* * *
•
Jesse Joseph Tafero. Brown hair, brown eyes. Six feet tall, 145 pounds. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in October 1946 to Jesse Senior and Kathleen, who went by Kay. Jesse Senior was a used car salesman. Kay was a miner’s daughter, born in rural Wales. She came to Pennsylvania with her father as a young girl. After Kay and Jesse Senior married, Kay joined a women’s club in Neptune City, New Jersey, where she helped with the refreshments and the afternoon teas, always as “Mrs. Jesse Tafero.” Jesse Junior was their only child and Kay doted on him.
Little Jesse was sickly, Kay wrote in her statement. Frail. It worried her. So when a doctor told them little Jesse needed warmth, they sold up and moved to Miami. It was the mid-1950s, a boom time. Flamingos, flower gardens, swanky hotels out on the beach, with diving shows in the afternoon and Frank Sinatra at night. The Fontainebleau. The Eden Roc. Everyone decked out in black tie, the women with their beautiful jewels, luminous in the neon night. In Miami, Jesse’s father bought a used car dealership just south of the Little River. But they were poor, and Jesse was ashamed of that; he was teased at school for his old clothes, which embarrassed him. His father beat him and locked him in closets, where Jesse screamed and cried to no avail, his mother wrote. The family attended Catholic church, and Jesse was an altar boy when he was young. “Jesse has never in his life been a violent person,” Kay Tafero wrote. “He just wanted peace and quiet.”
When I look Kay up, I find she died ten years ago. But there are other people who knew Jesse I can try to talk to. I decide to start with a friend of Jesse’s named Marianne, mainly because she lives near our rented bungalow in Fort Lauderdale. But also because she was a Playboy Bunny and her affidavit doesn’t mention Jesse being an altar boy at all.
3
The Most Dangerous People
“Marianne?”
The house is a buttercup-yellow cottage with a white Mercedes in the driveway and a pot of pink geraniums on the porch. I am on the porch as well, and I am having second thoughts. My skydive anxiety, as usual, plus it’s hot out, there’s no doorbell, my skirt is sticking to the backs of my knees, and I am not ready, it’s too soon, what am I doing here, I need to be better prepared, I should leave and come back later. Or never. Hi, Marianne, remember your friend Jesse? Well, I saw him die. That feels crazy. Because it is crazy. I think I’ll just—
“Who is it?” a voice calls out, from behind the door.
“Marianne?” I say.
“Yes? Who is it?”
“Marianne, I need to talk to you about someone—”
Okay.
“Jesse Tafero,” I call out.
A moment. Then the jangle of keys in locks.
A woman in a pink polo shirt and slim sand-colored capri slacks stands in the doorway staring at me. Big blue eyes, dark blue eyeliner, a bombshell figure, cotton-candy lip gloss. Blond hair tumbles in thick ringlets down past her hourglass waist.
“Yes, I knew Jesse,” she says, in a sweet whisper.
And she opens the door wide so I can step inside.
* * *
•
I am in a front parlor with two velvet armchairs and a fireplace. After the heat and light outside, the cool darkness is like stepping into a stone church. Around us, the house stretches away, oriental carpets and beveled-glass French doors and good antiques. On the wall to my right hangs a portrait of a young woman in farmer’s overalls, blond curls tied up in a red kerchief, denim straps strained to bursting over her bare breasts. She looks, I notice, just like Marianne. She is holding a daisy and smiling.
Marianne has taken a seat in one of the velvet armchairs, and when I tear my eyes away from the painting I find she is watching me. This friend of Jesse Tafero’s. “I was just thinking about Jesse when I heard you at the door,” Marianne says. She seems so much less surprised than I am that I’m here.
* * *
•
It was 1973, Marianne begins. Back in those days, she owned a bar in Miami called the Gold Dust Lounge.
I’ve taken a seat in the velvet armchair across from hers and am balancing my notebook on my lap. I’d been thinking we would inch delicately toward the reason for my visit today, but no. We’re into it. That happens sometimes.
