Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  Walter was excited. He and Jesse had both done time behind bars and they knew the same people from prison and they were both into karate—all of that felt like a bond. Plus, Jesse was better than Walter at karate, and to Walter, that seemed auspicious, career-wise. A chance to get ahead in life.

  After drinks, Walter drove Jesse and Sunny and the kids back to his apartment. Walter put a favorite record by his man Joe Walsh on the stereo and fired up some weed. Right there in Walter’s living room, Jesse pulled a few slow-motion karate moves, and Walter noted with appreciation Jesse’s precise and excellent technique. Very much like Walter’s own technique, Walter thought.

  Soon, Walter writes, he and Jesse were on the same wavelength. A unit, a team. Partners, “vibrating in resonance” along the warrior path. Being around Jesse Tafero made Walter feel superior. Arrogant. And definitely up for some action. He turned to Jesse and said as much right out loud:

  “To the death!”

  13

  The Closest Thing to a God in Prison

  That night I stay up late reading Walter’s memoir.

  Walter Rhodes received TV transmissions in his head and saw UFOs. He dreamed he was beamed up onto a starship in a tube of pure white light. He spent nights out in the ocean in a speedboat, floating above the sunken city of Atlantis, watching strange lights in the sky while his drug-running buddy killed eels by crushing their heads. That was weird, Walter wrote. Walter’s wife was a CIA agent, or so Walter suspected. Two of his girlfriends turned tricks in massage parlors and gave him fistfuls of cash. A mafia guy hooked him up with his apartment. He had his future predicted at a séance. And he was a literal sex magnet, attracting and tapping hot chicks like he was “God’s personal gift” to womankind.

  Walter Rhodes is also the only person who saw Jesse Tafero shoot the officers.

  Walter’s testimony, plus Jesse being arrested with the murder weapon strapped to his hip, were—as far as I’ve been able to tell—what sent Jesse to death row. I’ve got my notebook in front of me now and I’m charting it out. All the other facts point either to Walter—his confessions, the gunshot residue on his hands—or to Sunny: the metal windshield post, the truck driver eyewitnesses, the bullet casings in the car. I am planning on trying to talk to Walter again, if he’ll put me on his prison visitor list, and to Sunny, if I can find her in Ireland. But today I need to talk to a friend of Jesse Tafero’s named Art, I decide, as dawn starts to gleam along the edges of the windows. Because in 1989, Art gave an affidavit to Jesse’s attorney that squarely blamed the murders on Sunny and Sunny alone.

  * * *

  •

  “Jesse and Sunny? I introduced them to each other,” Art says, at his front door a few hours later. His apartment is just down the road from where the Cadillac crashed that morning. “Sure. Come in.”

  Art is a retired United States Air Force mechanic, dressed this rainy Sunday afternoon in a T-shirt and shorts, barefoot, with a shock of silver hair. His voice is low and slow, like Karo syrup poured on a bass guitar. I’m grateful for that. He sounds so mellow that he’s calming me down, and I need it—I am running on fumes now. It’s not simply my long night with Walter’s memories and Walter’s voice in my head. My time in Florida is almost up. I’ve been here just shy of three months. An entire winter. In a week, I have to head home.

  In addition to the Air Force, Art also worked as a substitute teacher, as a bus driver for disabled schoolchildren, and as president of the local food co-op, he’s telling me as we sit down together on his couch. Oh, and he was in the drug business too. Art is entirely matter-of-fact about this. He mentions the .38 handgun and the shotgun he used to have with such laid-back casualness that I find myself thinking, Oh, hey, sure, that’s just two guns. A totally reasonable number.

  Art knew Jesse his whole life, he says. They met as children in grammar school in Miami and were close friends from then on. Art knew Jesse’s mom, Kay. “A sweet lady.” Jesse’s dad was “stricter.” And Art knew Sunny, from the old North Miami flea market, a skating rink near the co-op on Dixie Highway. Sunny sewed yoga pants to sell, that was her thing. “She was really friendly, and she got to be in our group because of her sewing ability,” Art says. In 1973, after Jesse was paroled from prison on his robbery and attempted-rape convictions, Art arranged for Jesse and Sunny to meet. “I thought they might hit it off.” Also, Jesse needed a place to stay. “So Jesse stayed with Sunny one night and they got sexually involved and then he was just living there.” At the time, Jesse was going by the name Tony Caruso, and dealing drugs.

