Framed

2

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.