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![Ellen McGarrahan - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_ellen_mcgarrahan.jpg)
Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice
EDGAR AWARD FINALIST • A private investigator revisits the case that has haunted her for decades and sets out on a deeply personal quest to sort truth from lies.
CLUE AWARD FINALIST • "[A] haunting memoir, which also unfolds as a gripping true-crime narrative . . . This is a powerful, unsettling story, told with bracing honesty and skill."-The Washington Post
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • One of Marie Claire's Ten Best True Crime Books of the Year
Ellen McGarrahan was a young journalist for The Miami Herald in 1990 when she witnessed the botched execution of convicted killer Jesse Tafero: flames and smoke and three jolts of the electric chair. When evidence later emerged casting doubt on Tafero's guilt, McGarrahan found herself haunted by his fiery death. Had she witnessed the execution of an innocent man?
Decades later, McGarrahan, now a successful private investigator, is still gripped by the mystery and infamy of the Tafero case, and decides she must investigate it herself. Her quest will take her around the world and deep into the harrowing heart of obsession, and as questions of guilt and innocence become more complex, McGarrahan discovers she is not alone in her need for closure. For whenever a human life is taken by violence, the reckoning is long and difficult for all.
A rare and vivid account of a private investigator's real life and a classic true-crime tale, Two Truths and a Lie is ultimately a profound meditation on truth, grief, complicity, and justice.
CLUE AWARD FINALIST • "[A] haunting memoir, which also unfolds as a gripping true-crime narrative . . . This is a powerful, unsettling story, told with bracing honesty and skill."-The Washington Post
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • One of Marie Claire's Ten Best True Crime Books of the Year
Ellen McGarrahan was a young journalist for The Miami Herald in 1990 when she witnessed the botched execution of convicted killer Jesse Tafero: flames and smoke and three jolts of the electric chair. When evidence later emerged casting doubt on Tafero's guilt, McGarrahan found herself haunted by his fiery death. Had she witnessed the execution of an innocent man?
Decades later, McGarrahan, now a successful private investigator, is still gripped by the mystery and infamy of the Tafero case, and decides she must investigate it herself. Her quest will take her around the world and deep into the harrowing heart of obsession, and as questions of guilt and innocence become more complex, McGarrahan discovers she is not alone in her need for closure. For whenever a human life is taken by violence, the reckoning is long and difficult for all.
A rare and vivid account of a private investigator's real life and a classic true-crime tale, Two Truths and a Lie is ultimately a profound meditation on truth, grief, complicity, and justice.
Editorial Reviews
"The experience of inhabiting that investigation with McGarrahan is so intense readers should experience it for themselves. For me, the even deeper draw here is McGarrahan's struggle to come to terms with the evil she was drawn into as a young reporter."-Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Extremely entertaining . . . McGarrahan's obsession with rooting out the truth in the case leads her [to] Florida, Ireland and Australia, where she tracks down any detail that might potentially help her know what happened."-The New York Times
"This riveting read is the memoir of a reporter–turned–private investigator who looks back at the case that snagged her imagination."-Marie Claire
"[A] compelling true-crime debut."-Bustle
"A spellbinding memoir . . . Among the truest of true crime stories ever written . . . McGarrahan's story renders the tawdriness and banality of crime, the frustrating limits of witnesses and evidence, the hazy frontier between truth and lies, the slipperiness of culpability."-The Washington Post
"Both admirable and harrowing . . . I highly recommend Two Truths and a Lie if you're looking for a gripping, fast-paced book with a thoughtful and insightful premise."-True Crime Index
"In these beautifully written pages we find both a page-turning whodunit and a sobering assessment of the American justice system."-Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water
"Two Truths and a Lie is a masterpiece-more honest than In Cold Blood and more profound than The Executioner's Song. A brilliant addition to the literature of crime and punishment."-David Von Drehle, New York Times bestselling author of Triangle
"Both mesmerizing page-turner and haunting meditation on...
"Extremely entertaining . . . McGarrahan's obsession with rooting out the truth in the case leads her [to] Florida, Ireland and Australia, where she tracks down any detail that might potentially help her know what happened."-The New York Times
"This riveting read is the memoir of a reporter–turned–private investigator who looks back at the case that snagged her imagination."-Marie Claire
"[A] compelling true-crime debut."-Bustle
"A spellbinding memoir . . . Among the truest of true crime stories ever written . . . McGarrahan's story renders the tawdriness and banality of crime, the frustrating limits of witnesses and evidence, the hazy frontier between truth and lies, the slipperiness of culpability."-The Washington Post
"Both admirable and harrowing . . . I highly recommend Two Truths and a Lie if you're looking for a gripping, fast-paced book with a thoughtful and insightful premise."-True Crime Index
"In these beautifully written pages we find both a page-turning whodunit and a sobering assessment of the American justice system."-Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water
"Two Truths and a Lie is a masterpiece-more honest than In Cold Blood and more profound than The Executioner's Song. A brilliant addition to the literature of crime and punishment."-David Von Drehle, New York Times bestselling author of Triangle
"Both mesmerizing page-turner and haunting meditation on...
