Dance of Death

by Dale Hudson

  CHAPTER 38

  Posttrial motions to Judge Cottingham were presented the following Wednesday, November 17. In this hearing, Renee’s defense team asked for a new trial because they believed trial errors had led to her conviction. Bill Diggs told the judge that Renee’s confession should never had been admitted in court and Detective C. E. Martin should have been allowed to testify as a witness as to why and how he believed the composite pointed to another suspect other than Frazier.

  Cottingham denied the first argument with little explanation and squashed the second motion on the basis that the composite drawing fell short of the standard required by the case law in regard to third-party guilt.

  “A composite drawing that does not look like the alleged co-conspirator standing alone is not sufficient to raise the issue of third-party guilt, particularly when the individual who gave the information giving rise to the composite drawing says that ‘it does not look like the individual I saw,’” the judge dutifully informed Diggs.

  Diggs submitted a third motion for a new trial on the grounds that deputy solicitor Humphries had switched transcripts in relation to the ponytail incident.

  “It made me appear to have a lack of command of the facts in the case in the presence of the jury,” he complained to the judge. But after much discussion, it finally came out in the wash that the fault was not Humphries’ at all but Diggs’s. Diggs had never asked for a copy of the transcript from Mark Hobbs’s testimony—only a copy of the taped interview—and thus had mistakenly assumed Hobbs had referred to a “ponytail” when he listened to it. Hobbs and the prosecution both denied the statement was ever made.

  Two additional motions for retrial submitted by Diggs were in regard to certain information he had received about the jury. Juror Jarid Hardee had called Diggs at home the day after the trial to complain he had not received an answer to his inquiry about the admittance of Renee’s confession during the trial. Cottingham explained in great length how clear he had been in his instructions to the jury about Renee’s confession and this particular juror had every chance during court to ask for further explanation, but did not. Motion denied.

  The second tidbit of information passed on to Diggs was that the jury’s forelady, Gail Whitehead, attended Humphries’ church and failed to reflect that in jury selection. But once the judge heard the prosecutor’s position on the incident, he was confident there had been no wrongdoing and denied the fifth motion.

  In Diggs’s last motion for a retrial, he cited the lack of adequate time to properly present Renee’s case and cross-examine many of the witnesses.

  “I felt like when this case was being tried last week, that we were under a tremendous amount of pressure to get that case finished so that [we’d be out of the way] of all those jurors coming in here for the next case Monday morning.... The defense attorneys were tired; we were exhausted; and the impression that we both had [was] to conclude that case that night and we didn’t really have a full opportunity to do what could have been to represent this defendant.”

  Cottingham stated there was never a set time for the Poole case to conclude. The choice to continue working late on Friday night was not his choice, but had been the jury’s. And that the record would reflect that he had never told the defense to hurry up in its cross-examinations. They had been given all the time they needed and had asked for. Diggs’s last motion was denied as well.

  As expected, Diggs would later file those same arguments with the South Carolina Court of Appeals in yet another effort to get a new trial for Renee.

  Several weeks after the hearing of Renee’s posttrial motions, solicitor Greg Hembree turned his attention toward John Boyd Frazier and filed a motion in the Fifteenth Judicial Court that his bond be revoked. In a hearing on December 9 at the Horry County Courthouse in front of the circuit court, Hembree and defense attorney Morgan Martin debated the issues in the presence of Judge John Breeden.

  “Now that Renee Poole has been convicted and a jury convinced she and John had planned Brent Poole’s killing, John Frazier might decide to flee,” Hembree cautioned the judge. “Her trial became very much a trial of not only Kimberly Renee Poole, but also John Boyd Frazier. If Frazier had not done it, then Poole would have been exonerated.”

  Martin disagreed wholeheartedly. John had followed all the conditions of his bond established fourteen months ago and wasn’t planning on going anywhere. “If he was going to run, it would have been before today,” he argued. “John looks forward to answering these charges and getting on with his life. The fact that a jury has convicted Renee Poole doesn’t mean that a jury will convict Mr. Frazier.”

