[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS

[Rick Halperin]

March 24



TEXAS:

The Trouble with Innocence----For almost 40 years, Kerry Max Cook did 
everything to clear his name after being convicted of a horrifying murder in 
Tyler. So when he was finally exonerated, why did he ask for his conviction 
back?


June 6, 2016, convicted murderer Kerry Max Cook walked into a Tyler courtroom. 
The 60-year-old was dressed in black, his silver hair trimmed short. Cook's 
eyes, dark and nervous, shot around the wood-paneled chamber, which was filling 
rapidly. Local news reporters and a documentary-film crew from New York were 
setting up cameras and microphones. Cook caught sight of 3 men in the audience, 
men who had once been convicted criminals themselves: Billy Smith, Michael 
Morton, and A.B. Butler Jr. All 3, famously, had been proved innocent of their 
alleged crimes after serving a collective 60 years behind bars. They had come 
from miles away to attend this hearing, and Cook walked over to greet them. 
Smiling, the 3 stood to shake his hand. Morton clapped him on the shoulder.

Cook, who has a big, square face, smiled too. He had fought for almost 4 
decades to get to this moment. In 1978 a jury found him guilty of the murder of 
Linda Jo Edwards, a 22-year-old Tyler secretary whose body was discovered in 
her apartment bludgeoned and mutilated. The case confounded the city's 
investigators and prosecutors with its gruesomeness, and Cook became known as a 
monster and a deviant, the most notorious killer in Smith County. Over the 
years, the county's prosecutors had sought - 4 different times - to send Cook 
to death row.

But Cook had always claimed he was innocent, saying he'd had no motive to kill 
Edwards. Though his protests garnered little attention early on, eventually his 
case attracted a number of sympathizers and advocates, some who reexamined the 
evidence and others who represented him in court for his numerous appeals. Cook 
and his supporters had clashed fiercely with Smith County, making repeated 
headlines, and he had become a celebrity worldwide, an indelible symbol - at 
least outside Tyler - of the overreach of the Texas criminal justice system. 
His story was dramatized in both a play and a movie, and Cook grew into an 
anti-death penalty hero, accumulating thousands of friends and followers on 
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter; 1 of his fans, Madonna, had recently posted a 
short video made by New York fashion photographer Steven Klein about Cook. 
"Join me and Steven Klein," she wrote, "in his long struggle to prove his 
innocence and clear his name."

Now, finally, Cook had been granted this hearing, to determine whether his 
conviction should be thrown out at last. Scanning the room, he recognized many 
of the players who had moved his case through the courts. Up front was Scott 
Howe, who had represented him in the eighties, sitting next to Paul Nugent, who 
had done so in the nineties. In the back was Nugent's adversary, David Dobbs, 
the prosecutor who, for 8 years, had tried relentlessly to have Cook executed. 
Also present was Jim McCloskey, an investigator for Cook whose research had led 
to an exhaustive report naming another man - Edwards's boyfriend - as her 
killer.

That man, James Mayfield, was in the courthouse too, waiting in a hallway for 
his turn to testify. 40 years earlier, Mayfield had been a brazen lothario, 
carrying on a 17-month affair with Edwards - who was 1/2 his age - under his 
wife's nose. On this day, though, the 82-year-old sat quietly, wearing a green 
T-shirt and spectacles, looking tired.

Cook took a seat at a table in front of the judge's dais, next to his lawyers, 
Gary Udashen, the president of the board of directors of the Innocence Project 
of Texas, and Nina Morrison, from the national Innocence Project. Across from 
them were the district attorney of Smith County, Matt Bingham, and 2 
assistants. The 6 sat in awkward silence as they waited for the judge to 
appear. Finally Cook whispered something to Morrison, putting his arm around 
her shoulder. She leaned in and whispered something back.

Moments later, at 9:30, Judge Jack Carter climbed into his seat, banged his 
gavel, and announced to the world what Cook and his lawyers already knew. 
Peering over the bench, the judge declared in a deep East Texas accent that, as 
of that morning, the state had agreed to recommend that Cook's conviction be 
set aside. He was, for all practical purposes, exonerated.

Quickly, Udashen, whose graying eyebrows and glasses give him an owlish look, 
rose from his seat and addressed the court. He and Bingham had struck a deal, 
he explained: in return for the prosecution's acknowledging that Cook's due 
process rights had been violated by the state's use of false testimony in 
earlier trials, the defense had agreed to relinquish 6 of its 8 claims, 
including several that alleged prosecutorial misconduct. The defense would 
still fight for Cook to be declared "actually innocent" of the murder, a legal 
claim for which his lawyers would need to offer powerful new evidence. If Cook 
was ruled actually innocent, he would be entitled to about $3 million in 
compensation for 19 years behind bars.

Then Udashen's words took a curious turn, at least to those familiar with his 
client's long-standing battle with Smith County and its prosecutors: the lawyer 
began to praise Bingham for his openness and assistance. "We deal with these 
kinds of cases, and we deal with DAs around the country," said Udashen, "and 
the ability of justice to be done in a case largely depends on the ability or 
the willingness of the DA to cooperate, to let us review their files. The way 
Mr. Bingham handled this is a model for how to deal with these types of 
situations."

When Udashen finished, Bingham - a bald and bearded man who carries himself 
with the confidence of a successful prosecutor - stood and spoke briefly. He 
was followed by the judge, who announced that the agreement would go to the 
state's highest criminal tribunal, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, for 
approval. He excused the witnesses - there would be no testimony now - and 
declared that the hearing on Cook's actual innocence would take place later 
that month. Then he banged his gavel. The whole thing was over in 13 minutes.

Cook, who had remained impassive throughout, rose slowly. He hugged his lawyers 
and crossed into the gallery to embrace his wife, Sandy Pressey. Then, followed 
by the scrum of supporters and reporters, he made his way down the stairs and 
outside, where he stood in front of the courthouse to have his photo taken with 
his defense team, the 3 other exonerees, and his family. Cook seemed more 
impatient than exuberant, smiling thinly for the cameras. At one point he 
looked out over the milling crowd and watched as a stooped man with white hair 
and a walker made his way slowly down the sidewalk. It was Mayfield, heading 
toward an SUV that would take him home to Houston.

An hour later, at a celebratory lunch at Outback Steakhouse, Cook sat with a 
large group of lawyers and friends, listening as they told stories, laughed, 
and toasted one another for the day's hard-earned results. It was the end of an 
era. Cook had arrived on death row in 1978 and was finally getting justice, 
like other Texas men who had been condemned to death before him and also won 
their freedom: Randall Dale Adams, Clarence Brandley, Ernest Willis, and 
Anthony Graves.

The day should have been the happiest of Cook's life. But instead Cook seemed 
preoccupied, not quite present. Something was bothering him, and two days 
later, he wrote an email to his lawyers and several journalists to explain: he 
could not accept the praise that Udashen had heaped that day upon Bingham and, 
by extension, Bingham's predecessors, who had sought his misery and death for 
so long. He was firing his lawyers, he declared. Then he posted the email on 
Facebook and followed it with a series of rants accusing his lawyers of 
collaborating with the enemy. His words grew more and more hysterical, until 
finally, Cook announced that he needed a new attorney, one who would help him 
withdraw the agreement and "restore me with a wrongful murder conviction."

Even his closest supporters thought he was crazy. "I'm frankly devastated by 
this recent development," wrote a blogger on a sympathetic criminal justice 
site. Around the country, observers scratched their heads, as did other 
exonerees, many of whom had also worked with Udashen and Morrison. What kind of 
person would fire 2 of the best lawyers in the country - and then ask to be 
given back his wrongful conviction? Who would sabotage an exoneration forged 
after 39 years of heartbreaking struggle?

Kerry Max Cook would. And he has his reasons.

Linda Jo Edwards was a tall, striking brunette who grew up on a farm in 
Bullard, a tiny town just south of Tyler. After high school, she traveled up 
the road to the city of 67,000 and landed a job as a library clerk at Texas 
Eastern University. Edwards liked living in the Rose Capital, which still had a 
small-town feel. In May 1977 she moved into a spare room of her friend Paula 
Rudolph's place at the Embarcadero Apartments, a huge complex on the south side 
of town. Tyler, which had more than 50 Baptist churches, might have been a 
conservative city, but the Embarcadero was a place for young singles, and on 
her days off, Edwards would sit out at the pool, sunbathing and socializing. 
She had a bubbly personality, Rudolph would later remember. "She made you feel 
good when you walked in the room and she smiled and said hello to you."

When Edwards was found dead in her room on the morning of June 10, 1977, the 
news sent shock waves across the city. Investigators found her body on the 
red-and-black carpet, naked from the waist down. She had been beaten in the 
head and stabbed more than twenty times in the face, neck, chest, back, and 
pelvis. Though they found no semen, officials figured she had been raped too, 
and it appeared that the killer had also cut off some hair and sliced out parts 
of her lower lip - as well as her entire vagina. One of her stockings appeared 
to be missing, a fact that investigators tried to make sense of. "We kind of 
figure he placed all the body parts in the hose and [took] it out," lead 
detective Eddie Clark would surmise. It was the type of crazed crime committed 
in Southern California, not in East Texas, and not in the hometown of the Rose 
Queen and all-American football hero Earl Campbell.

