“Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave / When First We Practice to Deceive”

JIM McCLOSKEY

Tyler, Texas, known as the Rose Capital of America for its impressive production of roses, is the seat of Smith County, located a hundred miles east of Dallas in the middle of the Bible Belt. In 1977 this East Texas town had close to fifty Baptist churches amid a population of more than 65,000. Kansas City Chiefs' quarterback Patrick Mahomes, winner of three Super Bowls, hails from Tyler, which is also home to the University of Texas at Tyler, known in the 1970s as Texas Eastern University (TEU). This tidy town and university were not prepared for the gruesome news that broke Friday morning, June 10, 1977.

Paula Rudolph had returned home to her Tyler apartment in the sprawling Embarcadero complex at 12:30 a.m. after spending a couple of hours with a friend who was in town on business. As she came through the front door and stepped into her darkened foyer, she came face-to-face with a man standing nine feet away in her brightly lit spare bedroom. He quickly took a step toward her and closed the bedroom door without saying a word. The man wasn't a stranger; at least, that's what Paula thought at the time. He was Jim Mayfield, her boss at the TEU library. She knew why he was there, too—to visit her friend, Linda Jo Edwards, with whom he had been carrying on an affair. Embarrassed, Paula exclaimed, "It's okay, it's only me. I'm going to bed." She then briskly walked across the living room into her own bedroom, and closed the door. Several minutes later she heard the patio door open and close.

In her bedroom the thirty-six-year-old librarian lit a cigarette and fumed. Mayfield had promised Paula that his long-standing affair with Linda was over. Now it appeared that he'd been secretly visiting her. Paula's first thought was That S.O.B. can't leave her alone. She felt sorry for Linda, who was only twenty-two and clearly in over her head, too young to handle the stress of a relationship with a married man twice her age. Paula and Linda had talked often about the unsettled, topsy-turvy affair, one that Paula described as "nasty." It seemed that part of Mayfield wanted to break it off, but part of him did not.

Three weeks earlier, on May 19, Linda had attempted suicide after Mayfield left her to return to his wife of twenty-three years, Elfreide. Linda had swallowed eight to ten Dalmane 30mg sleeping pills. Mayfield had found her unconscious the next morning when he came by to get his clothes. He carried her to his car and rushed her to the hospital, where she stayed for six days. Upon her release, Mayfield had convinced Paula to take Linda in until she could get back on her feet, swearing that he and Linda were finished as lovers and that he wouldn't visit her in Paula's apartment.

After the university learned the cause of her suicide attempt, its president, James Stewart, had fired Mayfield from his position as library director and dismissed Linda from her secretarial post in the Humanities Department. Mayfield's firing took place on Monday, June 6, just three days before Linda's murder.

Now Paula read in bed for a few minutes, set her alarm, and went to sleep. She woke up the next morning at 7:10. Not getting a response after calling for Linda, Paula opened Linda's bedroom door. The sight would haunt her for the rest of her life. Linda lay spread-eagled on her back, practically naked and covered with blood. Paula stuffed her hand in her mouth, backed out of the room, and somehow managed to make two phone calls, first to the police and then to Olene Harned, her trusted friend and a senior colleague at the library, who arrived shortly after the police.

The scene was sickening. Linda was mutilated, every part of her sexual anatomy destroyed. The killer had used three weapons, all from Paula's apartment. With a five-pound statue from the living room credenza, he had repeatedly, at least ten times, smashed her face, mouth, and head, knocking her unconscious. The killer then used sewing scissors from a nearby table to stab her neck at least nine times, severing her carotid artery and jugular vein. He used a vegetable knife ten inches long and three inches wide in a variety of gruesome ways. He sliced both corners of her mouth several inches across each cheek, cut her right breast three times, plunged it deep into her body right below the breast and thrust it three times into her back, almost all the way through to her chest. In a frenzy, he then stabbed her genitalia with the scissors multiple times, obliterating her vaginal cavity and its deeper recesses. He cut and took several inches of hair from her head, apparently as a souvenir.

Linda's jeans were on the floor by the bed, next to her left ankle, clean with no blood, indicating that she or her killer had removed them before the assault. Her blouse and bra were cut with the knife and pulled above her breasts. Her panties were also cut with the knife, pulled off and lying by her right foot. Her right mid-calf-high nylon stocking was missing but her left one was still on. The statue and scissors were on the floor. The vegetable knife—part of an expensive cutlery set that Paula kept in a drawer in the kitchen—was missing at first, despite a concerted search by the police. It was finally discovered by Paula's father five days later when he was cleaning out her apartment. The knife had been sitting all along under a pile of clothes in Linda's bedroom closet.

Small traces of blood were found on the bedspread and pillow, barely noticeable with the naked eye. Minimal blood spattering was found in the room. The bathroom adjacent to the spacious bedroom closet was clean, dry, and spotless. The killer had to have been covered in blood, yet left no trace of it, except a drop on the glass terrarium near the patio door, as he made his exit from the bedroom through the apartment's living room to the patio door. There was no forced entry into the apartment, nor any sign of a struggle in the tiny eleven-by-twelve-foot bedroom. Nothing was out of place or knocked over. The iron was on, sitting upright on the ironing board. The TV was on. The bed, which was only a half-bed on blocks, was made and unruffled. The crime scene was chillingly clean and neat. How the killer achieved this ninja-like feat of a cleanup was a mystery to the forensic experts who analyzed the crime, including the FBI.

One thing was apparent, however: Linda Jo Edwards, six feet tall, 150 pounds, athletic and strong, with no defensive wounds and intact fingernails, was most likely the victim of a surprise attack by someone she knew and trusted.

Paula was taken downtown for a statement that morning and described in some detail the man she had seen the night before. He had "silver hair, cut in a medium, touching-the-ears fashion…The body was that of a Caucasian with a tan wearing white shorts…The figure was sleek and slender…my first impression was that it was my boss Jim Mayfield…" In later testimony she consistently described the man's height as one to two inches taller than her almost 5'6" height. Whoever it was, she said, had a very trim figure and moved quickly. He was reasonably proportioned with good-sized shoulders and a visible tan.

Her detailed description fit Mayfield to a T. He had silver hair, cut so that it just touched his ears. At a February 1978 deposition Mayfield agreed that his silver hair was "moderately short, comes down a little over the top of the ears—not quite to the middle of the ear." Paula testified twice in later hearings that Mayfield was 5'7" to 5'8" inches tall. Mayfield's university colleagues all recalled that he often wore white tennis shorts, was well tanned and lean. Obsessed with physical fitness, he played tennis or racquetball almost every day.

Sergeant Eddie Clark was a detective with the Tyler Police Department. Despite his youth (he was only twenty-six) and his lack of experience with homicides (this was his first), he was assigned to lead the investigation into the murder. Clark had known Linda her entire life. Both were raised in Bullard, a town with one railroad crossing and 500 residents, located eighteen miles south of Tyler. Both went to Bullard High School. Linda graduated four years behind Eddie, along with his younger sister, Susan. Eddie was president of his 1970 graduating class and voted most likely to succeed among his fifty classmates. Bringing Linda's savage killer to justice was personal for him. He felt that he owed it not only to the citizens of Tyler, but also to Linda's family and friends and the folks back in Bullard who expected nothing less.

Linda had been the star basketball player for Bullard High, weighing in at 200 pounds before meeting Mayfield. She was a pretty young woman, gregarious, vivacious, and well liked. Soon after high school she married a local boy, Bobby Lester. For a small-town farm girl, Linda was a spendthrift, running up thousands of dollars in credit card bills for clothing and jewelry. She wanted the finer things in life, which Bobby could not afford. Bobby, who loved her dearly, worked double shifts at the Tyler tire factory to keep them afloat. In November 1975, Linda began working at Mayfield's library as a periodical clerk. It didn't take long for the forty-two-year-old Mayfield, an inveterate womanizer, to notice the beauty and potential sexuality in twenty-year-old Linda. Their affair began at the library's 1975 Christmas party at Mayfield's home with a kiss under the mistletoe. It lasted until the night she died. During its duration, Mayfield remade and molded Linda physically into the woman he wanted. Through a regimen that included pills, diet, and exercise, he got her to lose fifty to sixty pounds, and encouraged her to get contact lenses and change her hairstyle. Under his Svengali-like guidance, she was transformed into a statuesque figure he delighted in, and she was proud of.

Realizing he'd be a suspect, Mayfield contacted Eddie Clark and was interviewed by him at the police station that very afternoon, June 10. He provided a rather understated description of his affair with Linda, which he claimed began when she came to him with her marital problems. Linda had split with her husband in June 1976, and she had gladly accepted Mayfield's invitation to live in his family's Tyler home, along with his wife and their three adopted children, eighteen-year-old Bonnie, seventeen-year-old Charley, and sixteen-year-old Louella.

Mayfield told Sergeant Clark that Linda stopped living with them in January 1977, when the family moved to a new home on Lake Palestine, seventeen miles south of Tyler. Elfreide no longer wanted Linda in the house. So Linda moved in with her grandmother in Bullard, a short distance from the lake. By then, Bonnie had married and Charley had joined the army, leaving Louella the only child at home. Mayfield told Sergeant Clark that the affair continued for the next five months until it culminated in the brief and torrid week in mid-May when he left his wife and daughter and moved into an apartment he rented at the Embarcadero complex for him and Linda, not far from Paula Rudolph, and then, six days later, changed his mind and returned to his family, leaving Linda so despondent that she tried to take her own life.

Sergeant Clark already knew quite a bit about Linda because he was the officer who had investigated her suicide attempt. From her Bullard friends he'd learned she had had other affairs while married to Bobby. He learned that a month before her death, Linda had dated an old friend from high school, and asked her best friend to cover for her if Mayfield called. This same friend told Eddie how possessive Mayfield was. Years later she told others that "he would die if he knew she was seeing someone else." Eddie learned from other sources that when Linda lived with the Mayfield family in Tyler, she and Mayfield carried on their affair right under the nose of Elfreide and their teenage children. Eddie knew that Linda had spent a great deal of time at the Mayfields' lake house as well, often observed by neighbors sunning herself on the pier in a bikini. Eddie also learned that Linda habitually called Mayfield at night and beckoned him to her apartment, much to Elfreide's resentment. They couldn't stay away from each other. He, sexually addicted to her; she, madly in love with him.

Mayfield concluded his story by telling Eddie he was with Linda several different times during the day leading up to her murder. She came to TEU to speak with him late in the morning. That visit spilled over into lunch at the Dairy Queen until 1:30, when she departed for a job interview at a local bank. She returned to his office at 4:00 to tell him she got the job. Then, driving their own cars, at 5:30 they went apartment hunting for her until 6:00 when they went their separate ways. He failed to mention that they had also played tennis that afternoon at the Embarcadero courts. According to him, the last time he saw Linda that day was at 8:30 p.m. when she unexpectedly arrived at his Lake Palestine house. They talked a few minutes in his driveway. She told him about meeting another man—someone called Steve—at the local tennis court and asked Mayfield to fix her car on Saturday. Mayfield told Eddie that he remained home that night with his wife and Louella.

Mayfield agreed to return to the police station the following Monday, June 13, to take a polygraph. But on Monday he retained the top criminal defense attorney in Tyler, Buck Files, who immediately canceled the polygraph. Files notified Sergeant Clark that he was not to speak with Mayfield or his wife without his permission, effectively excluding the Mayfields from the police investigation.

That same afternoon, Friday, June 10, Sergeant Clark had other visitors who wanted to volunteer information: history professor Dr. Andrew Szarka and speech professor Dr. Judy Freeman, along with their spouses. They were all neighbors of Mayfield's at Lake Palestine, as well as his former colleagues at TEU. Both couples knew Linda well and suspected Mayfield may have been involved in her death. The Szarkas reported that Linda had stopped by their house immediately after she had spoken with Mayfield the night before and stayed a half hour, until 9:00 p.m. Linda spoke of how upset Mayfield had been when she told him she had decided to date other men while still continuing their own relationship. Judy Freeman, ten years older than Linda, had been a confidante to the younger woman. She told Sergeant Clark how possessive and jealous Mayfield was, unwilling for Linda to see other men.

