Over the course of a year, my search stripped me of my illusions, forced me to recognize my own mistakes, reawakened my worst memories, and humbled me in failure. I lived with shame, doubt, fear, and silence. And I kept waking up into Q-Wing, directly into the flames and smoke. All of it, alive. The price of a lie.
In paying that price, I have not been alone.
When I first decided to try to solve this mystery, I did not know if anyone would talk to me. I was afraid it would be a burden to even ask. But on doorstep after doorstep, I only had to say that I was looking into two murders, hoping to find the truth of what really happened, and the person I was talking to finished my sentence for me. Trooper Black. Constable Irwin. Jesse Tafero. It was a solace to find out that this secret language I’d been carrying, a language of doubt and pain and sorrow, was a language many other people spoke as well. Two-, four-, six-hour conversations. Communication. Connection. For so long I’d thought I was crazy to care. All that time, others were watching and wondering too.
That was a revelation. I am grateful. It made me realize the power of truth. We needed—all of us caught up in this case—to know for sure. To stop wondering. To find peace. But my long journey also made me realize the power of myth. Everyone I talked to in my year of traveling has been available all along for interviews. I don’t have magic powers. All I do is knock, ask, and listen. And it’s no secret that the Internet is not a permanent, accurate record. It’s a mirror. We know that. But it has not mattered. The myth of Jesse’s and Sunny’s innocence has an allure that keeps it alive.
In January 2019, seven years after I first read about Sunny’s wedding in The New York Times, nearly four years after I found my way to her kitchen table and asked her to please just tell me the truth about the man I saw die, after I confronted her about the bullet hole in the police car and the Taser, after she herself told me actually, yes, Jesse Tafero might have been guilty, she gave another interview to the paper’s wedding reporter, repeating exactly the same story that had ignited my long and painful search.
“The greatest tool is forgiveness,” Sunny told the Times this time around, the article illustrated by a full-color photograph of her smiling sweetly, up toward the sky. “If you hold on to that anger and resentment, then there’s no room for happiness and love in your heart, and you start destroying your own life.” The article made sure to mention that Sunny was a vegetarian hippie when she was arrested, and that “Mr. Rhodes eventually confessed.”
The myth lives on, the foolproof brainwashing of merciless repetition, no matter how many cold hard facts out in the real world contradict it, no matter how absurd it might be.
Because it is absurd. A young, wealthy, attractive, sophisticated, well-connected white woman who caught a ride from the wrong person and ended up on death row through absolutely no fault of her own—she didn’t even see what happened!—and then was saved by a documentary filmmaker who was also her best friend from childhood. An exonerated woman who now lives in Ireland, where she practices yoga and forgiveness. Life turned out beautifully. That is what Sunny told The Guardian in 2013.
Maybe life has turned out beautifully for Sunny Jacobs. But the myth has nothing to do with the tragedy of two young fathers gunned down at a rest stop in the Florida mist.
Or with the bleakest realities of the American justice system.
The summer I first testified in hearings about the electric chair—in 1997, one year after I started working as a private detective—I heard about another man on death row who might be innocent. He’d been convicted of killing a police officer, but there was someone else in prison who was confessing to his crime. Those case facts sounded familiar, but this man was from Jacksonville, not Miami. His name was Leo Alexander Jones.
Leo Jones was a Black longshoreman and drug dealer. One night in May 1981, police officer Thomas Szafranski was murdered across the street from Leo’s apartment in Jacksonville. Within minutes, police were storming Leo’s building. Police kicked in Leo’s door, dragged Leo and his cousin out of their beds, and beat them. The beating was not a secret. The police did not deny it. They said they had been forced by necessity to beat Leo Jones because he was “resisting arrest.” Police took Leo downtown, interrogated him, took him to the hospital for skull X-rays and treatment of head and facial wounds that included blood trickling from his ear, bruises on his head, and a busted lip, took him back to the police station, and continued the interrogation. After eleven hours in police custody, and without being allowed to see his lawyer—who was there at the station house, searching for him—Leo signed a two-sentence confession, stating that he had used “a gun or rifle” to murder Szafranski. Leo immediately recanted the confession, saying that he’d signed it only because he was in fear for his life, but it was too late. No physical evidence linked Leo Jones to the murder of Thomas Szafranski, but on the basis of his confession Leo went to trial and was convicted, and the conviction stuck even after another man started bragging about having committed the crime. That man’s name was Glenn Schofield. He was a widely feared drug dealer, rumored to be a police informant, and he was known to have been in Leo’s apartment earlier that evening. But when questioned, Glenn said he was with his friend Shorty that evening. No, he did not remember Shorty’s real name.
