* * *
•
“Jack Murphy?” LaGraves is saying now. “Jack Murphy and I go way back.”
Jack Murphy was the first case LaGraves investigated for the Broward State Attorney’s Office, he tells me. It wasn’t a far-out cat-burglar jewel heist. It was a vicious double murder.
In 1968, Jack Murphy and a man named Jack Griffith were charged with killing two young women and tossing their bodies into a shallow backwater near Miami called Whiskey Creek. At the time, Murphy was a big part of the North Bay Village scene, LaGraves says. The Jilly’s/go-go dancing/Frank Sinatra scene. The victims were two “swinging young secretaries” who stole half a million dollars’ worth of securities from the brokerage house where they worked and ended up in a dispute with the two Jacks about the loot, according to news accounts of the trial. That’s when Murphy and Griffith invited the women on a boat ride. “They gutted them, sliced their bellies, and then tossed them overboard,” LaGraves says. “They ripped the wires out of the boat and used the wires to tie concrete blocks to them.”
Carol interrupts. “Well, and wasn’t one of them giving him a blow job when they killed her?”
LaGraves looks at her, and then at me.
“Yes,” he says, like this was not an absolutely necessary detail to be discussing.
Both Jacks were convicted of murder, and in 1969 they both went to prison—Murphy sentenced to life plus twenty years.
Fast-forward to 1977, one year after Jesse’s trial. Two prison inmates came forward to say they had heard Walter Rhodes at a prison amputee clinic confessing to the murders of Trooper Black and Constable Irwin. LaGraves investigated, and interviewed the inmates on tape. The two inmates swore to LaGraves that Walter had indeed confessed, and one inmate gave a very detailed statement about Walter’s confession. LaGraves asked him if anyone had helped him prepare that statement. The inmate said yes. Jack Murphy.
“But why would Jack Murphy get involved in Jesse Tafero’s case?” I ask LaGraves.
Because Jack Murphy loves the limelight, LaGraves replies.
The Whiskey Creek murders cast a pall over Murph’s image, but not for long. Murph found God behind bars, served seventeen years, and in 1986 was released amid front-page fanfare from prison. Murph announced his reentry to society with a press conference in a chapel, standing at a pulpit lit with seven candles and proclaiming the Lord as the “master of my life.” In 2014 a Vanity Fair story titled “The 50th Anniversary of New York’s Most Sensational Jewel Heist” celebrated Jack Roland Murphy as a beach boy, a playboy, a compelling prison evangelist, and fascinatingly intelligent outlaw—a truly original man.
“Jack Murphy is a really bad guy,” LaGraves tells me. “But he’s a bad guy with a lot of class.”
To Jesse and Sunny, though, Murphy was a beacon of hope. In her book, Sunny wrote: “Jack Murphy, better known as Murph the Surf, was the chaplain’s clerk, a born-again ex-jewel thief who had done a lot of time and was well respected as a ‘stand-up’ guy.”
When those two inmates told Jack Murphy that Walter had confessed to the murders, Sunny wrote, “he advised them to do the right thing. They went to the authorities.”
But the courts let the death sentences stand.
* * *
•
There was a case LaGraves worked on years ago, he’s telling me now. Two girls whose car broke down. Two guys came by, said, We’ll give you a ride to a gas station so you can call for help. The girls were like, No, that’s okay, we’ll stay here. But the guys kept on and finally one of the girls said, Fine, sure, okay, I’ll go. Her friend stayed with the car. The guys did not take the girl to a gas station. They took her down to an abandoned house on the beach and they raped her and beat her until she died.
LaGraves has seen a couple of executions, and they didn’t bother him at all. Just one less evil person in the world walking around to worry about.
“There truly is evil,” LaGraves says. “Evil does exist.”
I want to agree with him, because it seems so easy. That clear-cut delineation. The thing is, I was totally in favor of the death penalty until I witnessed Jesse Tafero’s execution. Then I was totally against it. And then the daughter of a friend was murdered and I realized that I might be a novice, actually, about grief. About its requirements, what it asks of you, what it takes. But evil? I think if you go with that explanation, you’re heading toward vengeance, not justice. It’s justice that interests me.
