Two Truths and a Lie is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2021 by Ellen McGarrahan
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McGarrahan, Ellen, author.
Title: Two truths and a lie / Ellen McGarrahan.
Description: New York: Random House [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020009767 (print) | LCCN 2020009768 (ebook) | ISBN 9780812998665 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780812998672 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Tafero, Jesse, 1946–1990. | Murder—Investigation—Florida. | Crime and the press—Florida. | Judicial error—Florida.
Classification: LCC HV8079.H6 M388 2021 (print) | LCC HV8079.H6 (ebook) | DDC 364.152/3092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009767
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009768
Ebook ISBN 9780812998672
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Carlos Beltrán
Cover photograph: Floortje/Getty Images
ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
Murder is an act of infinite cruelty.
—Raymond Chandler
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Away
Prologue
Part One: Florida
Chapter 1: A Real Strange Situation
Chapter 2: By Glue and by Dream
Chapter 3: The Most Dangerous People
Chapter 4: No One Is Going to Talk to You
Chapter 5: A Squealer, a Liar, and a Mute
Chapter 6: The Fugitive
Chapter 7: Don’t You Worry That Someone Is Going to Kill You?
Chapter 8: So Much Blood
Chapter 9: The Missing Pixels
Chapter 10: Fifteen Miles, Seventeen Minutes
Chapter 11: Everything. It Was All Gone.
Chapter 12: The Personification of Death, If I Chose
Chapter 13: The Closest Thing to a God in Prison
Chapter 14: Naw, He Ain’t Shot Him
Chapter 15: A Very Uneasy Feeling
Chapter 16: Grace
Part Two: But Which Truth?
Chapter 17: Investigation 101
Chapter 18: But Which Truth?
Chapter 19: If Anybody Moves, They’re Dead
Chapter 20: The Playground
Chapter 21: The Kingdom of Lochac
Chapter 22: Investigator Strait
Part Three: Gone Ghost
Chapter 23: The Boxes
Chapter 24: Shattered Glass/Shiny Gun
Chapter 25: What Kind of Strange Fate
Chapter 26: Metal Rods, Running Through
Chapter 27: On the Road
Chapter 28: Michael J. Satz, State Attorney
Chapter 29: The Truth
Chapter 30: The Heat
Home
Epilogue: The Price of a Lie
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Away
Prologue
Six Minutes Past Seven
The road out of town was narrow and dark, and I did not see the prison until it was right in front of me. Five-thirty in the morning. Starke, Florida. May 1990. A bleak building, boxy, wrapped in razor wire and washed white by flares. I drove past the prison gates as instructed and pulled into a grass parking lot. The other reporters were already waiting, silhouettes in a mist floating up from the night fields, and as I walked over they were talking about clothes. Wear what you would wear to a funeral, one reporter said his father, a preacher, had advised. He looked solemn and shiny in his clean dark suit. I was back in my car scrambling out of my blue jeans and into my black jeans when two lights swept across me. The prison van, arriving to take us inside.
In the prison entrance hall, steel bars spanned floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Beyond them, the prison slept, cold and bright and pin-drop quiet. A guard with a gun checked my driver’s license and press credentials, then I passed through a metal detector and into a room where a prison matron told me to get my hands up over my head. She patted underneath my shirt, skin to skin. She took away my shoulder bag, car keys, and wallet, and handed me a yellow notepad and two pencils. I carried those down a linoleum corridor to a briefing room, where tiny desks stood in tidy rows, like school. The prison spokesman was friendly and had a metal hook for a hand. Last meal: scrambled eggs, fried pepperoni, toasted Italian bread, two tomatoes, steamed broccoli, asparagus tips, strawberry shortcake with fresh strawberries and whipped cream, whole milk, and hot Lipton tea, he said. Yes, the governor was aware of the complexities of the condemned man’s case. The innocence claim. No, the governor had not issued a stay.
* * *
•
As the spokesman talked, a banging began, metal on metal like a hammer on a pipe. The noise grew louder, clanging, clanking. A huge slamming sound, and the room blacked out.
Standard procedure, the spokesman said, through the gloom.
For every electrocution, Florida State Prison switched to its own generator to make sure there was an uninterrupted flow of power, he explained. When the lights came back on, they were yellower, weaker. I made a note: These people know what they’re doing.
Then we got back in the van and rode around the prison yard to Q-Wing, and the electric chair.
* * *
•
Q-Wing was one small room, very brightly lit. The electric chair stood directly inside the door. It was enormous. Old, oak, bristling with electrodes and leather straps. It was so close I could have reached out and touched it except for the Plexiglas separating the witness area from the death chamber. On this side of the Plexiglas were four rows of seats, facing front. I chose a spot over by the window, third row back. The ivory-colored venetian blinds that covered the window felt reassuring in their vaguely residential way. The sun was up now, the sky outside the pale white of dawn. On the wall behind the electric chair was a junction box with a thick black wire snaking out of it. On the other wall was a clock. The clock hung just above the compartment where the executioner sat with the electrical controls. By law, every single thing about the executioner was secret. I tried, but there was no way to see into the booth.
