Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  But people who knew Sunny Jacobs back in the day seem to have a different take.

  Marianne, the Playboy Bunny, for one. Marianne knew Jesse before he and Sunny got together, and she knew them as a couple too. “I don’t think any of this would ever have happened if it hadn’t been for Sunny,” Marianne told Jesse’s lawyers. Marianne thought Sunny was “a complete sociopath,” a weapons-obsessed rich girl with millionaire parents and a fascination with machine-gun-toting heiress Patty Hearst. Guns excited Sunny, Marianne said. Guns thrilled her. When I asked Marianne who she thought was responsible for the murders, Marianne did not hesitate.

  “I think Sunny did it. I believe the truck drivers.”

  “The truck drivers?”

  “Yes. The ones who saw Jesse bent over the police car during the shooting. I believe them.”

  A cold, controlling “princess” who was “into gun warfare.” That’s how Marianne described Sunny in the affidavit she gave Jesse’s attorneys in 1989. “She thought she was Bonnie and Clyde….That’s why I’ll never believe it was Jesse who shot those cops.”

  “Sunny was crazy,” Jesse’s mother, Kay Tafero, said in her statement. “Sunny was always the leader in that relationship—Jesse just went along with what Sunny wanted.”

  * * *

  •

  Kay and Marianne. The Welsh matron and the Playboy bombshell—they were friends. They went to church together and said novenas for Jesse and rode up together to death row. “She was a real lady,” Marianne told me, about Kay. Wistfully.

  This morning, after watching the newsreels on Peter’s laptop, I continued my searches about Marianne and her friends. One thing I found was a report in the National Archives with a very dry title: Organized Criminal Activities: Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs. A U.S. Senate investigation into organized crime in South Florida—“loansharking, narcotics trafficking, arson, and murder”—in the 1960s and 1970s. The investigation included a long run of sworn testimony about a drug gang involved in “incredible violence,” according to then-senator Sam Nunn. Marianne is mentioned by name in the transcript.

  Murders. Extortions. A nightclub owner car-bombed over a bar tab. Men forced to dig their own graves in the Everglades. Men tied up in curtain cords and bedsheets, jammed into bathtubs, interrogated, and shot dead. The leader of the gang was a man named Ricky Cravero who, along with his high school friend Ronnie and their pals Stanley and Bobby and Billy the Kid, brought millions of dollars of cocaine and marijuana into South Florida. On Valentine’s Day in 1974, a rivalry among Cravero’s gang members ended in gunfire in the parking lot of the Pirate’s Cove bar in North Miami Beach when Stanley—dressed up for a night out in a maroon slacks and sweater set—stepped out of his Lincoln Continental Mark IV to find his friends brandishing a sawed-off carbine and a .32 pistol with a silencer. “What is up, fellows?” Stanley asked. “This, Stanley,” his friends replied, blasting him twenty-three times. “He sure looked funny,” Cravero later said, laughing. The initial idea had been to kill Stanley in Billy’s apartment, but they worried about blood getting on the velvet couches and shag carpet in the living room. And on the lion-skin rug in the bedroom. When police searched the call records for Stanley’s home telephone, they found Jesse Tafero’s name.

  So now I’m wondering. How does a hippie peace-and-love vegetarian rich kid end up asleep in a beat-up Camaro with her two young children, a guy on parole with a gun, and a boyfriend on the call list of the most dangerous drug gangsters in South Florida?

  * * *

  •

  Sonia Jacobs, also known as Sonia Leigh Linder, Sonia Lee Jacobs, Sonia Lee Jacobs Linder. Born in August 1947 to Herbert and Bella Jacobs, prosperous owners of a textile firm. Sunny grew up in a leafy Long Island suburb with her younger brother, Alan. In school, she was vice president of the student council, according to her book. In 1965, when she was in college, Sunny found out she was pregnant. She dropped out and got married, with a wedding reception at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. But the marriage didn’t last, and by 1968 Sunny and her young son were in Miami, living in “a nice house” owned by Sunny’s parents. Sunny “backed off from achievement,” her mother later said, but doesn’t “have a mean bone in her body.” Interviewed by a court officer as part of a pre-sentence investigation after the murders, Sunny said that she only rarely drank alcohol and that while she occasionally smoked marijuana, she was “very anti-drugs.” Her parents were convinced of her innocence. It was simply a matter of the “wrong time, wrong place, wrong people,” her mother told the investigators.

