Ellen McGarrahan and the search for truth following a grisly execution
Ellen McGarrahan: Witnessing the execution of a convicted murderer would haunt both her personal life and her work for decades to come. Picture: Alan Williams
Ellen McGarrahan was among the witnesses to the execution, sent by her newspaper, the , on assignment. She had never before laid eyes on Tafero and although his life was about to end in horrible circumstances, the events to follow would haunt both her personal life and her work for decades to come.
“Jesse Tafero was bracing his feet against the floor and bending backwards towards the door he’d just come through,” McGarrahan wrote in her book .
“But the guards were strong and they were ready for this. They had him by the armpits, and they dragged him into the chamber and slammed the door shut behind them. Then they turned him around and made him look at the chair.”
What followed was a botched execution. When the electricity was turned on, the headset that was bolted onto his bare scalp caught fire. “Flames blazed from his head, arcing bright orange with tails of dark smoke. A gigantic buzzing sound filled the chamber, so deep I felt it inside the bones of my spine,” McGarrahan wrote.
Tafero was not dead. It took three jolts of electricity, rather than one, to kill him, and the process wasn’t completed for a full seven minutes.
Even worse, as far as McGarrahan was concerned, they may well have killed an innocent man.
Tafero was executed in May 1990. The crime for which he was convicted occurred early one morning on a motorway lay-by near Fort Lauderdale in February 1976.
He, his girlfriend Sunny Jacobs, and another man, Walter Rhodes, had been asleep in the car along with Sunny’s two children. They had been on a drugs round, selling cocaine, and there is a suggestion they may have been hiding out from other criminal elements.
A patrol car pulled up to see what the story was. Within minutes, the two cops, Philip Black and Donald Irwin, were shot dead. The three adults took the patrol car, later hijacked another vehicle and then crashed into a police roadblock.
Rhodes quickly agreed to co-operate with the prosecution, claiming Tafero and Sunny Jacobs had shot dead the two policemen.
“He testified against them at the trial and they were both convicted and sentenced to death,” Ellen McGarrahan told the .
“A year later, Rhodes [who had been sentenced to life with the possibility of parole] confessed that he had done it and then he recanted and then he confessed again and recanted again.”
Despite that, Tafero’s execution went ahead. Two years later, a court ruled a polygraph report done on Walter Rhodes, which contradicted what he said in evidence, had not been revealed to the defence at Sunny Jacobs’ original trial. A deal was done and she was freed after spending 16 years locked up.
Three years later, across the Atlantic, Peter Pringle, the man who would become Sunny Jacobs’ life partner, was freed after spending 15 years locked up, also for killing two police officers.
In 1980, Pringle, along with two others, had been convicted of murdering two gardaí in Roscommon following a bank robbery. They had links to paramilitary organisations but were flying a Republican flag of convenience to rob money for their own benefit.
Like Jacobs and Tafero in the US, these three were also sentenced to death. However, within a few months the sentence was commuted to 40 years in prison without parole.
Then in 1995, in another echo of the Sunny Jacobs’ case, the court of appeal deemed Pringle’s conviction unsafe over an element of the evidence that hadn’t been revealed at the original trial.
It was open to the State to retry him, but some crucial witnesses had since died. If he had been retried, there was every possibility that the verdict would once again have been guilty, but that didn’t come to pass.
Sometime after his release, Pringle met Sunny Jacobs in the US. They obviously had a lot in common. Their marriage was attended by a clutch of celebrities and they settled in Galway, where later they opened their home as what was described as a sanctuary for the victims of miscarriage of justice.
Meanwhile, the young reporter who witnessed the botched execution of Sunny’s former boyfriend went on her own journey. Following a few career changes, Ellen McGarrahan eventually went to work as a private investigator.
But the past would not leave her alone. The manner in which she had seen Tafero die, the various confessions and recantations of guilt from Walter Rhodes, and the eventual release of Sunny Jacobs, all left her wondering as to where the truth actually lay about what happened on that fateful morning in 1976 when two cops were murdered on a routine patrol.
“It raised questions for me whether I had witnessed the execution of an innocent man and because of the circumstances of the execution that was haunting for me,” McGarrahan says.
The issue at the centre of her quest was whether Walter Rhodes had been responsible for the murders and had acted quickly to blame Tafero and Sunny in order to save his own skin.
Rhodes’ subsequent confessions lent weight to any such theory and would raise major questions for the prosecution about a case that sent a man to his death and could also have resulted in the execution of an innocent woman.
Or, maybe the prosecution had got it right, that Tafero and Jacobs were responsible and, notwithstanding her own opposition to the death penalty and the manner in which Tafero died, at least he had not been an innocent man.
So she put on her investigator’s hat and set about hunting down the facts from the past. This brought her to Florida for an extended period, during which she accessed the public records about the original police investigation and trial. She also met with surviving cops, friends, and some legal personnel.
Repeatedly, she sought an interview with the main prosecutor in the original trial, but her efforts were continually stymied.
Meanwhile, Peter Pringle and Sunny Jacobs became celebrities in liberal American circles in particular. They campaigned against the death penalty, both presenting themselves as exhibits of how innocent people could so easily be killed by democratic governments. Their status was further enhanced by a Broadway play based on cases of innocent people who had spent time on death row.
, which was also adapted as a movie starring Susan Sarandon, told the story of six people who had been sentenced to death but were later freed. Well-known actor Jill Clayburgh played Sunny in the original production, which also featured Richard Dreyfuss. Brooke Shields later played the role of Sunny.
