Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  “And how did that get there?” I ask, pointing to the tiny gun by the Camaro’s front tire.

  “What is it?”

  “That’s the twenty-two. The derringer.”

  “Okay, well, I don’t know how that got right there,” Walter says.

  I watch him.

  “It doesn’t make sense that it would be right there,” Walter says, staring hard at the photograph. “I’m pretty sure you’ll find it wasn’t fired, right?”

  Yes, the criminalist did find that it had not been recently fired, I tell him.

  “Did anyone try to get fingerprints off that?” Walter asks, still looking at the photo.

  “They really didn’t do anything with that piece of evidence.”

  “That’s crazy,” he says. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  * * *

  •

  I’m not kidding myself this time. Despite reading his ten boxes of documents and his five hundred handwritten pages of memoir, I don’t know Walter Rhodes. Everything I’ve learned has actually made Walter more of a stranger to me. I have been so wrong for so long, I wrote in one of my many notes to myself while reading his files. And I’ve made enough mistakes where Walter Rhodes has been concerned. I don’t need to make any more. But even so, his question just now about the fingerprints on that derringer—it’s got my attention.

  When I was with Sunny in her kitchen, I asked her about the Taser. We were at her table, we’d been talking about her Alford plea, I said that the plea had made kind of a big deal about a Taser, and I asked her what she remembered about it. And Sunny replied, “I have no clue.”

  That is what’s striking to me right now. Did anyone try to get fingerprints off that? That is what Walter asked. During two days of conversation in Ireland, I’m just realizing right now, Sunny did not ask me a single question about the Taser. Not one. Not: A Taser? Really? How do they know? When was it fired? Did it hit anyone? Did anyone get fingerprints off that? A mystery weapon in a murder case she was sent to death row for, that she has spent more than twenty years talking about onstage and onscreen, and she had zero curiosity about it? Less than zero. She did not want me to talk about it either.

  I think back to that afternoon in Ireland, nearly three months ago now. We were at her kitchen table, and Sunny was telling me that Trooper Black pushed Jesse and then took his gun out and said, Okay, nobody move. The next one to move is dead. “So there was a Taser fired at some point in that,” I had told Sunny. “Do you know where or when that happened?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “So when you say ‘dancing,’ were they—”

  But that’s when Sunny began waving her hands at me, and raising her voice.

  “I am not doing that!”

  * * *

  •

  Now in this windowless prison conference room, Walter Rhodes is watching me.

  “They took pictures of Black,” he begins. On the slab, after his murder. Naked, propped up against the wall with his legs straight out in front of him, with metal rods running through his body, showing his wounds. The path of the bullets, entry to exit.

  Those photos prove the first shot came from the back of the car, Walter says.

  I’ve heard about these photos before. From Michele McCain, widow of Jesse’s defense attorney. But she told me the photos prove that it was Walter Rhodes who murdered the officers. It had to have been someone tall.

  Those photos are not in the files you sent, I tell Walter now.

  Investigator LaGraves showed them to him, Walter says. “I could have sworn I had them,” he tells me.

  No, I say. And I asked for them from the Broward County State Attorney’s Office, but they said no too. Privacy reasons.

  Well, there were clay dummies made from the photos, and used at trial, he says.

  As soon as he says this, I realize that I know it already. I saw a mention of the dummies last winter when I read the transcript of Jesse’s trial, and months ago I asked the State Attorney’s Office to see them. But that never happened, and with everything that has gone on between now and then, the dummies have slipped my mind.

  I’ve been staring at my notebook, but I look right at Walter now. There’s a question I’ve needed to ask him for a long time.

  “You talk a lot about all this,” I tell him. “To the police, the prosecutors. To me.”

  I say it sharply, in a knowing tone, thinking of The Exonerated. In the play, Sunny says that immediately after the murders, while she and Jesse were being questioned, “Rhodes, from his hospital bed, was negotiating a deal. He’d been in prison before, he knew how the system worked.”

  I bring that up to him now. “Even on the morning of the murders,” I tell Walter Rhodes, “you were talking right away.”

  “Because I felt like what happened was wrong,” Walter says. Forcefully. “The truth is, Tafero could have just thrown down with the gun and handcuffs.” Brandished the weapon, instead of pulling the trigger. “It wasn’t necessary to kill them.”

  * * *

  •

  A knock on the door—it’s the guard. Time’s up.

  “I didn’t turn you in,” I say to Walter as I gather my papers to go.

  Walter nods now, and says he believes me. He says he knows who did. He was taking photographs of UFOs, he says. That was what tipped the government off. He was sending the UFO pictures to a guy who he’s positive was in the CIA. “He had a secret project set up around Earth to capture secret UFO photos—I think he turned in a report about the photos I was taking, and then somebody would have checked me out. I knew that was a risk, and anyway, that really has no bearing on all this.”

  “Well, I just wanted to tell you that,” I add, after a moment.

  I look up now, right at him. He is looking at me.

  “Do you know how long it’s been?” Walter says.

