by Dale Hudson
“John is adamant about the fact he’s not guilty. The only reason he’s been arrested is because of the statements made by the lady, who is an established schemer and an admitted liar.”
Martin said he came to his conclusion about Renee Poole because of what he had read in the police report. She had changed her story repeatedly.
“I think if you read the warrants and you put together the facts that she has told several different stories to the police about what had happened, it leads you to the inevitable conclusion that she is capable of telling a lie and she has lied to the police.”
Martin made it clear there were no plans for any plea arrangement with the prosecutor to testify against Renee. John was an innocent man, who had been wrongly accused, and was going to South Carolina, hoping for better things. Hoping to win his freedom there.
Frazier’s attorneys said it best when they hoped for better things for their client. The press was having a field day with his case, giving it twenty-four-hour coverage, and they were ruthless in their reports on him. Nearly every day, there was a newspaper article or television broadcast that portrayed John as a violent and volatile person, a real Jekyll and Hyde personality. Those who had any dealings with John were saying he was not a peaceful man. Stories of Frazier having assaulted, threatened, harassed or shot at others made the news nightly, attesting to his violent nature.
Tony Allen, of the MBPD, had taken a phone call from an anonymous caller before Frazier had been arrested, which later turned out to be the bartender at the Silver Fox Gentleman’s Club, Bruce Wolford. Wolford said he didn’t want to give information and the person (Frazier) turn out to be innocent: “I don’t want one of my friends really pissed-off at me. You know, thinking I’m trying to do something against him. I wouldn’t want to be killed like Brent. You know, if this person done it, then I’m actually nervous about being around him.”
Wolford claimed to be one of John’s best friends, but the word was out about a $50,000 reward, and that was a lot of money to him. Real money. Enough to consider turning in his own mother—so, why not his best friend?
Even though John knew Wolford also had had an affair with Renee, he did not let what had happened in the past affect his friendship with Bruce. All the time he was under suspicion, he was counting on Wolford and his wife to standup for him in court. Wolford’s wife would later tell police that John had hinted to her he needed an alibi and she could provide that.
Wolford told Allen he no longer trusted Frazier.
“As a matter of fact, I’m sitting here with my shotgun laying beside me on the couch, because I’m afraid if that person done it once, then he’ll do it again,” he said.
Wolford informed Detective Allen that he was friends with all three people involved. At one time or another, he had talked with Brent, Renee, and John via the Internet. Said he worked at the Silver Fox, where Renee worked, and that John was a customer there—and that’s how he had met him.
“I work with John’s computer. He comes around my house. He and Renee came together to see my wife when she was in the hospital. Renee was supposed to have been with her husband. I got e-mails to prove all that.”
“Uh-huh,” Allen said, in an easygoing manner.
“They are actually what you call carbon copies. You know, where you can send an original to one person, then make a carbon copy to a second person. I got one of them printed out right here. It talks about where John is pissed-off because she moved out from living with her husband to move in with him and then went back home to her husband. It also says Renee went back to her husband because he was threatening to take her kid away from her for leaving him. I can read it to you, if you want me to.”
“Sure, go right ahead,” Allen encouraged him.
Wolford read the entire May 31 e-mail. Parts of it, Allen jotted down:
I don’t know who is the dumber of the two of us. One, for me trying to believe she really wanted me. Or, two, for you being so stupid that you really want her to be your wife and actually trust that she won’t keep doing this again and again like she has done so many times in the past and that you don’t know about it.
Frazier told Poole he had seen some of the video footage of Bruce and Renee. He said he felt sorry for him believing they could make their “so-called marriage” work. “She’s cheated on you with me and others, and me with you, so what makes you think she is still going to be faithful to you?” he posed the question, then answered it with, “She never did stop coming over to my house for the past three weeks.”
At the bottom of the e-mail was an invitation:
“If you want to talk about a few things that I know, send me an e-maiI. I don’t think Renee would ever tell you all. I told you, Renee, not to cross me.”
A threat.
“Wow!” Allen said in an elevated voice. “Now, you have all this on hard copy?”
“I have this printed in front of me,” Wolford said, like it was the winning ticket in the million-dollar lottery. “I have it still on my hard drive in my computer. I’ve actually made copies on floppy disks.”
Wolford said he had been conversing with his friends on an Internet program called ICQ. Whenever one of his friends logged in, their name appeared on his buddy list. He admitted he was a do-it-yourself hacker and had confiscated some of John’s e-mails. Those messages he had saved on floppy disks and volunteered to send copies to Allen for review.
“Let me boot my computer up and I’ll read that dialogue to you where John’s saying he’s not worried. That he has a gun and tried to talk Renee into meeting him somewhere, but Renee was afraid he was going to kill Brent. I mean, I have that actual dialogue set up, too. To where it’s obvious you know who said what.”
“We’re definitely interested in what you have,” Allen said.
“I seen Brent last week,” Wolford continued. “Him and Renee came into the club. John was also there. I do know for a fact that Brent and Renee came into the club one night and John walked with a pair of Renee’s underwear in his back pocket hanging out, just to sort of tease Brent along.”