  Morgan Martin had been practicing law in Horry County for nearly twenty years. In South Carolina, he and trial partner Tommy Brittain’s reputations as criminal defense attorneys were legendary. Anyone who had ever looked at their track record would agree with that assessment. They had represented many clients who had been charged with murder and they excelled in that area. They both loved a challenge, were fierce competitors and always were a class act in court.

  Martin and Brittain had defended some very high-profile clients with great success, getting many of their clients either acquitted or their charges reduced. Their most recent case was one that immediately followed Renee’s and preceded the solicitor’s request to revoke Frazier’s bond. It involved a capital-murder charge where a man had supposedly killed his girlfriend by pushing her down a stairwell. In this case, Martin and Brittain amazingly got the jury to acquit their client of all charges. In another case, probably one of the most horrendous murders ever to occur in Horry County, their client had strangled his girlfriend and had set her body on fire; he should have faced the death penalty. But somehow the legal duo was so convincing they got a jury to reduce his charges from murder to voluntary manslaughter.

  John Frazier’s mother, Jane Lovett, had spent nearly $500,000 on her son’s case since he had been arrested. And she was confident the flamboyant and dramatic team of Martin and Brittain were capable of winning her son’s freedom.

  After hearing from both sides, Judge Breeden issued a ruling that John Frazier would remain free until his trial began. “You can make me look real smart, Mr. Frazier,” he told him, “or you can make me look real stupid. I suggest you make me look real smart.”

  Frazier did not comment during or after the hearing, but accepted the judge’s order that he contact the solicitor’s office weekly until his trial date, set for February 14. Judge Rodney A. Peeples, of Barnwell, already had been appointed to preside over the trial and his first show of authority was to impose a gag order. The prosecutors and defense attorneys were asked that they not comment on the trial.

  CHAPTER 39

  On Monday, Valentine’s Day, 2000, Judge Peeples asked the one hundred prospective jurors seated in the Horry County Courthouse whether they had seen, heard or read news accounts of the case. Thirty-three potential jurors indicated they had. Three said they had formed an opinion about Frazier’s guilt or innocence. Defense counsel believed jurors from Horry County had been swayed by the extensive media coverage were prejudiced and their client would not get a fair trial if these jurors heard the evidence. Martin had requested a change of venue or that jurors from another county be brought in to decide the case. Peeples declined Martin’s request, saying to one juror who said she had read stories about the slaying, “None of us live in a vacuum. We all are creatures.” He believed the jurors selected could give Frazier a fair trial. It took until nine o‘clock that night, but seven women and five men were finally chosen as jurors and two alternates selected.

  The same witnesses that testified at Renee’s trial were expected to testify at Frazier’s. Peeples had not decided yet if the prosecutors would be allowed to use Renee’s statements to the police where she identified him as the killer. If convicted, Frazier would be looking at the same sentence as Renee’s.

  Renee had also been subpoenaed to testify at John’s trial, but her attorneys told the press not to e
xpect anything from her because it could jeopardize her appeal. “Poole will not testify at Frazier’s trial because prosecutors have no authority to compel her to testify,” Diggs told reporters before she appeared in court. “She doesn’t know who the shooter is anyway. . . . She will not take a position that is inconsistent with [the] position she took at trial.”

  Renee’s testimony could have flattened Frazier’s case like roadkill.

  John Frazier walked into the courtroom smiling, with his head held high. He was already a large man, but he looked as if he had added an additional forty pounds since his bond hearing.

  As in Renee’s trial, there was no rush of crowds from Myrtle Beach or any large media events at the beginning of this trial. Court prognosticators took in consideration a jury had already believed Frazier was guilty after hearing testimony in Renee’s trial and were giving him only a faint hope for an acquittal.

