* * *
•
The next day, on my way to the airport, I drive past the address in Charlotte, North Carolina, provided in police reports for Sunny’s parents circa 1976. Four bedrooms, three-point-five baths, an open floor plan, and a pool in a golf-course neighborhood the real estate websites call “prestigious.”
I also drop by a house where I believe Alan Jacobs, Sunny’s brother, is living. In her book, Sunny wrote that her brother, “Big Al,” was the person who introduced her to her boyfriend John, and I’ve noticed in police reports that Sunny and John were said to have been buying guns together in North Carolina in November 1975, three months before the murders, using a credit card that John’s mother later reported stolen. Also, Debbie has just told me that Eric lived with Alan for a while, after his grandparents died in the plane crash. I’m hoping that if there’s any aspect of this mystery I’m wrong about, or need to think more about, or have missed, Alan will let me know.
But the man who lives at this address refuses to open the door.
“Who are you?” the man says, from behind the portal.
I tell him. Your sister, Jesse, Walter, the murdered officers, the electric chair.
The man behind the door doesn’t tell me I’m at the wrong house, or that he has no idea what I’m talking about. He says: “Go away.”
The odd thing is that when you look up Alan Jacobs on the Internet, one of the first things you come across is a video of him demonstrating martial arts skills. He is a security expert offering martial arts classes in personal defense, in person and online. I’m here with Josh and John and we’re going to show you a third-party gun disarm. And you find lots of photographs of him with Whitney Houston. He was her director of security, for real. The Bodyguard. Doesn’t seem like a guy who’d shy away from a private eye.
“Alan?” I call out. “Everybody else has talked to me. I just want to hear anything you have to say.”
“Go away, right now, or I’m calling the police.”
Those are the magic words to get a PI off your porch, by the way. In case you ever need them. But in twenty years, I’ve almost never heard them spoken, let alone shouted through a locked entryway. Most people at least open the door.
“Okay!” I say instantly. And leave.
* * *
•
On my way to the airport, I get turned around in the aftermath of a thunderstorm—power lines are down across the city and I find myself lost amid ambulances, crashed cars, flooded streets, police roadblocks. I think of going back to Alan’s door again, but then I decide, No. Whatever it is he won’t talk to me about, he can keep.
And I’m not going to try to talk to Jesse and Sunny’s daughter, I’ve finally decided. Tina was ten months old that morning, in the backseat of the Camaro. Innocent. She is forty now. All through this investigation, I’ve thought about her. I’ve tried to imagine myself on her doorstep. Hi, Tina? I have not been able to do it. I saw your father die. I just cannot.
That little girl in the backseat has not had an easy time through life—her father in the electric chair, her mother in prison, her grandparents killed in a plane crash. I do not want to make things any harder by telling her what I now know. It’s not my place, anyway. What happened at the rest area is something she can ask her mother about. And what happened at Florida State Prison that morning is for the State of Florida to explain, not me.
I think I might be starting to let go.
It has been such a long time, I think, as I drive. Such a long time since that afternoon out in the Los Angeles desert when I stepped out of my car into away. So many days and nights and years of traveling, all the doors I’ve knocked on, all the time spent with the radio singing me sad songs, with the way the road looks sometimes, shiny and flat, broken edges up ahead, shimmering.
But now it is starting to feel different. Like I could step into a new world where today is today, not a bramble of yesterday and today and tomorrow. I’m not pretending that none of this happened. I know it happened. The murders, the execution. But maybe it is no longer happening. No longer happening now.
That would be an incredible relief.
* * *
•
At the airport, it’s late afternoon and the terminal is almost empty, a lull before the evening flights begin. I find a seat by the window and watch the wind sweep across the tarmac, gray sheets of rain. It’s melancholy, this weather, and it makes me think of Constable Donald Irwin, another person in this I’ve had to let go of.
