Maybe it was because I was now a private detective, but after reading all the latest news stories about Jesse and Sunny and Walter, I’d gone and dug up some older clips too. And those older stories mentioned something that the more recent reports did not: Two independent eyewitnesses who’d seen the murders firsthand. Two truck drivers with nothing to gain either way. At Jesse’s trial in 1976, those two truck drivers swore they saw Walter Rhodes standing with his hands in the air as the fatal gunshots rang out. Maybe it was no big deal. Eyewitnesses are unreliable, as everyone knows. But I was having trouble letting it go. If the eyewitnesses saw Walter standing with his hands in the air as the shots were fired, then how could Walter have killed two policemen? That question was starting to haunt me. I wanted to stop thinking about Jesse Tafero. About the ashes on his dress shirt afterwards, fallen down from his scalp. Was this burned man innocent? I had to know. Every time I read or heard his name now, I trembled. A hard shudder, brittle. Dark like a gravestone. I needed that feeling to stop.
And there was one other thing. It was something everyone agreed about—prosecution, defense, the eyewitnesses, even Jesse himself. As the first shot rang out that morning, the doomed officers had Jesse up against the police car. Restrained. Jesse Tafero, the man who went to the electric chair, could not possibly have acted alone. Someone else had to fire first. It wasn’t the police officers—their hands, tested after their deaths, were clean of gunshot residue. So who did? Double-crossing Walter Rhodes, according to the current news reports. Perjurer, murderer. But that’s not what the two truck drivers told the jury back in 1976. Their eyewitness testimony said the first shot had to have come from the woman who was famous now as a sweet, spiritual, tragically innocent yoga teacher: Sunny Jacobs herself.
* * *
•
One Sunday morning in November 2011, I was at my breakfast table, having coffee and reading The New York Times. I’d gotten married and moved east to Chicago; outside, the wind blew leaves along empty sidewalks, a first icy breath of winter. I opened the newspaper and took out the Style section, my favorite. And there was Sunny, surrounded by Hollywood actresses, smiling out from a color photograph splashed across the top of the society wedding page.
Most married couples will tell you that the things they hold in common helped cement their relationships. For Sonia Jacobs, 64, and Peter Pringle, 73, married in New York last Sunday, common ground was the decade and a half each had served on death row before their convictions were overturned for the murders that they steadfastly maintained they did not commit.
“We have each lived a nightmare,” Ms. Jacobs, in a gold dress and matching pearls, whispered to a friend minutes before marrying Mr. Pringle, his snow-white beard aglow against the backdrop of a black suit and matching bow tie. “Now it’s time to live our fairy tale.”
I could feel myself starting to tremble.
Eight years ago, after reading those rave reviews, I’d gone to see The Exonerated, the play that had made an international star out of Sunny. And after seeing the play, I had visited Walter Rhodes. Again. To ask him, straight up this time, not as a dazzled young reporter but as a professional investigator: Did you kill Florida Highway Patrol trooper Phillip Black and Canadian constable Donald Irwin? Because that is what the play said, Walter. Tell me the truth.
But Walter Rhodes had not been a friendly prison inmate this time around. My attempt to confront him was a total disaster. And afterwards, I’d shut down. Just: no. I stopped talking about Jesse Tafero and Sunny Jacobs and Walter Rhodes. I stopped reading about them. I tried everything I could to put all of them the hell out of my mind. Shredding my files. Never mentioning my own experience as an eyewitness to an electric chair execution to anyone, ever. Silence, always. To erase, to disappear. Them, me. But even so, in my own home, here at my own breakfast table, on a Sunday morning no less, my ghost had found me. “Mr. Rhodes confessed to murdering the two officers,” the Times said.
I am an idiot, I thought. A former reporter who should know better. A private detective who cannot let go. Gunfire, two mortally wounded police officers, all this pain.
Old murder cases are like coffins. Buried deep, holding a world of hurt. I knew this from the death row cases I’d worked on over the last two decades as a private eye. I was not going to lie to myself about it. You have to be careful, opening them up. You may find things you cannot forget. That you’ll wish you’d never seen.
