Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  “Yeah, they’re the mob, they all kill each other, going around in a circle,” Mark says. “What other names have you come across?”

  “Ricky Cravero.” The cocaine mobster arrested with Marianne.

  “That rings a bell. Who else?”

  “Stanley Harris? The guy who was murdered on Valentine’s Day?”

  “Oh, yeah, okay, I know that name.”

  “Jack Murphy?” I say, taking a guess. The jewel bandit who was friends with Marianne’s husband, and who allegedly pistol-whipped Eva Gabor.

  “Oh, I know Murph, we used to surf with him, he was cool. But all we knew about was the Star of India sapphire.”

  We’ve moved outside. Mark has pulled the huge metal gates closed behind us.

  “Aren’t you worried that someone is going to take a dislike to what you’re doing?” Mark asks me now. His junkyard looms like a ghost ship behind us. “You shouldn’t fool around with this. You seem like a nice girl—nice lady, sorry—I don’t mean to be sexist, it’s not that, but you should stop and do something else. Don’t you worry that someone is going to kill you?”

  8

  So Much Blood

  “I never even saw the junkman’s eyes,” I tell Peter at dinner that night, at a fish restaurant on the beach. Men in bone-flecked rubber overalls walk past our table carrying buckets and tackle. “ ‘Don’t you worry that someone is going to kill you?’ He said that with his dark glasses on.”

  I mean, come on. Yes. That is the answer. Yes, I worry. I’m not a fucking robot. Go home, I tell myself. Get on with your life. Quit asking questions that make people wonder about you being dead. It is exactly this worry that stopped me cold after my visit to Walter Rhodes in the woods twelve years ago. And now I’ve come down here to Fort Lauderdale expecting to spend a few quick weeks with some dusty old court documents and instead I’ve tripped into this cocaine backstory of terrorized go-go dancers and the Star of India and a murderous narcotics mob.

  “But you know,” I tell Peter, “as soon as the junkman said that, my fear disappeared.” Don’t push me, pal. My basic reaction since forever. Something I learned growing up in New York City. It’s an asset until it’s a liability. “He was standing right next to me and looking through his dark sunglasses at me with his arms crossed over his chest. So I smiled and gave him my business card and told him to please feel free to keep in touch.”

  Peter and I sit for a while, watching the water. I almost believe what I’ve just told him. My pep talk to myself. The night is warm, humid, a salt brace from the sea spray and a twinkle of stars. To the south, we can see the lights of freighters heading out to sea.

  I do feel upset, though. Mad at myself. I want this to be easier. Weeks of wrangling with the Broward County State Attorney’s Office to see the case files—it should have taken just one call. I keep asking for an interview with the prosecutor, Michael Satz, and I keep getting told no. Satz is a legend in this county. He’s famously ascetic, tough-minded, intense. I think he should talk to me. I cannot get him to agree.

  As I was leaving the junkyard today, a car ran a red light and almost hit me. Sailed across the intersection right toward me, everything freeze-framing as I hit the brakes, spinning, gasping. The driver turning to look at me, windows down, wind in his hair, slo-mo, then turning away, speeding on, gone. I wouldn’t even be here right now if I’d been just a little farther across. I’d be dead. Maybe it’s the murders, but I feel that a lot now. The fine, fine line between an ordinary day and catastrophe.

  “I found the town where Sunny is,” Peter says, casually.

  Every news story about Sunny in recent years has said she lives in Ireland. But none of them have given any clues as to where. It’s a nation of 4.678 million people. Thirty-two thousand square miles.

  “She lives in a tiny Gaelic-speaking village in a far western part of the country,” Peter says. “Casla. She’s raising money to open a center for exonerated inmates. She’s got a charitable foundation in New York.” He slides a printout from her website across the table.

  No street address. No telephone. That’s tricky. I need to talk to her, obviously. It’s hard to foresee how this one’s going to go. But still. Now at least it seems possible to try.