It did not take long for the police to account for Linda's movements the night of her murder. She had made the seventeen-mile, twenty-two-minute drive from the Embarcadero to Mayfield's home, arriving around 7:30 p.m. Since he was not yet home, she went over to a nearby tennis court, and happened upon twenty-five-year-old Steve Nations. Never shy, she introduced herself, gave him her telephone number, and suggested he call her if he wanted to play tennis. She then went by the Freeman home, but they weren't there. After her visit to Mayfield and the Szarkas, she arrived home at 9:30. Paula informed Linda that she was going to shower and get ready to visit a friend at the Rodeway Inn. She would be leaving in about an hour. Linda left the apartment at 10:00 p.m. and went to the nearby Embarcadero tennis courts to see who was there. She bumped into Orlando and Alma Padron, who lived in one of the Embarcadero apartments, and they invited her back to their place for a drink. Linda reluctantly accepted but kept telling them that she had to get back to her apartment before her roommate left for the evening.

Alma Padron years later said that Linda was nervous and jittery that night. Her legs were shaking as she constantly looked at her watch. She seemed troubled as she sat on the edge of the couch. Earlier at the tennis court, before they returned to the Padrons' apartment, Linda had poured out her heart to Alma, whom she barely knew. Linda talked of her divorce, her attempted suicide over her problems with a married man, and his jealousy. She also spoke of a new job she'd gotten at a bank that day, and how she wanted to begin life anew. Alma sensed that Linda was determined to let go of the past, but at the same time was "emotionally torn up." Linda left the Padrons' at 10:25 and was back in her apartment in time to see Paula off at 10:30.

Only two hours later, at 12:30 a.m., Paula arrived home and saw the killer in Linda's bedroom.

In a bizarre twist in the case, it turned out that two weeks before Linda's murder, during the week of May 23–27, sixteen-year-old Louella Mayfield had impersonated a police officer in her Explorer Scout uniform and visited several Tyler apartment complexes, including the Embarcadero. She told apartment managers that she was investigating a murder involving Jim Mayfield and Linda Jo Edwards. The next day, Louella was warned by the police that such behavior was a serious offense. Then, about a week before Linda was killed, Louella stormed into Linda's TEU work area and in front of others loudly confronted Linda, threatening to kill her if she continued seeing her father. She then marched into her father's office, screaming at him that he must stop seeing Linda.

All of Louella's actions had been written up in a police report by a Sergeant Hayden, who ended his report by stating, "I personally know Louella to be mentally and emotionally unstable, very hyperactive and a pathological liar."

Years later Louella told The Dallas Morning News that she did these things because "my mom was going through a lot of emotional stress…and it hurt." This was certainly true. Elfreide was indeed worn out by her husband's nonstop philandering and devastated by his decision to desert her and Louella and move in with Linda. When she learned of Linda's suicide attempt, she wondered aloud to her best friend, Wanda Joyce, "When will it ever end?"

Jim Mayfield was Elfreide's Coffeyville, Kansas, high school sweetheart and the love of her life. She was determined not to lose him to a woman half her age. On May 19, her forty-second birthday, days after he had moved out, she called Mayfield and implored him to come home. This request threw Mayfield into a frenzy. Torn between his young paramour and the wife of his youth, he started behaving erratically. On that same day, he filed papers to divorce Elfreide, then immediately returned home to her. Mayfield's whiplash broke Linda's heart. That was the night that she, depressed and feeling abandoned, took the pills that nearly ended her life.

Sergeant Clark interviewed Louella on Tuesday, June 14, about her threats to Linda. Louella admitted making them and to pretending to be a police officer. She wanted her father back; his absence was tearing her mother apart. She also told Clark that she, her father, and her mother were all home together the night of Linda's murder. Based on this interview, Sergeant Clark eliminated Louella as a suspect. In any case, the next day attorney Files called Sergeant Clark and told him no more interviews with Louella.

Initially, Sergeant Clark did consider Mayfield and his wife as possible suspects. If Linda had told Mayfield she was cutting off the relationship, Clark reasoned, then out of anger Mayfield might have killed her by destroying her sexual parts; that way no one else could have her. Clark also thought that Elfreide might have had motive to destroy Linda's sexual parts, so Linda could never use them again to destroy her marriage. In the end, however, neither Sergeant Clark nor the Tyler police could bring themselves to believe that the director of the university library or anyone in his family was capable of such savagery. The Mayfields simply did not fit the profile of such a killer. Especially not the one compiled by local psychologist Jerry Landrum, whom Sergeant Clark had used before and who coincidentally lived at the Embarcadero. After viewing the crime scene photos and receiving a debriefing by Clark the week of June 13, it was Landrum's view that the murderer was possibly eighteen to thirty years old, homosexual, impotent, introverted, a drug user, and epileptic. So Sergeant Clark believed it would be a waste of time to interview any of Mayfield's or Linda's university colleagues, or anyone associated with Mayfield's professional and personal life, past or present. Instead, he focused his attention on the Embarcadero apartment complex, convinced that he would find Linda's sadistic killer in those 265 units. Thus he enabled Mayfield to walk free.

At 9:00 a.m. on June 10, Sgt. Doug Collard, the fingerprint identification police supervisor, dusted Paula's apartment for fingerprints. He was intrigued by the clarity of prints he lifted from the patio door, how they "jumped up at him" immediately upon dusting the door. Later that morning, he told Clark: "When you find the man whose prints are on the sliding patio door, you will have your killer." For the next two months, from morning to night, Clark knocked on every apartment door, contacting almost all the residents. He fingerprinted all the men in the Embarcadero, polygraphed several of them, and investigated those who had any kind of criminal record. He was a man possessed.

On August 2 he hit pay dirt. He bumped into James Taylor, whom he had fingerprinted and interviewed earlier. Taylor was an independent truck driver who made frequent out-of-town deliveries of oil equipment for a family company. For the first time, Taylor told him that while he had been away when Edwards was murdered, a guest had been living temporarily in his apartment. His name was Kerry Max Cook. When Taylor returned from his trip that weekend, he learned that Kerry had left Tyler the day after the murder for Jacksonville, a town thirty miles south of Tyler, to visit his parents. Taylor told Clark that Cook had had problems with the law in Jacksonville. He went on to say that Cook returned to Taylor's apartment on Monday, June 13; later that day, Taylor dropped him off in Houston during another delivery run.

Before crashing at Taylor's apartment, Cook had been a bartender in Dallas at a gay bar called Old Plantation. Taylor had met Cook there, and introduced him to his friend, Robert Hoehn, a Tyler hairdresser. Both Taylor and Hoehn were homosexual and attracted to Cook. The fact that Cook worked in a gay bar and was temporarily staying with Taylor is what later led police to believe he was homosexual.

The next day, Sergeant Collard obtained Cook's fingerprints from the Jacksonville police and compared them to the prints on Paula's patio door. Excited, he told Clark they were a match. Eddie and his colleagues thought they finally had their man. This view was reinforced when they learned that Cook was a twenty-one-year-old with a criminal record. No violent crimes, but he had spent time in prison. As a juvenile delinquent in the early 1970s, he had made a habit of running away from home and taking friends on junkets in stolen cars. These escapades earned him a short stint in a Texas prison for first-time offenders. He was released on his eighteenth birthday, April 5, 1974, and returned home to his parents in Jacksonville. There, he got into new trouble when he kicked out a store window after being wrongly accused of robbing the store. For that he was put on probation for "malicious mischief." His probation ended in the spring of 1977. For the first time in four years, he was free and clear of any entanglements with the law.

In the midst of these earlier arrests, Kerry had been sent to Rusk State Hospital for pre-trial evaluation. The man who examined him was none other than Dr. Jerry Landrum, the psychologist who, four years later, would offer Sgt. Eddie Clark a profile of Linda's killer. In his report on Kerry, Dr. Landrum called him a "typical rebellious juvenile" and "an immature, dependent youth who cries for his mother at night." After determining that Kerry was not psychotic and had no other mental disorder, Dr. Landrum saw no reason to confine him and ordered his release.

On August 3, Sergeant Clark took statements from two people who had interactions with Cook in the days leading up to the murder—Randy Dykes, Taylor's seventeen-year-old nephew, and Cook's friend Robert Hoehn. Both recounted a story that caught Sergeant Clark's attention. At one point during his stay, Kerry had seen a girl undressing in the bedroom of a different unit. The girl was Linda Jo Edwards. Hoehn said he'd heard the story from Kerry at 11:00 p.m. the night of the murder, while they were walking from Taylor's apartment to the Embarcadero swimming pool. Dykes told the sergeant that he had heard the story days earlier, also on a walk to the pool with Kerry. Both Dykes and Hoehn now showed Clark the window. Dykes recounted another detail: On June 7, three days before the murder, Cook's neck "was covered with passion marks." Dykes had asked Kerry about the marks, and Kerry said he had met the girl he saw in the window—Linda Jo Edwards—at the pool, and that the two of them had gone back to her apartment and made out.

The stories told by Hoehn and Dykes convinced Eddie Clark that Kerry was a peeping Tom. This, in combination with Dr. Landrum's profile, made him conclude that Kerry was Linda's killer. In fact, there was some evidence that Linda had an exhibitionist streak—two other men in the building testified later that they'd noticed her standing nude in the window as if she wanted to be admired. But, convinced they had their man, law enforcement moved with lightning speed against Kerry. On August 3, Smith County district attorney A. D. Clark (not related to Eddie Clark) issued an arrest warrant for Kerry Max Cook for the capital murder of Linda Jo Edwards. It wasn't until 5:30 p.m. on Friday, August 5, however, that Cherokee County sheriff Danny Stallings of Jacksonville, who knew Kerry and his family, learned of Kerry's whereabouts from his parents. Kerry was working as a bartender at the Holiday Club in Port Arthur, Texas. Sergeant Clark and Sheriff Stallings flew on a private plane from Tyler to Port Arthur at 8:00 p.m. that evening.

With the assistance of local police, at 10:50 p.m. Sergeant Clark placed Kerry under arrest at the club. The police then proceeded to search—Kerry would later say "ransack"—his apartment. As this was close to midnight, Kerry's girlfriend, Amber Norris, with whom he had been living for several weeks, sat on the bed in her nightgown, terrified. Nothing of evidentiary value was found.

Back at the Port Arthur jail Sergeant Clark, Stallings, and the Port Arthur vice squad interrogated Kerry for hours on end, trying to extract a confession. They yelled expletive-laden accusations in Kerry's face and told him, falsely, that his hair and semen were found on Linda's body. One of the locals even plunged Kerry's head into a toilet bowl, continually flushing it, screaming at him to confess. All to no avail. At last, before dawn, they put him on the plane back to Tyler. But his ordeal wasn't over. The Tyler police stripped Kerry of his clothing and locked him in a windowless jail cell with an air-conditioning unit pumping freezing air onto his naked body.

A day or two later Kerry's mom and dad, Earnest and Evelyn Cook, arrived. Although a rebellious youth, Kerry loved them both and greatly respected his dad, who had been a career army sergeant running the motor pools at different army bases in Europe. Kerry and his older brother, Doyle Wayne, whom Kerry idolized, were army brats who moved from base to base throughout Germany in their formative years. In 1972 his dad had retired after twenty-one years of service and moved the family back to Jacksonville, Texas, where he and Evelyn had been raised, met, and married.

During this visit Kerry's dad asked him if he knew the girl who was killed. When Kerry began to tell him the story about meeting her at the pool and going to her apartment, Earnest interrupted him and warned, "Never tell anyone you were inside that apartment or that you even knew her. If you do they will pin that murder on you. Promise me you will keep your mouth shut." For the next fourteen years Kerry followed his dad's dictum, and denied he ever met Linda Jo Edwards. This lie, along with the web of lies spun against him by prosecutors, would ensnare him for years to come.

On September 1, Sergeant Clark went to Port Arthur to interview those who knew Kerry. He spent some time with Kerry's live-in girlfriend, Amber Norris. She told him she first met Kerry on July 1 at a gay bar in Houston when she was visiting friends. She returned to Port Arthur after the July Fourth weekend and Kerry came with her. He got a bartender's job at the Holiday Club on July 7, and they rented an apartment together. She accompanied him to Jacksonville in mid-July where she met his mom, dad, and brother. She told the prying Sergeant Clark that their sex life was very normal and included oral, but not anal, sex. Although she and Kerry had several homosexual friends, she had no idea if Kerry was bisexual or not. He was never impotent with her. On occasion they smoked marijuana; under its influence he became "silly," never angry or violent.

The grand jury met about Kerry's case from August through October 1977. Cyrus Kugler, the manager of the Holiday Club where Kerry worked, testified on September 19. He had nothing but good things to say about Kerry.

The Holiday Club's clientele, he said, was straight, middle-class Americana, not gay. He characterized Kerry as a "very easygoing fellow who made friends with many people around the club." Everyone liked him, men and women. "Girls galore" wanted to go out with him. He was always "nice, polite, with good manners." He was an experienced and excellent bartender who needed no training. To better fit in with the club's customers, Kerry got his hair cut and dressed conservatively.