I knew, too, that trying to figure out the truth of Jesse Tafero’s case would mean bringing murder back to the doorsteps of Trooper Phillip Black’s and Constable Donald Irwin’s families. I was not sure I had the right to do that. Reawakening the very worst part of the past—prying it open, picking it apart—when everyone else has put it away. Selfish. Arrogant. Self-important. Damaging. Futile, in any case. For naught.
Shivering at my breakfast table in Chicago, I don’t know yet that when I finally do visit the widow of Trooper Black, she will greet me with kindness. She will tell me that Phil Black was a gentleman and a “really, really great father” to their little boy, who was just seven when his father was slain. “I would like to know the exact truth of what happened as well,” Grace Black will tell me, her eyes steady and serious on mine. “If that is what you are doing, you have my blessing.” From the depths of her loss, a shining generosity.
But I don’t have the benefit of her benevolence yet. Right now, with this newspaper story in front of me, I only know that I have arrived at a turning point.
I’ve tried to ignore this mystery, this misery, which has grayed the edges of so many days. My unfinished story. I’ve tried to plead with it, to appease it, to surrender to it, to concede its points to it, to argue with it, and to bury it. But I keep waking up in the middle of it, this rattling echo, this old sorrow, these dead bones. I need it to go away and leave me alone.
It never has. It will not. It has become part of you.
There is only one way for that to no longer be true.
I’m a private detective. This is a mystery. I know what I have to do.
But I’ve never worked inside my own life before. Never dared to face my own shadows.
And I am afraid of ghosts.
PART ONE
Florida
1
A Real Strange Situation
Fort Lauderdale, Florida. January 2015. A dead-end street beneath a power plant, just west of downtown. Except for the metallic buzzing sound in the air around me, the day is empty and dusty and bright. I am standing in the middle of the street, listening to the power plant and staring at an apartment building. Single-story, chipped stucco, asphalt for a front yard. I’ve got an old newspaper clipping with me from the days immediately after the murders—“Witness Testifies Tafero Didn’t Shoot”—and I dig it out now to double-check the address.
Yes. It started here.
In the winter of 1976, Walter Rhodes lived in this building. In Apartment B, up on the right, second door in from the street. One afternoon around Valentine’s Day, just after Taxi Driver hit the movie theaters and as heiress Patty Hearst was standing trial for bank robbery out in California, Walter took a call in Apartment B from his friend Jesse Tafero. Jesse asked if he could come crash with his girlfriend and kids for a few days. Walter said okay. And on about their third day here together, Walter and Jesse and Sunny and the children came out of Apartment B, down this cement walkway, climbed into a red Ford Fairlane, and drove off. For Jesse Tafero, that trip ended in the electric chair.
There are some things I need to make clear, here at the outset. I’m a licensed private detective but I don’t carry a gun. I’ve never slapped a witness or slept with one, although there’ve been some who deserved it and a few who tried it. All my life I’ve been mistaken for someone else—Don’t I know you? Haven’t we met?—and what people assume about me is usually wrong. I’m not going to lie: That used to piss me off. Once when I was a ne
wspaper reporter, the press secretary to the governor of Florida asked me who I’d slept with to get my job. I wrote a whole newspaper column about how sexist and outrageous and unacceptably ubiquitous his attitude was. But not long into my new life as a detective I realized all that bullshit was now working in my favor. Being underestimated, talked over, talked down to, ignored, pitied, patronized, flirted with, hit on—all superpowers, to a professional investigator. No wonder women make good private eyes. For nearly twenty years now, I’ve earned my living by speaking to strangers, but in my own life I’m shy. And I don’t know how I feel right now, standing here, except that I cannot believe it is real.
Four days ago, after I finally got up my nerve to do this, my husband and I shuttered our house up north, threw some clothes in the car, and headed off into a blizzard so fierce it took five hours to drive fifty miles. Trucks skidding off into drifts in Michigan, snow blowing across the road in Indiana, rain pounding down in the mountains of Tennessee. All the way along, I tried not to think about what I was getting myself into, but the electric chair flickered in the back of my mind. Now I’m in South Florida for the first time in a quarter century, standing on this street, looking at this building, and feeling—nothing. It’s weird. Nothing at all.