  * * *

  •

  The next morning, I take the crime scene photos I found at the State Attorney’s Office and spread them out on the dining room table. In an hour I am going over to the courthouse to view the physical evidence in the case. I know now that everyone in the Camaro had a motive to commit the murders. But who had the means? That’s crucial. That’s what I need to find out next. And the physical evidence that I’m going to see today—those objects were there at the rest area. That very day. Time travel. I am taking a step closer, in toward the instant when the shots rang out.

  In the crime scene photographs, the Camaro is parked tight along the curb at the rest area, its headlights pointing north, next to a patch of grass. It’s a two-door car. The passenger-side door is on the right, next to the grass. That door is closed. The driver’s-side door, on the left, faces the pavement and is wide open.

  To the north of the open driver’s-side door, toward the car’s headlights, Black’s Stetson is on the ground. Next to the Stetson, a pistol. The pistol almost touches the Camaro’s front tire. There is no blood north of the door.

  South of the door, blood runs underneath the car, glistening all the way to the curb. Where the open door meets the body of the Camaro, directly under the driver’s seat, the blood is thick, and red, and deep.

  Shards of glass are scattered on the car’s running board and into the backseat, which is plainly visible through the wide-open door. Glass is scattered in the blood below the door, along with a foil packet of cocaine, two bullets, and a set of police handcuffs, shining silver on the ground.

  * * *

  •

  Room 407, the Broward County courthouse. I’ve been buzzed in through a locked metal door past armed guards and am sitting at a table beneath a bank of closed-circuit television cameras. Next to me: a big cardboard box. It’s the physical evidence from the Jesse Tafero and Sunny Jacobs trials in 1976.

  Dave, the evidence chief, has gone off somewhere with my driver’s license. A couple of weeks ago, I met Dave and filled out a public records request to see this box of evidence. Just now, Dave has explained the protocol here. It’s very simple: I am not allowed to touch anything. Now Dave is back, pulling on a pair of blue surgical gloves.

  “Ready?”

  When crime scene investigators examined Trooper Black’s cruiser, they found it had been damaged by gunfire during the murders. There was a crack in its windshield, a dent in the front door on the passenger side, and a rip in the metal window trim just above that. And there was a bullet hole clear through the cruiser’s windshield post on its passenger side, the side that had been parked alongside the Camaro.

  Dave is holding the windshield post now. “Do you want to stand up and take a closer look?”

  It’s long and thin, this post, made of shiny silver metal and about the size and shape of a yardstick. It ran along the passenger edge of the windshield, from the hood to the roof. The bullet hole is about in the middle and it pierces the post clear through, in one side and out the other. At the point of entry, the bullet hole is round; at the exit, it is U-shaped, bursting upward and outward, its edges like petals that have been pushed apart.

  Dave puts a photograph on the table—a picture of Black’s cruiser. In this photo, the windshield post is still on the cruiser, the bullet hole is visible, and there is a metal rod sticking out of it, showing the trajectory of the bullet. When it smashed through the windshield post, the bullet was traveling forward, upward, and from the right. The rod looks like it points directly to where the Camaro would have been.

  The shots appeared to come out of the back of the car. That is what the truck driver eyew
itness Pierce Hyman said.

  Through this whole thing I…I…I sat in the back of that car. That’s what Sunny Jacobs told police.

  “Okay, thanks,” I tell Dave.

  Now I’m looking at photographs of the Camaro’s interior. In the front passenger wheel well, a jean jacket is crumpled in a heap next to the center console, by the gearshift. On top of the jean jacket is a bronze-colored metal cylinder about an inch long, hollow with a flat cap. Another of these cylinders is in the center of the ribbed floor mat in the front passenger wheel well. Shell casings, ejected from a gun while it was being fired.

  Next Dave holds a wrinkled piece of paper. It’s a handwritten sales receipt, white with blue ink, made out to Sunny at the address of her family’s textile business in North Carolina. The receipt is for two Smith & Wesson Model 39 9mm semiautomatic handguns, serial numbers A187854 and A234895.

