TMN's Outstanding Lobbyist for 2001
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Here is a Dallas Observer Cover Story on Kerry.
Kerry at the 2001 March for a Moratorium in Austin. |
Life after Death Row
November 18, 2001, Sunday
Fort Worth Star Telegram
BYLINE: JESSIE MILLIGAN; Star-Telegram Staff Writer
After nearly 20 years in prison and numerous appeals, Kerry Cook agreed to a plea bargain in the murder of Linda Jo Edwards . Now he's a free man with DNA tests on his side, a need to clear his name and a burning desire to abolish capital punishment.
There, on one of Kerry Max Cook's muscular arms, is the blurry, blue-black tattoo of a fairy, inked by another Death Row inmate of the Texas State Penitentiary.
Deeper into his skin are the scars from brutal death house bullies who held him down and carved demeaning words into his flesh.
Incised even farther are the wounds from suicide attempts, and penetrating even more is the heartache. It will never go away, because life after Death Row is like no other life.
He was dizzy on the first day he walked beyond the bars. His eyes had rarely focused beyond the 5-by-9-foot cell where he spent almost 20 years, most of his adult life. Always, he had maintained he was innocent of raping, bludgeoning, stabbing and mutilating 21-year-old Tyler library clerk Linda Jo Edwards in 1977. He kissed the ground. He hugged a tree. He tried to kiss a yellow jacket but it stung him on the lip. Freedom is never easy, and it seldom is complete.
The pockets of his suit were empty. But he carried an unenviable and burdensome record: His nearly two decades on Texas Death Row mean that in all of the United States only one other person has spent a longer time awaiting execution before being released back into society.
Cook is still not completely free. He now works a $5.15-an-hour retail job in Plano. He travels around the United States and Europe - including a trip to France last summer to speak and march with death penalty abolitionist Bianca Jagger - to make cases for his innocence and against the death penalty. He lobbies in Austin. And he doesn't feel satisfied.
"I have a profound sense of loneliness. There's a hole inside me that never feels filled up," Cook says.
Death Row and a harrowing legal battle have left an indelible tattoo on his soul.
*
Now and then a judge invites him to speak to 13- and 14-year-old probationers on the perils of landing in a courtroom. "They think that American freedoms will safeguard them. They think that if their rights are violated that scientific evidence will help them," Cook says.
"I tell them look what happened to me."
*
On the eve of Cook's trial in 1999 - the fourth trial for the same crime because the first three had become so hopelessly muddled - Smith County prosecutors from Tyler offered Cook a deal.
"Plead guilty and get out of prison." Cook refused. He would never plead guilty.
"OK, plead no contest, which is not an admission of guilt," prosecutors told him. "Get a murder conviction on your record, but get off of Death Row and out of prison."
Cook opted for freedom and a chance to tell the world his story. He took the deal. The conviction is on his record.
Two months later, DNA tests came back showing Cook was not the man who had sex with Edwards the night she was killed.
Had he gone to trial, the DNA evidence may have persuaded a jury to clear him or, as Smith County Assistant District Attorney Ed Marty says, "We would have had to have found a way to explain it away."
Cook, now 45, will never know. The DNA test did go a long way toward exonerating him in the court of public opinion, but it did nothing to legally clear his name or solve the Edwards murder.
"We already have a conviction," says Marty. "We have no plans to pursue the case any further."
*
One day late this fall, Cook is at El Chico Mexican Restaurant in Huntsville. He's visiting his old "neighborhood." Midmeal, without warning, he pushes away from his plate of tacos with extra jalapenos, the chiles being part of his attempted recovery after years of eating bland Death Row food. He jumps up and starts dancing by himself. Other diners turn and laugh. Who is this happy guy? He is wearing a T-shirt that says he was innocent but spent decades on Death Row.
*
Cook is hyperactive, like a very large puppy. His moods swing quickly. At one moment he can be brooding. The next he is pleading and begging for someone to understand him. Next, he is passionately articulate. He is impatient, often interrupting others' sentences. "I spent so many years waiting," he explains.
He leaves the restaurant and drives in his rust orange Eddie Bauer edition Ford Explorer to the outer gates of the Ellis Unit, home of Texas Death Row. Cook wants to show friends and family where he was kept. He wants them to try and understand. He puts a CD into his Kenwood car stereo. The lyrics are hard to make out but the word "freedom" is repeated. Cook bows his head and struggles against tears, as he says he often has in the past two decades.
