“I mean, there are all these newspaper articles about Jesse Tafero saying he was a good dad,” I continue, stumbling.
“You don’t take your children on drug deals and have your nine-year-old son act as a lookout,” Carol interrupts. As it turns out, Carol worked as secretary to Michael Satz, the state attorney. “Tafero was anything but a good dad.”
LaGraves jumps in. “He was a down-on-his-heels, evil, little angry man. A hard, cruel human being.”
“A sociopath, that’s what I thought,” Carol adds.
“And Sonia was a cold, hard bitch,” LaGraves says. “Rhodes, now, he was a fascinating guy, but you wouldn’t want him to date your sister.”
“Have you met Walter?” Carol asks me.
“I interviewed him before I witnessed the execution, in 1990.”
“What did you think of him?” Carol says.
“Well, I was twenty-six, and he was the first prison inmate I’d ever—”
They both burst out laughing.
“I personally believe that they were heavy narcotics users,” Walt says, when he and Carol collect themselves. “These are not big-time criminals. Scum-sucking bottom-feeders, all of them.”
I am writing this down when Carol adds something out of the blue.
“My thing is the Taser,” Carol says.
“Sonia deploying the Taser started the whole mess,” LaGraves agrees.
* * *
•
The Taser. After I saw those gray cartridges in Room 407, I’d gone back and read through Walter’s confessions. No mention of a Taser. Then I’d read through the initial statements given by the truck drivers and by Jesse, Sunny, and Walter. Nobody mentioned a Taser there either. Walter was specifically asked about a Taser in the statement he gave officers the day after the murders, and Walter said no, he did not see a Taser used.
“This?” I ask LaGraves.
I’ve come here with my stack of evidence photos from the State Attorney’s Office. I slide the first one across the table now. It’s the one of the rear window on the passenger side of Black’s cruiser, with the object that looks like a cigarette butt lodged in the weather stripping. LaGraves and Carol look at it. Yes, that is a Taser dart, they confirm. Absolute proof that a Taser was fired, they say.
But I thought the two officers were killed with gunshots, I say.
Picture the rest area, LaGraves says. It’s just past seven o’clock in the morning. Trooper Black is in his cruiser, pulling up alongside the Camaro, parking, getting out. Black walks over to the Camaro. What does he see? A gun on the floorboard at Walter’s feet. Black leans in, gets hold of the gun, takes it out of the car.
“That started the whole affair,” LaGraves is saying.
Black orders Walter out of the car. Walter gets out. Then Black orders Jesse out.
“We believe Tafero exploded out of the car,” he says. Black and Irwin try to subdue him, pushing Jesse up against the passenger-side door of the police car. Sunny is in the backseat of the Camaro, just inside the open door of the car, watching as Jesse and the officers start to struggle.
“That’s when Sonia fired the Taser,” LaGraves says. “This whole thing probably started when Sonia fired the Taser at one of the officers.”
But ballistics tests were useless when it came to the Taser. The weapon left no identifying marks on the darts it fired. The Taser dart in the cruiser window proved that a Taser had been involved, that’s all. No link to the specific Taser at the crime scene. No clue about who fired it.
Another photograph. It’s 1976, and LaGraves is sitting in the backseat of the green Camaro, holding a gun. A234895, the murder weapon.
LaGraves picks up the photograph and looks at it.
“God, I was young,” he says.
After the murders, two bullet casings from A234895 were found inside the Camaro near the front passenger seat, one on a jean jacket, the other in the wheel well. The prosecution needed to understand how those casings got there, so LaGraves climbed into the Camaro with a ballistics expert, he’s saying now. “We took the Camaro down to the FHP lot on State Road 84 in Fort Lauderdale, and parked the Camaro and Trooper Black’s cruiser side by side to as best we could reconstruct the relative positions based on testimony.”
Specifically, they were testing whether firing the gun from the backseat—where Sunny was sitting—would have landed those two bullet casings up front like that.
LaGraves and the ballistics expert fired the murder weapon about fifty times inside the Camaro, according to the ballistics report that was attached to this photograph in the state attorney’s files. Of those shots, just four bullet casings landed up front, and only with the gun held sideways, lying flat. They did not fire the gun outside the car to see if the casings bounced in. The report did not make a whole lot of sense to me, which is why I want to ask LaGraves about the ballistics test now.
“What did you find out?” I ask him.
“I don’t think we could prove to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt that Sonia fired from the backseat,” he says. “I don’t think we could do that. But there’s a whole lot of circumstantial evidence, and in a civil trial we could prove it.”
I glance down at my notebook to hide my surprise. This is the state attorney’s chief investigator speaking. A civil trial? They sent Sunny Jacobs to death row.
“Did you talk to Angie?” Carol asks. Meaning Angelo Farinato, the detective who said Sunny confessed to him.
* * *
•
Farinato’s handwritten notes were in the files at the State Attorney’s Office. Farinato interrogated Sunny immediately after the murders, and later that same day he drove Sunny down to the Broward County jail, just the two of them in the car. Along the way, Farinato wrote, Sunny confessed. His notes use “Tony” as the name for Jesse. It was the name Sunny gave to police when they asked her who Jesse was.