* * *
•
“I just thought they’d have more proof,” I tell Peter at dinner. About Walter Rhodes, in particular. “I believed he believed what he was saying—what does that even mean?”
Around us the restaurant is filled with partying Canadians toasting the moon as it rises over the water. I watch them glumly. I need to talk to prosecutor Michael Satz, clearly. But his office is not returning my calls. And LaGraves told me that even if Satz does agree to an interview, I am not going to enjoy the experience. He and Carol laughed about that too.
“LaGraves called it quixotic, what I’m doing,” I tell Peter. “I had to look it up. Do you know what quixotic means? Extremely idealistic. Unrealistic and impractical. So he doesn’t think it’s possible. Why would it be quixotic, to want to know exactly who killed whom that morning?”
I realize, with a burst of panic, that I did not ask LaGraves a crucial question. So right there in the middle of dinner, I rush downstairs onto the beach and out onto a dock, shouting into my phone.
“Why don’t the testimonies of Rhodes and the truck drivers match?” I ask LaGraves.
“Why? I don’t know why.”
“Okay, let me rephrase that. What was the effect on your case of the testimonies not matching?”
“You know those paintings, what are they called, that are made of little dots,” LaGraves says.
“Pointillist?”
“Yes, pointillist. It’s like that. Or pixels. Just because a few pixels are missing doesn’t mean you can’t see the whole picture.”
We hang up, and I walk out to the end of the dock, the sea indigo around me with the night. I think over what LaGraves has just said. Pixels: Rhodes, hands in air, truck drivers, shots from backseat, Taser dart, Tafero with murder weapon. Maybe they’ve never really known for sure. I can’t help but think that now. Maybe they simply ballparked it and got a jury to convict. Then when the star witness recanted his trial testimony and confessed to the murders himself, their trusted investigator got him on tape, taking it back. And too bad about that unsightly electric chair malfunction, but shit happens. The End.
You know what? No. That is just not good enough for me.
* * *
•
The next morning, on the way back up the Keys to Fort Lauderdale, Peter and I pull over at a fishing pier, a white concrete span over the aquamarine sea. We walk out. At the end of the pier, there is a gap—the sea, far below—and then, out in the open water, a remnant of the old overseas highway, the road that was here before the new one came through. The old road is a strip of two-lane blacktop with a thin yellow stripe down the middle and rusted metal railings on each side. It’s an island now, with weeds and trees growing up through its pavement and dust blowing off into the clear blue below. It looks like the past, this road that goes nowhere, that you have to leap over a gap to get to and from which you cannot easily return, a span from here to there in midair, crumbling down, so stunningly desolate—and lovely. So entirely in ruins.
10
Fifteen Miles, Seventeen Minutes
The summer after I first started working as a private detective, I found myself in a courtroom, testifying under oath about the way Jesse Tafero died.
“It was actually pretty intense,” I’m saying now, on the shaded patio of a sports bar in Coconut Creek, Florida. I’m with John Sutton, the lawyer who defended Jesse Tafero at trial in 1976. It’s a few days after
my visit with Walt LaGraves in the Keys.
It was 1997, I’m telling Sutton. Seven years after Jesse’s execution. I came home one day to find a letter on my doorstep from an attorney in Florida saying that the electric chair had malfunctioned again. Flames, smoke. The witnesses heard gurgling. The next inmate up for electrocution was suing the state, saying that the chair was cruel and unusual punishment. But his attorney was having trouble finding anyone to testify about what it looks like when a man catches fire on the state’s dime. I read the letter in the backyard of the house I was living in then, an old cottage in San Francisco. Fruit trees woven into a canopy overhead, blossoms in the springtime, then bitter fruit. I thought of what Sister Helen Prejean told me outside the prison that morning: Bear witness. So I went to Jacksonville and in a courtroom there I testified about Jesse Tafero’s death.
Q: When the electricity was turned on, were you able to hear that or how did you know it was turned on?