*
Flash back to spring 1977. A library clerk named Linda Jo Edwards was having an affair with her boss, James Mayfield, dean of library sciences at the then-Texas Eastern University, now the University of Texas-Tyler, according to court records and reported accounts of the trials.
The two broke up. On May 26, Edwards attempted suicide and left a note naming Mayfield as her closest companion. She recovered. News of the scandal made its way back to university administrators. Within days, Mayfield resigned. The relationship didn't split cleanly. Edwards and Mayfield were seen arguing on June 9.
On the same night, Edwards was killed. No signs of forced entry marked her apartment. The killer cut off a lock of her hair and severed part of her lips and part of her genital area, causing speculation among investigators who wondered if the murderer was someone who knew her, had sexual relations with her and wanted to control her.
Police found semen stains on her underwear. This was years before DNA testing was available, so they locked the undergarment away as evidence that would not be looked at again for 20 years.
Mayfield would be quickly cleared by the Tyler police on the basis of an alibi that he was at home with his family at the time.
Cook would be arrested on the grounds that his fingerprint had been found on her sliding-glass door. He'd moved into the same apartment building a few weeks earlier. He met Edwards at the swimming pool, he says, and she invited him to her apartment to visit.
Tyler police also said Cook fit a psychological profile of a killer who was young, homosexual and hated women.
Cook matched the first two descriptions, at least partially. He was bisexual at the time, and he still believes that is why he was arrested and tried. He was a wild child, a guy who once went joy riding in a Cherokee County sheriff deputy's car, a young man who was certainly impulsive and mischievous, but with no record of violence. The overall image wouldn't play well with juries in Tyler and later, an even smaller Texas town, Georgetown.
*
What music would be used in the soundtrack if Texas Death Row were a movie? What possibly could capture the feel of the place? The gangsta rap music of Tupac Shakur. Cook doesn't hesitate before answering. The rapper is rhythmic, relentless, threatening.
*
Cook went to Death Row after his first trial in 1978, when he was 22. The conviction was overturned on appeal. He went through a second trial where the jury split 6-6. That made him eligible for a third trial, where the conviction was again overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on the basis of unfair trial procedures.
Cook once came within 11 days of execution before the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the lethal injection and sent the case back to Texas for re-examination.
While Cook waited, he suffered. He was repeatedly raped. He knew many of the 141 other inmates executed during his imprisonment, and, being literate, he wrote many goodbye letters to their families. He worked in the prison garment factory, where he made uniforms for guards. In his mind, he spent his days clothing the people who kept him constrained, his nights under emotional distress and physical attacks from inmates.
"There was never a break from it. There was nowhere to escape from it," Cook says. "I wanted to always maintain my innocence. If I fought back, I wouldn't be seen as innocent," he says.
He took the pain out on himself, slashing at himself so horribly that it took repeated surgeries to correct the damage.
*
Cook, on one of his two trips to Huntsville since his release, sees a small truck on the side of the road. A man is leaning against the hood. Cook stops. He recognizes the man. It is a Death Row guard the inmates used to call Big Nick.
"Do you need help?" Cook asks.
"No. I got a tow truck coming," the man answers.
"Remember me?" Cook asks.
"One Row, Three Cell," Big Nick answers, reciting Cook's former address.
"I really was innocent," Cook says before driving away.
*
Is Cook innocent? What's clear is that he had no logical motive, and there were other people who could have committed the crime. And it was not his semen left at the site of a sexually motivated crime.
What's also evident is that the first round of prosecutors from Smith County vigorously overstated the case against Cook.
The Smith County prosecutor's office was chastised by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for allowing a witness to change his story.
Robert Hoehn, a friend of Cook's, first testified to a grand jury that he and Cook had spent a peaceful evening together the night of the murder. A year later at trial, Hoehn said the two had sex and watched a cable TV movie that sent Cook into a "sexual frenzy." It was that frenzy that was supposedly the motive for the murder.
Prosecutors didn't tell defense counsel or the jury that the story had dramatically changed. Marty, a Smith County prosecutor who came in to the case later, said, "They shouldn't have done that. It was a mistake. We've paid for that mistake with the retrials."
Other testimony changed, as well.
