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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.
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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
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...
About the Author-
Ellen McGarrahan earned a degree in history from Yale and worked as an investigative reporter at newspapers in New York City, Boston, Miami and San Francisco before accidentally finding her calling as a private detective. For two decades her investigations agency has specialized in complex civil and criminal cases ranging from corporate whistleblowing to capital murder. Two Truths and a Lie is her first book.
Reviews-
Starred review from December 21, 2020 Journalist-turned-PI McGarrahan brings readers along on her affecting quest to discover the truth about who killed two law enforcement officers in 1976 Florida. State trooper Phillip Black and a visiting colleague, Canadian constable Donald Irwin, spotted a car in a rest area containing five sleeping people: Jesse Tafero; his girlfriend, Sunny Jacobs; their two young children; and Tafero’s friend Walter Rhodes. Shortly after Black radioed that he saw a gun in the car, multiple shots rang out, leaving the officers dead. Based on Rhodes’s testimony, Tafero and Jacobs were convicted of the homicides. In 1990, Tafero was electrocuted, an execution McGarrahan witnessed in her role as a reporter for the Miami Herald. McGarrahan knew from attending a play based on the crime and its aftermath that Rhodes confessed to pulling the trigger less than a year after Tafero and Jacobs were convicted, then he recanted. She subsequently embarked on her own investigation, which included travel to Ireland to interview Jacobs and to Australia to interview Jacobs’s son. Ultimately, she reached a definitive conclusion about who was responsible for Black and Irwin’s murders. McGarrahan’s blend of detective work and insights into the criminal justice system make this must reading for fans of Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line. Agent: Mollie Glick, Creative Artists Agency.
January 1, 2021 Vivid re-examination of a puzzling double murder. Journalist and private investigator McGarrahan's debut is an engrossing, authoritative fusion of true crime and memoir. She has a particular connection to the grisly crime at is center, which she portrays in a chilling prologue. In 1990, as a young reporter for the Miami Herald, she witnessed the execution of Jesse Tafero, convicted with his girlfriend, Sunny Jacobs, in the 1976 slayings of two police officers during a roadside stop. Their convictions were based on the testimony of Walter Rhodes, who recanted and changed his story numerous times, which led to Sunny's release--and celebrity following the case's dramatization in the play and movie The Exonerated. Haunted by questions about Tafero's possible innocence, McGarrahan took a leave of absence to review the case. During her investigation, she was able to link Tafero, Sunny, and Rhodes to a startling web of South Florida criminality, including mysterious mob deaths, celebrity jewel thieves, a violent drug gang, and even tales of "men forced to dig their own graves in the Everglades." McGarrahan interviewed Jacobs and tracked down Rhodes, by then a fugitive, in a tense encounter: "He knew about the murders," writes the author, "the blood monolith suddenly in the center of my life again." Throughout, she maintains tension by connecting the case's labyrinthine backstory to her own life of wanderlust and detection, portraying her exasperated husband as a source of solidity and her PI career as an enigmatic motivation for grappling with the ugly mystery of the murder. She eventually makes a conclusion about the case after a full consideration of available evidence, including talks with the state's attorney and surviving eyewitnesses. Although her reflections are occasionally redundant, McGarrahan captures a keen sense of place and the significance of the entire ordeal. An accomplished, unsettling look at a confounding crime and larger issues of memory, culpability, and punishment.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from February 1, 2021
Private investigator McGarrahan was haunted for decades after witnessing the botched execution of Jesse Tafero, who, along with two others, was convicted of murdering two police officers during a traffic stop in 1976 in Florida. The author became further consumed by the case when one of Tafero's coconspirators, Sunny Jacobs, claiming that she and Tafero were innocent, was released from prison and another, Walter Rhodes, confessed to the murder. McGarrahan embarked on a years-long quest to discover who was telling the truth. Documenting dozens of interviews with friends, family, and associates of the three convicted killers and examining the evidence still available at the Broward County courthouse in Florida, she meticulously studied the case from all angles. McGarrahan passionately and unflinchingly conveys the emotional impact of her investigation on her and her husband. The book is engaging and fast-paced, though readers may be frustrated by some of McGarrahan's unwise decisions, such as her choice to spend the night at the home of a suspect. VERDICT Dark, foreboding, and emotional, this title is as gripping as a thriller and laced with cogent insights--McGarrahan stresses that sometimes there isn't an objective truth to uncover. Fans of Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark will be spellbound.--Ahliah Bratzler, Indianapolis
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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