Because there were no defensive wounds on Edwards and no signs of a struggle, 
the police suspected the victim had known her killer. Edwards's roommate, in 
fact, told investigators that when she returned from a date at 12:45 a.m., she 
had seen a slender, tanned man in Edwards's room whom she'd assumed was 
Edwards's boyfriend, James Mayfield. The man had silver, medium-length hair, 
like Mayfield, and was wearing white shorts, which the tennis-playing Mayfield 
often did.

But when investigators spoke with Mayfield - who drove himself to the police 
station to give a statement that same afternoon - he said he had been at home 
the previous night, with his wife, Elfriede, and their daughter Luella. The 
married father of 3, who until recently had been the head librarian at Texas 
Eastern, admitted he'd been having an affair with Edwards. But it was over, he 
stated, and they'd not had a tryst in 3 weeks. Luella confirmed her father's 
alibi. Though the 16-year-old confessed feeling rage toward Edwards - she 
admitted threatening the woman's life on several occasions - her feelings 
appeared to be those of a jealous teenager, not those of a killer.

In any event, the police theorized, the killing was so savage that it was 
inconceivable for a family man or a teenage daughter or a roommate to have 
carried it out. 3 days after the murder, a team of investigators, led by 
Detective Clark, reached out to a psychologist to help them determine the type 
of person who would commit such a crime. Jerry Landrum had lent his expertise 
in previous criminal cases, and after poring over the crime-scene photos and 
visiting Edwards's apartment, he provided a profile of the killer. The 
murderer, said Landrum, was a man between the ages of 18 and 30 who was 
probably gay or bisexual, maybe a drug user, maybe impotent, and definitely 
introverted. He was "a sexually inadequate male with pathological hostility - 
toward women. He probably had an "abnormal relationship" with his mother and 
had also "seen a doctor for his extreme anxiety."

Armed with the profile, the police focused their efforts on the apartment 
complex, going door to door to interview every resident and fingerprinting 
every man. When no one who fit the profile emerged and none of the fingerprints 
matched those in Edwards's apartment, the Tyler Courier-Times, which had been 
publishing updates on the investigation, printed a public plea from the police 
department for help. But June turned to July, and Clark, who was spending every 
single day at the Embarcadero, couldn't catch a break.

Then, on August 2, a truck driver who lived in the complex spotted Clark on the 
grounds and called him over to his apartment. The truck driver was named James 
Taylor, and Clark had already interviewed him. But Taylor had been doing some 
thinking. Back in April, he said, he had picked up a hitchhiker in Tyler and 
brought him back to his apartment, where the young man wound up crashing for a 
few days; he'd returned in early June for another stay. This man, said Taylor, 
matched some elements of the profile. He was 21 years old, his parents lived in 
nearby Jacksonville, and oddly enough, he had left town a few days after the 
murder. He was, Taylor noted, bisexual. His name was Kerry Max Cook.

Back at the station, Clark discovered that Cook had a criminal record. A fellow 
officer then made a stunning find: one of Cook's fingerprints matched a print 
found on Edwards's patio door. Cook was tracked to Port Arthur, where he was 
living with a girlfriend and tending bar, and flown to Tyler in handcuffs. The 
arrest made the front page of the Courier-Times. When the reporter asked an 
officer to speculate about Cook's motive, the law agent demurred, then added 
that any attempt to do so was "so complicated it would take 3 or 4 hours to 
explain, and you still might not understand it."

Cook was an outsider, a long-haired misfit who liked to dabble in drugs and 
experiment with his sexuality. Born in 1956, he was an Army brat who'd been 
raised in Europe with an older brother until 1972, when his family moved to 
Killeen and later Jacksonville, where his parents had grown up. He'd been an 
anxious, troubled youth who frequently fought with his parents: he'd run away 
from home several times, dropped out of the 10th grade, and stolen cars for 
joyrides. He'd been arrested several times as a juvenile - once he kicked in 
some store windows at a secondhand shop - and spent 5 months behind bars, where 
he said he'd been sexually abused by another inmate. He'd also made 3 trips to 
Rusk State Hospital, where he had cried for his mother at night. Staff members 
there had diagnosed Cook with "situational depression" and an "inadequate 
personality" and made several recommendations, including for Cook to "explore 
inordinate dependency on mother." Cook fled Rusk and traveled around the 
country, sleeping on couches and bartending and dancing in strip clubs. At a 
time when homosexuality was illegal - the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated 
Texas's sodomy law was still 26 years away - he'd spent several months in the 
gay bar scene in Dallas before winding up in Tyler.

Cook denied having anything to do with the murder, or even knowing Edwards. He 
offered an explanation for his fingerprint: Edwards sometimes undressed in 
front of her window, and one time during his stay with Taylor, he had leaned 
against the patio door to get a closer look. His story was corroborated by 
Taylor's 4 nephews, who often came to visit at the apartment and had heard Cook 
talk about seeing Edwards naked.

Investigators were skeptical of Cook's protestations. Besides the fingerprint, 
there was Cook's rap sheet, as well as the fact that, according to Taylor, he 
was impotent (making him, in Clark's assessment, "a very frustrated bisexual"). 
There was also the matter of Cook's whereabouts on the night of the murder. A 
friend of Taylor's, a hairdresser named Robert Hoehn, told the police that he 
had spent the evening with Cook and that the 2 had engaged in sex at Taylor's 
apartment while watching The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, an art 
movie that featured a cat mutilation scene. Afterward, Hoehn had taken Cook to 
get cigarettes and dropped him back off at the complex at about 12:30 - which 
would have given Cook enough time to kill Edwards before her roommate came 
home.

In addition, Edwards's roommate was increasingly unsure that the man she'd seen 
that night was Mayfield. (In fact, at a September 1977 bond hearing she 
testified that it was definitely not him.) Most troubling of all for law 
enforcement officials, word came from the jail where Cook was housed that a 
fellow inmate there had heard him confess. Edward Scott Jackson, himself 
charged with murder, told investigators and A.D. Clark III, the district 
attorney on the case (no relation to the detective), that Cook had told him 
he'd killed Edwards.

The details added up to a highly disturbing picture, which prosecutors 
presented at Cook's trial, in June 1978. Representing the state, Michael 
Thompson, aided by Thomas Dunn and Randy Gilbert, explained their theory: the 
sexually frustrated Cook, who had been aroused by the mutilation scene in the 
movie, had entered Edwards's apartment and raped, killed, and mutilated her, 
cutting out body parts and stuffing them into her stocking, which he took with 
him. The theory was supported by a parade of witnesses, including the jailhouse 
informant, who testified that Cook had confessed to cutting the victim "in 
between her legs in a V shape." Hoehn testified that Cook had been unable to 
perform sexually that night; a fingerprint expert testified that he had been 
able to date Cook's print to within 6 to 12 hours of the murder; and 
Edwards???s roommate, despite not recognizing Cook at a pretrial hearing, 
pointed at him from the witness stand.

Cook's parents had hired two lawyers, John Ament and LeRue Dixon III, whom they 
paid $500 to defend their son. Though the attorneys did their best to cast 
doubt on the state's theory, their efforts were undermined by the crime-scene 
photos, which prosecutors insisted on showing the jury. ("After they put those 
66 slides on the wall," Ament would later recall, "school was out. The rest was 
an exercise in futility.") The lawyers did not have the money to hire their own 
experts, nor could they compete with Thompson's dramatic flair. "He was tall 
and gaunt and spoke with a dry, crackling voice," said David Barron, who 
covered the case for the Courier-Times and the Tyler Morning Telegraph. "He 
looked like Ichabod Crane." Confidently roaming the courtroom, Thompson called 
Cook a "little pervert" time and again, referring to his "lust for blood and 
perversion." He even speculated that Cook had eaten Edwards's body parts. When 
the jury announced its guilty verdict, Cook hung his head, placed his hands 
over his eyes, and wept. At the punishment phase, the state called psychologist 
Landrum, who testified that Cook was a "severe" psychopath and a deviant 
pansexual. A psychiatrist declared him an "extremely severe" threat to others. 
He was sentenced to death.

Before being taken away, Cook spoke to the Courier-Times, claiming that he was 
innocent and had been framed. "One day I'll prove I didn't do it," he swore. 
"If it takes me 10 years or 20 years, I'll prove I didn't do it."

Just 2 months later, Jackson, the jailhouse informant, recanted his testimony. 
The career criminal had been released from prison, and on September 12, he gave 
an interview to a reporter from the Dallas Morning News. His murder charge had 
been reduced to involuntary manslaughter, said Jackson, after he made a deal 
with prosecutors to testify against Cook; he'd been released 8 days later. But, 
he continued, Cook had never actually talked to him about the murder. Rather, 
it was law enforcement officials who had, showing him crime-scene photos and 
asking questions loaded with details. The Morning News reporter, a man named 
Donnis Baggett, began digging into the story. "I was doing a lot of criminal 
justice stories out of that area," Baggett later recalled, "and there were 
already a lot of questions about the Cook case."