That same day, September 19, Jerry Landrum also appeared before the grand jury. He expanded on his earlier profile of the killer. He said the perpetrator was most likely bisexual with problems of impotency, a problem that caused him to harbor an inordinate amount of anger and hostility toward females. He believed the offender was a "sexually inadequate" male with a "pathological hostility toward a mother figure." In a contradictory and somewhat incomprehensible analysis, he first stated that the killer, a homosexual, was motivated to mutilate the victim's sexual body parts because he did not have those parts. Then, in the next breath, confusing the grand jurors, he said it was a sexual attack by a bisexual.

Three witnesses—Taylor's nephews Randy and Rodney Dykes, and Robert Hoehn—testified to the grand jury that Kerry had told them he had met Linda at the Embarcadero pool and that she had invited him into her apartment where they made out, giving him the passion marks on his neck. Hoehn testified that Cook told him about his encounter with Linda during dinner at Hoehn's home on Monday night, June 6. Randy testified that on Tuesday morning, June 7, Kerry had told him the same thing when he questioned the marks on Cook's neck. Hoehn also testified that he and Kerry had spent June 9, the evening of the murder, together. The X-rated movie The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea was on cable TV, but Hoehn said that Kerry "wasn't paying any attention to it." He also testified that Kerry was not angry, frustrated, or upset that night. All three men were questioned by A. D. Clark, Sgt. Eddie Clark by his side.

Fearing that this grand jury testimony, which gave an innocent reason for Kerry's prints on Linda's patio door, could undercut his case against Kerry, A. D. Clark unlawfully withheld it from Kerry's trial attorneys. It would not see the light of day for another fourteen years.

—

In June 1978, ten months after his arrest, Kerry's trial took place. His attorneys were Larue Dixon and John Ament. Dixon was the former district attorney of Cherokee County who had prosecuted Kerry and sent him to jail five years earlier; Ament had represented Kerry on some of those charges. As Jacksonville partners they accepted the case for a retainer of $500—all the Cook family could afford. They received no other payments for their representation, making it impossible to pay expert witnesses and investigators to help defend Kerry. The thirty-five-year-old trial prosecutor was Michael Thompson, an overbearing bulldog who would stop at nothing to get a conviction.

The murder of Linda Jo Edwards was the most heinous crime in East Texas history. Thompson and his boss, District Attorney A. D. Clark, were determined not only to convict but to put Kerry Max Cook to death for it. Besides that, Clark, appointed district attorney by the governor after his predecessor resigned, was up for election later that year. Heading into the trial, Clark knew he needed more evidence, and a lot of it, to get a conviction. His political career depended on it.

The first challenge was the patio door prints that were indisputably Kerry's. How and when did his prints get on that door? Was he an invited guest earlier, or did he slip in and kill her? Clark's solution was to convince Doug Collard to testify that those prints were six to twelve hours old when discovered, thus placing Kerry in Linda's apartment at the time of her death. By hiding the three men's grand jury testimony, which offered an alternative account for Kerry's presence at Linda's apartment, and insisting that Collard place Kerry's prints on the patio door at the time of the crime, Clark was well on his way to being able to present the assault on Linda as a "stranger-on-stranger" crime committed by the deranged defendant. He knew full well, of course, that Kerry was no stranger to Linda.

—

Now A. D. Clark needed Paula Rudolph to identify Kerry as the man she saw in the bedroom. Kerry's appearance was vastly different from the man she had described to the police and grand jury. There was even proof of that. On the morning after Linda was murdered, Randy Dykes had taken Kerry to get his driver's license renewed. The Tyler Department of Public Safety took a new photo to process the renewal. It showed Kerry with a full head of bushy dark brown hair that covered both of his ears and ran down the sides of his face. This was a far cry from "silver hair, cut in a medium, touching-the-ears fashion." The photo also listed Kerry's height as 5'11", significantly taller than the 5'7"–5'8" described by Paula. Unfortunately for Kerry, the photo got lost in the mail and was not secured until years later.

Regardless, Paula was never asked to attend a lineup, nor was she shown a photo array for identification purposes. She was never asked at two pre-trial hearings to specifically identify Kerry as the man she saw, despite the fact that Kerry was sitting at the defense table across the room. Nor was she asked if Kerry was the man she saw when testifying to the grand jury on September 19. At Kerry's bond hearing, she was asked if she could identify the man she saw. She answered evasively, "I will not swear under oath who it was." Prosecutors Clark and Thompson knew they needed time to convince Paula that the man they were prosecuting for Linda's murder was, in fact, the killer, and for Paula to agree that the man she had seen couldn't have been Jim Mayfield, because Jim Mayfield couldn't have committed such a barbaric act.

It took almost a year for her to come around, sort of. At trial she was no longer certain that she had seen the man's hair. Her nonsensical rationalization for this significant change was that she'd been looking at a brightly lit room against which she observed only a "reflected silhouette." (Forensic experts agree that standing in the dark and looking into a well-lighted room a short distance away is the ideal visual environment to make accurate observations.) Paula said that she didn't see facial features, only "shadows and planes on a shape, a figure." When asked if the defendant was the man she saw, she replied, "Yes, he fits." Thus, in the end, her identification of Kerry was based on "a silhouetted body shape," which, according to her, Kerry fit.

—

Now allied with the prosecution, Paula backed off what she originally told the police. She was now certain that the man she saw was not Jim Mayfield. But she was still convinced that the man was wearing white shorts. This proved helpful to Kerry when Robert Hoehn testified for the State. But the testimony that came next was absolutely damning in the eyes of the jury.

As they did in their grand jury statements, Hoehn and the Dykes brothers portrayed Kerry to the jury as a peeping Tom. Randy testified that Kerry told him he was passing the girl's bedroom window one night, and from the sidewalk he stopped and watched her undress. He added that Kerry told him she had big breasts and played with herself. On the morning after Linda's death, Randy took Kerry to fill out a job application in Tyler, and then drove him to Jacksonville and dropped him off at his brother's workplace. Although he did not say it at this first trial, Randy testified at a 1994 retrial that on the morning after Linda was murdered, he took Kerry to the local Department of Public Safety to renew his driver's license—not a likely destination for a man who had allegedly mutilated a woman twelve hours earlier.

Hoehn testified at trial that he and Kerry had watched the X-rated movie The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea on cable TV the night Linda was killed. But this time, in direct contradiction of his grand jury testimony—in which he said several times that Kerry "wasn't paying any attention to it"—Hoehn now disgusted the conservative jury by salaciously describing the oral and anal sex that he and Kerry supposedly had together while the movie was playing, including Kerry masturbating and ejaculating on the floor as Hoehn watched. Hoehn told of one scene in the movie where a little boy peered into his mother's bedroom and watched as she pleased herself. He said Kerry was "rubbing himself" when children in the movie were getting ready to mutilate a cat, and that he held up a butcher knife saying, "Let's cut it out." None of this was true, but the prosecution ran with it, portraying Kerry as a perverted and intoxicated homosexual killer so sexually stimulated by the film, and by the memory of seeing Linda nude in her bedroom window, that he'd gone to her apartment, slid in through the patio door, caught her by surprise, and did to her what the young boys did to the cat in the film. If Ament and Dixon had had Hoehn's suppressed grand jury testimony, they could have knocked down the State's ludicrous presentation.

Parts of Hoehn's trial testimony, however, did help Kerry's case, except by now the jury was so turned off they probably gave it no credence. Hairdresser Hoehn told the jury that Kerry had a full head of dark brown hair down to his shoulders and was wearing the same blue and red boxing shorts that he always wore (not white tennis shorts).

Hoehn also testified that he and Kerry left the apartment sometime after midnight to get a pack of cigarettes. When they returned, he dropped Kerry off at the Embarcadero's front entrance. He was positive it was between 12:30 and 12:35, not earlier and not later. After they purchased the cigarettes, Kerry had suggested that they ride around for a while. Hoehn said no. When he dropped Kerry off, Kerry invited Hoehn to come in and visit with him a little longer. Hoehn declined because he had to get up early the next morning for work.

So, if Kerry were the killer, he would have had to turn into a monster in the blink of an eye as soon as Hoehn drove away. On an impulse, he would have had to dash back to Taylor's apartment, change into white shorts, run over to Paula's apartment, slip in the patio door, confront and mutilate Linda, meticulously clean up, and hardly leave behind a trace of blood.

There was a reason Hoehn testified falsely against Kerry. Inexplicably, Smith County prosecutors were convinced that Hoehn had joined Kerry in killing Linda. The police interrogated Hoehn so intensely, and harassed him so ceaselessly, that he retained an attorney to put a stop to it. But prosecutor Thompson still tried. When the last juror was selected, he asked for a recess and ushered Kerry and his attorneys into a conference room. He offered Kerry a plea whereby if Kerry named Hoehn as his partner in the murder, he would recommend a sentence of twenty-five years instead of death. Insisting on his innocence, Kerry refused and went to trial.

The fixation of the authorities on Robert Hoehn had no basis in fact. Hoehn looked nothing like the man Paula described. He had blond hair thinning on top. He was overweight and soft-looking with a noticeable belly. He stood close to 5'11" at 175 pounds. His skin was pasty white with not a hint of a tan. When Kerry refused to plea out, Hoehn was given immunity to testify as he did. Besides a murder charge, he avoided prosecution under the anti-same-sex sodomy law in effect in Texas until 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court found the law unconstitutional.

After Hoehn's testimony, the prosecutors had a jailhouse snitch to share with the jury. Thompson brought in Edward Scott Jackson (aka "Shyster"). He had been in jail for first-degree murder since November 1976, awaiting trial. Shyster told the jury that Kerry had confessed to killing Linda while they were in the Smith County jail together. Shyster repeated gory aspects of the murder Kerry had supposedly told him. For instance, Kerry allegedly told him he cut out Linda's vagina and took it with him along with hair from her head. Jackson recalled that Kerry had a particular hatred for women with dark hair (Linda had long, dark brown hair), but he liked blondes and redheads. He'd say vulgar things about dark-haired women while they perused girlie magazines together, like "this bitch needs her ass kicked for posing like this."

Shyster assured the jury there were no secret deals with the prosecutor for his testimony. Thompson backed this up during summation, claiming, "I will be yelling for [Shyster] Jackson's head right before this rail of justice just like I am this killer and it will fall. I don't make deals with killers." That's not what happened, though. On August 15, 1978, a month almost to the day after Kerry arrived on death row, Shyster was back in court. He pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter, was sentenced to time served, and walked free. He had spent 625 days in the Smith County jail on a murder charge, rather than a life sentence in a Texas state prison if convicted at trial.

The State's last witness was Dr. V. V. Gonzalez, a pathologist who had examined the body at the crime scene and performed the autopsy at a funeral home later that morning. Dr. Gonzalez was not trained as a medical examiner, nor did he formally serve in that capacity. In 1977, Smith County did not have a medical examiner's office. Years later, the renowned Texas forensic pathologist, Dr. Lloyd White, reviewed Gonzalez's work in Linda's case. He described his autopsy report and testimony as "almost unintelligible." Dr. White also characterized Dr. Gonzalez as "incapable of describing any sort of wound or injury in a manner consistent with all generally accepted standards of forensic pathology practice."

Dr. Gonzalez offered one very damning, and highly suspect, finding. Even though he had not made note of it in his autopsy report, he testified that he believed a piece of the vaginal canal had been "cut off" and "was missing." He was able to discover this even though the killer had repeatedly stabbed the vagina and the area around it so many times that her genitalia and rectum all the way into the pelvic cavity had been eviscerated. As soon as Dr. Gonzalez departed the stand, the State rested its case.

The defense consisted of only three witnesses, all Smith County jail inmates. They told the jury that Shyster Jackson had told them he had a deal with the district attorney that would enable him to plead to involuntary manslaughter, get time served, and go home. Which is exactly what happened.

Fearful that Thompson would ride roughshod over Kerry, his attorneys persuaded him not to testify.

In his summation, Thompson used Gonzalez's "missing vagina" finding to tell the jury that this "pervert" took Linda's missing calf stocking, "dropped those body parts in it," and with the stocking in hand exited the apartment. In an outrageous assertion, he then added, "I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't eat those body parts." Thompson branded Kerry a "young sexual psychopath" and implored the jury to "take his warped, twisted and perverted mind out of existence" and "do something about that pervert before he does it again to a young woman in our county."

