Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  Det. Lt. Farinato: Alright. Who was with you this morning?

  Sunny Jacobs: We were in the back seat, of the car.

  […]

  Det. Lt. Farinato: Alright, where were you sitting in the car?

  Sunny Jacobs: In the back.

  Det. Lt. Farinato: Alright, now who was—

  Sunny Jacobs: Through this whole thing I…I…I sat in the back of that car.

  Who were the men in the Cadillac with her? The man in the blue shirt? The man in the tan pants, with the beard? Sunny does not know. She does not know their names or where they are from.

  Sunny Jacobs: I don’t know. I don’t know.

  Sunny also does not know who fired the shots.

  Sunny Jacobs: I didn’t see. I didn’t see.

  Asked directly, she says she herself did not shoot anyone or fire a gun that day. The officers remind her that she is under oath. She says she knows that. “I—I’d like to help but I’d like to help myself,” she tells them.

  * * *

  •

  Jesse Tafero, in a separate interrogation room at the Delray Beach substation, is not talking. The officers turn a tape recorder on and run through the Miranda warning questions, including “Do you understand that I am a police officer?” and “You have the right to remain silent….Do you understand this?”

  Tafero says just one thing: “I want an attorney.”

  With that, the questions stop. Tafero is taken to a hospital, where a nurse treats abrasions on his temple and finds a foil packet of cocaine in his sock. Jesse does talk briefly to the nurse. He tells her, “I have been on a bad trip.”

  * * *

  •

  Walter Rhodes is in the emergency room of Bethesda Memorial Hospital, waiting to be admitted to surgery. He is awake and in a great deal of pain, according to the hospital records. Walter’s left leg has been shattered by the roadblock gunshot. His left knee is bleeding profusely and his left foot is cold and mottled with no pulse—early gangrene is setting in. He is surrounded by police officers as the doctors and nurses move him from room to room. He’s been Mirandized two times already, once at 8:37 a.m.—he was unable to sign his rights card—and again at 9:43 a.m. He has not had pain medication yet, according to the notes on his hospital chart. At first Walter insists that he does not want to talk to anybody, but then he changes his mind. He tells Detective Fred Mascaro of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office that he “didn’t do anything” and that he “wasn’t the one that shot the trooper.” Then Walter gets shots of Demerol, a painkiller, and Phenergan, a sedative, and after that he can’t talk anymore.

  The next day, after a long night on morphine, Walter gives another statement from his hospital bed, this time to Captain Valjean Haley. Walter is under oath, on tape. The statement is twenty-four typewritten pages long.

  Capt. Haley: What is the only reason or what is the various reasons that you are making this statement?

  Walter Rhodes: Because I feel like, I feel at ease with you, particularly I feel like I can talk to you, I don’t feel like you are going to stab me because I believe, I just feel, at ease talking to you, you know, I would like to clear this up and you seem to be the one I want to talk to.

  Then Walter tells Haley that he knows what happened. Sunny shot first from the back of the car, and then Jesse grabbed the gun and finished the officers off, Walter says.

  Capt. Haley: Let me interrupt at this time, when the shot went off did you actually witness the shots?

  Walter Rhodes: I actually witnessed the shots.

  As Walter is giving his statement, a doctor pokes his head into the room and tells Walter that he is going to cut Walter’s leg off.

  * * *

  •

  Interesting, I think, as I put the folders back in their file boxes. Before coming in here today, I already knew that Walter had talked to the police and cut a deal to testify against Sunny and Jesse.

  But I had not known that Sunny told the officers she didn’t know the guys she was with in the Camaro, or that Jesse had not said one word at all.

  A squealer, a liar, and a mute. Whom to believe?

  * * *

  •

  It’s the next documents, though, that rattle me.

  In that wedding announcement in The New York Times, the one that took me by surprise at my breakfast table three years ago, the newspaper reported that Sunny and Jesse were in the car at the rest area with Walter Rhodes because “he was giving the couple a ride from Miami to the home of friends in West Palm Beach.”

