Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  Afterwards, the warden was walking the new chief guard along the rows, and a voice from Belfast rang out. “Hey, John”—the new chief’s name was John—“you’re next!”

  Pringle kicks back in his chair and laughs.

  As soon as dessert is finished, Peter and I are more than ready to take our leave.

  “Well, thank you so much,” I begin, for the second time today. Our car is locked inside the yard, behind the big metal fence around their house. We actually need their permission to go.

  “Oh, no,” Sunny says. “Not until you’ve answered a question.”

  Peter gives my trembling knee a steadying pat underneath the table.

  “Because while you were late, I told a friend in Florida about this great lady who stopped by, and she sent me this piece you wrote,” Sunny says. “And I thought, Oh good, because you can read it aloud, I love when people read what they’ve written aloud. But then I read it.”

  That thing that I feared, them reading the 2003 Chronicle piece right in front of me? It’s happening now.

  Exonerated Blurs the Facts about Death Penalty Case

  In The Exonerated, Tafero’s story is told by an actress playing Sunny Jacobs, Tafero’s lover and his co-defendant in the crime he died for. In the play, their tale is simple: Jacobs and Tafero, young and in love, catch a ride from ex-convict Walter Rhodes. In cold blood, Rhodes shoots two police officers, frames Tafero and Jacobs and sends them both to death row to save his own skin. Jacobs is exonerated after Rhodes finally confesses, but it’s too late for Tafero, who dies in the electric chair.

  In creating The Exonerated, according to the program, playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen “spent countless hours in dusty courthouse records rooms, pawing through thousands of microfiche files and cardboard boxes full of affidavits, depositions, police interrogations, and courtroom testimony….With a few exceptions, each word spoken in this play comes from the public record legal documents, court transcripts, letters or from an interview with an exonerated person.”

  But in researching the Tafero case, Blank and Jensen seem to have missed evidence that did not fit their story. For one thing, Sunny Jacobs, who owned the gun used in the murders, was not exonerated. According to court records, she entered a plea of guilty to second-degree murder and was released with time served after an appeals court found that prosecutors had withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from her defense. And Tafero’s own lawyers argued in court that only Jacobs could have started the shooting, if eyewitnesses were to be believed. “The entire incident might never have occurred if she had not fired the first shots,” the lawyers wrote, in a brief I found at the Florida State Archives.

  That’s just mean, Sunny says, when Pringle has finished reading it. “As an investigator, you can’t go in with an agenda. Otherwise they’re not going to talk to you.”

  “Oh, but I do have an agenda here,” I say. “What I really want to do is find and print the entire whole truth. It is the thing that I’ve realized is the thing I have to do. And that’s—”

  Sunny cuts me off. “But which truth?”

  “I really need to know what happened.”

  “Whose truth do you accept?”

  “I like to believe that there is an objective absolute something that happened.”

  “I don’t think you can know that. I don’t think that’s knowable,” Sunny says.

  “Okay, there are all those facts,” Pringle says, stepping in. “And then there are the interpretations of facts. And there’s truth. But you know, my truth may not be your truth.”

  “It depends on your purpose, too,” Sunny says. “If you do a scientific experiment, it’s well known that the experimenter’s viewpoint affects the result of the experiment. You know this, right?”

  “You mean, an observed particle behaves differently?” I ask.

  “Yes. And that’s what’s going to happen to your truth. Whatever you want it to be, you will affect it,” Sunny says. “It’s the nature of the universe. There’s really no way, in my opinion, to ascertain The Truth. Because it will change according to people who are examining it.”

  “I’ve been an investigator for nineteen years,” I say slowly. This whole discussion has, frankly, caught me by surprise. I had expected Sunny to say, if she said anything, something along the lines of You want to know what really happened? What really happened is Walter fucking Rhodes killed those officers. Not “I don’t think that’s knowable” hitched to a debate about the nature of truth and the universe.

  “What I do is go out and find the facts,” I say. “The lawyers fit them to their case. The lawyers will take a fact and turn it into an argument, but a fact is a fact. You know, the car was red or the car was green. One or the other.”

  “But that’s a different kind of fact,” Sunny says. “When it comes to, like, who killed Cock Robin. Who did what. Like in our case. We might as well take it. How would one ever know? I was there! I don’t know. And that’s the truth. I don’t know. When I looked up, Jesse was standing in the middle of the cars, he looked like I felt, you know, and Rhodes was running around the car with a gun in his hand, ordering Jesse to put me in the backseat. Now, some people would say that’s not a fact. But I’m saying, that’s a fact. That’s what happened. So they might not accept my facts, so what’s a fact? It’s not a case of red or green or light or dark. It’s a question of things that happened that—I don’t know.”

  The thing is, when Sunny was interviewed by the police that morning, right after the Cadillac crashed into the gravel truck and everything came to a halt, she never mentioned Walter having a gun in his hand. As far as I can tell from the case documents, anyway. That’s a fact, if now we’re talking about facts.