“Was May thirty-first the last e-mail that you received?” Allen asked.
“That was the last e-mail that I received from John along this line. I do know John called into work Monday night, June 8, the night before Brent was murdered, and was taking a couple of days off from work.”
“Were you there when the call was made?”
Wolford said he wasn’t there when the call was made. “But I do know he called into work and didn’t work those two nights. He usually calls me like every day or every other day for help with his computer. He didn’t call me those few days, which I found was unusual. And he’s made several calls here to my answering machine lately. I haven’t been able to actually answer the phone, but it seems like he’s wanting to talk to me or my wife about something very important.”
Allen asked him, “How long has this problem been going on between these three people?”
“I’d say at least a month or so. My wife was in the hospital and had her gallbladder taken out. Renee and John came to see her. My mother was there when they showed up and met them. She thought John was Renee’s husband.”
Wolford also related an incident where Brent and John had a disagreement at the club. He said it was about two weeks ago that Brent and Renee came into the Silver Fox.
“They had just gotten back together and Brent was really pissed-off. He wasn’t talking to anybody. He wasn’t even talking to me. When he left, he just happened to run into John in the parking lot. I was being kind of nosy and just asked him what had happened.”
Wolford just happened to have a copy of the conversation and read it to Detective Allen. The e-mail was from John, dated June 4, 1998, at 2:50 A.M. Bruce had asked John if he was worried about Brent, and he replied:
I ain’t worried about shit. I just [think] it’s funny as Hell. He told Renee he was going to kill me or at least beat my ass if he ever saw me out in public again.
&nbs
p; In that same e-mail, John also wrote:
I was trying to get Renee to show up somewhere preplanned with him but she wouldn’t do it. She’s afraid I’d kill him just for the hell of it.
“Wait a minute.” Allen stopped him. “Back up. John e-mailed you and said, ‘I was trying to get Renee to show up somewhere preplanned, but she . . .’” Allen was writing it all down as fast as he could.
Wolford volunteered to e-mail him a copy. “‘Somewhere preplanned with him . . .’ ” He filled in the blanks. “‘But she wouldn’t do it. She’s afraid I’d kill him just for the hell of it.’”
Allen cupped his hand over the phone, called Chief Hendrick to his desk, and spoke with Hendrick about what Wolford had just shared with him. They agreed it was a good idea to get this information from Wolford before he changed his mind. “We’ve got some investigators up there now,” Allen informed Wolford. “Can I get one of them face-to-face with you so you can show him that e-mail and talk with him about it?”
Wolford agreed and gave Allen directions to his house and his telephone number. “Like I said, I don’t want everybody knowing what’s going on with me. Because I know everybody in this situation, and if something turns out and they are innocent, I don’t want to lose my friends over it. Like I said, I want to remain anonymous on this if possible to where I don’t get myself in the middle of something. You see, I just called the club earlier today trying to find out my schedule and was told by one of the managers that there were some people up there asking questions about me and my wife and John Frazier and our relationship with the Pooles. Said his name was Frontz.”
Allen informed him that was Lieutenant Frontz. One of the MBPD in Winston-Salem who was investigating the case.
“Well, I’ll need to talk with him,” Wolford insisted. “There’s some other things in here he’ll want to know. Something about a gun.”
The detective’s heart raced. “About a gun?”
“Yes. Where I left off it says: ‘She’s afraid I’d kill him just for the hell of it, ’and I said, ‘Tell her a cop will be watching and get his [Brent’s] ass arrested.’ He goes, ‘Hell no. They might try to arrest me too. Do you really think that scrawny little fucker could take me? Besides, I’ve got too many guns with me all the time.’”
“Well, that’s stuff we need to know,” Allen assured Wolford. “I’ll have one of the detectives give you a call.”
Wolford said he had it all on floppy disks and the police could take it with them if they wanted. He later mailed thirty-seven pages of copies from chat room conversations with John Boyd Frazier and Renee Poole and a videotape of him and Renee having sex. Police learned from the copies of Wolford’s chat room conversations that Wolford and his wife were involved in computer sex with the Pooles.
Lieutenant Frontz visited Bruce Wolford after Frazier had been arrested and was delighted that he was still willing to assist in the investigation.
“Like I said, I don’t mind cooperating with you,” he assured Frontz. “A crazy asshole like him needs to be put away somewhere. The way I see it, I can understand situations with disagreements and arguments and fighting. And, you know, occasionally you do get into a fistfight, but I don’t see no reason to take a gun out and kill somebody over some shit like that.
“And I damn sure don’t want to even consider myself to be a friend of somebody like that. Before I found this out, I considered him to be a friend, but after thinking about all this shit, I don’t care if he sits there and they electrocute him on the spot. If you can prove him guilty, go for it. In my personal opinion, he is guilty.”
If Bruce would have been a solid witness, the prosecution could have counted on him to help convince a jury that Frazier was the only man in the world that had reason to kill Brent Poole. The only problem was, there were dozens of men, including Bruce, who had had sex with Renee and could have wanted Brent out of the way.