On the wall clock, the minutes ticked past. Half a minute now. Seconds.
At seven a.m. exactly, the door in the back of the death chamber burst open.
Three men. Two in uniform. One shackled, struggling.
He was white, this prisoner. Wan and wiry. Dressed in a light blue button-down shirt and dark blue trousers, in stocking feet. Bald, because guards had just shaved his head. A square face with a strong nose, full lips, wide-set long-lashed dark brown eyes. He was forty-three years, six months, and twenty-three days old. His name was Jesse Tafero.
Jesse Tafero was bracing his feet against the floor and bending backwards toward the door he’d just c
ome through. But the guards were strong and they were ready for this. They had him by the armpits, and they dragged him into the chamber and slammed the door shut behind them. Then they turned him around and made him look at the chair.
* * *
•
Before this moment, I had never laid eyes on Jesse Tafero. I’d never spoken with him. The only photograph I’d ever seen of him was a mugshot, taken the day he was arrested for the murder of two police officers, back in February 1976. The arrest that had landed him here.
Whenever the governor of Florida signed a death warrant, the editors at The Miami Herald, where I was a staff writer, called up the paper’s capital bureau in Tallahassee and asked who wanted to be put on the witness list. When Governor Bob Martinez signed Jesse’s warrant, I was new in the bureau, the youngest journalist there, and the only woman. I volunteered. I knew nothing about prisons. I’d grown up in Manhattan, spent summers on Cape Cod, went to private schools. Five years earlier I’d been deconstructing The Executioner’s Song in literature class at Yale. But the State of Florida was using taxpayer money to carry out death sentences and my beat assignment included the Department of Corrections, so it seemed to me that witnessing was part of my job as a reporter. I wanted to be a good reporter. I also thought I had the whole death penalty thing figured out. A delicate equation of actions and forfeiture and gain and loss, plus the law is the law, was my opinion. It did not seem impossibly complicated to me. And anyway, almost every death warrant was turned down by the courts at the last moment, everyone said, so no need to get too worked up. My bureau chief, for example, had never witnessed an execution and he’d been covering the state government for seven years.
But now the guards were strapping Jesse into the chair. Thick leather straps: arms, chest, legs. The electric chair faced the witnesses, and as we watched Jesse, Jesse was watching us. Beneath his shaved scalp his dark eyes burned. He was starting to look at the witnesses in the front row, one by one, I realized. He was going to stare right into the eyes of every single person who had come to see him die. I did not want him to stare at me. But when his eyes finally reached me—the guards were yanking the straps tight—I decided, Well, it’s probably polite. I met his gaze. Locked in. One, two, three, four, five, six. Then his stare moved on.
He is defiant, I wrote on my notepad. He also looked afraid.
Now the guards were pushing a microphone in front of his face so he could say his last words. My hand was shaking and all I got was “I think it’s very unfair. I think it’s time that everyone wakes up to see that the same laws that can go against crime can go against you tomorrow.” Then the guards tied a leather strap across his mouth and dropped a leather mask over his face and screwed the thick black wire from the junction box into a metal headpiece and clamped that down tight onto his shaved bare skull.
A pause.
At six minutes past seven o’clock, they pulled the switch.
* * *
•
My buddy Tex had witnessed two executions for his job with a wire service. He told me it was going to be no big deal. We had been out drinking at an oyster bar near St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, a marshy stretch of mudflats and alligators on the Gulf of Mexico. “They sit up straight when the juice hits them, and then they slump forward and they’re dead,” Tex told me, in his molasses drawl. “The worst part about it, babe—and I mean this—is the long, boring drive back home.”
* * *
•
That is not what happened to Jesse Tafero.
When the electricity hit Jesse Tafero, the headset bolted onto his bare scalp caught fire. Flames blazed from his head, arcing bright orange with tails of dark smoke. A gigantic buzzing sound filled the chamber, so deep I felt it inside the bones of my spine.
In the chair, Jesse Tafero clenched his fists as he slammed upward and back.
He is breathing, I wrote on my yellow notepad.
The executioner, anonymous in the booth, turned the power off. Jesse, in the chair. Nodding. Breathing. His chest heaving. Then—the buzzing again. Flames. Smoke.
His head nods. His head is nodding. He is breathing.
My prison-issued pencil dug into the page so hard that the paper ripped.
I can see him sigh.