Up at Apartment B, there’s a doorbell, an aluminum threshold, and a window so dirty I can’t see inside. I stand still for a moment, staring at a pile of cigarette butts on the ground. It’s not that I’m expecting to trip over a bullet here and solve the case. But this threshold is the threshold Jesse and Sunny and Walter crossed, setting off. This roof is the last roof Jesse Tafero slept under as a free man. An investigation has to start somewhere, and I like to touch base. It’s a form of superstition, possibly. The hope that the past will be present in a place.
And I don’t have any other clues. This building. Some old newspaper clippings. A few court records. Seriously. That’s it. With those as my starting point, I have to find the truth about two heartless murders committed almost forty years ago on the side of an interstate highway in a rest area that has long since been completely torn down. Obliterated. Erased.
Detective work is, in its essence, a form of time travel. It’s being in two places at once—now, and then. Now being me, with all my fears and flaws. Then being the split seconds those shots rang out in the rest area. That is the instant I need to get back to. To own my life again. That.
I raise my hand. I knock.
But no luck. There’s no sound. No one’s around.
* * *
•
At the Fort Lauderdale courthouse the next day, I write the names Jesse Joseph Tafero, Sonia Jacobs Linder, and Walter Norman Rhodes Jr. on a piece of scrap paper and slide it to the clerk who sits behind a pane of bulletproof glass. It’s a gorgeous day today—I drove along the Atlantic Ocean on my way here, cobalt waves beneath a clear blue sky—but this office is windowless with overhead lights that buzz and snap. I hate the buzzing. I’ve spent the morning calling my clients to tell them I’m taking some time off. I don’t say why. Nobody wants a haunted detective. I’ve given myself three months here in Florida, from now until the end of March, to figure this case out. It’s day two and already I feel like I’m running behind.
Now the clerk is coming toward me with a stack of boxes on a cart. Broward County’s official court file for case number 76-127SCF, State of Florida v. Tafero et al. The case is thirty-nine years old and the boxes look alarming. Onionskin documents, faint purple mimeographs from the 1970s, mold on the pages, staples rusted in place. But somewhere in this mess are the undisputed facts of this mystery, the facts that have always been accepted by everyone as true. Every case has them, even this one. I reach into the box, take a file folder, and begin.
* * *
•
February 20, 1976. A Friday morning, about seven o’clock. In a rest area off Interstate 95, a beat-up green two-door Camaro is parked tight alongside a grassy curb. The car’s windows are cracked open, its hood is bashed and rusted, the door on its passenger side is jammed shut, its front bumper is falling off. The sun is up but the day is foggy and the rest area is covered in white mist.
Inside the Camaro, lanky Walter Rhodes is asleep in the driver’s seat. He’s dressed in a silky blue shirt, corduroy trousers, a wide leather belt, and sneakers. He has dark shiny hair in bangs across his forehead and a mustache that is midway between male model and porn star. At his feet, a loaded gun.
Over in the front passenger seat: Jesse Tafero. Jesse is asleep too. He’s wearing a tan leather jacket, a dress shirt, tan slacks, and white slip-on shoes. He has wavy brown hair, a mustache, thick muttonchop sideburns, and a dark beard. Around his neck, on his smooth bare chest, he wears a green-and-gold Buddha on a chain.
Jesse’s girlfriend, Sunny Jacobs, is in the backseat, also asleep. Sunny is delicately built, five feet tall and one hundred pounds, with wide brown eyes and long hair. She’s got on a green pullover sweater, loose on her thin shoulders, and bell-bottom jeans. With her are two sleeping children: nine-year-old Eric and little Tina, ten months. A denim bag with pink baby pajamas is at Sunny’s feet.