I did try to talk with Constable Irwin’s family. I wanted to know who he was in life, before this tragedy happened. What his childhood was like, what his dreams were. His wife, Barbara, has passed away, so I could not sit down with her as I had with Grace Black, but I found other family members. I wrote to Irwin’s son. I called him. I called the church where Irwin’s daughter used to preach. I talked to her briefly by phone. I followed up in writing, as she requested. No response. I reached out to the Ontario Provincial Police and the Ontario Provincial Police Association. I considered driving to Canada. But ultimately I decided no.
Donald Irwin’s family does not want to talk to me. Clearly. And although I wish that were not so, I understand why it might be. I know in their place I would find me too much to bear. People have the right to their grief. To be left in peace. I am finally learning that too.
28
Michael J. Satz, State Attorney
In the morning, I arrive early at the Broward County state attorney’s suite of offices, on the sixth floor of the courthouse in Fort Lauderdale.
At this moment in September 2015, Michael J. Satz has been state attorney for Florida’s Seventeenth Judicial Circuit for thirty-nine years. Satz arrived here in 1968 after graduating from law school and never left. He’s in his seventies now. Satz was an assistant state attorney in 1976 when he brought the capital murder cases against Jesse Tafero and Sunny Jacobs, and a week after Sunny’s conviction Satz announced his candidacy for the county’s top law enforcement job. Getting death sentences against two accused cop killers did not hurt him at the polls. In November 1976, Satz won the election and immediately named as his chief assistant state attorney Ralph Ray, the lawyer who had represented Walter Rhodes. Satz has since been reelected nine consecutive times. This prosecutor is a legend. A fixture. And he’s come in for his share of criticism about the case that helped him win his powerful job, particularly from Sunny Jacobs and Walter Rhodes.
At her trial in 1976, Sunny handed a note to reporters referring to Satz as “His Satanic Majesty” and saying Satz “is willing to do anything to win.” In 1992, after the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned Sunny’s conviction, Sunny’s attorneys tried to get Satz disqualified from retrying the case, arguing that the Satz/Ray/Rhodes connection was a serious conflict of interest. In a newspaper interview, one of Sunny’s lawyers said at the time that Satz had “made a deal with the wrong person—Rhodes was actually the triggerman.”
Walter Rhodes has not been happy with Satz either. In 1991, Walter filed a petition in federal court alleging that Satz had conspired with Ralph Ray to coerce Walter into his plea deal, and in 1997 he sued again, alleging “an ongoing lack of independence” between Satz and Ray that had added up to a miscarriage of justice in the case. “Satz is no dummy. He manipulated me into pleading guilty,” Walter told me in prison two months ago.
And in her kitchen in Ireland, Sunny too spoke bitterly about the man who put her and Jesse on death row. “Satz is so dirty and so powerful,” Sunny told me. “Withholding evidence in a capital case and allowing the person to be executed? That is murder. He should have been charged with murder.”
Now Michael Satz’s executive secretary is calling my name.
For nearly a year, I’ve been a nuisance to this office. Pestering. Asking to see the case files. Asking to see the exhibits. Demanding that they unlock the exhibit warehouse and un
crate the dummies. Along the way, they’ve asked me pointed questions and have seemed at times to harbor nebulous suspicions about articles I wrote about the case, including the piece that Time magazine linked to on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Jesse’s execution. “It takes seven minutes before the prison doctor pronounces him dead, seven minutes of heaving, nodding, flames and smoke,” I wrote. My calls went to voicemail, I was put on hold, I was told to try back later. I left messages, I waited, I called back. I spent days pacing, worrying, wondering. On two separate occasions this spring, I parked myself in the library here to read through the piles of file boxes, and twice I ordered copies of everything. Every page. I’m sure they’re hoping that this will be the day they finally see the last of me.
Inside the office, the vibe is austere. Michael Satz himself greets me, along with Carolyn McCann, head of the State Attorney’s Office’s appeals unit. McCann worked on Sunny’s case in 1992 after the conviction was overturned, and when Sunny agreed to her Alford plea, McCann read the entire plea out loud, word for word, into the court record. I take a seat at Satz’s conference table facing a row of windows. The sky outside is so pale it is colorless. I know that if I walked over to the window right now, I would see just to the south the street behind the power plant where Walter’s apartment was. That’s where I started this search, ten months ago. Where they set out from on that long-ago morning, never to return. Come full circle. Now McCann sits down across the table opposite me, and Satz is at the head of the table, on my right.
