Framed

9

By the early 1990s, A. D. Clark was long gone from the Smith County district attorney’s office.

Jack Skeen—Clark’s first cousin, their mothers were sisters—was the new DA.

He and his top trial prosecutor, David Dobbs, would be prosecuting Kerry.

In the fall of 1991, before Nugent came on board, Dobbs and I had traded discovery material.

Among the more important exchanges, he gave me the hitherto suppressed grand jury testimony of Hoehn, Taylor, and the Dykes brothers; and access to the eighty-four-page police investigative report.

I gave him a twenty-two-page memo on why Centurion believed Mayfield was guilty.

I tried in vain to convince him of Kerry’s innocence and Mayfield’s guilt.

Dobbs said he believed Mayfield loved Linda and was impressed that Mayfield would cry whenever he spoke about her. Much to my horror, he revealed to Mayfield my sources of information and what they had said about him.

One evening, Dobbs and I visited the crime scene—Paula’s now vacant apartment—and reenacted the moment when Paula came in the door and saw Linda’s killer.

We re-created the lighting conditions and took turns being Paula and the killer.

It was clear to both of us that this was a perfect visual environment to make accurate observations.

Dobbs therefore stunned me during this exercise when he said he didn’t believe it was Kerry whom Paula had seen, but rather Hoehn, and that Kerry was in the closet where the knife was found.

I retorted in shocked disbelief that Paula had described Mayfield to a T, and Hoehn looked nothing like the man Paula described.

Preparing for trial, Paul Nugent gained access to Dobbs’s files and discovered the 1989 memo from Collard to the International Association for Identification explaining why he had aged the patio prints to the hour, despite knowing it was wrong to do so.

There appeared to be four missing pages from Hoehn’s grand jury testimony, and Dobbs assured Paul that he would search for these.

On March 4, 1992, Kerry was removed from death row and transported to the Smith County jail to await trial.

Without authorization and behind Paul Nugent’s back, Dobbs confronted Kerry when he arrived at the jail.

He attempted to interrogate Kerry about his fingerprints at the scene, a blatant and unethical violation of the prohibition against interviewing a defendant without his attorney present.

Judge Tunnell later upbraided Dobbs for this misconduct.

Paul attempted to prevent the retrial by arguing that, under the rule of double jeopardy, the State should not be permitted to retry Kerry for the same crime when, in its first prosecution, the State had hidden critical exculpatory evidence from the defense and the court, and suborned perjury from numerous witnesses.

If the judge were to agree with Nugent’s arguments, a retrial would be precluded and Kerry would be set free.

In order to make his determination, Judge Tunnell conducted a series of hearings in the fall of 1992, focusing on these allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct, to decide if the rule of double jeopardy applied.

Many witnesses testified at the hearings, including A. D. Clark, Collard, Dobbs, and Eddie Clark.

Shyster Jackson was even brought in from Missouri state prison.

He recanted his entire trial testimony, admitting, “I lied to save myself,”

and testified that he was coached, fed information, and shown victim photos by A. D. Clark. His trial testimony had all been a sham.

In his jailhouse conversations with Kerry, Cook had always maintained his innocence.

At the conclusion of the hearings, Judge Tunnell flabbergasted the defense by announcing that the trial would proceed, and that he would reserve ruling on the double jeopardy issue until after the conclusion of the trial.

That made no sense.

It defeated the purpose of the hearings, which was to determine if there should be a trial at all.

Citing the substantial media presence in Tyler, Tunnell granted a change of venue to Georgetown, Texas, at that time a conservative town and the seat of Williamson County in Central Texas, twenty-five miles north of Austin and more than two hundred miles from Tyler.

Judge Tunnell also made a series of pretrial rulings in favor of the State that hamstrung Kerry’s defense.

The most damaging was the exclusion of the grand jury testimony of Robert Hoehn, James Taylor, and the Dykes brothers that A. D. Clark had hidden from Kerry’s first defense team.

Thus the jury was unable to hear an alternative reason for Kerry’s prints on the patio door: that Kerry had been in Linda’s apartment on Monday afternoon, June 6, to make out, the passion marks on his neck being the evidence of their romantic tryst.

Without the “passion marks”

testimony, Nugent knew he wouldn’t be able to make the argument that Kerry left his fingerprints on the patio door days before the murder.

He argued vigorously against the judge’s prohibition, saying that under Texas evidentiary rules he should be allowed to question these witnesses using their prior statements in order to fully complete their conversations with Kerry, and not limit these to Kerry telling them about observing Linda nude in her apartment.