  “Yeah, it’s been about thirteen years,” I say, rounding up. “I see you and talk to you every thirteen years.”

  “What kind of strange fate is that?”

  * * *

  •

  The road south from the prison to the Gulf of Mexico is a shimmering strip through a pine forest. It’s just us here, me and Peter and the pavement and the trees up ahead, closing into a triangle where road meets trees meets sky. We drive for hours. We pass a prison road gang wearing the same blue jumpsuits as at Jackson this morning. The car temperature gauge says it is one hundred degrees outside, and we roll the windows down to see what that feels like. Just as we do, the rains come again, pouring down from above with such force that the road disappears. We are on the big bridge over Apalachicola Bay, flying out toward the Gulf of Mexico, when the lightning begins.

  “Is it safe?” I ask Peter, looking down at the roiling black water.

  “Oh, it’s the safest place we could be.”

  Three months from now, scientists will announce another step in the verification of quantum entanglement, the theory that Einstein derided as “spooky.” In a lab in the Netherlands, researchers will prove that “objects separated by great distance can instantaneously affect each other’s behavior.” A newspaper will characterize this step as a peek into “an odd world formed by a fabric of subatomic particles, where matter does not take form until it is observed, and time runs backward as well as forward.”

  I will read that story and think it an accurate description of what my life has been. This year in particular.

  That summer after the execution, I used to come out to this bridge all the time. I’d drive down from Tallahassee and hit it midmorning, the concrete roadway cracked beneath my tires, sunlight like silver coins along the tops of the waves. I didn’t have air-conditioning, so I drove with the windows down. Sometimes when I reached the top of the span—up and out for that brief moment when the world seemed to drop away—I’d think about crashing through the gu
ardrail down into the water below. After Starke, the line between life and death seemed so thin. How easy to slip over into the abyss. Did I have any idea, though? That I might find out life—this life—wasn’t just for other people, but for me?

  Peter is driving, watching the rain. Without taking his eyes off the road, he reaches his hand over and puts it on my knee. We ride like that for a while, up and over the bridge. Here on the other side, coming down toward the sea.

  26

  Metal Rods, Running Through

  In the morning, on the way to the airport, I call the State Attorney’s Office.

  “I’ve talked to Sunny Jacobs and Eric and Walter Rhodes,” I tell an assistant state attorney. “I really think Mr. Satz should talk to me too.”

  “How is Walter?” she asks me.

  “He’s gotten old,” I tell her. Look, I continue, Walter told me yesterday that he was shown photographs of Trooper Black taken after the murders. I know those photos are protected under privacy laws. But what about the clay dummies?

  “We’re still having trouble finding them,” the assistant says.

  Pause.

  “I also talked with Carl Lord and Robert McKenzie,” I tell her. The polygrapher and the one surviving truck driver eyewitness.

  “You do your homework,” the assistant says.

  “I need to speak with Mr. Satz,” I say. “And I need to see the dummies.”

  * * *

  •

  A week later, I get a call. They’ve located the dummies.

  The week after that, I am in Deerfield Beach, Florida, at the north branch of the Broward County courthouse. It’s just down from the retirement village where Jesse and Walter and Sunny carjacked the Cadillac that morning. I meet Dave the evidence chief in the courthouse lobby and follow him down a corridor through a door that he badges his way through and then through another door that needs an actual metal key to open. We step into an enormous warehouse, big as an airplane hangar, lined floor to ceiling with shelves of neatly labeled brown paper parcels, all tied up with manila tags. Trial evidence. Life and Death. Facts.

  Dave disappears down into the shelves. He comes back carting two big wooden crates.

  For the eight months that I’ve been working on this, I’ve not yet been able to understand the trajectories of the bullets that took the lives of Trooper Black and Constable Irwin. I read the medical examiner’s autopsy reports and the trial transcripts but those have been opaque, and in interviews I’ve been told, Well, you know it all depends on the position of the shooter versus the falling object of the body, as if death were a physics equation, which I suppose in some way it is. The one specific thing I’ve heard was what Michele McCain told me, which was that the photographs of the slain troopers proved that the shots that took their lives were fired at a sharply downward angle. The dummies in these crates were made from those photographs, which is why I want to see them.

  When I’d imagined the dummies, I’d seen them as department store mannequins, life-size and smooth. These are much smaller and made of pale white clay, roughly formed. They are lying on their backs in the crates. They have surprisingly lifelike faces, with eyes and noses but no mouths. I can see the metal rods, running through.

  * * *

  •

  Back at home again, we act the dummies out.

  I am in our garage in Michigan. Peter is here too, and our friend John, who introduced us and married us. He’s visiting from California. Right now John is at the front of our blue Mazda station wagon, which is standing in for the Camaro. John is between the car’s headlights, about two feet in front of the hood. Peter stands next to the driver’s-side door of the Mazda. The door is open. Peter is facing the rear of the car. I am behind him, toward the rear of the Mazda, a little to his right.

  At this moment, I am Donald Irwin. I am crouching down in a deep squat with my hands extended, reaching forward. In that position, I am looking straight up. That is the state’s theory—that Irwin was shot after Trooper Black, as he was reaching for Black’s gun on the ground.

