Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  A few hours later, the Ringwraiths came for me. Burning-eyed, bolting through the dark forest, branches catching at their billowing cloaks. I screamed so loud I woke myself up. I woke Peter up too.

  Our friend John has gone back to California and last week his house burned down in a wildfire. Everything he owned is now cinders and dust. It does not matter, he tells us. His husband died last year, and after that, the house—it’s not important, he says.

  I feel helpless. I am helpless. I keep seeing Trooper Black on the pavement, fallen, bleeding. Constable Irwin, his eye socket shattered, the metal frames of his eyeglasses perfectly intact. I see Jesse Tafero too. It’s odd, but I can see him more clearly than ever now. I have clarity, but not peace. It is seven o’clock on a May morning, and in the back of the death chamber, the door bursts open. Three men—two guards and a prisoner, bald, shackled. The prisoner is struggling but the guards are strong and they are ready for this. They have him by the armpits and they march him into the chamber and they slam the door shut behind them. Then they turn him around and make him look at the chair. Jesse Tafero, murderer, looks at the electric chair. And startles backwards.

  That is how it ended.

  I still do not know exactly how it began.

  In Phillip Black’s autopsy, the medical examiner noted a small rip in Black’s uniform shirt, one inch long, near his heart. Grace Black pointed to that spot on her own body, when we were talking about the Taser. Pressing down on her own bones, her eyes searching mine.

  Oh my God, I’ve been shot.

  Mr. Satz is available to meet with you, the email says, and names two possible dates. I pick the later one, and pack my bags. On the way from my house in Michigan to the State Attorney’s Office in Fort Lauderdale, there are a few last people I need to talk to.

  * * *

  •

  Two days later, I am in a West Virginia trailer park. The person I’m looking for here was married to Eric many years ago, when they were both just out of their teens. I’m hoping she can help me now.

  Do you remember a Taser being fired? That is what I asked Eric, down in Adelaide.

  That’s weird. I’ve never heard about that, I don’t think, Eric replied.

  I’m not trying to pin blame on Eric. He was nine years old that morning. A child. It feels odd to me, uneasy, to insist on knowing what that child may have done when the man today denies it, or does not know. Still, this matters. My mother made me do it. That is what Eric told his social worker, according to her report. Somebody. That is who fired the first shot from the backseat of the Camaro, according to what Walter Rhodes now says, which is not what he testified to in court. The State of Florida based its case on Walter’s testimony, but he did not see. “No, I did not,” he told me, when I asked him directly. So I still need to find out the rest of the story. Exactly what happened. This has never been a guessing game for me.

  In Australia, when Eric told me he knew nothing about a Taser, I simply could not tell if he was stonewalling or telling the truth. And then he started talking about how he’d always carried weapons and how the police were out to get him and the whole thing, from the Taser to the casings to the social worker’s report, was just one big conspiracy against him and his mom. I’d gone to the Kingdom of Lochac expecting to meet a forty-eight-year-old man, but it suddenly felt like I was talking to a terrified nine-year-old child. That’s the thing I did not understand as it was happening. His fear, resonating. Radiating. It sparked something in me. I can see that now. For I too was once a terrified nine-year-old child, hunted and cornered and attacked. That day at the playground, fighting back, scrambling, clawing, catapulting myself into thin air. I had to be able to protect myself. Because no one else would. That’s what Eric said to me, and as he said it I could feel it, as painful as a scar catching fire. The whole thing threw me so hard I backed off.

  I have been so angry with myself since then. For being soft. Letting him off the hook. Not confronting him with case photographs and documents. I’ve been proud of myself too. In that moment on the fence rail with Eric, caught between being a private detective and being a human being, I chose to have a heart.

  Now it’s time to find out if I made the right call.

  * * *

  •

  “Yes?”

