Framed

5

Now allied with the prosecution, Paula backed off what she originally told the police.

She was now certain that the man she saw was not Jim Mayfield.

But she was still convinced that the man was wearing white shorts.

This proved helpful to Kerry when Robert Hoehn testified for the State.

But the testimony that came next was absolutely damning in the eyes of the jury.

As they did in their grand jury statements, Hoehn and the Dykes brothers portrayed Kerry to the jury as a peeping Tom.

Randy testified that Kerry told him he was passing the girl’s bedroom window one night, and from the sidewalk he stopped and watched her undress.

He added that Kerry told him she had big breasts and played with herself.

On the morning after Linda’s death, Randy took Kerry to fill out a job application in Tyler, and then drove him to Jacksonville and dropped him off at his brother’s workplace.

Although he did not say it at this first trial, Randy testified at a 1994 retrial that on the morning after Linda was murdered, he took Kerry to the local Department of Public Safety to renew his driver’s license—not a likely destination for a man who had allegedly mutilated a woman twelve hours earlier.

Hoehn testified at trial that he and Kerry had watched the X-rated movie The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea on cable TV the night Linda was killed.

But this time, in direct contradiction of his grand jury testimony—in which he said several times that Kerry “wasn’t paying any attention to it”—Hoehn now disgusted the conservative jury by salaciously describing the oral and anal sex that he and Kerry supposedly had together while the movie was playing, including Kerry masturbating and ejaculating on the floor as Hoehn watched.

Hoehn told of one scene in the movie where a little boy peered into his mother’s bedroom and watched as she pleased herself.

He said Kerry was “rubbing himself”

when children in the movie were getting ready to mutilate a cat, and that he held up a butcher knife saying, “Let’s cut it out.”

None of this was true, but the prosecution ran with it, portraying Kerry as a perverted and intoxicated homosexual killer so sexually stimulated by the film, and by the memory of seeing Linda nude in her bedroom window, that he’d gone to her apartment, slid in through the patio door, caught her by surprise, and did to her what the young boys did to the cat in the film.

If Ament and Dixon had had Hoehn’s suppressed grand jury testimony, they could have knocked down the State’s ludicrous presentation.

Parts of Hoehn’s trial testimony, however, did help Kerry’s case, except by now the jury was so turned off they probably gave it no credence.

Hairdresser Hoehn told the jury that Kerry had a full head of dark brown hair down to his shoulders and was wearing the same blue and red boxing shorts that he always wore (not white tennis shorts).

Hoehn also testified that he and Kerry left the apartment sometime after midnight to get a pack of cigarettes.

When they returned, he dropped Kerry off at the Embarcadero’s front entrance.

He was positive it was between 12:30 and 12:35, not earlier and not later.

After they purchased the cigarettes, Kerry had suggested that they ride around for a while.

Hoehn said no.

When he dropped Kerry off, Kerry invited Hoehn to come in and visit with him a little longer.

Hoehn declined because he had to get up early the next morning for work.

So, if Kerry were the killer, he would have had to turn into a monster in the blink of an eye as soon as Hoehn drove away.

On an impulse, he would have had to dash back to Taylor’s apartment, change into white shorts, run over to Paula’s apartment, slip in the patio door, confront and mutilate Linda, meticulously clean up, and hardly leave behind a trace of blood.

There was a reason Hoehn testified falsely against Kerry.

Inexplicably, Smith County prosecutors were convinced that Hoehn had joined Kerry in killing Linda.

The police interrogated Hoehn so intensely, and harassed him so ceaselessly, that he retained an attorney to put a stop to it.

But prosecutor Thompson still tried.

When the last juror was selected, he asked for a recess and ushered Kerry and his attorneys into a conference room.

He offered Kerry a plea whereby if Kerry named Hoehn as his partner in the murder, he would recommend a sentence of twenty-five years instead of death.

Insisting on his innocence, Kerry refused and went to trial.

The fixation of the authorities on Robert Hoehn had no basis in fact.

Hoehn looked nothing like the man Paula described.

He had blond hair thinning on top.

He was overweight and soft-looking with a noticeable belly.

He stood close to 5'11" at 175 pounds.

His skin was pasty white with not a hint of a tan.

When Kerry refused to plea out, Hoehn was given immunity to testify as he did.

Besides a murder charge, he avoided prosecution under the anti-same-sex sodomy law in effect in Texas until 2003, when the U.S.

Supreme Court found the law unconstitutional.

After Hoehn’s testimony, the prosecutors had a jailhouse snitch to share with the jury.

Thompson brought in Edward Scott Jackson (aka “Shyster”).

He had been in jail for first-degree murder since November 1976, awaiting trial.

Shyster told the jury that Kerry had confessed to killing Linda while they were in the Smith County jail together.

Shyster repeated gory aspects of the murder Kerry had supposedly told him.

For instance, Kerry allegedly told him he cut out Linda’s vagina and took it with him along with hair from her head.

Jackson recalled that Kerry had a particular hatred for women with dark hair (Linda had long, dark brown hair), but he liked blondes and redheads.

He’d say vulgar things about dark-haired women while they perused girlie magazines together, like “this bitch needs her ass kicked for posing like this.”

