* * *
•
In Carl Lord’s Space Coast living room this winter, he and I examined the polygraph charts together. The machine had printed out Walter’s physical reactions to the questions onto a sheet of graph paper, and that paper—I found a copy in the State Attorney’s Office’s files—when laid out on Lord’s black granite bar countertop, looked like the readout from a hospital heart monitor, peaks and valleys across the page.
“This guy answered the questions truthfully,” Lord said, at first.
But then he stopped, looked at an answer, looked back at the question, looked at the answer again.
“There was something he told Captain Valjean that wasn’t truthful,” Lord said.
On the morning after the murders, Walter gave a statement to Captain Valjean Haley of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. That statement was the basis for polygraph test question number four: Did you tell the truth on the statement that you gave to Captain Valjean, to the best of your knowledge and memory? Walter talked to Haley from his hospital bed, coming off a night of morphine and intense pain.
Haley: Let me interrupt at this time. When the shot went off, did you actually witness the shots?
Rhodes: I actually witnessed the shots.
Haley: Who had the gun in their hands or whose hands was the gun in when the first shot was fired?
Rhodes: When the gun first went off, Sonia was the one holding the gun….I am not clear, it was after she shot him, I think this is to the best of my knowledge, I am not a hundred percent sure. To the best of my knowledge, she fired two shots, there was three shots fired off at the officer, I know, I believe then Jesse pulled the gun from her and shot him one more time and then he shot the other cop twice.
To the best of my knowledge, she fired two shots— Since Walter told his attorney under the protection of privilege that he did not think Sunny fired any shots at all, yes, it certainly seems that Walter may have lied to Captain Haley from that hospital bed.
But Walter also told Haley that “I didn’t kill them, I didn’t pull the trigger and I am innocent of that charge.” So that could be the lie that Lord detected, too.
* * *
•
Sitting here now in my basement in Michigan, with Walter’s voice coming out of the tape player beside me—And then when she fired, it dawned on her at that second the seriousness of what’s happened, and she froze—I tally it up. Walter told his attorney one thing, testified twice to another, recanted that testimony on numerous occasions, recanted the recantations, and may have lied during a lie detector test. This is the State of Florida’s star witness, in trials that sent two people to death row. And I still need to go talk to him. Again.
As I’m leafing through the files from Walter’s attorney, getting ready to put them away, a sentence fragment catches my eye. It looks like Ray’s handwriting, just two lines at the bottom of one page, in the same folder as a long list of notes about photographs police took at the rest area crime scene.
“Holy shit,” I say out loud.
I saw crime scene photos this past winter at the State Attorney’s Office. But only the ones I was allowed to see—due to privacy laws, I was not allowed to see any that showed the deceased officers, lawyers at the office told me. At the time, I had not thought that restriction was a big deal. Now I do.
I rip through all of Walter’s boxes. Yes, there are crime scene photos, a more complete collection than I was allowed access to in Fort Lauderdale. I find the photographs Ray’s sentence fragment seems to have been referencing. I stare. I bolt upstairs to find Peter.
“You have to look at these.” I hand him a stack of close-ups of the Camaro at the rest area, taken right after the murders. Constable Irwin, covered in a bright yellow tarp. He’s in a pool of blood, with his feet at the rear wheel of the Camaro. There’s a pair of handcuffs on the ground near him, and some stray bullets. And all around him is shattered glass.
“See?” I say to Peter. I’m pointing to the glass. “That’s glass from the driver’s-side door on the Camaro.”
“Okay,” Peter says.
“The glass is to the rear of the door. At the back of the car. All of it.”
We examine the photo more closely.
“None of the glass is in front of the open door. None. Glass breaks in the direction it was hit. And look.”
I hand Peter the piece of paper from Ralph Ray’s files.
Window to Camero [sic] drivers’ side was smashed (someone firing from front of the car)? the note says.
“From the front of the car,” I say.
Peter nods. He squints at the Camaro’s front tire. “What about that, right there?”
He’s pointing to the photograph. I have to lean in even closer to get a good look. But once I do, there’s no mistaking it. That, right there, next to the front tire of the Camaro, just over from where Walter Rhodes was standing, on the ground next to Phil Black’s cream Stetson hat, is a little pistol. It’s not either of the 9mm semiautomatics taken from Walter and Jesse at the roadblock, or the .38 Special from Sunny’s purse. It’s another gun, one virtually unremarked on in the voluminous records of the case: a .22 mini-revolver.
A tiny, shiny gun.
25
What Kind of Strange Fate
“What if I have been just centrally wrong about this whole thing?” I ask Peter.
It’s evening on our screened porch. In the woods around us, a soft chorus lit by fireflies. I’ve gotten word that I’ve been cleared for a prison visit at Jackson Correctional Institution. The day after tomorrow, I will be leaving for Florida to go talk to Walter Rhodes.
I’ve spent the last week in the basement, trying to figure out about the shattered glass, that little gun, and Walter Rhodes. Someone firing from front of the car? That is exactly what Jesse Tafero testified.
