by Dale Hudson
Renee and Bruce were determined not to allow what had happened between them to mar their friendship. The Pooles would remain friends with the Wolfords, continue to talk in the club and communicate over the computer. Bruce would occasionally make reference to their affair, just flirting or joking, but that was about all. Renee still believed Brent had set up her affair with Bruce so that he could have his wish to be with Courtney. The way she saw it, she was just basically “following orders,” as she usually did when it came to Brent.
CHAPTER 18
It has been said that animals were a good representation of human character traits. The peacock, for example, is a vibrant example of pride, and whenever he senses he has an audience, he spreads his brightly colored feathers and struts about proudly for all to see. As if such strutting were not enough, he also makes a loud, almost screeching sound, seemingly to ensure that all eyes are turned his way. But unlike the peacock, people who proudly strut their stuff and seek complete adulation and fawning from others soon learn that such unadulterated displays of pride quickly lead to their doom and demise, and this inevitably becomes their ultimate undoing.
It was bound to have happened to the Pooles when Renee’s mother kept calling their house at night, but there was no answer. Marie told Jack she knew their daughter was working as an exotic dancer. She could just feel it in her heart. When they rode by the Silver Fox and saw her car parked outside, she immediately called Brent’s mother. “Guess where your son has my daughter working?”
“Oh, my, that is going to kill us!” Agnes exclaimed. “Especially Bill. He’s a deacon in the church.”
Even when Brent was working the second shift, he and Renee would drop Katie off at the Pooles’ until late in the night or pick her up the next day. Marie cautioned Agnes about keeping Katie, allowing them to go off in directions she knew nothing about. Renee had admitted on the nights the Pooles had kept Katie, she had been dancing. On some nights, Katie had gone to an all-night day care and stayed there until after one in the morning.
Jack Summey was furious with his daughter and refused to speak with her as long as she continued dancing at the club. For weeks, when she walked in one door, he would walk out the other. Brent’s sister, Dee, tried to talk with Renee about how being an exotic dancer would affect her marriage and about the example she would be setting for Katie, but Renee didn’t like to talk about it. Dee could also tell from Brent’s reaction to her questioning Renee that there was a line of questioning that she had not better cross. It was kind of like they were aggravated that anyone had found out about their being involved in this activity. Actually, some of Agnes’s friends had seen a program on television about the strip clubs in Winston-Salem and had recognized Renee as she twirled around the brass pole at the Silver Fox. They told Agnes after the program aired that the news was probably spread all over town about her daughter-in-law.
But look at how much money I’m making was always Renee’s response to those who confronted her. Where could I find a job that pays that much money for so few days’ work? Renee ultimately did decide to stop dancing, but swore she wouldn’t stop seeing her friends.
With Renee no longer working at the club, it seemed she and Brent had lost interest in each other again. One day in March 1998, when Renee was missing her old life, she called Cynthia and invited her out for dinner. It just so happened that her boyfriend, Thomas Pedersen, and his friend John Frazier arrived home just as they were leaving and asked to accompany them to dinner.
Although John had been a regular patron at the club, Renee said she didn’t remember him. She was told he worked at Champion Products in Winston-Salem as a computer technician and lived about forty miles from her house. John was very witty, polite and very attentive to Renee. Before dinner was over, they had exchanged phone numbers and agreed to see each other again.
If Brent was pretending there was no one else in his life, Renee made no bones about the other man in hers. MBPD detectives were told by another dancer at the Silver Fox, Tonia Grubbs Atwood, that Renee had stopped dancing in the club for a while, but returned sometime in March. She had overheard Renee in the dressing room talking about how bad she hated being married. Renee was dating John Frazier at the time; she was the fourth stripper in the club he had dated.
Tonia knew that Renee hadn’t told Brent about her relationship with John, that they had just started off talking, and seemed to hit it off perfectly. John was twenty-eight—four years older than Brent—but Renee didn’t think he was any more mature. He just paid her a lot more attention.
Renee and John started out talking on the phone and then she started visiting him at his house. It was always while Brent was working in the evenings. She would take Katie with her to visit, and the three of them would watch Disney movies or run errands together. Renee liked John and found him very entertaining. He was always a big joker and enjoyed being the life of the party.
Renee continued seeing and communicating with John almost every day for the first four months of 1998. Tonia remembered John had been cheating on Renee with another dancer while she was absent from the club, but Renee found out about it and had it out with the girl. That night, Tonia said, she had heard Renee complaining in the dressing room about what had just happened with her and John’s girlfriend.
“Renee was like, ‘Oh, I need a vacation. I need a vacation.’ Then someone, a redheaded girl—and I can’t remember her name—entered the room. I guess Renee had a child, because this girl asked where her child was going to start play school, and Renee told her she wasn’t going to play school. That she wasn’t sure where she would be moving. So, the other girls asked if she and her husband were moving, and Renee’s like, ‘Well, my husband’s not moving, but I’m definitely moving. I don’t want to be with him anymore. He’s driving me crazy.’”
During the three days in May 1998 that Renee had moved in with John, Tonia’s roommate overheard her talking with Brent on the phone in the dressing room at the club. She was screaming at him, saying how bad she hated him, and that she was not coming home.