  But Jesse was not a successful drug dealer, according to Art. “Jesse had access to drugs from a lot of different people. From Ricky Cravero. From me. Jesse’s problem was that he had no buyers.”

  Drug dealing is a social business, Art explains. You have to sit down with people, do the drugs with them, hang out. And that’s why people didn’t want to buy drugs from Jesse. It was his personality. “Jesse was a wild man,” Art says. It turned people off.

  What Art has just told me matches what I read in Walter’s memoir last night. On one deal, Walter wrote, Jesse tried to entice a balking cocaine customer with a sample snort and a threat of bodily harm: “ ‘I’ll pistol whip you and take all your money motherfucker!’ ”

  That had not seemed like tip-top pharmaceutical salesmanship to me, but then again, it’s not like I know the etiquette of the 1970s cocaine marketplace. So it’s helpful to hear what Art has to say.

  But Art does not believe that Jesse murdered the officers.

  “Write this down,” he tells me, looking at my notebook. “Write down that one of Jesse’s best friends says Jesse never pulled the trigger.”

  Before Jesse met Sunny, Art says, “to my knowledge I don’t think he ever had money to buy a gun. Jesse didn’t know anything about guns. Sunny did. Sunny—even though she denies all of this—Sunny knew guns. We were all in the drug business in one way or another. Some of the guys we knew were very dangerous people. She tries to play herself off as an innocent bystander, but she was as active in everything going on as Jesse was.”

  That is exactly what I’m here to talk to him about. I hand Art his affidavit from 1989:

  Some time after the shootings, I met Sunny’s brother, Alan, at a party. We were all talking about what had happened, sharing what we had heard about it. I remember that Alan laughed, and said that he knew what really happened. He said that Sunny had told him that she was the one who actually fired the shots from the backseat of the car. He said that to a group of people. I’ll never forget it.

  “Yeah, I remember this,” Art says now, reading it over.

  I watch him from my end of the couch. He looks a little hesitant, I think. Holding the statement carefully, like it might bite him.

  Now Art is handing the statement back to me. When Jesse’s attorneys first approached him for the statement, Art says, he didn’t know what to do. So he told them he’d agree to give the affidavit only after hearing from Jesse himself that this was what Jesse wanted. Art worked out a code, something Art told the attorney to ask Jesse, something only Jesse would know. When it came back correct, that’s when Art felt like it was okay to sign.

  Jesse blamed Sunny for the murders, Art says. “He thought she killed the cops.”

  Sunny, I think. Not Walter. Interesting.

  * * *

  •

  I’m about to say goodbye when Art asks, apropos of nothing, “Have you heard of Jack Murphy?”

  Murph the Surf. Beach boy, Star of India, Whiskey Creek. “A really bad guy,” investigator LaGraves called him, “but a bad guy with a lot of class.” Just this morning I read in Walter’s memoir that Walter was in a band with Jack Murphy in prison. Murph the Surf played the violin and was “exceptionally good.”

  “Yes, I have heard of Jack Murphy,” I say to Art.

  “Have you heard of Jack Griffith?” A
rt asks next.

  Murph’s codefendant in the Whiskey Creek killings. Yes, I’ve heard of him too.

  Well, the two Jacks were high-rise cat burglars, Art says. They were real quiet about it, but they were working together. And in addition to burglary with Murph, Griffith was also into karate. Art knows this because he and Griffith studied at the same dojo in North Miami. Which is how Art happens to know that Griffith taught Jesse karate in prison. “Jack Griffith the cat burglar taught Jesse Tafero the martial arts.”

  This is fascinating for a whole bunch of different reasons, none of which I mention right now to Art. All of which have to do with Walter’s confessions. Walter Rhodes’s confessions are at the heart of Jesse’s and Sunny’s claims of innocence. They’ve troubled me for half my life. Before my Creator. Why would Walter confess like that, using those words, unless he had in fact committed the murders?