Over the next decade, the police officers who had obtained Leo’s confession resigned amid allegations of brutality—one after beating a woman with his police flashlight, the other accused of arranging a contract murder—and nearly two dozen new witnesses came forward with information linking Glenn Schofield to the murder. Witnesses who swore Schofield confessed to them behind bars. Witnesses who saw Schofield running away from the crime scene that night with a rifle. A Jacksonville policeman broke the code to testify that at roll call the morning after the murder, one of the officers who had arrested Leo bragged about “beating him and beating him and beating him.” All that time, Leo’s lawyers and investigators searched for Shorty, the alibi witness. Finally, in April 1997, they found him. Roy “Shorty” Williams. Shorty said yes indeed, he was with Glenn Schofield that night. And that night, Shorty said, he personally witnessed Glenn Schofield kneel in a vacant lot beside Leo’s apartment building, level his rifle, and fire the shot that took Officer Szafranski’s life.
In the summer of 1997, my friend Freya and I went to investigate. We spent a week going door-to-door in Jacksonville—in an old neighborhood underneath a highway, a cast-off world of broken windows, nailed-shut doors, and tall weeds—talking to people about Leo Jones and Glenn Schofield. We talked to Leo’s defense team, the police, and the prosecutor. And we talked to Shorty. Shorty told us: “I saw Glenn Schofield shoot the police officer.”
But Shorty was uneducated and unsophisticated and impoverished, and his word did not sway the courts. The news stories written about Leo’s case—including mine and Freya’s, in The Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine—never caught on. Nobody was interested in Leo Jones. Just another ghetto drug dealer on death row. Leo Jones was the inmate who brought the suit against the State of Florida after its electric chair caught fire. The state responded by making Leo sit through a dry run of his own execution, to show him that the chair was indeed working. And in March 1998, Leo Jones went to the electric chair and died.
When I was in Florida talking to people about Jesse and Sunny and Walter, I took an afternoon off to meet with Leo Jones’s lawyer again. It had been nearly twenty years since I last saw Martin McClain. We went out to a bar for lunch, as I had with Jesse Tafero’s attorney. But McClain did not kick back in his chair and laugh about his client’s case all these years later, as Jesse’s attorney had. McClain did not tell me that his old client was guilty. When I brought up Leo Jones’s name, McClain went pale and looked stricken. And then, as we talked about Leo Jones in that crowded bar, thronged with sunburned tourists on their second margarita of the afternoon, Martin McClain covered his face with his hands and wept.
*
* *
•
Americans know that the foundation of our justice system, and our society, is the principle of equality under the law. We also know that inequality and injustice and racism continue to be tragic realities in our country. The appeal of the Ballad of Jesse and Sunny and Walter is that it takes the unconscionable atrocities that haunt our judicial system and turns them into a sentimental story with a feel-good ending. It’s a story that is notably absent of any meaningful mention of its victims, Phillip A. Black and Donald Robert Irwin. It’s a story that glosses over the intransigencies, the heartbreak, and the shattering violence of what a death penalty case actually involves. And it’s a story that, in the end, evades the difficult questions around capital punishment.
In the years that I worked on this book, I came to despise Jesse Tafero. A killer, a rapist, a liar, with his cold eyes and his cowardice, he was a dangerous and selfish and guilty man.
But I still ended up uneasy about his case.
Innocence is the star around which our discussion of capital punishment now orbits. But Jesse Tafero was not innocent. He was a murderer. Does it matter, then, that the prosecution’s key witness at trial testified to things he did not actually see? Is it okay that this key witness told his own attorney a version of events that contradicted his trial testimony? Should a police captain have been allowed to feed this key witness a mixture of facts and lies about the case, rehashing his memories as new evidence came in? Is it acceptable that the prosecution withheld from Jesse Tafero’s defense lawyers the damning—to use the appeals court’s own language—polygraph report that undermined what this witness told the jury? Is it a concern that Jesse Tafero’s primary defense lawyer did not call any witnesses on his behalf and was a few years later disbarred? And is it troubling that after the trial, the key prosecution witness was caught pretending to be a spaceman imprisoned in the Florida system? That incident involved the bilking of an elderly pen pal and an inquiry by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and it resulted in a finding of conspiracy to defraud against Walter Rhodes years before the first death warrant was signed against Jesse Tafero. Plenty of time for the State of Florida to have second thoughts about the integrity of the conviction. But the reckoning never happened. The execution went forward anyway.