A: I knew—I could hear it. It was sort of a large sound, a humming sound, but also I saw Tafero kind of jump backwards in his chair and flames and smoke rose from the—underneath his headpiece.
After the hearing, the court ruled that the electric chair worked just fine. Then two years later the chair malfunctioned again. Blood, this time. Dripping from underneath the hood covering the condemned man’s face. Another lawsuit. I testified in that hearing too. One piece of evidence introduced: the leather strap that had been used to gag the condemned inmate. Tied so tight into his jaw that it had twisted his face into a deep-red bloody knot. Does this look like the strap that was used over Mr. Tafero’s mouth? the attorney asked me. Holding it up in his hand. Coming closer. I felt the room fall away. Once again, after the hearing, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the chair was good to go, but this time Justice Leander Shaw, in dissent, uploaded photographs of the blood-soaked dead man in the electric chair to the court’s website, where anyone could see them. In the uproar that followed, the Florida legislature quickly passed a law allowing for lethal injection instead.
After that second court ruling, I resigned from the detective’s firm, left the office in his mansion behind me, and went to work for a California state agency that defends death row inmates. I personally worked for condemned killers. That might have been what Walt and Carol were poking around at, with the Rush Limbaugh iced tea. Fair enough. But I only lasted six months. It was too wrenching. Because of the clients, yes. The doom of their impending executions. But because of their crimes too. Their vicious, violent, heartless, shocking crimes. I’d thought the electric chair hearings had given me a fiery determination to fight for equitable treatment under the law, but I was wrong. All they’d done was make everything about the death penalty too much to bear. For those six months, I went to work each day and investigated the excesses of human cruelty, and then I mostly went home and sat by myself. Every so often I’d go out on a bad date, or rather someone would go out on a bad date with me. My fault. I was living in a world where very terrible things happened, but I could not talk about it, so I had nothing whatsoever to say.
And then one day Freya called me to ask if I wanted to start a detective business with her. Not too long after that, I met Peter. Slowly, I began to find my way back.
Back here.
I’ve got a bad habit of staring at the ceiling when I think. I’m doing it now, here on the sports bar patio. I snap out of it to find Jesse Tafero’s trial attorney taking a sip of his iced tea, watching me.
“Well, I can tell that you’re not going to like what I have to say.” Sutton laughs. He has a soft voice, white hair, a freshly pressed white shirt, faded blue jeans, lively brown eyes. A big square of white gauze is taped to his forehead. I don’t ask.
“What are you going to say?” I ask him.
“Jesse Tafero was a killer,” Sutton tells me. Almost cheerfully. “He was a stone-cold killer.” Pause. “And Sunny? She sure wasn’t much to look at. I mean, how good in bed can someone be?”
Sutton kicks back in his chair and laughs again.
“Those two were so into Bonnie and Clyde,” he says. “They were fascinated by Bonnie and Clyde. They lived that movie.”
He drops his voice to a stage whisper. “Didn’t they watch it all the way to the end?”
* * *
•
I have found Sutton unexpectedly. Jesse’s primary attorney, Robert Staley McCain, died in 2002, but in reading the transcript for Jesse’s trial I noticed a quick reference to a young lawyer who was working with McCain on the case. At the time, John Sutton was fresh out of law school, a member of the Florida Bar for just one year. Now Sutton is telling me that getting the court appointment to represent Jesse was going to be a wonderful thing for him and McCain. That’s what they thought at the time. “We were going to be in the paper every single day, and that’s advertising you could never purchase.”
But that’s not how it worked out. The problem, Sutton says, was Jesse Tafero.
“The first time I met Jesse, he said to me, ‘If I wasn’t chained and handcuffed to a table and I thought I could get away with it, I’d kill you right now.’ Jesse was a bad guy—he was really a bad guy. That guy was scary as hell.”
There was never any question of Jesse testifying, Sutton is saying. “We couldn’t put Jesse on the stand, for Christ’s sake. He would have lied so much. He was not a smart man. He wasn’t one of the brilliant ones, he was one of the ballsy ones. They’d have eaten him alive.”
