Mortal Danger

sniff out human remains.
    What no one knew at the time was the identity of the tipster who had told the troopers where to dig: Daniel Tavares. Furthermore, in 1988, the house on June Street had been the home of Ann and Danny Tavares, and Kristos Lilles. This was where they lived just before they bought the house with John Latsis in Somerset. Gayle vanished almost exactly three years before Danny stabbed his mother to death.
    With the necrosearch dog’s signals, they focused their digging next to a brick outdoor barbecue that was built against a wall that separated the Tavareses’ former backyard from the driveway of the house next door.
    They were extremely careful as they dug. It had been a dozen years, and they used small tools, their gloved hands, and brushes to remove soil. If Gayle lay near the outdoor hearth, her body would have long since gone back to earth, leaving only delicate bones. They hoped to find other items and artifacts in the ground, too—perhaps some they could connect to a killer.
    She was there, not far at all below the surface. For all those icy Northeast winters and simmering summers, Gayle Botelho had lain within seventy feet of where her fiancé waited for her to come home.
    An autopsy and X-rays officially identified her body. The cause of death? Stab wounds. There were enough defects on her bones to indicate where a knife had plunged in, even though her soft tissue had disappeared many years earlier.
    At the time Gayle’s fate was discovered, Bristol County District Attorney Paul Walsh—the DA who had accepted Danny’s plea bargain to have his mother’s stabbing death lowered from murder to manslaughter—did not reveal who the tipster was.
    Danny told investigators that he, Gayle, and two “acquaintances” of his had attended “some wild party.” He said the other two men had stabbed Gayle to death, while he was only an observer.
    At the time, he would have been twenty-one or twenty-two, and he already had a history of drug use and theft.
    Given his tendency to embroider the truth, most detectives would have suspected Tavares of Gayle’s murder, as well as those of the other nine victims of the Highway Killer and two subsequent suspicious deaths of similar female victims that had come to light.
    Massachusetts state detectives located the two men that Danny Tavares had named but refused to comment on what, if anything, they had learned from them.
    Indeed, the public had no idea that a convicted killer had led troopers to Gayle Botelho’s body seven years before he murdered Brian and Beverly Mauck. When the Tavares connection to Gayle’s murder hit the media in Massachusetts, Washington, and the wire services and the Internet, her family was outraged. They had never heard of Danny Tavares and had known only that a “prisoner” hadled police to their sister’s body. And now he was out of prison and he’d killed two more people.
    Lori Fielding, one of Gayle’s sisters, spoke for her family. “I can tell you after nineteen years, it still hurts. A little healing is allowed to take place, and then it starts again. Gayle mattered, and she was somebody’s sister and daughter and mother in spite of the problems she might have had. But she didn’t seem to matter to anyone else.”
    Ann Tavares’s fiancé, Kristos Lilles, had his doubts about Danny, and with the news that he had been charged with double murder in Washington, Lilles talked to the media, telling them he believed that the young man who was like a son to him for many years might very well be the Highway Killer.
    “He kept talking about them,” Lilles told the Free Republic , “and saying, ‘I know that one.’ One was found buried in the yard.”
    Lilles recalled the night in October 1988 when Gayle Botelho went missing, even though it had been nineteen years earlier. He and Ann had been at a party, and they came home to find Danny staring out the window at a police cruiser outside Gayle’s apartment.
    “They’re looking for Gayle,” Danny said.
    “I said, ‘How do you know? Did you talk to the police?’”
    “No,” was all Danny said.
    Lilles wondered how Danny would know that Gayle was missing if he hadn’t talked to the police. He himself hadn’t known the missing woman. The conclusions Kristos Lilles came to were too horrifying to deal with.
    He never asked Danny about Gayle Botelho again. Shortly after that, he, Ann, and John Latsis had purchased their home in Somerset and left the June Street