  But it’s not the fact I’m interested in right now. What I want to know now from Sunny is about another piece of physical evidence, one of the most important pieces of physical evidence in the entire tragedy: that piece of metal I saw in Room 407. The bullet hole in the windshield post of Black’s police cruiser.

  The police put a rod in that bullet hole and drew a straight line to the backseat of the Camaro, where Sunny—by her own account—had been sitting. Voilà, the prosecutors said. But the defense lawyers disputed that, saying there was no way to tell how the cars had been parked, since after the murders they’d stolen the cruiser and driven it away. In terms of exact angles, it was a good argument. But the one thing that remained unchallenged—and unchallengeable—is the basic trajectory. Back toward front, low to high. Four decades haven’t eroded that piece of evidence at all. It’s metal. It’s unmistakable. I saw it myself.

  “But here’s the, here’s the— Okay,” I say. “At your trial, Jesse testified that he saw Rhodes shoot from a position at the front of the car. Right?”

  “Right,” Sunny agrees.

  “So what I don’t understand is how, if he’s at the front of the car, how do you get that bullet through the windshield post?”

  Sunny knows exactly what I’m talking about. Bullets don’t reverse themselves in midair. She leans forward.

  “Rhodes moved. He moved.”

  “But that’s not what Jesse testified to. Jesse testified that Rhodes shot from this position from the front of the car. So that’s under oath at trial, right? So I figure that he’s telling what he saw.”

  “But I told them, I did see him move.”

  Saw him when? Sunny’s whole story is based on her claim that she didn’t see anything after the gunfire started. I must look skeptical, because Sunny adds, “I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so I can’t swear to anything.”

  And anyway, that bullet hole in the cruiser? “It couldn’t have possibly come from me. You couldn’t anyway. You could not, in the back of a two-door car, be able to do anything effective. Even if you had a gun or whatever.”

  “But Jesse was standing between the cars,” I say. “A
nd so it could have come from him. And Jesse testified that it came from Rhodes. So that’s what I’m trying to figure out. That is actually the question I am trying to answer.”

  “Like, which one?” Sunny says.

  “Right. Exactly,” I say.

  “I mean, in that case it could have been both. They could have worked together. They could have,” she says. “Right?”

  I pause for a moment, steadying myself.

  So it is possible that Jesse Tafero was guilty.

  According to Sunny Jacobs, no less.

  * * *

  •

  You know everything and you don’t know anything, and you have to decide when to flip the switch. I decide that the time has come to flip the switch. To test her with a few facts from the case file and pay attention to what she says. I’m listening for honesty. For evasion. For truth versus lies.

  My first question: the missing bullet casings. Six gunshots killed Trooper Black and Constable Irwin, but crime scene investigators only found the casings for three bullets. “That is one of the mysteries to me. I just don’t understand it,” I tell Sunny. Walter has said Jesse picked up the casings from the ground outside the Camaro where Black and Irwin lay dying, and police later found fourteen casings in little Eric’s pockets, but I don’t mention that. I want to hear what Sunny volunteers.

  “Were the guns automatics?” Pringle wants to know.

  “Yeah, they weren’t six-shooters,” Sunny says.

  “An automatic. So there would be casings,” Pringle says knowledgeably.

  “Right, and there weren’t any,” I say.

  “That’s strange. There were no casings?” Pringle says.

  “See, that’s the point, though,” Sunny says. “I don’t think it’s going to be possible to really ascertain what happened.”

  My next question: the truck driver eyewitnesses, who swore they saw Rhodes standing with his hands in the air when the gunshots went off. What about them?

  “It was very, very foggy,” Sunny says. “From the distance those trucks were from the cars, under those weather conditions, they couldn’t have seen.”

  “And if they had seen, they couldn’t have identified the person,” Pringle offers.

  “They wouldn’t have known which man it was,” Sunny says. “They’re both tall, slim, dark-haired men. So that—”

  “He could have seen Jesse standing there,” Pringle says.

  “And you know eyewitness testimony is not reliable,” Sunny says.

  Well, why was Jesse arrested with the murder weapon?

  “He explained that himself,” Sunny says. “He said that when he got in the car, Rhodes handed him the gun and picked up the new gun that had been placed in the police car, that had been taken away from his feet.”

  “Did you see that happen?” I ask.

  “I was in the back,” Sunny says.

  “So then, no?”

  “At this point in time, to be honest, it would be hard to say if I really saw or if I just remember it from being said.”

  That is such a sudden burst of apparent honesty that I feel grateful.

  “Thank you for that,” I tell her.

  “Yes, and that’s why I say again I don’t think you’re going to be able to achieve either of those goals. Either the yes or the no,” Sunny says.

  “I’m emotionally prepared for that. I am.” I have no idea what I’ll feel, actually.

  “So then what happens?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So then that’s the answer,” Sunny says. “That to me is the whole point of this exercise. The system was misused and as a result countless people were victimized. And someone may have been put to death who was innocent, or at least was entitled to a new trial. And that is a fact, he was entitled to a new trial. That is a fact. So on what we can say are facts, that’s the only conclusion we can come to, and that’s actually helped me enormously.”

  “What has?”

