02 March 2022

Two Truths and a Lie


Lisa Sandlin's The Do-Right (2015) was one of the two best debut private eye novels I have read in decades.  (The other was Joe Ide's IQ.)  The Private Eye Writers of America wisely agreed with me, giving her the Shamus Award for best first.  The sequel, The Bird Boys, was nominated for best paperback private eye novel in 2019, and the New York Times proclaimed it one of the ten best crime novels of the year.  I invited her to write something for SleuthSayers and she sent us a review of a highly relevant book.

— Robert Lopresti

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE

by Lisa Sandlin

Ellen McGarrahan’s book Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, A Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice (Random House, 2021) has been categorized as a memoir and as true crime. It’s both. What makes it remarkable, what caught all my attention, was not only the expressive, dynamic, honest writing, but the motive for such writing. McGarrahan’s book is a soul search. A crusade she can’t quit until her soul quietens enough to let her go.

At seven a.m. on February 20, 1976, a Florida trooper and his friend, a visiting Canadian constable, pulled their cruiser into a rest stop to check on a beater Camaro. They found two men asleep in the front seat, one with a gun at his feet, and in the back, a small sleeping woman, a boy, and a baby. Shortly, the two officers were dead. The Camaro’s occupants abandoned that car when they hijacked a Cadillac and its terrified, elderly owner, then crashed the Cadillac into a police roadblock. One man eventually testified against the others. The second man and the woman ended up on Death Row.

The author was a cub reporter in May 1990 when she covered a Florida execution. She faced Jesse Tafero, convicted of the murder of the two officers, strapped into the Chair. He in turn scrutinized each of the witnesses to his death. For the beat of six seconds, his gaze locked onto Ellen McGarrahan’s. Tafero looked defiant. And afraid. The execution went awry, inflicting on the condemned even more suffering than this particular cruelty commonly produces. 

Two years later, the news program 20/20 quoted McGarrahan’s story and asked, “Could the State of Florida have executed an innocent man?”

McGarrahan froze. Her life had gone on, of course, she became a skilled private investigator and married a man she loved. But an uneasy place inside her, the place Carl Jung called “a living and self-existing being,” began to clamor to know the ultimate truth of what had happened to land Jesse Tafero in the electric chair.

In 2015, Ms. McGarrahan takes all her P.I. experience and talents on a search for the facts. This is where the book resembles a mystery novel: the many witnesses and participants she finds and questions, one leading to another to another. The truck drivers who saw the shooting, old friends of the convicted, prosecutors, defense witnesses, P.I.’s, the boy in the backseat, the woman. 

Her search takes her to a Florida prison—and other spots—to interview Walter Rhodes, the man who testified against his friends, and to interview him again and again as he recants, confesses, recants, confesses, and so on. The search takes her to Australia to talk with the grown up boy, to Ireland to question the woman, freed and the subject of a play proclaiming her wrongful imprisonment, her innocence. With each interview, the author must confront reluctant or combative strangers and manage her own fear and doubt. She has to co-exist with a penetrating force that won’t allow her to leave off and go home. 

The book’s suspense comes from both sources, the drive for the truth and what the quest demands of Ellen McGarrahan. Two Truths and a Lie is true crime, it’s memoir—and it’s breath-taking. 

4 comments:

  1. Lisa, it’s kind of you to review another’s book. As a Floridian and an opponent of capital punishment, life in the Sunshine state can be, well, interesting.

    We KNOW men have been wrongfully executed in Florida– not surmise, not guess, not deduce– we know. In one case, members of a small-town police department offered an alibi after the accused’s truck had broken down in front of the station, miles from the scene of the crime. They weren’t called to testify.

    Governor Martinez fulfilled a campaign promise by signing death warrants within the first hour of taking office. He didn’t have tine to read them. He churned out record numbers of death warrants, ramping up in the days before his next election.

    Governor Rick Scott tried to compete, but awkward Supreme Court rulings somewhat held him in check. He insisted victims’ families need closure… even if the exact identity of the perpetrator wasn’t quite known. But he compensated with corporate prisons: During one year, nearly a prisoner a day died at the hands of guards or other prisoners. In one particularly brutal assault, guards boiled a prisoner to death.

    Ellen McGarrahan… I prefer the way she defines closure.

    That’s the dark side of the Sunshine state.

    Thanks for the review, Lisa!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for a great and tragic and true comment, Leigh.

      Delete
  2. At least one university study has conservatively concluded at least 4 out of 100 condemned did not commit the crime. The Innocence Project says their work raises that to 5 out of a hundred and likely much higher. And yet we keep killing.
    I appreciate your article. Too many people turn a blind eye.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the article, Lisa. I put the book on my wish list. I'm intrigued.

    ReplyDelete

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