Chasing justice

Former death row inmate tells of struggle for freedom

-By Lori Craig

Kerry Max Cook had spent about a decade on Texas’ death row when he decided to take matters into his own hands.

Wrongly convicted of the 1977 rape and murder of 21-year-old Linda Edwards in Tyler, Texas, Cook was growing despondent in the “seething hate factory” that was death row: He had attempted suicide three times, once leaving a note in blood that read “I really was an innocent man.”

Kerry Max Cook: "I didn't have time for limitations."

“I felt like I had to do absolutely everything I could do so I could die OK,” Cook said during an Oct. 11 talk at USC Law.

As a result, Cook, who hadn’t finished high school, requested law books from the inmates’ library. He studied by the moonlight shining through a triangle-shaped hole that had broken in his blacked-out cell window.

“I read and I took notes until the sun came up,” said Cook, who would eventually spend 22 years in prison. “Whatever my limitations were, I had to pass them up because I didn’t have time for limitations. I found an old, coverless, weathered Webster’s dictionary in an inmate’s cell after he was executed, and by the time I left prison I knew that book from A to Z.”

Cook, the longest-tenured death row inmate in U.S. history to be freed, spoke at USC Law as part of Trojan Parents Weekend to a crowded room of students and parents, faculty, alumni and staff. He was joined by attorney Scott Howe, professor of criminal law at Chapman University, who began representing Cook pro bono in the late 1980s.

“I was stunned when I came away (from our first meeting) because this man was like no other man I’d ever met,” Howe said. “He is the smartest man I’ve ever represented.”

A slide shows a headline from a 1991 newspaper article about Cook's case.

Desperate, Cook disregarded Howe’s advice and cooperated with a newspaper’s investigation of his case, providing them with a 40-page digest. The paper would later print a series of articles from 1988 to 1991, beginning with one titled “Inmate railroaded, inquiry suggests.”

Cook also appealed to Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit organization that works to free innocent prisoners who have received life or death sentences. The group would support his case.

Cook was tried three times. He described some of the prosecution’s key evidence during his presentation at USC Law.

Immediately after the crime, Edwards' roommate, Paula Rudolph, told police she saw a man with short, silver hair (who she believed was Edwards’ boyfriend) in their apartment on the night of the murder. Edwards had ended her relationship with the boyfriend — a married professor with whom she worked — earlier that same night.

However, a year later, Rudolph testified in court that she came home to see a man fitting Cook's description. Cook had brown, shoulder-length hair.

Cook had met Edwards only once, when they hung out in her apartment four days prior. During the trial, a lead investigator would testify that Cook’s fingerprint, found on Edwards' patio door, was six to 12 hours old — placing him in the apartment at the time of the crime — although it is scientifically impossible to age a fingerprint. The man would later admit that there was no way to know when the fingerprint was left.

Held on Trojan Parents Weekend, Cook's talk attracted students and their parents, alumni and USC Law faculty and staff.

Another key witness was Edward “Shyster” Jackson, who was in prison for murder. In exchange for his release, Jackson testified that Cook confessed to him. Jackson would later admit that he lied at the behest of the prosecutors.

After an appeals court overturned the first verdict, a second trial resulted in a hung jury. Cook was convicted again in 1994, but that verdict also was overturned.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered another trial, saying that “police and prosecutorial misconduct has tainted this entire matter from the outset.”

In lieu of a fourth trial, in 1999 prosecutors accepted a no-contest plea from Cook, releasing him from prison for good.

Soon after his release, DNA testing was finally done on semen found at the crime scene. It wasn’t Cook’s. Prosecutors said the evidence only showed that Edwards had sex with someone else the night she died, not that Cook was innocent, Cook says.

“Forgiveness gave me the power to be free,” Cook said. “Death row may have had my body, but it never had my mind.

“As I stand before you, I consider myself the luckiest man alive.”

Following his talk, Cook signed copies of his book.

Today, Cook is married and says his son, Kerry Justice “KJ,” is his greatest gift. He speaks out against the death penalty, saying that, while he would support executing people who have committed horrible crimes, the collateral damage is too high.

“I say the innocent shouldn’t have to pay the ultimate price for us to have the death penalty,” he said. “Life in prison is awful enough — trust me.”

Joining Cook at USC Law were KJ, James McCloskey, executive director and board president of Centurion Ministries, and several of Cook’s friends, including actors Cary Elwes and Chad Lowe, who have starred in the play “The Exonerated,” which tells Cook’s story.

Cook has authored a book based on his struggle, Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit. For more information, or to order the book, visit http://www.chasingjustice.com.