Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  Black and Jesse struggle. Constable Irwin steps in to help.

  That’s when Walter, in his blue shirt, moves from the front of the cars to the back, McKenzie told police:

  ’Bout that time, the other guy, with the blue on, the blue shirt on, he walked behind the car, behind the car on the other side, he walked behind, in the back.

  Suddenly: Gunshots. Both officers fall to the ground. “They dropped instantly. Instantly.”

  McKenzie’s testimony that Walter was behind the Camaro as the shots rang out was not what truck driver Hyman saw. Hyman saw Walter standing in front of the cars during the shooting. The discrepancy between the two eyewitnesses was not hugely controversial at trial. But in the years since, McKenzie’s testimony has become a crucial piece of evidence in the case. The reason?

  That slender strip of metal I saw in Room 407.

  The metal ran along the edge of the front windshield on the passenger side of Trooper Black’s cruiser. When forensics examined the cruiser after the murder, they saw that a bullet hole had been shot clear through this windshield post. The bullet entered the metal strip low and exited high, and it entered from the right—that is, from the direction of the Camaro. Whoever shot that bullet did so from a point lower than, to the right of, and to the rear of the front windshield of Trooper Black’s car. At trial, the state argued that the bullet hole was physical proof that Sunny Jacobs fired from the backseat of the Camaro. But the 20/20 broadcast—and, later, In the Blink of an Eye, the ABC Sunday Night Movie—argued that Robert McKenzie’s testimony showed Walter Rhodes to be the true killer. In an interview with filmmaker Micki Dickoff—a childhood friend of Sunny’s, and the director of Blink—20/20 reported:

  Reporter Tom Jarriel: The key to the murder mystery: Could Walter Rhodes have been at the rear of the Camaro when the fatal shots rang out? Micki Dickoff believes she found the answer to that question when she re-created the crime scene. There were only two eyewitnesses, truck drivers parked 150 feet behind the Camaro and the police car. One of them, she discovered, told a very different story than Walter Rhodes.

  Dickoff: That truck driver, without a shadow of a doubt, saw the “man in blue”—Rhodes was wearing blue—move from the front of the Camaro around the passenger side to the back of the Camaro. Absolutely, positively.

  Jarriel: According to this driver, Rhodes walked from the front of the Camaro to the rear, putting him in position to have fired the fatal shots.

  * * *

  •

  “I am so sorry to bother you,” I tell McKenzie now, in his garage. “But I witnessed the execution of the guy who was convicted in that case, and I’m trying to figure it out.”

  “Naw,” McKenzie says. “He ain’t shot him.”

  A pause.

  “He got electrocuted?” McKenzie asks.

  I nod.

  McKenzie shakes his head. “I don’t think that guy did that. Let me tell you, I don’t think he did it.”

  Pause.

  “That lady in that car got to have shot him. She was talking to the officer and then bang bang bang, and they fell. It had to be her. It was from the car.”

  There is a car right in front of Robert McKenzie and me right now. It’s a blue four-door sedan in McKenzie’s garage, where we are talking. McKenzie is standing alongside the passenger side of the car, about where the handle is on the front door. Now McKenzie steps sideways, faces the backseat of the car. That’s how the officer was standing, he says, looking at me. Real close up, like this, talking to someone in the backseat. The car’s door was open and the lady that the officer was talking to was sitting right behind the driver’s seat, right inside the open door, he says.

  “I didn’t realize Trooper Black was standing that close to the backseat of the Camaro,” I say.

  McKenzie nods and looks at me with a puzzled expression. “How were the officers shot?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that,” I confess.