Readers Top Reviews
Barry Sparks
Ellen McGarrahan was a young reporter with the Miami Herald when she witnessed the execution of Jesse Tafero for murder in 1990. Tafero was convicted of shooting and killing two police officers at a rest area in 1976. Fellow reporters told McGarrahan the execution (via electric chair) would be over in a minute and she it wouldn't bother her. That was far from true. It took seven minutes and several attempts for the state to execute Tafero. Two others were involved in the case. Sunny Jacobs went to jail, but was later released. Walter Rhodes Jr. confessed to the crime four times and recanted four times. The case haunted McGarrahan for 25 years. In 2015, McGarrahan, who had become a private investigator, decided to pursue the case. She took three months off to investigate. In the end, she spent almost five years on the case. There were multiple versions of what had happened, few clues and many unanswered questions. Who actually fired the shots that killed the policemen? McGarrahan looked up as many people that she could who were associated with the case. She also tracked down Sunny Jacobs in Ireland and her son, who was 9 at the time of the murders, in Australia. Interestingly, the son remembered everything differently than what had been recorded in the official records. Everyone had a different version of what happened. The case remained confusing. Obsessed with knowing what happened that day in 1976, McGarrahan found that myth and fantasy often overwhelmed the facts. The only thing she is sure of is that two police officers lost their lives that day. And that's a tragedy that can't be erased.
Michael BetzoldKe
This 326-page slog that keeps going back over and over the same material is like watching 25 years of therapy for PTSD. The author witnessed an electric chair execution gone wrong and spent a lifetime so haunted by it that she kept trying to discover whether the executed man was really guilty. But there are no significant surprises in store--just long slogs through evidence pointing to three people, all of them enormously criminal liars. It's very difficult to care about which of these three was as guilty of exactly what early as much as the author does. She returns to the crime scene and reenacts it dozens of times to no startling illumination. This story should have been edited to a 30-page magazine article.
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
A Real Strange Situation
Fort Lauderdale, Florida. January 2015. A dead-end street beneath a power plant, just west of downtown. Except for the metallic buzzing sound in the air around me, the day is empty and dusty and bright. I am standing in the middle of the street, listening to the power plant and staring at an apartment building. Single-story, chipped stucco, asphalt for a front yard. I've got an old newspaper clipping with me from the days immediately after the murders-"Witness Testifies Tafero Didn't Shoot"-and I dig it out now to double-check the address.
Yes. It started here.
In the winter of 1976, Walter Rhodes lived in this building. In Apartment B, up on the right, second door in from the street. One afternoon around Valentine's Day, just after Taxi Driver hit the movie theaters and as heiress Patty Hearst was standing trial for bank robbery out in California, Walter took a call in Apartment B from his friend Jesse Tafero. Jesse asked if he could come crash with his girlfriend and kids for a few days. Walter said okay. And on about their third day here together, Walter and Jesse and Sunny and the children came out of Apartment B, down this cement walkway, climbed into a red Ford Fairlane, and drove off. For Jesse Tafero, that trip ended in the electric chair.
There are some things I need to make clear, here at the outset. I'm a licensed private detective but I don't carry a gun. I've never slapped a witness or slept with one, although there've been some who deserved it and a few who tried it. All my life I've been mistaken for someone else-Don't I know you? Haven't we met?-and what people assume about me is usually wrong. I'm not going to lie: That used to piss me off. Once when I was a newspaper reporter, the press secretary to the governor of Florida asked me who I'd slept with to get my job. I wrote a whole newspaper column about how sexist and outrageous and unacceptably ubiquitous his attitude was. But not long into my new life as a detective I realized all that bullshit was now working in my favor. Being underestimated, talked over, talked down to, ignored, pitied, patronized, flirted with, hit on-all superpowers, to a professional investigator. No wonder women make good private eyes. For nearly twenty years now, I've earned my living by speaking to strangers, but in my own life I'm shy. And I don't know how I feel right now, standing here, except that I cannot believe it is real.
Four days ago, after I finally got up my nerve to do this, my husband and I shuttered our house up north, threw some clothes in the car, and headed off into a blizzard so fierce it took five hours to drive fifty miles. Trucks skidding off into drifts in Michigan, snow blowing across the road in Indiana, rain pounding down in the mountains of Tennessee. All the way along, I tried not to think about what I was getting myself into, but the electric chair flickered in the back of my mind. Now I'm in South Florida for the first time in a quarter century, standing on this street, looking at this building, and feeling-nothing. It's weird. Nothing at all.
Up at Apartment B, there's a doorbell, an aluminum threshold, and a window so dirty I can't see inside. I stand still for a moment, staring at a pile of cigarette butts on the ground. It's not that I'm expecting to trip over a bullet here and solve the case. But this threshold is the threshold Jesse and Sunny and Walter crossed, setting off. This roof is the last roof Jesse Tafero slept under as a free man. An investigation has to start somewhere, and I like to touch base. It's a form of superstition, possibly. The hope that the past will be present in a place.
