Dance of Death

by Dale Hudson

  Perhaps that was what had motivated Renee’s parents to sneak Katie into the prison to see her mother. The Pooles were furious when they learned what had happened and threatened to cut off all ties completely. For Renee, it didn’t matter what they did. One day, she would get out of prison and get her daughter back from them.

  CHAPTER 28

  The new year promised hope for John Boyd Frazier’s defense team. In a press conference held on February 12, 1999, Jane Lovett’s voice was filled with emotion as she stood before the Winston-Salem press and declared her son’s innocence. Reading from a prepared statement from her attorneys, she announced, “My son, John Frazier, has been arrested and charged with [the] murder of Brent Poole, but he is not guilty.”

  Lovett and one of her Myrtle Beach attorneys, Tommy Brittain, described another possible suspect who may have gunned down Brent Poole and presented a police sketch of a white man of average build with light-colored, shoulder-length hair.

  “There is evidence of an identifiable suspect,” Lovett proposed. “He was observed at or near the crime scene and was dressed in all black.”

  Lovett and her son’s attorney wouldn’t elaborate about the man they were searching for, but said the information was recently developed by their private investigator, Darrell Wilson. Wilson would tell reporters the next day that he discovered the key suspect that the Myrtle Beach police had ignored.

  Referring to the composite of the blond-haired man police had constructed after talking with Christopher Hensley, Wilson said they had “just sort of deep-sixed it and lost it. They didn’t want to pursue it. But I’ve found two witnesses who put a blond-haired man dressed in black in the area of the slaying, within ten to fifteen minutes of the time it occurred. He doesn’t have a name and I need help finding him, but he’s out there somewhere.” Frazier’s family was offering a $10,000 reward for additional information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person who shot Brent Poole and resulting in the dismissal of the charges against John.

  Solicitor Greg Hembree scoffed at the idea. “The way this was handled (I received a fax after the news conference) is a whole lot more Barnum and Bailey than it is law and order. But finding another suspect near the crime scene at the time of the killing is not that impressive. For heaven’s sake, it was summertime at the beach.”

  Myrtle Beach police supported Hembree’s summation. In a written statement, they stated that no new information had been developed that would lessen their belief that John Frazier was the true perpetrator in this murder.

  Renee was running her own public-relations campaign from prison, still insisting that John Frazier was her husband’s killer. In a jailhouse interview with Christopher Guinn, of the Winston-Salem Journal, in early March, she described her time with Frazier as a fling and not a relationship.

  “Sex really didn’t happen before I knew him at least for a month,” she said. “It was a fling and that was all. There is a difference between a relationship and a fling.”

  Renee told Guinn she never had any intention of a permanent relationship with Frazier. There had been other affairs before him and she had sought Frazier for sex and attention because she was lonely and Brent was not paying her or Katie the daily attention she thought they deserved. After she had moved in briefly with Frazier, Brent had pleaded with her to return, but was feeling awful. She told Frazier she thought about killing herself and that was when he made the remarks about finding another solution.

  “He said, ‘Well, why don’t you kill him?’ He brought up a couple of ways.... I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ That is when he brought up the beach trip. He said, ‘Your anniversary is coming up. Where is he taking you?’ I told him we were going to the Carolina Winds. He said, ‘that’s a nice hotel. I have family near there.’ And he said, ‘What if someone approached you?’ And I can’t recall, he said kill him, or hurt him, or injure him. But it was to the effect of doing harm to him. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘What if somebody robbed you and did this?’ I told him he was crazy and don’t do it. ‘Don’t do anything like that.’”

  Renee said after police questioned her, she had thought about the proposal Frazier had made to her several weeks before, but she didn’t tell police. “But the thought ran through my mind, yeah, but I didn’t want to say that it was, because I wasn’t sure.” When police asked her again whether she and Frazier ever planned or conspired, or whether Frazier ever planned or said anything about killing Brent Poole, she recalled thinking about something Frazier had said that she hadn’t taken seriously. That’s when she had told them yes. When she answered that question, she said she was thinking of the what-if question Frazier had asked her weeks before, but was not admitting that she had conspired with him to do so.

  Renee admitted she had told police she had taken part in her husband’s killing, but said she had made those admissions because the police had interrogated her for hours without a break, threatened and screamed at her. They had pressured her and wore her down until she was willing to make those admissions, knowing full well they were not true and that they would get her into trouble.

  “I know now that what I told the police wasn’t true and made under duress. I don’t know whether the man in black was John. If it was, he was acting alone.” She said she loved her husband and didn’t want to leave him. “We were going to go home and renew our vows and have another baby.”

  Guinn had also talked with Renee’s former next-door neighbor Renee Bollow, who said that was not the Renee Poole she had remembered. “Renee told me that it was Brent Poole who wanted to have another baby, not her. She said, ‘No way in hell.’ That is what she told me. She also told me that she loved Frazier. That she had already talked to a lawyer about leaving her husband. If she were intent on staying with Brent, why would she do that?”