Paula Rudolph, Edwards' roommate, told police after the crime that she had seen a silver-haired man with medium-length hair in the apartment that night. She said she assumed it was Mayfield. On the witness stand at the trial, she said it was Cook she saw, although he had long, dark hair at the time of the murder.
Edward Jackson, a man who shared a cell with Cook while both awaited murder trials, claimed Cook had confessed to the crime. Instead of serving time for murder, Jackson was released. He told newspaper reporters he had lied on the stand.
A Tyler police detective first testified that Cook's fingerprints had to have been left within "six to 12 hours" - placing Cook at the scene of the crime. Later a fingerprint examiners' professional group admonished him, saying it was scientifically impossible to say prints were left within such a narrow time frame.
At times the trials were inflammatory. Then-prosecutor Michael Thompson told the jury that the victim's missing body parts may have been eaten by Cook, although there was no evidence that was the case. The comment caused one juror to vomit, and the trial was recessed until everyone calmed down.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, in its last opinion, said:"Prosecutorial and police misconduct have tainted this matter from the outset."
If Cook were guilty, Smith County had three chances and two decades to clearly prove it. Yet it never did.
*
He has had so much to do since he was released. He has had to re-learn to drive. He knows about e-mail because he saw Sleepless in Seattle while in prison, but he had no experience with the Internet. He has little experience with love. He has gone to see the film Titanic over and over, each time hoping the ship would not sink.
He is obsessed with his case, understandably. He confronts the reality of his nightmare over and over, even visiting the Huntsville cemetery where executed prisoners are buried.
He examines the "caskets" stacked up at the cemetery. They are black plastic, similar to the containers that hold six-packs of seedlings. "They look like something that comes from Home Depot," Cook says. He is outraged. "I know a lot of these people did horrible things, but aren't we all God's children?"
*
After his release, Cook was quickly linked up with Amnesty International and other nonprofit anti-death penalty groups, many of whom were delighted to have a standard-bearer with such a dramatic story who also was articulate enough to tell it.
"When he spoke to the Legislature last year, he was very effective," says Scott Cobb of the Texas Moratorium Network, an Austin nonprofit working to halt executions while issues of fairness are examined. "He is the most articulate person. I've seen him work one-on-one with legislators, and he can change opinions."
Now Cook is a human rights activist and lobbyist. He trades e-mail with death penalty abolitionist Bianca Jagger. He met her in France last June, where he spoke on the death penalty to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France. In October, he led an Austin rally for a moratorium on the Texas death penalty. In December, he will join Cher, Peter Ustinov, Roger Moore and Boris Becker at an anti-capital punishment meeting in Vienna, Austria.
Cook is good with words.
Last April, he urged Texas legislators to consider a moratorium on the death penalty so that issues of fairness can be examined. He ended with a touching comment. "For years you haven't believed in me. I am here today because I have always believed in you."
Several legislators pulled Cook's wife of about two years,
Sandra, aside afterward. They wanted to know if he was really
capable of writing the speech. He is. He's a high school dropout,
but he had 20 years of reading time.
*
Cook has not been pardoned.
"For Kerry to receive a pardon, we would have to get the district attorney to agree. We aren't even going to ask him," says one of Cook's attorneys, Paul Nugent of Houston. Nugent still bitterly speaks of what he calls "lying and cheating" on the part of the prosecution and says that is why he doesn't believe Cook could win any favors now.
Marty of the Smith County District Attorney's office says a pardon isn't something his office is considering.
"He made his plea and has his conviction," Marty says.
Each side has taken its stand, and nothing seems ready to break the deadlock.
"It's just a lot of pride that's invested," Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said at the time of the final appeal. "It becomes a pitched battle between the two sides not giving up."
Cook married after his release, and he and his wife have a 1-year-old namesake, Kerry Justice Cook. Also part of the family are his Jack Russell terrier, Everton, a buff-colored dog he adopted after friends wanted to send it to the pound, and Trixie a Chihuahua in a rhinestone collar.
One of the most significant legacies of his time inside prison is that he finds profound meaning everywhere.
Sometimes this translates to profound fear, as it did one night this fall when Cook was playing host to his Swiss friends, death penalty abolitionists Rene and Viviane Audrey. He took them to Southfork Ranch, where they took pictures of JR's bed. He drove them to Huntsville, where they visited the Texas Prison Museum and the graveyard for executed prisoners.