And not just Cook's. "There was suspicion about the way cases were being 
handled in Smith County," Baggett continued. The county's aggressive 
prosecutors and conservative juries were known for handing out harsh sentences. 
"The DA's office was modeled on the Henry Wade theory of prosecution," recalled 
longtime Tyler lawyer Bobby Mims, referring to the legendary law-and-order 
Dallas prosecutor from the 60s. "If an officer brought a case, the DA was going 
to prosecute, unless there was a plea. You won and let the appellate courts 
sort it out." Tyler also had serious problems with some of its police officers. 
In the year after Cook's trial, 2 undercover agents with the Tyler Police 
Department began doctoring reports and planting drugs on local residents, 
staging the biggest drug bust in East Texas history. (The resulting scandal led 
to the indictment of the 2 agents; 1 of them, Kim Wozencraft, later wrote the 
novel Rush about her experience.)

It took Baggett 9 months to check out the informant's claims to his 
satisfaction and put together an in-depth story about Cook's case. "Ex-inmate 
says his lie put man on death row," read the explosive Dallas Morning News 
front page on June 15, 1979. In the story, district attorney Clark denied any 
deal and blamed prosecutor Thompson, who could not speak for himself because he 
had committed suicide the previous October (friends and family insisted it had 
nothing to do with Cook's case). The same day that Baggett's story ran, the 
Longview Daily News featured an article on Cook that questioned his alleged 
propensity for violence. A reporter had looked into the doctors' reports at 
Rusk; yes, Cook could be hell on cars and windows, but he wasn't violent with 
people.

In response, a lawyer in Longview named Harry R. Heard offered to help Cook 
appeal his conviction. His offer brought some relief to the inmate, who by this 
time had become an easy mark in prison; he would later report that within days 
of arriving on death row in Huntsville he'd been thrown against a wall and 
raped by 3 inmates, one of whom carved the word "pussy" into his buttocks with 
a makeshift knife, rubbing in dirt to create a tattoo. Cook became a "punk," 
forced to service other inmates, and was made to shave his legs and wear makeup 
made with Kool-Aid powder.

Cook refused to tell on anyone - snitches got stitches - and turned to writing 
as he waited on his appeal. On a blue Royal typewriter he bought with money 
from a sympathetic minister, he composed letters declaring his innocence, 
sending them to 60 Minutes, 20/20, and Geraldo. When a guard gave him a pocket 
dictionary, the high school dropout read it to build his vocabulary. As months 
turned to years, he also checked out law books, learning enough to help other 
inmates with their writs. It was a way to fight against the gloom and abuse, 
though sometimes, overwhelmed, he would cut himself with a razor on different 
parts of his body, just to feel something besides desperation - or to get 
himself moved to the infirmary or another cell.

It would take almost a decade for the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) to 
finally rule on his case, in December 1987: his conviction stood. 2 1/2 weeks 
later, Cook received news from his father that his brother had been shot to 
death outside a Longview pool hall. It was more than Cook could bear. After a 
particularly brutal rape, Cook tried to kill himself with a homemade razor.

He was taken to the Ellis II psychiatric ward, also in Huntsville, and got a 
new attorney, Scott Howe. He also got an execution date: July 8, 1988. Howe 
filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted Cook a stay and sent 
the case back to the CCA. But the lower court once again approved the 
execution. After another rape and a humiliating strip search in front of fellow 
inmates, Cook set out to kill himself once more. After writing a note - "I 
really was an innocent man," it read - he cut his arm, leg, and throat, then 
sliced his penis, almost severing it.

He was saved by doctors, who reattached his penis. And in September 1991, for 
the 1st time in his life, Cook got the better of Smith County when the CCA, in 
a rare move, reversed course, throwing out his conviction and sentence on a 
technicality: the psychiatrist who had interviewed Cook and testified that he 
was an "extremely severe" threat to others had never read him his rights. Howe 
felt confident Cook's exoneration was inevitable, telling a reporter, "Every 
piece of evidence that the prosecution used to convict Kerry of this crime can 
be undermined, proven to be false, or explained."

One of the letters Cook sent out during his time on death row was a 61-page 
handwritten plea to Jim McCloskey, the founder of a nonprofit known as 
Centurion Ministries. The organization, based in New Jersey, was devoted to 
freeing the wrongly convicted and had already helped exonerate nine inmates, 
including Texas prisoner Clarence Brandley. McCloskey, a burly former divinity 
student, had been struck by the length and tone of the letter, in which Cook 
laid out his case and the details of his life - the drugs and alcohol, the 
foolish teenage escapades, his strained relationship with his parents. He'd 
done a lot of stupid things, Cook swore, but he hadn't killed Edwards. "He was 
very open and honest about his personal history," said McCloskey. "It was so 
earnest."

McCloskey decided to visit Tyler in August 1990. He had read the trial 
transcripts, but he'd also learned many details of Cook's ordeal from a series 
of articles in the Dallas Morning News by David Hanners, a reporter who had 
looked into why the CCA had taken more than 8 years to rule on Cook's case, 
longer than any other death row appeal in American history. The more Hanners 
investigated, the more skeptical he'd become of Cook's guilt. In his 1st 
article, in February 1988, he'd poked holes in the state's entire case, noting 
everything from dubious police work and forensics to "overzealous" prosecution.

Hanners discovered that investigators had never sent Edwards's clothing to a 
lab for testing. They had also failed to find one of the murder weapons, a 
bloody 14-inch knife. (It was discovered in a closet a few feet from Edwards's 
body 5 days after the murder, by the father of Paula Rudolph, Edwards's 
roommate). Hanners spoke with an FBI expert who said there was "no way" a 
fingerprint could be aged, and the journalist saved particular skepticism for 
how Rudolph's identification of the man she'd seen changed over time. In other 
stories, the reporter highlighted the problematic nature of Landrum's 
involvement. The psychologist, it turned out, had worked at Rusk and examined 
Cook as a teen in 1973 and 1976. His findings back then: Cook was "without 
psychosis." His prognosis: "Good." Yet when Landrum testified in 1978, wrote 
Hanners, he'd said that Cook was "a sociopathic, drug-abusing sexual deviate 
who couldn't be rehabilitated."

The articles, the transcripts, and Cook's own words filled McCloskey with 
questions. As he drove the pleasant streets of Tyler, past the extravagant 
displays of roses, he focused on 1 enigma in particular: Why had police so 
quickly abandoned Mayfield as a suspect? The description of the mysterious man 
had seemingly matched him best; Mayfield's relationship with Edwards, whom he'd 
met working at the library, had been torrid. Just a month before the murder, 
Mayfield had left his wife for the younger woman, moving into an apartment with 
her, also in the Embarcadero. But when he returned to his wife just 4 days 
later, Edwards attempted suicide, creating a campus-wide scandal that led to 
Mayfield's dismissal from his job.

The police had never searched Mayfield's 7 cars, his home, or the apartment he 
kept with Edwards, even though a new tenant hadn't moved in. They also had 
never questioned Elfriede and didn't interview anyone on Mayfield's staff at 
the library. When the police asked for polygraphs for Mayfield and his 
daughter, the request had been blocked by Mayfield's lawyer, Buck Files, who 
told investigators that his client had passed a private polygraph. And the 
police had appeared to ignore other promising leads, such as one from a friend 
and colleague of Mayfield's, psychology professor Frederick Mears, an expert in 
polygraphs who called the police department a few days after the murder. As 
Mears would later testify, he told an officer that Mayfield had asked for 
"assistance in taking a polygraph test" but the police had never followed up. 
(Mayfield insisted in a deposition that he had asked only "how a polygraph 
worked.")

McCloskey set out to do what the police had not: he began interviewing 
Mayfield's friends, neighbors, relatives, and colleagues 1-on-1. He was 
astonished by what he learned. "I kept hearing, 'It's about time somebody asked 
me these questions,'" McCloskey said. He spoke with more than 50 people, some 
of whom gave him affidavits. Mayfield was known to be carrying on at least 1 
other affair in addition to his relationship with Edwards, and, according to 
one acquaintance, he had a "terrible temper." Another person asserted that 
Mayfield was a "vindictive person." A 3rd stated, "We at the library were all 
afraid after the murder because we suspected Mayfield of killing Linda." 
(Mayfield would later contest this unpleasant portrait, testifying that 
"Centurion Ministries came up with a lot of stuff [that] was not true.")

McCloskey also learned that Edwards, according to a library secretary, "totally 
worshipped" Mayfield and was possibly stalking him. Another co-worker said 
that, during the short period after Mayfield returned to his wife, Edwards had 
declared 2 or 3 times, "I am going to get him back, no matter what." McCloskey 
found witnesses who said that, after losing his job, Mayfield had planned to 
move to Houston and was worried Edwards would follow him. The day of her murder 
she had surprised him in person 3 times - including in the evening at his home, 
where she spoke with both Mayfield and his wife just hours before she was 
killed.