In response, the judge challenged Nugent to put Kerry on the stand if he wanted the jury to hear about the passion marks and Kerry’s make-out session with Linda.

Of course, such testimony coming from Kerry alone, without his friends’ corroboration, would sound highly dubious.

Thus Judge Tunnell’s ruling allowed Dobbs and Skeen to make the same deceptive pitch A. D. Clark had used in the first trial—that this was a “stranger-on-stranger”

crime by a perverted sexual deviant.

The judge also precluded Nugent from telling the jury about the prosecutorial misconduct that had tainted the previous trial.

Nugent was forbidden from mentioning Shyster Jackson’s false confession or Collard’s unscientific aging of the patio door fingerprints.

The past misdeeds of the district attorney’s office were wiped clean for this new jury.

Judge Tunnell also set tight limits on what the defense witnesses could say about the evidence implicating Jim Mayfield in the killing.

For instance, the judge precluded Dr. Mears from telling the jury that Mayfield had asked him days after the murder how to beat a polygraph, and had admitted to ordering the book The Sexual Criminal, which depicted wounds from sexual organ mutilation that eerily resembled Linda’s.

These judicial rulings significantly tilted the trial in favor of the prosecution, just as State-sponsored perjury had prejudiced the first trial.

The second trial began at the end of November 1992, fourteen years after the first.

The State’s case was a more refined and somewhat expanded version of what it had presented at the earlier trial.

Paula was now certain that the man she’d seen was the defendant and not Mayfield.

Watching Dobbs examining Paula, I thought back to our conversation in Paula’s apartment a year earlier when Dobbs told me he believed it was Hoehn whom Paula had seen, not Kerry.

Yet here he was eliciting from her the exact opposite, that it was Kerry she had seen, not Hoehn.

Since Robert Hoehn was dead, Nugent didn’t have the chance, on cross-examination, to hammer away at his testimony about the night of the murder and perhaps to elicit an admission that his testimony at the 1978 trial was false and coerced by the belligerent Michael Thompson.

Judge Tunnell allowed attorneys to read most of Hoehn’s 1978 trial testimony to the jury, including the more salacious parts.

The movie was also played for the jury.

Since Collard had earlier admitted that there was no scientific way to age a fingerprint, he got around this by cleverly describing it as a “fresh print.”

Dobbs brought in Danny Carter, supervisor of the Latent Fingerprint Department of the Texas Department of Public Safety, who confirmed that it was Kerry’s fingerprints on the patio door.

Tunnell decided to ask him outside of the jury’s presence if it was appropriate to describe a print as “fresh.”

Carter emphatically said “no.”

Calling a print “fresh”

was just another way of estimating its age, and a fingerprint examiner could not estimate a print’s age.

Such honesty from a prosecution witness was unexpected, even if the jury did not hear it.

Fingerprint expert George Bonebrake confirmed this point for the jury when he testified as a defense witness.

Now that the prosecution no longer had the false confession of Shyster Jackson, it came up with a brand-new “confession”

witness, Robert Wickham, a former reserve deputy sheriff.

On September 26, 1991, one week after the CCA had ordered a new trial, he informed the prosecutor for the first time that Kerry had confessed to him in an elevator during the 1978 trial.

He repeated his story to the jury in 1992.

He said that, while he had been escorting Kerry to the courtroom, Kerry had blurted, “I killed her and I don’t give a shit what they do to me.”

Wickham’s excuse for his thirteen years of silence was that he didn’t think it was admissible—there was no one else who heard it.

Wickham’s account had a glaring flaw.

He said that Kerry had been handcuffed and was wearing a jail jumpsuit in the elevator.

Yet Smith County had a strict policy that inmates should be escorted into the courtroom in civilian clothes and not in handcuffs, so as not to prejudice the jurors.

Also, Wickham’s account was transparently self-serving.

He managed a restaurant that was a law enforcement hangout.

His employees considered him a “wannabe cop.”

As a reserve deputy sheriff, he wasn’t a real deputy sheriff.

He was a volunteer who was required to serve twenty unpaid hours a month to keep his reserve status.

His testimony at Kerry’s second trial elevated his status among the Tyler cops who frequented his restaurant.

As part of maintaining the fiction that Kerry never knew Linda, Dobbs convinced the judge to order the journalist David Hanners to testify.

David, who knew very well how Kerry had been framed, reluctantly told the jury that Kerry always insisted he never met Linda, nor was he ever in her apartment.

He said his prints got on the door when he was watching her from the outside.