  That is one of the most important things in this whole case, and I do not know it yet. I’ve read the autopsy reports but I don’t understand the medical terms. I have not been able to reach the doctor who was the medical examiner on the case. I asked investigator LaGraves when I was down in the Keys, but he told me there’s no way to determine from the wounds to the officers the position from which the shots were fired. Michele McCain, widow of Jesse’s lead trial attorney, said the shots were fired directly down into the officers, and that there are autopsy photographs showing exactly that. I have not been able to find those photographs. The medical examiner testified at trial, of course, and I have read the trial transcript, but the questions from prosecutor Michael Satz are along the lines of “Was it like this?” and “Was it like that?” without any kind of physical detail. Black was shot four times: in the arm, in the head, in the neck, and in the shoulder. Irwin was shot twice, in the head and in the shoulder. But what path did the bullets travel as they passed through the officers’ bodies, taking their lives along with them?

  “Would you mind drawing what you saw for me?” I ask McKenzie, putting my notebook on top of the car. He takes my pen and sketches it out.

  “It had to have come from there,” McKenzie says, pointing to the Camaro in his drawing. “The lady had to have shot them, because that’s when they fall. I saw it, bam bam bam, it had to have come from the car.”

  McKenzie heard about the murders on the radio all that day, and the next days as well. He didn’t tell anyone what he’d seen. But the other truck driver who was there told the police that there had been a Food Fair truck at the rest stop, and the police came to the warehouse and told everyone that if they didn’t tell the truth they’d all go to jail. “I ain’t never been in jail,” McKenzie said. “A friend who had been there told me to tell the truth.”

  “Did the police put words in your mouth?”

  “They ain’t told me nothing,” McKenzie said.

  “What about the state attorney? Did he tell you what to say?”

  “They just told me to tell the truth. They didn’t tell me what to say, how to say, nothing.”

  He was scared, McKenzie says. He didn’t want to go to court. He didn’t want to testify. And he’s never talked about it since. A television program called him one time, but he said no.

  “I can’t get it off my mind—it’s bothering me all the time, I ain’t never seen somebody get killed before. I’m telling you, it’s something else—I’m seventy-one years old, and I still remember that day. It’s been a long time. And I ain’t talk to nobody about this. I wish I could get it out of my head.”

  He falls silent, and I watch him for a moment. He looks tired, and so sad.

  “I’m so sorry,” I tell him. For being here, demanding answers, bringing it all back. Me, the intrusion. Appearing on the doorstep, past in hand, knowing full well how it feels to have one morning of your life come back around again and again, present tense. I do not want to cause anybody pain. I do believe in truth. I’m not sure how those add up right now.

  “I am so sorry,” I say again.

  Robert McKenzie nods. He’s going to go inside and take a shower and have some breakfast, he tells me. Then he’s going to mow the lawn to help himself forget.

  15

  A Very Uneasy Feeling

  It’s typewritten and faded, this report. A copy, not the original. Titled “Narrative” and dated February 20, 1976–March 5, 1976, it is a day-by-day account of events in the immediate aftermath of the murders, as observed by a social worker. I am at the State Attorney’s Office in Fort Lauderdale, at the start of my last three days in Florida. I’m back in the office library, being allowed to retype the report into my computer but not to make a copy. The report is about another person in the backseat of the car that morning. Sunny’s son. Little nine-year-old Eric.

  When the Cadillac came to a stop at the roadblock, p
olice found an attaché case that contained, among other items, six Polaroid snapshots. Three were images of young Eric with a gun. In two of the photos he is on horseback, pointing a handgun into the air. In the third, Eric is sitting on a flowered futon couch next to Jesse Tafero. Eric is wearing a sweatshirt and a pair of plaid slacks; Jesse is bare-chested, with feathered necklaces draped around his neck. They are both smiling. Jesse is holding a handgun, pointing it almost directly at the camera. Eric is holding a machine gun. A real one.

  Police believed, based on trucker Hyman’s written statement, that at least some of the gunshots that killed Black and Irwin came from the backseat of the Camaro. They’d already begun interrogating Sunny. Now, seeing the photographs, together with some statements the child was reported to have made after the murders, they were considering Eric as a suspect too.

  “Extremely disturbing,” the police captain said of the evidence.

  “Very incriminating information,” the social worker wrote.