  Serial A187854 was the gun Trooper Black saw at Walter’s feet, inside the Camaro. Black picked up A187854 and took it back to his patrol car. After radioing in the serial number, Black put A187854 on the front seat of his police cruiser. Walter was later arrested at the roadblock with A187854 stuffed down his pants. The other 9mm, A234895, was the gun Jesse was arrested with.

  There were other guns in the Camaro too. There was a Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolver in Sunny’s purse, a .32 revolver in an attaché case hidden under the front seat, and a short-barrel .22 pistol that ended up on the ground next to the Camaro’s front tire, by Black’s Stetson hat.

  All the guns were in good working order, but only one matched the casings found on the jean jacket and floor mat in the wheel well of the Camaro. That same gun also matched metal jackets recovered from the bodies of Phillip Black and Donald Irwin. So only one of the five weapons in the Camaro could be linked to the murders. That gun was A234895. At the roadblock, Jesse was arrested with A234895 strapped to his hip.

  Now Dave is holding up a small gray rectangular box. Two thin wires snake out of it. Dave puts this box on the table along with a glossy pamphlet titled “Read This Before You Attempt to Use Your Taser.” Then he puts down two more of the boxes, exactly the same except that at the end of their wires is something that looks like a cigarette butt with a fishhook sticking out of it.

  “What on earth are those?”

  Taser cartridges.

  I look closely. Each cartridge has two darts, made up of “barbed contacts and conducting wires which are projected to target by a small propellant,” according to the glossy pamphlet. Each time the Taser is fired, it shoots the darts out and if they both land on the target—or one on the target and the other on a grounding element—they deliver 50,000 volts of electricity. That’s enough to “achieve incapacitation,” the pamphlet says, and “unlike a gun, you don’t have to be a great marksman to use the Taser.” These cartridges were found in the attaché case that Black mentioned in his second-to-last radio call. When police recovered the attaché case at the roadblock, there was a Taser in there too. The Taser is under seal, in the vault.

  “Wait a minute,” I say, going back to the photographs. A photo of the police cruiser. Rear window on the side that had faced the Camaro. Something is stuck in the weather stripping. Something that looks like a dark cigarette butt with a white tip. Yes. That could be one of these Taser darts.

  So it seems there were two weapons involved in the murders of Black and Irwin. Not just the gun Jesse was arrested with. A Taser too. I make a note.

  The last item is a set of glass vials. Small glass test tubes, elastic-banded together in a plastic box. Swabs. Gunshot residue evidence. I stare hard at them, because these fragile vials are key to two things that are really starting to bother me.

  * * *

  •

  Both truck drivers saw Jesse being restrained against the cruiser as the shots rang out. Up against the cruiser with his hands held behind his back. But that is not what Walter said. Walter testified that Sunny shot first from the back of the Camaro, and that Jesse broke free, grabbed the gun from Sunny, and finished the officers off.

  Which leads to the second thing.

  The morning of the murders, Jesse and Sunny and Walter all had their hands swabbed for gunshot residue. Trooper Black and Constable Irwin were swabbed too, posthumously—they both tested negative for the indicative chemicals of gunshot residue. Even little Eric, the nine-year-old boy sitting next to his mother in the backseat, had his hands tested.

  Five days after the murders, test results came back from the Florida Department of Criminal Law Enforcement.

  Two of the swabs tested “consistent with the subject having handled an unclean or recently discharged weapon.” Those were Sunny and Eric.

  One of the swabs tested “consistent with the subject having handled an unclean or recently discharged weapon, or possibly discharging a weapon.” Jesse Tafero.

  And one swab tested “consistent with the subject having discharged a weapon.” That swab was of the hands of Walter Norman Rhodes Jr.

  9

  The Missing Pixels

  Not even a year after Jesse Tafero was sentenced to death, Walter Rhodes began to confess.

  In March 1977, two prison inmates came forward to say Walter confessed to the murders to them while in line at a prison amputee clinic.