This testimony hurt Kerry’s defense and was a key example of how this lie came back to bite him.

It wasn’t until Paul Nugent and I were preparing Kerry for trial in the summer of 1992 that he finally came clean about meeting Linda at the pool and making out with her in her apartment.

He told us what he had sworn to his father and offered us a heartfelt apology.

Unfortunately, given the judge’s exclusion of the “passion marks”

grand jury testimony of Robert Hoehn and the Dykes brothers, Nugent had no credible way of offering the truth to the jury.

The lie had taken on a life of its own.

Dobbs put Mayfield, Elfreide, and Louella on the stand.

Mayfield testified for hours.

Dobbs took him through his relationship with Linda from beginning to end.

Mayfield assured the jury that his sexual relationship with Linda ended once he returned to his wife on May 19.

From that point on it was akin to a father-daughter relationship, and he had encouraged her to get on with her life and start dating other men.

He, of course, denied killing Linda.

Under cross, he denied telling Ann White that Linda had ruined his career and couldn’t recall if he told Olene Harned he was afraid Linda might follow him to Houston.

Even if she did, he said, it would not have been a problem.

He admitted that he and Linda would meet in Paula’s apartment at night when Paula was away.

He denied playing tennis a lot.

He testified that Elfreide and Linda were on friendly terms.

Elfreide and Louella steadfastly provided Mayfield with his alibi.

They said he never left the house the night of June 9–10.

Elfreide denied telling her husband that Linda was not to live with them on Lake Palestine.

She didn’t remember feeling animosity toward Linda, testifying, implausibly, that even though Jim’s affair had cost him his career, she didn’t harbor resentment toward Linda.

Linda moved in with them because they needed someone to clean the house.

When her husband returned home after living with Linda in mid-May 1977, she and he did not discuss what happened because “it was over”

and “I didn’t think about it anymore.”

She didn’t recall if, after Linda’s attempted suicide, she exclaimed to Wanda Joyce, “When will it ever end?”

For her part, Louella admitted to threatening to kill Linda if her affair with her father continued.

In Kerry’s defense, Paul Nugent focused on developing Jim Mayfield as the more likely suspect.

Unfortunately, given the judge’s pretrial rulings, each witness was only permitted to tell the jury snippets of what they knew.

Nine faculty members and staff testified for the defense.

Olene Harned, Mayfield’s successor at the library, had taken Paula into her home for a few days after the crime.

While there, Paula told Olene more than once that she thought it was Mayfield she had seen that night.

Olene also testified that Mayfield often wore white tennis shorts around campus and was worried that Linda might follow him to Houston.

Library staffer Ann White testified that the morning after the murder Mayfield angrily complained that Linda had ruined his career.

Professor Andrew Szarka told the jury what he’d told the police on Friday afternoon, June 10—that the previous evening, mere hours before she was murdered, Linda had dropped by his house for a visit.

Linda had been distressed about her relationship with Mayfield, saying that she had told Mayfield she wanted to date other men and that Mayfield had reacted badly to this.

Professor Gary Mears was only allowed to testify that Mayfield played tennis a lot and fit the description of the man Paula had seen.

Doris Carpenter, manager of the Embarcadero, remembered Paula coming into her office several days after the murder and, when asked if she’d been scared when she saw the man in Linda’s room, replying, “No, because it was Mayfield.”

In his summation, Dobbs pointed out the connection between Linda’s missing calf stocking and the scene in the movie when the little boy snuck into his mother’s room after watching her play with herself.

He reminded the jury how excited Kerry was while watching the movie, that he had started masturbating and climaxed on the carpet.

In his closing remarks, Skeen repeatedly emphasized to the jury that the defense had offered no alternative explanation for the appearance of Kerry’s fingerprints on the patio door other than that he placed them there the night he killed her.

Skeen, of course, knew full well that an alternative explanation existed, and that the judge had simply ruled it out of evidence.

Two unbelievable things happened during jury deliberations.

The first was the jury sending a note to the judge that said, “We have found the nylon stocking in the jeans of Linda Jo Edwards.”

Being good finders of fact, the jury had decided to remove the jeans from the plastic evidence bag in which they had been sealed for fifteen years.

As they shook them to their natural length, the “missing stocking”

fell out of the right leg.

And lo and behold, it had no body parts in it! Somehow, neither the Tyler police nor anyone from the Smith County district attorney’s office had ever thought to explore the legs and pockets of the jeans for evidence.

As the jury deliberations stretched into their third day, the second incredible thing happened.