  In 1982, when Sunny was still in prison, her parents died in an airplane crash. New Orleans, Pan Am, takeoff, thunderstorm. “They cannot be dead. They will be found alive somewhere…my mommy and daddy,” Sunny wrote in her book, about the moment she heard the news. “This is the saddest day of my life,” she wrote to Jesse that afternoon. The value of Herb and Bella’s estate in today’s dollars was more than $4 million, including a payment from the airline’s insurance company.

  The old newsreels I watched this morning had footage of Sunny. On her way into the courtroom for her trial in 1976, shoulders back, gaze steady, chin up. Prim in a light blue suit, smoking a cigarette, handcuffed. Coming around a corner in the courthouse, she arches one eyebrow at the camera, halfway between a wink and a smile. Asked about Sunny, the mother of one of her ex-boyfriends said, “She thought she was God’s gift to men.”

  * * *

  •

  That last statement is why I am now standing in front of a tumbledown apartment building just off Dixie Highway here in Dania Beach, in the rain.

  In her book, Stolen Time, Sunny wrote about the life she was leading before she met Jesse. At the time, she wrote, she was in a “long-term, monogamous relationship” with her boyfriend John, “a laid-back kind of guy”:

  We had a house in North Miami surrounded by tree nurseries. I called it the Ranch. It was a sweet old house with a stream running behind it and a family of ducks that would come to the door for their daily feed of dried corn. You could walk outside and collect your breakfast of oranges, grapefruits, bananas and coconuts fresh from the trees in the morning. It was a kind and gentle way of life.

  One day, a buddy of John’s dropped by for a visit and brought his friend Jesse. Sparks flew. “Jesse was the most fascinating human being I had ever met. And he was so beautiful to look at—the way he moved, the way he’d drape himself into a chair.” Soon, Sunny and John were history and Sunny’s young son, Eric, “was already calling Jesse ‘Dad.’ ”

  I have not been able to find John, but I’m pretty sure I have found his mother, because a woman named Marion Mulcahy—in this building I am now standing in front of—gave an affidavit to Jesse’s attorneys in which she said her son John lived with Sunny in the early 1970s, and that John and Jesse were good friends. Marion’s affidavit does not mention any fruit trees:

  John lived with Sonia Jacobs—we called her Sunny—for about two years….Their whole life revolved around drugs. She was even more involved in them than he….Sunny set her sights on Jesse and went after him full force. It was the same thing as with John—drugs, drugs, and more drugs….All of this is so tragic. I mean, if it hadn’t been for Sunny this never would have happened. She is a sick, evil person. She’ll tell you anything you want to hear as long as it gets her what she wants.

  In my detective work, I have always promised myself that if I ever have serious misgivings—a feeling, intuition, whatever—I will not knock on the door. I’ve only had to invoke it once—in North Carolina, at dusk, at the door of a shack down a gully, on a case where I had to find a guy and ask him if he’d raped his girlfriend. Today, my initial impression of this apartment building here in Dania Beach has been a similar feeling of Oh shit. But now I decide I’m just nervous. Because if Marion does not talk to me, I have no backu
p plan. I know who Sunny says she is now. But there’s no one else to talk to about who Sunny Jacobs was that morning at the rest stop almost forty years ago.

  The apartment building is a duplex, side by side, two doors facing the street. A cigarette burns unattended in an ashtray by the door on the right. I knock. No answer. I peek through the open window. No one around. I walk over to the other apartment. I’m about to knock there when a rough voice startles me from inside.

  “What are you doing?” a man says. Big guy, barrel-chested, gray hair, gray beard. One of his eyes seems injured. Thick white flesh creeping over the iris. He is wearing a T-shirt with the word irish on it. He does not open the screen door. He does not look friendly.