“I’m not coming home tonight, but I will be back tomorrow night,” Renee had yelled out. Brent must not have liked her response, because she then told him, “Well, you’re just gonna have to learn to live with stuff like this because I’m tired of being with you. And I don’t want to be with you anymore.”
Tonia said that the next day, Renee had come into work again; two days in a row was a rarity for her. But this night, she was with John Frazier, Cynthia Hanson and some other people. They were showing everyone the tattoo of Cynthia’s lips on Renee’s neck. She said Renee and John were acting like a couple, embarrassingly hanging all over each other. And when she and Cynthia went into the dressing room to fix their hair or do whatever they needed to do, Renee said, “I think that I really like John. He seems to be a nice guy and he knows the kind of things I like to do.”
“Well, what are you going to do about Brent?” Cynthia had asked.
“I’m not really sure what to do with him,” Renee then answered. “I do know that I would like to continue seeing John, but I’m sure if Brent finds out, he’s not gonna be very happy at all.”
Tonia went on to say that the next night when Renee was dancing at the Silver Fox, she had several messages stuck on the mirror above her stuff. One was from Brent and one was from John. She said she watched Renee call John first and heard her say to John over the phone, “I don’t know how he got our number. What all did you say to him?” She stated she had to leave and go back on stage for two songs for about ten minutes. When she came back to the dressing room, she heard Renee then talking to someone else she believed was Brent. She remembered hearing Renee say, “I hate you. I wish you were dead. And I hope I never have to see you again.”
Tonia told police she didn’t see much of Renee after that. For some reason, she just quit working at the club. But that wasn’t unusual. That sort of thing happened to entertainers all the time. “One day, they’ll drop out and you just wo
n’t see them anymore,” she said, guessing that was what had happened to Renee.
Like many couples who choose to dishonor their marital vows, Brent and Renee had come to a crossroads in their relationship. They discovered that unless they changed their lifestyles and rededicated themselves to one another, their two left-handed rings would never guarantee things would be right in their marriage. Their families had heard the grumblings way before now, but what they didn’t know was that Brent and Renee’s relationship was in deeper trouble than they had realized. They found out the night Brent came home from work and his house was empty. Renee had taken Katie and moved out.
Later, when Renee and Brent reconciled, it wasn’t the money that had driven her back to Brent, she said. She had worked since she was fourteen, and was never accustomed to anyone supporting her completely. She was making good money as a dancer, was used to having her own spending money and could make a living if she had to. But she had come back to Brent because she truly loved him and wanted to make her marriage work.
“There was a time when I tried to overdose on pills right after I broke off with John,” Renee would admit years later. “Brent and John were mad, but were taking it out on me. Brent was giving me hell about John and John about him. I went to John’s house and told him, ‘You have got to quit all this stuff. You’re about to push me off the edge. If you don’t quit, I’m going to kill myself.’ ”
Renee said she got a paring knife, put it to her wrist and cut herself. It bled, but didn’t hurt. She was ready to quit, ready to give up. Frazier came back in and saw the blood, then told her he didn’t think she had the balls to do it. She asked him why, if he wanted her so bad, was he doing this to her?
Brent was to be home at midnight. Renee had just put Katie to bed and was sad and depressed. She had a bunch of pills: Valium, uppers and downers. She took a handful of pills and tried to kill herself. She was very mad at herself for giving up, but had already made up her mind she wasn’t going through this anymore. The next night, she went into work and thought about how it wasn’t working with Brent because he didn’t want to let the marriage go. He wouldn’t give up and John wouldn’t leave her alone.
“I felt like shit for putting my marriage through all that. I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to take the easy way out, so I took pills for three days. I wasn’t sure if I was awake or if I was dreaming. I never told Brent; he just thought I was depressed. A couple of weeks later, he took me to the emergency room for my depression, and when I was asked by the physician if I had any thought of suicide, I said yes. Brent was shocked to learn that. My purpose in leaving Brent and having an affair was to change his eyes and be sure that he was willing to change to help me keep our marriage together. And as we worked on things between us, my thoughts subsided and we talked of having a baby. It gave me hope and meant things were going to be okay. That was the sole intent and purpose of our beach trip—to put our marriage back together.”
One night, John and Brent had gotten into an altercation at the Silver Fox over Renee. John had threatened Brent, called him a “pussy” and tried to get him out of the car and into a fight. Brent refused. A few hundred yards down the road, he stopped at a Mr. Waffle restaurant and told Renee he couldn’t live like that anymore. She agreed, and they talked about getting a restraining order against John to make him leave them alone. But Brent cooled down and took a let’s-just-wait-and-see attitude.
But when the Pooles got home around 2:00 A.M., the phone rang. They both knew who it would be on the phone. John talked with Brent and said he just wanted to know what was going on with Renee. Brent then handed the phone to Renee, and John asked her, “Are you going to stay with that asshole?”
As Renee stepped out of the police car at the Carolina Winds Hotel on the northern end of Myrtle Beach, she knew things for her were only going to get worse. Looking down at her hands, she hadn’t realized it until then, but she had bitten at her fingers and shredded what little nails she had left. Her fingers were bleeding at the quicks. They looked awful.