  Peter is standing directly above me, at the open car door, the position where Sunny and Eric—and Walter too—say Jesse was standing when the shooting stopped.

  John, up at the front of the car, is standing in the position where Jesse testified Walter was standing when Walter shot the officers.

  “Okay,” I say to John.

  The dummy for Donald Irwin had two metal rods piercing it. The first metal rod went straight down into his eye. Go on, try it. Tilt your head all the way back and stare at the ceiling. Now take a pen and hold it directly perpendicular to your right eye. That is what the rod looked like. Irwin was wearing gold-framed aviator eyeglasses. The bullet went straight down through the right lens of his spectacles, shattering the glass without damaging the frames, down into his eye socket, fracturing the bones of his face, through his eyeball, and traveled downward and backwards out the back of his head into the base of his neck, where it lodged near his spine. The second bullet went straight down into the top of his left shoulder and exited his back.

  “Hold the gun below your waist,” I tell John. At trial, Jesse said Walter had the gun there, “down by his private parts.” At his crotch. “Now,” I continue, “can you shoot me through the eye, straight down?”

  “No,” John says.

  Peter walks to John’s position at the front of the car and gives it a try. Peter is taller.

  “I can shoot you through the eye, but it goes out through the back of your head. Not down into your neck,” Peter says.

  It feels odd but also helpful, to be so cold about this.

  “What about now?”

  Peter is back at the open door of the Camaro, where Jesse was standing. He is standing directly above me. I am crouching, craning my neck back to keep an eye on him, still reaching on the ground for my friend Trooper Black’s gun.

  Yes. Straight down. My eye socket, my eye, my skull, my neck, my back.

  Straight down into my shoulder too.

  * * *

  •

  Phillip Black was shot four times. The coroner could not determine the sequence of the wounds, but all the bullets entered Black on the left side of his body.

  He was shot in the head. That bullet sliced sharply downward, entering the back of his skull, traveling forward through his brain and exiting from his right ear. That wound caused Black’s death.

  He was shot in the neck. That bullet sliced sharply downward, entering on the back left side of Black’s neck, exiting through his right armpit. That wound also caused Black’s death.

  He was shot in his right shoulder, possibly while he was falling to or on the ground. The metal rod for that shot ran straight down into his body from above, like a marionette string. Like the shot into Irwin’s shoulder.

  And he was shot in the front of his left arm, the bullet traveling to the right and lodging behind his spine in his neck. That shot went in an upward trajectory. As had the bullet hole through the cruiser’s windshield post.

  * * *

  •

  We’re standing up now, Peter and John and I, closing the car door, turning back toward the house. I feel dizzy.

  There is no way that anyone standing in front of or behind the Camaro could possibly have shot Donald Irwin straight down through his eyeglasses or shot Phillip Black downward into his head and neck. Not possible from the backseat of the Camaro, either. No way. That is perfectly clear. It had to have been someone standing above them at the open door of the car, firing down toward the ground.

  The person who was standing at the open door of the car the instant the shooting stopped was Jesse Tafero. That is what both Sunny and Eric told me, when I asked them for the truth.

  Jesse Tafero. In that moment, standing there at the door of the Camaro, Jesse was a fugitive on the run from the law. He was a convicted home-invasion
robber who had brutally beaten and sexually assaulted two young women. He was a karate athlete who’d studied with the most feared sensei in the Florida prison system. He was a drug dealer associated with a notoriously violent gang of cocaine traffickers. He’d been startled awake by police in a car full of guns and ammunition and drugs—amphetamines, cocaine, Quaaludes, marijuana, hashish, glutethimide, and Thorazine. He had more than forty pieces of fake identification with him, including stolen passports and driver’s licenses. He refused to tell the officers his real name or address. He was a psychosexual sociopath, the Florida Department of Corrections would later determine, and so paranoid and so strung out on drugs in this moment that he could not think, reason, assess, or recognize reality, according to his own lawyers. He was shortly to be arrested with the murder weapon strapped into a hand-tooled holster around his waist. His own lawyer would be terrified of him and believe for the next four decades that indeed he was guilty. And when the shooting stopped that morning, Jesse was standing alone, directly between two mortally wounded police officers, both of whom had just been shot straight down into their heads.

  There is no doubt in my mind now. None. Jesse Tafero fired the shots that took the lives of Trooper Phillip Black and Constable Donald Irwin. He was not innocent.

  I’d watched a murderer die.

  27

  On the Road

  “Hello, Ellen,” the email from Michael Satz’s office begins.

  It blinks into my inbox on a bright September morning, not long after my afternoon in the garage. Outside my window, it’s still summer, but the trees are a fading green that means fall cannot be far behind.

  A few nights ago, a prison friend of Walter Rhodes left a message on my home telephone. A convicted murderer, just checking to see if you need anything, as the message said. I do not know him. I don’t want to know him. I’d not given him my name, or my number. Or, God forbid, my address.