In the fall of 1988, Gayle Botelho, a 32-year-old Caucasian woman and mother of three, vanished from her Fall River, Massachusetts apartment on Prospect Street. On October 27th, she told her live-in boyfriend's brother she would be back in five minutes, leaving her personal belongings like her purse and identification behind. She was never seen alive again. A missing person report was filed by her family on November 5, 1988.
Despite an extensive police investigation that included interviewing over 100 people, no significant leads emerged, and her disappearance turned into a long-standing mystery.
For twelve years, Gayle Botelho's fate remained unknown until the year 2000 when a tip from a prison inmate led investigators to her skeletal remains. She was found buried in a shallow grave in the backyard of a house on June Street, less than fifty yards from where she was last seen. The location was the former residence of a man named Daniel Tavares Jr., who lived across the street from Botelho at the time of her disappearance. At the time of this discovery, Tavares was already incarcerated for the 1991 murder of his own mother. Initially, Tavares claimed he had witnessed two other men kill Botelho during a "wild party." However, there was not enough evidence to press charges.
The case went cold again for more than a decade until a significant breakthrough occurred in 2013. A woman who had provided Daniel Tavares with an alibi for the time of Botelho's disappearance came forward and recanted her statement. This new information reinvigorated the investigation, and a grand jury indicted Tavares for the murder of Gayle Botelho. Prosecutors laid out a harrowing narrative of that day in 1988. They detailed how Tavares, a known drug dealer, had lured Botelho to his home with the promise of more cocaine for her to sell, as she allegedly owed him money for drugs. According to the prosecution, when Botelho bent over to snort a line of cocaine, Tavares attempted to shoot her, but the gun misfired. He then viciously stabbed her to death.
In December 2015, a jury found Daniel Tavares guilty of the first-degree murder of Gayle Botelho. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. This conviction brought a legal conclusion to a case that had remained unsolved for 27 years. By the time he was convicted of Botelho's murder, Tavares was already serving a life sentence in Washington state for the 2007 killing of a young married couple over a small debt.
