Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  “And yeah, didn’t you and Jesse both know Jack Griffith?” I say.

  A pause.

  “Jack Griffith,” Murphy says slowly. “He was my fall partner on Whiskey Creek.”

  Murphy talks a little bit about Jack Griffith—“a tough guy”—and is just about wrapping it up with the sad news that his old running partner died in prison as I figure out how, exactly, I am going to ask my question. The question that is the reason for this call.

  “So I’ve read through the files on this case, and I read that Jack Griffith put the word out that there was a thirty- to forty-thousand-dollar price tag on Rhodes’s head,” I say. “Does that make sense to you?”

  “A price tag?” Jack Murphy says. Pause. “It does make sense. Those rumors were around. They probably weren’t from Jack Griffith, though. They were from me.”

  In my preparation for this phone call, I had not considered this possibility. And yet here he is, talking in an utterly matter-of-fact, reasonable tone.

  “Wherever Rusty was at, I put the heat on him,” Murphy says.

  * * *

  •

  There was heat, for sure.

  In May 1976, on the day Jesse was sentenced to death, a drug-dealing Cravero gang member named Marlene Hudson—one of Jesse’s main sources of cocaine—was caught on a police wiretap discussing the case. She called Walter “a motherfucking cocksucker” and swore: “I’m going to do everything in my power over that guy.”

  In September 1976, LaGraves wrote to the assistant superintendent of the state prison medical center, where Walter was incarcerated: “It has come to my attention and to the attention of other law enforcement personnel that threats have been made against Rhodes’s life. In most circumstances, threats of this nature can be labeled as ‘bluster’; however, it appears that Tafero and his associates have sufficient contacts, in prison and on the street, to lend credence and to present some cause for concern.”

  In February 1977, Walter wrote to LaGraves. “I must admit that I was afraid the entire time I was in the general population; I felt totally helpless, with no friends.” He found a knife under his pillow, and one morning a prison official got word “that I was to be killed” and locked him in a shower for his own protection.

  “There is a contract out on me in the event that I do not change my testimony,” Walter wrote again, in December 1977. “There has been money put up for this. The vibes are pretty bad. I know I’m in trouble and it’s just a matter of time before they get me.”

  An inmate “who knew Tafero on the streets informed me that there was ‘money out on me’ from the Crevaro click [sic],” Walter wrote, in May 1978. The letter specifically named the Cravero associate who was charged along with Jack Murphy—and Jack Griffith—with the theft of the securities in the Whiskey Creek case.

  “Rhodes’s life at this time is in imminent danger,” a prison inspector reported in November 1979.

  “I was told point-blank that if I didn’t play ball I’d be dead,” Walter told LaGraves in November 1979.

  * * *

  •

  And Murphy did more than just put heat on Walter. He personally obtained one of Walter’s confessions himself. He’s telling me about that right now.

  It’s 1982, Jesse’s been scheduled for a clemency hearing, and Walter has been transferred again, this time to Union Correctional Institution, the toughest prison in the system.

  “He landed at UCI and he came to see me in the chapel. He knew I was very hostile toward this whole situation and very pissed off at him,” Murphy is saying. Murphy had told Walter, “You need to fess up. I said, ‘I got to have this.’ He knew I had a very, very serious attitude about this. He said, ‘Let me come clean.’ ”

  So Murphy and Walter sat down for “three or four or five different sessions” to work on Walter’s confession, Murphy says. Murphy tape-recorded it, edited it to clear it up, and had diagrams drawn up. “It all fit in with the ballistics charges and everything,” Murphy tells me.

  Shortly after signing that confession, in 1982, Walter told LaGraves that the statement had been “well, well, well constructed” in conferences over “many hours” with Jack Murphy, in preparation for Jesse’s clemency hearing. The statement reworked his previous confessions and tied them all in together, Walter said.

  “He wrote up this thing…which we—I had to memorize, what have you, okay, then we made this tape,” Walter said. He called Murphy “the brains behind this whole thing.”