  * * *

  •

  The social worker’s report has an old-fashioned look about it. The typing skitters and trips on the page, and it’s packed with small details—impressions, snippets of conversations. It feels contemporaneous, spontaneous, something the social worker wrote as she went along to document what was going on:

  2/20/76

  “Eric” and “Tina” were the two minors who were found to be with the three adults who are being charged with the murder of two policemen in Deerfield Beach….Among the three adults was a white female who is allegedly the children’s mother. Her identity has been undetermined at this time. “Eric” allegedly nine years old…was in the back seat of the car when the Canadian officer was killed. Also in the back seat of the car were his alleged mother and baby sister “Tina,” ten months old, date of birth unknown. According to reports, it has been alleged that the Canadian officer was killed from the back seat of the car, thusly leaving as suspects “Eric” and his alleged mother.

  At the police station after the murders, police tested Eric’s hands for gunshot residue and fingerprinted him. While they were fingerprinting him, Sunny was taken out of her cell to be transferred to the Broward County jail. On her way past Eric, the social worker reported, Sunny “leaned over and said to the child, ‘Eric, shut up!’ ”

  Sunny, too, wrote about seeing Eric at the jail after the murders. In her book, Stolen Time, Sunny wrote that as she was being led through a jail hallway, she saw Eric. He cried out “Mommy!” and she told him, “You don’t have to talk to these people. Tell them you want a lawyer.”

  Eric obeyed his mother, according to the social worker’s notes. In the days that followed, Eric claimed to not remember his last name, where he lived, where he went to school, “or anything that would lead us to his true identity.” Eric’s grandparents hired a lawyer for him—a veteran criminal defense attorney who had recently represented two associates of Ricky Cravero in the Stanley Harris murder trial—and Eric handed out the lawyer’s business card when anyone asked him a question. The social worker reported that Eric was “a very innocent and lovable child” but that he also “radiates a very uneasy feeling to those who communicate with him when he ‘cannot remember’ the facts surrounding his and his family’s identities.” She described Eric as “brainwashed.”

  On February 24, 1976, the social worker wrote that “the tests they took on Friday to see if Eric had fired a gun had come back positive and that Broward County was going to charge Eric with 1st Degree Murder today.”

  But that did not happen. And on February 24, Walter Rhodes provided a new statement to police. From his hospital bed, where he was recovering from the amputation of his left leg, Walter wrote that he now thought that perhaps a Taser had been used during the murders. Sunny, sitting in the backseat, “may have had the Taser in one hand—Pistol in the other,” he wrote. It was the first time Walter had linked a Taser to the crimes; he’d previously told police, under oath, that he’d not seen a Taser used.

  By February 26, 1976, almost a week after the murders, Eric still was not talking. Anytime he was asked about the shooting, or his family, or himself, he displayed “a tremendous amount of fear,” his social worker wrote. So the psychiatrist treating Eric asked the social worker to “get in touch with the judge to get authorization to use drugs on Eric to see if the boy would talk.” According to the social worker, Eric overheard that conversation and “went into hysterics,” saying, “My mother made me do it, my mother made me do it.”

  * * *

  •

  When I visited investigator LaGraves weeks before on the Keys, I’d asked about Eric.

  “Could he have fired the Taser?”

  “I don’t recall ever considering it,” LaGraves said.

  But then LaGraves kicked back in his chair, nodding his head a little bit, thinking. It’s such an investigator thing to do, seeing if the puzzle pieces fit together a different way.

  “He may well have,” LaGraves said, after mulling it over. “The boy was of the age and size that he could have fired a Taser, at Black and maybe the Canadian, or both.”

  I mentioned that I had read a police laboratory report that said Eric had tested positive for gunshot residue.

  “He could very easily have tested positive,” LaGraves said. A Taser has a “mini-cartridge that projects the darts out,” and when fired that could produce a positive gunshot residue test, he said. Also, “Eric was in the confined area where we believe that Sonia fired a handgun,” which would have gotten residue on him as well. “Or he could have fired a gun. It’s possible that he could have. It would be easy to construct a scenario where Eric was the one who kicked everything into high gear—substitute Eric for Sonia.”

