Larry Keller covered the execution of Jesse Tafero in 1990 for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.
It was a relief when the alarm clock jarred me awake before the macabre dreams returned.
Two days earlier my sleep had been tormented by vivid images of an old friend and my beloved dog, both dead. In reality, both, thankfully, were alive.
It was the morning of May 4, 1990, and, as I greeted a fellow journalist in the pre-dawn darkness, she told me she also had had a nightmare: she and others were gazing down upon an algae-covered, naked corpse and each person was instructed to take a bite out of it.
After discussing our ghoulish experiences, the two of us drove together to Florida State Prison near Starke for a rendezvous with the source of our dreams: the execution of cop-killer Jesse Tafero.
Tafero had a 7:01 a.m. appointment with Florida’s “Old Sparky” — the three-legged electric chair constructed of oak by prison inmates decades earlier.
Tafero was sentenced to death following his conviction on charges of killing Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Phillip A. Black and his friend, Donald Robert Irwin, who was a Canadian constable, at an Interstate 95 rest stop in Deerfield Beach in 1976.
At the prison, journalists went through a screening for sharp or potentially dangerous objects as rigorous as a TSA airport search. Even ballpoint pens and reporters’ notebooks were surrendered. The prison provided us with pencils and yellow legal pads instead.
Then we were led through a series of locked doors and down a hall to the room where we would watch Tafero die. It was a small room with white walls, four rows of folding metal chairs and a wide window with a view of the death chamber. We took our seats along with other witnesses, including a half-dozen uniformed Florida state troopers.
Jesse Tafero's last hours of life
Tafero had been allowed visitors for the last time the previous night. In the wee hours of this morning, a Catholic priest said Mass for him. “He had a strong constitution,” the priest said later.
Mass was followed by a couple of phone calls and his last meal. Tafero left half of his food uneaten. Then after he had his head and lower right leg shaved by prison personnel, he showered and donned dark blue trousers and a pale blue shirt paid for by the state.
The condemned man was then escorted by two guards guiding him by his arms for the 30-foot walk from his cell to the death chamber. When he entered he nodded at those of us sitting somberly to witness his demise.
He also could see — no more than 5 feet away — a blue curtain pulled almost entirely shut to conceal a small room. That’s where his executioner — one of the applicants who responded to a newspaper ad 11 years earlier for the $150 job — awaited the signal to pull the fatal switch.
Finally, Tafero was strapped into the chair. He said his last words, which were about the death penalty being "very arbitrary and capricious" and that "the same laws that can go against crime can go against you tomorrow."
A black hood was then placed over his head.
The witness room was so eerily quiet that the only sound was that of reporters’ pencils furiously scribbling notes. After checking with the governor’s office, the prison superintendent nodded to the anonymous person behind the blue curtain.
Soon the loud throb of a jolt of 2,000 volts of electricity shot through Tafero.
What happened next was unexpected: flames erupted from Tafero’s head as his body jerked forward.
After a brief pause, the executioner was given the go-ahead to pull the switch again. And once again, flames shot up from Tafero’s head. His body jerked once more and his chest continued to heave.
Another pause was followed by another bolt of electricity. This time there were no flames. Tafero jerked again, and then was still, his right hand clenched in a fist.
First one doctor, then a second one, placed stethoscopes on Tafero’s chest and listened. He was pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m.
Most of the journalists in the room, including me, hadn’t covered an execution before. We thought surely a condemned man’s head isn’t supposed to erupt in flames during an execution, is it? The Associated Press reporter had seen 11 executions and said it was not. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen flames and smoke from the head area,” he said.
The Florida Department of Corrections spokesman then had the thankless task of trying to put the best spin possible on the botched execution when he took questions from journalists outside the prison.
“The execution was carried out and that’s what is important,” he said.
By then, the day had dawned. It was as gray and grim as the execution of Tafero.
Twelve hours after Tafero's execution, I was home eating dinner when the refrigerator hummed, as they routinely do now and then. I flinched — it was very much like the sound of the electric chair being fired up.
A couple of nights later, I dreamed I was on death row, but I received an 11th-hour commutation. Instead, another reporter was electrocuted and his body was stored temporarily in my closet.
I'll never forget Tafero's execution, but it's rarely something I think about, any more than the time I was robbed at gunpoint while working at a 7-Eleven while in college.
Life for me, unlike Tafero and the men he killed, goes on.
Source: pnj.com, Staff, November 1, 2022. Larry Keller covered the execution of Jesse Tafero when he was a courts and criminal justice reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. He later worked as a reporter for The Palm Beach Post
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde