In every photo taken of her, Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs appears eager to live up to a childhood nickname that otherwise might have seemed perversely ill-suited to the arc of her life. Yes, I’ve had my troubles, the broad smile she wears in every photograph projects, but look at me now. I’m at peace.
And all the evidence suggests that she had indeed found solace in Connemara, until her body – and that of her 31-year-old carer Kevin Kelly – was pulled from an inferno in her home last weekend.
The circumstances of her life made those of her death all the more tragic. Jacobs spent 16 years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit, five on death row. Her co-accused, Jesse Tafero, died in a horrific botched execution.
What happened on the morning in 1976 that determined the course of her life was this. Or what happened was something like this – maybe. Nearly 50 years on, the details are still murky, obscured by the heat of the moment, conflicts of motive and narrative, confusing forensic evidence, the unreliable nature of human recall and the passage of time.
Sunny Jacobs, then 28, was sleeping in the back of a car parked up at a rest stop in Florida, a bag containing pink pyjamas at her feet and two small children at her side: Eric was nine; Tina just 10 months. In the front were two men: Tafero, her boyfriend and father of her baby, and another man, Walter Rhodes.
A state trooper – accompanied by a friend, a Canadian police officer – came to do a routine check. One spotted a gun in the car – there were several, it would later emerge. Gunfire broke out – it was never clear how it started – and both police officers were killed. Rhodes was the only one who tested positive for gunpowder residue. He agreed to testify against Jacobs and Tafero in return for a life sentence. Tafero and Jacobs were sentenced to death by “Maximum Dan” Futch, a judge who kept a replica electric chair on his desk.
The same US news outlets that had gorged on Jacobs when she was on trial just as enthusiastically redeemed her after she was freed on a plea deal in 1992. Originally she had been portrayed as the Bonnie to Tafero’s Clyde. Now she became a vegetarian hippie who simply found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that her parents died in a plane crash while she was still in prison.
Death in Connemara: who was Sunny Jacobs?
She went on to campaign against the death penalty and to marry another former death row inmate, Peter Pringle. They moved to Connemara where they sometimes had exonerated inmates come to stay. There have been documentaries, a stage play, books, interviews, even a Vows column in The New York Times.
As journalist turned private investigator Ellen McGarrahan discovered, when she set out to write a book on it, there is no absolute truth about any of the events of February 1976, least of all the question of who Jacobs was. She had many advantages in life – loving parents, material comforts – but a series of bad choices saw her end up on the run with her drug-dealing boyfriend in a car packed with drugs, weapons and two children.
Her life is a reminder that we should be wary when presented with stories of women – and particularly women accused of high-profile crimes – who are rendered in black and white, all good or all bad. Jacobs wasn’t Bonnie – but neither was she just a hapless hippie who stumbled into a bad situation. McGarrahan suggests the gunfire started with a taser shot from the back seat, where Jacobs and the children were huddled.
In the search for a definitive set of facts, broader truths were overlooked. One of those was perhaps best expressed by Jacobs herself. The only facts that actually matter are that two people died and “the system was misused and as a result countless people were victimised. And someone may have been put to death who was innocent, or at least was entitled to a new trial.”
If there are lessons to be gleaned from the life and awful death of Jacobs, one is about the unspeakable cruelty of that system. McGarrahan became haunted by the story after she witnessed Tafero’s execution in May 1990. The description in her book is so distressing that I decided not to include it here. But then I read that US president Donald Trump intends to forcefully pursue new death sentences, particularly against migrants.
And so here is what McGarrahan saw.
“His scalp caught fire. Flames blazed from his head, arcing bright orange with tails of dark smoke. A gigantic buzzing sound filled the chamber ... In the chair, Jesse Tafero clenched his fists as he slammed upwards and back. He is breathing, I wrote on my yellow notepad. ... Breath. His chest heaving. The – the buzzing again. Flames. Smoke. His head nods. His head is nodding. He is breathing ... It took seven minutes and three jolts before he was finally declared dead.”
Jacobs never forgot that this could have been her fate; the fact that the flames came for her in the end is the cruellest conceivable irony.
In the final analysis, her story is a reminder about how ready we are to render women as either the evil witch or Snow White, with no room for the grey areas in between. It is about how you don’t have to be blameless to deserve a chance of a happy ending. And it is about redemption.
“Life turned out beautifully,” Pringle told The Guardian in 2013. While they could be forgiven for glossing over some of the details of their lives, that – for a period at least – was the unvarnished truth.
