“I’m so sorry, but I wanted to introduce myself to you, and make sure you had this back,” I say, handing Grace the photo album that her son lent me. We are in the front courtyard of her waterside condominium; it’s sun-splashed and neatly swept, tidy, bright.
“This isn’t a good time,” Grace says, firmly. Small, slender, blond hair and blue eyes, Doris Day–pretty in a pink-and-gray Hawaiian shirt, blue capri pants, blue sandals, and sheer pink lipstick. She holds the photo album up against herself like a shield.
“Yes, of course,” I say. I offer my deepest condolences. “If you ever do feel that you want to talk to me—or if you have any questions about what I’m working on—please call me, anytime.”
She takes my card. She pauses, and asks me to wait a moment. She disappears into her house for a few minutes. Then she comes back to the door and invites me in.
Inside, the living room has a cathedral ceiling. Waves of light play across it, reflected from a canal just beyond the sliding glass doors. Grace remarried in the years after the murders, and her husband, frail, sits in an easy chair, recovering from a recent illness. He and I say hello, and then Grace shows me to her dining table and brings us both glasses of peach iced tea.
“I witnessed Jesse Tafero’s execution,” I begin.
“You told me that on the phone, yes.” Her eyes are on mine. Steady, still.
“There’s been—as I’m sure you know—quite a bit of discussion since then about his case, and whether he and Sonia Jacobs were guilty. What I’ve been working on is to try to find out what—what really happened that morning.”
I can’t bring myself to say it. Murder. Not here.
* * *
•
Phillip A. Black was born in Wheaton, Illinois, in March 1936, the youngest of three children. The family moved to Florida when he was three or four years old because his sister had asthma. His father and mother both died young of cancer, and after his dad died, Phil Black joined the Marines. Black went through boot camp and was posted to Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, where he was a member of a specialized unit made up of paratroopers and scuba divers. As part of his training, he learned to jump out of airplanes, deep-sea scuba dive, and survive in cold water. He was a Marine’s Marine, Grace says. “Lean and mean,” was what he used to joke.
Grace was from Canada, working at the San Clemente Inn, near Camp Pendleton. Phil Black’s sister was friends with one of the other women who worked at the inn—that’s how Phil and Grace met.
Not long afterwards, Phil injured his back parachuting and had to hang up his Marine uniform. He and Grace moved back to Florida in 1966, settling in Hialeah. Phil found a job as a salvage diver, but the money from diving came in only when there was work. A neighbor at the end of the street was a Florida Highway Patrol trooper and he encouraged Phil to join the force. So Phil signed up. His first assignment was in the Florida Keys.
“How did you like living there?” I ask Grace.
“Well, there’s a lot to do if you like to drink and fish,” she says, with a smile.
When their son, Christian, was born a few years later, Phil was so excited, Grace says. “My husband was the greatest father. He was just a really, really great father. He couldn’t wait for his little baby to be out walking so he could take him everywhere.”
In the summer of 1975, the Blacks went on vacation to Canada. While there, they happened across a terrible traffic accident. Phil Black got out to talk to the officer in charge, and at the end of the conversation, he invited the officer to look him up if he was ever in Florida. That next winter, the winter of 1976, the Canadian officer, Don Irwin, gave the Blacks a call. Don and his wife, Barbara, wanted to take them up on their offer. Could they come spend a week?
Sure thing, Phil Black said. The Blacks set up a camper in their backyard as a guest room, and Black got permission for Irwin to come with him on a couple of ride-alongs. Friday, February 20, 1976, was the last one, on the last day of the Irwins’ Florida vacation.
* * *
•
“It was about eight in the morning,” Grace says. “I was getting ready to go to work and to take my son to school when the phone rang. It was my pastor calling. Just as I was saying ‘Hello, Pastor, how are you,’ there was a knock on the door. My husband had sometimes called me late at night when he was on the night shift, and I always said, ‘Oh, honey, you scared me when I heard the phone ring,’ and he always told me, ‘No, Grace, you don’t have to worry about the phone. If anything happens to me, they’ll come to your door.’ I asked my pastor to hold on a moment, and I went and opened the door. A trooper was on the doorstep, and he said, ‘Mrs. Black, I need to take you to the hospital.’ Barbara Irwin was standing next to me, and I said, ‘That’s Mrs. Irwin, what about her?’ And the trooper said, ‘She needs to come too.’ ”
We sit for a moment, in silence.
“I’ve read that Sonia Linder has said that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Grace says, using the name that Sunny Jacobs was known by at the time of the trial. Grace is looking directly at me now. “But that is not true. Phil Black and Don Irwin were in the wrong place at the wrong time, to encounter them. Not the other way around.”
* * *
•
When Sunny’s conviction was overturned, Grace says, “It was tough, it was very tough. I thought they should have locked her up and thrown away the key.” The casings that police found in the Camaro—those are what convinced Grace Black that a gun was fired in the car. The truck driver eyewitnesses too.
