“Now add back in Hyman, the truck driver. He said the shots came from the back of the Camaro. That matches the shot in the windshield post and the Taser dart. Add back in McKenzie, the other truck driver. He also said Rhodes was with his hands up, but had him in a different position. We know Tafero was in violation of his parole. We know Tafero said Rhodes shot from the front of the car, and Tafero said the attaché case belonged to Rhodes. Both lies.”
The physical evidence, minus the testimony—that’s how you see what happened, Satz says. And about Walter Rhodes, “Our main concern was did he do anything with the shooting. That’s where we made him do a polygraph. Then you go to the physical evidence and see what you have.”
I think for a minute.
Then I take my notebook and draw an X on the page, to mark where Jesse swore Walter was standing at the front of the Camaro.
“Could the person who murdered the officers have fired the shots from there?” I ask Satz again. Coming back around to where I started the interview. Because this feels so key to me. If Jesse Tafero lied under oath on the stand at a trial where his girlfriend, the mother of his beloved baby daughter, was facing the electric chair, there seems to me just one reason for that. It had to have been because telling the truth about what happened at the rest area that morning would not have helped Sunny—or set her free.
“No,” Satz says, answering my question. “Rhodes firing from the front doesn’t explain the bullet through the windshield post or the casings in the Camaro—or the Taser dart.”
“But Sunny told me that Rhodes moved,” I say. I am trying to push this as far as I can. “She told me Walter Rhodes moved from the front of the car to the back of the car. She said she saw that herself.”
Satz leans forward again. “She is sitting in court where Tafero’s testifying that Rhodes is firing from the front.” So if that is what she’s saying now, “she knows she is changing her story.”
“Well, Sunny Jacobs also told me that Walter Rhodes flunked that polygraph and you covered it up. She said you made a deal with the real killer.”
Satz is silent.
“Is that true?” I ask.
“Why do you polygraph someone?” Satz asks.
“To find out if they are telling the truth.”
Satz raises his hands with his palms up, like, Thank you for stating the obvious.
“Say you’re a law enforcement officer and this happened. What do you want?” Satz asks next.
I know this is what Satz does—ask question after question until you the jury reach the conclusion he wants you to. The one he has already reasoned through and reached himself. He’s a master at it, clearly. It’s been an interesting experience, being here on the hot seat. But still, I find myself hoping that the answer I’m about to give him now is true.
“You want to find out who really did it,” I say.
“Yes,” Satz says. “That’s exactly right. You want to find out what really happened.”
* * *
•
“You know on those crime shows, it’s always, ‘Where is the murder weapon?’ ” Satz says. We are reaching the end now. “Well, here’s the answer: strapped onto Jesse Tafero’s waist, in his holster, with two additional cartridges.”
“But Sunny and Eric told me that Walter gave Jesse the murder weapon,” I say.
“Why would Rhodes give Tafero the murder weapon?” Satz asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s simply good manners to offer your hostage a gun.”
“Hostage?” Satz says.
“They’ve all said they were hostages.”
“They all said they were hostages of each other?” Satz says. Disbelieving.
I’ve had a thought about that, and now I might as well run it past him.
“But it seems to me they were all acting in concert up right until they hit the roadblock.”
“Yes, I agree with that,” Satz says.
Bonnie and Clyde, and Clyde’s excitable friend.
To the death!
The cocaine, the guns, the UFOs, Jimmy Hoffa, the amphetamines and Thorazine and Quaaludes and the swapped-for beat-up Camaro, the stolen passports and licenses in the attaché case and the rubber mask with the wig in the Camaro’s trunk, the hatchet behind the driver’s seat, the bayonet, the KTW Teflon-coated bullets, the Taser, one dart, three bullet casings, two small brown paper bags. Half past seven in the morning.
All this sorrow.
“Truth and lies matter,” I say to Satz.
“Of course they do,” the prosecutor replies. Instantly.