Some people say—they’ve said it to me—that Jesse Tafero deserved to die as he did. On fire in the electric chair. But I have spent half my life thinking about him and his crimes and his death, entangled in a tragic mystery of guilt and innocence, and I come now, finally, to bear witness. That morning at Starke, I witnessed a guilty man in an electric chair and, at six minutes past seven o’clock, an act of infinite cruelty. And I say we need to be better than that.
* * *
•
Still, I have realized something good in all of this. There was a door in the back of my world that blew open all those years ago, a door that let the night wind in. And now I have found that door and pulled it closed. That is what finally sorting truth from lies feels like. What owning up to myself and my own mistakes feels like. It feels like the start of something brand-new. Freedom.
One morning, on the beach near our house in Michigan, I say that out loud to Peter.
It’s a wild and windswept place, this beach, an arc of blue lake water and silver dunes shimmering north as far as it is possible to see. For such a long time, even out here, I felt the shadow. Now it’s gone.
“Already it all seems so long ago,” I tell him. “Thank you.”
“Anytime,” Peter says.
And he reaches over to put his hand in mine.
For Peter
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my agent, Mollie Glick, for her unshakeable faith in this story and for everything she has done over many years to bring it to life. I’ve had lightning in my corner.
It has also been my extraordinary good fortune to have had a home at Random House while working on this book. To everyone whose desk these pages passed across, I give my thanks. In particular, thank you to David Ebershoff for saying yes to my quest and, with genius and generosity, helping it take shape. I am so grateful to Andy Ward for his steady patience and for the gift of time; to Tom Perry for inspiring me to do better; and to Robin Desser for kind encouragement. I am grateful too to Andrea Walker and Anna Pitoniak, for their hard work on my behalf, their commitment and creativity, and their editorial expertise. Many thanks to Carlos Beltran and Jo Anne Metsch for their beautiful designs, Deborah Dwyer and Loren Noveck for their exacting and thoughtful copyediting and production work, and Rachel Rokicki and Katie Tull for their enthusiasm, advocacy, and support. Thank you too to Matthew Martin for his meticulous review. And I am deeply indebted to Clio Seraphim, who helped me find this story’s true heart.
For his friendship and advice I thank Mitch Langberg, whose wise insights and honest opinions greatly improved these pages. I am lucky to know Jacqueline Tully, who welcomed me years ago into her cool group of women investigators and has been generous ever since with both assistance and camaraderie; I am grateful to her and to Nancy Pemberton for sharing their deep knowledge of the death penalty. Sue Carswell was a valued ally; her steely precision made these pages shine. I am thankful for the inspiration and fellowship of Jane Moss and Kath Morgan at The Writing Retreat in Cornwall. And my teacher Tom Parker’s voice is always with me.
I am grateful to Martin McClain for talking with me again about Leo Jones. And without the decision of the Broward County State Attorney’s Office to grant me access to their case files, I could not have written this book. Thank you.
All along I have relied on my excellent friends. I am grateful to Carol Anshaw, Jason Friedman, Kim Lile, Jane Moss, Sharyn Saslafsky, and John Sullivan for their astute comments on early drafts. Jean Bahle, Julia Barrie, Larry Block, Jesse Ewing, Jeffrey Friedman, Bill Gleave, Tim Kingston, Edward Kiszenia, Robert McDonald, Max Moses, Chuck Prestidge, Rob Rebigea, Darren Reynolds, Kari Richardson, Christine Stroyan, Kevin VandenBergh, and Alan Williams asked, listened, advised, endured, and made me laugh. Thank you to my Lorrimar friends and neighbors for all the good cheer. To Lynn Stubbs and Karen Williams, I offer my heartfelt gratitude for guidance and healing. You have shown me the bright world.
As I worked to understand the tragedy at the center of this story, I came to imagine all of us who’d been caught up in it as ripples on a pond, overlapping, extending outward from the central pain. It has been my profound privilege to meet and speak with so many people, from all different parts of the story we share. With some of you I had brief conversations; with others, we spent hours together. Some of your names appear here, but many do not, else this book would have been one thousand pages long. I thank every single one of you now. For opening your doors to this stranger, for taking the time to talk, and for listening too. In sharing your stories you have helped me reclaim my days, and that means much more to me than I can say.
In particular, I thank Grace and Christian Black for their kindness in talking with me.
To my family: You are all amazing and you inspire me every day.
And to Peter: Thank you for our life. I love you so much.
About the Author
Ellen McGarrahan worked for a decade as an investigative reporter at newspapers in New York City, Miami, and San Francisco before accidentally finding her calling as a private detective.
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Two Truths and a Lie Page 35