About the constitutional claims that resulted in the reversal of the conviction, Grace says, “I guess if you look long enough, you’ll find something.” But the plea deal that let Sunny Jacobs out of prison was a guilty plea, which was the whole point, she says. “Hers was not an exoneration. It was a plea bargain for time served.”
The problem with retrying the case in 1992 was all the time that had passed, Grace says. Walter Rhodes had recanted, the truck drivers could not be found, and Leonard Levinson, the man whose Cadillac they carjacked, had died. “A lot of the people who had known a lot of the facts were not available for the second trial,” Grace says, and so the prosecutor “recommended that this was the way to go. The plea deal—which was why we went for it—was she would still be guilty, time served.”
But then Sunny went on television. “I don’t know how you can put a positive spin on criminal behavior, but people tend to believe stories when they’ve seen them on TV,” Grace says. “You get confused about who’s good and who’s bad.”
Phil Black was a gentleman, Grace tells me. He had chivalrous manners and he was a devoted father. When he looked into the Camaro and saw a woman sitting with her little baby, he would not have seen her as a threat. “That’s what tricked my husband,” Grace Black says. Grace believes shots came out of the back of that car, where Sonia Jacobs was sitting. “I never once felt that she was innocent.”
And what about Eric? There’s a document in the State Attorney’s Office’s files that mentions that they were going to charge Eric with murder, I tell her.
That is one of the things she has wondered about, Grace Black says.
She’d heard that Eric spat on the shoes of the officers at the roadblock, she says. So, yes, the possibility that Eric was involved has crossed her mind. Actually, now that she’s thinking about it, prosecutor Michael Satz might have mentioned something about the boy, just off the cuff. “He might have even just said, ‘We’re wondering about the boy in the car.’ ”
It’s the missing pixels again.
“I would like to know the exact truth of what happened as well,” Grace Black says. “If that is what you are trying to find out, you have my blessing.”
* * *
•
The next day, my last full day in Florida, I’m back in Room 407 at the Broward County courthouse. Evidence.
It’s the jacket. His jacket. The one Jesse Tafero was wearing at the rest area that morning. The jacket both truck drivers saw him in. It is smaller than I would have thought, a mid-1970s tan, yellowish, not brownish, and belted, with a lapel collar and buttons. Among the photographs police found in the attaché case were a Polaroid of Jesse in this jacket, wearing a fedora, machine gun in one hand and pistol in the other. And a Polaroid of Jesse in this jacket with a ski mask covering his entire head. Faceless, eyeless, on his back on a bed, machine gun brandished at the ceiling, pistol toward the wall.
It’s not a scheduled part of my visit, my hands on this garment. Dave just needs the jacket out of the way for a second while he puts a cloth down on the table. I hold the jacket with as little contact as I possibly can, just thumb and forefinger on each hand, all others extended far out of the way. And afterwards, I feel odd. I have now touched an object that Jesse Tafero touched. Something he wore. Not just any day, but that very day. Those very instants.
Next is the purse that Sunny had with her, the one holding her loaded .38 revolver. A designer monogram is on the purse’s clasp: Oleg Cassini. When officers confiscated this purse at the roadblock, they found documents from the glove box of Trooper Black’s cruiser inside. His FHP individual trooper inventory and a recall notice. The officer who drove Sunny and the children from the roadblock to the stationhouse told me that Sunny tried to insist on having the purse with her in the backseat of the car, but he’d refused. “If I’d given her the purse like she wanted, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now talking to you,” Lieutenant Gary Hill said.
Next: ammunition. Nine millimeters and thirty-eights and twenty-twos, rattling inside white paper boxes. Teflon-coated bullets too, the kind retrieved from the bodies of Irwin and Black. The Teflon coating is bright green. The box is marked “National Police Supply Company.” These bullets were known as “cop-killers” because they could pierce armored vests.
But it’s when I see the holster that I think, Oh, okay.
The case documents state that Jesse was arrested with the murder weapon strapped to his hip in a holster, and all along I’ve been picturing something basic off a gun shop shelf. But the item Dave puts in front of me is a fancy belt. It’s tan leather, handmade it looks like, with an ornate image of a woman in a lotus position as its centerpiece, dyed with reds and greens and blues. A hand-tooled yoga-lady lotus hippie holster, if such a thing can be said. A leather pouch for two ammo clips is threaded onto the belt, plus a pancake holster, secured with just one snap. Easy access. That’s interesting. But what really gets me is how personal it is. The handiwork on the leather, the details, the colors—this was his holster. That’s perfectly clear. And when the Cadillac came to a rest at the roadblock, Jesse Tafero stepped out of the car wearing this holster, with the just-fired murder weapon and a clip full of armor-piercing bullets for the gun.
I pause for a moment as the crime scene flashes before me once more. Three months ago, when I stood outside Walter Rhodes’s apartment building in the January sunshine of my first day here, I knew nothing about any of this. Piece by piece, the rest area has come to life. At its heart, detective work is a form of time travel. I have to be in two places at once. Now, in the present, with all my fears and flaws. And also then.
