Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  “So we only have an hour and I want to get to the facts,” I say.

  Just like that, we are back at the rest area. It is almost seven-thirty on the morning of February 20, 1976. Walter is standing up at the front fender of the FHP cruiser. Constable Irwin has Jesse up against the cruiser, trying to get handcuffs on him. Trooper Black is stepping back and drawing his gun. Walter looks at Black, looks at the drawn gun, puts his hands up and turns around. Facing away. Sunny is sitting in the backseat of the Camaro, with her nine-year-old son and the baby.

  What happens next?

  Over these last months, the more I’ve thought about it, the more it’s started to seem to me that it was Jesse Tafero who fired the shots that murdered Black and Irwin.

  I’m at least eighty percent sure of this right now. Both Sunny and Eric told me that when they looked up after the gunfire stopped, Jesse was standing at the open door of the Camaro. In that position, Jesse would have had one dying police officer on each side of him, based on the bloodstains on the pavement and the narratives in the police reports. So if it was not Jesse who fired those shots, it was someone with extraordinary marksmanship, shooting Trooper Black and Constable Irwin with pinpoint accuracy while leaving Jesse Tafero, standing directly between them, completely untouched. Like an action-movie superhero, immune to bullets. It’s possible, I guess. In a million-to-one world.

  But even though I’m feeling increasingly certain about Jesse’s role in the murders, I still do not know how the shooting began. Jesse didn’t start it. He couldn’t have—he was up against the police cruiser, restrained by the doomed Donald Irwin. So was it Sunny, in the backseat of the Camaro? Her frightened little son? Walter, from the front, with the tiny, shiny gun?

  “I think there’s still a question of how it got started,” I tell Walter now.

  In 1976, Walter Rhodes told two juries that as he was standing with his hands in the air facing away from the Camaro, he heard gunshots, turned around, and saw Sunny in the backseat of the Camaro with a gun in her hands.

  “She looked scared. She had the gun in her hand, like this,” he told the jury at Jesse’s trial. Then Jesse ran over, grabbed the gun out of Sunny’s hands, and continued firing, “boom, boom, boom, at both officers,” Walter testified.

  At Jesse’s trial, prosecutor Michael Satz used his opening statement to tell the jury the same thing: “Trooper Black drew his gun. There was more scuffling, and what happened was that there were some shots from inside the car. Rhodes turns around. He sees the gun in Sonia Linder’s hand. He sees Tafero scuffling, and getting away, and running over and firing the rest of the shots.”

  The gun in Sunny’s hand is a crucial piece of Walter’s testimony. Without it, the testimony of the truck drivers—that the shots came from the backseat of the car—conflicts with Walter’s testimony that Jesse shot the officers from outside the car, and the state’s case falls apart. “That’s what really got the conviction, was Rhodes,” the officer who commanded the roadblock that morning told me. He’s the one who shot Rhodes in the knee. “If I’d have killed him, maybe they would have walked.” But after studying the case file and finding the notes that Walter’s lawyer took, I think there might be a problem. I think Walter Rhodes did not see what he testified to at all.

  “Because when you really look at it,” I tell Walter now, “if you think about the time between when Trooper Black pulled his gun and said, ‘If anybody moves, they’re dead’ and the time the first shot came out, you had your back turned and your arms in the air.”

  “Well, when he pointed the gun at me, I put my hands up—I’m facing him. Then I turned my back,” Walter corrects me.

  “Then you turned, okay,” I say. “My question is, I want to know exactly how it got started. And I’ve read a lot of what you’ve said about it. You’ve said a lot of different things over the years. So I don’t know if you actually saw what happened at the very beginning of it.”

  “Now, here’s the thing. The trooper is between me and her,” Walter says.