  Deputy solicitor Fran Humphries was the leadoff hitter again for the prosecution and used many of the same buzzwords he had used in Renee’s trial. The prosecutor, by now, had put this case to memory and knew it better than he knew the back of his hand. He revealed to jurors that the two defendants in this case had given misleading statements to investigators after the shooting to cover up their plot and then summed up the facts proving that John Boyd Frazier certainly had the motive, reason, and ability to kill Brent Poole. And the evidence in this case would substantiate that Renee’s confession to a plot of murder with Frazier was much more than the innocent panic of a woman suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder at having witnessed her husband’s shooting on the beach.

  “It is absolutely horrific what John Boyd Frazier has done for the love of a bad woman, Kimberly Renee Poole.” Humphries outlined the motivations behind this. “People get divorced all the time. . . . In this case, Kimberly Poole wanted the house and home. John Boyd Frazier wanted Kimberly Renee Poole. Kimberly Renee Poole wanted her child. John Boyd Frazier wanted Kimberly Renee Poole. In order for Kimberly Renee Poole to have what she wanted, William Brent Poole had to die. . . . She makes love to her husband on the dunes of that beach and then walks him to the arms of John Boyd Frazier, where he is shot once under the chin and in the head.”

  The prosecutor refuted the defense’s claim there was no physical evidence that connected John Frazier to Brent’s murder. “Circumstantial evidence is just as good as physical evidence, if it comes together properly.”

  Morgan Martin had stood before a jury many times to counter the claims of a prosecutor. If the jury was going to believe his viewpoint, he would have to get them to disagree with what the police and the prosecution said the facts meant. He would have to prove the evidence in this case showed the police certainly had their own agenda. They had their own set of problems. They had their own motives for pinpointing his client as the murderer.

  “There’s absolutely no physical evidence linking John Boyd Frazier to this crime,” Martin told the jurors. “No fingerprints, no gun, no DNA tests, no hair, or fibers.” In his easy conversational style and a heavy Southern drawl, which was very appealing to jurors, he assured them the police had arrested the wrong man. “There is a lot I would submit that a man would do for a woman, but there is not evidence John Frazier killed Brent Poole. John Frazier is wrongfully accused.”

  And second, if the jury was going to be convinced his client was innocent, Martin would have to substantiate the reasons a desperate woman had agreed to a murder plot in the first place. He would have to submit that Renee was a well-known liar and point out, one by one, the many lies she told not only to the police, but to her husband, her lovers, her friends and her family.

  The jury would have to see that Frazier at the time was a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor who was only looking for a good time. He had had a brief relationship with Poole, but he certainly wasn’t in the market for a wife. Especially one with a jealous husband and a two-year-old kid.

  Finally Martin had to put out the brush fires of doubt that Frazier was not home the night of the murder and out looking for an alibi. He wanted the jury to keep in mind that Frazier was at home alone on the night of the murder. Martin would argue and fight for the truth of that fact, suggesting to the jurors, “You can’t prove that you were home, if you were alone.”

  In the first day of testimony, there were no surprises from the prosecution’s witness list. The same four Myrtle Beach police officers and two residents described the crime scene along the beach and how Brent’s wallet was found in a nearby neighborhood to where he was killed. But it was the seventh witness for the prosecution that brought a wave of anticipation and bewilderment in the courtroom.

  As promised by the prosecution, Renee Poole was called to the hot seat. Dressed in jailhouse blues with a white T-shirt underneath and the sleeves hanging out, she had been escorted through the back of the courthouse and a rear elevator in handcuffs, shackles and belly chains. Her hair was pulled back loosely behind her head and she wore no makeup. Before she walked into the courtroom and took her place on the witness stand, her hardware was removed and she was joined by her attorney Bill Diggs.

  Renee quickly glanced at Frazier before she sat down beside the judge’s bench. She looked downward as Diggs explained to the judge that her case was being appealed and that her testimony might threaten the success of the appeal. “She will invoke her right not to incriminate herself,” he said.

