Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Although her reflections are occasionally redundant, McGarrahan captures a keen sense of place and the significance of the entire ordeal.Īn accomplished, unsettling look at a confounding crime and larger issues of memory, culpability, and punishment.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. 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. 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. Haunted by questions about Tafero’s possible innocence, McGarrahan took a leave of absence to review the case. 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. 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. She has a particular connection to the grisly crime at is center, which she portrays in a chilling prologue. Journalist and private investigator McGarrahan’s debut is an engrossing, authoritative fusion of true crime and memoir. Vivid re-examination of a puzzling double murder.
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