by Dale Hudson
Thomas told the police all he ever knew about John and Renee’s relationship was that they were sleeping together. Renee had planned on leaving her husband—and John had even gotten his lawyer to talk with her about it—but John never said he loved Renee and she was the girl that he really wanted to be with. Besides, John always had had a thing for strippers, taking them into his home like stray cats. Thomas admitted John was somewhat upset at first, wanting to know why Renee had moved in with him, then had moved back in with Brent. Said he was hurt and believed she had used him just to get back at her husband, but it wasn’t like the biggest thing in his life.
Thomas said he didn’t know Renee well, but she had been over to their house to visit Cynthia at least four or five times. In all those times, he had heard her talk about her husband only once.
“The first night I met her,” he explained, “she and Cynthia were going out to play pool and I was going to watch her kid for her. It was kind of odd that I was sitting on the couch and she kind of up and said, ‘Cynthia is really lucky to have a guy like you. It’s been a month or more since I’ve had sex with my husband.’ ”
In those first five minutes of conversation, Thomas said he learned that Renee and Brent were having serious trouble in their marriage. Cynthia told him afterward that Renee said Brent had forced himself on her, they were having money problems and their relationship was rotten, and that she wanted to leave him but didn’t know how to do it.
According to Thomas, John was scared and had already spoken with an attorney who had advised him to remove anything and everything in his house that had to do with Renee Poole and put it in a safe place. When Thomas asked John where he had put Renee’s things, he wouldn’t tell him. One of the items he specifically asked John about was his 9mm Glock. “John, why don’t you take your gun down to the police department and let them check it out, so at least they could clarify it wasn’t the gun that killed Brent.” John said his gun had never been fired and that wouldn’t be a problem, but when he talked to his lawyer, he had advised against it. The gun had been removed from John’s house, but he wouldn’t tell Thomas where it was hidden.
Cynthia told police Renee was acting as strange as John. She had called her the day she arrived home from the beach to break the news about Brent’s murder. In their conversation, Cynthia had asked Renee if she thought John had murdered Brent. Renee told her the killer was bigger than John and his voice was deeper. Afterward, Cynthia called John and left him a message not to worry about the police, that Renee had said it wasn’t him. John then telephoned her and asked if she would phone Renee to see if it was okay for him to call her.
“No, I’d rather not talk with him right now, “Renee said harshly. “I’d rather not see him. I’m with my family now and I have a friend of the family coming over. I really need to get off the phone.”
Renee’s snub had rubbed Cynthia the wrong way. Knowing that she and John were having an affair and were supposedly in love, it was strange for her not to want to see him. After all she had said about how much she loved him and then had left her husband for him, it just didn’t sound like Renee.
“I haven’t eaten and I haven’t slept,” Renee reminded her. “The only thing you can do for me is pray.”
Cynthia couldn’t believe her ears. Pray? Has Renee forgotten who she is? Before she could respond, Renee asked her if she would retrieve a ring she had left at John’s house. Cynthia promised she would.
Renee’s next-door neighbors Jim and Renee Bollow told the police Renee had called them the day after Brent had been killed. Renee Bollow called her husband at work and Jim rushed home. He and Brent had not only been neighbors, but were good friends. The first words out of Jim’s mouth were “Oh, my God, she did it. And she’s going to try and get away with it.”
The Bollows had also recognized some of Renee’s inappropriate behavior the Wednesday she stopped by to pick up some things from her house. They had been the Pooles’ neighbors on Blue Bonnet Court in Mocksville for 2½ years and were very much aware of their marital problems. They recalled for police many examples of the Pooles’ troubled marriage and detailed the time Renee had moved out to live with John, then came back home to Brent.
While the Pooles had been on vacation in Myrtle Beach, the Bollows had volunteered to retrieve their mail. The first thing Renee had asked them on Wednesday was “Can I get the mail? There’s supposed to be a check in there for Brent and I need it.”
Renee Bollow gave Renee her mail, and she and her husband watched as she stood there and opened it. Jim could see in one envelope there was a check made out to Brent, but he couldn’t see the amount. There was a little note with it thanking Brent for his work on a diesel engine.
Renee closed the letter and shoved it and the check back in the envelope. “Okay, this is what I needed, thank you,” she said in a rush. Jim walked her back over to her house, where he saw two men waiting.
“There were two young guys sitting there on the front porch,” Jim told his wife after Renee had left. “They looked like guard dogs.”
Renee Bollow informed her husband that they were friends of Brent’s and were there to make sure something didn’t happen to Renee.
“Wow, they’re really misdirected if they think that they are going to be protecting her,” he said sarcastically. “Wait until they find out that she could have possibly been responsible for killing their friend. They’ll think twice about protecting her then.”
The next day, Renee came back over to her house with Vincent and Tony to get some pictures of Brent. She asked Renee Bollow if they could park in her driveway because they didn’t want the press to see her.
