Dance of Death (24 page)

Poole still insisted she was innocent. Although she admitted having affairs during their marriage, she told Leach she loved Brent, did not kill him and did not plot to have him killed. She said she would rather risk receiving the death sentence by going to trial than plead guilty.

In a lengthy, front-page feature complete with photo spreads of Renee, Leach wrote that Renee planned on testifying at her trial. “I'm not scared to die as long as my daughter knows her mommy is innocent. I don't want to die for something I did not do.”

Renee had said one of the few highlights in her life was talking with Katie on the phone. She was fully aware that Brent's parents had gained temporary custody of Katie and was brokenhearted she couldn't be with Katie on her third birthday. She had sent Katie a birthday card, a letter and drawings she had drawn of a clown, a unicorn and a cake.

“I cried,” Renee said.

But more than anything, Poole hoped she would be at home with her daughter on Katie's next birthday. She told Leach that if she was found not guilty, she planned to return home, go to school and study computers. “I'm not going to have negativity run me out of the town I was brought up in,” she said.

Even if Diggs had filed a motion for a speedy trial before a judge, it would have been impossible to pull together a trial in January or February, most likely early summer. At last, Renee's and Brent Poole's families agreed on something in that they both thought it was not fair that Frazier was free while Renee was still in jail. Her parents said that Renee should have been released on bond, too, while Brent's family wanted them both in jail until their trials started.

In November, the estate of William Brent Poole filed a civil suit against Kimberly Renee Poole and John Boyd Frazier for the wrongful death of Brent Poole. But it never moved forward and was eventually dropped.

As the holidays approached, Renee reminisced about her favorite Christmas.

“It was in 1997, when Katie was two. She was fascinated with the lights and decorations, and got excited about ripping into her presents. I bought Brent several model Mack Trucks from Danbury Mint and Franklin Mint. I ended up spending twenty-five hundred altogether on him. Just the look on his face was enough to make me happy. That was our first Christmas in our new house and our first tree. We went tree shopping and found a six-foot tree that was fat. Brent wanted colored lights, so I let him have his way with that and let him handle decorating the porch and bushes while I decorated the tree. I'd been busy buying Disney collectibles ornaments and a Winnie the Pooh tree topper. I didn't receive any gifts from Brent that year, but it didn't matter to me. Just seeing his and Katie's excitement was my gift.”

But now, in the worst Christmas of all, she'd lost Brent, missed Katie and was away from her whole family. She was lonely and in a jailhouse, surrounded by people she didn't know and she didn't care to know. The jail was filthy and cold; stinky and unsanitary. She had been there long enough to see some people come and go, and it unnerved her to think that these people had freedom but chose to keep coming back to jail. She had no choice but to stay in her private hell hole, but she just wanted to go home. Brent was gone and it hurt. But it also hurt her that Katie was without both of them. Katie was a part of him, and if she could just be with her, it would make things a little easier.

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.

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 helped 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.