Mortal Danger

Massachusetts State Police investigated Daniel Tavares’s intimidating letters to his father in Florida. He hated the older man. “He threatened to kill me,” Tavares Sr. said. “He said he’d come down here when he got out and break all my ribs and maim me.”
    Finally, Daniel Tavares was placed in Cedar Junction’s Departmental Disciplinary Unit, a prison enclosed within another prison. He was housed there longer than any other inmate—more than seven years. And he lost “good time” again and again because of his refusal to abide by prison rules. In the end, he spent more time in isolation than all but a few convicts at Cedar Junction and lost a thousand hours of good time. He could have been released almost three years earlier than he was.
    But there was an instance when Daniel Tavares did cooperate with Massachusetts authorities. Ben Benson’s eyes widened as he read about another connection between Tavares and violent death.
     
    Two decades ago—in 1988—still unsolved cases of serial murder had occurred in and around New Bedford, Massachusetts. On July 3, a woman who had stopped to pick wildflowers along Route 140 stumbled over a skeleton in a woodland clearing. The desiccated remains were later identified as Debra Medeiros, twenty-nine, of Fall River. Over the next nine months, the bodies of eight more women were found alongside Bristol County highways. The serial murders became known as “the Highway Killings.”
    Like many other vulnerable targets who fall victim to serial killers, the dead women had all spent time in Weld Square, a section of New Bedford known for prostitution. Reportedly, they were all dependent upon illegal drugs.
    There have been a few prime suspects; one committed suicide three years after the first body was discovered, and another was charged with murder, but the charges were eventually dropped.
    Although the Highway Killings were never connected directly to Danny Tavares, the victims lived in the same area and shared the same addiction to drugs.
    Another unsolved murder case in the Fall River–New Bedford area in 1988 has so many connections to Tavares that it is almost incomprehensible that he was not charged with murder.
    On October 27, 1988, pretty, dark-eyed Gayle Botelho, thirty-two, vanished from her home. Hers was the kind of disappearance that couldn’t have happened—and yet it did.
    Gayle lived at 114 Prospect Street in Fall River with her fiancé and one of her three children. At 4:30 p.m., she answered a knock on the door of their second-floor apartmentand called back to her boyfriend that she was leaving to talk to someone (a man) and she’d be gone about five minutes.
    She didn’t come back.
    Seeing that she had left behind her purse, money, all of her sweaters and jackets, her fiancé was concerned. It was close to Halloween, and the weather was chilly at night. When she didn’t return for several hours, he called the police. Everyone in the Fall River area was jittery because of the Highway Killer’s victims, and although Gayle really didn’t fit the victim profile, her case was treated seriously from the beginning.
    Gayle was the middle child among seven sisters and two brothers in a family that had lived in Fall River for generations, and they missed her dearly. Waiting year after year for Gayle or her body to be found was agonizing for them.
    Danny Tavares had been in prison for nine years in early September 2000, when he sent a kite (a prison note) to the Massachusetts State Police telling them that he could locate Gayle Botelho’s body. It was probably a ruse, or possibly he was planning an escape once he got outside the walls.
    Nevertheless, the state police paid attention.
    In mid-October, Gayle’s onetime neighbors noticed police detectives going in and out of the basement of a large two-story house across from her old apartment. They were there for hours, and when they left quietly, they carried a number of articles. That didn’t seem like prime gossip, but what happened next did.
    The residents on Prospect Street watched curiously asstate troopers and deputies from the state medical examiner’s office erected a tent in the backyard of the two-story house at 314 June Street. Although the houses fronted on different streets, the tent where the troopers were digging was directly across the street from the apartment where Gayle Botelho had last been seen.
    The crew from the state police had a dog with them—a necrosearch dog trained to