  At the rest area, the white mist is starting to break as the sun rises higher over the horizon. Walter is standing at the front of the two cars. Jesse, in his tan jacket, is being held at the police cruiser by Constable Irwin. Sunny is in the backseat of the Camaro with little Eric and the baby. The driver’s-side door of the Camaro is wide open, and Trooper Black is standing between the Camaro and the cruiser, inside that open door. From where Walter is standing at the front of the cars, Walter cannot see Sunny in the backseat, because Black is directly in Walter’s line of sight. Black draws his weapon, and Walter turns around and faces away.

  “So when the trooper turned and went like that”—Walter mimes holding a gun out in front of him—“apparently she must have had a gun or something, because the gun fired.”

  “See, this is the thing, though—”

  “Her gun fired.”

  “It’s the apparently part,” I tell him.

  “I didn’t see that, though, because of him.”

  “Exactly,” I say.

  A pause.

  Walter is watching me.

  “So here is my question,” I say. “You can’t see her—”

  “I can’t see through him—to what she got in her hand, or anything,” Walter agrees.

  “Right. So can you say that you know what happened?”

  “I can’t say—except for one thing I can say. Somebody fired a shot.”

  Somebody.

  * * *

  •

  On the table next to me, I’ve got a manila folder with the notes from attorney Ralph Ray. I’ve brought the notes for this moment.

  “So you at some point, you initially”—I’m stumbling a bit here because I don’t want to mess this question up—“you told Ralph Ray that you didn’t think Sonia fired any shots.”

  “No, I did not tell him that.” Instantly. Vehemently. “I damn sure didn’t tell him that.”

  I take the copy from Ray’s file and push it across the table to him. He leans close, reading it. Conf w/Rhodes—he doesn’t think Sonia shot—thinks maybe Jesse fired all shots.

  “I would never have made this statement,” Walter says, pushing the paper back toward me.

  “You did at some point, and I’m just curious.”

  “If I did, it was because I was probably delirious on morphine and I wasn’t in my right mind.”

  “So this is not something you currently agree with.”

  “No,” Walter says. “I definitely don’t agree with—it’s possible I said that, but I don’t believe I would have said that, because of the fact that I know that somebody fired something from that backseat.”

  “So you don’t think it’s that they tried to corral you,” I say.

  “No. They never tried to manipulate me into—”

  “Into saying that Sunny was involved?”

  “No. No, they didn’t do that. No. I think they were sincerely trying to find out what the answers were.”

  But Walter’s statements significantly changed over time in ways that matched the developing physical and eyewitness evidence. In the statement he gave to Captain Valjean Haley on tape and under oath the day after the murders, Walter said he “actually witnessed the shots” and that Sunny “may have fired” all the shots that killed Black from the backseat, a statement that closely matched truck driver Pierce Hyman’s statement that the shots came out of the Camaro. Three days later, Haley visited Walter again in the hospital, told him the results of the gunshot residue tests, and took another statement. This time, Walter said: “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.” This was a better match for the test results, which did not show that Sunny had definitely fired a gun, but it directly contradicted what Walter had told Haley under oath and on tape just days earlier, when W
alter said that to his knowledge, he had not seen a Taser used. Then, on the witness stand at Sunny’s trial, Walter told the jury that he was turned with his back to the Camaro, heard two or three gunshots, “jumped and immediately looked” toward the Camaro, saw Sunny holding a gun “in two hands,” and saw Jesse snatch it out of her hands, lean against the driver’s seat, and fire four or five shots at Black and two at Irwin. This version was an exact match for the state’s theory of the crime.

  Walter liked and trusted Captain Haley, he is telling me now. “I always had a good impression of him. I think he was a straightforward man. I really believe he was an honest man. He was almost like a father-type figure, or maybe that was the role he was playing to get me to talk.” Haley visited Walter in the hospital, he brought Walter cigarettes, he gave Walter paper to write and rewrite his statements. At the hospital, Haley informed Walter that a Taser dart had been found on Trooper Black, Walter says. Actually the dart was found on the trooper’s patrol car, but this news from Haley was what gave Walter the idea that a Taser had been involved in the murders, Walter is saying. Before Haley mentioned the Taser, Walter thought the only weapons used were guns. And Haley told Walter that Sunny and Jesse were blaming him for the murders, according to Walter’s memoir and Ray’s notes. That was a lie. Jesse was stonewalling the cops, and when Haley himself had interrogated Sunny, she claimed not only that she did not know what had happened at the rest area, but that she had no idea who Jesse or Walter were.