Statement from Sonia in Vehicle 20 Feb 76
On returning from PBSO Sonia stated that she fired one shot from vehicle and heard someone outside the vehicle state give me a gun give me a gun, at which time she threw the gun out & did not know [sic] picked it up. She believes that Tony had fired the fatal shots that killed FHP Trooper & Canadian police officer.
Sunny vehemently denied confessing to Farinato. But Farinato’s statement was admitted as evidence at her trial and was upheld by the courts, including on Sunny’s final appeal, the one that resulted in her release from prison in 1992. That ruling, though, included a footnote that stopped just short of calling Farinato a liar. The court wrote: “The credibility of the statement to Farinato is not unassailable. Farinato insisted that Jacobs referred to Irwin as ‘the Canadian,’ although there is no evidence in the record indicating how she could have known he was Canadian at that point in time.”
In October 1990, five months after Jesse Tafero’s execution, Farinato was the subject of a complaint filed with the Broward County sheriff, alleging that Farinato had ordered deputies in another case to falsify an official police report. Farinato was indicted on one count of official misconduct, a felony, and in June 1991 his case went to trial. The jury acquitted him. But after the jury’s verdict, the internal affairs division of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office conducted its own investigation into Farinato’s conduct and in July 1991 issued a report that sustained misconduct allegations against him. Among the investigation’s findings was that Farinato had violated the Broward County Sheriff’s Office policy that “employees will not make false statements in any communication, verbal or written, concerning official matters” and brought “discredit to himself” and to the sheriff’s office as well. Shortly after the investigation, Farinato retired.
* * *
•
Last week, before coming down here to the Keys, I drove to Angelo Farinato’s house, out near the sugarcane fields. I talked to him in his front yar
d, through a shiny wire fence. Farinato told me that the state had been lucky to get a conviction in the case, and that the shell casings inside the Camaro were crucial to the conviction. Those casings meant that shots had to have been fired inside the car, and Sunny had a gun in her purse, Farinato said.
Also, the two truckers saw the shots coming from the back of the car, he added.
“Well, you’re an important part of the case too,” I told him. “You’re the one who got Sunny Jacobs to confess.”
He looked blank. Then he corrected me.
“No, Valjean Haley got the confession.”
“Haley did?”
“Yes. Haley got her to admit that she was in the back of the car.”
He held my gaze for a long moment. A wiry man with ice-blue eyes, dressed all in white. In his hand was a metal wand he had been using to pinch pine cones one by one up off his perfect crew-cut lawn.
* * *
•
“I did talk to Detective Farinato,” I tell Carol now.
“Did he remember getting Sonia’s confession?” Carol says, crunching up and winking both of her eyes hard on the word confession.
“No,” I say, looking from her over to LaGraves. “Actually, he did not remember that.”
LaGraves and Carol both burst out laughing again.
* * *
•
I feel upset now. Okay, fine, this is all a joke. I feel foolish too, with my typed-up study notes and my list of questions. All of which LaGraves is brushing right off.
Bullet trajectories? Meaningless, according to LaGraves. “You can’t depend at all on the path of a projectile through the body.” The gunshot residue tests? “Oh, Rhodes was covered in gunshot residue.” The bullet blast through the Cadillac door, the one that blew into Rhodes’s left leg, sprayed gunshot residue everywhere, plus the officers at the roadblock stood right over him with shotguns aimed at his body. So those tests were meaningless too, LaGraves says. In fact, the state’s own expert testified on the witness stand that the test was unreliable. What about Tafero’s possible connection to this guy Ricky Cravero, the violent cocaine overlord? Meaningless, I write down, in my notebook, as LaGraves replies. These cases are complex, they’re messy, and maybe if I were a trained police detective with a badge and a gun instead of a Girl Scout waltzing in with my pie-in-the-sky questions and unrealistic factual expectations, then I wouldn’t be insisting on answers nobody is going to be able to provide. That could be the message I’m getting.
“So why did you believe Walter Rhodes?” I ask LaGraves. Because that’s really the reason I’m here.
LaGraves nods. He’s been expecting this.
After Jesse, Sunny, and Walter were indicted, Walter’s court-appointed attorney said Walter might be interested in a plea in exchange for his testimony. Michael Satz, the chief homicide guy in the office, asked LaGraves to visit Walter in jail along with Walter’s attorney and size Walter up.
Walter had just had his leg amputated and “he was terrified,” LaGraves says. “A deer in the headlights. And he started telling his story.”
As Walter talked, LaGraves took note of Walter’s body language, his inflection, his choice of words, and his emotions. “He was strongly indicating to me that he was telling the truth,” LaGraves says. “Or at least that he absolutely believed he was telling the truth.”
“I’m sorry?” I say. I’m not sure I’ve heard that last part correctly.
“I was convinced Rhodes was telling us what he believed to be the truth,” LaGraves repeats.
So, no ballistics, no trajectories, no gunshot residue that could conclusively show who murdered Trooper Black and Constable Irwin. Just the testimony of Walter Rhodes, who later confessed multiple times to murdering the two officers, and who had that positive gunshot residue test, apparently from being leaked on by shotguns at the roadblock. Walter Rhodes believed what Walter Rhodes was saying, which does not seem like the same thing as LaGraves believing it himself.