  I asked Walter myself about his confessions. In 1990, when I interviewed him in prison, and in 2003, up there in the woods. Both times he claimed that he confessed because friends of Jesse Tafero’s pressured him behind bars. They were going to kill him if he didn’t sign the statements, he claimed. But that seemed to me like a flimsy explanation. If it was even true.

  “Did they come and visit you?” I’d asked Walter, in 1990. “What kind of friends were these? How come Jesse Tafero would have friends coming for you?”

  So what Art has so casually mentioned about the two Jacks might be important.

  In her book, Sunny writes that Jesse had a sensei, a teacher, who was his “mentor and protector” in the tough Florida prison system. This sensei, she wrote, was the man who taught Jesse karate. She doesn’t give a name for the sensei, but Art has just accidentally told me who he was. Jack Griffith. Jesse’s teacher. His mentor. His protector. And a legendary badass revered by the inmates of the Florida Department of Corrections as the fiercest, most mysterious motherfucker of all, according to none other than Walter Rhodes.

  Jack Griffith was “the closest thing to a God in prison,” Walter wrote in his M.O.

  In 1979, Walter confessed again. This time, Walter signed the confession himself. It’s the confession quoted in The Exonerated. In addition to Walter’s signature, that confession bears the signature of three other inmates, attesting to it. Investigator LaGraves put those inmates under oath and interrogated them. One of the inmates told LaGraves that there was a contract out on Walter, to force him to sign or else. A price tag on Walter’s head. LaGraves asked: How much was the price tag? Answer: Thirty to forty thousand, “more if we can get it over with.” LaGraves: “Okay, who’d you hear that from?” Answer: Jack Griffith.

  The same Jack Griffith who was Jesse’s sensei and friend and protector. The same Jack Griffith who cat burgled with Jack Murphy. And it was Murph who brought Walter’s first confession to light in 1977, sparking hope in the hearts of Jesse and Sunny.

  I have a picture of the two Jacks together at Florida State Prison, a Polaroid dated January 28, 1977—two weeks before Walter’s first confession. I found it online, on a genealogical website. In the photo, Jack Murphy has his arm around Jack Griffith, and Griffith has his hand on Murph’s knee. Convicted murderers. Cat burglars. Karate buddies. Friends.

  It seems these two Jacks fully believed Walter was guilty. Not Jesse. And not Sunny.

  That, or there is more to this story.

  * * *

  •

  The night before the murders, Jesse was at Art’s house, Art is telling me now. Art was living then in a place he’d rented from an antiques dealer, a big house deep in a mango orchard, only moonlight to see by at night. The house was full of antique furniture—and marijuana. A huge stash hidden upstairs.

  That night, Art heard a car pulling into the yard. A commotion. Voices, shouting. Art ran outside, into the orchard. Jesse was standing there in the shadows, holding a gun. A man was on his knees on the ground in front of Jesse, cowering. Art recognized the guy—he was a mutual friend of theirs. Jesse was pointing his gun directly at the friend’s head. I’ll get it for you tomorrow, the guy was pleading. He owes me money, Jesse told Art. He added, “Art, I got no place to stay.”

  “So I had to come out in the garden with my own gun and say, ‘Take it off my property, I have a hundred and fifty pounds of pot in this house,’ ” Art says. “And I took a fifty-dollar bill out of my wallet and I gave the money to Jesse. I told him to use the money to get a room.”

  Art’s next question is clearly something that he has been carrying for forty years: “So I don’t know why they were in that rest area. Why didn’t they just go to a hotel?”

  * * *

  •

  Because they were being chased around by four goons in a Lincoln Continental. Because the goons had figured out where Walter lived. Because there was a strange car in the parking lot of Walter’s apartment building, so they went to Steve Addis to borrow his green Camaro. Because at Steve Addis’s house, Walter saw the Lincoln Continental again, with the same four guys in it. Circling the block, slowly. Because they’d spent days driving around doing drugs and Walter, for one, was “not in my right mind,” according to his own M.O. That’s why Walter decided they had to sleep in the rest area.

