Framed

11

If this bloody hair had been tested for DNA and it proved to be Mayfield’s, it would have blown the case wide open, because neither Mayfield nor the DA could have easily explained such results away.

But they never had to.

The Tyler authorities went on to destroy the hair follicle in 2001, in direct violation of a Texas statute enacted eight months before that barred destruction of evidence suitable for DNA testing.

Jack Skeen was still the DA at that time.

He did not leave office until 2003, when he became a Smith County judge.

In early April 2016, Skeen’s successor as Smith County district attorney, Matt Bingham, at the request of Gary Udashen, surprisingly agreed to set up an on-the-record interview with Jim Mayfield at his Houston home.

Bingham granted Mayfield immunity for whatever he might say, put him under oath, and allowed his long-standing attorney, Buck Files, to attend.

The ever-faithful Elfreide sat in as well.

Forty years had passed since Linda’s murder.

Mayfield was now an eighty-three-year-old retiree who had served many years, ironically, as an assistant building manager of the Harris County jail.

The unrestricted interview lasted two hours.

Udashen took the lead in asking questions, with follow-ups by Bingham.

The session yielded several significant Mayfield admissions.

He admitted for the first time that he and Linda did have sex at lunchtime in Paula’s apartment to celebrate his forty-fourth birthday on June 8, and that Linda had showered him with gifts, including a new tennis outfit.

He professed surprise that his semen was found in the underwear she was wearing the night of her homicide, because the last time they had sex was the day before.

He couldn’t understand why she would wear dirty underwear two days in a row.

He admitted that he was sexually addicted to Linda.

Whenever he was around her, he was weak and couldn’t resist the temptation to have sex.

In fact, practically every time they were together, they had sex.

“I’m not the strongest person when it comes to Linda,”

he said.

He knew he “needed to stay away from Linda, best I could.”

At the time of her death, the most important thing for him was to save his marriage; Linda “came second.”

He was trying to put his life back together, and “stop the sex with Linda.”

If he continued to see her, it would start all over again.

His librarian career was destroyed.

He had lost not only his job but also his house on the lake, and he had almost lost his wife because of her.

He said he “wasn’t going to destroy my marriage for Linda.”

He had promised Elfreide that it was over between him and Linda.

If Elfreide had ever found out about what happened on his birthday at Paula’s, that would have ended their marriage.

But Linda wouldn’t let it go.

She wanted to keep the relationship.

After his birthday, she still wanted to be together.

She “wasn’t happy”

he had decided to return to Elfreide.

When she showed up at his house the evening of her murder, it was apparent that she was still trying to see him.

She had visited him four times that day.

He had to stop seeing her.

He knew that somehow he had to end their relationship.

He admitted that he had angrily exclaimed to Ann White, while they were sitting in her car in the Embarcadero parking lot before Linda’s body was brought out, that Linda had “ruined”

his career.

He had denied saying that at Kerry’s trials.

He conceded that he might have told Olene Harned he was afraid Linda might follow him to Houston, that Linda had that in her mind.

He had also denied this at Kerry’s trials.

Perhaps unknowingly, by making these admissions, Mayfield in effect laid out his motivation for killing Linda.

To preserve that which he was desperate to hold on to—his marriage to Elfreide—he had to end his relationship with Linda.

She had already destroyed his cherished way of life and a career perfectly suited to his ambition.

He knew he did not have the will to overcome his sexual addiction to her, and that she would once again cause his ruination if she followed him to Houston.

As he told Olene Harned several days before the murder, “If she [moves to Houston], I’ll never be rid of her.”

Something had to be done to stop the relationship.

Those who knew him well believed his explosive temper got the best of him and, in a fit of rage, he had cracked and uncontrollably destroyed those parts of Linda that had destroyed him.

In the interview, Mayfield also admitted for the first time that Professor Mears had confronted him about the illustrated mutilation book entitled The Sexual Criminal.

At his depositions prior to Kerry’s trials, Mayfield had denied having any knowledge of the book’s existence.

Because of his denial, Judge Tunnell and later Judge Jones prohibited Paul from introducing the book to the jury and questioning Mayfield about it.

Mayfield said he never saw or spoke with Paula after Linda was killed, and never tried to reach out to see how she was doing.

When Udashen asked if he was aware that Paula was telling people he was the man she saw that night, he said he was.

Curiously, during this interview he never said Paula was wrong in identifying him at the scene.

As he always had, he claimed he was home that night with Elfreide and Louella.

He never left the house.

Standing by her husband of sixty-two years, Elfreide interjected, “Until I die, I know he was home with me that night.”

Because Jack Skeen was now sitting as a Smith County judge, a judge from outside the county was appointed to hear Kerry’s habeas claims—Judge Jack Carter from Texarkana.

The hearing was scheduled for Monday, June 6.

In the meantime, Udashen and Bingham negotiated behind the scenes for a settlement.

David Dobbs, who had long ago left office, aided Bingham in these discussions.

He and Judge Skeen wanted at all costs to avoid a public hearing that would subject them to a humiliating cross-examination.