“Okay,” I say. “What is the proof that Jesse Tafero was even involved?”
“There was no single item—there never is, there almost never is—the single item that is the golden nugget,” LaGraves says.
“I’m sorry?” I say, again.
For almost twenty-five years, I have wondered if Walter told me the truth the day I interviewed him in prison in 1990. And for all those years, I have assumed that whether Walter told me the truth or not, there must have been evidence that backed up his trial testimony. Not bullshit evidence, direct physical evidence. Hard facts. I have simply taken it for granted that the state would not have relied on just one man’s word to send two people to death row, especially after that man began confessing to the crime himself. There must have been more evidence than that, I’ve told myself. But now the prosecution’s chief investigator is telling me the case against Jesse Tafero was all basically, what, circumstantial?
“I don’t see it as a single instant. I rarely see it as a single instant,” LaGraves is saying. “It’s like a film loop. You look at each frame, you put it all together, and what do you get? To quote a Disney movie, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.”
He and Carol look at each other and laugh again.
“Look, Rhodes had given up,” LaGraves says. “When Black radioed in, Rhodes gave him his real name, his real date of birth. He had his hands in the air, you got me. It was over, for him.”
“Walter Rhodes was telling a story that was completely reasonable and Jesse Tafero, you can tell from the outset, he was a mean, evil person,” Carol adds.
* * *
•
But there are people who believe that Jesse Tafero was innocent, I’m thinking. Staring at my notes while I try to figure out my next question. Jesse’s friend Marianne, for example. Marianne was in touch with Jesse all the time he was on death row. Marianne told me Jesse was innocent, just before she handed me the letters Jesse sent her. Some of which turned out to be pretty steamy.
March 17, 1988
I’ve really been in love with you for so many years….You’re everything I desire in a woman….You’re soft loving and sensual, you’re strong willful and smart, you’re all the things I find most pleasing and desirable….
The letters were a surprise to me, actually. Because the official story of Jesse and Sunny, as told in newspapers and on television and onstage in The Exonerated, is that Jesse and Sunny were madly in love—with each other. “You’re my woman, as close as my breath,” Jesse writes to Sunny, in the play. “Hand and glove, you know?” The night I saw the play, the woman sitting next to me reached for her Kleenex when she heard that line.
If I hadn’t read Jesse’s letters to Marianne, I might not have searched for more information about her. But I had read the letters—you’ve never really tasted all my love—so I did. The first thing I found was that story about Marianne and her husband and his blown-up boat. Next I found stories saying John Clarence Cook was a jewel thief. Then I found news reports linking John Clarence Cook to Jack Murphy, the beach boy and jewel thief. And then I found a transcript of Jack Murphy testifying to the Florida Parole Commission about Jesse Tafero. By the time of his testimony, Jack Murphy was a famous man, a dazzling celebrity bad boy turned devout Christian prison evangelist. Bringing his full star power to bear, Jack Murphy told the commission that he personally knew Jesse Tafero was an innocent man.
“What about Jack Murphy?” I ask LaGraves now.
* * *
•
Jack Murphy: high diver, smooth talker, cat burglar. Legend.
In 1964, Jack Murphy and a friend scaled a fence surrounding the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Spider-Manned up the façade to the fourth floor, slipped through a window into the Hall of Gems, and stole the Star of India sapphire, a gray-blue stone with white blazes on both sides, one of the largest cabochon sapphires in the world. They
also stole the flawless DeLong Star Ruby, the yellow Eagle Diamond, and a smash-and-grab bagful of other rare jewels. Outside again, Murphy coolly hailed a taxicab to get away. “One of the greatest jewel burglaries in history,” the newswires said. It didn’t take long for police to arrest Murphy, but the debonair, talkative, insouciant thief was an instant hit with the press. “Murph the Surf,” the newspapers called him, detailing his days as a cabana boy, a surfer, and a stunt diver who had wowed crowds on Miami Beach. Nora Ephron, then a cub reporter, was among the writers who covered the story. “Murphy was, in a sort of pop-art way, the true twentieth-century man,” Ephron wrote:
He might have been invented as the hero of an ABC television series. Surf Side Suspect, or some such thing: tall, blond beach boy tends cabanas and leaps from high diving boards by day and, police insist, robs by night.
In 2011 this famous beach boy jewel thief appeared before the Florida Parole Commission. The hearing was not on Jesse Tafero’s case, but Murphy brought Jesse up all on his own. Murphy told the commission: “I’ve been working with the largest prison ministry in the entire world for the last twenty-four years. I’ve been in over 2,500 prisons…and I’ve met many, many people that all say, ‘I’m innocent, I’m innocent,’ and I just, I don’t even bother with it. But I was there with Pitts and Lee,” Murphy said, referring to Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, who spent nine years on death row before being pardoned, perhaps the most notorious wrongful conviction case in Florida’s history. And, Murphy added, “I saw Jesse Tafero die in the electric chair, who was innocent, because I know the man who killed the officer.”
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