  The Scotsman, a Scottish daily newspaper, reported in 2005: “Tafero’s friend, Walter Rhodes, offered them a lift part of the way home. Jacobs didn’t like him, but he was willing to drive them north.”

  Sunny Jacobs, to The Scotsman: “It was only a ride.”

  So the property receipts catch me off guard.

  Officers who searched Jesse and Walter and Sunny and the crime scene and roadblock and the cars after the murders found two Smith & Wesson 9mm semiautomatic handguns, a Smith & Wesson .38 Special six-shot revolver, a North American Arms .22 short derringer, a Manuel Escodin Eibar .32 caliber revolver, a shoulder holster, a hatchet, and a bayonet. Those last two items were stashed in the backseat of the Camaro, behind the driver’s seat, along with a denim purse holding baby pajamas and a jar of Beech-Nut baby food.

  Drugs too. Amphetamines, cocaine, Quaaludes, marijuana, hashish, glutethimide—a hypnotic sedative that produces intense euphoria. Thorazine. Pentazocine. Cigarettes. Beer.

  Jewelry: earrings, rings, necklaces, pendants, charms, loose gemstones.

  Forty pieces of identification in other people’s names, including birth certificates, driver’s licenses, passports, adoption papers, voter registrations, Selective Service registrations, checking accounts, and library cards. A flesh-colored over-the-head rubber mask with a white wig attached.

  And ammunition. So much ammunition. Bullets loaded in the weapons taken off Walter and Jesse at the roadblock, bullets loaded in the gun found in Sunny’s purse. Bullets in cardboard boxes in the Cadillac at the roadblock and bullets in a black plastic ammo case at the crime scene, right there on the backseat of the Camaro, where Sunny and the kids were sitting.

  * * *

  •

  “And not just the Cadillac and the Camaro. The apartment too,” I tell Peter later, at dinner.

  At the courthouse, I’d looked through a stack of case photographs from the archives. Eight-by-ten glossies of the crime scene and also pictures taken of Walter’s apartment the evening after the murders, when his landlady let the police inside. I have copies of them here with me now.

  Two thin and bare mattresses. A bullet on the floor next to a box of Pampers. A weight-lifting bench with a handwritten list on it of bills coming due. Rent, $165. Karate mementos. Cast-off clothes on the floor, on the couch, spilling out of suitcases. A black-light bulb, an empty container of L’eggs pantyhose, an eight-track tape for a Gregg shorthand course. Dirty coffee cups and cereal bowls and a baby bottle on the kitchen counter. The fridge door open, the fridge empty except for a tipped-over jar of baby food, a bowl, and a dirty yellow cloth.

  “I’d say the apartment looks like a bomb hit it, but it actually looks messier than that,” I say. I’ve put the photos on the table and we’re studying them. “It looks like whoever was in that apartment was so busy doing whatever it was they were busy doing that they forgot to eat or sleep or clean up after themselves.”

  “Or pick their stray bullets up off the floor,” Peter says, looking closely. And then he pushes a pile of news clips across the table. “You need to read these.”

  The Palm Beach Post, July 1974: A Miami man, described by a Dade County organized crime investigator as “the principal member of a major narcotics smuggling organization,” yesterday was arrested in conjuncti
on with a marijuana-laden boat which burned in Lake Worth two weeks ago. Richard Douglas Cravero was arrested with three other persons at the home of convicted stamp thief John Clarence Cook and charged with possession of marijuana with the intent to resell.

  Fort Lauderdale News, June 1977: Two reputed minor members of the notorious Cravero gang have been indicted by the Broward County Grand Jury in connection with [a] brutal 1975 murder….The body…was found floating in a western Broward rock pit…shot three times in the head and weighed down with rugs, concrete, and an anchor….Cravero’s gang, sometimes known as the Dixie Mafia, was heavily involved in South Florida drug traffic but it was their brutality which sparked their notoriety.

