Film-maker Mark McLoughlin showed the finished cut of his documentary Stolen Lives to its subject, Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs, on Friday, May 30th. That was a few days before she died.
The showing took place at the isolated Co Galway house at Glenicmurrin, Connemara, which had been her sanctuary and her home with her husband Peter Pringle, who died in December 2023.
It was a tough but tender watch for Jacobs. The story of how she had been placed on death row for two murders she didn’t commit, and how she changed her life after prison, brought back a flood of emotions, some good, a lot bad.
“She was in really good form. She was always protective about her emotions. It was a build-up of years of self-protection,” recalls McLoughlin.
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“She was quite overwhelmed after it, but she didn’t fully articulate it. On Saturday she sent me a beautiful text about how overcome she was. It was so special for her.”
Her parting comment was that she wouldn’t change a frame of the documentary.
She told McLoughlin that an electrician was coming out the following Monday to look at a few things. The house at Glenicmurrin features a lot in Stolen Lives – cluttered, with plug sockets everywhere. Jacobs postponed the electrician’s visit on Monday when two American friends turned up out of the blue.
That Monday night or early on Tuesday morning she and her carer Kevin Kelly (31) perished in a house fire. His body was found in her room. Evidently he had tried to save her. They died from smoke inhalation.
It was a tragic end to two lives – one had overcome a near lifetime of adversity, the other was a young man with most of his life ahead of him.
Jacobs had been sentenced to death – later commuted to 17 years – in a Florida prison following the murder of two police officers.
She was in a car with her partner Jesse Tafero and her two children, aged nine years and 10 months, when she became caught up in a fatal shooting incident at an Interstate 95 rest stop in 1976. She was released from jail in 1991.
Seven years later, on a tour of Ireland, Jacobs met Pringle, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of two gardaí, John Morley and Henry Byrne, during a bank robbery in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, in July 1980. His death sentence, along with that of two other men, was commuted to 40 years in jail.
Pringle was acquitted of the killing at the Court of Appeal in 1995 after the court ruled the original verdict was unsafe and unsound.
The Stolen Lives documentary was 10 years in the making. Since 2014 McLoughlin has been following the story of the couple and also the work of the Sunny Center Foundation, which has homes in Florida for exonerees to rebuild their lives.
The documentary spends time in Florida with many of the exonerees, most of whom are American. Stolen Lives is as much an indictment of America’s vengeful judicial system as it is about the work that the foundation does to help the people involved rebuild their lives after wrongful convictions.
Among those who appear in the documentary is Robert Du Boise, who spent 37 years on death row, and Derrick Jamison and Joseph Frey, who spent 20 years apiece. All attended the Sunny Center in Tampa after their release.
McLoughlin says that early on Tuesday morning after the fire that took Jacobs’s life, he got a phone call from the woman who ran the centre in Florida to tell him the tragic news. Not only had the subject of his documentary died; he had lost a friend too.
“What started out as a working relationship 15 years ago ended up as a very strong friendship. The most difficult thing with exonerees is building trust. They spend so many years fighting everybody,” he says.
“They build a wall of absolute distrust so it took us a long time to build the trust and that became very special, especially since Peter died. We had a very strong bond.
“Sunny was very guarded with her emotions. She became happier and happier in the last two years. She was in a very good place.”
Stolen Lives is told through the eyes of the subjects of the documentary. Both Jacobs and Pringle get to tell their own story. McLoughlin says the documentary is not about guilt or innocence, but about how they managed to turn their lives around after leaving prison.
It includes an interview with Pringle’s son Thomas Pringle, who was an Independent TD in Donegal for eight years. He speaks candidly about the break-up of his parent’s marriage and growing up without his father.
“To have two people who were on death row together for so long should be inspiring to other people coming out to get on in their lives,” he says.
Pringle believes it is the fate of exonerees that many people will believe them to be guilty even if, as in his father’s case, the State quashes the conviction.
“No matter what, there are people who are going to believe he was guilty anyway. The State was convinced that his conviction was unsafe. It doesn’t matter. There are a lot of people who think he was guilty anyway,” Thomas Pringle says.
The first airing of Stolen Lives had always been planned for the Galway Film Fleadh this Thursday, July 10th, with further plans to tour the documentary in the US. The sudden death of Jacobs adds a deep poignancy to the premiere.
Stolen Lives will be shown at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway at 2pm on Thursday, July 10th.