Bollow would later tell the police that for about nine months she had seen a red car over at Renee’s every night. The driver obviously knew Brent’s working hours because he would wait around the corner, at the end of the neighborhood, until Brent left and would always leave a half hour before he returned. Frazier’s Black Blazer had started showing up about three months ago. It was the same routine as the first one: Renee’s lover inside the house with no lights on, then leaving just before Brent arrives.
Renee had told her neighbors quite a lot about her new boyfriend, John. Said she was still in love with him and had only moved back in with Brent because of the security. The Thursday before the Pooles left to go to the beach, Renee Bollow had overheard her saying to John, “I wish you’d come over, please, please come over. I love you, I don’t really know what you want to know.” A few days later, Poole had been talking on her cordless phone to John again, talking real low and telling him how much she loved and missed him. “And then she got her daughter, Katie, to tell him she loved him,” Bollow added, saying that had really upset her and her husband.
Renee had boasted to Bollow that she liked John a lot because he babied her. He would paint her toenails, wash her hair and watch Katie while she took a nap. One evening, she said, they had made sure Katie was asleep, then videotaped themselves having sex.
“I’m no goddess of marriage or anything,” Bollow had tried to tell Poole, “but things like that don’t usually last. It’s just good little nothings.”
The Bollows had never seen Brent get physically abusive. But they had seen him get angry and then trash his house when he learned Renee had been having an affair with John. After she moved back in, he had caught her talking to John over the Internet and pulled the phone cord out, then threw it against the wall.
Jim Bollow said he had talked with Renee several times after she returned home to Brent in May. Among other things, she told him she was still in love with John and that they had gone out and gotten their genitalia pierced. “Renee said it was really uncomfortable and she had wanted to take hers out, but John had kept his in for her. She said it was some kind of bond thing they had for each other.”
After hearing about Renee’s undying love for Frazier, Jim honestly asked why she had come back home.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I guess it was the mon
ey. Brent can afford me.”
Jim shook his head in disgust.
“Don’t tell Brent, but I’ve talked with an attorney,” Renee whispered, “but he told me that I could lose my daughter in custody because I just up and left one night. And that I had to get Brent to let me back in the house, and if he did that, then it means legally he accepts me and he can’t sue. Now I’m back in, so here I am.”
Jim had to turn away from her before he said something he would regret later. He started to walk away, but she grabbed him by the arm.
“Well, you know we’re fighting again. He wants me to get a regular job and I told him there’s no way.”
“Why?” Jim asked. “What do you want to do?”
Renee informed him she had been working at the Silver Fox for about ten months. She was good at what she did, but a full-nudity bar had just opened in Winston-Salem that was going to compete with the Silver Fox and other gentleman’s clubs for business. It would take some of their customers away.
“I want to work at that full strip joint,” she said with a straight face. “I’ve been talking to the girls there and they’ve been making as much money in one night as what I make in a week.”
“How does Brent feel about that?”
“He wants me to get a secretarial job or drive a truck, a courier for a junkyard delivering parts.”
“Well, you ought to think about that,” Jim advised earnestly.
“There is no way in hell I’m going to do that,” Renee shot back.
Bollow also recalled for the police an incident Renee had shared with him about Brent and John getting into a fight at the Silver Fox. It had started the weekend before they went to the beach. John was at their house in his black Blazer when Brent suddenly popped into the driveway, looking real mad. Renee and Brent had gotten into a very big fight about John being there. Finally they decided they needed to chill out and rode over to the Silver Fox for a few drinks. John came in later and he and Brent wound up having words in the parking lot. Renee told him that John had threatened to kill Brent.
Above everything else, Bollow said, it was the nonchalant manner in which Renee was handling Brent’s death that was eating him alive. “She walked over to my house on Thursday and handed me the keys to her house in case something happened while she was away. And when my wife told her again how sorry we were that Brent was dead, she said, ‘We’d been fighting like cats and dogs. You know he was a shit, but I kind of feel sorry for him.’ ”
Bollow said that comment had made him so mad that he called Crimestoppers and told them, “Y’all don’t know what she’s done yet, but Renee Poole had her husband murdered.”
Channel 45 ABC-news in Winston-Salem aired an exclusive interview with Renee that hot and humid Thursday evening. It would become a big story; the kind that would send their ratings through the roof. A polite, handsome and broad-shouldered Troy Harbison interviewed Renee and the two of them quickly developed a good rapport. He made light conversation by asking how she and Brent had met, and then a disheveled Renee, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt, looked away from the camera and started crying. She could barely get the words out that a man had robbed them at gunpoint and shot and killed her husband after he begged for his life.
“Do you know why anyone would want to kill your husband?” Harbison asked her.
Looking away from both the camera and the reporter, as if she were in shock, Renee shook her head, sniffed, then answered no. “He never did anything to anybody,” she said in a nervous and apprehensive voice. “He never did anything. He was so kind.”
Harbison wrapped up his part of the newscast and thanked Renee for her participation. Brent Poole’s murder was definitely going to be a major news story that would demand their total attention until it was finally resolved. As he was putting the final touches on his lead story for the 4:30 P.M. news, anchors from other television stations were also attempting to be the first to interview Renee. Harbison’s crosstown rival, Channel 12, could see it was going to be a killer story the moment word was out. Newshound Adam Shapiro drove out to the Summeys’ house in search of an interview.
