    
Doberman23
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Username: Doberman23
Post Number: 869
Registered: 01-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, March 09, 2007 - 04:25 pm: | 
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this is my longest post evah! so my appologies... but i found it an interesting story none the less.
>5/1/1998 Capital murder defendant awaits 4th trial in 1977 East Texas case
>fraught with error
>
> By EVAN MOORE
>Copyright 1998 Houston Chronicle DALLAS -- The middle-aged man cut a
>strange figure beside the convenience store gas pumps as he slowly circled
>his aging Mustang, casting puzzled looks toward the car's gas tank.
>"Ma'am," he said, as he flagged a passing customer. "Can you help me? I
>can't get the gas cap open on this thing." The woman eyed the man warily.
>He had a slight build and carried his hands thrust nervously into his
>pockets, but his voice was soft and the gaze from his deep-set eyes
>appeared more confused than menacing. "Have you pulled the release?" she
>asked. "Where is that?" he asked. The woman showed him and was turning to
>leave as he spoke again. "Just one more thing, ma'am. Could you show me
>how to work these gas pumps?" "Where have you been?" the woman asked with
>a smile as she lifted the nozzle and handed it to the man. "Oh, just
>around," he replied. For the past 21 years, "around" for Kerry Max Cook
>has been a cramped cell on death row in Huntsville. It's the world in which
>he has spent half his life. There, until his release on bond last
>November, Cook lived a life isolated from the changes in society. Branded
>as a homosexual, raped and beaten by other prisoners, he withdrew from
>others and focused only on the series of trials and appeals, reversals and
>mistrials in a case that has made him unique among defendants. It's not an
>envious distinction. When Cook faces his fourth trial in September, he will
>become the nation's most often retried capital murder defendant. Cook's
>case also is singular because it has been so fraught with error. Smith
>County District Attorney Jack Skeen of Tyler, whose predecessor began the
>case, would not return calls about Cook. The Texas Court of Criminal
>Appeals, however, cited prosecutorial misconduct in granting Cook his
>fourth trial. Evidence in the case was withheld. Witnesses who testified
>have since recanted. One who gave conflicting statements has died without
>being questioned about his contradictions. Others with knowledge seemingly
>pertinent to the case have never been allowed to testify. Evidence has been
>lost and lost evidence has inexplicably reappeared. At the heart of the
>case is a strange and brutal killing, one that Cook adamantly says he did
>not commit. The victim was Linda Jo Edwards, a 22-year-old secretary at
>what was then known as Texas Eastern University in Tyler when she was found
>slain in a friend's apartment on June 10, 1977. The killing was savage.
>Edwards had been bashed on the head with a porcelain statue, stabbed with a
>butcher knife, then mutilated with scissors. The damage was so extreme that
>pathologists were unable to determine if she had been raped. Parts of her
>vagina and face appeared to be missing, along with a single lock of her
>hair. HE ORIGINAL suspect was Edwards' supervisor, James Mayfield, then 44
>and dean of the school library. Mayfield, a dapper, athletic tennis
>player, had held an important position at the school. He and Edwards had
>been involved in a long-standing affair, however, and its revelation had
>cost Mayfield his job. The affair had been destructive to both Mayfield
>and Edwards. Mayfield had left his wife and moved in with the younger
>woman, only to return to his wife within days. Edwards had countered by
>taking an overdose of barbiturates a week before her death and Mayfield had
>asked Paula Rudolph, another library employee, to allow Edwards to move in
>with her when the young woman was released from the hospital. It was a
>trying time for Mayfield and Edwards alike. School officials had asked for
>Mayfield's resignation after Edwards' suicide attempt and he had complained
>bitterly to others that his lover had "ruined" his life. Edwards, for her
>part, had more than her estrangement from Mayfield to contend with.