In a chilling twist, psychology professor Mears told McCloskey - as he'd told 
police in 1977 - about a disturbing book he'd found in the library called The 
Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytic Study, which contained graphic photos of 
female victims of brutal mutilation murders. Mears swore in an affidavit that 
"I learned from the staff in the library that this book had been ordered 
personally by James Mayfield." What struck McCloskey was that the vicious 
injuries suffered by several victims in the photos - to the neck, back, and 
mouth - were akin to those inflicted on Edwards. One of the victims had had her 
vagina "dissected"; another had been left to lie in a position similar to 
Edwards's. Mayfield denied ordering the book, and would later assert in court 
that he had never even seen it. But McCloskey couldn't help wondering. Had 
Mayfield used the book as a primer?

McCloskey was uncovering so many new facts that he decided to write a report, 
which he gave a no-nonsense title: "Why Centurion Ministries Believes James 
Mayfield Killed Linda Jo Edwards." With Cook's retrial looming, McCloskey 
persuaded Paul Nugent, a young, scrappy lawyer in Houston who had helped 
exonerate Clarence Brandley, to take the case. Nugent would face off against 
Smith County's current district attorney, a former municipal judge named Jack 
Skeen who also happened to be a cousin of A.D. Clark III's, the DA who had 
overseen the 1st trial. Skeen had come into office in 1983 promising to clean 
up the mess from the drug-bust scandal and to be tough on criminals. "Jack 
Skeen was tenacious," recalled Robert Perkins, who worked under him. "He was 
never afraid to try difficult cases, and because this murder was such a 
high-profile and vicious one, it was not one he'd let go of."

The case would be mostly handled by Skeen's top assistant, David Dobbs, a smart 
and personable lawyer who had been in high school when Edwards was murdered. 
Before Nugent signed on, Dobbs met with McCloskey and assured him that the 
prosecutorial issues in Cook's case were in the past; if he and Skeen felt that 
Cook hadn't committed the murder, they'd dismiss the charges. McCloskey liked 
the fresh-faced lawyer and was so encouraged that he gave Dobbs a copy of his 
report. Dobbs reciprocated by sharing valuable documents, such as police 
statements and transcripts of grand jury testimony in 1977 that had never been 
shown to Cook's defense lawyers before being sealed by the trial judge.

McCloskey focused on 1 enigma in particular. Why had police so quickly 
abandoned Mayfield as a suspect?

Reading through the material, Nugent and McCloskey were amazed. Taylor's 2 
nephews and Hoehn had testified to the grand jury that, a few days before the 
murder, Cook had shown them hickies on his neck, saying he'd gotten them from a 
woman he'd met at the pool; she invited him to her apartment, he'd said, where 
they'd necked on the couch. One of the boys testified that Cook had said her 
name was Linda or Limma, and Hoehn said that she was the same woman in whose 
window he'd peeped. Hoehn had also told the grand jury that Cook "wasn't paying 
any attention" to the movie on TV.

The documents not only gave a plausible explanation for how Cook's fingerprint 
had gotten on the patio door, they undercut the prosecution's theory of a 
crazed stranger butchering a pretty woman in an unfulfilled gay frenzy inspired 
by an art film. The only problem: Cook had always insisted he'd never been in 
the apartment. At McCloskey's next visit, the inmate confessed that he had lied 
about how the fingerprint got on the patio door. He had, in fact, met Edwards 
at the pool 3 days before her murder, he said, and she had invited him to her 
apartment, where the 2 shared iced tea and kissed on the couch. After Cook was 
arrested, his father had made him promise to never reveal this because the 
police would surely nail him for the murder.

The explanation struck McCloskey and Nugent as plausible. Dobbs, however, was 
skeptical. He had already interviewed Mayfield and found him an unlikely 
butcher. "He didn't seem like a killer," he said. "He loved her. He'd cry when 
he talked about her." Dobbs found it hard to believe that Edwards would have 
been interested in a weirdo like Cook; besides, she was hung up on Mayfield. It 
seemed more likely that Cook had gotten the hickies from a man, and that the 
story about his father was a lie. Why keep quiet about such a possible 
life-saving truth for 15 years?

In fact, according to Dobbs, there was a better explanation. The previous 
investigators and prosecutors had always suspected Cook had an accomplice; the 
damage to Edwards's body was more than 1 person could have reasonably done in 
15 minutes. That accomplice, the first prosecutors figured, was Hoehn, whose 
short blond hair could have appeared silver from a distance. But they "didn't 
have anything to put a handle on that we could prosecute," as assistant DA Dunn 
told the Dallas Morning News in 1988, so they'd given Hoehn immunity and asked 
him to testify. The prosecutors told Dobbs (and later a grand jury) that, 
during Cook's trial, the defense had proposed a deal: drop the death penalty 
and Cook would testify against Hoehn, the actual killer, in whose yard 
Edwards's body parts were buried. When the police didn't find anything in the 
yard, the discussion had ended. (Ament admits there was a discussion but 
insists that he and Dixon were merely feeling out the prosecution on a deal to 
avoid the death penalty. "Kerry never confessed, I guarantee you that.")

Dobbs shared Smith County's theory with McCloskey one evening while the 2 were 
standing in Edwards's vacant apartment, where they had gone together to try and 
figure out what the roommate had seen. According to McCloskey, Dobbs said, "It 
wasn't Kerry that Paula saw. It was Robert Hoehn. I think Kerry was in the 
closet dropping the knife." McCloskey was baffled. Though he was glad to be 
collaborating with Dobbs, he found the hypothesis strange; after all, there was 
no physical evidence to connect the mild-mannered hairdresser to the crime.

McCloskey grew even more wary of Dobbs a few months later, when Cook was 
bench-warranted back to Smith County in advance of the retrial. Unannounced, 
the prosecutor showed up at the county jail to introduce himself without Nugent 
present, a potential violation of state bar rules. According to Cook, who 
called journalist Hanners afterward, Dobbs asked about the fingerprint - the 
only evidence connecting Cook to the case - and suggested a polygraph. Dobbs 
denied this. "I understand ethics and I didn't violate any ethics," he told 
Hanners for a story that ran 3 days later.

For McCloskey, the maneuver was an omen of sorts: it indicated just how hard, 
and possibly how dirty, Dobbs was willing to play in order to win. (The trial 
judge later called the meeting "improper" and a "breach of duty and protocol" 
but said it did not rise to the level of prosecutorial misconduct.) Hanners's 
stories - the journalist would eventually write more than 50, repeatedly 
questioning the validity of the conviction and the integrity of Smith County 
law enforcement - were only raising the stakes. The desire to prosecute Cook in 
the face of so many questions, thought McCloskey, was a matter of stubbornness. 
Only pride could explain why Dobbs and Skeen were taking Cook to trial again, 
15 years after the murder.

For Dobbs it was much simpler. Cook was guilty, and he was going to send him 
back to death row, where he belonged.

The 2nd trial opened in November 1992 at the Williamson County courthouse, 200 
miles away, in Georgetown, where the case had been moved because of its 
notoriety in Tyler. As Cook entered the courtroom with Nugent and McCloskey, 
his hair already graying at age 36, he felt hopeful. But his team was 
frustrated almost at the outset, when the judge announced a series of decisions 
in the state's favor, including that he would not allow any witnesses to 
testify about Cook's conversations with them in 1977 regarding the hickies from 
Edwards in her apartment. (The judge determined it to be rank hearsay.)

Taking advantage of the ruling, Dobbs and Skeen insisted that Cook was a total 
stranger to Edwards, with only one reason to be in the apartment: to kill and 
mutilate her, inspired by the movie scene. The state called familiar witnesses 
- Edwards's roommate identified Cook from the stand once again - as well as a 
new one: former reserve deputy Robert Wickham, who testified that, during jury 
selection for the 1st trial, he had taken Cook in the courthouse elevator from 
the basement to the 2nd floor. In those 17 seconds, Wickham testified, the 2 
had had a conversation, and the inmate confided, "I killed her and I don't give 
a shit what they do to me." Wickham had never told his superiors because, "I 
thought it was just going to be his word against my word."

Exasperated, Nugent tried to undercut Wickham's credibility and highlight the 
incompetence of the investigation, from the failure to test Edwards's clothes 
to the dubious science of fingerprint dating. He focused on Mayfield and his 
daughter as likelier suspects. One police report, originally hidden from the 
defense, revealed especially bizarre behavior from Luella. In addition to 
making death threats against Edwards, she had dressed up in her cadet uniform 
from Police Explorers, a youth organization, and visited the Embarcadero. While 
there, she had pretended to be a cop investigating Edwards's murder - she told 
residents the crime somehow involved Mayfield - 2 weeks before the actual 
murder. (On the stand, Luella said she had no memory of the incident.)