He also took them out to Sylvan Road west of Dallas to take a nighttime picture of the city skyline. It was just three days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit by airplanes hijacked by terrorists. Cook and Rene Audrey saw a helicopter flying in their direction with a searchlight scanning the ground.
The police helicopter hovered over the men, bathing them in light. Cook says his heart pounded. He was sure that he would be accused of doing something wrong. Two police cars pulled up. Dallas police found Cook's record on their database and questioned him.
"What are you doing here? Why are you looking at the skyline?" they asked.
Cook thanked the officers for their vigilance in protecting Dallas buildings from potential terrorists, and he explained he was only bringing guests out to take photographs.
One officer pulled Cook's wife aside and said, "Do you know who you are with?" No arrests were made.
To Cook, it feels as if the searchlight is always on him, casting him in bad light, creating an image that is out of focus while in the shadows, his real self lives, waiting to be whole.
The trials of Kerry Max Cook: a timeline
1977: Arrested in the rape and murder of Linda Jo Edwards in Tyler
1978: First trial - found guilty; sentenced to death
1987: First appeal to Texas Court of Criminal Appeals fails
1991: Second appeal is successful; conviction overturned
1992: Second trial - jury splits 6-6; mistrial declared
1994: Third trial - found guilty; sentenced to death
1997: Third appeal is successful; conviction overturned. Cook is released from prison to await his fourth trial.
1999: Accepts plea bargain that gives him his freedom; DNA tests later show he did not have sex with the victim.
Cook sits in a coutroom in Bastrop in 1999, awaiting his fourth capital murder trial. He later accepts a plea bargain.
|
'Being innocent is not enough to save you.'
Kerry Max Cook spent 20 years on death row. His message is clear:
'Being innocent is not enough to save you.'
By Bella English , Globe Staff, 1/25/2003
Kerry Max Cook, who spent 20 years on death row in Texas for a crime he didn't commit, doesn't want bleeding-heart liberals to come see ''The Exonerated,'' a play based in part on his story. No, he really wants those who believe in the death penalty to ''come see another side'' of the issue. Not that he expects them all to change their minds - but it might give them pause.
''Usually, somebody will come up to me [afterward] and say it made them think differently,'' he says.
''The Exonerated,'' which opened at the Wilbur Theatre Tuesday night for a two-week run, uses a stark setting and simple narrative form to tell the stories of six former death-row prisoners who were found innocent and released.
The play, which has also opened in New York and other major cities, has garnered strong reviews for its unadulterated, affecting portrayal of lives nearly lost to the American criminal justice system. It comes at a time when the death penalty is under the microscope: The five young men convicted in the Central Park jogger case have been freed after DNA evidence determined their innocence, and Illinois Governor George Ryan basically shut down the state's death row earlier this month, releasing four prisoners and commuting the sentences of the remaining 164 to life without parole.
The night before he announced the decision, Ryan had seen ''The Exonerated,'' which was playing in Chicago. After the performance, he spoke privately with Cook, who was in the audience watching Richard Dreyfuss play his part. ''I told him to remember the six stories he saw were just part of the real face of the death penalty. I told him there was no way of knowing how many innocent people we've executed in America,'' says Cook, who was 21 years old when he began serving time for rape and murder, and was 41 when he was released in 1999.
While he was in, 141 fellow inmates were executed, and Cook came within days of his own demise. While he was in, Cook's beloved only sibling - his older brother, Doyle - was shot dead defending a friend in a bar brawl. While he was in, Cook's father died of cancer.
Cook lost his mother, too. She still lives in east Texas, but she will not speak to him.
''She accuses me of killing my brother and father,'' he says, looking down at his hands. ''She knows I didn't rape, mutilate, and kill that girl, but she says that I brought shame on the family by hanging out with the wrong people. She has no love for me at all. She said I was executed and I can't come back.''
But Cook has come back from his near-death experience. When he got out, he went to work as a paralegal in Dallas, where he fell in love and got married. He and his wife, Sandra, have a 2-year-old son, Kerry Justice Cook. ''We say that after 23 years, Justice has finally arrived,'' says Cook, who is 45.
A simple message
Now that he's out, his life still revolves around the death penalty and prison. He and his family moved to New York after a ''well-known philanthropist'' saw the play and offered them a place to live. Cook spends his time traveling and speaking out on human rights violations - mainly the death penalty - and promoting the play. He has appeared with Bianca Jagger, Johnny Cochran, and many other celebrities. He says he was put on the waiting list at Bennington College, where he would like to study writing, and will reapply for the fall.
