Framed

3

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.