penis. Danny’s never mentioned it since.”
    John Latsis said he had pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent assault and battery to save Danny from embarrassment and served forty days in Bridgewater Hospital/ Prison.
    As Latsis casually explained the household setup, it certainly didn’t sound like Father Knows Best.
    “We’re all as close as family,” he said. “We have all always stayed close friends. In fact, Ann, Kristos, and I have lived together for eight or ten years. The three of us bought the house together.
    “It was cocaine that made Danny do this. He’s been off it for a while, but I guarantee he’s shooting coke.”
    When Sergeant O’Neil asked Latsis if, to his knowledge, Danny ever participated in sexual acts with his mother and Kristos, Latsis suddenly erupted. “Oh, myGod,” he burst out, “he said that about Kristos and his mother? I’ll never forgive him. That woman was not promiscuous; she could go twenty years without sex.”
    Apparently, she hadn’t, but O’Neil made no comment. The entire household was one of the most bizarre he’d ever encountered.
    John Latsis also denied that there were any guns in the house, and he had never seen Kristos Lilles with a gun.
    Although Latsis admitted that he had molested teenage Danny, how much damage he had done was an open question. Latsis himself tried to slough it off as almost “normal.”
    A dozen years later, it would appear that Danny was spouting his own fantasies about sex, and that they had little basis in reality. Psychiatrists had ventured that it was quite probable that Danny had an Oedipus complex, a sexual fixation on his mother. She had raised him alone and spoiled him since he was a toddler.
    Theirs had, indeed, been an unusual household, but apparently it had limped along for a decade. Whether Danny Tavares’s claims of parental abuse were true was questionable. The Massachusetts investigators already had a lot of medical background on him that indicated he was addicted to cocaine and perhaps other illegally obtained drugs. Bruce Jillson had gathered up fourteen vials of psychiatric medications as he processed Danny’s attic “apartment.”
     
    Bristol County District Attorney Paul Walsh Jr. felt that the State could not prove that Danny Tavares, at age twenty-five, had a “sound mind.” Therefore, his charges were reduced to manslaughter, and he was allowed to plead guiltyto that. He was sentenced to seventeen to twenty years in prison and moved to MCI–Cedar Junction in Walpole, Massachusetts’s maximum-security prison.
    He was not the prison staff’s favorite inmate. He quickly gravitated to the white supremacist group, and one of the corrections officers referred to Tavares as a “cell warrior,” who was always making trouble from behind the bars of his cell. Full of hate, he spat at guards who walked by his cell and threw his urine and even feces on them. He made violent threats.
    He wrote threatening letters to public officials and his own family members. The