  I reach over now and show Walter another note from Ray’s files. Someone in Ray’s office—likely Ray himself, based on the handwriting—jotted down notes from a conversation with Walter, probably on the day Ray was appointed to the case. The note says that Walter thinks his first handwritten statement “is the more correct version.”

  The case file has two handwritten statements from Walter Rhodes. One of the statements is dated February 24, with Captain Haley’s name written in at the top. This statement is the one that mentions the Taser, contradicting what Walter had told Haley just three days earlier. It also states that one of the officers was Canadian—something Walter surely learned from the police after the murders. And it states that Walter “heard shots” and then saw “Jesse struggling to get the gun from Sonia or from between the seats.” The other handwritten statement is undated and it does not mention a Taser or that one of the officers was Canadian, which makes me think that this statement is an earlier, more spontaneous, less carefully crafted one. And, importantly, this statement has the gunshots starting after Jesse got the gun, not before:

  Then Jesse started to scuffle again and he just pulled away from the officer and that’s when the shots started—Jesse reached in and got a gun either from Sonia or near her and turned around and fired at both officers.

  “Yeah, there was a little confusion in my mind at first,” Walter says, looking over the documents. “But I believe I saw her with her hands on the gun like she was trying to hand it to him.”

  But you also told Captain Haley that you didn’t see Jesse get the gun from Sunny, I say. “You said, ‘I couldn’t see, his back was to me.’ ” I read that statement to Walter. “You even told Haley that Jesse might have gotten a gun from just ‘the area where Sonia was at.’ ” Not from out of her hands.

  “Looking at this objectively, maybe that is what I saw,” Walter admits. “I didn’t see, and then the rest of my mind put the rest of this together afterwards. It’s not impossible.” Now he’s thinking over his statements in which he said he saw Sunny holding the gun. Those, “my mind may have created after several days of rehashing this and getting feedback from Haley. You actually—you can actually—start believing things that you really didn’t see.”

  Exactly, I think. Rehashing. Without a lawyer, in a hospital bed where your leg has just been cut off, and with the help of hints, lies, and other feedback from a friendly police captain. You can actually start believing things you really didn’t see. And then maybe you swear to those things under oath in open court at trial and send two people to death row.

  * * *

  •

  On March 1, 1976, ten days after the murders, Walter’s attorney Ralph Ray had a telephone call with Haley, discussing the case. Ray’s notes of the conversation were in the boxes that Walter sent me, and I have them with me now. Haley has passed away, so I can’t ask him about it, and in any case he quit the sheriff’s office just a year after the murders, amid an investigation into his alleged misconduct off-duty at a hard-drinking Delray Beach bar. And Ralph Ray refused to talk to me, so I can’t ask him either. It’s up to what Walter remembers.

  The note says:

  Dr. Gold—WPBeach = hypnotist Valjean has used.

  - Defendant wanted to prove to Vjean that he’d been telling the truth to him.

  I slide the note across the table to Walter, and watch him read it.

  “Were you hypnotized?”

  “I wanted them to use the truth serum or hypnotize me or do something. They said they couldn’t do it.”

  “So you never saw a guy named Dr. Gold.”

  “No, I never saw a doctor at all, except for medical,” Walter says.

  I make a note. Not hypnotized.

  But later Walter will write me to ask, “Was I hypnotized by this Dr. Gold? I really want to know.”

  I will make another note. He does not know.

