Tom Kay gives Tom Colbert's web page address and I suggest that everyone here visit it to get the flavor of it. Among other things, Colbert pays $100 to $300 for tips on cases that have the potential to be developed further for TV, etc.
Bruce, come clean. 
I'm going car shopping tomorrow...
(Smile).
300 bucks? Shitski! I just gave him a cool story on the Spotlight/Geoghan/Mauck Murders story. For details, see the Mountain News.
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LoginSynopsis for lazy people: Spotlight, the movie, shows how the Boston Globe broke the Catholic priest sex scandal story. Father John Geoghan was the first and biggest pedophile to get caught, with over 400 victims over 30 years. Ultimately, my boys at the Globe proved that 250 priests had been were fiddlin' where they shouldn't have been over the past 50 years. The Big, Bad Cardinal Law went down, and the rest is history.
Geoghan was arrested, convicted and went to prison in Massachusetts. He was later stomped to death in prison, and the Big Question is who did the dirty deed. The official story is that an inmate named Druce did it, and the prison guards tried heroically to save the priest.
What I was told by Boston reporters is that a guy named Tavares was involved. Tavares was in prison for stabbing his mother 26 times with a butcher knife, and even though he had 120 written citations for violence within prison, he was released for "good behavior" in June 2007. The next month he moved to Graham, Washington and six months later I made his acquaintance covering his arrest for the double homicide of two of my neighbors, Brian and Beverly Mauck.
The Boston guys came out to cover
that story and told me that Tavares got his early release for assisting in the Geoghan whack - that Tavares left a door open to Geoghan's unit, prison guards were able to slip in, and then kill Geoghan. Tavares took the fall, and a year later he was released from prison.
This kind of "sleeper agent" angle, where an inmate will do a dirty deed that no one else will, and then receive prison goodies, seems to be real and fits the bill with Tavares.
So, why did Tavares kill Brian and Beverly? It seems like it was an attempt to sandbag the 2008 Romney presidential campaign that was just cranking up. When he was Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt appointed the guys who let Tavares go, and McCain and Giuliani really played up the soft on crime angle. Mitt lost the NH primary the next month and his campaign was sunk. Pix of the Maucks played big in the Boston papers - much bigger than in WA - so much so that folks in Boston got tired of seeing them in the news. Letters to the Editors began clamoring for them to go away, "Please, it's getting close to Christmas. Can't we just move on," said one.
After his arrest, Tavares made a deal with the Pierce County DA, saying that he would confess if they took the death penalty off the table. The DA agreed, and the trial was not held. Hence, the facts of the case were never made public. Tavares was sentenced to two life imprisonments, and is supposedly in Walla Walla - where "Jake" was. I've asked to see Tavares, but so far the WA DOC is unresponsive to my requests.
