Gayle Botelho was 32 and a mother of three when she disappeared from her Fall River, Massachusetts apartment on Prospect Street in the fall of 1988. On October 27 she told her live-in boyfriend’s brother she would be back in five minutes, leaving her purse and identification behind, and was never seen alive again. Her family filed a missing person report on November 5, 1988; more than 100 people were interviewed during the initial investigation without producing a significant lead.

In 2000 a tip from a prison inmate led investigators to skeletal remains in a shallow grave in a backyard on June Street, less than fifty yards from where Botelho was last seen. The property had been the former residence of Daniel Tavares Jr., who was already incarcerated for an unrelated 1991 murder. Tavares initially said he had witnessed two other men kill Botelho; authorities did not then have enough evidence to charge him.

A woman who had provided Tavares an alibi later recanted in 2013, and a grand jury indicted Tavares. Prosecutors said Tavares lured Botelho with the promise of cocaine because she allegedly owed him money, that a gun misfired when he tried to shoot her, and that he stabbed her to death. In December 2015 a jury found Daniel Tavares guilty of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life without parole. Did anyone in Fall River at the time remember unusual visitors or parties on Prospect or June Street in late 1988?