Marie Summey spotted Shapiro that afternoon standing on her front porch, peeking in her front window. She opened the door and greeted him. When Shapiro mistakenly assumed Brandy, the girl standing behind her, was Renee, he got excited and shouted, “Is that Renee? Does she have an attorney?”
Marie was livid. She told him they had an attorney and that he needed to leave, then slammed the door in his face. Shapiro’s crew parked their car in the cul-de-sac near her house and waited for something to happen. Marie called the sheriff’s office and then phoned Shapiro’s boss at the television station. There was a prickly distrust that lingered between Marie and the reporter. When told she and Shapiro needed to make up, she snapped back, “Well, you and Adam can make up. But the next time he sticks a microphone in my face, I’m going to whip his ass.”
CHAPTER 22
Captain Sam Hendrick believed it was time to move their investigation to Mocksville, North Carolina. The Pooles lived in Mocksville, a part of Davie County in the western section of North Carolina. Centrally located between the bustling metropolitan areas of Charlotte and Greensboro on I-40, Davie County, at that time, had a comfortable population of around thirty thousand. Detective Altman called SBI agent Steve Gregory and advised him they would be coming to Mocksville on Friday.
Detectives Altman and King got off to a late start and didn’t arrive at the Davie County Sheriff’s Office until around 8:30 P.M. Someone had already leaked the word to the press and reporters were crawling around the sheriff’s office like ants at a Fourth of July picnic. As the detectives slipped in through the back door, they could see the media still crowded around the front of the police station, standing poised and ready to respond like a disassembled precision military unit. Once inside, Agent Gregory brought them up to speed on the information they had received relating to Frazier’s background checks and his criminal history.
Detective Altman called Renee’s parents’ home and asked if Renee could come to the police station for an interview. Renee called back a short time later and told him they were coming, but needed to call their attorney first. At 9:00 P.M., she and her parents arrived with attorney Victor M. Leckowitz in tow. The entourage managed to park the car and get out unnoticed, but just as soon as the press recognized Renee, they bombarded them.
Marie Summey had been taking chemotherapy treatments to combat breast cancer, but it didn’t slow her as she bravely led the way through the army of reporters and a barrage of cameras and microphones. The reporters were competing furiously, as if they were in a race vying for some kind of news Emmy. Tension mounted immediately as her little group walked together a few feet toward the police station. James Brown, reporter with News Channel 12, ran forward and closed in on them. In his quest for a story, he asked Renee, “Did the Myrtle Beach police ask you to come here?”
There wasn’t much room to navigate with the crews in front of Marie and Renee and Jack and their lawyer behind them. “No questions and there will be no questions answered,” Attorney Victor Leckowitz shouted from the rear. Marie looked like a raging bull, dragging her daughter behind her and changing directions when the reporters stood in her way. The camera didn’t display her anxiety, but she struggled to maintain a cool, calm demeanor, while inside her heart was pounding away.
Renee was forced to keep moving forward, her focus intensely oblivious to everything and everybody. She looked worried. Never looking around at all the people pressing in on her, she thought about exactly what had happened to put her in this predicament, then glanced up at the police station and nearly broke into tears. They seemed to be moving in slow motion, barely inching their way through the crowd. She could hear her heart throbbing above everything. It seemed to take forever for them to get to the front door. They scampered through the crowd, and finally distanced themselves from the reporters and their television microphones.
Marie caught her breath, walked up to the front desk and stated, with a wry smile, “We’re here to see Detective Altman.” For the first time in her life, she didn’t have to explain to the police who she was and what she was doing at the police station.
Perspiration dampened Renee’s body and her nerves jangled. Her mouth felt like she had left it open while asleep during a sandstorm.
Before the interview started, the detectives spoke with attorney Leckowitz alone and explained the reason they wanted to interview Renee again was that her story did not seem consistent. He advised them that he didn’t know the specifics of Brent’s murder because the family had just called him and asked if he could attend the interview.
Renee was read her Miranda rights and was told the interview would be recorded. The detectives didn’t want to risk losing a word of it and, to ensure there would be no mistakes, they had even brought their own recorder. As in their other interviews with Renee, they recorded it all for posterity.
“Maybe you’re thinking that you’d be spending tonight somewhere else than home,” Detective Altman began. “But let me tell you, you will be going home tonight.”
Renee breathed easier, then nodded. “Thank you.”
Altman had set the tone for the meeting. It was to be an interview, not an interrogation. They were in no way trying to bamboozle or pull a fast one over on her. Even though she had been read her rights, she was not going to be arrested. And for her protection, she had her attorney sitting beside her.
Altman began with an apology. “I’m sure you can tell by everything that’s going on up here that people are taking your husband’s murder very seriously. Things have been turned completely around and it’s almost turned into a circus. Unfortunately, the news media takes things and they run with it.”