* * *
•
Outside again, the daylight was a hammer. The van dumped us back out onto the field opposite the prison and drove away. I stood there trying not to blink. It had taken seven minutes from the time the executioner first turned the power on until Jesse was declared dead, and three separate jolts. Usually it took one jolt, one minute, no nodding, no flames, no smoke, no heartbeat, no sighs. I went back to my motel room to file my story, working at a table next to a window. One of the radio reporters who had been at the execution sat with me because he didn’t want to be alone. I propped open the door to my room so we could smoke cigarettes together while we wrote. My computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80, a Trash 80, about the size of a cereal box with a screen that displayed eight lines of text, and I typed fast on deadline and transmitted my report down to the city desk using rubber cups fastened around the handset of the motel room telephone. Twice it cut off before finishing. A buzzing on the line, the operator said.
I did not know this then, but I had picked up a ghost.
* * *
•
That summer, after the execution, my house in Tallahassee was robbed. I came home from the Herald one day to find my front door jammed open and everything I owned trashed on the floor. I moved instantly. My new place was in a forest by a set of railroad tracks, deep in a ravine. When the freight trains came through, the ground shook, a low rumble like a far-off growl, a sound that kept catching me off guard. Every morning, I ran up the hills of the city in the punishing heat. In July, I went back to Florida State Prison for a test of the electric chair. The prison officials had determined that a kitchen sponge they’d used in the headset during Jesse’s execution was to blame for the fire, and to prove that the chair was working they hooked up a metal colander to the same wire that they’d bolted onto Jesse’s head, put the colander in water, and turned the power on. The water boiled.
After I saw that, I stopped being able to run uphill, and then to run at all. When I tried, my breath turned to lead. I’d been seriously dating a reporter—beautiful, hilarious—from the Herald’s city desk, but I abruptly broke up with her and took up with Tex, getting wasted on beer with him on Saturday afternoons out on St. George Island. There was a high bridge out to the island, and I found that if I hit the top of it at the right speed there was a moment when the road disappeared and it felt like flying, white pylons flashing past and blue water shining all around. The heat out at the shore was so intense that on the drive home I sometimes stopped and threw myself into the Wakulla River, water the color of tea, cottonmouths in the trees.
Go see another one, Tex told me. That’ll get it out of your mind.
In August a serial killer stalked Gainesville just as the University of Florida was starting its fall term. Four young women murdered, one young man. Mutilated, decapitated. I was sent to cover the story. Everywhere I went in Gainesville, people told me I fit the profile, meaning I too was a young woman with dark hair. Like the victims. Like a lot of other people also, I said. An old man at the city morgue insisted: You could be next.
The following spring, I spent my days rereading my battered college copy of Les fleurs du mal in the rotunda of the capitol during the legislative session instead of taking notes in the committee meetings, which I decided were soul-crushing rodeos of blowhards and existentially irrelevant concerns. As opposed to French poetry, you see. It was all lies, I told my bureau chief, the one who’d never witnessed an execution. Liars and lies.
Being a journalist was what I’d wanted to do. From the time I first read Brenda Starr in grammar school to editor jobs on my high school and college papers to an investiga
tive reporting internship at The Village Voice to a local news stint at a small Massachusetts daily to political reporting at The Miami Herald, I had devoted myself to finding the truth, making it public, holding the powerful to account. But after witnessing Jesse Tafero die, I could not tell if any of that shit mattered, at all.
* * *
•
It was purely by chance that I started working as a private detective.
In the winter of 1992, I packed all my belongings in my car, drove out to California, and got a job in construction. Tile setting. It wasn’t anything I’d ever thought of before. In this new life, I had a hose, a shovel, two five-gallon buckets, a pair of leather gloves for carrying things, and a pair of rubber gloves for cleaning up. My job was to load sand, lime, and cement into a mixing pan, add water, shovel the wet mud into the buckets, and lug the buckets upstairs without tripping over my own feet or gouging the walls. I liked it. With tile, a small mistake at the beginning could turn into a much bigger mistake at the end, one that would be impossible to change since everything was literally set in stone. I respected that. The zero-bullshit factor of the physical world. My new girlfriend had a big red dog, an Akita mix who looked like a giant fox, and he became my dog as well, riding shotgun in the front seat of my powder-blue Volvo sedan as I went from one high-end residential job site to the next. Palo Alto, Mill Valley, Hillsborough, Sea Cliff, Sausalito. A new world of Port-O-Lets, pallets, shards of Sheetrock everywhere like shattered snow. The hills above the Berkeley flatlands had burned to the ground the previous autumn, and on jobs up there I found myself in a blasted wasteland of melted glass and twisted metal. That felt familiar to me. I moved into a stilt house out on a marshland, and after work I watched night herons hunt in the shimmering shallows below my dock. I envied those birds. Their ability to tune everything out—and fly away.
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