At closing arguments, both Dobbs and Skeen spoke at length about the nylon 
stocking; in one scene in the film, a boy caressed one, and, of course, Edwards 
was missing one. This stocking, they emphasized, was key to understanding 
Cook's perversion. "It does not make any sense," urged Dobbs, "unless you take 
a look at the facts of this case and see what is missing from Linda Jo 
Edwards's mutilated body. Interesting, isn't it?"

Even more interesting was when jurors, deliberating in the jury room, asked to 
examine the evidence and broke open an evidence bag. When they unfurled 
Edwards's jeans, out fell a stocking - the very 1 that 2 sets of prosecutors 
had long insisted Cook used to carry away body parts. "If I were Smith County," 
McCloskey told the Morning News the next day, "if I were Tyler police, I'd be 
absolutely humiliated."

After 5 days of deliberating, with the jury deadlocked 6 to 6, the judge 
declared a mistrial. Again, Cook wept. He had finally beaten back Smith County 
- if only to a draw. Almost immediately, Skeen and Dobbs announced they would 
prosecute him again. Cook, meanwhile, told a reporter he'd keep fighting: "I 
will never give up until I'm vindicated."

He was found guilty again fourteen months later. The 3rd trial, also in 
Georgetown, largely mirrored the previous one, though now, because of modern 
technology, experts had identified 5 fingerprints belonging to Cook on the 
patio door. Once again, Cook's lawyers were not allowed to bring in any 
testimony about Cook's being inside the apartment. During the punishment phase, 
Dobbs pushed to send him back to death row, portraying Cook as a teenage 
predator who had grown more depraved on death row. Skeptical of Cook's claims 
of prison rape, Dobbs suggested in his questions to defense experts that the 
inmate had voluntarily had the "pussy" tattoo inscribed and that his gay 
dalliances before prison made his supposed assaults less traumatic.

Dobbs also showed a graphic prison video of Cook's last suicide attempt, a 
fifty-minute recording that depicted Cook naked on the blood-soaked floor. 
Cook's self-mutilations, declared Dobbs, were a sign he was a danger to society 
- a claim supported by Landrum, who took the stand once more to testify that 
there were studies, including one out of Rusk, to prove this. "Very violent, 
aggressive people sometimes are suicidal and self-mutilate," said Landrum, 
"especially if there is no other victim available." Though Nugent insisted that 
Cook's actions on death row came from desperation, not deviancy ("Yes, Mr. Cook 
is a danger. He is a danger to himself'), his efforts did no good. Cook was 
handed a 2nd death sentence.

Nugent filed a 213-page appeal, with 55 points of error, summarizing for the 
1st time the misconduct and mistakes in the case. In detail, Nugent described 
the prosecution's ongoing attempts, from 1977 to 1992, not just to try Cook but 
also assassinate his character. "In every step from the grand jury room to the 
Supreme Court," he wrote, "the State has humiliated the appellant with 
accusations of singularly perverse acts of violence, with graphic descriptions 
of homosexual activities thrown in for good measure."

This time, the work paid off. In November 1996 the CCA threw out the verdict, 
decrying the state's role in the case with unusually harsh language, 
proclaiming that "prosecutorial and police misconduct has tainted this entire 
matter from the outset." Though most of the misconduct singled out was from the 
1st trial, the court noted other disquieting behavior from the 2nd and 3rd, 
including Dobbs's visit to Cook at the jail. In a concurring opinion, a judge 
found the misconduct so bad that he thought a fair trial was no longer possible 
and that in his view Smith County should not be allowed to continue prosecuting 
Cook: "The State with all its resources and power should not be allowed to make 
repeated attempts to convict an individual for an alleged offense."

For the 1st time, a judge allowed Cook to post bail, and almost exactly a year 
after the CCA's decision, the inmate walked out of the Smith County jail. His 
father had died of cancer while he was on death row, but he was met by his 
mother, who wept as she hugged her son. Cook looked exhausted - he hadn't slept 
in days - and the 2 held their embrace for an extended period, surrounded by 
reporters, including a film crew from ABC's news program Turning Point. "I'm 
home, Mama," he said.

There was little remaining evidence against Cook - the fingerprints, the 
changing memory of the roommate, the belated words of the reserve deputy - but 
many in Smith County, especially those in law enforcement, still found it 
difficult to believe in his innocence. Cook's proclivities were too aberrant, 
his troubles in prison too disturbing. "Everyone around here thought he was 
guilty," recalled one woman who worked at a law office across the street from 
the courthouse. "They all said really crude and ugly things about Kerry."

A week after Cook's release, a fax showed up in a communal space shared by her 
law office and three other firms. It had been sent by one former assistant DA 
to another, and it contained lyrics to a "Kerry Max Song" to be sung to the 
tune of Steve Miller's "Take the Money and Run." The sender, Lance Larison, had 
created 3 verses ("If we had justice Cook'd be dead today"), a chorus ("Go on, 
cut my penis for fun"), and a caricature of Cook holding a chain saw and 
saying, "Now I'm out, this should make a much smoother cut." The message was 
clear: Cook was a twisted criminal who had gamed the system. "Spent twenty 
years avoiding justice," went one line, "despite the fact the guilt is all 
his." The fax was laid on a couch in the communal area. "Everyone thought it 
was real funny," said the woman. "They talked about the tattoo as if Kerry had 
it put there himself."

This perception of Cook in Smith County was made worse by the fact that he was 
gaining more allies in the outside world. His case had been drawing increased 
national attention, especially after Dobbs and Skeen announced that they 
intended to try him the following September for an unprecedented 4th time. ("We 
wouldn't even consider a plea to life," declared Dobbs.) After his release, 
Cook had moved to Dallas, where he worked as a paralegal and began speaking 
publicly about his case, lecturing to a Texas government class at Brookhaven 
College, in Farmers Branch, and at fund-raisers for Centurion Ministries and 
the Innocence Project. He ventured to Yale, Princeton, and Columbia to deliver 
speeches about his experience, sometimes accompanied by his new girlfriend, 
Sandy Pressey, whom he'd met at an Amnesty International meeting. On their 
first date, they'd gone to see Titanic, and Pressey had held Cook's hand 
through the entire film.

Cook also visited a deep-trauma expert named Rycke Marshall, the former chief 
psychologist at Terrell State Hospital. Cook was the most broken person she had 
ever seen. "He had severe post-traumatic stress disorder," she recalled later. 
"He'd been emasculated by the rapes and was actively suicidal." Marshall was 
shocked by all the times Cook had cut himself, but she was even more shocked by 
the notion advanced at trial that self-mutilation was an act of violence. 
"Self-mutilation is a very primitive behavior designed to alleviate 
overwhelming stress," she said. "The physical pain is a way of trying to focus 
and pull yourself together." Cook's counselor at Ellis II had found him to be 
sincerely suicidal, noting in particular the abuse that the tattoo carved into 
his buttocks invited, and Marshall agreed. Cook, she decided, had severed his 
penis not out of savagery but despair. "He was saying, 'I don't need it 
anymore,'" she said. "It had nothing to do with the murder and everything to do 
with how dehumanized, helpless, and emasculated he felt." (Rusk has no record 
of the self-mutilation study Landrum testified about.)

To prepare for trial once again, Nugent received the help of two new lawyers, 
both funded by Centurion Ministries: Cheryl Wattley and Steven "Rocket" Rosen. 
In February 1999, as the lawyers readied themselves for trial, Wattley received 
a call from Dobbs with remarkable news: a semen stain had been discovered on 
Edwards's underwear, almost 22 years after her murder. Now that DNA testing was 
available (the technology had been developed in the 80s), the DA's office was 
having the stain tested. In a conversation with journalist Hanners, Dobbs 
hailed the discovery, declaring that the semen "could only have been left by 
the killer."

Cook and Mayfield gave blood samples, and Dobbs filed a motion to delay the 
trial to finish the testing. But the defense lawyers, who had lined up eight 
forensic witnesses and figured the DNA results would come in before the end of 
the trial anyway, pushed to keep the original date. Meanwhile, Dobbs proposed 
trying to work out a no-contest plea deal, offering first a forty-year 
sentence, then a deal where the judge could sentence him to less. Cook refused 
both. Finally, on the morning of jury selection, Dobbs offered a 
take-it-or-leave-it bargain: plead no contest to murder, get twenty years, and 
because of time already served, be free - though not exonerated. The judge gave 
Cook 30 minutes to decide. Terrified of losing again in what he felt was a 
rigged fight, Cook accepted the deal.

2 months later, the DNA results came back: the semen belonged to Mayfield. 
Speaking to reporters, Dobbs expressed a new understanding. "It's irrelevant," 
he said, explaining that, according to the lab, it was possible the stain had 
been left weeks before Edwards's death. "Cook has been convicted of the 
murder."

For Cook, however, this was the most powerful proof yet that he'd had nothing 
to do with Edwards's death. Many outside observers agreed. Within a few months, 
the Dallas Observer published a 2-part cover story on his case titled 
"Innocence Lost." The next year, in 2000, the Houston Chronicle printed a 
front-page investigation into the legal workings of Smith County, with quotes 
from lawyers who accused the DA's office of railroading defendants and having a 
"win at all costs" mentality. Cook's case, wrote reporter Evan Moore, was "one 
of the better known examples of prosecutorial misconduct in the nation."

