Animator solution for combining full body and masked animations.

I spent a lot of time on animator for enemies in my game and i cant quite achieve the result im looking for. What im trying to do is have masked animations (like strafing for lower body and throwing for upper body) and at the same time being able to play some full body animations without mask. As example imagine this: Enemy that strafes around looking and player and sometimes shoot. After some time enemy desides to make a dash to other position. At this point it stops looking at player and runs. So it is no longer strafing and shooting but only running. I tried to make this by having three layers in my animator: "WholeBody", "Legs", "UpperBody". They have corresponding masks assigned to them, "WholeBody" not having mask at all. I assumed that if i transition to empty state in "WholeBody" layer and this empty state doesnt have "WriteDefaults" in that way layer will not interrupt "Legs" and "UpperBody" layers. And vice versa. But this seems to not be the case. Once animator does some of transitions empty states are not so "empty", and either "WholeBody" layer starts messing with "Legs" and "UpperBody" or the other way. The question is how one can make animator with masked layers but have transition to unmasked animations on demand?