  “It’s gonna look like it makes a lot of sense,” Walter warned LaGraves.

  “Oh Jesus Christ, oh God, okay,” LaGraves said. “How on earth does Murphy have any contact with Jesse? You know, Murphy’s in population and Jesse’s in death row.”

  “Very easily done,” Walter replied.

  Not just inside the prison system, either. Outside too. Because in addition to their contacts behind bars, Murphy and Jesse communicated through Kay Tafero, Walter told LaGraves. “He calls Jesse’s mother and everything, man,” Walter said.

  The proper Welsh matron. A real lady. Such a perfect disguise.

  * * *

  •

  “How come?” I ask Murphy now, about the “heat” he put on Walter.

  “Because I wanted to see Rusty.” His tone makes the statement seem self-evident.

  “Why did you want to see him?”

  “So that I could sit down with him and ask him what happened and collaborate what Jesse had told me and to get a deposition that would free Jesse and exonerate Jesse.”

  Collaborate. Not corroborate, a different word entirely.

  * * *

  •

  After we hang up, I take another look at the Vanity Fair profile of Murphy. “The 50th Anniversary of New York’s Most Sensational Jewel Heist” was the headline. In addition to detailing Murphy’s glamorous past as a surfer and jewel thief, and detailing his pious present as a prison minister, the article dipped a toe into the case of Whiskey Creek.

  On that boat ride more than 40 years ago, Murphy says there were five passengers—the two girls, himself, Griffin [sic], and a mysterious guy named Rusty. Murphy claims that he was at the wheel when a contentious conversation broke out: “One of the girls said, if we don’t get our money we’re going to the FBI.” On December 8, 1967, the two women’s bikini-clad bodies were discovered submerged in the Whiskey Creek canal, weighed down with concrete blocks. They had been stabbed in the stomach and their skulls had been smashed. Murphy insists to me that the shadowy Rusty murdered the women.

  The article doesn’t name Walter Rhodes. And possibly Murphy has some other “mysterious guy named Rusty” to blame for the Whiskey Creek murders. But if it was Murphy’s intention to have Walter Rhodes take the rap for his double murder too, that’s interesting. Because in December 1967, Walter “Rusty” Rhodes was in the Maryland House of Corrections, under lock and key and far away from Whiskey Creek. He was seventeen years old and serving a thirty-month sentence for stealing a car. He was still five months away from being paroled, getting out, going on the lam, running away to Florida, stealing another car—and ending up in prison with Jesse Tafero, Jack Griffith, and Jack Murphy, where this story, this tragedy, would begin.

  * * *

  •

  I had asked Walter Rhodes about Jack Murphy, when I went to see him at Jackson Correctional Institution this summer.

  “Murphy is an ego-tripping manipulator, very likeable, personable,” Walter told me. Charismatic, a showboat, possibly a genius too. When Walter was at Florida State Prison the first time, in the late 1960s, he lived on the same prison wing as Murph, and back then the famous prison playboy had women visitors who brought him drugs, enough to get the whole wing “high as kites,” Walter has claimed. His first acid trip was in that prison cellblock, compliments of Murph, Walter said. He and Murph played in their prison rock band together,
they knew all the same people, were friends with all the same people. “He was fun to be around, witty, and friendly.” Later, after the murders, Murph used to stand on one leg to imitate Walter and his missing leg, and call Walter “Clem Kadiddlehopper,” after the simpleminded Red Skelton country bumpkin character.

  “I liked him,” Walter said to me. “I’ll tell you right now, I always did like him. He’s also a little scary.”

  “Did Jack Murphy think that you actually killed those officers?”

  “No, of course not. I don’t think there was any doubt in his mind. I think he knew Jesse did it. I don’t think he had any doubt about that.”

  So what were Murphy and Griffith trying to do with the recantations?

  “To get Jesse off death row. That was the objective,” Walter said.

