Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  The second statement ruled inadmissible was one Sunny allegedly made to a trooper at the roadblock. As the officers were leading her and the children away from the Cadillac, Sunny burst free and rushed over to Jesse as he lay handcuffed on the ground. The trooper had been thinking Sunny was a hostage, but after that, he asked her, “Do you like shooting troopers?” and he reported that Sunny said, “We had to.” That statement was ruled inadmissible because the trooper had not read Sunny her Miranda rights.

  The third statement was one Sunny made to Palm Beach County detective Gary Hill, who transported her and the children from the roadblock to the Delray Beach police station that morning. Hill read Sunny her rights, and then asked her questions after she refused to tell him her name. The court ruled that by refusing to tell Hill her name, Sunny was invoking her right to remain silent, and that therefore any statements Sunny made to Hill were inadmissible. Hill reported that Sunny told him her name was Sandy Jenkins, that she was a hitchhiker, that the men in the orange Cadillac had stopped and asked her if she wanted a ride, that she did not know them and had never seen them before, and that she was their hostage.

  After Hill dropped her off at the Delray Beach substation, Detective Lieutenant Angelo Farinato and Captain Valjean Haley read Sunny her Miranda rights again and interrogated her. On appeal, the court ruled that the statement Farinato and Haley obtained was inadmissible because not enough time had elapsed between Sunny’s refusal to tell Hill her name and the Farinato/Haley interrogation. It was a win for Sunny and a big loss for the prosecution, because on that tape Sunny tried to mislead the officers about who was in the Camaro at the rest area. She said there had been another woman in the car, who ran off after the shooting. A woman named Frenchie.

  Q: What kind of clothes did she have on?

  A: Uh, she had on jeans and, uh, a pullover blouse, dark-colored blouse.

  Q: Alright, what was her nickname once again? Frenchie?

  A: —

  Q: You don’t know her last name? Do you know where Frenchie was from?

  A: I have no idea.

  Now, in his office, Satz is wondering aloud about that to me.

  “I thought it was significant, that she put another woman in the car. Maybe she felt that somebody saw a woman.”

  Certainly Walter and Jesse and Sunny knew they’d been observed. Eric was reported to have told a sergeant that it was the truck driver on his CB radio who notified the police about the shootings, and that if they’d “wasted” him, they would have made a clean getaway.

  In her book, Sunny acknowledges that she fabricated Frenchie. No mention of the taped statement, though. Instead, she claims she was having trouble finding a good attorney and:

  In one of the little notes that Jesse managed to send to me he said he did not trust this new lawyer and that I should test him in some way. So I made up some fantastic details, which I told to him. I said that Rhodes was gay and that his lover, Frenchie, a man dressed as a woman, had been in the car with us. The story came back to me as the latest police theory. I dismissed the attorney.

  In her taped interrogation, the Frenchie one later ruled inadmissible, Sunny told the officers that she did not witness the murders. But she claimed the man in the blue shirt—Walter Rhodes—“was giving the instructions.”

  That, however, is not what Leonard Levinson—owner of the carjacked Cadillac—said.

  * * *

  •

  January, earlier this year, back at the beginning. I’d just spent the day at the Broward County courthouse. I’d returned to our rental house with a stack of papers from the court files, and Peter and I were sitting on the couch together, reading.

  “Okay, wait,” Peter said. He was reading a piece of paper covered in a spidery scrawl. “Hasn’t Sunny always said she and Jesse were hostages that morning?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Because here is a statement from a guy named Leonard Levinson, and he says he was a hostage too.”

  I’d never given much thought to Leonard Levinson. He was a retired World War II veteran who’d had the misfortune to be holding the keys to a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville when the stolen police cruiser blasted into his retirement village. After that Cadillac crashed to a halt at the police roadblock, officers found Levinson in the backseat, captive, terrified. What could Levinson know? He wasn’t present when the murders took place.

  “He says that Jesse Tafero kidnapped him,” Peter said, reading.

  “So?”

  “So, the hostages took a hostage?”

  “Let me see that.” I snatched the paper out of Peter’s hand.

  “It’s what hostages want most in the world, I’ve heard,” Peter said. “Ask a hostage, any hostage, what they dream of, and the answer is always the same: Get me another hostage.”

  * * *

  •

  Leonard Levinson. The third independent eyewitness. Not to the murders, but to the aftermath. The chase. He’s gone now, but on February 20, 1976, at exactly the same time as the officers were interrogating Walter, Sunny, and Jesse, Leonard Levinson was giving his own statement to police. There were no fake answers from him. No pitiful lies.