Shyster assured the jury there were no secret deals with the prosecutor for his testimony.

Thompson backed this up during summation, claiming, “I will be yelling for [Shyster] Jackson’s head right before this rail of justice just like I am this killer and it will fall.

I don’t make deals with killers.”

That’s not what happened, though.

On August 15, 1978, a month almost to the day after Kerry arrived on death row, Shyster was back in court.

He pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter, was sentenced to time served, and walked free.

He had spent 625 days in the Smith County jail on a murder charge, rather than a life sentence in a Texas state prison if convicted at trial.

The State’s last witness was Dr. V. V. Gonzalez, a pathologist who had examined the body at the crime scene and performed the autopsy at a funeral home later that morning.

Dr. Gonzalez was not trained as a medical examiner, nor did he formally serve in that capacity.

In 1977, Smith County did not have a medical examiner’s office.

Years later, the renowned Texas forensic pathologist, Dr. Lloyd White, reviewed Gonzalez’s work in Linda’s case.

He described his autopsy report and testimony as “almost unintelligible.”

Dr. White also characterized Dr. Gonzalez as “incapable of describing any sort of wound or injury in a manner consistent with all generally accepted standards of forensic pathology practice.”

Dr. Gonzalez offered one very damning, and highly suspect, finding.

Even though he had not made note of it in his autopsy report, he testified that he believed a piece of the vaginal canal had been “cut off”

and “was missing.”

He was able to discover this even though the killer had repeatedly stabbed the vagina and the area around it so many times that her genitalia and rectum all the way into the pelvic cavity had been eviscerated.

As soon as Dr. Gonzalez departed the stand, the State rested its case.

The defense consisted of only three witnesses, all Smith County jail inmates.

They told the jury that Shyster Jackson had told them he had a deal with the district attorney that would enable him to plead to involuntary manslaughter, get time served, and go home.

Which is exactly what happened.

Fearful that Thompson would ride roughshod over Kerry, his attorneys persuaded him not to testify.

In his summation, Thompson used Gonzalez’s “missing vagina”

finding to tell the jury that this “pervert”

took Linda’s missing calf stocking, “dropped those body parts in it,”

and with the stocking in hand exited the apartment.

In an outrageous assertion, he then added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t eat those body parts.”

Thompson branded Kerry a “young sexual psychopath”

and implored the jury to “take his warped, twisted and perverted mind out of existence”

and “do something about that pervert before he does it again to a young woman in our county.”

Thompson told the jury that after Randy Dykes took Kerry down to Jacksonville the day after the murder on June 10, “he [Kerry] kept on running and never came back to Tyler…he went like a rabbit from the City of Tyler and hadn’t come back.”

Thompson knew this was false.

While James Taylor didn’t testify at trial, he had testified before the grand jury on October 3, 1977, that Kerry had returned to Tyler on Monday afternoon, June 13, three days after the murder, having spent the weekend with his family in Jacksonville.

Kerry only left Tyler again when Taylor kicked him out of his apartment after hearing that Kerry had had sex with one of his friends.

It was a groundless rumor, but Taylor’s jealousy got the best of him, and he asked Kerry to leave.

Taylor drove Kerry to Houston later that day during a truck delivery run.

Kerry called twice from Houston later that week, asking Taylor to let him come back.

Taylor refused and never heard from Cook again.

Like Hoehn’s and the Dykes brothers’ grand jury testimony, Taylor’s was kept from the defense for the next fourteen years.

In their summation, defense attorneys Ament and Dixon tried to drive home how much Kerry’s physical appearance differed from Paula’s initial description of the killer.

They argued that Kerry could not have committed the crime, since Paula saw the killer in the bedroom at 12:30 and Hoehn dropped Kerry off at the same time.

They ridiculed the Shyster Jackson “jailhouse confession,”

characterizing him as a “smooth talker”

who should not be believed.

Dixon predicted, accurately as it turned out, that in two months they would read in the paper that Shyster had pled to involuntary manslaughter and walked free.

But Cook’s attorneys couldn’t get around Collard’s testimony that the prints were six to twelve hours old when found.

Absent Kerry’s admission that he’d touched the patio door when he and Linda had gone to her apartment a few days earlier to make out, Collard’s testimony placed Kerry in the apartment at the time of the murder.

The jury reached its verdict at 10:00 p.m.

on June 28, 1978, after deliberating through the afternoon and evening.

They found Kerry guilty of capital murder.

The punishment phase began the next day.

For this, Dr. Jerry Landrum took the stand.

He was now a self-employed psychologist, no longer at Rusk Hospital.

But he recalled his evaluation of Kerry at Rusk several years earlier.

He told the jury he didn’t have his notes but remembered that he had diagnosed him as “an anti-social personality.”

Even though he had not interviewed him since, he added that he would put Kerry in the “severe psychopathic category”

and had “no doubt”

he was a continuing threat to society who could not be rehabilitated if institutionalized.

Since the defense never saw his September 1973 evaluation, they didn’t know that Landrum was contradicting his own conclusion that Kerry was “not psychotic,”

that Kerry was “free of any mental disorder,” and that there was “no reason” to keep Kerry confined.