* * *
•
“Just so you know, this office did not have to give you those records,” McCann says, as we stand up and start to walk out of the office.
“Really?” I assume she’s joking.
Later, when I realize this is for real—there is indeed a statutory exemption for investigative materials received by a state law enforcement agency prior to January 25, 1979—I will think of all the phone calls, all the messages, all the silences, all the back-and-forth, all the documents. I will think of the two separate weeks I spent in their library, once to see the state attorney’s files and then a second time to review LaGraves’s investigative files, the coffee machine behind me slow-toasting that roast all afternoon. The many, many times I acted like they had to kiss my ass on this one, the utter imperiousness with which I marched around and demanded to see things. And the immense amount of information in the records: all the rest-stop interviews, the roadblock interviews, LaGraves’s notes and files, the audiotapes, the autopsy reports, the ballistics, the Addis family. The dummies. It will hit me with a force so strong it feels like falling backwards: I almost had to take the word of Walter Rhodes on this. Or Sunny Jacobs. Or the Internet, for God’s sake.
I would have had to live with the ghost for the rest of my life.
29
The Truth
The road I take out of Fort Lauderdale after the interview is the same route they drove that morning. North on Interstate 95, west along the parking lot where they kidnapped Leonard Levinson, then north again past the roadblock where they crashed the Cadillac and onward, out across the sugarcane. Green grass, storm light, white birds flying low. I get to the cemetery at five minutes past four o’clock.
Two pillars mark the entrance, here in the small town where Trooper Black grew up. A narrow drive leads up to a circle, and from there, paths radiate outward, patched and torn. The afternoon has turned cloudy and very hot, with the pale lemon glow of coming rain. The trees overhead are completely still, no breeze or breath in the heavy air. I am here to pay my respects to Phillip Black, who has now been beneath the earth here almost exactly as long as he was alive. Fourteen thousand, four hundred, and sixty-seven days.
Up the faded pavement of the central drive, I see a small building that looks like an office. It’s closed. There’s a paper posted on a bulletin board outside, and I get out of my rental car, hoping it is a map. It’s a notice about flowers. I know from the Internet that I am looking for a gray granite headstone near an evergreen shrub. So now I stand for a moment and look out. This cemetery is nearly a hundred years old. Rows upon rows of graves, as far as I can see. From here, every headstone is gray granite, every shrub is evergreen.
No matter, I think. I can find him.
I start in my car, making my way slowly along the widest paths, and then along the narrower ones, and then along the narrowest ones. Finally I get out and walk.
The grass is wet. It soaks through my canvas shoes. The light is fading around me as the rainstorm moves in. Why did I not call ahead? I should have known the office here would close early. Why did I stop for gas? Maybe his grave is in the older section of the cemetery, under the huge live oaks weeping Spanish moss. No one else is here, there’s no birdsong or wind in the trees, just all these graves. I f
eel a gathering sense of—no. It’s the inner voice I’ve always promised myself I will listen to. It is speaking now.
No, this is not for you, no, this is private, no.
In one instant I decide to leave.
Phillip Black needs to rest in peace, I think, as I drive back down the main path and out onto the county road. He needs his privacy. It’s not my place to give any kind of remembrance, I think. Or hallowing. One of the saddest parts of this tragedy is how he and Donald Irwin have gotten lost in it. No wonder I cannot find him now.
Outside the cemetery walls, I get turned around. I’m trying to get to the town where my hotel is, but now for the life of me I do not understand the route on my map app. That never happens. Where am I? I start to head off, but I only get a little bit away when I decide that actually I can’t leave here without paying my respects. I turn the car around.
The exit off State Road 60 in this direction has a big sign with the words avon park on it—the name of the prison where I first went to talk to Walter all those years ago—and the ramp leads right to the cemetery. I am starting up the center drive again when I stop.