>Mayfield's 16-year-old daughter, Louella, angered over her father's affair,
>had made repeated threats to kill Edwards and had been seen at Rudolph's
>apartment complex, posing as a police investigator and asking for
>information about Edwards. Still, Edwards and Mayfield continued to see
>one another. The two had argued in Mayfield's driveway in the early evening
>on the night the young woman was slain, and Edwards told friends later that
>evening that Mayfield was furious. Added to that was Paula Rudolph's
>description of a man she had seen on the night of the slaying, standing in
>the doorway of the bedroom that Edwards used. Rudolph said she had entered
>the apartment shortly after midnight and seen a person she recognized as
>Mayfield, with his familiar gray hair and white tennis outfit, standing in
>the room. Rudolph told police and others she was not surprised to see her
>boss and had retired to her room and gone to bed, only to find Edwards'
>battered body the next morning. Mayfield was questioned briefly by police
>after the killing. He then approached Dr. Fred Mears, a colleague at the
>school and a forensic psychologist, and asked Mears "how to beat" a
>polygraph. Subsequently, at least two library employees say, Mayfield told
>them he had commissioned his own polygraph examinations and failed six of
>them before passing the seventh. Police, however, never questioned those
>employees. The investigators accepted Mayfield's account that he was at
>home with his wife and daughter when the killing occurred, never questioned
>the wife or daughter and dropped Mayfield as a suspect. Instead, they
>settled on Kerry Max Cook. OOK'S SINGLE fingerprint on a sliding glass
>door leading to Edwards' bedroom linked him to the crime and a petty
>criminal history made him a palatable suspect. In a recent interview, both
>Cook and his attorney, Paul Nugent of Houston, cited a gag order that
>prevents them from discussing details of the case. But Cook spoke of his
>life before his arrest and of his years in prison. He and an older brother
>were "Army brats" who grew up around various military posts in Europe
>before the family moved to Jacksonville, in East Texas, in 1970 when Cook
>was 14. "I had trouble adjusting to this country," he said. "We had lived
>off-base in Europe and didn't associate with other kids much. Everything
>was `Yes, sir,' and `No, sir,' short hair and military. "When I got here,
>it was kind of a culture shock, kids with long hair, smoking dope. Believe
>it or not, what was going on in Jacksonville seemed like an exotic
>lifestyle to me." By the time Cook had reached the ninth grade he had
>become a petty car thief, stealing cars with other teen-agers, abandoning
>the vehicles when they ran out of gas and stealing another to return home.
>He was caught in a stolen pickup at age 15 and spent a brief time in
>detention. He was arrested again at 18 when he broke the front window of a
>Jacksonville hardware store and stole several firearms. His final crime
>was littering, which netted him a $200 fine and probation. He later
>settled in Tyler and, at the time of Edwards' killing, was living with a
>friend in the same apartment complex occupied by Paula Rudolph and Edwards.
> Edwards had already gained a reputation around the complex for failing to
>close her drapes while undressing. Cook was among the men who had watched
>her and had remarked to others that he had been to her apartment and "made
>out" with her and displayed marks on his neck to bolster his claim. Those
>marks had long faded, however, by the time police arrested Cook six weeks
>after the killing. He was charged with capital murder based on the
>contention that he had compounded the murder by taking body parts from the
>scene in a missing stocking. He was brought to trial in June 1978. By that
>time prosecutor Mike Thompson was referring to Cook as "a sexual
>psychopath" with a "lust for blood and perversion." The testimony was
>damning. Paula Rudolph had changed her description of the man she saw in
>the doorway from that of a gray-haired, white-clad Jim Mayfield to that of
>Cook, who had shoulder-length black hair and was wearing a black shirt on
>the night of the killing. Rudolph's previous statements were never raised.
>Neither was that of Robert Hoehn, a man who told jurors that he and Cook
>had had a homosexual liaison on the night of the killing while watching The
>Sailor Who Fell >From Grace With The Sea, a movie that featured mutilation
>with a knife. Hoehn told jurors that Cook was aroused by the film and
>waved a knife and yelled, "Let's get it on," at the mutilation scene.
>Hoehn, who has since died, had made a previous statement to police,
>however. In it he included no mention of sex with Cook and his description
>of Cook's reaction to the movie was one of disinterest. But his testimony
>was compounded by that of Tyler police Lt. Doug Collard, who told jurors
>that Cook's fingerprint on the door was "less than 12 hours old" when it
>was lifted on the morning after the slaying. Forensic experts, however,
>agree that it is impossible to "date" fingerprints and Collard has since
>made a written admission that he could not substantiate his testimony with
>any scientific evidence. Further, said Collard, he was pressured by the
>district attorney's office to make the statement that the fingerprint was
>less than 12 hours old. The most incriminating tale, however, came from
>jail inmate Eddie "Shyster" Jackson, who said Cook had been his cellmate
>and had confessed the killing in detail to him. Responding to questions by
>Thompson, Jackson emphasized that he had made no "deal" for his testimony
>and was only attempting to see justice carried out. Weeks later, weeks
>after Cook had been convicted and sentenced to death, and weeks after
>Jackson had been released from jail, Jackson told police and newspaper
>reporters that he had concocted his story about Cook's "confession" in
>return for a reduction of the murder charge against him and his immediate
>release from jail. Shortly after Jackson's announcement, Thompson, the
>prosecutor, shot himself and died. EITHER OF those events was known to
>Cook, who, by that time, was being initiated to the rigors of death row.