Michael Satz is trim and taut, with brown eyes and blunt features. He has a reputation for tenacity and frugality, for being a tough litigator and for being a bit of an enigma too: Newspaper stories portray him as a man of few indulgences, never married, living in the same sparsely furnished condo he’s had since forever, going skiing every year at the same Colorado mountain, staying in the same modest hotel there. Today he’s wearing a white button-down shirt, gray suit pants, and a bright blue tie, thick in a knot at his throat. And right now, he’s sizing me up. I can feel it.
Neither Satz nor McCann has said anything beyond hello—no pleasantries, no how was your trip, no it’s warm today isn’t it. This is a chess game, and I know I have to make the first move, but I feel suddenly frozen. Not out of questions, too many questions. And Satz seems preoccupied. Maybe irritated.
“So, I witnessed Jesse Tafero’s execution.”
They know this. They have no reaction.
“And since then I’ve spent a quarter of a century reading stories in the newspaper about how he was an innocent man. So I’m here to ask you about his case. I want to know what the truth is.”
“Read the transcript,” Satz says. He looks like he’s ready to get up and walk out.
“I have read the transcript,” I tell him. “But there are still some things that I don’t understand.”
Silence.
“Look, I’m not going to put words in your mouth. I am just trying to find out what actually happened,” I say. “That’s all. I saw the man die, I want to know.”
After that, everybody seems to relax. Me, definitely.
* * *
•
When Jesse testified at Sunny’s trial, he was under oath, of course. Jesse told the jury that he witnessed the shots that killed Trooper Black and Constable Irwin that morning, and that Walter Rhodes was the one who fired the gun, from a position at the front of the Camaro.
Over the past year, I have come to my own conclusion about Jesse and his testimony. But I am not actually a forensic expert, and so this is my leadoff question. This prosecutor put Jesse Tafero on death row. I’m finally face-to-face with him. I need to ask.
“Could the shots that murdered the officers have been fired from the front of the Camaro?” I begin.
“Do you know the difference between a revolver and a semiautomatic?” Satz replies.
I do not.
A revolver is a cowboy gun, Satz says. The casing stays in the barrel. With semiautomatics, the casings are dislodged when the gun is fired. That’s why you find casings when a semiautomatic has been used. In this case, the murder weapon was a semiautomatic handgun, and there were three casings found at the rest area crime scene. Two of the casings were inside the Camaro, one on a jean jacket just below the front passenger seat and the other on the floorboard of the front passenger wheel well. That casing on top of the jean jacket didn’t just climb up there by itself, Satz says. The jacket had to be there first, before the gun ejected the casing on top of it. The third casing was found outside the car, along the curb in front of the front tire on the Camaro’s passenger side. The ballistics test showed that those three casings all came from the murder weapon. Next, they tested how that gun ejected casings, and found that the gun ejected casings fifty-four degrees to the right and ten feet to the rear. So if someone was standing and firing the gun at the front of the car, where Tafero testified that Rhodes was firing, the casings could not have landed inside the Camaro or near the front tire on the passenger side, Satz says.
“The three casings were really important,” Satz says. “There’s no way those casings could have gotten there shooting from the front of the car.”
So that’s physical evidence point one.
Point two, Satz continues, is the bullet hole in the windshield post of the cruiser. The criminologist “put a metal rod in that hole and the direction was the rear seat of the Camaro. And Pierce Hyman, the truck driver, testified that the first shot came from the Camaro.”
“Hyman said all of the shots came from the Camaro,” I correct Satz.
Satz looks at me.
“Three,” he continues. “The murder weapon was reloaded and strapped to Tafero’s waist with two extra magazines. I think one of those was KTW armor-piercing bullets.”
“Yes, it was,” I say.