“It’s a beautifully written play,” McGarrahan says. “A really emotional play, it’s a work of art.”
There is, however, one issue with it in respect of Sunny Jacobs. Unlike the other real life cases featured, Sunny was not exonerated.
“Sunny Jacobs and the state [had] entered a plea agreement called a plea of convenience,” McGarrahan says. “As part of the plea, she was adjudicated guilty on two counts of murder and a count of kidnapping. Legally, she was not exonerated.”
She was released on the basis of time already served under the plea.
Ellen McGarrahan says there is a crucial difference between being exonerated and freed as a result of a wrongful, or unsafe, conviction.
“If you look at it in terms of the law, there is a very important legal principle that very rightly saw her conviction overturned,” McGarrahan says.
“But a wrongful conviction and factual innocence are separate issues and particularly in discussion around the death penalty those two things get merged. Following correct procedures is really important, especially in death penalty cases, but a conviction that is wrong doesn’t mean factual innocence.”
A similar issue arose in the case of Peter Pringle. There is copious evidence he was present at the shooting in Co Roscommon in 1980 when the two gardaí were murdered.
Yet, the couple, individually and collectively, presented themselves far and wide, to campaign groups, students, those who highlight miscarriages of justice, and in celebrity circles, as innocent people framed by authorities for murders in which they had absolutely no role.
Ellen McGarrahan’s quest for the truth eventually brought her to Galway to talk to Sunny Jacobs. She travelled with her husband Peter and cold called on Pringle and Jacobs.
The couple was welcoming, at least until Ellen told them what she was about. Still, they were invited in and back again a second day. At one point, Sunny did open up to talk about the past and what happened on that morning of the murders.
Did McGarrahan get what she had come for?
“It was an interesting, profoundly affecting conversation for me, but it’s difficult for me to answer that question.”
At dinner on their second day, Pringle told them the story about “the little Napoleonic guard” in Portlaoise prison where he had been serving his sentence who was shot after leaving a boxing match.
McGarrahan related Pringle’s version of the story in .
“‘They didn’t kill him, though,’ Pringle says, looking from me to Peter [her husband] with a highly instructive expression. ‘They turned him into a vegetable for nearly a year. When the news came down, the prison erupted in cheers’…Pringle kicks back in his chair and laughs.”
McGarrahan didn’t know it but the reference was to the murder of Brian Stack, a chief officer in Portlaoise who was shot by an IRA unit as he left the National Stadium in Dublin in 1983.
As Pringle said, Mr Stack survived in a severely paralysed form and died a year later. The shooting became a major political issue 20 years on when Mr Stack’s family sought assistance from Sinn Féin in identifying the killers.
So how did Ellen McGarrahan take this story that so amused Pringle?
“It was a chilling moment and I thought that it was a warning to me,” she says. “Just about the world that he had travelled in and had access to and perhaps he was somebody whom it wouldn’t wise to get on the wrong side of.”
Despite that, the private investigator and her husband enjoyed their few days in Galway.
Did she warm to Pringle and Sunny?
“Oh yes, of course, absolutely,” she says. “Sunny is an extremely warm, extremely likeable person now. And I felt that one of the things that happened [in Galway] when you encounter somebody who knows what you know, it’s a shared language and that can feel like a form of intimacy.
“At that point, I had carried Jesse Tafero’s execution with me for 25 years and had thought really a lot about it, so sitting with Sunny Jacobs and talking with her felt like it was something I needed to do and I felt like our lives had crossed at a point that was important to me.”
McGarrahan also sought out the other surviving adult from that motorside lay-by in 1976, Walter Rhodes. After shopping up Tafero and Sunny, Rhodes had the chance of parole from his life sentence. This he got in 1994 and then he broke the conditions of the parole and went on the lam.
McGarrahan tracked him down to a rural outpost in Washington state, at the other end of the USA from Florida.
The account of how McGarrahan approached Rhodes in what was the middle of nowhere is freighted with suspense. After all, this was a man who had spent years in prison and may well have shot dead two police officers and he was hiding out from the law. Despite that, she took her chances.
“Good friends of mine have written to me while reading about it [in the book] and said, I know you survived but I can’t believe you did this.
“I have to tell you in retrospect, would I do it again? No.
“But that was in 2003 and I had just seen and it says in the play very directly that Walther Rhodes murdered the police officers and it quotes from one of his confessions. I’d known he had confessed but hever heard it before so I had to go and ask him.”
Shortly after McGarrahan’s visit, Rhodes was recaptured and sent back to prison, where he has remained since. For a long time, he wrongly blamed her for shopping him to the authorities.
She also travelled to Australia to seek out Sunny’s son Eric, who had been nine when she was sentenced to death and taken from him. Eric spent some of the remainder of his childhood with his maternal grandparents until they died in a plane crash.
He also visited Tafero on death row during his teenage years.
He was another victim of the murders and had plenty of opinions on what happened and who was to blame.
By the end of her book, Ellen McGarrahan reaches conclusions as to who she believes, on the basis of the weight of the evidence, was actually responsible for the murders of the two police officers.
Has she heard from Sunny Jacobs since the book was published in 2021? “I have not heard from her,” she says. But she did hear from Grace Black, widow of one of the murdered cops, Philip Black.
“It meant a lot to me. She sent me a message after reading the book which I will always treasure,” Ellen says.
“I think the truth does have a place in justice and sometimes just being able to share the story really matters as well.”
Peter Pringle died on December 31, 2022. Attempts to contact Sunny
Jacobs in respect of this report were unsuccessful.
- Two Truths And A Lie by Ellen McGarrahan is published by Random House
