NATION : Florida Killer Electrocuted

STARKE, Fla. — A killer who described himself and his girlfriend as a “modern-day Bonnie and Clyde” was executed in Florida’s electric chair today for shooting two officers 14 years ago.

Jessie Joseph Tafero was electrocuted at 7:13 a.m. at Florida State Prison, eight hours after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution, exhausting his last appeal.

The executioner interrupted the standard two-minute, 2,000-volt electrical cycle because of the smoke and flames when a wet sponge on Tafero’s head caught fire, said state Corrections Department spokesman Bob Macmaster. But he said the prison’s chief medical officer, Dr. Frank Kilgo, believed Tafero died quickly.

The killings occurred Feb. 20, 1976, when a state trooper and a visiting Canadian constable checked on a car parked on the highway where Tafero, his girlfriend Sonja Jacobs, her two children and traveling companion Walter Rhodes Jr., were sleeping. Trooper Phillip Black died of gunshot wounds to the head and neck, while Constable Donald Irwin of Kitchener, Ontario, received fatal wounds in the right eye and shoulder.