  In 1979, Walter confessed again, this time in writing. Three new inmates witnessed Walter writing the confession out, typing it up, and sending it to Sunny’s lawyer.

  In early 1982, Walter wrote out another confession and mailed it, unsolicited, to a newspaper reporter in Jacksonville, Florida.

  And in September 1982, Walter gave his final confession, this time to an attorney representing Jesse Tafero. That statement, on tape and under oath, was forty-five pages long.

  “I just turned around—I lied about that. I said that I stayed there with my hands up. And I just fired from that position where I said Tafero fired from. So, that is another lie there.”

  From 1977 to 1982, Walter confessed three times under oath to murdering Trooper Black and Constable Irwin. Then, under oath, Walter recanted every one of those confessions. Demonstrably, Walter Rhodes has lied under oath—either when he confessed or when he recanted. Walter was the State of Florida’s star witness. And Walter was the one with gunshot residue on his hands.

  * * *

  •

  In 2003, up there in that isolated trailer in the far north woods of Washington State, Walter Rhodes told me about an investigator who had worked on his case. Walter said the investigator sat with him, talked to him, understood him, believed in him. “It’s the hardest thing about being a fugitive,” Walter said. “That man believed in me, and I let him down.”

  Now, more than a decade later, I’m standing in front of a stilt house out on the water at the end of one of the smaller Florida keys. It’s hot here, and empty. Tangled mangroves in a white-green sea beneath a pale violet sky. I’m down here because I need to talk to the investigator. His name is Walt LaGraves.

  Because I don’t get it. Three people, three motives, five guns, and a Taser. Walter was a felon on parole with a weapon, Jesse was a fugitive, Sunny was living with Jesse on the run. The eyewitnesses saw shots come from the backseat of the car, where Sunny was sitting; Jesse was arrested with the murder weapon strapped to his waist; and Walter had the dirty hands. Everything I learn leads to something more I don’t know. I’m not sure how to go forward. I have no way back.

  From the reverent way Walter talked about LaGraves, I assumed LaGraves was working for Walter’s attorney in the service of Walter’s defense. But I’ve just learned from the files at the State Attorney’s Office that actually LaGraves worked for the prosecution. He investigated the case before the trials in 1976 and then kept on for the next decade and a half, looking into every one of Walter’s confessions and obtaining all of Walter’s recantations. For ten years, I’ve been told, LaGraves worked on this cas
e every single day. He was the prosecution’s chief investigator. And yet Walter seems to have believed that LaGraves was on Team Rhodes too.

  That’s impressive. Playing both sides is an investigator’s dream game, and winning takes nerve and skill. So if he will talk, LaGraves can help me understand this case—facts, strategies, and Walter Rhodes too. I am certain of that.

  * * *

  •

  “Hello!”

  A big bear of a man with his arm in a sling and an Ernest Hemingway beard is hollering at me from the top of the stairs to his deck, here in the Keys. An American flag floats next to him, snapping in the salty breeze.

  Historically, law enforcement officers and lady private detectives don’t always get along so well. They think we’re dilettantes, is why. “Divorced women are ruining the PI profession,” a retired FBI agent once told me. I’m not divorced, if that was his point. But now here is Walt LaGraves, extending his hand. “Welcome!” he says, as I reach the top of the steps. It’s encouraging. Although maybe he’s being Officer Friendly just so he can find out what I’m up to. There’s that possibility. A sharp listener can learn more from your questions than you do from any replies, that’s for sure.

  Inside, white shutters are closed against the noonday glare. LaGraves takes a seat at the head of the dining room table as his wife, Carol, arrives with cold drinks. Rush Limbaugh brand “Two If by Tea” iced tea.

  “I hope you’re not a liberal,” LaGraves says.

  I glance over at him. He might be teasing me, but he’s definitely not joking.

  The iced tea glass sweats in front of me as I launch into my explanation of what I’m doing. As I go along, it occurs to me, belatedly, exactly whose dining table I’m sitting at right now. This man helped put Jesse Tafero in the electric chair.