  “I’m sorry, is Marion here?”

  “Who are you?” the guy in the irish T-shirt says.

  “I witnessed Jesse Tafero’s execution.”

  “You’re asking about my mother,” he says. “She’s ill. She’s not going to talk to you.”

  “Actually, I’m hoping to speak with John,” I say. “Is he around?”

  “My brother?” he says. “My brother?”

  “Well, Sunny wrote about—”

  “My brother John is dead,” Irish says.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” I say. Instantly. “I didn’t know. I’m really sorry.”

  “My brother was shot in the head,” Irish says. Opening the screen door now and taking two steps toward me. He’s large. “You’re trying to find out the reason for what happened to Jesse and Sunny? There will never be a reason. Just like there will never be a reason for what happened to my brother. There could never be a reason for that, either.”

  “I’m not looking for a reason,” I say. “I just want to know what happened.”

  “You will never know.”

  “I need to know,” I tell him.

  “Look, I could talk to you—I was around then, I knew them—but I’m not going to. Nobody from the old days will. People have put this to rest. Nobody wants to dig it all back up. For what. For you? No way. What you’re doing is pointless and hurtful. You’re going to have to figure out a way to just live with it.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve tried that. And obviously I’ve failed because here I am on your porch.”

  We stare at each other.

  A moan from the shadows of the apartment. Frail, hollow.

  “Be right there, Ma,” he says, turning away.

  The door slams behind him. He does not come back.

  5

  A Squealer, a Liar, and a Mute

  I am shaking as I walk back across Irish’s shitty lawn to my car.

  What you’re doing is pointless and hurtful. Nobody is going to talk to you.

  Standing there on his porch with his damaged eye, its pupil diamond-shaped, glaring, fixed. With the sour smell of beer and the damp ash of burned-off cigarettes, and the rain.

  I feel a stinging inside my rib cage and my throat, trapped, toxic. Like I have swallowed live hornets. A mixture of shame and fury.

  But whatever, I think, as I slam the car into gear. This is not the first time I’ve been told to drop dead. It happens. Those two retired FBI guys in Dallas on that stock fraud case, back when I was just starting out. With their aviator sunglasses and Southern drawls, they’d straight-up called me a slut. How do we know you won’t go upstairs with the next guy who buys you a drink and tell him everything we’ve told you here? I burst into tears right in front of them. Pillow talk, they’d mocked me. She sure looks like a pillow talker to me. That old grizzled cowboy roaring No no no as I asked his daughter about the heroin ring she’d been operating out of a San Luis Obispo surf shop. The secret lover of a murdered San Francisco tattoo artist, storming around his echoing loft as the night fell outside, accusing me of not caring about his pain. I had cared about his pain, actually. I just had no power to make it go away. My boss had warned me that getting yelled at came with the job. His advice: Don’t take it personally.

  But this is personal. That’s the problem. All the times I’ve been yelled at before, it’s been for the job. The boss, the client, the case. Now it feels like I’ve crossed a raw, exposed line. That guy Irish was yelling at me. The thing is, in my own life, I’m terrible at cocktail parties, terrible at chatting, terrible at knowing what to wear and what to do with my hair. It’s only as a private detective that I can do this thing where I appear on your doorstep and you invite me inside. It’s an alchemy I don’t fully comprehend.

  Usually people talk. I didn’t understand why until my friend and fellow private eye Jacqueline asked me a question. Isn’t there anything or anyone you’d talk about, if someone came to your door? I thought about it. The guy who robbed me at knifepoint outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was in high school. Him. The guy who slapped me across the face on a Lexington Avenue bus after a tiny piece of paper I tossed out the window—I was in the seventh grade—accidentally bounced off his sister. Everyone frozen, staring, as he raised his hand high and slammed it down into my cheekbone. Him. The elderly janitor at the New York Society Library who lunged lips-first at me in that rickety cage of an elevator—absolutely, him too. The chapped old rat. Jacqueline nodded, and suddenly I got it. There is an incredible healing value to saying out loud what you know to be true to someone who is listening, who understands, and who might be able to help.