  A woman about my age in pajamas, blinking into the sunlight from the doorway of her home. Short dark hair, warm brown eyes. If she is surprised to see a stranger on her doorstep asking about her long-ago ex-husband and a capital murder case, she sure doesn’t show it. Debbie has not had any contact with Eric since 1999, she tells me. No ill will, but the way it ended wasn’t the friendliest. Sure, she’ll talk to me.

  “I’m all about being honest,” Debbie says, stepping out onto the rickety porch. “I’m not somebody who puts things out of my mind. I’m a person who continues to process them.”

  “I am too,” I tell her. Because somewhere along the way here, I’ve stopped burying my feelings about all of this. About everything. It feels unreal to admit that out loud.

  Eric talked about the murders very openly, Debbie says as we sit down. It was one of the first conversations they ever had, and the case was always part of their lives. Even when money was super tight, they kept a working telephone so that Sunny could call from prison, and Eric went down to Florida a couple times a year to visit her. When Debbie and Eric’s daughter was born, Jesse sent them baby booties knitted by one of his condemned-men friends on death row. But growing up without his mother was very hard on Eric, Debbie says, and he felt “a certain amount of anger that all of this happened in the first place. He wished she had taken up with someone who was more stable, not somebody who was a parole violator. He felt that robbed him of a normal childhood.”

  Yes, of course it did, I think. But I don’t say that.

  “What did Eric remember?” I ask, instead.

  “He remembered a lot. He remembered them getting awakened in the rest stop—the cops, the Canadian and the Florida cop, very abruptly getting both Rhodes and Jesse out of the front of the car. He remembered one of them very roughly manhandling Jesse at the front of the car.”

  “Which car?”

  “The Camaro.”

  See, that is what Eric told me. That’s why this is important.

  “Eric was watching what was going on with Jesse,” Debbie is saying. “He didn’t see where Rhodes had gone. Then all of a sudden gunshots started, and Sonia covered him up.”

  It’s so interesting, this recall that everyone has about this case. It’s like we’ve all lived it, every one of us, for all these years. It’s shared, collective. Have you ever heard water running underneath a city street? This case is like that, I think. Lift up the drain grate, step into the flow.

  “Did Eric ever talk about a Taser being at the scene?” I ask Debbie.

  Debbie looks mystified.

  “No, I haven’t heard anything about that.”

  I take the picture of the Taser dart in the police car out of my bag and show it to her.

  “I’ve never heard about that at all.”

  “It looked like a flashlight. Did Eric mention a flashlight?”

  “No.” Debbie is still looking at the photograph.

  “The theory is that the Taser was fired from the back of the car and then Jesse burst over and grabbed the gun, but nobody knows.”

  “Again, when you mentioned the Taser, it was the first I’d ever heard about it.”

  “It really wasn’t something he ever—?”

  “No!” she says. Emphatically, not impatiently. She is almost laughing at my obsessiveness now. No!

  * * *

  •

  I take the small roads, heading south. As I approach the Virginia state line, I fly through a tunnel, a long deep darkness that ends in a slingshot out along a mountain ridge. The first leaves of the changing season flutter ac
ross the roadway, like exhaled breath.

  Eric never mentioned a Taser to his wife. I believe her. For all of the dozen years they were together, not one word about the stun gun or the dart. So when I asked Eric this spring about the Taser and he said he’d never heard of it, he was telling me his truth.

  All my soul-searching and second-guessing, the insanity and turmoil of those weeks on the reef, with the night-screaming birds and the silty sea—all of that, for nothing. But oddly everything feels a little easier now, with this new tiny bit of certainty. That was his truth. Maybe instead of obsessing, the thing to do is to accept that truth, just as it is, I tell myself. Take the no and move on. Move beyond.

  How did it start, then? I ask myself as I drive.