  In 1985, the use of hypnotism was banned by the Florida Supreme Court in a lawsuit brought by Ted Bundy, who alleged that testimony given at his trial by witnesses whose memories had been “hypnotically refreshed” was per se tainted and unreliable. The Florida Supreme Court agreed. The court ruled that hypnotized witnesses would not be permitted to give testimony in criminal cases going forward in Florida, and ruled that all cases currently on appeal in which witnesses had been hypnotized were subject to mandatory review.

  Why ban hypnotism from the courtroom? In its ruling, the Florida Supreme Court cited California, which had spelled its concerns out clearly: A hypnotized witness “will lose his critical judgment and begin to credit ‘memories’ that were formerly viewed as unreliable, will confuse actual recall with confabulation and will be unable to distinguish between the two, and will exhibit an unwarranted confidence in the validity of his ensuing recollection.”

  * * *

  •

  Here in the prison visiting room, Walter Rhodes is still on the subject of Sunny and the gun and Jesse and the Camaro. “But the thing I do know and what we all know is that Tafero did get that gun and he did shoot it, and so therefore he had to get that gun from somewhere—and it wasn’t in a vacuum, it didn’t come from another dimension, you see. Maybe I made the leap in my mind, but I know this: He got that gun from the direction of where she was. And the crux of the matter is that she cannot be innocent. She fired first.”

  I pause for a moment, thinking.

  I can’t say—except for one thing I can say. Somebody fired a shot.

  “What about Eric?” I ask Walter now.

  Eric was in the backseat too, and some of the police officers who investigated the murders thought maybe Eric was involved, I say. So maybe it was a child with a Taser who sparked the tragedy. Not Bonnie. Not Clyde.

  “Well, it just doesn’t make sense to me that Eric would take the initiative. I can’t possibly even fathom he did it. It never entered my mind once.”

  “But what about ‘My mother made me do it’?” I ask Walter. I show him the statement from the social worker.

  “I don’t think Sonia told him, ‘Look, when this guy turns around with this weapon in his hand, I want you to fire the Taser at him.’ She didn’t know what was going to happen. She couldn’t have known what was going to happen. The only thing she knew was going to happen was we were probably going to be arrested.”

  A flash. I’m in Adelaide, sitting with Eric on the fence. Eric has just been telling me ab
out watching the officers and Jesse from the backseat of the Camaro.

  “My mum was holding Tina and she grabbed me and pulled me down like this and laid over both of us,” Eric is saying. “Apparently she saw something I didn’t.”

  “Oh, so she pulled you down before it started?”

  “Before the shooting actually started.”

  So now I’m wondering. Was it the Taser Sunny saw? Jesse, lunging toward her to grab a 9mm semiautomatic? Or was it Walter, standing at the front of the car with that tiny, shiny gun?

  * * *

  •

  I take the crime scene photos out now and slide them across the table to Walter. Pictures of the Camaro at the rest area. The blood, Constable Irwin, the shattered glass at the rear of the car, the shiny gun at the front.

  “Do you know how the window got blown out?” I ask Walter now, pointing.

  Walter seems taken aback. He hasn’t seen a photograph of the Camaro in—forever. He had these files when he was on the outside, but he never looked at them, he says. He cannot believe the condition of the car. That it is such a shit heap.

  It was from the trooper’s gun, Walter says, taking a photo and looking at it up close. But he always thought it was the windshield that got hit, he tells me.

  I make a note. Black’s .357 Magnum service revolver was recovered in Jesse’s attaché case at the roadblock, and when forensics examined the gun they found one bullet missing. Black’s hands tested negative for gunshot residue, so the state’s theory was that the gun accidentally fired at the rest area, probably when Black dropped it after having been shot himself.

  “Was the trooper in front of the car window?” I ask Walter. “Because the glass got blown backwards.” I point out the shards to him, glistening on the pavement in the blood.

  “Well, obviously he must be in front of—but I didn’t know what the bullet hit, I think I was thinking that the windshield got hit because I didn’t look.”