  All of which makes me wonder now about this pal of Sunny’s. Irish hadn’t said thanks but no thanks. He’d told me to go straight to hell. Exactly as if he was afraid of something I might find out. But here’s a fact I did not mention to Irish, back there on his front porch: You can patronize me, scold me, lie to my face, and I’ll roll with it. But flat out telling me no? That word is a red cape in a bullring to me. Not sure why. Always been true.

  * * *

  •

  In the morning, I call the Broward County State Attorney’s Office.

  If Irish is right that nobody is going to talk to me, then I am going to need to find every piece of paper there is on this case. I already have the case documents from the Broward County Circuit Court, but I’m sure those exploded old onionskin files are not the whole story. I want the records that the prosecutor gathered—the investigation papers, the trial files. Getting an answer from the State Attorney’s Office, though, is turning out to be much more difficult than I’d thought. This feels like my tenth phone call over there. It should be so straightforward. Florida has an ironclad public records law. I remember that from my days here as a newspaper reporter. Ask for the files, get the files. Not this endless back-and-forth.

  Is it because the prosecutor now is the same person who was the prosecutor then? It’s incredible, but the current Broward County state attorney, Michael J. Satz, is the lawman who back in 1976 put Jesse and Sunny on trial for their lives, with soon-to-recant Walter Norman Rhodes Jr. as the star witness. When Satz tried the case, he was an assistant in the office, but days after Sunny was convicted, Satz announced that he was going to run for the top job. He was elected in a landslide and he’s been in office ever since. Thirty-eight years, eleven months, and six days, as of today. He has not spoken publicly about the case in many years. I am going to have to get him, somehow, to talk to me.

  As I listen to the office’s phone ring and ring, I realize that another question has been forming in the back of my mind. The truck driver eyewitnesses at the rest stop did not tell the police that Jesse murdered those officers. According to the eyewitnesses, Jesse was pushed up against the cruiser when the shots rang out.

  And yet Jesse Tafero was the person who went to the electric chair.

  Is that why the State Attorney’s Office is hiding the files?

  “Hello?”

  I am startled back into the present. The supervisor I’ve been calling at the State Attorney’s Office has answered the phone herself this time. Super friendly, super apologetic about a plumbing e
mergency that she says has preoccupied her all week.

  Yes, she has the files, she says. “You can come see them right now, if you want.”

  * * *

  •

  An hour later I am sitting at a table in a windowless library on the sixth floor of the Broward County courthouse. The library is lined floor-to-ceiling with law books, row upon row of black and red and gilt. Around me are a dozen boxes holding the prosecutor’s files of State v. Tafero, stacked in tidy towers. These boxes are pristine. Well-tended manila folders, organized by subject, alphabetized. The files have some of the same documents as those shabby boxes over in the courthouse, but many more too—the entire case file from the Florida Highway Patrol, reports filed by the officers who rushed to the rest area after Trooper Black’s 10-24, transcripts for both trials. The morning of February 20, 1976, is before me once more.

  * * *

  •

  At the roadblock—twenty-three miles north of the highway rest area—blood has soaked into the orange-and-cream plaid upholstery of the bullet-riddled carjacked Cadillac. The Cadillac is still where it crashed, crumpled headfirst into a dirt-filled tractor-trailer truck.

  A plainclothes police officer is leaving the scene, taking Sunny Jacobs and the children—the nine-year-old boy and the ten-month-old baby girl—over to the Delray Beach substation of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. When they get there, Sunny and her children are separated. A clerk strip-searches Sunny, watches as Sunny uses the toilet and washes her hands and face, and then brings Sunny to an interrogation room. Two policemen and a tape recorder are waiting.

  The officers are Captain Valjean Haley of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and Broward Sheriff’s Office detective lieutenant Angelo Farinato. They read Sunny her rights, then get the interrogation off to a quick start. Haley informs Sunny that she is under arrest for first-degree murder. Sunny laughs. Farinato steps in.