I have been searching for the truth of this case for nearly a year. I’ve traveled across three oceans and three continents, to Florida and Ireland and Australia. I’ve been trying to get as close as I can to the instant those gunshots rang out. I’ve been trying to understand exactly what happened. For the last twenty-five years, I’ve been obsessed with knowing the truth. And all along, I see now, the bigger truth was here. Somewhere between the patched and cracked pathways of the cemetery, beneath this lowering sky. I can feel it. A wrenching despair.
Murder.
Phillip Black’s life was stolen from him. That is the truth of what happened that morning. No amount of going to or through the past will ever make that right, or bring light to it, or bring him back. A beloved husband and father was gunned down in the morning mist. After that morning, Phil Black never took his little boy fishing. He never called home during his shift to say a quick hello to his wife. He never stopped on the side of the road to help a stranded motorist, or checked on a rest area after a cold winter’s night. Donald Irwin’s life was stolen too. For both men, for their families, for their friends, the joys they would have had, the days they would have shared—all that light stolen away, buried in a field of graves.
And that part of the story is not mine. The heartache part, the wrenching part. The truest part. The dark birds came and bore them across. That will always have happened and can never be changed. It is the darkness at the center of this story.
The violence. The sorrow. The loss.
30
The Heat
The phone number is online, on a website for Jack Murphy’s prison ministry, Sonshine Adventures. “To inspire those imprisoned behind bars and those imprisoned with personal limitations to Believe a Man Can Change!” I dial it one afternoon in late December, just before the end of the year.
The day after my trip to the cemetery, I’d stopped by Jack Murphy’s house in Florida, but he wasn’t home. A big American flag at the cobwebbed front door, and a rusted Hello Kitty umbrella. Patchy grass, scattered sand, peeling paint. Not what I’d expected from the glamorous playboy portrayed in Vanity Fair.
“Jack Murphy?” I say now, into the phone.
“Yes.” Deep voice. Southern accent. Not friendly.
“I’m writing a book about Jesse Tafero.”
“Who?”
“Jesse Tafero.”
He does not respond.
“I saw online that you know the man who really killed the officers,” I say.
“What is your connection to this?”
“I witnessed Jesse’s execution.”
A bit of a pause, again.
“That was a tough one,” Jack Murphy says.
“Were you there? I wasn’t able to tell from what I read if you were there or not.”
“No, I was in Boston, praying for him, and my wife was on the phone with Jesse’s mother the whole time.”
“Oh, Kay, I’ve heard she was lovely.” Thinking of how Marianne Cook described Kay, at the start of this year. “A real lady.”
“Yes, she was.”
“So I read that you testified in front of the Florida Parole Commission that you knew the real killer in the Tafero case.”
“Yes, I did.”
And that is how we get to talking.
* * *
•
Jack Murphy. It seems like every time I’ve dug into anything to do with Jesse Tafero and Walter Rhodes, there he is. Murph the Surf. The star of Miami Beach diving shows, a dazzling beach boy with a brilliant mind and a taste for daring adventure. The cat burglar who stole a legendary sapphire, a flawless ruby, and one of the largest diamonds ever mined in North America. The debonair jewel thief who charmed the press after his arrest. The murderer convicted of killing two young women at Whiskey Creek. The prison preacher who found God and won his freedom. “A stand-up guy,” according to Sunny Jacobs.
The lynchpin to Walter’s confessions.
Even though I feel certain that Jesse Tafero murdered Trooper Phillip Black and Constable Donald Irwin, I still care about the confessions. I care about them for the same reason I’ve always cared: Because in this capital murder case, a person other than the man who went to the electric chair confessed to the crime. I care because no matter what the other evidence points to, the fact of the confessions remains—and a confession can seem like the ultimate proof. The smoking gun. I care because the words before my Creator had me so convinced at one point that I tracked down the fugitive Walter Rhodes in the far north woods, a reckless journey that I have long regretted. I care because the confessions have always been the crux of the case against Walter Rhodes. I care because Walter confessed. He confessed.