The Gold Dust was an after-hours bar in a basement opposite the Playboy Club, over on Biscayne Boulevard near the beach. It had live music—cool jazz, saxophones—and dancing and drinks until two a.m. A fun, popular place. This kid named Jesse used to hang out at the Gold Dust, and one night he asked Marianne for a job. Jesse was twenty-seven then, a good-looking, soft-spoken young man. Always in chinos, never in jeans. Marianne was older, thirty-seven, married. Jesse seemed too fragile for the real world, Marianne thought. So Marianne had him help her around her house. Odd jobs, for pocket money.
“Jesse was very, very sensitive,” she says.
When she says that, I sit still for a moment. Absorbing.
Last weekend, Marianne says, she spent a day cleaning out her house. No one lives forever, is why. She’s in her seventies now and she wants to save her children from having to go through her things after she’s gone. In a back closet, she found a box of letters from her children, and some from Jesse too. Letters Jesse wrote to her from death row. She spent yesterday reading the letters from her children and destroying them. It’s time to let go, she tells me. This afternoon she had just taken Jesse’s letters out, to read and destroy them too, when she heard me at the front door.
“It’s so funny you came by today,” she says.
“I almost didn’t,” I tell her.
She reaches over and puts her hand on my arm. Her touch, like her voice, is soft and warm.
“Did you ever talk to Jesse about what happened?” I ask.
“He verbally told me he didn’t do it. He said, ‘I did not do it.’ ”
Marianne goes opaque for a moment. A candle, blown out. Then she stands up and walks into the next room. When she comes back, she’s holding a piece of paper. It’s my newspaper article “3 jolts used to execute killer.”
“Have you seen this?”
“I wrote that.”
Marianne looks at me, then looks down again at the paper.
“Did he scream?” she asks.
“They gagged him.”
We sit there for another moment. Marianne gets up again, and this time she comes back holding a stack of envelopes with bright red prison postmarks.
“Do you want these?” she asks.
* * *
•
That night, I sit at the dining room table in our rented bungalow with Jesse’s letters from death row. Outside, there is a wind through the palm fronds, a deep rush and rustle as they sway. As I open one of the envelopes, a Polaroid falls out. A thin pale man in prison whites. He has a thumb looped in his waistband, a pair of wire-rimmed amber-lensed sunglasses dangling from his collar, and a gold watch on his left wrist. Jesse Tafero. He’s smiling. There’s a letter with the Polaroid, dated March 1988, which would have been right after Jesse won a stay on his second death warrant. The letter is about the warrant and the run-up to his execution, the one that was called off.
“The whole situation was such a nightmare,” Jesse writes.
His penmanship is all slashes and loops, and it takes me a while to decipher, this faded blue ink on paper turned brittle with age.
Hearing that his death warrant had been signed was difficult, Jesse is saying. And the warrant meant each new dawn brought him one day closer to the date set for his death—a countdown, a pressure cooker, a “definite physio-psychological torture experience” that made him feel kinship with slaves and revolutionaries and even “Christ himself.” And every moment, the prison around him rang and echoed with the cries of one hundred caged men screaming and cursing. A high-pitched noise riot twenty-four hours a day.
At times he
felt hopeless, he confides. But coming close to death also put him in touch with “deep, intuitive and valid insights into the meaning of things like courage, love, friendship, faith, wisdom”—those words all in one line across the bottom of a page, keeling sideways like sails pushed by a gust of wind.
And now, having survived the warrant, still alive, Jesse feels optimistic. Determined. Courageous.
“Things will all go right,” Jesse’s letter says. “I’m sure.”
After I read the letter, I put it down on the table and sit for a long moment, listening to the wind outside. My ghost has taken on color. I feel—I’m not sure. Sad. So sad.
* * *
•
Later, I can’t sleep. I tiptoe into the living room and switch on my laptop. After reading Jesse’s letters to Marianne, I’m curious about her.