Ballistics: A North American Arms .22 short is the world’s smallest and lightest five-shot mini-revolver, according to the manufacturer’s website. Not much bigger than a credit card, barrel included. At the rest area, that tiny gun was found fully loaded there on the ground. So maybe Walter fired it and reloaded it and then cast it aside. Can a bullet fired from a .22 short shatter a car window? It’s a gun with a small, light short-range bullet, good for putting tiny holes in empty Coke cans—but lethal too, according to the Internet. Maybe the bullet hit the car window at exactly the right angle to explode it. The fact is, I do not know if I’ve stumbled onto a red-hot clue or a red herring. But I do know that I cannot give Walter Rhodes the benefit of the doubt. Not again.
After Walter was paroled in 1994, he got his hands on a twelve-gauge shotgun, a knife, ammunition, handcuffs, Mace, and two swords. He cleaned out his bank account, rented a car, and took off to hunt two people: the doctor who amputated his leg and Michael Satz, the prosecutor. That’s what Walter wrote in his memoir. “I’m now a wanted fugitive—a convicted double cop killer who has absconded from parole with a car full of various weapons, with the intention of shooting someone.” Walter’s wife called the parole board to warn them. An old memorandum from the Florida Parole Commission in the boxes Walter sent me has that down in black and white: “Mrs. Rhodes is concerned subject may attempt to pursue these people in Florida.”
And in 2003, when police in Washington State arrested Walter, they searched his trailer—the one I spent the night in—and found a .22 caliber rifle sawed off into an illegal handgun, live ammunition, a pair of handcuffs, and a Florida Highway Patrol badge. Walter Rhodes bought the badge from a flea market as a memento, according to the arrest report. “He only had short contact with the Trooper but there was a connection, there was something in the Trooper’s eyes he connected with,” the report said. A keepsake, I thought. It’s what the commander of the police roadblock told me, when I interviewed him this winter: “All police shootings, they always take something,” Corporal Jack Har
den said. Up there in the Washington woods, Walter had the .22 and the FHP badge hidden in a black bag in his bedroom. In his bed.
I have not been wrong about my fear. I see that now.
* * *
•
That night, Peter and I get into a terrible argument. I don’t want him to come to Florida, and I am wasting no time telling him so, even though I don’t understand why.
“There’s not going to be anything for you to do,” I say.
“I don’t need anything to do. I’ll wait.”
“But I don’t know how long it’s going to take at the prison. You’re going to be stuck in a crappy hotel.”
“I’ll come with you and wait in the parking lot.”
I explode. “Have you even been to a fucking prison?”
I cannot deal. I do not want to go. This trip is doom incarnate and it’s a stupid fucking mess and I never want to fucking think about any of this ever again. It has wrecked my life. And even so, I can’t stop. I have come much too far to stop now. I need to see this through.
“It’s not a fucking vacation,” I tell him.
A long silence follows.
“Wow, that hurts,” Peter says eventually. “You know, Ellen, I’m not some random guy with one dream and one dream only, which is to go to Florida in the last week of July and now by God I have my chance. I want to go because I care about you. About you.”
And? That’s what I want to say. Well, you can take that caring feeling and—
The day in 1990 when I went for the first time to talk with Walter Rhodes, the route I took from the highway to the prison was a two-lane blacktop that ran for miles through a grove of orange trees. In my rearview mirror, I could see the white stripes on the pavement behind me vanishing as I went around each bend. I was twenty-six, confident, ambitious. Naïve. I did not know it, but that was the last day of the life I would have had. An abyss was about to open up in front of me, and not only would I have no way to get across it, I had no way back. I would be stranded, uncertain, and totally alone. I feel it all again, right now.
“I love you,” Peter says. “Let me help.”
* * *
•
We exit the terminal into the rental car lot and stand for a moment in the bright light and the heat. Alabama in the last days of July. Walter is in prison over the Florida state line, serving out the remainder of the three life sentences he was given in 1976 for his role in the murders of Black and Irwin. He has been back in prison since he was arrested as a fugitive in 2003. Walter has said this reincarceration is my fault.
On the way into town from the airport, Peter and I pass faded brick buildings with boarded-up windows, railroad tracks, a shotgun shack sliding off its foundation deep underneath a stand of shade trees, a yellow velvet couch on its front porch. The rains come all of a sudden, big heavy drops falling hard.
That night, I reread all of Walter’s statements. Accusations, confessions, recantations. I actually witnessed the shots. When the gun first went off Sonia was the one holding the gun. I cannot be sure that Sonia fired a pistol first—she was definitely the first to shoot but it may have been the Taser she fired. She may have had the Taser in one hand—pistol in the other. “He doesn’t think Sonia shot—thinks maybe Jesse fired all the shots.” I heard two, for sure two shots….She had the gun in her hand, like this. She had both hands on it.
Now a thought hits me with the smack of a baseball going over the far fence.
Walter Rhodes is either lying about all of this to cover up his own role in the murders—or he doesn’t know. This star eyewitness may have sworn to something he did not actually see.
But would he admit that to me?