  * * *

  •

  But if you substitute Eric for Sonia, I think, as I write that down, the state’s entire case against Jesse and Sunny is based on a false premise. It’s no longer a double murder planned and carried out by two street-smart lovers trying to avoid arrest. It’s a tragedy triggered by a terrified little boy. The theory of the crime is wrong. If you substitute Eric for Sonia, a fabrication, a fiction, a lie put two people on death row. That matters. It matters to me.

  * * *

  •

  I’d asked Fred Mascaro too. Mascaro was the Palm Beach County detective who spent a week in 1976 with Eric and the social worker while Eric was in police custody. He’s mentioned by name in the social worker’s report. When I stopped by to talk with Mascaro a few weeks ago, he was still on the job, still specializing these forty years later in criminal cases involving children. Mascaro told me that at the police station on the morning of the murders, Eric was in a panic.

  “He was very meek and very scared,” Mascaro said. “He was very scared.”

  “Sure, it must have been very upsetting,” I said, imagining.

  No, Mascaro corrects me. Eric was scared of his mother. “Before she left, she turned to him and told him not to say anything.”

  Could it have been Eric who fired first?

  “Well, he had gunpowder on his hands, so they wanted to charge him too,” Mascaro said. But Mascaro didn’t think it happened that way. The shots that killed Black and Irwin were too on target for Mascaro to believe a child had committed the murders all by himself.

  “He might have stuck the gun out the window and shot one time,” Mascaro said.

  * * *

  •

  Paul Weber, too, had mentioned Eric, when I talked to him. Weber was the deputy sheriff who helped fingerprint Jesse at the station house that morning, and who kept an eye on Sunny after she was first taken into custody. Weber remembers Sunny as cold, “very unemotional,” and completely entranced by Jesse. “She was the type of woman who was so involved with blind love for him that she would do anything for him—that’s the impression I got. I remember that because of the casual way she wanted to know what
was going on. She wasn’t traumatized. She just sat there with her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.”

  At the substation that morning, the officers wondered at Eric’s behavior too, Weber said.

  “There was the suggestion that possibly the boy fired the Taser which immobilized Trooper Black, because the boy knew how to fire a weapon,” Weber told me. “There was discussion among the investigators because of the fact that they saw these pictures, and the boy had such a defiant, arrogant attitude, that maybe he had some involvement in the case.”

  * * *

  •

  I didn’t ask Marianne about Eric when I visited her at the start of all this, almost three months ago. She brought him up all on her own. We’d just sat down in the ornate chairs on either side of her fireplace, sunlight bathing her in a radiant glow. Marianne herself thought Sunny did the shooting. But “Jesse, not directly, said it was the boy.”

  “Eric?” I said. Surprised. “How did you hear that?”

  “Kay told me,” Marianne said. Jesse’s mom.

  * * *

  •

  My mother made me do it.

  I stare at those six words on the old report now, a knot of anxiety in my stomach.

  The small boy in the backseat, that nine-year-old child—he needs to be on my witness list too.

  16

  Grace

  “Oh! You found me,” Grace Black says, as she opens her front door.

  It is my second-to-final day in Florida, and I’ve come to her doorstep only as a last resort. Grace is the widow of Phillip Black, the Florida Highway Patrol trooper murdered on the morning of February 20, 1976. Before showing up here today, I wrote her a letter. No response. I spoke to her briefly on the telephone to ask if she might talk. She said she’d consider it but did not call back. I wrote and called Constable Irwin’s family too. No response from them either. Last month I stopped by the address given for Trooper Black on the police reports from the day of his murder and spoke to their son, Christian, who still lives there. Christian was extremely nice, but he’d been a very young child when his father died. He lent me a photograph album of his dad. In one photo, handsome, clean-cut Trooper Black is standing in the sunshine, smiling and holding a license plate the State of Florida had issued to promote safe driving. arrive alive, the plate says.