Some people might quibble about notability. But I think there’s an interesting story here, though not the one some people want to tell.
Ms. Jacobs spent nearly 17 years in prison in Florida, five of them on death row, for the murders of two law enforcement officers in February 1976 at a rest stop near Fort Lauderdale.
Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire.
Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated.
It was this story that formed the basis of Ms. Jacobs’s subsequent, celebrated tale — that she had been an innocent, a “28-year-old vegetarian hippie,” as she told The New York Times in a 2011 Vows article about her marriage to a fellow former inmate, the Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023.
A product of a prosperous Long Island family, Ms. Jacobs said she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, as had Mr. Tafero, when the killings took place. Responsibility for them, she said, lay with another passenger in the car, Walter Rhodes, who had also been convicted of petty crimes and who later confessed to the killings of the two officers (though he subsequently recanted, confessed and recanted again, multiple times).
Ms. Jacobs became a cause célèbre. There was an off-Broadway play, “The Exonerated” (which actually deals with six people, not just Ms. Jacobs) that was turned into a TV movie. There was also another TV movie that I think focuses on Ms. Jacobs, though information is hard to find.
Except…there’s more to the story.
A young former reporter, Ellen McGarrahan, who had witnessed Mr. Tafero’s execution for The Miami Herald and was haunted by it, spent much of the next 30 years digging into what had actually happened that day at the rest stop. She published her findings in a well-received 2021 book, “Two Truths and a Lie.”
Ms. McGarrahan’s meticulous, incisive research — she left journalism to become a professional private investigator after witnessing the execution — contradicts Ms. Jacobs’s story on almost every point.
Ms. Jacobs, Mr. Tafero and Mr. Rhodes existed in a murky underworld of violence, drug dealing, gun infatuation and petty crime, Ms. McGarrahan found.
By the time of the fatal encounter with the Florida state trooper Phillip Black and his visiting friend, the Canadian constable Donald Irwin, Ms. Jacobs’s charge sheet was already long: arrests for prostitution, forgery, illegal gun possession, contributing to the delinquency of a minor (her then-4-year-old son, Eric), and drug dealing.
After the killings, a loaded handgun was found in her purse. Several weapons — two 9-millimeter semiautomatic handguns, a .38-caliber Special revolver, a .22-caliber Derringer, a .32-caliber revolver — were found in the various cars linked to Mr. Tafero and Mr. Rhodes, Ms. McGarrahan wrote.
Two eyewitnesses, truckers who were at the scene of the killings, said in court testimony that Mr. Rhodes couldn’t have been the shooter because they saw that his hands were in the air. Forensic evidence suggested that a Taser shot, setting off the volley of fatal gunfire between the two parties, came from the back of the car, where Ms. Jacobs was sitting with her children.
Ms. McGarrahan posits that Ms. Jacobs may have at least fired the Taser, which she had purchased months earlier.
“The state’s theory was that Sunny fired the Taser and the gun at Trooper Black while he was attempting to subdue Jesse,” Ms. McGarrahan wrote, and that “Jesse grabbed the gun from Sunny and continued firing at both Trooper Black and Constable Irwin.”
According to a Florida Supreme Court opinion in the case, as Ms. Jacobs was being led away after her arrest, a Florida state trooper asked her, “Do you like shooting troopers?”
Ms. Jacobs was reported to have responded, “We had to.”
I haven’t read Two Truths and a Lie, but a copy is on the way from the ‘Zon.
Ms. McGarrahan, reflecting on the saga that she had spent so many years uncovering, said in an interview that with Ms. Jacobs, “the myth has become the truth.”
“She made herself into the victim,” Ms. McGarrahan added. “It removes the actual victims.”
Officer Down memorial page for Trooper Phillip A. Black. Ontario Police Memorial Foundation page for Corporal Donald R. Irwin.