Is there something I’ve missed? As I said, this has never been a guessing game for me. I need to know for sure.
From 1977 until 1982, Walter Rhodes was reported to have confessed at least four times. And it seems to me now that every one of those confessions was linked—directly or indirectly—to Jack Murphy.
In 1977, not quite a year after Jesse’s trial, two inmates said Walter confessed to them while in line at a prison amputee clinic. Those inmates went to Murphy for advice, and he helped one of them type up a sworn affidavit for prison officials.
In November 1979, Walter signed another confession. It’s the one quoted in The Exonerated. Three of Walter’s fellow inmates witnessed that confession, and one of those inmates later told LaGraves that he’d heard there was a contract out on Walter’s head. Specifically, he’d heard about the contract on Walter from Jack Griffith—Murphy’s partner in the Whiskey Creek murders.
In 1982, Walter confessed two more times. One was a typewritten and tape-recorded statement he sent to a Jacksonville newspaper. The other was a forty-eight-page sworn statement taken under oath in deposition by an attorney representing Jesse Tafero. In both those confessions, Walter said he murdered the officers from a position at the driver’s-side door of the Camaro. Where Jesse was standing. And he told LaGraves, later, that he’d drawn up that new version with Murphy’s advice.
* * *
•
“It just always was a very, very uncomfortable situation,” Jack Murphy begins, about Jesse Tafero and Walter Rhodes. “I knew them well,” he says. Jesse and Rusty, as he calls them.
Jesse was a “neat guy,” Murphy remembers. He first met Jesse at Jesse’s 1967 trial on home-invasion, sexual-assault, and robbery charges. Murphy’s attorney represented Jesse’s codefendant in the case, and one day Murphy stopped into the courtroom to say hello. “The dialogue was something out of a triple-X-rated Saturday Night Live routine.” Murphy laughs.
Walter was a neat guy, too, at least at first. In the early 1970s, before the murders, Murphy and Walter and Jesse a
ll hung out in prison together. Murphy and Rusty played in a band together, and Murphy and Jesse took karate. Good times, from what Murphy says.
But then Jesse and Rusty got out, met up again, woke up that morning in the rest area, and came back.
“Rusty, from the trauma he went through, he was like a dog that had been hit by a car—he was living a life of fear.” And because “Rusty”—Walter—had testified against Jesse and Sunny, when he came back to prison after the murders “he was never really comfortable around my crowd.” So Murphy kept tabs on him.
“My friends would meet Rusty where he was and they would talk to him,” Murphy says. “They’d say, ‘I want to ask you these specific questions,’ and then they would tell me what he said. Rusty went from prison to prison, he kept getting beat up, getting in trouble in different places, because of Jesse.”
Murphy and Jesse, on the other hand, stayed friends. Even when Jesse was on death row.
“I had some serious meetings with Jesse in the back of the building of death row—they would bring me back up there at eleven o’clock, I’d have to sign up that I wanted to see Jesse, that I was working on his law case. We’d sit in the corner of this long skinny room and there was a stack of law books in the corner. We worked on Jesse’s case. We worked on Sonia’s case. We’d go back there and visit. We knew a ton of the same people in Miami.”
People in the Cravero gang, for one. A top Cravero associate—a drug dealer who was a defendant in the Stanley Harris murder trial—was a defendant along with Murphy in a criminal securities case connected to the Whiskey Creek murders. But that’s not what Murphy is reminiscing about now. He’s keeping it light. Murph’s gal and Jesse’s high school girlfriend—“a hot chick, intelligent, with Woodstock written all over her”—used to drive up together from Miami to visit him and Jesse in prison, Murphy is saying. John Clarence Cook, Marianne’s husband—“one of the great incredible jewel thieves”—visited too. Had special permission for the visit, even.
Two Truths and a Lie Page 33