“Two Bombs Rip Home of Underworld Figure.” A story from my old newspaper The Miami Herald floats up onto my screen in the dark room. It seems to be about Marianne.
In 1967, a bomb blew up a “sleek red high-powered speedboat” docked at the home of Marianne and her husband, blowing two doors off the house and shattering every window, the story says. Another bomb wrecked the “sky blue Cadillac” parked in the carport. Two days later, a third bomb sent the family’s cabin cruiser to the bottom of Biscayne Bay. The boat was named for Marianne, “a 101-pound Playboy Bunny,” the Herald reported. “Rubble and shattered glass” covered the house and the lawn, but no one was hurt.
“Jewel fancier John Clarence Cook” is how the Herald described Marianne’s husband. Cook was a master of disguise and the best jewelry thief in the business, according to a sworn statement from the man who planted the bombs, I’m reading now. Cook pulled off high-profile heists in Belgium and the Bahamas and Miami Beach, and one night he was said to have escaped police in his speedboat, a volley of gunshots across the dark waters as he fled with his running lights out. A few years before the bombings, FBI agents investigating the theft of a priceless sapphire and other precious gems from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City tailed John Clarence Cook around Miami. Three beach boys—one of whom was a suave stunt diver famous for his act at Miami Beach hotels—had confessed to the daring theft, and the sapphire, a cabochon rock nicknamed the Star of India, turned up in a bus station locker in Miami, but some of the other jewels—including a one-hundred-carat ruby—were still missing. When the FBI staked out John Clarence Cook after the heist, Cook rammed the agents’ car.
As I’m scrolling through the old news stories, a short wire report catches my eye. In January 1975, Marianne was arrested by federal narcotics agents who alleged she was part of a drug-smuggling ring.
Odd jobs. Pocket money. Miami, the 1970s.
I am a fucking moron. Of course: cocaine.
* * *
•
Twenty-four million dollars in smuggled drugs, operatives in Colombia and Miami, eighteen people indicted as federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents tried to smash the ring. The wire story has a quote from one of the DEA agents and I read it over and over, trying to square it with the gorgeous, sweet, soft-spoken woman I met yesterday.
“These,” the agent said, “are the most dangerous people I’ve ever encountered in my years as a lawman.”
4
No One Is Going to Talk to You
Pine trees, a green car, a white sky. Blood.
It’s the morning after my conversation with Marianne. I am at the dining room table again, next to the pile of Jesse’s letters. I am not reading the letters. I’m staring at my husband’s computer. On the screen is Friday, February 20, 1976. The day exactly. The sunlight and shadows of that morning, flickering.
Look, there’s the Camaro. Dusty, dirty. There’s Constable Irwin, on the ground, under a yellow tarp. Trooper Black has been taken away in an ambulance, but his cream Stetson is still where it fell, right by the Camaro’s front tire—next to a small shiny gun. And blood. So much blood. Bright red and so thick, like paste. A thick bright red pool at the driver’s-side door.
“How did you find this?” I ask Peter.
Peter shrugs. He searched the video collection of Miami Dade College. The Wolfson Archives. Newsreels. “But I’ve never seen it before,” I say, almost in protest. It’s been all around me in the ether this whole time.
I hit pause, rewind, and watch it again. My stomach feels like it is filled with burning cement. And again. And again. I’m looking for the truck drivers, to see if they’re on this tape too. Their statements are in the case file at the courthouse: the eyewitnesses.
* * *
•
At the rest area, it’s close to seven-thirty in the morning now. Mist covers the ground still, shrouding the cars and the spindly pines. At the south end of the lot, a truck driver is pulling in to check the lights on his tractor-trailer. Pierce Hyman is fifty years old, from Jacksonville, Florida. He’s working for Pilot Freight. As he brings his big rig to a halt, Hyman can see a Camaro and a Florida Highway Patrol cruiser parked side by side, up at the north end of the lot, near the entrance ramp that leads back onto the interstate. There’s some action going on up there. Hyman sees Trooper Phillip Black standing at the open door on the driver’s side of the Camaro, bending forward, looking inside the car. There’s a man in a brown jacket sitting in the driver’s seat of the Camaro. That is Jesse Tafero. Another man stands outside the Camaro at the front of the cars. Walter Rhodes.