* * *
•
February 20, 1976. Just past seven o’clock in the morning. A beat-up green Camaro is parked in a rest area fifteen miles north of Fort Lauderdale on Interstate 95. Inside are an armed robber on parole; a fugitive convicted rapist and drug dealer; his girlfriend, a rich young woman with a history of drug dealing and a loaded gun in her purse; and her two children—a baby girl and a nine-year-old boy. In the car are five guns, a hatchet, a bayonet, and a Taser. Drugs: amphetamines, cocaine, Quaaludes, marijuana, hashish, glutethimide. Thorazine. Pentazocine. Cigarettes. Beer. The sun has risen but the day is new and the rest area is shrouded in fog.
Trooper Phillip Black, on routine patrol, enters the rest area in his cruiser. With him today is his Canadian friend, riding along. Trooper Black pulls up next to the Camaro and parks. Then he and his friend Constable Donald Irwin step out into the mist.
* * *
•
The last items that Dave puts on the table are two paper parcels. Lunch-bag brown, stapled shut and labeled in black ink. Dave puts them out on the cloth gently, one by one. The parcels are worn and creased and crumpled. At first glance, nothing much. But inside are the bullets retrieved from the bodies of Phillip Black and Donald Irwin. Their last breaths.
I sit and look at those brown paper parcels for a long, long time.
Dad, you were taken from me at age seven, yet I remember everything you taught me about life, Christian Black wrote in memoriam to his father. There will always be an empty place in my heart that can never be filled. I will love you always and make sure you are never forgotten.
When I started this search, I knew I had to somehow find the nucleus of the case. The split seconds those shots rang out in the rest area. That is the instant I have needed to get back to. That.
Here it is.
Oh my God, I’ve been shot.
* * *
•
It only gets harder from now on.
PART TWO
But Which Truth?
17
Investigation 101
Along the coast road, Connemara is wild and in bloom. It is the last day of April, and I am standing in a seafront graveyard in the afternoon. Already today Peter and I have searched along the strand beside the harbor and twisted through the streets of the quay, running up on abandoned houses and turning around on steep dirt roads that fall down toward the sea, clear like glass and cold blue below. We’ve stumbled onto this graveyard with its black headstones draped in bone-colored rosaries and ruins of a church, ivy-covered, sea-swept. Now a sharp wind is starting off the water as I make my way back through the long grass to the car. On the radio there is a report of a lashing storm, and we listen to the scratchy broadcast in the gravel lot at the cemetery beach, watching the Atlantic darken and the skies before us gather with rain.
Just a few weeks ago in Florida, finding Sunny Jacobs had seemed so simple. Peter found the registration information for Sunny’s website, listing an address of “Muiceannach, Casla.” No street name or house number, but on Google Maps the town of Casla looked tiny. On Facebook, Sunny’s page had a photo of two horses in front of a green shed and a metal gate, with the caption “our morning visitors,” another photo of the horses running across a rocky hillside with the caption “today in the garden,” and a third photo, of a rainbow, taken through a window with a view out over a wooden deck to a body of water with houses on the far side. So, a house with a green shed, a metal gate, and a wooden deck, in a small Irish village near the sea. Now it’s time to live our fairy tale. That’s what the New York Times wedding story said about Sunny in Ireland, all those years ago. It had seemed like plenty to go on.
But now, after not even one full day in Ireland, we are at a loss. And lost. Casla is not tiny. There are so many houses on so many gossamer roads. Gray stone cottages with red doors, whitewashed cottages with blue eaves. There are gardens and cattle and rough stone walls. There are no wooden decks. No green sheds. And I don’t know who I’m looking for. A martyr, sent to death row for a crime she had no part in? Or a murderer, hiding out in this wilderness of sea and stone?
Now I stare out at the Atlantic. I am not allowing myself to worry.
Peter is studying the map on his cellphone, and now he points to a lake, up away from the coast.
“What about this?” he says.
* * *
•
As soon as we turn north, the landscape changes. With the sea behind us, the world is a glacial emptiness glittering beneath a high wide sky. We pass the lake o
n the map and continue on, and a gap in the hedgerow appears. Peter spins the wheel hard, and now we are jolting along a paved thread, uphill. Brambles, trees, the black and blue of the sea.
“There’s one,” I say.
A shed with a green metal door. We rush toward it.
But it’s too large, the color is wrong, there’s no metal gate.
We round a corner, and a pony in a stone corral startles into a gallop. Behind her, another green shed.
We rush toward that one as well.
Now they are everywhere. We pass another graveyard and come back to the crossroads we started at, or the one we think we started at, and this time we turn left. This road runs out to the sea between two stone walls. A fierce wind buffets our little car. Out here, on the tidal flats, there are six houses, two to the left, two to the right, and—out at the end where the road stops and the water takes over—two more. One of the houses at the end has a white Mercedes in the driveway, and we rule that one out right away. Too fancy. But the one next to it is a tumble, with weather-worn whitewashing and two silent chimneys. The houses on the far shore shine like sugar cubes in the storm light.
Two Truths and a Lie Page 18