“Do you know how semiautomatics are reloaded?”
I do not.
Satz explains. “When you put the magazine in the butt of the gun, you can’t immediately pull the trigger. First, you have to pull back the slide to load the bullet into the chamber. As I recall, when they took that gun from Tafero there was a bullet in the chamber. The other gun, the one they took from Rhodes, did not have a chambered round.”
I think I get it. Basically, it’s that the gun police took from Walter at the roadblock had not been readied to fire, whereas the gun they took from Jesse had a bullet loaded in the chamber, all set to go.
Plus, Jesse Tafero had just reloaded that gun, Satz says. The man whose Cadillac they carjacked, Leonard Levinson, testified that he saw Tafero reloading the gun as they were speeding away.
And then of course there was the Taser, Satz adds.
The Taser, I think to myself. Remembering Sunny’s reaction. I have no clue. It’s the mystery piece of evidence, the weapon nobody who was actually there in the Camaro that day—Walter, Sunny, Eric—seems to know anything about. Or wants to tell me about, certainly. And now here is the prosecutor himself, bringing it up on his own.
“Why was the Taser significant?”
“It was significant because obviously it was fired, the only one who had a Taser was them”—meaning Jesse, Sunny, and Walter—“and there was an empty Taser holster behind the driver’s seat of the Camaro where Jacobs was sitting. In the attaché case, there was the Taser, the fired cartridges, and extra cartridges.”
“Well, when I talked with Sunny Jacobs, I asked her about the Taser, and she said she had no clue as to what I was talking about.”
Satz is waiting, like, What am I supposed to say to that?
“Did you mention the Taser at her trial?” I ask.
“I asked Tafero about it, there was the photo of the dart in evidence, we put the attaché case and its contents into evidence. There was a lot of testimony about that,” Satz says.
“There was the Taser stipulation in the Alford plea,
so even if she didn’t remember that it was mentioned at her trial, the plea was read aloud in court,” McCann adds.
Satz leans across the table now, right at me.
Sonia Jacobs told the police that her name was Sandy Jenkins and that another woman named Frenchie was with them in the car at the rest area, he says. He’s talking about statements that Sunny made to police, right after the murders. “If you didn’t do anything wrong, why would you lie? You’re in a police station, surrounded by police officers, why wouldn’t you say, ‘Oh, this terrible thing happened, help me’?”
* * *
•
The Delray Beach substation. February 20, 1976. Sunny Jacobs is being interrogated. The detectives have read her the Miranda rights and she has answered affirmatively that she wishes to proceed with the interview. They’ve told her that she is being charged with first-degree murder, and she has laughed. Now they want to know more about the guys she was arrested with. Who are they? What are their names? How long has she known them? How did they meet? The guy in the blue shirt—what is his name? Sunny has no response.
“How did you meet this man with the blue shirt?”
“Well, the, he’s a friend of the other guy,” Sunny says.
“What’s the other guy’s name?” They’re asking about Jesse now.
“I just call him, ah, ah I…I…I was just calling him, ah, Tone.”
“Tone?”
“Tone. Tone.”
As Sunny later wrote in her book, “It was a pitiful lie.”
That interview was one of three statements Sunny made to police that morning that were ruled inadmissible on appeal. In addition, the appeals court also found that the failure by the State Attorney’s Office to disclose Walter’s polygraph report was a violation of Brady v. Maryland, the important U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires prosecutors to hand over evidence that is both exculpatory and material to the defense. The court ruling wasn’t a total win for Sunny. She lost on one of her key claims, concerning a prosecution witness named Brenda Isham, who testified for the state at Sunny’s trial and then years later confessed, in tears on national television, that she had lied on the stand. Regarding Isham, the court found that her “highly significant and dramatic” recantation was credible, but otherwise her testimony was “rife with inconsistencies,” and ruled that the prosecution “neither knew or should have known that Isham would commit perjury.” But on the basis of the Miranda and Brady violations, the court overturned Sunny’s conviction and ordered that she be retried.
Two Truths and a Lie Page 31