Just past seven o’clock, a marked Florida Highway Patrol cruiser pulls in off Interstate 95, Trooper Phillip Black at the wheel. Trooper Black is starting his shift this morning with a routine patrol of the highway rest areas. Waking people up, checking they’re okay: He’s told friends that he considers it one of the basic duties of his job. Black is tall and fit, with short brown hair and a square jaw; clean-cut, friendly, helpful, and popular, he’s a central-casting version of a handsome state trooper. He’s also a former United States Marine who picks up his young son from school after his shift ends and stays a moment to help tidy up the classroom too. Today he’s wearing his Florida Highway Patrol uniform: light brown shirt and trousers, black epaulets, belt, and shoes, a cream Stetson hat. Black has a fully loaded .357 Magnum service revolver strapped in a holster at his waist. And this morning, Black has a friend riding along.
Donald Irwin is a Canadian constable who, along with his wife, has been spending the week as a guest of the Black family. Both officers are white, thirty-nine years old, and married with children. It’s the last day of Irwin’s Florida vacation; tomorrow he and his wife are heading home to the Ontario cold. As a ride-along, Irwin is here as an observer with no official police powers, so he is dressed in civilian clothes: a white knit T-shirt, gray Levi’s, brown shoes. He’s wearing gold-framed aviator eyeglasses. He is unarmed. Irwin has been a police officer in Canada since 1958, and in those eighteen years, he has never once fired a weapon in the line of duty or come face-to-face with a gunman.
In his cruiser, Black pulls alongside the Camaro. The two cars are side by side now, with the cruiser on the left. Black parks, and he and Irwin step out into the morning mist. As Irwin hangs back, Black walks over to the Camaro. Two young children, asleep in the backseat. A fragile-looking young woman, sleeping with them. Walter, asleep in the driver’s seat. There’s a handgun at Walter’s feet. A Smith & Wesson 9mm semiautomatic, black steel with a wood grip.
Trooper Black reaches into the Camaro and takes the gun.
That wakes everybody up.
Black asks Walter for identification. Walter hands over his driver’s license and then steps out of the Camaro. Black takes Walter’s license and the gun, goes to his FHP cruiser, and radios in.
Trooper Black: We’ve got a real strange situation here. Need some 28s and 29s. First one is…on a weapon, Smith & Wesson, uh, it’s a .38 automatic, serial number is A187854, that will be A Adam 187854—correct that to a 9mm semiautomatic. Then run one on a Walter Norman Rhodes, R-H-O-D-E-S, Jr., W/M, DOB 9-2-50. Then run a 10-29 on 10-169558, 10-169558, and we believe there’s a weapon under the front seat and we’re having trouble getting the two people out of there, we’ll let you know in just a second.
The two people that Black is “having trouble” with are Jesse,
in the front seat, and Sunny, in the backseat with the children.
Dispatch radios back: Walter Norman Rhodes Jr. is on parole.
Black orders Walter to get up to the front of the cars. Next Black stands at the open door on the driver’s side of the Camaro and talks to Jesse and Sunny. Minutes pass. Then Black radios in again.
Trooper Black: 10-24 Lauderdale.
10-24 means send help.
The radio goes dead.
* * *
•
Outside the courthouse, dusk has fallen. Gone is the Kodachrome afternoon; in its place, a black-and-white world, night sky and streetlights, shadows and glare. I find my car in the gravel parking lot and head back along the ocean to the bungalow my husband and I have rented for the winter. A fifties throwback with jalousie windows and terrazzo floors, it’s nothing like home. I live in Michigan now; we left Chicago a year and a half ago, trading the clash and clamor of the city for a house by the lake in the pine woods. It’s quiet there, and dark, no streetlights, just foxes in the fields at night, bare branches, a silvery moon. Here in Florida, the very sunshine feels flagrant and outrageous. And I don’t recognize this place at all. Back when I was a reporter, I spent a lot of time in Fort Lauderdale. Drinking, dancing, running around. After the execution, that all fell apart. I haven’t been back since, and now, twenty-five years later, nothing looks familiar. Everything is bigger, taller, faster, brighter. I’d always worried that maybe no one would talk to me if I ever came to ask them about this. But maybe that won’t be the problem. Maybe no one will even remember.
Two Truths and a Lie Page 3