Energized, Cook took his story even farther into the world, delivering speeches 
on capital punishment and overcoming adversity at events in Paris, London, and 
Rome. In Strasbourg he led 5,000 anti-death penalty protesters through the 
streets, holding hands with Bianca Jagger. He and Pressey married, and soon had 
a son, Kerry Justice, whom they called KJ. In 2001 Cook testified before the 
Texas Legislature in favor of a moratorium on the death penalty; his story also 
became part of The Exonerated, a play that was made into a movie in 2005 (he 
was played onstage by Tim Robbins and Richard Dreyfuss, among others; Aidan 
Quinn played him in the film). He was befriended by the likes of Pete 
Townshend, Hilary Swank, and Marisa Tomei. Frontline televised a sympathetic 
story, and photos of Cook - with Susan Sarandon, Morgan Freeman, Robin Williams 
- appeared in the media. Bruce Springsteen gave him a Jack Russell terrier 
puppy. Hillary Clinton asked him to help bring the play to Washington, D.C.

Dobbs and Skeen, meanwhile, grew increasingly incensed with their portrayal as 
unprincipled prosecutors. Cook still had a murder conviction on his record, and 
in their eyes his fame was an affront to the justice system. They sued the 
Houston Chronicle for libel over its story on Smith County, a bitter lawsuit 
that dragged on until 2005, when the state Supreme Court threw it out by 
unanimous vote. Many of those who had sought to have Cook executed had since 
moved into other positions - Skeen was now a district judge, assistant DA Dunn 
was a county judge, and Dobbs had gone into private practice with his wife, a 
lawyer who helped him prosecute Cook in 1992 - and Cook's ongoing celebrity was 
an insult to their careers. The DNA proved that Edwards had had a relationship 
with Mayfield, not that Cook was innocent. As far as they were concerned, Cook 
was not only not exonerated, he was also clearly unstable.

In fact, Cook was showing signs of volatility. He'd begun writing a book about 
his life, consulting with former Tyler undercover cop Kim Wozencraft, but their 
work was often made difficult by his erratic behavior and PTSD. "He would start 
writing, then go off on a rant," she would later recall. "His words seemed 
paranoid, but I realized I don't know how you could even define 'paranoid' for 
Kerry." In 2007, when Chasing Justice finally came out - a detailed account of 
everything from Cook's arrest to his decision to take the no-contest deal - it 
got rave reviews. ("If it were fiction," wrote John Grisham, "no one would 
believe it.") But the reviews and adulation only served to deepen Cook's rage 
over his incarceration. After so many years in despair and isolation, he found 
an outlet on a new platform: Facebook. Posting letters, poems, and songs from 
supporters (one young musician in Dublin wrote him a song titled "Don't Quit"; 
a Danish band came up with an homage called "Kerry Max Cook"), he also wrote 
frequently, in pitched tones, about being wronged. His case, he wrote, "is 
known as the worst documented example of prosecutorial misconduct in Texas 
history."

Though he was traveling the world, from Ireland to Dubai, and delivering 
speeches about never giving up - youth groups frequently gave him standing 
ovations - in Texas, Cook was still a killer. With the murder conviction on his 
record, Cook had trouble finding a job or signing a lease. Several times he had 
to move his family after neighbors in Dallas found out about his past (1 woman 
threatened to plaster the neighborhood with signs saying "Convicted Murderer 
Lives Here"). He had been acquitted in the eyes of the public, but that was not 
enough. What Cook really wanted was to be exonerated in the eyes of the law.

I first met Cook in 2012, when I was working on a story for Texas Monthly and 
the New York Times. I spent a day with him in his North Dallas neighborhood, 
following along when he went to pick up KJ, then 11 years old, from school. 
When we arrived at the campus, classes had just let out, and several kids 
squealed and ran toward Cook when they saw him. One little girl squirmed away 
from her mother. "Mr. Kerry!" she yelled, laughing, and then jumped into his 
arms. "Haleigh!" he responded, tickling her. When I asked the school's director 
about Cook, she said, "We know him. We know what kind of man he is."

Cook was fast-talking and neurotic, returning again and again to the same 
subject: his wrongful conviction. He still suffered from PTSD and depression, 
he told me, and repeated himself with the same well-worn phrases, often hyping 
his case as the worst of all time. But he was also sweet, funny, and charming, 
often looking to Pressey for help finishing his sentences. He was excited 
because his case had come to the attention of the Innocence Project, a national 
nonprofit that had, with the help of DNA testing, successfully secured the 
exonerations of more than three hundred people. In February, Gary Udashen, from 
the Innocence Project of Texas, had filed a motion for DNA testing on the other 
crime scene evidence in Cook's case, including the bloody knife and a bloody 
hair found on Edwards's body that investigators had long ago determined 
belonged to neither her nor Cook.

If the testing showed no evidence of Cook's presence at the crime scene, and if 
someone's else's DNA showed up in the hair, Udashen believed there was a chance 
the courts might finally exonerate him. The idea made Cook practically giddy, 
and he compared his plight to that of 2 other men who had recently been 
exonerated after wrongful murder convictions: Anthony Graves, released in 2010, 
and Michael Morton, released in 2011. The prosecutors in both cases were facing 
disciplinary action - Graves's prosecutor would be disbarred in 2015, and 
Morton's prosecutor would serve jail time in 2013 - and Cook was beginning to 
feel hopeful that he might get similar justice.

But when the DNA motion was approved, and officials began looking for crime 
scene evidence, they discovered that law enforcement had destroyed the hair in 
December 2001. It was a huge blow, but not a fatal one, as the other results 
revealed exactly what Udashen had hoped: none of Cook's DNA could be found on 
anything. The DNA on Edwards's underwear was still conclusively Mayfield's.

Udashen and Nina Morrison, a lawyer with the Innocence Project, filed a writ of 
habeas corpus in September 2015, asking for Cook's conviction to be thrown out 
based on the DNA evidence. The lawyers also claimed that Dobbs and Skeen had 
known in advance the results of the 1999 DNA testing and that they'd had 
something to do with destroying the hair - only 8 months after Texas had passed 
a new law granting post-conviction DNA testing and barring the destruction of 
biological evidence without notifying the defendant. (The state denied any 
foreknowledge or that there was any misconduct, noting that by December 2001 
Cook hadn't filed any challenge to his conviction and thus "34 months after his 
conviction, the State disposed of some of the evidence from the prosecution in 
the ordinary course of business.") After filing another motion to recuse the 
judge who would oversee the writ (the judge's late husband was the lawyer who'd 
received the fax of the "Kerry Max Song"), Cook's lawyers filed an additional 
one, this time asking the DA's office to provide any exculpatory evidence it 
hadn't before.

The Smith County DA by this time was Matt Bingham, a law-and-order prosecutor 
who had served as assistant district attorney under both Skeen and Dobbs. 
Bingham, elected in 2004, had never worked on Cook's case, and he invited 
Udashen and his law partner Bruce Anton to look through the entire case file of 
49 boxes. The 2 discovered evidence that Cook's earlier defense lawyers said 
they had never seen, including a 1991 police report stating that Edward's 
roommate had told prosecutor Thompson that it was Mayfield, not Cook, she had 
seen in the room. (The state insisted the detective had made a mistake and 
transposed the names, a fact the detective himself affirmed in a later 
affidavit. As to why the defense never saw the original report, Dobbs insisted 
he shared it with Rosen in 1999.) Wanting to question Mayfield, Udashen and 
Morrison pestered Bingham. To their surprise, the DA, who had never spoken with 
Mayfield either, suggested they go see him together.

In April 2016, Udashen, Bingham, and several other lawyers traveled to see 
Mayfield, whom Bingham had offered immunity from prosecution, at his home in 
Houston. Mayfield and Elfriede, who had baked cookies for the occasion, 
welcomed them in their living room. The former library director, aging and hard 
of hearing, repeated many of the things he had said in the past, but then he 
made a couple of astonishing admissions. First, he said, contrary to his 
previous denial, he had seen the book The Sexual Criminal before Edwards's 
murder, and he and Mears had discussed it. More important, he confessed that he 
and Edwards had had a sexual rendezvous on the day before her death. This was 
in direct contradiction to what Mayfield had long maintained - that his affair 
with Edwards was over 3 weeks earlier - and suddenly made him a more viable 
suspect. Armed with the newly discovered police report, Cook's lawyers could 
credibly allege that Mayfield had had both the motive and opportunity to kill 
Edwards: he'd lost almost everything after their affair was revealed, he'd been 
the last person seen with her, and his DNA had been found on her clothing.

Cook, who by this time had moved his family to New Jersey, could barely contain 
his excitement at the revelation. The Smith County judge who had been set to 
rule on the writ recused herself, and the new one - Jack Carter, of Texarkana - 
soon scheduled a hearing to look into Cook's claims. Cook would finally get to 
testify and tell his story, and his lawyers would at last get to question, 
under oath, the men who had sent him away. "This is the story of my own 
Tiananmen Square against an army of Smith County tanks," he emailed me.

