Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  Every day now ended in a layer of fine gray dust on my skin. A shroud, slowly lightening as it dried to white. At work I earned my pay sweating, with my heart pounding, my arms and legs on fire. I am alive. I listened to the radio, turned up loud. I hated the hard-rock music that played on every job site radio and then I started to love it—the foolproof brainwashing of merciless repetition. Some of the clients spoke slowly to me, enunciating their words carefully as they stared at my cement-covered clothes. Others were kind; one blistering afternoon a homeowner appeared with a bowl of plums, cold from the refrigerator, burstingly sweet. A few of the job site guys were jerks, but I let it roll. Mostly I was invisible. It was all okay. I knew I was making myself pay penance for sitting in a folding chair like a spectator at a sports match and watching a man die. I just did not exactly know why.

  * * *

  •

  One Friday evening, not quite two years after the execution, I was watching television in my living room. On ABC, the news program 20/20 was beginning, with Barbara Walters in a bright yellow suit. Suddenly a close-up of my front-page Miami Herald story about the execution—my byline, right there—flashed onscreen. “3 jolts used to execute killer.” An announcer asked: “Could the State of Florida have executed an innocent man?”

  On my couch, I froze.

  * * *

  •

  The day Jesse Tafero’s death warrant went up on the bulletin board at The Miami Herald’s capital bureau, I’d read through a stack of news clippings about the crime that sent him to death row. It was a complicated tale.

  One morning in the winter of 1976, Jesse; his girlfriend, Sunny Jacobs; two young children—Sunny and Jesse’s baby daughter and Sunny’s nine-year-old son; and a friend of Jesse’s named Walter Rhodes were asleep in a beat-up Camaro in a highway rest area. Just past seven o’clock, two police officers on routine patrol stopped in the rest area to check out the Camaro. Moments later the officers were dead.

  Jesse and Sunny and Walter—with the children—fled the scene, crashed at a police roadblock, and were arrested. Walter quickly told police that Jesse and Sunny murdered the officers. Walter testified against his friends at trial and his testimony helped send both Sunny and Jesse to death row. But not even a year later, Walter confessed that he had committed the murders himself. Then he recanted his confession. Then he confessed again. Then he recanted again. He confessed again. He recanted again. Confessed again. Recanted again.

  Before arriving at the prison for Jesse’s execution, I tried to figure out if Jesse and Sunny were guilty—or if Walter was. There was not much time. The death warrant Governor Martinez signed in mid-April had scheduled Jesse’s execution for early May, and I was starting from zero. I had never so much as read Jesse Tafero’s name before. I raced through the old news clips in our office files, then ordered more from the Herald’s main archives and scoured those too. I requested interviews with Jesse and with his girlfriend, Sunny, but they told me no. And in late April, I drove down through a grove of orange trees to the prison where Walter Rhodes was serving out three life sentences, because Walter had agreed to talk to me.

  This was the week before the execution. It was my first time inside a prison.

  Prison was not like it is in the movies. There was no bulletproof glass panel, no telephone. A guard ushered me down an empty corridor into a conference room. In the center of the room was a table, and at the table was a prison inmate dressed all in blue, waiting. The guard left the room, closing the door. I was alone with a convicted murderer.

  Standing close by the door, I took a good long look at him.

  Walter Rhodes, chief prosecution witness and possible liar, was tall, broad-shouldered, lean, and ripped. Jet-black hair, onyx eyes, skin tanned to an amber brown. A young Clint Eastwood, a young Montgomery Clift. His gaze was smooth and smoldering, I thought, steely, like the inside of the barrel of a gun. Not that I’d ever seen one of those.

  I knew I needed to ask Walter Rhodes about Jesse Tafero and Sunny Jacobs. About how Jesse and Sunny said that it was actually he, Walter, who had killed the officers. And about his confessions. All those confessions. Is Jesse going to the electric chair for crimes you committed, Walter? That was what I was there to find out.