  Dee Mishler was angry when Guinn told her what her sister-in-law had said. “Renee has already made her confession. Now that she is down to having to spend the rest of her life in jail or face death, she is going to renege on it. Like the prodigal son, Brent had returned to church during his last months of life. That may have caused more tension between Brent and Renee. I would love to believe that Renee had nothing to do with his death, but I think otherwise.”

  Agnes Poole said she believed that Renee had been a manipulator from the very beginning. “She manipulated Brent. We raised Brent to go to church, but after he started dating Renee, he stopped going to church. He started bringing home R-rated movies to watch with Renee until we asked him to stop. Anytime you have someone that goes against the beliefs you know they were raised with, it is disappointing.”

  Marie Summey was livid when she read in the newspaper what Dee and Agnes had said about her daughter. “Let those of us who are without sin throw the first stone. But if you’re talking about going against someone’s beliefs, have they forgotten that Dee had an affair with a Baptist deacon in their church? Don’t they know that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?”

  Things were really beginning to heat up in North Carolina.

  The first-year anniversary of Brent Poole’s death passed and the state had still not set a trial date for either Renee Poole or John Frazier. Renee and her family still hung all their hopes on Bill Diggs. Diggs had told them they had a defendable case. In fact, he had won a similar murder case in Myrtle Beach just last year, where there was a confession and inconsistencies in the confession. The client in that case admitted he had used a .25-caliber pistol to shoot a store clerk during a robbery, but the police’s investigation later showed that the gun used was a .22-caliber pistol and he was acquitted.

  Prosecutors had shown Diggs the evidence they had, and he saw immediately the case against Renee was weak and had a lot of problems. He was so confident in his ability to win this case, he went so far as to offer Renee a job with him when she was released from prison. She took him at his word.

  Diggs also believed the change in the solicitor’s office had h
elped their case. He cited the length of time it was taking for the state to prosecute Renee’s case as an example of their difficulty to formulate enough evidence to get a conviction.

  Although the newly elected solicitor Greg Hembree had never worked on a death penalty or a murder case, he had gained experience while working as an assistant solicitor in the largest solicitor’s office in the state of South Carolina, the Fifth Judicial Circuit, in Richland County. “I prosecuted thousands of cases working in an office of twenty-plus lawyers,” the North Myrtle Beach city attorney boasted. “In that atmosphere, I absorbed the methodology to run a big office. My number one responsibility is to be not only a good trial lawyer and chief operating officer, but to be a leader. You have to set a tone and give your soldiers marching orders.”

  Hembree was fortunate enough to have hired at the beginning of the year Fran Humphries as one of his deputy solicitors. Considered one of the most honest and honorable lawyers Hembree had ever worked with, Humphries’ experience in the Lexington County prosecutor’s office would be of great help to familiarize Hembree more with the case. Once those two lawyers were into it, they would first have to decide whether to try the two suspects together or separately.

  Myrtle Beach captain Sam Hendrick said even if the trial doesn’t start anytime soon, he didn’t know that time would have any bearing on whether the state got a conviction or not.

  “Certainly, we have a very good case against them,” Hendrick said to the press. “You’ve seen the affidavits and warrants. There’s plenty of evidence to support the charges. We have a good case against them. We’ve continued to work on the case, and certainly as time wears on, it gives us the opportunity to gain some additional evidence. We still are investigating, although the charges have already been made. All we’re after is the truth.”

  The Pooles were supportive of the police and the prosecution. They said they just wanted justice done—whether here on earth, or in the hereafter.

  “I cannot imagine these two not being convicted,” Dee Mishler stated. “I can’t even think like that. They’re just evil people. I hope the jury can see that.”

  It would be another five months before the jury would get their first look at either Renee or John. After an Horry County grand jury indicted the two defendants on August 26 for murder, conspiracy to commit murder and armed robbery, the prosecution asked they be tried separately. Renee would be the first to get her day in court on Monday, November 8, 1999.

  CHAPTER 29

  The trial Court TV had already dubbed the “Love Triangle Murder” was to be held at the Horry County Courthouse in Conway. The town of Conway, Horry County’s seat, is exactly fifteen miles west of Myrtle Beach. Conway’s population in 1998 was elven thousand, as compared to Myrtle Beach’s 165,000. There are no high-rise hotels, fast-paced lifestyle, or adult entertainment clubs in Conway. People talk and move at a slower pace, and there are as many churches as there are businesses in this small Southern town. Bill Diggs wondered if his client could get a fair trial in Conway.

  Renee missed her daughter greatly and was eager to be able to tell her side of the story finally. Renee’s parents still had visitation rights, but it was very unlikely that Katie would spend any time with her mother at the Horry County Jail or at her trial. Oddly enough, Renee would celebrate her twenty-third birthday on her first day in court.

  When Dee Mishler was asked before court began how Katie was doing, she answered, “Katie is wonderful and is doing great. She has held up well. Raising Katie has kept our family strong.”

  Renee’s road to justice, however, would take a short detour.