Udashen, meanwhile, knew that the battle ahead was not so clear-cut. A veteran 
of 12 exonerations, he recognized that a complex case like Cook's was resolved 
only after considerable give-and-take with the state. He cautioned Cook to 
focus on his exoneration, not on his quest to punish the prosecutors. First, 
Cook needed to be found actually innocent; then he could seek for a court of 
inquiry or the state bar to look into the conduct of his adversaries. Cook 
complained heatedly - how could he possibly let Smith County off the hook? - 
but eventually relented, signing an agreement in which he stated that his goal 
was exoneration and nothing else, including "conducting a public hearing." He 
also agreed to stop posting his abusive opinions of Smith County on Facebook. 
Udashen had already been talking to Bingham about working toward a deal. In 
addition, he reached out to Dobbs, who, over the next few months, helped lay 
the groundwork for various plea offerings from the DA's office, all of which 
Cook turned down. (Udashen, knowing Cook's feelings toward Dobbs, downplayed 
his role.) Dobbs insisted to Udashen that he had never known about the DNA 
results in advance and that he was looking forward to testifying. ("Clearing 
things up would be a blessing," he said.) On June 5, 2016, the day before the 
hearing, Bingham, Dobbs, and Udashen met at a Mexican restaurant in Tyler, 
where Bingham made his best offer yet: the state would agree to set aside the 
conviction based on the new evidence of Mayfield's lie about his final 
encounter with Edwards, but only if the defense agreed to throw out its other 
claims, including those alleging prosecutorial misconduct. Both sides would 
leave for the judge the final claim of actual innocence. There would be no 
testimony from Cook, Dobbs, Skeen, or Mayfield.

Udashen and Morrison were ecstatic. Here, at last, Cook's exoneration was 
within reach; it would become official as soon as the CCA ratified the deal. 
But when they informed Cook of the arrangement a few hours later, their client 
was furious - especially once he learned that Dobbs and Skeen would not be 
required to testify. Cook grew so agitated he threatened to go home to New 
Jersey. In his mind, the Smith County DA's office had won over and over for 39 
years, and now it was winning again.

No, insisted Udashen and Morrison, he had won. It was exactly what Cook had 
yearned for: exoneration. They would still have to fight for actual innocence, 
but he was truly free - no more murder conviction. To turn the deal down, 
Udashen cautioned, was crazy. It would be the biggest mistake of Cook's life.

Finally, Cook relaxed. He agreed to the deal, and the following morning, after 
the hearing wrapped, he seemed to have fully come around. He even managed to 
crack a few jokes at the lunch afterward. McCloskey, who declared the day one 
of the best in his 36 years of innocence work, grabbed his old friend by the 
shoulders. "This is a great accomplishment," he said. "Yes, Dobbs and Skeen 
skated, but you've got to give something to get something." Cook looked at 
Udashen across the large restaurant table and said, so that everyone could 
hear, "Gary, thank you for not listening to me last night."

The following day, Cook posted the words he'd long waited to say. "I'm free," 
he wrote. "I'm free at last."

Exonerations are deeply compelling. When someone we thought guilty is found to 
be, in fact, innocent, we seek for ways to make things right - with admiring 
headlines, with soul-searching articles, with compensation. In this rush to 
make amends, there is also an expectation. Though we can barely fathom the 
suffering of someone who has endured such injustice, we look to find in him 
signs of resilience and magnanimity, of the strength of the human spirit. We 
want exonerees to be like the Tim Robbins character in The Shawshank 
Redemption: a model of righteousness, an exemplary man whose calm demeanor and 
determination underscores just how badly he was wronged, and how right it is 
for him to go free.

The reality, of course, is much darker. An exoneree has brutal memories to 
recover from, both physical and psychological, and faces the devastating burden 
of making sense of his lost years, his ruined relationships, his powerlessness, 
and his anger. There are a few who are able to navigate this challenge, whose 
names we remember as a result. Michael Morton spent 25 years in prison, yet in 
public he speaks of forgiveness for his tormentors. Anthony Graves languished 
behind bars for almost 2 decades, yet he spent a portion of his compensation 
money to set up the Anthony Graves Foundation, which looks into innocence 
claims from other inmates. Both men were able not only to accept the terms of 
their release but also to control their demons.

Cook could do neither. The morning after the hearing, he began to fret again, 
increasingly certain that his lawyers had colluded with Bingham to protect 
Skeen and Dobbs, who Cook felt was still pulling the strings behind his 
persecution. Though his friends argued to the contrary - you won, they insisted 
- he would hear none of it. A day later, he sent an email to his lawyers, which 
he then posted on Facebook. He'd been humiliated, he wrote, by Udashen's praise 
for Bingham and the DA's office. He could no longer trust Udashen or Morrison, 
and they were both fired. He continued ranting in subsequent Facebook posts: 
Udashen and Morrison had not been prepared, he claimed, and had coerced him 
into the agreement.

Cook had refrained from posting about his case for a month, and now he couldn't 
stop, as if a dam had broken, and 39 years of hurt and rage were pouring out. 
"Again, the Texas legal system has let me down," he wrote, "leaving me broke 
and penniless on the goal line of 'Actual Innocence,' unrepresented by counsel 
because I stood up to the system again." He was grandiose 1 minute, quoting 
Franklin D. Roosevelt ("Far greater is it to dare mighty things . . . "), and 
self-pitying the next ("Please, please help me someone, anywhere. Please. I 
cannot give up. I can't. Please").

5 days after his exoneration, Cook posted the craziest thing of all: he needed 
an attorney to throw out the agreement and give him back his wrongful 
conviction. "I'd rather be convicted again than live with this lie," he wrote. 
His friends thought he'd lost his mind, or at least his grasp of reality. "His 
obsessive contempt for Skeen and Dobbs has clouded his mind," McCloskey told 
me. "I think they did him wrong, no question. But to get the DA's office to 
toss the conviction was a major accomplishment."

In fact, Cook was running the risk of putting his actual innocence - and his 
compensation - in jeopardy. Firing his lawyers and then haranguing Bingham and 
Smith County made him appear ungrateful and unhinged in a way that could 
displease the judge. It had certainly dashed all possibility of any further 
deal with Bingham. On June 15, Cook posted that he had come to his senses. "I 
do not wish to withdraw the Agreement," he wrote. "I was upset, felt betrayed." 
He apologized to Udashen and Morrison and asked them to take him back. But the 
lawyers declined, explaining that Cook's actions had destroyed their 
credibility as effective advocates.

The actual innocence hearing took place on July 1. Cook, who had worn black to 
every public event since being freed in 1997, showed up at the Tyler courthouse 
wearing a light-blue shirt with a tie and a blue jacket. By this time Kim 
Kardashian had tweeted about his case to her 46 million followers ("You should 
google Kerry Max Cook his story is fascinating and heartbreaking"), and Cook 
had found a new lawyer, Mark Bennett, from Houston. Bennett, who'd had a mere 
12 days to learn the details of a 39-year case, faced a difficult task: to show 
that the new evidence was "clear and convincing" enough that, had a reasonable 
juror known of it back in 1994, he or she would not have found Cook guilty.

Bennett attempted to frame the argument around why Mayfield was the better 
suspect, but the lawyer representing the state, M. Keith Dollahite, was quick 
to point out that Mayfield's admission was not enough to prove that he'd killed 
Edwards. Nor did the DNA evidence place Mayfield at the crime scene. Instead, 
Dollahite pointed out, other details were more resonant: that Cook was a 
convicted felon, that he had spent time at Rusk, that his self-mutilations on 
death row were evidence of his potential violence. Cook, said Dollahite, 
trotting out the decades-old arguments, had behaved in keeping with Landrum's 
testimony that "very violent aggressive people often are suicidal and 
self-mutilating, especially when no victims are available."

Cook leaned forward, holding his head as if he had a splitting headache. On 
some level, he'd known the state would bring up the same material. And on some 
level, he knew that Carter would rule against him - which he did, on July 25. 
"It is this court's conclusion that a reasonable jury would not necessarily 
acquit Cook after hearing both new exculpatory evidence and the previous 
evidence of guilt." Smith County had won again.

Why did Smith County prosecute Cook in the first place - and then 3 times more? 
I asked Dobbs this question on a warm afternoon last October. We were sitting 
on the outdoor patio at Stanley's Barbecue, in Tyler, pausing between bites of 
brisket and sausage. Stirring his iced tea, the lawyer looked up. "He was 
guilty," he said. Dobbs has lively green eyes, graying hair, and a genial 
manner, and though he is wary of reporters, he'd agreed to meet to set the 
record straight. "The most amazing thing to me is how many people he's 
hoodwinked on his path to celebrity. He's pulled off the biggest fraud of all."