Thompson told the jury that after Randy Dykes took Kerry down to Jacksonville the day after the murder on June 10, "he [Kerry] kept on running and never came back to Tyler…he went like a rabbit from the City of Tyler and hadn't come back." Thompson knew this was false. While James Taylor didn't testify at trial, he had testified before the grand jury on October 3, 1977, that Kerry had returned to Tyler on Monday afternoon, June 13, three days after the murder, having spent the weekend with his family in Jacksonville. Kerry only left Tyler again when Taylor kicked him out of his apartment after hearing that Kerry had had sex with one of his friends. It was a groundless rumor, but Taylor's jealousy got the best of him, and he asked Kerry to leave. Taylor drove Kerry to Houston later that day during a truck delivery run. Kerry called twice from Houston later that week, asking Taylor to let him come back. Taylor refused and never heard from Cook again.

Like Hoehn's and the Dykes brothers' grand jury testimony, Taylor's was kept from the defense for the next fourteen years.

In their summation, defense attorneys Ament and Dixon tried to drive home how much Kerry's physical appearance differed from Paula's initial description of the killer. They argued that Kerry could not have committed the crime, since Paula saw the killer in the bedroom at 12:30 and Hoehn dropped Kerry off at the same time. They ridiculed the Shyster Jackson "jailhouse confession," characterizing him as a "smooth talker" who should not be believed. Dixon predicted, accurately as it turned out, that in two months they would read in the paper that Shyster had pled to involuntary manslaughter and walked free. But Cook's attorneys couldn't get around Collard's testimony that the prints were six to twelve hours old when found. Absent Kerry's admission that he'd touched the patio door when he and Linda had gone to her apartment a few days earlier to make out, Collard's testimony placed Kerry in the apartment at the time of the murder.

The jury reached its verdict at 10:00 p.m. on June 28, 1978, after deliberating through the afternoon and evening. They found Kerry guilty of capital murder. The punishment phase began the next day.

For this, Dr. Jerry Landrum took the stand. He was now a self-employed psychologist, no longer at Rusk Hospital. But he recalled his evaluation of Kerry at Rusk several years earlier. He told the jury he didn't have his notes but remembered that he had diagnosed him as "an anti-social personality." Even though he had not interviewed him since, he added that he would put Kerry in the "severe psychopathic category" and had "no doubt" he was a continuing threat to society who could not be rehabilitated if institutionalized. Since the defense never saw his September 1973 evaluation, they didn't know that Landrum was contradicting his own conclusion that Kerry was "not psychotic," that Kerry was "free of any mental disorder," and that there was "no reason" to keep Kerry confined.

Later, it was discovered that Dr. Landrum consistently misrepresented his résumé and used highly questionable practices. He often testified under oath that he had a PhD in psychology, when in fact his doctorate was in education and personnel administration. In 1982, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ridiculed Dr. Landrum's diagnosis of another Texas death row inmate's future dangerousness as "ludicrous," one that "cannot be seriously considered." In that case Landrum rendered his opinion after silently observing the inmate for thirty minutes while sitting alone with him, the inmate refusing to speak the entire time.

The other primary witness against Kerry at the punishment hearing was Dr. James Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist. He examined Cook and also found him to have an antisocial personality, which he defined as a person without conscience who has no regard for another person's life. He went deeper and put him "at the very end, the very most severe [end] where you will find the sociopath," further adding: "You can't come any more severe than that…I feel absolutely 100% certain that he is and will continue to be a threat no matter where he is." As it turned out, Dr. Grigson was a career witness for the prosecution. He had testified on behalf of the State in 167 capital trials, nearly all resulting in death sentences. The press dubbed him "Dr. Death." He was eventually exposed as a prosecutorial shill and expelled by the American Psychiatric Association in 1995 for unethical conduct. Professionally disgraced, he died in 2004 at age seventy-two.

But, of course, the jury knew none of this, and Kerry's family had no money to pay an expert to rebut the testimonies of Landrum and Grigson. On June 29, 1978, after only a few hours of testimony, the punishment phase of Kerry's trial concluded: The jury voted unanimously for death. The judge sentenced him immediately, stating, "Your punishment is assessed at death to be carried out by lethal injection." With that, Cook was quickly ushered out of the courtroom by deputy sheriffs and met by a horde of reporters and TV cameras. When someone shouted, "Tell us why you did it" he responded, "I am innocent. I have been framed. But one day I'll prove I didn't do it. If it takes me ten years, or twenty years, I'll prove I didn't do it."

—

On July 18, 1978, Kerry was permitted one last tearful embrace with his parents and brother Doyle Wayne at the Smith County jail. After a deputy sheriff told Kerry, "It's time to go home," the authorities put him in chains and drove him three hours south to the infamous death row unit outside Huntsville, Texas. He was assigned the number 600, meaning he was the 600th person sentenced to death in Texas. His new home was in a wing containing fifty cells. His cell was three-sided with concrete walls, each 5'9" in length, with a sink, toilet, and a front door of steel bars operated electronically. Daily routine was breakfast at 3:30 a.m. ; then lunch at 9:45 a.m., capped off by dinner at 3:30 p.m. Each meal was served on a metal tray pushed underneath the door by a trusty inmate (an inmate who had gained privileges for good behavior). Lights out at 10:00 p.m.

Since Kerry's case was widely reported, his reputation as a "homo punk" preceded him. He was constantly ridiculed as a "pussy-eating faggot" by his cellblock neighbors, who yelled and threatened to make him their "bitch." It was terrifying. He was warned by a sympathetic inmate that when—not if—he was sexually assaulted, he must vigorously fight back as if his life depended on it, which it very well might. If he didn't, he would lose respect and become game for all.

Then it happened. Kerry had mustered up the courage to go through the dayroom into the small recreation cage with other inmates. Before he knew it, James Demouchette, a huge black man, instructed Kerry at knifepoint to strip naked while others looked on.

Kerry obeyed and braced for the inevitable. When he was finished, Demouchette carved into Kerry's buttocks Good Pussy and his new name for him, Cindy . From that point on, he was a lamb among wolves.

Overwhelmed by shame, Kerry cut his wrists with a razor blade. This was the first time, but not the last, that he would attempt suicide. When he recovered, he was moved to the front of the cellblock, closer to the guards' station. But the sexual abuse continued. Perhaps he could have stopped the attacks if he had fought back, but he feared that, if he did, he might kill his tormentor, confirming the prosecutors' belief that he was a killer. He would then never escape the executioner. Instead, he studied legal books from the law library, determined to find a way out by educating himself on Texas criminal law.

Meanwhile, the media had taken notice of Kerry's conviction. The first story to examine the State's case with a critical eye appeared in a local paper in Longview, Texas, in April 1979. Written by Bob Howie and headlined Is the Real Guilty Party Now Awaiting Execution on Death Row, the article caught the eye of Longview attorney Harry Heard, who offered, pro bono, to appeal Kerry's conviction.

Then, a few months later, in June 1979, Dallas Morning News reporters Donnis Baggett and Howard Swindle published a bombshell. Shyster Jackson, the jailhouse snitch who had lied about Kerry on the witness stand, had recanted his story to Baggett and Swindle—and a Texas Ranger named Stuart Dowell—in an interview the previous September. Not only was his story about Kerry's supposed "confession" a complete fabrication, Shyster said that he cooked it up with the aid of District Attorney A. D. Clark in exchange for a sweetheart deal. Instead of the maximum sentence of life that he could receive at his upcoming murder trial, he would be given a get-out-of-jail-free card—a sentence of twenty-one months in the county jail, which time he had already served. Shyster jumped at the chance to walk free, and told his lie to Kerry's jury.

Although Shyster now regretted the false testimony that had sent an innocent man to death row, he refused to sign an affidavit for Ranger Dowell, fearing a perjury charge. He took off for his home state of Missouri, where in 1982 he committed another murder. For that, he was tried, convicted, and received a life sentence after all.

Attorney Heard filed Kerry's appeal and later argued it before Texas's highest court, the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), on February 13, 1980. He pointed out to the court that Jackson's admission was indicative of the State's trumped-up case against Cook. His brief encompassed nineteen different errors at trial that he argued rendered the conviction unreliable and unconstitutional. Kerry was cautiously optimistic that the CCA would rule in his favor. But then the years ticked by with no decision. On December 7, 1982, Texas executed its first man since 1964. More years passed, and still the CCA sat on Kerry's appeal. Kerry's only friend on death row, Kenneth Brock, was executed on June 19, 1986, even though the prosecutor who convicted him and the father of the victim appealed to Governor Mark White for a stay on his behalf. Kerry was heartbroken. He felt alone and forsaken.

Then came the real blow. On December 9, 1987, the CCA denied his appeal. The court had sat on his petition almost eight years, the longest time without a ruling for a direct appeal in American history. The CCA's vote to uphold the conviction was 8–1. The court cited Jackson's jailhouse confession, Paula Rudolph's identification, and Cook's patio prints as more than sufficient evidence to convict the defendant. It did agree with one of attorney Heard's arguments, that is, that Dr. Grigson's punishment phase testimony was inadmissible because Dr. Grigson had interviewed Kerry to assess his future dangerousness without notifying Kerry's attorneys or obtaining their permission to do so. However, the court ruled that the admission of Dr. Grigson's testimony had been a harmless error, because Dr. Landrum had offered a similar opinion, finding Kerry beyond rehabilitation.

Justice Sam Houston Clinton offered the lone dissent. At the outset of his twenty-two-page opinion he stated there were "troublesome aspects" to this case, and "a rational reviewer of all the facts is left with serious questions whether a rational trier of fact could find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." Justice Clinton was particularly troubled by Paula Rudolph's identification. He devoted thirteen pages to analyzing her testimony and questioning its reliability. He was also concerned that the unidentified fingerprint found on the scissors had a whorl pattern when Kerry's print didn't have that characteristic. Also, with the exception of the fingerprint on the patio door, Kerry's prints were nowhere else in the apartment. In contrast, there were five other unidentified fingerprints found—none of them Kerry's. Clinton was not impressed with Jackson's confession testimony, which he believed was the "most incriminating" flaw in the case. Nor did he grant much weight to Robert Hoehn's graphic testimony about the sex acts they had supposedly performed the night of the murder.

Mere days after receiving the CCA's decision, Kerry received more crushing news: His dear brother, thirty-three-year-old Doyle Wayne, was dead—murdered in a tragic misunderstanding. Doyle Wayne had been enjoying an evening at a Longview club with a friend. Around closing time, the friend had yanked a pair of sunglasses from the face of another patron. Thinking Doyle Wayne was the culprit, the man had pressed a .44 Magnum revolver against his neck and shot him dead. (The shooter was caught and would plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter. For taking Doyle Wayne's life, he'd receive sixteen years in prison.) The loss of both sons was almost too much for the Cooks to bear.

Three days after learning of his brother's death, Cook was once again raped. Hopelessness consumed him and triggered a second suicide attempt. Once again he cut himself with a razor blade, this time slashing his wrist, legs, and penis. Miraculously he survived and spent the next two years receiving in-patient treatment from the prison's psychiatric team. Such attention was unheard of on death row. At last, someone showed kindness and compassionate care to Kerry Max Cook.

—

In 1988, events started to turn in Kerry's favor. In February he attracted a talented lawyer to his cause, Scott Howe of the newly established Capital Punishment Project, which represented death row inmates. Howe's immediate concern was keeping Cook alive. Smith County judge Joe Tunnell, newly assigned to preside over the Cook case, had set a July 8, 1988, execution date. Howe appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court and asked for a stay of execution. On June 28, 1988, eleven days before Kerry was to die, the court granted the stay and remanded the case back to the CCA for reconsideration. The CCA reconsidered. On January 17, 1990, it once again reaffirmed the Cook conviction and sentence. But then, six months later, on June 13, something shocking occurred. This same court had a change of heart. In an almost unprecedented moment of self-reflection that stunned the legal world, it granted Scott Howe's request for a rehearing, and renewed Kerry's hope for a retrial.

Shortly after the CCA reopened Kerry's case, Scott Howe obtained two critical affidavits. One was offered by retired George Bonebrake, former director of the FBI's Fingerprint Section and a nationally renowned expert with more than forty years' experience. After examining Lieutenant Collard's testimony, Bonebrake was disturbed by many of Collard's determinations. He was most concerned that Collard had aged the patio door prints to the hour. He deemed this conclusion "entirely unreliable," stating that it "was impossible to determine whether the print was left on the door two hours or two weeks before it was discovered by the police." He added that "it is an accepted principle in the fingerprint examination field that an examiner cannot determine with reasonable accuracy the age of a fingerprint."