Renee looked forward to seeing her daughter and taking her back to North Carolina. It had been a long night and she wondered what her little girl was doing just then. She was relieved to see her parents’ car in the hotel parking lot. Hopefully, her mom had already gotten Katie up and out of bed and changed her flannel nightgown by now. Maybe she had already given Katie a bath, so Renee wouldn’t have to.
She suddenly remembered she had left the stuffed animal Mary Stogner had given her. Katie would ask if she brought her something from the store and she wished now she hadn’t left it at the police station. Perhaps the little stuffed animal would have kept Katie preoccupied, at least until she and her parents could figure how they were going to handle this delicate situation.
Renee clutched at her stomach. It felt so hollow. As she stepped off the elevator with the police officer, she turned toward the hall leading to room 604 and tried to pull herself together. Her feet felt like they were glued to the carpet that led to the hotel room and it took all the strength she could muster to move forward. She was terrified at the thought of having to tell her little girl that she was never going to see her father again.
The expression on Renee’s face said it all.
Just how do you tell your child that there had been a terrible accident and that a bad man on the beach had murdered her father? How can you ask a child to say goodbye forever?
CHAPTER 19
Those persons vacationing and living in Myrtle Beach who happened to read about Brent Poole’s murder in the newspaper or walk by the crime scene on the beach were perplexed. There was a sense of overwhelming disbelief that someone, especially a young husband and father taking a midnight stroll on the beach with his wife, could end up lying in a pool of blood. What explanation was there to justify killing a young man apparently filled with such life and love for his family? A bright wreath of red, yellow and white flowers, placed at the crime scene by Brent’s family, stood like a beacon on stilts in about a foot of yellow sand. A banner emblazoned with OUR SON WAS MURDERED sliced across the memorial flowers, reminding the public to call the Myrtle Beach Police Department if they had any information on the killer.
Two young men from Charlotte, North Carolina, on their senior trip after graduation from high school, had been at the beach the night of the murder and remembered seeing Brent and Renee huddled up in the sand dunes around Eighty-second Avenue. Chris Hensley and his friend Tommy Hudnall told police they had also seen the mysterious man dressed in black walking along the public-access path that same night. Thirty minutes later, as they stood talking with a friend, they were told someone had been shot and killed on the beach.
Chris provided a description of the man to Myrtle Beach detective Len Sloan. He said it was dark that night, and had he known it was going to be of great significance, he would have paid closer attention. But one thing that stood out about the man in black was that he had an irritated look on his face. As he walked north along the hurricane fences, he looked back at them like he was ignoring them or he was mad at something. Chris was certain the man in black was Caucasian and had a stocky build, about five feet ten, and thought he had medium-to-long, dark brown hair. There might have been some facial hair, maybe a slight mustache, and when they saw him, it was probably around 10:30 or 11:30 P.M.
Tommy confirmed Chris’s story, but he told Sloan he couldn’t tell if the guy was white or black, and if he had short hair, long hair or no hair.
Sloan attempted to generate a computerized composite of the suspect from what information they gave him, but both Hensley and Hudnall were adamant that the picture did not look like the person they had seen on the beach.
A second report from someone having seen the suspect on the beach was called into Myrtle Beach headquarters the day after Brent’s murder. Mark and Donna Hobbs were from Bedford County, Virginia, and were staying at the same hotel as the Pooles. Ironically they, too, had also decided to take a walk on the beach that same night
to celebrate their anniversary. Sometime around 11:00 P.M., the Hobbses came out of their hotel and stood near the outdoor pools, where they noticed a man dressed in black about forty to fifty feet away on the other side of the fencing. Not only was the man dressed inappropriately, but he had an odd look in his eyes that frightened them. After seeing him again on the beach, this time at a distance of twenty-five to thirty feet and in bright lights, the couple decided it was not in their best interest to be on the beach with this man around, and called it a night.
The Hobbses assisted police in completing a second computerized composite of the murder suspect, but they, too, were not pleased with the results. It wasn’t difficult for them to recollect the face of the individual they had seen, but the real challenge was in looking through all those hundreds of eyes, mouths and noses and trying to put them together to make a face. It didn’t matter how many times they adjusted the composite, nothing they saw resembled the individual on the beach.
The Myrtle Beach detectives still believed the answers to all their questions were harbored in Renee Poole. They were all convinced she was holding something back—not telling the truth—and needed to be interviewed again. Perhaps if they pushed her harder on the specific details of the murder and plunged even deeper into her relationship with Frazier, then she might fold. With a little luck, there was a real possibility they could shake her story. If Frazier was involved, they needed to get enough damaging information from her to implicate him and make the charges stick before they went after him.
Detective Altman had driven the Pooles out to the crime scene and conducted another lengthy conversation with them about their daughter-in-law. A complete forensic analysis had already been ordered for room 604 at the Carolina Winds, once Renee and her family vacated. He understood the Pooles to say they were going to meet Renee and her family at the hotel, then drive over to the hospital and view Brent’s body.