  Boat-burning. Drug-smuggling. Car-bombing. Body-littering. The notorious Ricky Cravero was arrested in Marianne’s home in 1974. He was arrested with Marianne in 1975. Ricky knew Marianne, and Marianne knew Jesse. But what does that prove? Nothing. Still, that apartment was a wreck. Bullets. Diapers. Jewelry. Guns, stolen passports, Quaaludes, cocaine. What did Sunny say? It was only a ride. She said Jesse was soft-spoken and gentle. “He was polite and well-mannered.” That’s what Sunny wrote about Jesse in her book. “He was the light and I had to follow the light.” And Walter—Walter confessed.

  As I look through the news stories and the photographs, I can feel myself starting to tremble. I try to steel myself against it: Here it comes. But it is stronger than I am, this undertow.

  Fear. Real, visceral, immediate. The same fear I felt after I went to talk to Walter Rhodes. Not the first time I talked to him, in 1990, when he was in prison. The other time. When he was out of prison and on the run from the law.

  6

  The Fugitive

  It started with a show on the radio.

  In October 2002, I was driving across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco when I heard the word “exonerated” together with the name “Jesse Tafero” coming out of the speakers of my car stereo. I turned the radio up. A play telling the true stories of six innocent people on death row was about to open in New York City, National Public Radio was reporting. The Exonerated was a documentary work, drawn entirely from court records, police reports, and interviews. “Every word in this thing is real,” the play’s director, Bob Balaban, told NPR.

  Reporter: Late one night in 1976, Sunny Jacobs and her common-law husband, Jesse Tafero, got a ride to a friend’s house in Broward County, Florida. The driver got tired and pulled over to take a nap. On a routine patrol of the rest area, police ran a check on the driver and found he was on parole. Then, Sunny Jacobs says, the driver grabbed a gun and killed the two officers.

  Sunny Jacobs: After he shot the policemen, the man who had done it made us get in the police car with him, and he drove us off.

  Sunny’s voice coming through my car speakers was girlish, hesitant, sweet.

  Reporter: In 1992, two years after Jesse Tafero was executed, lawyers uncovered evidence clearing him and Sunny Jacobs.

  The rest of my drive that day was a blur. I was heading into San Francisco to do interviews for a case about the ferries that ran out to Alcatraz, and I’d recently been spending quite a bit of time out on that prison island, listening to the wind whistle along the cold cellblocks as the gulls wheeled and keened overhead. That morning, though, I got a cup of coffee and took it down to the stone steps at the water’s edge beside the old sailing ships of Fisherman’s Wharf. I needed to think.

  Up on Russian Hill, behind me, was the detective’s mansion. Six years ago, I’d started my life as a private eye there. Since then I had worked as an investigator on some brutal cases, digging deep into crimes so violent that they’d stalked my dreams. A young woman kidnapped, raped, killed with a shovel, and buried in a shallow grave. An elderly drifter beaten to death in the marijuana hinterland up near the Oregon border. That case had hinged on the testimony of a young child. When I found him, by then grown up, he told me he wondered if maybe he had just dreamed the whole thing. Some of the murder cases I’d worked on for the detective, but after three years with his firm I’d taken a job as an investigator for the State of California, defending death row inmates. Now my friend Freya and I had our own detective agency, and just the past year we’d been down in Bakersfield talking to jurors who’d sent a serial killer to San Quentin State Prison. I’d seen death cases up close, I’d learned how complicated facts in those cases can be, how hard it is to overturn a conviction. How very rarely someone walks free, as Sunny did, and how important that is when it happens. And all along the way, I’d tried not to think too hard about Jesse Tafero.

  * * *

  •

  “I have to see this play,” I told my new boyfriend that evening.

  Peter and I had met exactly a year earlier, through a mutual friend. John was a buddy of mine from my newspaper days; for more than half a decade, he’d been telling me about this other friend of his and saying we should all get together sometime. It wasn’t until October 2001, though, that brand-new world, that we all three finally made plans for a Saturday morning coffee. A totally routine thing, except that when I came around the corner of the coffee shop and saw the handsome man sitting at a table with my friend John, I thought: Oh hey, it’s you. Just like that.

