Kerry Cook is an innocent man who wrongly served two decades in Texas's notorious death house for the brutal 1977 rape and murder of 21-year-old Linda Jo Edwards. His struggle for freedom is said to be one of the worst cases of police and prosecutorial misconduct in American history. In the summer of 1977, Cook was staying in Tyler, TX. He met an attractive young woman named Linda Edwards and was invited back to her apartment for a drink and left his fingerprints on the sliding glass door. Four days later, Ms. Edwards was found brutally murdered. When the police dusted for prints, they found Cook's and immediately arrested him. Edward Jackson testified that Cook confessed to the murder during a jailhouse conversation. Jackson was set free, only to kill again several years later. Cook, on the other hand, was convicted and sentenced to death. He was thrown into a world for which no one could be prepared, and he survived beatings, sexual abuse, and depression; all the while, he fought against a justice system that was determined to keep him quiet and loath to admit a mistake. Through the work of a crusading group of lawyers who forced a series of retrials, his case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered the case be reconsidered. It wasn't until the spring of 1999 that Cook was finally able to put the nightmare behind him: long-suppressed DNA evidence had linked James Mayfield, Linda Edwards's ex-lover, to the crime.

Chasing Justice
My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit

Chapter One

Prologue: 1977

On August 5, 1977, I was a twenty-year-old bartender at the Holiday Club in Port Arthur, Texas. I'd worked there since June, and like so much of East Texas, it was conservative—a suit-and-tie haunt where businessmen drank to such soft tunes as Lionel Richie's "Easy" playing on the nearby jukebox. Usually the Holiday was very busy and a second bartender, named Wayne, and I were both behind the bar; but it was a slow weeknight, so I was working the bar alone. I was mixing drinks and making small talk with a customer when two men in suits—one wearing gold-rimmed glasses and with blond hair that touched his shoulders, and the other with shorter brown hair—sauntered in and took stools beside each other at the bar. They looked at me and smiled. I finished cleaning out an ashtray, wiped my hands on a bar towel, and walked over to greet them.

"Hi. What are you guys having tonight?"

The lanky blond man smiled again and said, "Two draft beers. Budweiser." His partner went over to the jukebox and selected Charlie Rich's "Rollin' with the Flow."

As I set two full glasses on the counter, Pam, one of the waitresses, called out from the "Employees Only" entrance to the bar. "Hey, Kerry! Cy wants to see you in the kitchen for a second."

Cy Kubler was the manager, and we had gotten along well ever since he hired me on the spot two months earlier. I didn't want to leave the bar unattended for long, so I darted through the door to the kitchen. It was pitch-black. I stopped almost immediately—usually the kitchen was fully lit with bright fluorescent lights. Thinking someone had accidentally turned them off on their way out, I fumbled for the switch, all the while calling out, "Cy?"

The second the lights came on a pair of silver handcuffs were slapped and locked on my wrists. My startled eyes narrowed on the Smith & Wesson logo engraved at the base of the shiny restraints. Then two pairs of hands, each pushing me in a different direction, seized my arms from behind. I tried to look around but only saw a flash of blond hair. Apparently, as soon as I'd left the bar, the two men followed me into the kitchen. They were undercover vice officers with the Port Arthur Police Department.

The man who had slammed on the handcuffs said in a loud voice, "My name is Detective Eddie Clark. I am from Tyler, Texas. Kerry Max Cook, you're under arrest for the rape and murder of Linda Jo Edwards."

Everything inside me halted after I heard those words. I looked into the eyes of Detective Clark. This was not the first time I'd been arrested, but I'd never been charged with anything as serious as rape or murder. I'd had a few skirmishes, such as running away from home as a juvenile and taking cars with the keys left in them so my friends and I could get from one place to the other.

Suddenly the back door to the kitchen opened, and the furnace blast of August heat pressed against my body. There were more policemen standing outside. While I was being shoved through the doorway, Detective Clark barked into my left ear, "Kerry Max Cook, you have the right to remain silent. If you give up these rights, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. . . ." The last I saw of the inside of the club was the big round clock on the kitchen wall that read 10:30 P.M.

My body was pulled and pushed toward the sedan that was quietly running, and the top of my head was used to press me into the backseat. One of the vice detectives I served a beer to got behind the wheel and Detective Clark climbed in the passenger side. Cherokee County Sheriff Danny Stallings, who presided over the adjoining county where my parents lived, slipped into the backseat with me. He said he'd persuaded my parents to tell the authorities where I was, and that he was there as a friend of the family to protect me from being harmed.

Detective Clark reached for the police-band microphone mounted on the dash. He depressed the toggle and recited the call letters of the Tyler Police Department. There was a response I couldn't understand. Then I heard Detective Clark say, "We got him. No. There were no problems."

Fred Hollis, owner of the Holiday Club, suddenly appeared out of the darkness. Beads of sweat glistened on the top of his head as the moonlight hit it. He leaned into the driver's side of the car. "If you need anything else," he said while avoiding all eye contact, "you know where to find me." The detective thanked him for his cooperation and the four of us pulled away from the club.

We drove in silence for several minutes until we pulled up to the curb of my apartment on Fifth Street in Port Arthur. A lot of other cars were there—some with identifiable police markings and a couple like the one I was in. I had lived there for little more than a month with a friend named Amber Norris, whom I'd met at a club in Houston the month before. Detective Clark turned his head toward me in the backseat. "We want to search your apartment. Will you consent to this search?"

"Yes, sir. This is some kind of mistake. I'll do whatever you—"

Detective Clark pushed a paper form to the backseat. "Good, sign here." I scrawled my name as best I could, given the handcuffs.

Inside our small one-bedroom apartment, Amber was sitting in her nightgown on the edge of the bed, with a look of profound confusion screaming out of her face. During the thirty minutes or so that police ransacked the small apartment, I was instructed not to talk unless spoken to. I watched as the officers rummaged through the refrigerator, ripping the tops off TV dinners and opening up plastic containers.

Chasing Justice
My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit. Copyright © by Kerry Cook. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself after Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn't Commit by Kerry Max Cook
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