As I’m reading through the documents from Walter’s boxes, I open a file that I haven’t opened before and— Oh God. It is a photograph of Jesse Tafero after his execution. Naked on the autopsy table. Dead. I sit frozen in front of my computer screen, staring. How could Walter possibly have this? I’ve seen this photo before, but not for twenty-five years. It was part of a report that the State of Florida did in 1990, after Jesse’s execution. The photograph shows Jesse’s dead body from the viewpoint of the top of his head: his scorched scalp, the bridge of his nose, his bare shoulders, bare chest, bare feet. The burn mark on his scalp from the flames covers most of the top and left side of his head. The burn is charcoal black around the edges and raw red in the middle. The burn, plus his nakedness, the naked body on the slab, the charred corpse: for me, here right now, in this hotel room, in the dark, waiting until it gets light enough to drive to a prison and talk to the man who put Jesse Tafero in the electric chair—I don’t know. All of this has been a lot, but this—this—is too much.
After that, I don’t sleep much. In the morning, I’m ready early. Peter, sleepy in striped pajamas, gives me a hug as I head out the door.
* * *
•
Once I cross the Florida state line, the prison appears suddenly on the right: guard towers behind barbed-wire fences, coils shining in the sun.
In the lot, I park next to a battered white van. The driver turns to look at me and smiles, prison visitor to prison visitor. Blue tattoos cover the white skin of her face. I smile back. I walk across the lot to the administration building. A guard appears out of a door marked artillery and points me down the hallway to the warden’s office. She greets me from behind her desk, which overlooks the prison gates.
“Is it okay with you if we lock you in the room alone with the inmate?” she asks.
Her question sets off a mini-movie in my head: the visiting room with Walter in April 1990, right before Jesse’s execution. Walter sitting at the table in his blue uniform as I smoked my cigarettes and tapped my ashes on the floor. Walter telling me, that day: I guarantee you, there’s some people that can lie so good that you could not bust them.
I tell the warden it won’t be a problem.
I go through a metal detector, and a prison guard hands me an alarm to press if I need immediate help. I follow her outside to a pathway between a row of barracks. Up ahead of us, the main building of the prison looms. There are inmates everywhere, in blue jumpsuits. Working, not talking. The guard hands me off to a prison officer in a pink polo shirt. We walk a few steps toward the main building, and the officer says, “There he is.”
He is almost sixty-five now. He’s pale, with white hair, stooped in his prison uniform, wearing a thermal undershirt despite the heat and leaning heavily on a cane. Frail, thin. He sees me and smiles quickly and then turns his head away.
“They only told me five minutes ago it was you,” Walter Rhodes says.
* * *
•
In silence, Walter and I walk behind the prison officer over to one of the barracks buildings, into an entry hall packed with men—crammed together, sweating—then quickly down a corridor to a small windowless room. Inside the room are four long tables and a lot of chairs.
“You have one hour,” the officer says. I hear his footsteps receding down the hallway. I am alone in a prison visiting room with Walter Rhodes. Again.
“Long time no see,” Walter Rhodes says, in his raspy voice. He draws it out, each word an island. An accusation, perhaps. Long. Time. No. See.
“Yeah, I know,” I say. Even to me, my voice sounds cold.
I take a seat, setting out my pen and paper and documents, trying to gather my thoughts. In this moment, I have known Walter Rhodes longer than I’ve known a lot of the people in my day-to-day life, and I’ve carried his story—the part of the story that we share—with me all these years. For such a long time, I was convinced that he’d been sentenced too harshly for the crime of standing with his hands in the air while two police officers were gunned down. But then Walter falsely accused me, and to me he became a liar, pure and simple. And with that, at the moment in 2003 when I turned my back on this case, I shut a door against him and a
gainst all of it, the world and its abundant sorrows.
When I first came to Fort Lauderdale this past winter, it was the most extraordinary sensation. It was the relief of finally admitting that I needed to know, after half a lifetime of pretending this mystery did not matter much to me. It was the genuine liberation of deciding to care. It’s late July now; I’ve been on the road talking to people since January. That’s seven months—it’s a long time, too long—plus the previous twenty-five years as well, all of it an entanglement that I did not anticipate and certainly have not dealt with well. Now I’m back where it all started: in a Florida prison, facing the witness who testified against Jesse Tafero, trying to figure out the truth.
This time, though, I’m not a young reporter whose knowledge of the case has come from old newspaper clips. And I’m not a newly minted private detective with the script of a hit play ringing in my ears. Today I am not at the mercy of my impressions. Dousing, divining. I have read the entire case file. I know it cold. I have something much better to work with: evidence.
Walter’s white hair is shorn to a shadow on his scalp, and his eyes are coal black, so dark I can’t tell iris from pupil. Sitting across the table from me, he has his arms crossed over his chest and he’s squinting, like he’s trying to figure me out too. For an instant, I’m back at the rowboat again, on the shore of that mountain lake, in the far northern wilderness, with the wind in the trees behind me and the night coming on. I pause for a moment to run a quick internal check. No. I am not afraid. Not here. Not now. I decide to skip the pleasantries.
Two Truths and a Lie Page 27