* * *
•
Jesse did not testify at his own trial in May 1976. But after he was convicted and sentenced to death, he testified for Sunny at her trial that July. And on the witness stand, under oath, Jesse Tafero told the jury that he had personally witnessed the murders of Phillip Black and Donald Irwin. His was a new version of events, one not offered at his own trial or in police reports. Jesse testified that while Constable Irwin was holding him down on the police cruiser, Jesse saw Walter Rhodes standing at the front of the Camaro with a pistol in his hand.
Attorney: What did he do with it, if anything?
Tafero: I saw a flash come from the muzzle of the pistol; and shortly, you know—this all happened in just a seconds period—I was being pushed back and forth on the hood of the car by the man that was holding me. […]
Attorney: Did you eventually get up off the hood?
Tafero: Yes, sir, after the shots had stopped. During the last couple of shots, the last couple of seconds, the man that was holding me went sort of tight, and then he just wasn’t there anymore.
On cross-examination, prosecutor Michael Satz asked Jesse to demonstrate exactly how Walter was holding the gun.
Satz: According to you, how was Rhodes holding that gun? Stand up and show us.
(Witness indicated.)
Satz: Down by his private parts?
Tafero: Yes, sir.
With Jesse’s testimony, I now have three possible scenarios to consider for the murders of Trooper Black and Constable Irwin. Scenario number one is the state’s case, which relied on Walter’s testimony to convince two juries that Sunny fired the first shots from the backseat of the Camaro and then Jesse grabbed the gun from her outside the car and continued firing. Scenario two was presented on television, on 20/20 in 1992 and in the made-for-TV docudrama In the Blink of an Eye in 1996. It contends that Walter Rhodes shot the officers from a position behind the Camaro, putting the bullet hole through the police car’s windshield post. But now there’s this new-to-me scenario, from Sunny’s trial, that Walter shot both officers from a position at the front of the Camaro. Eyewitness testimony from Jesse Tafero himself, spoken under oath in open court.
It’s confusing. But something even more basic is troubling me now.
You know the moment in a TV courtroom drama where the prosecution rests and the defense counsel rises to present the defendant’s side of the
case to the jury? That did not happen at Jesse’s trial. McCain and Sutton presented no evidence on Jesse’s behalf. No testimony, no witnesses, no physical evidence. Nothing. Not one word. In a capital murder trial. Zero. Then, after the jury convicted Jesse, Bob McCain—instead of presenting mitigating evidence for the court to consider to spare Jesse’s life—dressed himself in black as the Angel of Death, stood up in open court, and denounced the entire proceeding:
I will be very brief here today, in that I have consulted with Jessie [sic] Tafero and he feels very strongly that he did not receive a fair trial. He feels very strongly that this verdict was not fair, and he feels that to participate in the sentencing argument in any way, would be a charade. He will not beg for his life, nor mercy.
Three years later, Bob McCain was convicted of conspiring to sell more than one hundred pounds of marijuana and of attempting to bribe a witness in a federal drug case. He was sentenced to serve twelve years in prison and was disbarred.
“What about Bob?” I ask Sutton now, on the patio. The lunch crowd has thinned out and it’s just the two of us left. “Was he using cocaine during the trial?”
“He was certainly into it during the trial,” Sutton says. “It was a circus.”
But why didn’t you and McCain put up a defense? I ask.
Sutton leans forward. There’s something he needs me to understand.
Jesse refused to talk about what had happened at the rest area, Sutton says. Even under the attorney-client privilege, Jesse wouldn’t say anything. And Jesse would not say one word against Sunny.
“Jesse was under her spell. As a woman, you’ve got to be smart to get a man like him under your control. She didn’t think they’d get caught, and she thought that if they did get caught, they’d go out in a blaze of glory. That’s why it became such a disaster at the rest area—Sunny saw that cop getting too close to her man, so she was like, ‘I’ve got to kill him.’ ” Sutton pauses. “Women murderers are actually very rare. A woman who kills two strangers? Very, very rare.”
Two Truths and a Lie Page 13