  “Just off death row?”

  “Well, yeah. Because he knew he was going to be executed. I mean, you don’t kill two cops and not get executed in Florida.”

  I think for a minute.

  “But where did you fit into that equation?” I ask. “Because saying Tafero was innocent would mean—”

  “Well,” Walter said, cutting me off.

  It would mean Jesse’s friends, the prison in-crowd of drug thugs and karate masters and jewel thieves and lady-killers who used to be Walter’s friends too but who made fun of Walter now right to his face, who mocked him, threatened him—it meant these friends thought that if someone was to be electrocuted for the murders of Trooper Black and Constable Irwin, murders that Jesse Tafero committed, let it not be Jesse Tafero. Let it be Walter Rhodes instead.

  * * *

  •

  A couple of months after my visit with Walter, I get a letter from him. He slipped in the shower, the letter says, breaking the hydraulics on his artificial leg and smashing the bones in his left hand and arm. The prison has not yet taken him to a doctor, and in the meantime the bones have fused back together. Without his artificial leg, he cannot walk. He is now a one-armed, one-legged man in a wheelchair, bones knit together in a tangle on his hand, in a prison building with no screens on the windows and no air-conditioning. He has an appointment in a few weeks to see the prison doctor, who will rebreak his hand so it can mend.

  “I dread that,” the letter says.

  “Life is just a flash, and it is over.”

  Home

  Epilogue

  The Price of a Lie

  In the summer of 1993, I went to see a psychic. It was a classic California experience—wind chimes, bead curtains, sage-scented candles. A friend had some questions about her business that she wanted advice on, and I thought, Hey, I might as well run Jesse Tafero past this lady. Three years after the execution, I was still dreaming about it and I did not know why. Plenty of other reporters went to Q-Wing and then out for a beer with their buddies and left it behind, but here I was, stuck. In my tile work at the time, I was setting a lot of limestone—countertops, walls, floors—and I kept noticing the fossils, tiny living creatures embedded in the stone, frozen forever exactly as they were when disaster hit. I thought, That’s me.

  I’d been worried that the psychic would say something about past lives or karma, but all she did was close her eyes. Then she told me I was grieving.

  “Grieving?” I said.

  That had not occurred to me.

  I was about to write this off as some New Age bullshit when I realized she might be right. Maybe it was grief I felt whenever I thought of the morning at Starke. A desolate feeling. Bewildering. I hoped naming it would make it go away. But instead it grew more urgent as reports of Jesse Tafero’s innocence increased.

  * * *

  •

  On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of The Exonerated in 2012, an interview with Sunny Jacobs appeared in The New Yorker. She was about to start a one-week run starring as herself onstage.

  Q: How did you end up on death row and how did you get off of it?

  A: Simply put, I was in the wrong place with the wrong people at the wrong time. We had pulled off the interstate into a rest area—there was no crime going on. We were just resting. But the police came to do a routine check and the driver had a gun, and he was on parole. Having a gun is a violation of parole. In the end, the policemen were dead and the driver was ordering us into the police car with the gun still in his hand. At that point, we became hostages. My partner Jesse was seated in the front. The children, my nine-year-old son and ten-month-old daughter, and I were seated in the back. Ultimately, there was a roadblock, the car was fired upon by a cordon of police armed with rifles, and we crashed. We were all taken into custody. The man who did the shooting immediately requested a plea bargain and received three life sentences in exchange for his testimony against Jesse and me. Jesse’s trial took three or four days. He was convicted and sentenced to death. My trial took longer. I was a young mother and a hippie vegetarian type with no history of violence….After seventeen years, and [a] number of confessions by the killer—and the discovery of evidence that had been hidden—we won my appeal and I was released. But not before Jesse was executed, my parents died, and the children grew up as orphans.

  There it is, in one paragraph. The Ballad of Sunny and Jesse and Walter, slow and sad and so bittersweet.