Howe also obtained a sworn statement from Dr. Gary Mears, a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Tyler, who had chaired the Department of Psychology there from 1973 through 1985. Dr. Mears recounted that Jim Mayfield, a day or two after Linda Jo's homicide, came to his office and asked him how to "beat" a polygraph. Mayfield knew that Mears had a polygraph machine in his laboratory and was a student of polygraph science. In that conversation, Mears confronted Mayfield about a book he had recently stumbled across in the university library called The Sexual Criminal . Published in 1949, the book contained police photographs of murdered women whose sexual organs had been mutilated. Chillingly, the photos mirrored Linda's wounds. After finding the book by happenstance, Dr. Mears had discovered that Mayfield himself had ordered the book for the library. Embarrassed, Mayfield had lamely said, "I have more books like that one, too." That same afternoon, Mears reported this conversation to a senior Tyler police officer, who seemed disinterested and never followed up. Not only that, but when Mears bumped into Mayfield the next day, Mayfield told him the police had passed along to his lawyer the tips Mears had given them about the book and polygraph. Mears was stunned. It was as if the police were working with Mayfield instead of treating him as a suspect.

—

Around the same time, David Hanners, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter with The Dallas Morning News, was digging into Kerry's case. Hanner left no stone unturned. His inaugural front-page story, published on February 28, 1988, was headlined, Inmate Was Railroaded. This and articles that followed touched on all aspects of the case and included interviews with most of those associated with it, including Smith County law enforcement, defense attorneys, and state witnesses. Randy Dykes told the reporter that the prosecutor told him what to say and what not to say. He also swore in a 1991 affidavit that prosecutor Thompson kept yelling at him, insisting he get his story straight. He continued, "I was just a high school kid and he really had me intimidated. I decided that I would just tell him whatever he wanted to hear so that I could get out of there as fast as I could. When I got home, I told my family what had happened." His younger brother, Rodney Dykes, while serving a ten-year sentence for drugs and burglary charges, told Hanners the law "put words in his mouth."

Robert Hoehn had died of AIDS in Dallas on September 12, 1987, but a close friend revealed to Hanners conversations he had with Hoehn on his deathbed. Hoehn told him that the Cook case haunted him, that he "felt guilty for his role in the Cook conviction," that "the wrong man is on death row." He swore to his friend that "Cook was never, ever guilty."

On October 9, 1988, The Dallas Morning News ran another feature story that focused on Collard's aging of the patio door fingerprint as further proof of prosecutorial shenanigans. The headline read, Key Testimony in Cook Case Said to Be False. This article had a far-reaching effect, sparking an inquiry by the International Association for Identification in 1989. In a thirteen-page response dated May 22, 1989, Collard admitted that when he gave his testimony, he knew that "there was no positive or scientific way that [his aging of the print] could be supported" and that "no other latent examiner would support such an analysis." Nevertheless, when he told A. D. Clark that he had no scientific basis for aging the print, Clark told Collard to offer it as his "opinion." Collard objected repeatedly to this but was met with "full and continued resistance" from Clark. When Collard finally caved, A. D. Clark was able to use his unrebutted testimony like a magic bullet—first to establish probable cause, then to get an indictment from the grand jury, then to set the terms of Kerry's bond, and, ultimately, to obtain Kerry's conviction at trial. With Collard's false testimony that the door print was only six to twelve hours old, Kerry hadn't stood a chance.

In February 1990, Kerry was inspired to write Centurion a sixty-one-page letter in pencil asking for help after learning of our role in Clarence Lee Brandley's exoneration and release from Texas's death row after ten years of false imprisonment ("Guilty Until Proven Innocent"). Hanners assisted Kerry by sending Centurion all the newspaper articles and interview write-ups. After discussing the case at length with Hanners on the telephone and studying the entire record, I had two lengthy visits with Kerry in November. I became convinced of his innocence and committed Centurion to his cause.

Believing Mayfield to be a viable suspect, Centurion spent the better part of 1991 doing what the Tyler police had not done—interviewing countless people who knew him—neighbors, relatives, university colleagues, faculty, library staff, and past associates throughout his career stretching back to Coffeyville, Kansas, where he was raised and began his professional life. We learned that early in his career he had a mental breakdown and would not go out of the house for a year or two. Elfreide supported the family during those dark days.

The people who knew Mayfield recalled one distinctive characteristic: his explosive temper. One of his past colleagues likened him to an "electrical capacitor," meaning he would build up a charge and then let it go like lightning. Another likened him to a "volcano." Another remembered that Mayfield would "shake with red hot rage" when his temper got the best of him. All remarked that he would explode and then an eerie calm would ensue. Most of those with whom we spoke would not have been surprised if Linda had been the victim of Mayfield's wrath. Every woman who worked for him at TEU or at Midwestern University, where he had worked as library director from 1969 to 1973, believed he was fully capable of Linda's murder. Shortly before he left Midwestern, nine women who worked for him signed a letter to the university president asking for Mayfield's immediate dismissal because of his "frequent temper tantrums" and abusive behavior. When Linda was killed, the female library staff at TEU had suspected that Mayfield might have been involved.

Even his adoptive son Charley thought Mayfield should be a suspect in Linda's death. He told police that, in his view, his adoptive father's "violent temper" would have made him capable of such a hideous crime. He also predicted that Elfreide would "stand by her husband" despite his mistreatment of her, Charley, and his siblings.

Those who knew the dynamics of the Mayfield marriage understood that Elfreide's sole purpose in life was to cater to his every whim and domestic need. She was a devoted and multitalented homemaker who tailor-made Mayfield's suits from bolts of fabric. Wanda Joyce, Elfreide's best friend, recalled that Elfreide "loved him so much that she'd be happy to live under a rock with him." Elfreide's sister told others the same thing. For his part, Mayfield was utterly domineering toward Elfreide. He ruled his home with an iron hand. Whatever he wanted, he got. According to the female TEU library staff, "he ordered her around like a martinet," and she was his "doormat." Elfreide suffered in silence at his verbal abuse as well as his constant philandering.

Wanda Joyce thought that Mayfield had "cracked, that he went crazy and killed [Linda]." Elfreide never told her that, but she did visit her the week after Linda's death. She looked "drawn and upset," and told Wanda, "They think Jim did it, but we've all taken polygraphs and passed." She added that "the stress is unbearable. It is all a nightmare." But Elfreide stood by him through thick and thin. Ultimately she saved his life as his alibi witness, a debt he owed her until the day he died on July 12, 2019.

Mayfield's executive assistant and successor at the library, Olene Harned, offered insight into Mayfield's mindset in the days before Linda's killing. Mayfield loved his job and his life at the university and on Lake Palestine, she explained. After moving around every three to four years in his twenty-year career, he felt he had finally found his niche and landed a position of respect and standing. At age forty-four, he hoped to remain dean and director of the TEU library for the rest of his career.

According to Olene, when Mayfield was fired, he was devastated. He blamed Linda for "ruining" his career. He told Olene that he and Elfreide had decided to move to Houston and pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Elfreide had family there. He was afraid Linda was going to follow him to Houston: "If she does, I'll never be rid of her."

Yet Olene knew the truth was more complicated. Mayfield was equally obsessed with Linda and couldn't stay away from her. He was exhausted by the consequences of the affair and wanted to break it off with her. But he couldn't muster the will to do it.

It was apparent to Olene and the other female library staff that Mayfield's sexual appetite for Linda had torn him and his family apart and destroyed his professional life. His secretary, Sophia Lenderman, recalled that "it was common knowledge Jim wanted to get rid of her, that he was tired of the relationship. He talked of giving her up, but somehow couldn't because he was sexually addicted to her."

On the morning Linda was killed, Mayfield arrived at work an hour early, a little after 7:00 a.m. Waiting for him was library staff member Ann White. She had just received a phone call informing her that Linda had been "badly beaten." He insisted that Ann drive him to the Embarcadero. While they sat in the car looking at the police activity outside the apartment, rather than express concern for Linda, Mayfield angrily exclaimed how she had "ruined him, cost him his job, and caused a lot of problems for him." Late Friday afternoon, after he had completed his police interview, Mayfield went to see Chad Edwards, a friend and university music professor, at his home in Lake Palestine. During the several-hour visit, he "came unglued, just crying and crying," and waited until dark for the police to come and arrest him. Close to another nervous breakdown, he returned home to the all-forgiving Elfreide.

On Monday after the murder, he came into the office and told Olene he had failed a privately administered polygraph commissioned by his lawyer, and would try again. He was shaking and crying, with "tears dripping down his chin." Olene realized he was "scared to death for his own hide. It was not grief for Linda." He told Olene, "I'm scared to death that I'm going to be implicated in her murder."

In addition to interviewing Mayfield's family, colleagues, and associates, Centurion spoke to people who were close to Linda. Coworkers said that, in the days after her suicide attempt and just before her death, she told them that she was "having problems with Mayfield" and vowed that she was "going to get him back no matter what." Wednesday, June 8, Linda's second-to-last day on earth, was also Jim Mayfield's birthday. He turned forty-four. That morning, Linda dropped by his office and gave him a set of bells that, ironically, she said brought good luck and would ward off evil spirits. Sophia Lenderman remembered how adoringly, almost worshipfully, Linda looked at Mayfield that morning. That lunch hour they spent alone in Paula's apartment. Linda showered him with gifts, including a new tennis outfit, cologne, socks, and a painting done by Linda. According to Mayfield in an early deposition, they only "necked."

That evening, Linda went to her art class from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. , and then spent an hour or so chatting alone with her art teacher, Gloria Coughenour, a woman twice her age. In the two and a half years that Gloria had been Linda's art teacher, she had become Linda's friend and confidante. Gloria was aware of Linda's history with Mayfield and the trouble it had caused for everyone involved. That night, Linda seemed excited that her brother-in-law had gotten her a job in Baytown, some twenty-five miles east of Houston, where he and Linda's sister, Carolyn, lived. It was Gloria's impression that Mayfield did not fit into Linda's plans, that Linda was starting anew and had let Mayfield know about this and her move to Houston. Coughenour was not aware that on the next day, June 9, Linda had a job interview lined up at a local Tyler bank. No one, except maybe Mayfield, knew exactly what Linda's real intentions were.

—

In April 1990, Kerry lost his father, Earnest, to cancer. His grief put him in a deep funk. But then came good news a year and a half later. On September 18, 1991, the CCA reversed Kerry's conviction and ordered a new trial. The court had decided that Dr. Grigson's testimony was in fact both inadmissible and harmful to Kerry in convincing the jury of his future dangerousness in the punishment phase. A technicality, yes, but an opportunity for freedom after fourteen years of dangerous and brutal confinement.

Scott Howe had accomplished his mission. He also knew he now needed to step aside. His strength was as an appellate attorney, and Kerry needed a trial litigator for this second trial. Scott and Kerry asked me to help them with the selection. I suggested Paul Nugent in Houston. I had worked with Nugent and his partner, Mike DeGeurin, in freeing Clarence Brandley from death row. Nugent was delighted to take on the case and agreed to represent Kerry pro bono.

—

By the early 1990s, A. D. Clark was long gone from the Smith County district attorney's office. Jack Skeen—Clark's first cousin, their mothers were sisters—was the new DA. He and his top trial prosecutor, David Dobbs, would be prosecuting Kerry. In the fall of 1991, before Nugent came on board, Dobbs and I had traded discovery material. Among the more important exchanges, he gave me the hitherto suppressed grand jury testimony of Hoehn, Taylor, and the Dykes brothers; and access to the eighty-four-page police investigative report. I gave him a twenty-two-page memo on why Centurion believed Mayfield was guilty. I tried in vain to convince him of Kerry's innocence and Mayfield's guilt. Dobbs said he believed Mayfield loved Linda and was impressed that Mayfield would cry whenever he spoke about her. Much to my horror, he revealed to Mayfield my sources of information and what they had said about him.

One evening, Dobbs and I visited the crime scene—Paula's now vacant apartment—and reenacted the moment when Paula came in the door and saw Linda's killer. We re-created the lighting conditions and took turns being Paula and the killer. It was clear to both of us that this was a perfect visual environment to make accurate observations. Dobbs therefore stunned me during this exercise when he said he didn't believe it was Kerry whom Paula had seen, but rather Hoehn, and that Kerry was in the closet where the knife was found. I retorted in shocked disbelief that Paula had described Mayfield to a T, and Hoehn looked nothing like the man Paula described.