  With the jury out of the room, Renee said, looking briefly again at Frazier, “I don’t wish to testify.” Once the jury returned, Renee invoked the Fifth Amendment. While she spoke, Frazier looked directly at her until she was dismissed and escorted away in handcuffs by two deputies. As she made her way out of the courthouse in chains again, and back to the waiting patrol car outside, her father and a family friend briefly walked alongside and talked with her.

  Dee Mishler said she was disappointed that Renee had decided not to testify. “She never ceases to amaze me,” she said after her sister-in-law left the courtroom. “John Frazier still comes first with her, instead of her daughter, Katie.”

  Having had enough excitement for one day, the jurors then listened to the testimony of Dr. Edward L. Proctor, forensic pathologist, who told them about Brent’s wounds and injuries to his skull and brain. Beach patrol officer Scott Brown followed him with a replay of the night Renee flagged him down and told him her husband had been shot.

  The third day of Frazier’s trial, the prosecution began smoothly enough with testimony from Lieutenant Bill Frontz and a taped conversation with Frazier from June 10, 1998. Jurors would hear Frazier on the tape respond, “Oh, my God. Oh, shit!” when Frontz told him Brent Poole “was no longer with us.”

  The prosecution relaxed a little. They had revealed to the jury the true nature of the defendant and let them hear Frazier’s own words when told he was a suspect in Brent’s killing. “My heart’s going now,” Frazier had responded, denying that he was the killer. Sounding startled, the jurors listened to him tell Frontz, “True, there was no love lost between us by any means because of the relationship that Renee and I had. But I mean, I’m not that, I’m not that type of person.”

  John showed no emotion as the jurors listened to the tape and while Agnes Poole glared at him the entire time. Even if the jurors had not already made up their minds that he had murdered her son in cold blood, she had no doubts about it.

  During the taped interview, Frazier said he knew that the Pooles were planning to travel to Myrtle Beach to celebrate their third wedding anniversary, but he didn’t know what hotel they would be staying at. He also admitted to Frontz that he and Renee had had an affair, but he said he was at his house in Winston-Salem when Brent was shot. Renee had had affairs with several other men during her marriage, but he didn’t think that any of them would be jealous enough to shoot her husband. His memory of the day of Brent’s murder was that he had talked on the telephone with a friend, Thomas Pedersen.

  The prosecution would go after that statement to verify that Jo
hn was searching for an alibi. Hembree later elicited the testimony of Thomas Pedersen, his questions continuing, each one leading to the next until Pedersen answered that he had not talked with John that day. It was the following day after Brent’s murder when police had called and questioned him about John’s possible involvement that he had spoken with him.

  John leaned slightly forward, listening to his best friend with his eyes steady and his lips slightly parted. Pedersen was not cutting him any slack.

  Hembree then showed jurors copies of a daily planner taken during a February search of Frazier’s home in North Myrtle Beach. He asked the jury to take notice that Frazier had recorded March 13 as his and Renee’s first date. Other dates of special interest to them were March 24, their first sexual encounter, May 1, the day she moved into his Winston-Salem home, May 12, the day she moved back with her husband, and June 9, the couple’s wedding anniversary and day Brent Poole was killed.

  The prosecution, courtesy of the Myrtle Beach police, had once again choreographed the trial so that witness testimony was followed by an audiotape or visual display that either confirmed or refuted the defendant’s claims to the police. The audiotapes played in the courtroom would prove the most damaging blow against the defense’s claim their client was innocent. Even though Renee had chosen not to testify against her former lover, the jury would now hear her interview with Sergeant King. They would be able to judge for themselves and decide from the actual interview if Renee’s words and opinion were true as to whether the man dressed in black, who had shot her husband, was John Frazier. The courtroom was quiet, except for the sounds of Renee testifying as to what had happened the night her husband was murdered and admitting John could have been the murderer. The words that the defense had feared lingered in the minds of jurors. As the tape played accusing John of murder, he would wipe the sweat from his forehead, then look back down at the floor.