  We were instantly friends. Peter grew up in Chicago; his dad worked in the steel mills and died when Peter was ten; Peter had spent years working as an actor and then in publishing; he’d written travel guides and directed plays; he loved theater and dancing and music and cooking and reading and gardening. Life, basically. Every thing, every day. A radiance. We met for drinks. We went out to dinner. We talked about our love lives. He was dating an emergency room nurse, I was dating an organic gardener. I thought Peter was smart and charming and funny. He had a lovely way of listening, free from comment, free from advice. He was warm and open and kind and honest. And he was gay. He’d dated women when he was young, but at the age of twenty-seven he’d come out and had identified as a gay man ever since—for almost twenty years. Which was fine. I’d always had gay friends and had dated women myself, so there was zero confusion about what was going on. Peter was my friend. My good friend. We were good friends who went out dancing. Who went out dancing pretty much every Saturday night. And one Saturday night, at the gay dance bar we always went to, something unexpected happened. We’d had a lot of tequila, I guess. We kissed.

  “I don’t see how this is going to work out,” I told him, a few weeks later, on the telephone. Peter and I had seen each other constantly since that night at the dance bar, and every single time we saw each other was magic, but now I’d decided that no matter how good things seemed to be, our relationship was impossible—who had ever heard of such a thing?—and we should end it. Most of our friends were in shock, seeing the two of us together. There was no point in trying to invent something new when it would only lead to heartbreak. “It’s too complicated,” I told him, and hung up the phone.

  About a half hour later, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it, and there was Peter, his collar turned up against the California winter rains. He took me in his arms, and he kissed me.

  “This,” he said, “is not complicated.” And he kissed me again.

  Now, six months later, we were on his porch in Oakland and I was going through the whole long story about Sunny and Jesse and Walter. And me. It had been a long time since I’d said it all out loud. I hesitated. I stumbled. I confided. Peter listened.

  “The radio report said that lawyers uncovered evidence that cleared Jesse Tafero and Sunny Jacobs,” I said. “Cleared them.”

  “Oh my God, you need to see this play,” Peter said.

  * * *

  •

  I was nervous as we took our seats at 45 Bleecker, the downtown theater in New York City where The Exonerated was playing. The stage was bare, just a row of music stands and stools. A hush fell over the audience as the actors came out and took their places. About ten minut
es into the show, it was Sunny’s turn to talk. The actress Anne Jackson—she’d played a doctor in The Shining—was Sunny this evening, feisty and fragile as the spotlight found her onstage. “In 1976, I was sentenced to death row, which for me wasn’t a row at all, because I was the only woman in the country who had the sentence of death. So I suggested they put me in the same cell as my husband!” Sunny said, in the play. Laughter. A beat. “But let me start at the beginning.” As one, the audience leaned forward to listen.

  Ninety minutes later, the instant the play was over, I stood up and walked out. Peter rushed after me. New York City. Car horns, footsteps, headlights, cigarettes, snippets of conversation. I sat down hard on the curb outside the theater, my head spinning.

  “I mean, Rhodes had just killed two policemen,” Sunny said, in the play. That was it. No discussion. No evidence. That was the entire explanation. “I was a hippie, I’m one of those peace-and-love people, I’m a vegetarian! How could you possibly think I would kill someone?”

  “But the guns in the car—those were Sunny’s guns. She bought them,” I told Peter, who’d come to sit next to me. I remembered that fact from the news stories I’d read.

  “And she wasn’t exonerated, actually,” I added. Sunny’s conviction had indeed been overturned on appeal, but not because the court had determined that she was blameless in the murders. In 1992, the appeals court ruled that the prosecution had improperly withheld the report of Walter’s polygraph test from the defense, and also that statements Sunny made the morning of the murders had been admitted into evidence in violation of her constitutional rights. That’s why the court reversed her conviction and ordered a new trial. Sunny had finally gotten out of prison on a special kind of plea called an Alford plea, which allowed her to claim innocence while admitting under oath that the state could prove certain incriminating facts against her. An Alford plea does have some important bells and whistles to it, but legally speaking it is a guilty plea. In the eyes of the law, Sunny wasn’t innocent. She was a convicted felon.