Preparing for trial, Paul Nugent gained access to Dobbs's files and discovered the 1989 memo from Collard to the International Association for Identification explaining why he had aged the patio prints to the hour, despite knowing it was wrong to do so. There appeared to be four missing pages from Hoehn's grand jury testimony, and Dobbs assured Paul that he would search for these.

On March 4, 1992, Kerry was removed from death row and transported to the Smith County jail to await trial. Without authorization and behind Paul Nugent's back, Dobbs confronted Kerry when he arrived at the jail. He attempted to interrogate Kerry about his fingerprints at the scene, a blatant and unethical violation of the prohibition against interviewing a defendant without his attorney present. Judge Tunnell later upbraided Dobbs for this misconduct.

Paul attempted to prevent the retrial by arguing that, under the rule of double jeopardy, the State should not be permitted to retry Kerry for the same crime when, in its first prosecution, the State had hidden critical exculpatory evidence from the defense and the court, and suborned perjury from numerous witnesses. If the judge were to agree with Nugent's arguments, a retrial would be precluded and Kerry would be set free.

In order to make his determination, Judge Tunnell conducted a series of hearings in the fall of 1992, focusing on these allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct, to decide if the rule of double jeopardy applied.

Many witnesses testified at the hearings, including A. D. Clark, Collard, Dobbs, and Eddie Clark. Shyster Jackson was even brought in from Missouri state prison. He recanted his entire trial testimony, admitting, "I lied to save myself," and testified that he was coached, fed information, and shown victim photos by A. D. Clark. His trial testimony had all been a sham. In his jailhouse conversations with Kerry, Cook had always maintained his innocence.

At the conclusion of the hearings, Judge Tunnell flabbergasted the defense by announcing that the trial would proceed, and that he would reserve ruling on the double jeopardy issue until after the conclusion of the trial. That made no sense. It defeated the purpose of the hearings, which was to determine if there should be a trial at all.

Citing the substantial media presence in Tyler, Tunnell granted a change of venue to Georgetown, Texas, at that time a conservative town and the seat of Williamson County in Central Texas, twenty-five miles north of Austin and more than two hundred miles from Tyler.

Judge Tunnell also made a series of pretrial rulings in favor of the State that hamstrung Kerry's defense. The most damaging was the exclusion of the grand jury testimony of Robert Hoehn, James Taylor, and the Dykes brothers that A. D. Clark had hidden from Kerry's first defense team. Thus the jury was unable to hear an alternative reason for Kerry's prints on the patio door: that Kerry had been in Linda's apartment on Monday afternoon, June 6, to make out, the passion marks on his neck being the evidence of their romantic tryst. Without the "passion marks" testimony, Nugent knew he wouldn't be able to make the argument that Kerry left his fingerprints on the patio door days before the murder. He argued vigorously against the judge's prohibition, saying that under Texas evidentiary rules he should be allowed to question these witnesses using their prior statements in order to fully complete their conversations with Kerry, and not limit these to Kerry telling them about observing Linda nude in her apartment. In response, the judge challenged Nugent to put Kerry on the stand if he wanted the jury to hear about the passion marks and Kerry's make-out session with Linda. Of course, such testimony coming from Kerry alone, without his friends' corroboration, would sound highly dubious. Thus Judge Tunnell's ruling allowed Dobbs and Skeen to make the same deceptive pitch A. D. Clark had used in the first trial—that this was a "stranger-on-stranger" crime by a perverted sexual deviant.

The judge also precluded Nugent from telling the jury about the prosecutorial misconduct that had tainted the previous trial. Nugent was forbidden from mentioning Shyster Jackson's false confession or Collard's unscientific aging of the patio door fingerprints. The past misdeeds of the district attorney's office were wiped clean for this new jury. Judge Tunnell also set tight limits on what the defense witnesses could say about the evidence implicating Jim Mayfield in the killing. For instance, the judge precluded Dr. Mears from telling the jury that Mayfield had asked him days after the murder how to beat a polygraph, and had admitted to ordering the book The Sexual Criminal, which depicted wounds from sexual organ mutilation that eerily resembled Linda's. These judicial rulings significantly tilted the trial in favor of the prosecution, just as State-sponsored perjury had prejudiced the first trial.

The second trial began at the end of November 1992, fourteen years after the first. The State's case was a more refined and somewhat expanded version of what it had presented at the earlier trial. Paula was now certain that the man she'd seen was the defendant and not Mayfield. Watching Dobbs examining Paula, I thought back to our conversation in Paula's apartment a year earlier when Dobbs told me he believed it was Hoehn whom Paula had seen, not Kerry. Yet here he was eliciting from her the exact opposite, that it was Kerry she had seen, not Hoehn.

Since Robert Hoehn was dead, Nugent didn't have the chance, on cross-examination, to hammer away at his testimony about the night of the murder and perhaps to elicit an admission that his testimony at the 1978 trial was false and coerced by the belligerent Michael Thompson. Judge Tunnell allowed attorneys to read most of Hoehn's 1978 trial testimony to the jury, including the more salacious parts. The movie was also played for the jury.

Since Collard had earlier admitted that there was no scientific way to age a fingerprint, he got around this by cleverly describing it as a "fresh print." Dobbs brought in Danny Carter, supervisor of the Latent Fingerprint Department of the Texas Department of Public Safety, who confirmed that it was Kerry's fingerprints on the patio door. Tunnell decided to ask him outside of the jury's presence if it was appropriate to describe a print as "fresh." Carter emphatically said "no." Calling a print "fresh" was just another way of estimating its age, and a fingerprint examiner could not estimate a print's age. Such honesty from a prosecution witness was unexpected, even if the jury did not hear it. Fingerprint expert George Bonebrake confirmed this point for the jury when he testified as a defense witness.

Now that the prosecution no longer had the false confession of Shyster Jackson, it came up with a brand-new "confession" witness, Robert Wickham, a former reserve deputy sheriff. On September 26, 1991, one week after the CCA had ordered a new trial, he informed the prosecutor for the first time that Kerry had confessed to him in an elevator during the 1978 trial. He repeated his story to the jury in 1992. He said that, while he had been escorting Kerry to the courtroom, Kerry had blurted, "I killed her and I don't give a shit what they do to me." Wickham's excuse for his thirteen years of silence was that he didn't think it was admissible—there was no one else who heard it.

Wickham's account had a glaring flaw. He said that Kerry had been handcuffed and was wearing a jail jumpsuit in the elevator. Yet Smith County had a strict policy that inmates should be escorted into the courtroom in civilian clothes and not in handcuffs, so as not to prejudice the jurors. Also, Wickham's account was transparently self-serving. He managed a restaurant that was a law enforcement hangout. His employees considered him a "wannabe cop." As a reserve deputy sheriff, he wasn't a real deputy sheriff. He was a volunteer who was required to serve twenty unpaid hours a month to keep his reserve status. His testimony at Kerry's second trial elevated his status among the Tyler cops who frequented his restaurant.

As part of maintaining the fiction that Kerry never knew Linda, Dobbs convinced the judge to order the journalist David Hanners to testify. David, who knew very well how Kerry had been framed, reluctantly told the jury that Kerry always insisted he never met Linda, nor was he ever in her apartment. He said his prints got on the door when he was watching her from the outside. This testimony hurt Kerry's defense and was a key example of how this lie came back to bite him. It wasn't until Paul Nugent and I were preparing Kerry for trial in the summer of 1992 that he finally came clean about meeting Linda at the pool and making out with her in her apartment. He told us what he had sworn to his father and offered us a heartfelt apology. Unfortunately, given the judge's exclusion of the "passion marks" grand jury testimony of Robert Hoehn and the Dykes brothers, Nugent had no credible way of offering the truth to the jury. The lie had taken on a life of its own.

Dobbs put Mayfield, Elfreide, and Louella on the stand. Mayfield testified for hours. Dobbs took him through his relationship with Linda from beginning to end. Mayfield assured the jury that his sexual relationship with Linda ended once he returned to his wife on May 19. From that point on it was akin to a father-daughter relationship, and he had encouraged her to get on with her life and start dating other men. He, of course, denied killing Linda. Under cross, he denied telling Ann White that Linda had ruined his career and couldn't recall if he told Olene Harned he was afraid Linda might follow him to Houston. Even if she did, he said, it would not have been a problem. He admitted that he and Linda would meet in Paula's apartment at night when Paula was away. He denied playing tennis a lot. He testified that Elfreide and Linda were on friendly terms.

Elfreide and Louella steadfastly provided Mayfield with his alibi. They said he never left the house the night of June 9–10. Elfreide denied telling her husband that Linda was not to live with them on Lake Palestine. She didn't remember feeling animosity toward Linda, testifying, implausibly, that even though Jim's affair had cost him his career, she didn't harbor resentment toward Linda. Linda moved in with them because they needed someone to clean the house. When her husband returned home after living with Linda in mid-May 1977, she and he did not discuss what happened because "it was over" and "I didn't think about it anymore." She didn't recall if, after Linda's attempted suicide, she exclaimed to Wanda Joyce, "When will it ever end?" For her part, Louella admitted to threatening to kill Linda if her affair with her father continued.

In Kerry's defense, Paul Nugent focused on developing Jim Mayfield as the more likely suspect. Unfortunately, given the judge's pretrial rulings, each witness was only permitted to tell the jury snippets of what they knew. Nine faculty members and staff testified for the defense. Olene Harned, Mayfield's successor at the library, had taken Paula into her home for a few days after the crime. While there, Paula told Olene more than once that she thought it was Mayfield she had seen that night. Olene also testified that Mayfield often wore white tennis shorts around campus and was worried that Linda might follow him to Houston.

Library staffer Ann White testified that the morning after the murder Mayfield angrily complained that Linda had ruined his career. Professor Andrew Szarka told the jury what he'd told the police on Friday afternoon, June 10—that the previous evening, mere hours before she was murdered, Linda had dropped by his house for a visit. Linda had been distressed about her relationship with Mayfield, saying that she had told Mayfield she wanted to date other men and that Mayfield had reacted badly to this. Professor Gary Mears was only allowed to testify that Mayfield played tennis a lot and fit the description of the man Paula had seen.

Doris Carpenter, manager of the Embarcadero, remembered Paula coming into her office several days after the murder and, when asked if she'd been scared when she saw the man in Linda's room, replying, "No, because it was Mayfield."

In his summation, Dobbs pointed out the connection between Linda's missing calf stocking and the scene in the movie when the little boy snuck into his mother's room after watching her play with herself. He reminded the jury how excited Kerry was while watching the movie, that he had started masturbating and climaxed on the carpet. In his closing remarks, Skeen repeatedly emphasized to the jury that the defense had offered no alternative explanation for the appearance of Kerry's fingerprints on the patio door other than that he placed them there the night he killed her. Skeen, of course, knew full well that an alternative explanation existed, and that the judge had simply ruled it out of evidence.

Two unbelievable things happened during jury deliberations. The first was the jury sending a note to the judge that said, "We have found the nylon stocking in the jeans of Linda Jo Edwards." Being good finders of fact, the jury had decided to remove the jeans from the plastic evidence bag in which they had been sealed for fifteen years. As they shook them to their natural length, the "missing stocking" fell out of the right leg. And lo and behold, it had no body parts in it! Somehow, neither the Tyler police nor anyone from the Smith County district attorney's office had ever thought to explore the legs and pockets of the jeans for evidence.

As the jury deliberations stretched into their third day, the second incredible thing happened. On December 16, Paul saw Dobbs reading the original copy of Hoehn's grand jury testimony. Not trusting him, he snatched it out of Dobbs's hands. To his shock, the transcript contained the missing four pages that Dobbs had repeatedly denied having. Nugent read the omitted pages in astonishment. When Hoehn had been asked whether Kerry was watching the movie on the night of the murder, Hoehn had said, "No, no, the movie was on and he wasn't paying any attention to it." Meanwhile, Dobbs had just gotten through arguing to the jury that the movie had so excited Kerry that he had decided to attack and butcher Linda. Nugent immediately showed the missing pages and their highly exculpatory contents to Judge Tunnell. The judge denied his request to show them to the jury. Once again, he used his rulings to stack the deck against Kerry.

After five days, the jury informed Tunnell they were hopelessly deadlocked. He declared a mistrial, denied Kerry bail, and shipped him back to the Smith County jail to await his third trial. Afterward, Centurion interviewed seven of the jurors and discovered they were deadlocked at 6–6. The unexplained patio prints and Kerry denying he knew Linda were the primary reasons for the guilty votes. Those who voted not guilty strongly suspected Mayfield. They believed it was a crime of passion committed by someone who was intimate with, extremely angry at, and obsessed with her. Mayfield fit the bill. They also characterized Mayfield, his wife, and daughter as "liars." They were impressed that the university witnesses, who did not know Kerry but did know Mayfield, were willing to testify against Mayfield at great inconvenience, driving two hundred miles each way.

