Framed

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.