Darrell Wilson, a private investigator from North Carolina hired by Frazier’s mother, had investigated the case thoroughly and concluded Wolford to be as strong a suspect as John Frazier. The savvy ex–police officer had tracked down and interviewed not only Wolford, but many of the witnesses. During his interview with Chris Hensley, Wilson showed him the computer-generated composite completed by the MBPD, along with color photos of Wolford. When asked if Wolford could have been the person he passed on the beach, Hensley replied, “Yes, that could possibly have been him.”
“Does he most favor that composite?” Wilson needed to know.
It was the first time Hensley had ever seen a photo of Wolford along with the composite. He told Wilson from what he remembered of the man’s body—the height, the hair and face—everything in the photos clearly resembled the composite.
Wilson had also spoken with another of Wolford’s girlfriends, Amy Marie Dudas. She had dated Wolford until she found out he was married to Courtney. When she broke up with him, he wouldn’t leave her alone and eventually threatened to kill her. Dudas had seen several of Wolford’s weapons, including a semiautomatic pistol with a slide on the top. She was so afraid he would make good on his threats that she had reported him to the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department. She also informed Wilson that he had several CDs with e-mails he had exchanged with John and Brent on it and had buried them in the woods in his backyard. Wolford had told her he was scared someone was after him.
Dudas said that she and Courtney had gotten Wolford committed to Charter Mandala in 1997 because he told them he was crazy. He said he loved Dudas and Courtney, but didn’t know whom he wanted to be with.
But the MBPD were not that concerned about Wolford’s screwed-up love life. Their investigation had led them to believe he was just one of only God-knows-how-many scheming bartenders preying on innocent women. The way they saw it, Wolford didn’t care whom he hurt or used as long as they gave him the sexual attention and pleasure he desperately craved. The thirty-minute videotape of him and Renee having sex he had mailed to police was indicative of that fact. It was enlightening, to say the least, but the detectives didn’t believe after having seen that tape that Wolford was so enthralled with Renee he would want to kill Brent to be with her. To Wolford, Renee was just another piece of ass.
The detectives were also aware that Wolford was hurting for money. They had been told that Courtney had been admitted to Charter Hills in Greensboro for drug addiction, and the weekend after she was released, she got into a nasty car accident and was rushed to the hospital. In late June, he told the police she was in her Miata and had rolled it after taking down a light pole. Said she was now in intensive care, suffering from multiple fractures in her skull, a crushed shoulder and a punctured lung.
“I’d heard one of the girls at work, Cynthia Hanson, is supposed to be a character witness for John,” he told Lieutenant Frontz. “She came to ask me and Courtney if we would talk to his attorney. I really don’t want to. I have no reason to, you know. Why should I talk to his defense when I’m dead sure he’s the one that done it and I’m not gonna help the damn defense at all. The last thing in the world I’m gonna. . . . Well, it’s just that they will try and turn my words around.”
Wolford was about as paranoid as a woman who sat in the stadium at a football game and claimed the players in the huddle were talking about her. Said there had been some strange things happening at his house: somebody tampering with and setting his alarm system off and disconnecting his phone lines.
“I mean, there is some weird shit going on,” he said, looking around him to see if anyone was listening, “And I just got nervous about some things.... [But] I’ve kept my ears open. Like I said, me working in the bar, everybody comes in and tells me everything. [And] I wanted to ask you if I was eligible for any part of that reward at all? I know they offered it up at one time, and I know they said something about they were keeping it for their little girl.”
“Yeah, and they still are, Bruce,” Frontz told him. “It’s the family’s discretion of what or how much they are gonna pay. Bu
t they have assured us they still have the reward money. It’s still there.”
Wolford was pleased to hear it was still a possibility. “Uh-huh. I didn’t know if I was eligible for anything like that or not. Because right now, it would really help my hospital bills.”
Frontz hated to rain on his parade, but told him the Pooles were holding the money now because arrests had already been made. “They are holding the money for what they think is gonna be helpful in the courtroom proceeding and in the trial. Again, it’s gonna be up to them, but it is our understanding that this money is not gonna be disbursed until the trial.”
Wolford said he understood that completely. He was just asking a question, and hoped the detective understood that was not the real reason he was helping out.
Another ex-lover of Renee’s had contacted the police, but not for the reward money. He just wanted to make sure he wasn’t being singled out as a murder suspect. Robert Cummings had been brushing his teeth when he heard the news about Brent’s murder. Said he nearly swallowed his toothbrush. While Brent was at work, he had driven his red Eagle Talon over to her house many times and even gone to the park with Renee and Katie.
“I stop[ped] seeing Renee three weeks before the murder,” Robert told Detective Beatty over the telephone. “I seen this coming on and I just barreled out pretty much. It was such a strange relationship. I don’t mind a love triangle, but not a love square. I couldn’t cope with her other boyfriend.”
“Did you ever think something like this would happen?” Beatty asked.
“No. I was shocked out of my mind, especially when she got arrested. Running around on your husband is one thing, but killing somebody that’s a whole lot different.”
“So, did you ever talk with John?”