Paul had fought Dobbs and Skeen to a draw despite Judge Tunnell's restrictive and exclusionary evidentiary rulings and the prosecution's chicanery. In January 1993, Tunnell finally issued his ruling on double jeopardy. Tunnell found that Collard's aging of the fingerprints and A. D. Clark's insistence that he do so was calculated to mislead the court and the jury. He scolded the prosecution for not disclosing to the defense its agreement with Shyster Jackson in exchange for his incriminating testimony. He characterized Dobbs's jailhouse encounter with Kerry as "a serious breach of duty and protocol." Despite all of this, however, Judge Tunnell did not rule in favor of releasing Kerry on the grounds of double jeopardy. Instead, he allowed the district attorney's office to proceed with yet another trial.

Judge Joe Tunnell retired in June 1993. Kerry's third trial began on January 31, 1994, with Judge Robert D. Jones presiding. After being voted off the bench in Travis County (where Austin is the county seat) several years earlier, he became a visiting judge appointed by a regional administrator to assist those courthouses with a shortage of judges. The press dubbed this program "Have Gavel, Will Travel." Judge Jones adopted Judge Tunnell's evidentiary rulings in their entirety and secured the same courtroom in Georgetown for the third trial. With minor variations, all of the witnesses testified as they had in the second trial. What set the third trial apart was the participation of two expert witnesses from the FBI's elite Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, a department dedicated to the research and study of violent criminal offenders, especially serial and sexual killers.

The prosecution's star expert witness was FBI agent David Gomez. He had just completed two years of training as a violent crimes analyst for the agency's Behavioral Science Unit. One of his responsibilities was to serve as a consultant to local police agencies in Texas. On the defense side was Robert Ressler, a world-renowned specialist in sexual homicide. Ressler was one of the founding fathers of the Behavioral Science Unit, and had served as its supervisory special agent and top criminologist for sixteen years until he retired in 1990. He had coauthored the two bibles on violent homicide, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (1988) and the Crime Classification Manual (1992). Gomez conceded at trial that these two books were important resource materials during his recently completed training.

Gomez classified the Linda Jo Edwards murder as a "lust murder," which he defined as a homicide focused on the sexual organs of the victim up to and including the removal of body parts. He concluded this was done by a stranger who was not intimate with the victim; that the offender was motivated from a personal sense of sexual ambivalence, inadequacy, and immaturity. Linda's lust murderer destroyed her sexual parts to neuter her. Amazingly, Gomez did not see "overkill" in the attack—an excess of violence—only the amount of force needed to control and kill her. This is why he wouldn't classify it as a "domestic homicide," which is a killing that occurs between persons who are personally intimate and often involves overkill rooted in rage. Gomez believed the attacking of the vaginal area was the lust aspect of the crime, not overkill. In his conclusion he agreed with Dobbs's theory that voyeuristic activities could establish a fantasy phase of a crime and reflect the offender's sexual frustrations.

Ressler looked at this homicide differently. He classified it as a domestic homicide, most likely perpetrated by a former lover of the victim. He saw clear evidence of "extensive overkill," which is frequently present in domestic homicides. The wounds indicated extreme fury toward Linda. The heavy vaginal damage denoted a previous relationship that drove the killer to destroy the area of his interest in her that had caused his own destruction. Ressler rejected the idea that this was a lust murder motivated by sexual inadequacy or ambivalence, neither of which he had ever encountered as motivation for a mutilation murder. He was also prepared to testify that persons who engaged in voyeurism, or who were allegedly peeping Toms, were not confrontational and did not perpetrate violent sexual homicides.

But Ressler's crucial testimony would never be heard by the jury. During his voir dire, the preliminary examination by a judge to determine a witness's suitability to testify, Ressler told the judge that, as part of his preparation, he had read Gomez's testimony on the plane ride down from Virginia. Because of that, Judge Jones barred him from testifying, erroneously declaring that Ressler had violated the rule that prohibits witnesses from learning opposing witness testimony before they testify. Paul correctly pointed out that Texas evidentiary law prevented fact witnesses, not expert witnesses, from learning the opposition's testimony beforehand. It was perfectly acceptable as a matter of practice and case law for experts to review the testimony of their opposite number prior to testifying. Judge Jones, however, refused to concede the point. He dismissed Robert Ressler from the witness stand, leaving the jury with the impression that the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit had one opinion of Linda's murder—the opinion of Agent Gomez. Skeen took full advantage of this. In his summation he mentioned Gomez's name numerous times, wrapping up with the words "What Dave Gomez was telling you is the key to this case."

Judge Jones's outrageous ruling had disastrous consequences for Kerry.

Deadlocked after several days of deliberation, the jury asked the court to read back Agent Gomez's testimony. A half hour after this reading, on February 23, the jury found Kerry Max Cook guilty of capital murder.

The punishment phase lasted five days. Paul fought long and hard to save Kerry's life, but the result was predictable, considering the horrid nature of the crime. The day of reckoning came on March 3, 1994. Before sentencing, the judge asked Kerry if he had anything to say. He responded, "Yes, sir. With respect to the jury, with respect to the Court, I am an innocent man and the Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do." With that, Judge Jones sentenced him to death by lethal injection, just as Kerry had been sentenced sixteen years before.

After spending the last two years in county jails during the retrials, Kerry returned to death row a beaten and devastated man. He was one month shy of his thirty-eighth birthday, but his hair had turned prematurely gray. Meanwhile, Paul refused to give up. In the face of formidable odds, he resolved to appeal the conviction to the Texas CCA. At this point, he had been handling Kerry's representation pro bono for nearly four years. In recognition of Paul's unwavering dedication, Centurion was able to raise enough money to sufficiently compensate him for his labors in preparing the appeal.

One year later, in July 1995, Paul Nugent filed a mammoth 213-page brief detailing sixty instances of systemic prosecutorial misconduct and egregious judicial exclusions of exculpatory evidence throughout all three trials. Kerry couldn't help but be impressed by his attorney's efforts, but he had suffered one disappointment after another. The CCA was considered at that time to be a predominantly conservative court. The odds were heavily stacked against him.

The CCA, however, astonished everyone. On November 6, 1996, it reversed Kerry's conviction, excoriating the prosecution for its behavior and the trial courts for their exclusion of favorable evidence for the defendant. Judge Charles Baird, in his concurring opinion, argued that a retrial of Mr. Cook should be prohibited due to the fact that "prosecutorial misconduct has so tainted the truth-finding process that it renders a subsequent fair trial impossible." He wrote that the State had "allowed itself to gain a conviction based on fraud and ignored its own duty to seek the truth" and that "the State's misconduct in this case does not consist of an isolated incident or the doing of a police officer, but consists of the deliberate misconduct by members of the bar representing the State." He found that "the Illicit manipulation of the evidence on the part of the State permeated the entire investigation of the crime."

The majority opinion written by Judge Stephen Mansfield vacated the conviction but fell short of precluding a retrial. He found that "prosecutorial and police misconduct have tainted this entire matter from the outset." He rebuked the trial court for prohibiting the defense from introducing the "highly exculpatory" grand jury testimony of witnesses that offered an innocent explanation for how Kerry's prints got on the patio door. Perhaps most significantly, the majority ruled that if the prosecution decides to retry Cook a fourth time, the court must exclude from evidence all statements made by the now deceased Robert Hoehn. Consequently, his tawdry yet mostly fictitious tale of steamy sex and graphic voyeurism on the night of the murder was now strictly off-limits.

So once again, this time to await his fourth trial, sheriff's deputies transported Kerry back to the Smith County jail from death row. It was August 6, 1997, twenty years and one day since his August 5, 1977, arrest.

A chastened, but increasingly hostile, Judge Jones set a $100,000 cash bond at a November 11 bond hearing, believing along with Skeen that this amount was well beyond Kerry's defense team's ability to meet. Two days later, Jay Regan, Centurion's board chairman and a Wall Street investor, wired $100,000 to the Smith County sheriff's office, much to the shock and dismay of Jones and Skeen. (Regan, trusting Kerry, knew he would get the money back so long as Kerry honored the terms of his release.)

Later that day, November 13, 1997, Kerry Max Cook walked out of the Smith County jail into the arms of his mother, Evelyn. His newfound freedom was exhilarating. But he was also scared, as he knew his battle with Smith County was far from over. Amid the sidewalk celebration, with reporters and cameras all around, Kerry, Paul, and I spotted David Dobbs standing across the street, glaring at us.

From prison, Kerry had developed a friendship with Dallas residents Mikaela and Richard Raine, who believed in his innocence. They generously invited him to live with them and their four children while he was awaiting trial, even giving him a Jack Russell terrier named Everton. Dallas criminal defense attorney Donya Witherspoon hired Cook as her paralegal. Soon he moved into an apartment on his own with Everton. Urinalysis drug tests in Tyler were a condition of his bail. His stomach churned every time he entered the town, fearing the police would set him up on some phony charge. Instead, life handed Kerry a gift. At a meeting of Amnesty International in Dallas, he met a lovely young woman named Sandra Pressey. Before long, the two of them fell in love. They have been life partners ever since.

On the eve of the February 1999 fourth trial, and despite the CCA ruling, prosecutor Skeen vowed not to rest until Cook was back on death row. Dobbs added that they "would never allow him to plea, not even to a life sentence." They wanted to put Kerry Max Cook in the ground. Centurion was equally committed to ensuring that Kerry's fourth trial would be his last. We knew he needed a well-heeled defense stocked with top-drawer forensic experts and a deep bench of legal talent to support Paul Nugent. This was no time to spare expense. A wealthy benefactor, David Gelbaum, stepped up and authorized a budget of $365,000. Dallas attorney Cheryl Wattley and Houston attorney Rocket Rosen joined the team. Eight different experts in the fields of eyewitness identification, visual environment, false confessions, forensic pathology, and psychiatry stood ready to offer their expertise. Among them was Robert Ressler, godfather of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit. As 1998 sped by, Judge Jones picked Bastrop, a largely rural county thirty miles southeast of Austin, as the site for the trial. Jury selection would begin mid-February 1999.

The week before the trial brought potential new DNA evidence. For the first time in the twenty-two-year history of the case, the prosecution had submitted Linda's underwear to the state's crime lab for examination. Remarkably, the lab found semen stains large enough to obtain the donor's profile. With both sides agreeing, Judge Jones ordered DNA testing and the trial to proceed concurrently. We expected the DNA results sometime during the trial. Dobbs told the press that the semen "could only have been left by the killer." We agreed, confident it wasn't Kerry's and believing it was Mayfield's.

Then there was more: Just days before the trial, the prosecution broke its vow never to allow Kerry to plead out. Dobbs put a no-contest deal on the table, offering Kerry a forty-year sentence in exchange for a guilty plea. Kerry rejected it out of hand. Dobbs then proposed a deal that would give Judge Jones discretion to sentence Kerry to a term less than forty years. Again, Kerry dismissed it out of hand. There was no way he was going to entrust his future to Judge Jones. Finally, on February 16, 1999, minutes before jury selection was to begin, Dobbs offered a no-contest deal that included a lesser charge (murder, but not capital murder), no admission of guilt, and a sentence of twenty years. Since Kerry had already served the time, he could go home that day, a completely free man, with no supervision of any kind. The only downside was that he would be a convicted murderer. The judge gave him one hour to decide.

We all huddled back at the house Centurion had rented for the team. We told Kerry that it was his life. If he wanted to go to trial, we were ready. If he accepted the plea, we could understand that as well. He left the room and took a few minutes by himself. We waited.

Then he came back in and announced his decision. He was going to take the deal.

He had suffered so much trauma on death row that he could not face the risk of going back there to await execution yet again. He chose guaranteed and immediate freedom, home with Sandra that night, rather than taking the chance of another conviction in an extremely conservative county with a hostile and vengeful judge. That evening Kerry, Sandra, and the entire team celebrated at an upscale Austin restaurant. Many of us had been fighting for Kerry for nearly ten years. We took turns toasting each other. We couldn't wait to learn what the DNA results would be from the semen stains on Linda's panties.