  “That the only real fact”—she leans hard on the word—“is that the system was abused.”

  She continues, bitterly. “Guilty people get help when they get out. Innocent people get nothing, and then they’re supposed to start their life again. And there’s always going to be people who think, Oh yeah, a technicality and Maybe they just had a good lawyer. There’s always going to be that and there’s always the stigma….It’s horrible. There’s no help, there’s no apology, there’s no big thing in the papers saying ‘We made a mistake, this woman was absolutely innocent, we apologize to her, we want her community to know that she was an innocent woman wronged by the system.’ That doesn’t happen. It’s horrible, and it just goes on and on and on.”

  She pauses.

  “Even you did it, you know?” Sunny Jacobs tells me. “And that’s, like, horrible. Horrible. That someone would doubt what we went through? Jesus Christ.”

  * * *

  •

  It’s past ten o’clock now and the light is fading. We are finally taking our leave.

  “Before you go, I want to tell you something,” Pringle says.

  He motions to me to come closer to him.

  “This is something I learned about myself in prison,” he says. “I learned that I cannot stop breathing voluntarily. You know, I could kill myself, but I can’t physically stop breathing except for a few minutes. I have to breathe. I can’t intellectually stop breathing. So what is the meaning of breath? Where is my breath coming from?”

  He inhales and exhales. Inhales. Exhales.

  “My breath is my spirit,” he says. “Your breath is your spirit.”

  “I’ve been afraid of my breath.” I don’t intend to say this.

  “Of course you have,” Peter Pringle tells me.

  19

  If Anybody Moves, They’re Dead

  We drive down through the green fields. Our hotel in County Clare is an old manor house, and if I stand on the front lawn and look hard enough I can make out the blue wink of Galway Bay, where we just were, off in the distance.

  Upstairs, Peter unpacks and then goes to get a drink in the bar while I run a bath. It is afternoon and the spring light is clear and cool, like water. This bathroom is white marble, with celadon walls above the stone wainscoting and a tall old window looking out over the garden. I sit on the edge of the tub in my hotel bathrobe for a long while, watching steam curl in white wisps against the porcelain and the stone. When the tub is full, I pour in a cup of bath salts and the water turns—I can’t, in the moment, quite decide. It is either the color of wine and roses, or of blood.

  If I close my eyes now, I can see it, all of it, start to finish. The van, the white gate, the way I held on to her hands that first morning as I wept, Pringle’s hard blue stare, the near-dogfight in the kitchen, her grim, flat blankness when we came back from the coast. The words, too, jostle and echo. But it all feels at such a distance. I feel lighter than I ever remember, expansive, as if I’ve swallowed clouds. It’s not until I’ve slipped underneath the pale red water that I realize what it is that I’ve lost, in meeting her. In talking with her. The anvil of anger—and guilt and fear—that I’ve carried for so many years: it’s gone.

  Which means the ghost must be too.

  * * *

  •

  In the morning, I begin writing a letter. The words surprise me:

  Dear Sunny, I just want to thank you so much for talking with me. I really feel that meeting you and talking with you has opened up my heart and started me on the road away from anger and sorrow toward peace and gratitude. Thank you. I’ll be honest, I think you know more than you are going to tell me, but that’s okay with me. I can handle it now.

  Downstairs, a peat fire glows in a stone fireplace, and antique puzzles in ruby velvet boxes stand stacked on polished walnut tables. After I draft out my letter, I sit for a lo
ng time looking out onto the front gardens and the emerald lawn.

  What does it matter? she’d asked me, over and over. What does it matter to you if Jesse was innocent or not? Now I find myself asking the same question, marveling at it, like a new taste on the tongue. What does it matter? The place within me where the anger lived feels like a suddenly empty room. I feel like I could open every door in my soul and find nothing but gorgeous parlors with parquet floors and high ceilings, gilded light falling across the walls. For years and years, before I met Peter, I dreamed almost every night of walking through the same imaginary city, across broad staircases that led out to the sea. In those dreams, whenever I was inside, the apartments were in disarray, with sheets thrown over the furniture, trash scattered on the floors. Now those rooms have been cleared out. I had no idea how much worry and fear I had crammed away and carried with me over the years, but now that it’s gone, it feels amazing.

  I try another draft.

  Dear Sunny, I think the trauma has been very complex, and I guess I was caught in it, and now I can see that you were as well. I don’t know where this journey will take me, but talking with you has brought me such peace.

  My phone is on the table in front of me, and I reach over and pick it up. What if I just called her? To say hello? To chat, see how she’s doing, what she’s thinking about, what she thought of me.

  Can I really just let it go? I don’t believe this is me writing this, but yes, I think I can. That is amazing to me. Can I let it go without finding out what actually happened? Yes. That’s an extraordinary place to have found myself at. A crossroads, and a path forward. Something I’d never dared see.

  Maybe it is as Sunny said yesterday, at her kitchen table. Maybe everything does depend on how you look at it. I’ve always firmly believed in an objective reality, but maybe my insistence on that has stood in the way of my coming to terms with what I witnessed. Maybe that is what I need to resolve.