And I don't have any other clues. This building. Some old newspaper clippings. A few court records. Seriously. That's it. With those as my starting point, I have to find the truth about two heartless murders committed almost forty years ago on the side of an interstate highway in a rest area that has long since been completely torn down. Obliterated. Erased.
Detective work is, in its essence, a form of time travel. It's being in two places at once-now, and then. Now being me, with all my fears and flaws. Then being the split seconds those shots rang out in the rest area. That is the instant I need to get back to. To own my life again. That.
I raise my hand. I knock.
But no luck. There's no sound. No one's around.
At the Fort Lauderdale courthouse the next day, I write the names Jesse Joseph Tafero, Sonia Jacobs Linder, and Walter Norman Rhodes Jr. on a piece of scrap paper and slide it to the clerk who sits behind a pane of bulletproof glass. It's a gorgeous day today-I drove along the Atlantic Ocean on my way here, cobalt waves beneath a clear blue sky-bu...
A Real Strange Situation
Fort Lauderdale, Florida. January 2015. A dead-end street beneath a power plant, just west of downtown. Except for the metallic buzzing sound in the air around me, the day is empty and dusty and bright. I am standing in the middle of the street, listening to the power plant and staring at an apartment building. Single-story, chipped stucco, asphalt for a front yard. I've got an old newspaper clipping with me from the days immediately after the murders-"Witness Testifies Tafero Didn't Shoot"-and I dig it out now to double-check the address.
Yes. It started here.
In the winter of 1976, Walter Rhodes lived in this building. In Apartment B, up on the right, second door in from the street. One afternoon around Valentine's Day, just after Taxi Driver hit the movie theaters and as heiress Patty Hearst was standing trial for bank robbery out in California, Walter took a call in Apartment B from his friend Jesse Tafero. Jesse asked if he could come crash with his girlfriend and kids for a few days. Walter said okay. And on about their third day here together, Walter and Jesse and Sunny and the children came out of Apartment B, down this cement walkway, climbed into a red Ford Fairlane, and drove off. For Jesse Tafero, that trip ended in the electric chair.
There are some things I need to make clear, here at the outset. I'm a licensed private detective but I don't carry a gun. I've never slapped a witness or slept with one, although there've been some who deserved it and a few who tried it. All my life I've been mistaken for someone else-Don't I know you? Haven't we met?-and what people assume about me is usually wrong. I'm not going to lie: That used to piss me off. Once when I was a newspaper reporter, the press secretary to the governor of Florida asked me who I'd slept with to get my job. I wrote a whole newspaper column about how sexist and outrageous and unacceptably ubiquitous his attitude was. But not long into my new life as a detective I realized all that bullshit was now working in my favor. Being underestimated, talked over, talked down to, ignored, pitied, patronized, flirted with, hit on-all superpowers, to a professional investigator. No wonder women make good private eyes. For nearly twenty years now, I've earned my living by speaking to strangers, but in my own life I'm shy. And I don't know how I feel right now, standing here, except that I cannot believe it is real.
Four days ago, after I finally got up my nerve to do this, my husband and I shuttered our house up north, threw some clothes in the car, and headed off into a blizzard so fierce it took five hours to drive fifty miles. Trucks skidding off into drifts in Michigan, snow blowing across the road in Indiana, rain pounding down in the mountains of Tennessee. All the way along, I tried not to think about what I was getting myself into, but the electric chair flickered in the back of my mind. Now I'm in South Florida for the first time in a quarter century, standing on this street, looking at this building, and feeling-nothing. It's weird. Nothing at all.
Up at Apartment B, there's a doorbell, an aluminum threshold, and a window so dirty I can't see inside. I stand still for a moment, staring at a pile of cigarette butts on the ground. It's not that I'm expecting to trip over a bullet here and solve the case. But this threshold is the threshold Jesse and Sunny and Walter crossed, setting off. This roof is the last roof Jesse Tafero slept under as a free man. An investigation has to start somewhere, and I like to touch base. It's a form of superstition, possibly. The hope that the past will be present in a place.
And I don't have any other clues. This building. Some old newspaper clippings. A few court records. Seriously. That's it. With those as my starting point, I have to find the truth about two heartless murders committed almost forty years ago on the side of an interstate highway in a rest area that has long since been completely torn down. Obliterated. Erased.
Detective work is, in its essence, a form of time travel. It's being in two places at once-now, and then. Now being me, with all my fears and flaws. Then being the split seconds those shots rang out in the rest area. That is the instant I need to get back to. To own my life again. That.
I raise my hand. I knock.
But no luck. There's no sound. No one's around.
At the Fort Lauderdale courthouse the next day, I write the names Jesse Joseph Tafero, Sonia Jacobs Linder, and Walter Norman Rhodes Jr. on a piece of scrap paper and slide it to the clerk who sits behind a pane of bulletproof glass. It's a gorgeous day today-I drove along the Atlantic Ocean on my way here, cobalt waves beneath a clear blue sky-bu...