At last, on April 16, 1999, the state crime lab spoke. The semen unquestionably belonged to James Mayfield, not Kerry Max Cook. Mayfield had testified at both of the retrials in 1992 and 1994 that he had not had sex with his former lover following her suicide attempt three weeks before her murder. While the district attorney's office was stunned, David Dobbs still tried desperately to salvage his dignity. He claimed that the DNA results didn't necessarily clear Kerry of the crime. Perhaps Mayfield's semen had been deposited when Mayfield claimed he'd last had sex with Linda three weeks before, and survived three weeks of wear and laundering, an absurd hypothesis. Before he had submitted the panties for DNA analysis, Dobbs had agreed, reasonably, that the semen had to belong to Linda's killer. Now, however, with the foundation of Kerry's plea deal—and his office's reputation—in question, he still insisted that Kerry was guilty, that the Tyler authorities had the right man, and that the new DNA evidence was "irrelevant."

The DNA evidence reinvigorated Kerry, though. It gave him new confidence and inspired him to take his exoneration to the world—literally. He spoke eloquently about wrongful convictions, the ills of capital punishment, and the flaws of America's criminal justice system to audiences in London, Paris, Rome, Geneva, and throughout America. He became a sought-after motivational speaker, telling his story to inspire others to never give up, no matter how dire the circumstances. Harvard, Princeton, and other universities welcomed him. He testified before the Texas State Legislature in favor of a moratorium on the death penalty.

His story was one of six featured in the theater production The Exonerated, which opened in New York in October 2000, and ran in venues across the country. His story was also adapted into a Hollywood movie by the same name, starring Aidan Quinn. In 2007, William Morrow published his memoir, Chasing Justice .

To Kerry, however, his greatest accomplishment during these years was the birth of his son, Kerry Justice Cook. "KJ," as Kerry and Sandra call him, will be twenty-four in 2024.

Despite all the adulation and accolades, Kerry struggled in his life after prison. He suffered from an acute case of PTSD and depression. The murder conviction still plagued him and his family, making it difficult to find work and keep it, and to sign leases and other legal documents. Occasionally, neighbors shunned him when they learned of his past. These problems and his long-held, deep desire for legal exoneration finally inspired Kerry to act. Exoneration by much of the public was not enough. He wanted the Texas criminal justice system to officially recognize his innocence.

In 2012, the Innocence Project took up his cause, bringing together a team led by Gary Udashen in Texas and Nina Morrison in New York. Three years later, in September 2015, they filed a writ of habeas corpus in Smith County, seeking to reverse Kerry's murder conviction and obtain a finding of actual innocence based on the 1999 DNA results and systemic misconduct by police and prosecutors.

Their investigation uncovered a suspicious decision by the Smith County law authorities regarding a bloody hair found on Linda's buttocks that was not Kerry's or Linda's. In 1999, when the authorities in Tyler submitted the hair to the crime lab along with Linda's underwear, the lab informed them that it, too, was suitable for DNA testing. But soon after the lab found the semen to be a match to Mayfield, the district attorney's office ordered the police to retrieve the hair follicle and not submit it for testing.

If this bloody hair had been tested for DNA and it proved to be Mayfield's, it would have blown the case wide open, because neither Mayfield nor the DA could have easily explained such results away. But they never had to. The Tyler authorities went on to destroy the hair follicle in 2001, in direct violation of a Texas statute enacted eight months before that barred destruction of evidence suitable for DNA testing. Jack Skeen was still the DA at that time. He did not leave office until 2003, when he became a Smith County judge.

In early April 2016, Skeen's successor as Smith County district attorney, Matt Bingham, at the request of Gary Udashen, surprisingly agreed to set up an on-the-record interview with Jim Mayfield at his Houston home. Bingham granted Mayfield immunity for whatever he might say, put him under oath, and allowed his long-standing attorney, Buck Files, to attend. The ever-faithful Elfreide sat in as well.

Forty years had passed since Linda's murder. Mayfield was now an eighty-three-year-old retiree who had served many years, ironically, as an assistant building manager of the Harris County jail. The unrestricted interview lasted two hours. Udashen took the lead in asking questions, with follow-ups by Bingham. The session yielded several significant Mayfield admissions. He admitted for the first time that he and Linda did have sex at lunchtime in Paula's apartment to celebrate his forty-fourth birthday on June 8, and that Linda had showered him with gifts, including a new tennis outfit.

He professed surprise that his semen was found in the underwear she was wearing the night of her homicide, because the last time they had sex was the day before. He couldn't understand why she would wear dirty underwear two days in a row.

He admitted that he was sexually addicted to Linda. Whenever he was around her, he was weak and couldn't resist the temptation to have sex. In fact, practically every time they were together, they had sex. "I'm not the strongest person when it comes to Linda," he said. He knew he "needed to stay away from Linda, best I could."

At the time of her death, the most important thing for him was to save his marriage; Linda "came second." He was trying to put his life back together, and "stop the sex with Linda." If he continued to see her, it would start all over again. His librarian career was destroyed. He had lost not only his job but also his house on the lake, and he had almost lost his wife because of her. He said he "wasn't going to destroy my marriage for Linda." He had promised Elfreide that it was over between him and Linda. If Elfreide had ever found out about what happened on his birthday at Paula's, that would have ended their marriage.

But Linda wouldn't let it go. She wanted to keep the relationship. After his birthday, she still wanted to be together. She "wasn't happy" he had decided to return to Elfreide. When she showed up at his house the evening of her murder, it was apparent that she was still trying to see him. She had visited him four times that day. He had to stop seeing her. He knew that somehow he had to end their relationship.

He admitted that he had angrily exclaimed to Ann White, while they were sitting in her car in the Embarcadero parking lot before Linda's body was brought out, that Linda had "ruined" his career. He had denied saying that at Kerry's trials. He conceded that he might have told Olene Harned he was afraid Linda might follow him to Houston, that Linda had that in her mind. He had also denied this at Kerry's trials.

Perhaps unknowingly, by making these admissions, Mayfield in effect laid out his motivation for killing Linda. To preserve that which he was desperate to hold on to—his marriage to Elfreide—he had to end his relationship with Linda. She had already destroyed his cherished way of life and a career perfectly suited to his ambition. He knew he did not have the will to overcome his sexual addiction to her, and that she would once again cause his ruination if she followed him to Houston. As he told Olene Harned several days before the murder, "If she [moves to Houston], I'll never be rid of her." Something had to be done to stop the relationship. Those who knew him well believed his explosive temper got the best of him and, in a fit of rage, he had cracked and uncontrollably destroyed those parts of Linda that had destroyed him.

In the interview, Mayfield also admitted for the first time that Professor Mears had confronted him about the illustrated mutilation book entitled The Sexual Criminal. At his depositions prior to Kerry's trials, Mayfield had denied having any knowledge of the book's existence. Because of his denial, Judge Tunnell and later Judge Jones prohibited Paul from introducing the book to the jury and questioning Mayfield about it.

Mayfield said he never saw or spoke with Paula after Linda was killed, and never tried to reach out to see how she was doing. When Udashen asked if he was aware that Paula was telling people he was the man she saw that night, he said he was. Curiously, during this interview he never said Paula was wrong in identifying him at the scene. As he always had, he claimed he was home that night with Elfreide and Louella. He never left the house. Standing by her husband of sixty-two years, Elfreide interjected, "Until I die, I know he was home with me that night."

Because Jack Skeen was now sitting as a Smith County judge, a judge from outside the county was appointed to hear Kerry's habeas claims—Judge Jack Carter from Texarkana. The hearing was scheduled for Monday, June 6. In the meantime, Udashen and Bingham negotiated behind the scenes for a settlement. David Dobbs, who had long ago left office, aided Bingham in these discussions. He and Judge Skeen wanted at all costs to avoid a public hearing that would subject them to a humiliating cross-examination. For his part, Kerry wanted a full-blown hearing, a reversal of his murder conviction, and a finding of actual innocence.

On the day of the hearing, the parties reached an agreement. Since it was clear from his recent interview that Jim Mayfield had perjured himself multiple times at the second and third trials, the district attorney agreed to recommend to Judge Carter that Kerry's murder conviction be vacated. But he would recommend that his claims of actual innocence be denied. For resolution of this final issue, rather than a hearing requiring witness testimony, the parties would make oral presentations to Judge Carter in the style of closing arguments at trial. The defense would argue for actual innocence, and the prosecution would oppose it, insisting on Kerry's guilt. Judge Carter agreed to proceed on that basis.

The only person who objected to the proposed settlement was Kerry. Even though the agreement included a long-sought and groundbreaking dismissal of his conviction, Kerry vehemently argued against it. He wanted his day in court to not only prove his innocence but to hold Dobbs and Skeen accountable for the physical and psychological distress he had suffered at their hands since they entered the case decades earlier. He believed this could best be done through an open, in-court evidentiary hearing.

Nevertheless, after a long and emotional discussion the night before the hearing, Kerry, with great reluctance, finally succumbed and agreed to the settlement. But a day or two after everything was in place, Kerry, still upset that the agreement did not include a public hearing, stunned everyone when he suddenly and without warning fired his legal team. Fortunately, a noted Houston attorney, Mark Bennett, who'd previously had no involvement in the case, stepped into the breach with only one stipulation. It would be impossible for him to spend time attempting to rescind the agreement. He now only had three weeks to prepare for the actual innocence argument.

On July 1, the attorneys made their arguments for and against actual innocence. The prosecutor regurgitated the State's evidence presented during the prior three trials. Attorney Bennett focused on the pervasive prosecutorial misconduct that led to Kerry's prior false convictions and made the case for Mayfield's guilt. On July 25, Judge Carter issued his opinion in the form of recommendations to the CCA. He recommended that Kerry's murder conviction be reversed, as agreed, but that Kerry's actual innocence claim be denied. He reflected that, for a convicted person to establish actual innocence, the CCA required that the new evidence must "unquestionably" meet a "Herculean" standard.

While he found that the DNA evidence was helpful to Cook's defense, it "required a jury to make a deductive step" that Mayfield had left it in Linda's panties the night of the murder. He therefore concluded that the DNA didn't "unquestionably" establish Cook's innocence or Mayfield's guilt. In contrast, Kerry's defense believed it was an easy deduction to make.

To believe Mayfield didn't have intercourse with Linda on the night she was murdered, but rather thirty-six hours earlier as Mayfield claimed, the jury would have had to accept that Linda wore the same soiled underwear for thirty-six hours straight—from lunchtime on Wednesday, June 8, when Mayfield admitted they had sex in Paula's apartment, until very early on June 10, shortly after midnight, when she was killed. Linda had attended an art class for several hours that Wednesday night; returned home and slept in her bedroom; dressed the next morning to visit Mayfield at his office and have lunch with him; interviewed for a job at a local bank at 1:30; and played tennis with Mayfield after that. Several hours later, she drove down to Mayfield's Lake Palestine home to confront him about their relationship. Would it not be reasonable for any set of jurors, considering these facts, to have deduced that Linda must have put on a fresh pair of underwear at some point during that day and a half, whether dressing after sex with Mayfield on Wednesday or dressing the next morning for her interview, or showering after playing tennis on a hot summer afternoon and changing into clean clothes for her early evening trip to Lake Palestine to pop in on Mayfield? Yet, for whatever reason, Judge Carter didn't see it that way.

In August 2016, Judge Carter submitted his recommended findings to the Texas CCA for it to accept or reject. Eight years later and forty-seven years into his fight for justice, Kerry Max Cook was still waiting for the court's decision. Kerry couldn't help remembering that it took the CCA eight years to deny his original appeal in the 1980s. Why this court demonstrated such an extraordinary laxity in its handling of his case, no one can say. Nevertheless, holding on for dear life, he refused to give up hope that someday the court would do the right thing. Then, without any warning, it came like a bolt of lightning from heaven above.

Scripture tells us, "If you have faith, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,' it will be done." The long, long arc of justice finally found its mark on June 19, 2024, when Judge Bert Richardson of the CCA, in a blistering and comprehensive 106-page opinion, threw Kerry's mountain of injustice into the sea. He wrote, "This case is riddled with allegations of State misconduct that warrant setting aside Applicant's conviction. And when it comes to solid support of actual innocence, this case contains it all—uncontroverted Brady violations, proof of false testimony, admissions of perjury, and new scientific evidence."

With that, the CCA gave Kerry what his heart longed for during those interminable lost years—pure, unadulterated exoneration. His dream to be declared an innocent man by Texas's highest court had come true. The world now knows what he has always known—the truth that he was framed by Smith County law enforcement and its judiciary. Vindication is so sweet!

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Note: The title quote is from Sir Walter Scott's poem Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field , published in 1808. Flodden is a hill in northeast England that was the site of a famous 1513 battle between the Scots and the English, won by England.