Now Hyman watches as Trooper Black straightens up and walks over to his FHP cruiser. Black is at the cruiser for a couple of minutes, on the radio. Then Black walks back toward the Camaro. As Black approaches, Jesse stands up from the driver’s seat and gets out of the Camaro. A sudden scuffle. Black grabs Jesse. Constable Donald Irwin steps in to help. Black and Irwin have Jesse pressed up against the cruiser; they are trying to restrain him. Now Black is backing off and drawing his gun. When Black does that, Hyman sees Walter Rhodes, up at the front of the cars, “put his hands in the air.” Then:
The trooper was standing at about the door of the Camaro. The shots appeared to come out of the back of the car, through the left side….I heard the patrolman say “Oh my God, I’ve been shot.”
Pierce Hyman is not the only independent eyewitness to the murders. Truck driver Robert McKenzie sees them too. McKenzie is thirty-two and driving for Food Fair, in Miami. He’s in the rest area on his morning coffee break, in the cab of his tractor-trailer rig. Through the mist, up ahead, McKenzie can just make out the cruiser parked next to the beat-up Camaro. He sees Trooper Black standing at the door of the Camaro, talking to Jesse, who is sitting in the driver’s seat, sideways, with one foot on the ground. He sees Walter outside the car, walking around. Now Trooper Black is bending down to look inside the Camaro. Black stays like that for a while. McKenzie thinks the trooper must be talking to someone in the backseat of the car.
McKenzie’s coffee break is over. Still watching, McKenzie puts his truck in gear and starts easing toward the highway entrance ramp. The route takes him close to the Camaro. There’s Trooper Black, stepping in toward Jesse to frisk him. Jesse, jumping backwards. Constable Irwin stepping to assist. The two officers push Jesse up against the cruiser. Now Black is backing off and drawing his gun. Black points his weapon directly at Walter Rhodes. Walter puts his hands up in the air. “The guy reached his hands up,” McKenzie says.
Then: I heard five shots. And the officer fell instant, and then the other guy fell right behind the officer.
McKenzie cannot see who fires the gun. But he is watching Jesse and Walter as the shots go off. They are both standing outside the Camaro. Neither one of them has a gun.
“You could see them clear?” a detective asks McKenzie.
“Could see them clear,” McKenzie replies.
Right before he hears the shots, McKenzie sees someone sitting in the backseat of the Camaro. Directly behind the dri
ver’s seat, immediately inside the open door of the car, just a few feet away from Trooper Black. A person with “long, light, light brown, sandy hair.”
A woman.
* * *
•
“Sometimes things happen that you have no control over in life, and this was one of them. I was there in the car with my children, in the backseat, and it never occurred to me that I would ever be accused,” Sunny told 20/20, in 1992.
“I was a vegetarian, I wouldn’t have killed a fly,” she told the BBC in 2007.
“I was a peace and love vegetarian. Violence was anathema to my life,” Sunny wrote.
That last quote is from a book Sunny wrote about her case. I have it with me in my car. It’s afternoon now and I am threading my way through a lost corner of tiny Dania Beach, Florida, a stitch of crabgrass just south of the Fort Lauderdale airport, looking for an address. Sunny’s book is called Stolen Time. The front cover describes it as “the inspiring story of an innocent woman condemned to death.” It quotes my Miami Herald story about Jesse’s execution on page 490.
“A remarkable book,” the Daily Mail, a British newspaper—circulation 1.16 million—calls it, according to a blurb on the front cover.
“An extraordinary and inspirational story,” says the actor Susan Sarandon, in red ink on the back cover. Sarandon played Sunny in the movie version of The Exonerated, released in 2005. “Sunny Jacobs is a remarkable woman.”
Two Truths and a Lie Page 5