  There’s the derringer. The tiny, shiny gun. In truck driver Robert McKenzie’s statement to police, he remembered seeing Jesse trying to keep Trooper Black from frisking his front pocket. The officer reached for him, reached for his pocket, and he jumped back….The guy, his hand, went down at his left pocket, trying to keep the officer from searching him. That tiny pistol was found on the ground very close to where Trooper Black and Jesse had struggled. “Dancing,” as Sunny called it. The derringer was found fully loaded and the police laboratory said it had not been fired. I know I’ve made mistakes before, but that gun just does not seem like a prime suspect to me. For sure, though, somebody fired the Taser. The dart in the police car speaks to that.

  As the miles flash past, my mind starts to spin.

  In Sunny’s book, she writes about watching Jesse arguing with Trooper Black at the open door to the Camaro. Sunny is sitting in the backseat with the children. She is scared. “I knew we were in for trouble now. Jesse had already violated his parole. He would almost surely go back to prison.”

  The TV movie In the Blink of an Eye has that moment too, I’m just realizing. Sunny watching anxiously from the backseat as Jesse fights Trooper Black. And in the movie, as Jesse struggles with the officers, Sunny turns suddenly to Eric and asks her little boy to find something for her.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Sunny says to Eric in Blink. “Try to find Tina’s bear.”

  Eric ducks down, searching. Then:

  “Found it. Here,” Eric says, handing it to her.

  And the gunshots begin.

  Right. I know I’m obsessing now. I promised myself I would not do this. Maybe it’s the road, this long drive, the sun sinking lower in the sky. But: There was no bear in that Camaro. No toys at all, according to the crime-scene property inventories that are part of the case record. And I know Blink is not a documentary. It’s a made-for-TV movie. Still, a disclaimer states right up front that the movie is told “from the perspective” of Sunny Jacobs. Blink is her account of the murders. Stolen Time is too. They are what she says happened.

  So I have to wonder: Found it. Here. Is that an admission? Something handed by Eric to Sunny just before the gunshots started. He would almost surely go back to prison. A disturbance, a disruption, to free her lover. The Taser looked like a flashlight. It was a device so new that it had not been classified in Florida as a firearm yet. “Unlike a gun, firing the Taser is not likely to be final,” its glossy pamphlet purred. “Its sole purpose is to protect you and your family from harm.” Although not if it’s followed by six blasts from a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, I think bitterly. If Trooper Black noticed the Taser in the backseat of the Camaro, would he have known the danger he was in? One of the darts lodged itself in the window frame of the police car, but the other dart did not. Oh my God, I’ve been shot.

  But that is conjecture. Eric does not remember. Sunny has “no clue.” I do not know.

  * * *

  •

  Ten hours later, I am talking to another ex-wife. At least I think she’s an ex-wife.

  “Who?” she says, when I tell her I’m hoping to talk to her about Walter Rhodes.

  “Never heard of him,” she says, when I ask again.

  Walter Norman Rhodes, I say. Walter. Rhodes. I am about to give up when I remember Walter’s old nickname.

  “Oh, Rusty,” she says. “I used to be married to the bum.”

  She’s chain-smoking and in a wheelchair, the former Mrs. Rhodes, sitting in front of a computer screen in her living room in a small Southern town, a black velvet headband on her shiny silver hair. I’ve stopped by well past dark, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She does not want me to use her real name, though, so I’ll call her Kate.

  It’s been a long day, but I’m here because I need to make sense of Walter’s magnum opus. All the UFO sightings. The scheming spiders and screaming flies. In his memoir, Walter wrote that when he was first arrested in Miami in the late 1960s, he saw Jimmy Hoffa in the police car next to him. Jimmy Hoffa! So I need to know if these visions are the product of a mind that’s been incarcerated for forty years—or if Walter saw those things back when he was the star witness in two capital murder trials.

  Kate and Walter met in karate class in 1974, she is telling me. “I broke his hand.” They lived in Maryland for a while and then moved down to Florida, to that little apartment in Fort Lauderdale. No, she was not in the CIA, despite what Walter claimed in his memoir. One day in early February 1976, she came home and found Walter in bed with another woman. “You told me you didn’t care what I did,” Walter protested. Kate threw a lamp at him, got the next bus out, and she never saw him again—because right after that, Walter met up with Jesse in Miami for that drink, which soon led to the Camaro and the rest stop.