  Two days before Renee’s trial was to begin, solicitor Hembree announced he was dropping the death penalty against Renee Poole. The solicitor believed a jury would agree with him that Renee had not only witnessed the entire scenario of Brent’s murder, but had also willingly participated in the planning of it. And most jurors would probably understand, after having been explained the legal definition of “one hand is the hand of all,” that she was just as culpable under the law as John Frazier. But would they feel comfortable enough to hand down a verdict of death? Renee was young, had no previous history of any crime and was still, after all, the mother of a 3½-year-old daughter. That had to mean something.

  Brent Poole’s family was not taken aback by the prosecution’s decision not to seek the death penalty. “It’s not an issue for us,” Dee Mishler said. “This does not change the proof and the evidence. Our family has never said we wanted the death penalty for Renee. Brent’s life cannot be brought back, regardless of what Renee’s penalty is. We do not want revenge; we just want Renee and John to pay for what they did. We want justice.”

  Renee’s mother, Marie Summey, said she was happy with the decision, but still believed that the call for the death penalty was only made to keep Renee in jail and away from Katie. If the prosecutors had not sought the death penalty, she may have been released on bond and could have been with her daughter all this time. Marie wondered what took the prosecution so long in deciding this.

  “We have put it all in God’s hands and Bill’s hands and let it go,” she said. “I know Renee is innocent and this just goes to prove how weak the prosecution’s case really is.”

  But as the opening of the trial drew closer, the prosecution had actually grown much more confident in its case. They firmly believed they could weave a basket of physical and circumstantial evidence that could convince a jury that Renee Poole and John Frazier were lovers and they had conspired to murder her husband. It wasn’t a matter of John just acting off his cuff because he wanted to have Renee. They could prove by her own admissions that they had had more than just a conversation about it. After all, she had, in the presence of her lawyer, admitted John had killed her husband, then later confessed she had helped him plan it.

  The prosecution planned on playing Renee’s taped interviews with the police and let her own statements be her own undoing. Even though they couldn’t produce the murder weapon, they were convinced they could string enough facts and technical information together to prove Brent had been killed with a gun that John previously had owned. And because she and John had acted in concert, she was just as guilty as if she had pulled the trigger.

  Of course, problematic for the defense were the statements Renee had made to the police. Her attorneys would have no alternative but to try and construct a defense around the age-old scenario that she had been coerced by the police into a confession. Diggs admitted before the trial that Renee’s life was a tangled tale, but claimed her case was a classic example of false confession. Tight-lipped John Frazier had said nothing to the police and they had not one iota of physical evidence linking him to the crime scene. Outside of Renee’s confession and a possible eyewitness, who looked shaky, Diggs thought their case against Renee was based solely on speculation and innuendo. What motive did Renee have for killing her husband? And if she had wanted to, couldn’t she have easily blamed it on Frazier and walked away?

  Although Court TV had already announced it would televise the Renee Poole trial at a later date, all the major-network news reporters still planned to cover the trial. Horry County’s judicial junkies predicted a lackluster event. The interest in the case stirred heavily from western North Carolina, but produced little-to-no interest from Horry County. Horry County’s biggest trial of the century had already taken place six years earlier in 1993 with the conviction of Ken Register. Nineteen-year-old Register had been arrested and tried for the murder of Conway High School senior Crystal Todd, a friend. Crowds of two-hundred or more spectators stood in line every day for a seat at the controversial two-week death penalty trial. In a courtroom overflowing and bursting at its seams, solicitor Ralph Wilson convinced the jury that Register was the only person in the world who could have killed Todd. Working against Register was his own admission to the crime and a collected DNA sample identifying him as the killer. The jury found him guilty, but thanks to the efforts of defense counsel Morgan M
artin and Tommy Brittain, the jurors showed mercy and spared his life.

  The Poole case, so sensational in the “Tar Heel State,” raced on toward a trial in South Carolina with much work for both sides still needing to be done. The prosecution wanted to make sure they had tied up all loose ends and had all their evidence and presentation materials ready for trial. The defense would argue then—and throughout the trial—that they felt rushed and had not been given enough time to prepare their case and schedule their expert witnesses.

  Nevertheless, when the Honorable Edward B. Cottingham called the court to order on Monday morning, nearly two hundred jurors-to-be were ready and seated in the second-floor auditorium. The old courthouse resembled a refurbished schoolhouse auditorium. The seats squeaked and squawked every time someone stood up and sat down, but it didn’t seem to bother Cottingham.

  Judge Cottingham had a reputation for maintaining firm control of his courtroom. Cottingham’s forty-five years of experience as a former defense lawyer and trial judge was nearly twice as long as Renee Poole had lived. Short and broad, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair, he was a tough, no-nonsense judge with a wit as dry and quick as a late-night comedian. Throughout his trials, especially when he got excited, he would stumble through his words or refer to people by the wrong name, prompting his clerks or the attorneys to respectfully “remind” him of his error. But lawyers from both sides of the law who had challenged and bantered with Cottingham on legal issues would be the first to say he got their respect. As predictable as a summer storm that followed a formation of dark clouds, he was known to lean across his desk and gaze down at the trial participants before issuing one of his scathing reprimands, “That’ll never happen in Judge Cottingham’s courtroom.” However, lawyers appreciated him for his consistency. They always knew there would be no monkey business of any kind in his courtroom.