  The first thing I did, though, was sit down across the table from him and light a cigarette.

  “I guess I’m gonna have to tap my ashes on the floor, which will probably piss off the Department of Corrections,” I told Walter, trying to sound cool. “Well, what I wanted to talk to you about was—how do you say his last name?”

  In the two hours that followed, Walter Rhodes did not confess to me. He said the only thing he’d done at the highway rest area was stand with his hands in the air—“surrender in any language”—while Sunny and Jesse murdered the officers. Still, it was a heavy conversation. We discussed karma and destiny in addition to the murders, and as the interview drew to a close, I decided Walter was telling me the truth when he said he was innocent. I knew it. I could feel it. I rushed back to the office and wrote a story about Jesse Tafero’s impending execution that did not so much as mention that Walter Rhodes had ever confessed to the killings at all.

  * * *

  •

  “He is a psychopath,” Jesse’s girlfriend, Sunny Jacobs, was saying now on 20/20 in my California living room, about Walter Rhodes. Onscreen, Sunny was small and delicate. A pixie. Clear brown eyes, shiny brown hair, pink lip gloss. She grew up in a leafy New York City suburb, 20/20 reported. Wealthy parents, summer camp, swimming pools. Now she was behind bars for the murder of two policemen, put there by someone who had later confessed to the killings himself. Her voice was sweet and soft and she looked directly at her interviewer with a calm and unblinking gaze. “I think he believes every word that he says, each time that he says a new story,” she continued, about Walter. “It’s been my experience that anyone who has really dug into this comes back finding out that I am not guilty—I did not shoot those men—and that I am as much a victim as they were.”

  And Jesse? the interviewer asked. “Did he still maintain he was innocent?”

  “Yes,” Sunny said, her voice a whisper now, raw with emotion.

  “Right up until the end?”

  “Yes. Yes. And we didn’t say goodbye, we just kept saying ‘I love you’ until we had to hang up.”

  I walked across the room and snapped the television off.

  * * *

  •

  Three years passed. In the winters the king tides came, flooding the boardwalk with silver water. In the summers the marsh behind my house dried out and turned to gold. Then one morning I blew out a disc in my spine picking up a hundred pounds of cement. Shortly after that, my girlfriend announced she was in love with someone else. I got a job writing again at a San Francisco paper, and found a tiny apartment in the city. After work now, I sat and watched the fog coming in over the hills from the ocean, opalescent, effacing, erasing. Absolving, I hoped. I started dating a photographer I’d met on a job site years before, when he was laying hardwood floors and I was starting out at starting over. We had nothing in common and we didn’t like each other much. That seemed best.

  I was driving to work in San Francisco one day when an interview program came on the radio. The guest was a woman who said she was a private detective.

  I listened for a little bit.

  Yeah, right, I thought. Sure. A private detective.

  A few weeks went by and I was hanging out at the Lone Palm on Guerrero with my friend Tim. Bourbon in highball glasses, red neon bleeding in through the windows, rain coming down hard outside. Usually Tim and I just complained about our love lives, but this time talk turned to the subject of work. Tim was a newspaper reporter, like me, and he’d stumbled onto a brand-new gig. He was working part-time as a private detective for an agency over in Pacific Heights. That’s so weird, I told him. I just heard that show on th
e radio.

  It’s a blast, Tim said. A license to go through the world sorting truth from lies. The detective was looking to hire a woman, because women make good private eyes. Here, he added, writing the detective’s office number on a bar napkin.

  I don’t think so, I told Tim. I might be at loose ends, but I am not fucking crazy.

  * * *

  •

  That whiskey-soaked napkin came home with me anyhow. And one afternoon soon afterwards, I decided what the hell. I called, as a lark. Then, when the detective didn’t call me back, I decided it wasn’t a lark, it was a test. If you can get the job, you can have the job. I called him again. And again. When I finally reached him, though, he yelled at me. “You’re calling me during the dinner hour. You have heard of dinner, yes? A time when respectable people have a reasonable expectation of privacy?” But then he’d paused as if a thought had hit him, barked an order to be at his office the following morning, and slammed down the phone.