On December 16, Paul saw Dobbs reading the original copy of Hoehn’s grand jury testimony.

Not trusting him, he snatched it out of Dobbs’s hands.

To his shock, the transcript contained the missing four pages that Dobbs had repeatedly denied having.

Nugent read the omitted pages in astonishment.

When Hoehn had been asked whether Kerry was watching the movie on the night of the murder, Hoehn had said, “No, no, the movie was on and he wasn’t paying any attention to it.”

Meanwhile, Dobbs had just gotten through arguing to the jury that the movie had so excited Kerry that he had decided to attack and butcher Linda.

Nugent immediately showed the missing pages and their highly exculpatory contents to Judge Tunnell.

The judge denied his request to show them to the jury.

Once again, he used his rulings to stack the deck against Kerry.

After five days, the jury informed Tunnell they were hopelessly deadlocked.

He declared a mistrial, denied Kerry bail, and shipped him back to the Smith County jail to await his third trial.

Afterward, Centurion interviewed seven of the jurors and discovered they were deadlocked at 6–6.

The unexplained patio prints and Kerry denying he knew Linda were the primary reasons for the guilty votes.

Those who voted not guilty strongly suspected Mayfield.

They believed it was a crime of passion committed by someone who was intimate with, extremely angry at, and obsessed with her.

Mayfield fit the bill.

They also characterized Mayfield, his wife, and daughter as “liars.”

They were impressed that the university witnesses, who did not know Kerry but did know Mayfield, were willing to testify against Mayfield at great inconvenience, driving two hundred miles each way.

Paul had fought Dobbs and Skeen to a draw despite Judge Tunnell’s restrictive and exclusionary evidentiary rulings and the prosecution’s chicanery.

In January 1993, Tunnell finally issued his ruling on double jeopardy.

Tunnell found that Collard’s aging of the fingerprints and A. D. Clark’s insistence that he do so was calculated to mislead the court and the jury.

He scolded the prosecution for not disclosing to the defense its agreement with Shyster Jackson in exchange for his incriminating testimony.

He characterized Dobbs’s jailhouse encounter with Kerry as “a serious breach of duty and protocol.”

Despite all of this, however, Judge Tunnell did not rule in favor of releasing Kerry on the grounds of double jeopardy.

Instead, he allowed the district attorney’s office to proceed with yet another trial.

Judge Joe Tunnell retired in June 1993.

Kerry’s third trial began on January 31, 1994, with Judge Robert D. Jones presiding.

After being voted off the bench in Travis County (where Austin is the county seat) several years earlier, he became a visiting judge appointed by a regional administrator to assist those courthouses with a shortage of judges.

The press dubbed this program “Have Gavel, Will Travel.”

Judge Jones adopted Judge Tunnell’s evidentiary rulings in their entirety and secured the same courtroom in Georgetown for the third trial.

With minor variations, all of the witnesses testified as they had in the second trial.

What set the third trial apart was the participation of two expert witnesses from the FBI’s elite Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, a department dedicated to the research and study of violent criminal offenders, especially serial and sexual killers.

The prosecution’s star expert witness was FBI agent David Gomez.

He had just completed two years of training as a violent crimes analyst for the agency’s Behavioral Science Unit.

One of his responsibilities was to serve as a consultant to local police agencies in Texas.

On the defense side was Robert Ressler, a world-renowned specialist in sexual homicide.

Ressler was one of the founding fathers of the Behavioral Science Unit, and had served as its supervisory special agent and top criminologist for sixteen years until he retired in 1990.

He had coauthored the two bibles on violent homicide, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (1988) and the Crime Classification Manual (1992).

Gomez conceded at trial that these two books were important resource materials during his recently completed training.

Gomez classified the Linda Jo Edwards murder as a “lust murder,”

which he defined as a homicide focused on the sexual organs of the victim up to and including the removal of body parts.

He concluded this was done by a stranger who was not intimate with the victim; that the offender was motivated from a personal sense of sexual ambivalence, inadequacy, and immaturity.

Linda’s lust murderer destroyed her sexual parts to neuter her.

Amazingly, Gomez did not see “overkill”

in the attack—an excess of violence—only the amount of force needed to control and kill her.

This is why he wouldn’t classify it as a “domestic homicide,”

which is a killing that occurs between persons who are personally intimate and often involves overkill rooted in rage.

Gomez believed the attacking of the vaginal area was the lust aspect of the crime, not overkill.

In his conclusion he agreed with Dobbs’s theory that voyeuristic activities could establish a fantasy phase of a crime and reflect the offender’s sexual frustrations.