  Jesse Tafero, she says musingly. “He was kinda eerie.”

  She and Walter used to go out to a house in the Everglades to party, she says. A friend of Walter’s had a big house—she names the same person that Walter does in his memoir—that was so isolated they could do whatever they wanted. Sometimes Jesse was there, “always looking for an angle. Looking for a scam. Always talking about winning a game. And he was always looking at you like he was undressing you. He had a very short fuse, and a dead cold stare. It gave you a chill. Jesse Tafero, that is one man this world is better off without. He was a predator in every sense of the word.” That whole group, she says, was “heavy into trafficking narcotics.”

  Walter included, she says. She doesn’t know the details of exactly how it worked, but Walter used to go out to the Everglades and help with the drug boats. Two or three times a month, sometimes overnight.

  So much for Walter’s claim in his court filings that he was only driving Jesse and Sunny around, I think. In his M.O., Walter wrote extensively about the drug runs and Everglades partying that Kate is talking about now, but when I read those pages, I assumed he was making that shit up. Speedboats, trips to Bimini, going out on nights when there were twelve-foot swells because the Coast Guard wouldn’t brave it, grocery bags full of cash. Orgies in the sauna at the party house, so many drugs laid out on the coffee table that it’s a miracle everyone didn’t OD. Bragging, boasting—but apparently it wasn’t fiction, or at least not entirely. No wonder Carl Lord, the police polygrapher, told me Walter hit the ceiling on that trick test question about “undetected crimes.” Which was how Lord knew the polygraph was working.

  “Cocaine,” Kate adds, when I ask her what kind of drugs.

  “Did he talk about UFOs?” I ask Kate.

  “Constantly,” she says. “We’d be out riding in the car and he’d look up in the sky and see something blinking way, way up there, and he’d say, ‘I wonder if that’s a UFO. I wonder if there’s life beyond.’ He was spacey. He had a vivid imagination.”

  So I know Jesse and Walter met in prison, I say now. But how did they end up in the same group of people out there in the Everglades?

  “Have you heard of Murph the Surf?” she asks.

  Jack Murphy, I write in my notebook. “I’ve heard of him.”

  “It was an association that was built when they were in the cellblock together.” B
efore the murders, obviously. “Jesse Tafero was friends with Murph the Surf. Jesse introduced Rusty to Murph the Surf, and they all became compadres in jail. It was pretty much through Murph the Surf’s okay that Tafero befriended Rusty and looked out for him.” Kate pauses. “It was a hierarchy,” she says, about that prison friendship. “The only self-esteem Jesse had was he was given authority by Murph the Surf. He was given authority in and out of jail—but how they did it, that kind of stuff, I don’t know.”

  “What did Walter tell you about the murders?” The case file has billing slips for phone calls between Walter and his wife in the days after his arrest. In his M.O., Walter writes that one call was so devastating that they both wept.

  “As far as I’m aware, Jesse was the one that did it,” Kate says. “That’s what Rusty told me when it first happened.”

  “Did he say Sunny was involved?”

  “No, she was in the backseat with the children.”

  “Did Walter ever confess to you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think he would have, if he’d murdered the officers?”

  She nods, slowly, and takes a long drag. “I said, ‘Tell me what happened.’ And I told him, ‘What do you need, I’ll do anything.’ He had no reason to lie to me. He knew I was in his corner. I was the only ally he had.”

  She pauses a moment.

  “He was really good-looking,” she says, about Walter. “I had a lot of people tell me he looked like Clark Gable. But looks aren’t everything.” Walter was very abusive, she tells me. When she left him, she left everything she owned in the world behind in that Fort Lauderdale apartment. But she never looked back.

  And about Jesse Tafero, Kate adds: “If this asshole is haunting you, put him out of your head and move on. He was a user and a manipulator and when it boiled down to it, he was cold-hearted too.”