  The address he gave me turned out to be a gilded Victorian mansion at the top of a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. The detective answered the doorbell himself. A serious man in a very good suit. I immediately regretted my flowered dress, ponytail, and cowboy boots. Upstairs, in an office with a spectacular view of the old prison on Alcatraz Island—glowing like a Roman ruin in the sun—I told the detective the truth: I was thirty-two years old, I lived alone, a runaway New Yorker with a degree in history, a newly found and hard-won respect for the law of gravity, and a dawning suspicion that I might not ever turn into the person I’d been brought up to be. Proper and all that. Where was I headed? No clue.

  Somehow we got on the subject of my fifth-grade teacher, Sister Frances Marian, who’d had her own theory about the way the universe worked. An elderly nun facing down thirty-seven children in a New York City classroom, she didn’t go in for forgiveness or redemption or grace. Her thing was consequences. That is going on your permanent record, is how she put it. She had me believing that somewhere there is a piece of paper where every single thing a person has ever said or thought or done is written down.

  I think she had a point, I told the detective, in his office. Not about the paper. About the existence of an objective reality, one that is wholly independent of what we might want it to be. What actually happened. I believe in that, I told him.

  He hired me. “You are motivated by guilt, which means you will never stop until the job is done,” he pronounced. I felt insulted and intrigued. How had he known? The job sounded impossible, in any case. I would be talking to strangers. Showing up unannounced on their doorsteps and asking for a moment of their time. It wasn’t gumshoe stuff. No divorces, no cheating spouses. His clients were celebrities, Fortune 500 companies, world leaders—these last two words delivered in a hoarse growl that was somewhere between a shared confidence and a direct threat. Oh, and my dress was fine, my hair was fine, but the boots would be off-putting to elderly witnesses. With that, he sent me out on the road.

  I never came back. Instead, I became a private detective. It freed me. It saved me.

  And then it brought me full circle, to the mystery I’d tried so hard to leave behind.

  * * *

  •

  After the execution, I kept running into Jesse Tafero.

  The first time was the 20/20 program hosted by Barbara Walters in her yellow suit. “Has a mother of two spent sixteen years in prison because the real killer lied in court?” 20/20 asked. “Sonia Jacobs and her boyfriend both claimed to be innocent. He was executed, and yet some believe this man”—a picture of Walter Rhodes flashed onscreen—“is the actual killer.”

  Six months after 20/20 aired, Sunny Jacobs was released from prison. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit threw out her murder conviction, ruling that the State of Florida had hidden a crucial piece of evidence in the case: a polygraph report that cast doubt on Walter Rhodes’s truthfulness at trial. A damning lie detector test.

  The appeals court ordered that Sunny be given a new trial, but since Walter had by then confessed to the murders many times himself, the state gave her a plea deal instead. Sunny Jacobs was free. Jesse Tafero, convicted on the same evidence, was dead.

  “They were both innocent,” Jesse’s mother, Kay, told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel after Sunny’s release, in October 1992. “I’m never going to get my son back. They killed the wrong man.”

  Sunny Jacobs walked out of prison into a blaze of flashbulbs. A death row prisoner set free—it was a major news story even without Jesse’s fiery execution just two years earlier. On the courthouse steps, Sunny let out a piercing cry. It was Walter Rhodes who murdered the police officers, she told reporters. But even so, Sunny had “no angry words” for the prosecutor who put her behind bars. “Being bitter is a waste of time,” Sunny said. “And I happen to know, none of us have any time to waste.” Later that day, Sunny’s childhood rabbi spoke to the press on her behalf, calling her “a wonderful soul” who spent her time in prison meditating and inspiring fellow inmates. “She learned to get rid of negative things and let go of the pain in her life,” Sunny’s rabbi said. For her first night out of prison, Sunny’s friends gathered together in an ocean-view room at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, where Sunny drank champagne and took a bubble bath, the Sun-Sentinel reported. “I don’t know who I am. I am a newly created person,” Sunny said. Jesse’s mother called the moment bittersweet. “I would like to see them both out together, but I’m just happy for her,” Kay Tafero said.