Dobbs still believed that Hoehn was likely involved. Back in 1992, he'd asked 
Hoehn's lawyer if the prosecution was on the wrong path, and, "He said 1 word: 
'No.'" Dobbs pulled out several documents for me to see, including a 2012 
affidavit in which the lawyer stated that Hoehn had told him in 1977 that he 
and Cook sneaked into Edwards's apartment, where Cook hit her over the head and 
cut her up - and were then surprised by the roommate.

As for motive, "Who knows?" said Dobbs in his East Texas drawl. ":I've 
prosecuted around 20 capital murder cases. You don't always know. They'd just 
had sex, Cook was talking about watching Edwards undress. Was Hoehn jealous of 
his attention to her? I don't know. Cook showed Hoehn where she lived. They'd 
been drinking. She wound up dead, and Cook's fingerprint was found - something 
he lied about for 15 years." To Dobbs, that lie was part of Cook's pathology as 
a predator, hustler, and celebrity fraud - a man who blamed the state for his 
abuse in prison when he was clearly harming himself. "The theory that this 
arrest led him to being a prison punk is ridiculous," he said, shaking his 
head. "That behavior predates this case. He claimed he was raped in prison as a 
teenager. I don't want to look like I'm insensitive to abuse in prison - I'm 
not. But don't try to attribute every violation to this case."

Dobbs was still angry that Cook and his defenders were insistent that he and 
Skeen were the bad guys. "I don't understand why Kerry thinks I'm a villain. I 
gave them the police reports and the grand jury testimony 25 years ago," he 
said. "In 1999 I begged them to delay the trial and wait for the DNA results - 
then they accused me of knowing the results prior to his plea." Those in Cook's 
camp, he feels, are selective with their memories. "They vilified us in order 
to block the 1st retrial," he said. "They had to. But, Michael, point to 
something we did that was unfair. We thought he was guilty - I still do. We 
inherited a mess from the first trial, and we fought hard - for the victim, for 
law enforcement. But we fought fair."

It's a thin line between throwing hard blows and throwing foul ones. When I 
spoke with Hanners, the Dallas Morning News reporter who spent 4 years 
analyzing Cook's case, he admitted thinking at first that Hoehn was a viable 
suspect too. But he never found a motive, and after Hoehn died, in 1988, the 
reporter talked to a close friend of the hairdresser's, who said that Hoehn had 
told him that Cook "was never, ever guilty." Hanners was also suspicious of the 
2012 affidavit. "There was nothing to that effect in Hoehn's statement, grand 
jury testimony, or trial testimony," he told me. Cook, who has repeatedly 
denied a connection to Hoehn beyond that night, showed me a letter Hoehn's 
lawyer wrote him in 1988 that directly contradicts the affidavit. "I have 
followed your case with considerable interest," the lawyer wrote. "If there was 
anything that I could do to reverse your sentence and give you a new trial, I 
would be happy to do so as, in my opinion, you were convicted on considerable 
put-up testimony and misstatements."

Photos of Hoehn from 1977 that were given to McCloskey show a man who doesn't 
come close to matching the original description of the person in Edwards's 
apartment. Hoehn is pale, plainly built, and balding, with blond-brown hair; 
there is nothing tanned, trim, or silver-haired about him. McCloskey remains 
astounded by the state's approach at the 2nd and 3rd trials, considering the 
prosecution's belief about Hoehn's involvement. "Even though Dobbs said he 
thought Rudolph saw Hoehn," McCloskey told me, "at both trials he unblinkingly 
allowed Rudolph to identify Cook as the man she saw. I was flabbergasted." But, 
I asked, isn't that just a matter of a prosecutor doing his job? "To what 
length do you go to win a case?" replied McCloskey, his voice rising. (Dobbs 
thinks he might have been less categorical about Hoehn during that evening with 
McCloskey in Edwards's apartment, saying something like, "Have you considered 
that Rudolph might have seen Hoehn?")

So why continue to prosecute, even as the passing years shed ever more doubt on 
the available evidence? The answer may have as much to do with the high stakes 
of the case - Edwards's murder was the most brutal in Tyler's history - as the 
particular character of Smith County. "The more horrific the crime, the greater 
the need to punish somebody," a former prosecutor in Dallas and Tarrant 
counties, Terri Moore, told me. "Once you've gone down the road and tried and 
tried and tried the man, it's hard to say, 'We had the wrong man all along.'" 
In Nugent's eyes, Cook was doomed from the start. "Most wrongful conviction 
cases come when the authorities choose a defendant and then start investigating 
the facts, instead of investigating the facts and seeing where they lead you," 
he said. "Once Kerry was arrested, the die was cast."

And because of Tyler's tight-knit legal community, in which many of the players 
have a connection to Cook's case, there are few lawyers without a vested 
interest in its outcome. "That courthouse is 1 big family," noted McCloskey, 
who has been traveling to Tyler for 26 years now. "They live to protect each 
other and their reputations and standing in the community. It's important to 
maintain the reputation of the DA's office and not impugn one's forebears."

Moore agrees. She became a top assistant for Craig Watkins, the Dallas County 
DA who in 2007 created the country's 1st conviction-integrity unit, which 
eventually led to 33 exonerations. She credits Watkins's status as an outsider 
- he had no connections with former Dallas DAs - for his willingness to 
scrutinize zealous prosecutions. "It's easier to investigate a suspicious 
conviction if it happened under a different administration," she said. "It's 
really difficult if it was you. In Smith County, everyone is connected - 
Bingham is an extension of Skeen. It takes courage and integrity to do the 
right thing, and Smith County hasn't been known for that. Smith County is known 
for being a locomotive running over everybody." In the past 40 years, there has 
been 1 exoneration in Smith County, compared to 52 in Dallas County. And it 
remains a tough place: in 2015, only 2 defendants were found "not guilty" in 
the Smith County district courts, which had a 94 % conviction rate, compared to 
a statewide average of 83 %.

Then there's the particular character of the defendant. Cook, with his public 
speeches, Facebook rants, and celebrity followers, made it impossible for those 
in Smith County to walk away. His interviews, the newspaper stories, the 
attention from Hollywood - these were rebukes too infuriating to ignore, not 
just because Cook's behavior maligned Smith County but also because, many of 
its players felt, it confirmed what they'd said to be true all along. "I have 
absolutely no doubt Cook was guilty," Mayfield's lawyer, Buck Files, told me. 
When I asked if he would say the same thing if he hadn't represented Mayfield, 
he said, "Yes. Cook's conduct in the pen confirmed what a lot of people 
thought." Was he referring to the self-mutilation? "His conduct in the pen, his 
behavior - words spoken, comments he made to others that showed his involvement 
in the murder, events that occurred in prison. It may not convince anyone else, 
but it convinces me."

Cook's case remains before the CCA, which must now uphold or deny the judge's 
recommendations in favor of his exoneration and against his actual innocence. 
While most observers believe the CCA will uphold them, in November the court 
shocked the criminal justice world when it reversed a recommendation in another 
well-known case and granted actual innocence to 4 San Antonio women wrongfully 
accused of rape. Cathy Cochran, a retired CCA judge, hopes her former 
colleagues will give Cook the same result. "This man may be a petulant, 
narcissistic publicity hound," she told me, "but when push comes to shove, he's 
right. Is anyone surprised that an innocent man, left to rot in prison for 
years, told to plead no contest to get out, who wants to be exonerated and take 
the prosecutors who put him in prison to task, who then has lawyers who know 
better and who make a deal with the very people he wants to excoriate - is 
anyone surprised when he finally loses it? He's reached the end of his rope. 
But the justice system is required to do justice even to those who are 
self-destructive."

I spoke with Cook over the phone in the fall, as he and his wife were getting 
ready for a trip to Lima, Peru, where he would speak to the local chapter of 
the Young Presidents' Organization on "the magic of freedom." He pinged between 
various favorite subjects, from his certainty that Smith County would come 
after him again to his reasons for firing his lawyers, growing more and more 
emotional as he spoke. Then, pausing for a moment, he asked his wife to leave 
the room. He had to tell me something about why he'd rejected his exoneration.

"It wasn't about revenge," he said. "It was about justice and accountability. I 
kept telling them, 'Stop talking to Matt Bingham, I don't want the deal!' What 
I went through, the lawyers didn't even see that." He took a breath and, in 
graphic detail, launched into a description of the sexual abuse he had suffered 
on death row.

"Michael, I did what I had to in prison to survive. Those guys were crazy, 
morally bankrupt from their psychoses. I was scared to death. I knew if they 
killed me, my mom, dad, and brother would live in infamy. I gave those men my 
body to protect my mind. Some of the other inmates would tell me, 'You can make 
it stop - just stab that dude!' But I couldn't. That would have been all the 
proof Smith County needed that I was a vicious killer. So I let it happen, over 
and over. It was so the truth would come out in a courtroom someday, so I'd 
finally be free, so I could restore what I gave up, restore my sense of 
manhood. I knew if I could survive and get out, I could tell my story, tell the 
truth about everything, show the whole world the case was made up.

"There was nothing left but the truth," he finished, then paused. "By God, I 
gave up everything to preserve the truth."

(source: Texas Monthly)