  That morning, Leonard Levinson had gone downstairs to get his newspaper and check on his car, and when he saw the highway patrol car pulling into the parking lot he started toward it to see what was up. Maybe someone in the building was having an emergency, he thought. He wanted to help. The cruiser came to a halt and a man with a beard got out of the car, pointed a gun at Levinson, and said, “We’re not going to hurt you, we have to get a child to the hospital.” Everyone piled out of the cruiser and climbed into Levinson’s Cadillac—Walter behind the wheel, Sunny and the two children in the front seat, Levinson and Jesse in the back. The Cadillac took off flying onto Hillsboro Boulevard heading west toward the fields, and Levinson asked them to please slow down because the fog was bad. Jesse said, “He’s right, slow it down.” As they drove, Jesse and Walter and Sunny were silent, for the most part, and they kept checking out the back window, but occasionally “some words would pass between them,” Levinson wrote later. They were talking in code, Levinson thought, “an abbreviation or first letters or cipher of some kind.”

  Along the way, Jesse, sitting in the back next to Levinson, opened an attaché case, took out an ammunition clip and counted it—“I guess to check to see if the clip was full”—and then loaded more bullets into it. Levinson tried not to look, not to let his eyes stray onto anything they should not see. Jesse told Levinson, “The quicker you forget about what you’ve seen or heard, the better, because we’re not alone.” Then Jesse asked Levinson to hand over his wallet.

  “Finally the one driving said, ‘I think we have a tail,’ the other one said, ‘Are you sure?’ and pushed himself down flat on the seat and made me do the same. Then the driver said, ‘I think we have a roadblock ahead.’ The other one said, ‘Oh no.’ I could see them run off the road and then sideswipe the truck. You know the rest.”

  Leonard Levinson had a very firm idea about who it was who was in charge that morning, according to his statement, and to his testimony later at trial. The man with the beard, sitting next to him.

  “I think by the actions of the one beside me, he was the leader,” Levinson wrote.

  Jesse Tafero.

  * * *

  •

  “Mr. Levinson testified that Tafero was reloading the semiautomatic handgun,” Satz is saying now.

  “But both Sunny and Eric told me that they saw Rhodes with a gun immediately after the shooting,” I say, to Satz. Sunny was so insistent about this to me, and Eric went a step further, saying it was Walter’s own gun used in the murders. “Did they ever tell you that?”

  Satz looks at me like, What are you, an idiot? “I would never have had direct communication with them.”

  “But was that inf
ormation ever communicated to you in any way? I didn’t see it in the case file, and so I’m wondering if I missed it.”

  Because it is so exculpatory. Walter Rhodes, chief witness for the prosecution, with a gun in his hand right after the murders—that is something the jury would have needed to know, for sure. In the police station that morning, though, Sunny and Eric both said on tape that they did not see anyone with a gun. I’ve read the transcripts. I’ve talked with the officers who obtained those statements. And now I’m asking Satz. For if they did not say Walter had a gun when they were on trial for their lives, then I don’t see how I can believe now that it’s true.

  “That information was never offered to us through their attorney, no,” McCann says.

  * * *

  •

  In July 1974, a year and a half before the murders, police officers in South Carolina stopped a van that Sunny and Jesse were driving, Satz says now. He’s always thought that traffic stop was just like the one in this case—except that the police officers were not murdered.

  This arrest is in the court file. Sunny and Jesse, traveling under the alias Antonio Martes—Tony Tuesday—were in a white van with a cracked windshield. Officers stopped and searched the vehicle and found guns and drugs. In her book, Sunny describes the drugs as “Jesse’s party pack—a selection of tablets and good smoke,” but actually it was a hundred capsules of amphetamine, plus Ritalin, Quaaludes, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, narcotic pain killers, LSD, and hashish. They both faced charges of drug possession with intent to distribute, and Sunny was charged with having a pistol in her purse. The case file lists Sunny at her parents’ home address, and Jesse—as Antonio Martes—at the address for the family’s textile business. Herbert Jacobs, Sunny’s dad, signed for the property in the case. His signature is on a paper in the file, noting that the guns—a .30 caliber carbine, a .22 caliber rifle, and a .25 automatic pistol, from Sunny’s purse—were not returned. Then Sunny and Jesse skipped town and were convicted in absentia.

  “This was not a life she was born into,” McCann says, about Sunny Jacobs. “This was a life she chose.”

  * * *

  •

  We are back to the physical evidence.

  “Common sense is, if you’re firing a Taser, that would be fired first,” Satz says. There’s no reason to fire a Taser at the two officers if they’re already mortally wounded with gunshot wounds. But a Taser is a little bit tricky. “You’d have to hit them with both darts in order to have electricity go through,” Satz says. Trooper Black was demonstrably not hit with both darts, since one of the darts was found in the cruiser’s weather stripping.

  “Would the dart still hurt, even if it was only one dart?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Satz says.

  And then think of the bullet hole in the windshield post, he says. Back to front, low to high. “If you fire a Taser and it doesn’t hit, what do you do next?” Satz asks.

  It seems like he’s expecting my answer will be Fire a gun. But I’m thinking of the notes in Ralph Ray’s files, the handwritten ones from an interview with Walter Rhodes.

  “Have you seen these?” I ask Satz now, putting the Ray file notes down in front of him. He doesn’t think Sonia shot—thinks maybe Jesse fired all the shots.

