Graham killings in 2007 to be TV show topic
STACIA GLENN
The execution-style slayings of a newlywed couple in their Graham home in 2007 will be featured Sunday on a television show called “Nightmare Next Door.”
The episode, which will air at 9 p.m. on the network Investigation Discovery, will include interviews from three Pierce County sheriff’s detectives involved in the case, as well as the victims’ relatives.
The show “tells the tales of mysterious murders from behind white picket fences that rocked Middle America,” according to the program’s website.
Brian and Beverly Mauck might not have had a picket fence, but their deaths rattled the community and garnered national news coverage after being linked to then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
The Maucks were a fun-loving couple who worked and played hard. They were gunned down in their home the morning of Nov. 17. Days later, detectives arrested a convict who lived in a nearby mobile home with his Internet wife.
Daniel Thomas Tavares Jr., 41, eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated first-degree murder in the deaths of Brian Mauck, 30, and Beverly Mauck, 28. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release.
Authorities said Tavares, who already had served 16 years in prison for fatally stabbing his mother in Massachusetts, shot Brian Mauck in the temple, then twice in the back of the head. He then shot Beverly Mauck three times at close range as she ran out of a bedroom to help her husband.
A solid motive was never established because Tavares gave conflicting reasons. He told detectives he went to the Maucks’ home to collect $50 he was owed. He then claimed he killed the couple after they insulted him and his wife.
When a neighbor found the Maucks’ bodies, they were covered with a blanket and someone had tried to sweep the blood up with a broom. Tavares eventually confessed after detectives told him they’d found his palm print and a boot print matching his footware inside the couple’s home.
Detective Ben Benson, who will appear in Sunday’s episode, has said he became suspicious after Tavares gave shifting accounts of what he saw the day of the murders.
The slaying devastated the victims’ families and grabbed headlines after fellow GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani tried to link Romney to Tavares in ads for the 2008 presidential campaign.
He blasted Romney for, when he was governor of Massachusetts, appointing the judge who later ordered Tavares released from prison, despite protests from prosecutors. Romney immediately called for Judge Kathe Tuttmann to resign.
stacia.glenn@thenewstribune.com 253-597-8653