  Joe Rourke, brother of Mickey and stepbrother of Steve Addis, saw Walter that night. Rourke testified in a deposition that Walter was “so paranoid” that he “was sitting outside waiting for a car to come by that he thought was following him.” Rourke added: “I thought he was kind of nutty myself.”

  And Jesse, according to his psychiatrist, was suffering from “delirium” and “delusional thinking” in the early morning hours of February 20, 1976, brought on by “having taken drugs indiscriminately on a daily basis from morning until night for several months prior to the crime” and possibly having been slipped a dose of LSD the previous evening at the home of John Mulcahy. “Perceptual disturbances, misinterpretations, illusions, hallucinations, and persecutory delusions,” the psychiatrist wrote. “Paranoid ideation, overall paranoia about being constantly followed and watched, inability to carry on a conversation, limited contact with reality, hyperalertness,” plus sleep deprivation, nutritional deprivation, and a “drug-induced inability to think, reason, assess or recognize reality.”

  Or, as Jesse told a nurse after his arrest: “I have been on a bad trip.”

  Trooper Black, pulling up alongside the Camaro, stopping his cruiser, stepping out. His wife and child are at home, having breakfast, getting dressed. Constable Irwin in his white T-shirt. This is the last day of his Florida vacation. As Constable Irwin hangs back, Trooper Black walks through the morning mist over to the Camaro, and looks in the driver’s-side door. A gun, down at the driver’s feet.

  “The reality,” Walter wrote, “is that I am somewhat responsible for our being at that rest area….Was this destiny? I don’t believe in accidents. Karma/catalyst. FATE.”

  14

  Naw, He Ain’t Shot Him

  The truck driver is in his seventies now. Robert McKenzie, the only living independent eyewitness to the murder of Trooper Phillip Black and Constable Donald Irwin. It has taken me these three winter months to find him. His address in the old court records led to an abandoned building underneath a half-dead tree in a Miami neighborhood of shuttered stores, men in wheelchairs begging on highway exit ramps, and falling-down houses on trash-filled lots. There wasn’t even anyone there to ask where McKenzie might have gone. Now I’m at a tidy brick house off a red dirt road in south Georgia and Robert McKenzie is standing in the doorway to his kitchen, dressed in a blue pajama set with a sleep mask pushed up on his forehead, telling me to go away.

  I’m trying to explain. All of it—chaos, confusion, truth, lies. Last night I read more of Walter Rhodes’s magnum opus. Walter admires some killers and thinks other killers “need a good killing.” It’s not just guns that kill—words kill too. He himself feels good around killers. Alwa
ys has. Comfortable. More powerful. He wonders: “Does this mean I’m a killer?” Crows hop through the pines in the yard behind me, their calls sharp like needles. It’s morning on the last Sunday before I have to go home.

  The other truck driver died twenty years ago, I tell Robert McKenzie. Please, you are the only person who can help me, I say.

  “I’m sleeping,” he pleads. “Can you come back later?”

  In investigation, later means never.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “No.”

  * * *

  •

  On February 20, 1976, Robert McKenzie was thirty-two years old and working for Food Fair, a Miami company. He started his shift that morning at five o’clock, and at ten minutes past seven he pulled into the rest area for his coffee break. That’s what he told the detective who interviewed him, days before the start of Jesse’s trial.

  “Did you see anything that was unusual?” the officer asked McKenzie.

  “Yes,” McKenzie replied.

  Like Pierce Hyman, the other truck driver, McKenzie saw the Camaro and the cruiser at the north end of the rest area, parked side by side. McKenzie saw Trooper Black standing at the open door of the Camaro, talking to Jesse Tafero, who was sitting in the driver’s seat. He saw Walter Rhodes, in a blue shirt, standing at the front of the cars. Then he saw Black lean down and start talking to someone in the backseat of the Camaro. A woman.

  At that point, McKenzie put his big rig in gear and started to pull out, watching the Camaro in his side mirrors as he headed toward the highway on-ramp. Trooper Black, standing up, reaching toward Jesse to frisk him, reaching toward Jesse’s front pocket, Jesse jumping back.