>The testimony from his trial had preceded him to Huntsville and, as a
>slight, shy and somewhat timid man, he was labeled a "•••••." Cook is
>reluctant to describe many of his experiences in prison and points out that
>he may return there to face retribution. Former prisoner Clarence Brandley,
>however, served with Cook from 1981 until 1990 and recalled how Cook was
>treated. Brandley, who was represented in a second trial by Nugent and was
>exonerated of the murder charge against him, remembered Cook as a quiet,
>retiring prisoner whose life on death row was "unreal." "It's not a
>Holiday Inn," said Brandley. "If you're perceived as being weak, you're a
>`•••••' and any one of them who wants you can take you. You're either a
>`•••••' or a `man' and, once he was labeled a homosexual, that was it."
>Cook kept to himself on death row. He attempted suicide three times after
>sexual assaults. He made few friends and saw the few he had go to their
>deaths. "It was pretty traumatic," said Cook. "One of them was Kenneth
>Brock (convicted of the murder of a policeman). I went by the death watch
>cell just before they executed him and he told me, `You're gonna get out of
>here, Kerry. This won't happen to you,' and he made me promise not to give
>up. "I know what these people had done, but it's different when you live
>beside somebody. They're still a human being." In 1987 he learned that his
>brother had been shot to death while attempting to stop a fight between two
>men in Jacksonville. In 1991 he heard of his father's death from cancer.
>Both announcements came by telephone, days after the deaths occurred. In
>the meantime, he took college correspondence courses and waited for
>Wednesdays. Wednesdays are special days on death row. They are the days
>that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals returns its findings. Cook waited
>through 12 years of Wednesdays and came within 11 days of an execution
>before the appeals court ordered a new trial in 1990. During those 12
>years Cook was befriended by Jim McCloskey, whose Centurion Ministries has
>taken over the defense of numerous prisoners throughout the country.
>McCloskey, who has called Cook's conviction "the most egregious case of
>misjustice I've ever seen," paid Nugent's fee and sent investigators to
>Tyler to examine the evidence against Cook. His organization later put up
>the $100,000 bond for Cook's release in November. OOK'S SECOND trial in
>1991 ended in a mistrial with a hung jury, but not before Edwards'
>"missing" stocking was found wadded in the legs of her jeans, where it
>apparently had been overlooked by police. A third trial in 1994 ended in a
>conviction and death sentence, but, by that time, the videotape of The
>Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea was nowhere to be found. Nugent
>had already prepared an appeal based on prosecutorial misconduct. In it, he
>pointed out that the Smith County District Attorney's Office had: ·
>Withheld from defense lawyers information about Louella Mayfield's threats
>against Edwards. · Procured Jackson's testimony about Cook's
>jailhouse "confession" with an agreement to reduce the charge against him
>and release him. · Withheld Robert Hoehn's first statement.
>· Introduced Collard's misleading testimony about the age of Cook's
>fingerprint and withheld his subsequent written rebuttal of that testimony
>until 1992. The appeals court found that "prosecutorial and police
>misconduct has tainted this entire matter from the outset," sided with
>Nugent and ordered a new trial. That trial promises to bring out testimony
>not previously heard. Former library employees are set to testify that
>Mayfield, who has since moved to Houston but could not be located for this
>article, was enraged over Edwards' suicide attempt and blamed her for
>losing his job. Mears is ready to testify about Mayfield's queries about
>"beating" a polygraph. Robert Ressler, the retired FBI agent who designed
>that bureau's "profiling" procedures, is poised to say that the killing
>appears to have been "a domestic, staged homicide," in which the mutilation
>was done as an afterthought to obscure the motive. And Cook is prepared
>for either possible outcome of the case. "The first conviction was
>devastating," he said. "The second was like an epiphany. This time ... I
>guess I get to go through it again." In the interim he lives with a family
>in Dallas, works for a telephone sales firm and tries to deal with a world
>that has passed him by. "I'm like a kid," he said. "I was locked in a
>vortex for 21 years and I don't fit in now. I choose the wrong kind of
>clothes and I listen to the wrong kind of music. "I didn't know how to
>operate a gas pump and I still don't know how to work an ATM machine. "I'm
>used to structure. I ask permission for everything. I ask permission to go
>to the restroom at work and everybody stares at me. Then, when I'm alone,
>I'm not used to ever being alone. It scares me. "But I'm ready to get on
>with my life if everything works out. "The last 21 years have been a
>nightmare. It's a nightmare to have people not believe you when you're
>telling the truth. Then, when you get to prison, the nightmare really
>begins." |
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