  “I would not have had the defense lawyer’s notes,” Satz says. He sounds shocked at my question. Then he studies the notes so closely that he’s bent over almost on top of them. He is reading every single word. Absorbing.

  “What if Sunny Jacobs did not fire a gun that morning?” I ask, watching him. “What if she only fired the Taser? Does that change anything—in your view—in terms of her responsibility?”

  Satz takes a long moment before answering. He stares down, hands flat on the tabletop in front of him. The room is silent. It’s very intense.

  “No,” Satz says, finally. “It’s the same.”

  * * *

  •

  “So how did it start, that morning?” I ask him.

  “You just have to go by what the testimony was.”

  But the testimony is from the truck drivers, who didn’t see Tafero do any shooting, and from Walter, who doesn’t know how it started. Somebody: That’s who Walter now says fired the first shot.

  “I talked to a lot of Palm Beach County troopers and they said they thought maybe Eric fired the Taser,” I tell Satz. “Did you consider that?”

  “We considered everything. There wasn’t any testimony that we had about that. The two truck drivers did not see or hear a Taser.”

  “Well, in your files, there’s a report from Eric’s social worker,” I say, getting my notes out. “What about ‘My mother made me do it’?”

  “I don’t remember hearing that,” Satz says, shaking his head. “I just don’t remember that. With Eric, the only thing we knew was what happened afterwards. She told him to shut up.”

  I have some pages from Walter’s memoir with me, and I get them out now too. Pages from the state’s star witness.

  “I’m just going to share a little bit of this with you,” I tell Satz and McCann.

  “New Mexico has all kinds of secret shit going on,” Walter’s reminiscence begins. I’m reading it aloud. It’s 1994, he’s just been paroled from prison, and he’s looking out the window of the house he lives in with Sara. He’s already seen a white limo driving around town with dark windows and a CIA license plate, but it’s still a little while before the night he comes home drunk, Sara calls the cops, he takes off, and then they both end up on the run in Washington. On this particular evening, it’s dusk and there’s a man with a dog outside his house, both floating, almost. Walter knows exactly what is going on: It’s a Man in Black, a government agent sent to silence people who have seen UFOs. He figures there must be an “interdimensional gateway” nearby.

  “Did you hear any of this stuff before the trial?” I ask Satz.

  “No,” Satz says. He seems unimpressed. “A lot of people thought they saw UFOs in the 1970s.”

  “Did you meet Walter Rhodes?” I ask.

  Yes, Satz says. Never alone of course, he hastens to add—always with Walter’s attorney present, and investigator LaGraves. “I never got the impression that he wasn’t stable or that he had any mental issues.”

  “Did you have any doubts about Rhodes—is that why you polygraphed him?”

  “I don’t think Valjean Haley had any doubts about him, or the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office. And he’s the only one who gave a statement at the time about what happened. Her statement, about Frenchie, we know that was definitely not truthful, and we had the physical evidence” as well as the truck driver testimony, Satz says. “We said, Look, let’s do everything we can, let’s run him and see if he passes. We wanted to do everything we could to make sure.”

  “But do you know if Rhodes was hypnotized?”

  In my pile of papers I find the note from Ray’s file that mentions Dr. Gold, the hypnotist, and slide it across now to Satz.

  Satz reads it.

  “I have never, to my knowledge, worked with a hypnotized witness,” Satz says. Fierce. Definite. “I did not hear that Rhodes had been hypnotized, and I didn’t know that was something that had been suggested.”

  What about Walter Rhodes’s recantations? I ask.

  “All I know is that when anybody interviews him—you or 60 Minutes—he comes back to the story he told us. All I know is he said right away to check the gun, ‘I didn’t do any shooting.’ What was important to me was the physical evidence, who does that corroborate,” he says.

  “What evidence?” I ask.

  “The Taser, the windshield, who owned the guns, where did they get the guns, who had the most to gain or lose by extracting himself from that situation, who was arrested with the murder weapon. The casings—they were very integral to the case. And those shots, they were all head shots.”

&nb
sp; But I thought there wasn’t much physical evidence in the case, I say.

  There was quite a bit of physical evidence, Satz corrects me. In fact “the most important thing was the physical evidence.” Why? Because eyewitnesses are unreliable. “The phrase I like to use is, ‘Murders don’t usually happen in front of a busload of bishops.’ ”

  So take out the testimony, he says. All the testimony. “Just get rid of it.”

  “You have the three bullet casings. The Taser dart. The hole in the windshield post. The evidence of what gun killed Black and Irwin. The path of the bullets in the body and the death shots. Tafero was arrested with the murder weapon in a pancake holster fully loaded. You have Mr. Levinson’s testimony that Jacobs takes the attaché case and gives it to Tafero and Tafero reloads the gun. You know the Taser was fired and you know that the Taser dart was fired. In the attaché case, there was the trooper’s gun and the Taser dart and expended Taser cartridge and KTW boxes and KTW ammunition.” The green Teflon-coated bullets.