Like the play, his message is simple: ''We're killing innocent people. The play depicts six stories that are the acceptable collateral damage of the death penalty. These are people whose only crime was being poor.''
Cook was perfect fodder for a flawed criminal justice system: a poor kid expelled in the 11th grade after an arrest for ''joy riding'' - in a deputy sheriff's car - in the small town of Jacksonville, Texas. He turned 17 in the county jail. A year later, he got out and went to Dallas, where he worked as a bartender. At his apartment complex, he met Linda Jo Edwards, who invited him over for drinks.
Five days later, Edwards was found raped and murdered, and Cook's fingerprint was found on a patio door. His family scraped together $500 for a defense attorney. After a five-day trial, he was convicted and sent to death row. ''I was 18 and poor and couldn't hire a lawyer to adequately defend me,'' he says. ''Being innocent is not enough to save you.''
One man's trials
Appeals courts granted him three trials because of police and prosecutorial misconduct, including a prison informant who cut a deal with prosecutors and testified that Cook had confessed to Edwards's murder. ''That guy got out early after testifying against me, ended up killing two people, and is now in Missouri doing two life sentences without parole,'' says Cook.
Finally, after pleading no contest on the eve of his fourth murder trial in 1999, Cook was released, though he told the trial judge, ''I would rather be executed than plead guilty to a crime I didn't commit. '' His plea, he stresses, is not an admission of guilt. But if he went to trial again, he knew he'd run the risk of being sent back to death row.
A month later, DNA test results came back, suggesting that Edwards's married boyfriend was the killer.
Cook said that man, called ''Professor Whitfield'' in the play, was dean of library sciences at what is now the University of Texas at Tyler, and Edwards was a library clerk working for him. According to court records, they were having an affair, and she attempted suicide after they broke up. He lost his job, and the two were seen arguing on the day of her murder, June 9, 1977. The man has never been prosecuted.
''He works for the Harris County Sheriff's Department,'' Cook says with a wry smile. He adds: ''When all the dust settled, the only real criminals in the courtroom were the prosecutors.''
Has anyone from the Texas criminal justice system ever apologized to him?
''No, no one ever does,'' he says. But other district attorneys and judges have come up to him after the play and apologized on behalf of ''the system.''
This is what Cook most remembers from his time in a 5-by-9-foot cell: for the first 10 years, his only book was the Bible. ''I read it cover to cover, then I smoked it,'' he says. He didn't have rolling papers or money to buy cigarettes, so he made his own, using the Bible pages. He remembers the men who went to the death chamber. ''Some put up a fight, but most go quietly,'' he says.
And there are indelible reminders - on his skin, and his psyche - of the sexual attacks he suffered behind bars: a crude tattoo of a fairy on one arm, an obscenity carved into his buttocks, both put there by other inmates. He tried to kill himself, more than once.
Cook still has trouble being alone, and nights are the worst, but it is life-affirming that he endured what he endured and didn't emerge in a psychotic rage. Indeed, Cook insists that he is not bitter or angry, despite the fact that he will not receive a cent in reparations from the state of Texas. (''You can't sue in Texas,'' he says flatly.)
''If I was angry, who would listen to me?'' he asks. ''My story would not reach people. I know it's a miracle just to be here.''
Seeing both sides
From death row to national spokesman, Cook must feel as if he has gone through the looking glass. He has seen the play dozens of times, watching stars such as Dreyfuss, Peter Gallagher, Aidan Quinn, and Chad Lowe tell his story. He won't say which one is his favorite. ''I love them all,'' he says diplomatically.
He was in Washington, D.C., for the opening, and was disappointed though not surprised that President Bush didn't attend. ''When he was governor of Texas, he pushed legislation to expedite executions,'' he says. ''That's why we lead the nation in executions. It's a `kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out' mentality.''
As a brother of a murder victim, he says, he can relate to both sides of the death penalty argument. For a long time, he hoped his brother's killer would be put to death. ''He murdered my brother,'' he says. ''I wanted him to die. But I came to realize that as long as we have the death penalty, there is no protection from errors in a human-operated system. How many innocent people have to die so we can give in to anger?''
As it turns out, his brother's killer served only three years in prison.
This story ran on page G1 of the Boston Globe on 1/25/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
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