  For twenty-five years, that ballad resounded around me. In magazines and newspapers and television shows and legal journals and spoken-word story hours and books and podcasts and onstage and online. Low and mournful, marking time, keeping score. Desolate. Bewildering. Finally it became unbearable, and I had to find out what was actually true.

  At that, I failed.

  I do not know exactly what happened at the rest stop that winter morning so many years ago. There are moments of the tragedy that remain a mystery to me.

  But there are a few things I can say for sure right now.

  Jesse Tafero was not innocent. On February 20, 1976, Jesse Tafero murdered Trooper Phillip Black and Constable Donald Irwin, and on May 4, 1990, he went to the electric chair for his crimes.

  Sunny Jacobs was not a hippie vegetarian in the wrong place at the wrong time. She and her violent drug-dealing rapist gangster boyfriend were living “the classic fugitive lifestyle…these individuals simply moved from place to place exchanging narcotics for whatever was available, and living from hand to mouth, day to day.” That is what the report of the pre-sentence investigation for Sunny said in August 1976, and now I believe it. I also believe Sunny set off the Taser shot that sparked the murders at the rest area. I think she fired it herself or she forced her little boy to—which, to me, is worse.

  And Walter Rhodes, star prosecution witness? At two capital trials, he took the witness stand, swore an oath to tell the truth, and shared a vivid tale of events that he now remembers differently—and admits he did not actually see. “You don’t always know who is telling you the truth and who is lying—especially in a situation like this. I guarantee you, there’s some people that can lie so good that you could not bust them.” That is what Walter told me when I interviewed him in prison before Jesse’s execution. It’s one thing he has said that I now know for sure to be true.

  But Walter Rhodes did not murder Trooper Black and Constable Irwin, despite what his confessions claimed. Walter’s confessions were the product of threats and duress, not the unburdening of a guilty soul. And while the confessions did not succeed in getting Jesse off death row, as Jesse and his friends clearly hoped they would, they did destroy Walter’s credibility as a witness. I believe those false confessions helped set Sunny free.

  During the winter of 2015, my laptop broke. I was in Florida at the time, talking to people about Jesse Tafero. Every time I touched my computer, I felt needles piercing my skin. I took it into the Apple store, and the nice Genius there told me there was voltage escaping from the machine. I went back to our bungalow and looked it up. Voltage is what keeps atoms connected togethe
r. The electric field. Without voltage, protons and electrons would float free. Two thousand volts in three jolts that morning. Maybe the molecules had gotten swapped around somehow, I thought, looking at the boxes of case papers in my office, the Polaroids from the court files, my notebooks, my notes. Maybe the mystery surrounding Jesse Tafero had literally become a part of me.

  But it had not. That’s something I know now too. It wasn’t fate, or voltage, or even grief that made Jesse Tafero my ghost.

  There’s an old party game called Two Truths and a Lie. Maybe you’ve played it. Someone stands up and says a few things about herself, the more outlandish the better. The trick is in guessing which parts are made up and which are true, and the goal of the game is to get you believing something that never happened. To mix fact and fantasy until no one can tell them apart. As played among friends over a few drinks, it’s harmless fun. But add an electric chair and put that game on the Internet, and there’s a price to be paid. Not by the storyteller. She’s living her fairy tale. By everyone else. The listeners. The families. The witnesses. I was trapped in that game for twenty-five years. I paid the price too.

  * * *

  •

  When I started to hear the tale—the myth—of the innocent man two years after Jesse Tafero’s execution, beginning with Sunny in tears on television, and first felt that dark slam of dread and grief, I thought it was just me being weak. Or obsessed. I did not yet understand the myth’s power. The incredible, intoxicating, madness-and-mayhem specter of an innocent in flames in the electric chair, how consuming that idea would turn out to be in the culture’s imagination, how prurient and alluring. How easily the myth would catch hold, how fast and how far it would fly. How consuming and painful it would be to live with. To not know. And to try to find out. That was painful too.