Framed

4

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.