Sunny Jacobs, a former death row inmate who was convicted of a 1970s double murder in Florida and later freed, becoming a news media celebrity and a leading subject in an acclaimed Off Broadway play and two television movies, died on Tuesday in rural County Galway, Ireland. She was 77.
Her death was announced by the Sunny Center, an anti-death penalty nonprofit organization founded by Ms. Jacobs, with locations in Galway and Tampa, Fla. It said she had “passed away after a fire at the Sunny Healing Center.” The circumstances of the fire were not immediately clear.
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’ 9-year-old son, Eric, and a baby daughter were also in the car, and they were left motherless by what she claimed was her unjust incarceration.
Her story was retold in theater and on film. Off Broadway, Mia Farrow, Jill Clayburgh, Lynn Redgrave, Stockard Channing, Susan Sarandon, Brooke Shields and others have all portrayed in “The Exonerated,” a 2000 play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. It became a Court TV movie in 2005 starring Ms. Sarandon. Ms. Jacobs’s story was also the basis of an earlier TV movie, “In the Blink of an Eye” (1996).
Barbara Walters once devoted a sympathetic segment to Ms. Jacobs on the ABC News program “20/20.” And Ms. Shields, along with the actresses Marlo Thomas and Amy Irving, attended Ms. Jacobs’s wedding to Mr. Pringle, in New York, at which Ms. Shields wept and said: “Despite everything they have been through, they are not bitter or jaded. They never closed their hearts.”
But the story was more complicated than the one that Ms. Jacobs fashioned about herself over the years, and that was swallowed uncritically by media outlets and by the worlds of stage and screen.
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.”
When Ms. McGarrahan went to find Ms. Jacobs at her home in Ireland many years later, “a small, plump, wrinkled, gray-haired woman in an oversized green sweater, sweatpants, and wire-rimmed glasses” appeared in the doorway.
Ms. Jacobs was wary, and mute on the subject of the Taser.
When Ms. McGarrahan told her that she was simply seeking to establish the truth about the case, Ms. Jacobs responded: “I don’t think you can know that. I don’t think that’s knowable.”
Sonia Jacobs — who was also known as Sonia Leigh Linder, Sonia Lee Jacobs and Sonia Lee Jacobs Linder, according to Ms. McGarrahan — was born on Aug. 24, 1947, in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens. Her parents, Herbert and Bella Jacobs, owned a textile firm. Sunny, as she was known, grew up in Elmont, N.Y., on Long Island.
She dropped out of college in 1965 and got married, with a wedding reception at the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Manhattan, Ms. McGarrahan wrote. By 1968 — the state of her marriage at that point is unclear — she was living with her young son in Miami in a house owned by her parents. Her life, before and after meeting Mr. Tafero, was “drugs, drugs and more drugs,” one informant told Ms. McGarrahan.
In 1982, after the Florida Supreme Court had overturned Ms. Jacobs’s death sentence and commuted it to life in prison, her parents were killed that year in a Pan Am plane crash in New Orleans.
When she was released 10 years later — the U.S. Court of Appeals ordered that she be given a new trial, but prosecutors offered a plea deal instead — Ms. Jacobs had already been the subject of the “20/20” segment.
In the years that followed, she taught yoga and became increasingly sought after as a speaker for her views opposing the death penalty. She moved to Ireland sometime in the 2000s. In 2007, she published her autobiography, “Stolen Time: One Woman’s Inspiring Story as an Innocent Condemned to Death.”
Facebook messages to her children, Eric Linder and ChrisTina Pafero, were not immediately answered.
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.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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