  In 1996, ABC aired a TV movie about Jesse and Sunny and Walter. In the Blink of an Eye was a docudrama that showed Walter Rhodes framing Jesse and Sunny—young, trusting, and in love—for his own terrible crimes. “A true story of justice compromised,” the Los Angeles Times called the movie. “Those arguing against capital punishment frequently point out cases in which the condemned are later found to be innocent. Sunday’s ABC movie, In the Blink of an Eye, is about one such case.”

  In 1998, two noted death penalty scholars wrote a law review article about Jesse Tafero stating as fact that “a prosecution witness”—Walter Rhodes—had perjured himself on the stand and was “the real killer.” The title of their article: “The Execution of the Innocent.”

  In press interviews—the stories always mentioned Jesse too—Sunny talked about having nightmares about being on death row again. Even so, she refused to be consumed by the past. She said her practice of yoga and forgiveness helped. “I figured if people could survive the concentration camps, then surely I could survive this,” Sunny told the St. Petersburg Times in 1999. Now that Sunny was free, one paper reported, she worked in a convent, teaching yoga to nuns.

  I watched it all. I read it all. I tried not to, but the news reports seemed to find me and stick like glue. Like quicksand. Sunny and Jesse. Jesse and Sunny. Every single thing I read and saw about them haunted me: two young lovers sent to death row on the false testimony of the true killer. I wanted to put the execution behind me and just get on with my life, but the news reports kept bringing that morning back. Jesse, masked, gagged, shuddering, flames shooting out of his head. Every time I saw his name, the world fell away and I could hear the buzzing in the death chamber. Feel it inside my own bones like it was still happening. I hated that feeling, but it never asked my permission. It just arrived.

  I’d been tricked, obviously. Taken in by good-looking Walter Rhodes. There were not many hard facts to be had in the flood of news stories about the case, and not too much detail either about Jesse and Sunny and Walter—who they were, how they knew one another—so it was difficult to tell what exactly went down out there at the highway rest stop that morning, but no matter. The whole thing was incredibly upsetting. The calm, controlled, rational private detective I was becoming examined the news stories, looking for clues. But it felt like there was a whole other part of myself still back in the death chamber, watching Jesse Tafero die.

>   * * *

  •

  In 2002, The Exonerated made its debut off-Broadway. Billed as a documentary play about wrongful convictions, with every word drawn from court documents and letters and interviews, it was an immediate smash hit. “Someone else committed their crimes,” The New York Times announced, calling the play “an artfully edited anthology of interviews with six former death row prisoners who were all discovered to be innocent of the crimes for which they were incarcerated.” One of “the exonerated” was Sunny Jacobs. Telling her own story of innocence, and Jesse Tafero’s too.

  It was now more than a decade since Jesse’s execution. During that time, I’d completed my training as an investigator, passed rigorous professional exams in two states to earn my private detective licenses, and opened my own detective agency. I’d spent tens of thousands of hours as a private eye investigating all kinds of cases: capital murders, extortion by kickboxers, cigarette trafficking, fires at sea, environmental pollution, bank fraud, theft of corporate secrets, and the dealings of syndicate kingpins. My entire professional life was all about tracking down facts. But even so, the facts of this mystery at the center of my own life continued to elude me. Discovered to be innocent. I accepted that. I believed it. I trusted the television specials and the news reports and the rave reviews of this new play. But: Discovered how? Discovered when? I wanted to know. I needed to know. Because I was having trouble figuring out how the eyewitnesses fit in.