For his part, Kerry wanted a full-blown hearing, a reversal of his murder conviction, and a finding of actual innocence.

On the day of the hearing, the parties reached an agreement.

Since it was clear from his recent interview that Jim Mayfield had perjured himself multiple times at the second and third trials, the district attorney agreed to recommend to Judge Carter that Kerry’s murder conviction be vacated.

But he would recommend that his claims of actual innocence be denied.

For resolution of this final issue, rather than a hearing requiring witness testimony, the parties would make oral presentations to Judge Carter in the style of closing arguments at trial.

The defense would argue for actual innocence, and the prosecution would oppose it, insisting on Kerry’s guilt.

Judge Carter agreed to proceed on that basis.

The only person who objected to the proposed settlement was Kerry.

Even though the agreement included a long-sought and groundbreaking dismissal of his conviction, Kerry vehemently argued against it.

He wanted his day in court to not only prove his innocence but to hold Dobbs and Skeen accountable for the physical and psychological distress he had suffered at their hands since they entered the case decades earlier.

He believed this could best be done through an open, in-court evidentiary hearing.

Nevertheless, after a long and emotional discussion the night before the hearing, Kerry, with great reluctance, finally succumbed and agreed to the settlement.

But a day or two after everything was in place, Kerry, still upset that the agreement did not include a public hearing, stunned everyone when he suddenly and without warning fired his legal team.

Fortunately, a noted Houston attorney, Mark Bennett, who’d previously had no involvement in the case, stepped into the breach with only one stipulation.

It would be impossible for him to spend time attempting to rescind the agreement.

He now only had three weeks to prepare for the actual innocence argument.

On July 1, the attorneys made their arguments for and against actual innocence.

The prosecutor regurgitated the State’s evidence presented during the prior three trials.

Attorney Bennett focused on the pervasive prosecutorial misconduct that led to Kerry’s prior false convictions and made the case for Mayfield’s guilt.

On July 25, Judge Carter issued his opinion in the form of recommendations to the CCA.

He recommended that Kerry’s murder conviction be reversed, as agreed, but that Kerry’s actual innocence claim be denied.

He reflected that, for a convicted person to establish actual innocence, the CCA required that the new evidence must “unquestionably”

meet a “Herculean” standard.

While he found that the DNA evidence was helpful to Cook’s defense, it “required a jury to make a deductive step”

that Mayfield had left it in Linda’s panties the night of the murder.

He therefore concluded that the DNA didn’t “unquestionably”

establish Cook’s innocence or Mayfield’s guilt.

In contrast, Kerry’s defense believed it was an easy deduction to make.

To believe Mayfield didn’t have intercourse with Linda on the night she was murdered, but rather thirty-six hours earlier as Mayfield claimed, the jury would have had to accept that Linda wore the same soiled underwear for thirty-six hours straight—from lunchtime on Wednesday, June 8, when Mayfield admitted they had sex in Paula’s apartment, until very early on June 10, shortly after midnight, when she was killed.

Linda had attended an art class for several hours that Wednesday night; returned home and slept in her bedroom;

dressed the next morning to visit Mayfield at his office and have lunch with him; interviewed for a job at a local bank at 1:30; and played tennis with Mayfield after that.

Several hours later, she drove down to Mayfield’s Lake Palestine home to confront him about their relationship.

Would it not be reasonable for any set of jurors, considering these facts, to have deduced that Linda must have put on a fresh pair of underwear at some point during that day and a half, whether dressing after sex with Mayfield on Wednesday or dressing the next morning for her interview, or showering after playing tennis on a hot summer afternoon and changing into clean clothes for her early evening trip to Lake Palestine to pop in on Mayfield? Yet, for whatever reason, Judge Carter didn’t see it that way.

In August 2016, Judge Carter submitted his recommended findings to the Texas CCA for it to accept or reject.

Eight years later and forty-seven years into his fight for justice, Kerry Max Cook was still waiting for the court’s decision.

Kerry couldn’t help remembering that it took the CCA eight years to deny his original appeal in the 1980s.

Why this court demonstrated such an extraordinary laxity in its handling of his case, no one can say.

Nevertheless, holding on for dear life, he refused to give up hope that someday the court would do the right thing.

Then, without any warning, it came like a bolt of lightning from heaven above.

Scripture tells us, “If you have faith, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ it will be done.”

The long, long arc of justice finally found its mark on June 19, 2024, when Judge Bert Richardson of the CCA, in a blistering and comprehensive 106-page opinion, threw Kerry’s mountain of injustice into the sea.

He wrote, “This case is riddled with allegations of State misconduct that warrant setting aside Applicant’s conviction.

And when it comes to solid support of actual innocence, this case contains it all—uncontroverted Brady violations, proof of false testimony, admissions of perjury, and new scientific evidence.”

With that, the CCA gave Kerry what his heart longed for during those interminable lost years—pure, unadulterated exoneration.

His dream to be declared an innocent man by Texas’s highest court had come true.

The world now knows what he has always known—the truth that he was framed by Smith County law enforcement and its judiciary.

Vindication is so sweet!