Dance of Death (30 page)

The prosecution continued to hammer away that Kimberly Renee Poole was a cold-blooded murderer who had plotted the murder of her husband with her lover, and was not the grieving widow she had pretended to be. They called Kevin Todd Fain, an acquaintance of her lover's, and asked him to talk about a gun he had sold him. Kevin had met Frazier in mid-1992 and had sold him a 9mm semiautomatic TZ-75.

“I sold it to him in 1994 or 1995,” the long-haired, portly Fain stated. “I didn't shoot it a lot, but when I did, the gun jammed once.” He said when he sold the gun to John, he had given him two magazines full of Black Talons. It was a simple transaction: Fain needed the money and John wanted the gun.

Even more damaging testimony came when Fain said he had taken a small vacation with John and the others to the Myrtle Beach area. Said he had remembered it was in July, three weeks after he had sold him the gun. Oddly enough, the place they went to eat was in Barefoot Landing and called Dick's Last Resort. It was the same restaurant Brent and Renee had planned on visiting. John was related to the bartender who was working there at the time, Michael Frazier.

Both Fain and the witness to follow, Cynthia Hanson, were sure reminders that one must be not only careful of who your friends are, but also careful of what you say and do in front of them.

Cynthia Hanson and Renee had worked together as exotic dancers at the gentleman's club, the Silver Fox, in Winston-Salem. Cynthia and her boyfriend/now husband, Thomas Pedersen, had also been friends with John. She spoke of Renee's marital strife and her tumultuous relationship with John, all the time continuing to bury Renee with her testimony.

“She was having marital problems,” the attractive blonde related. “She was very unhappy, to the point that she wanted a divorce, and financially she wasn't able to, I guess, get out on her own. So John agreed to have her move in until she was financially able to get a place of her own, and at this time, they contacted a lawyer.”

Cynthia never glanced over at Renee to see how she was reacting, but Renee stared angrily at Cynthia. On her face was the look of
You are my friend and I can't believe you are doing this.

The prosecution asked Cynthia how she would describe John Frazier's feelings in relation to Kimberly Renee Poole, and she stated, “I think that he was very [much] in love with her.” When asked how she would describe Brent Poole's feelings for Renee, she repeated, “I think that he was very [much] in love with her as well.”

In a very deliberate but soft voice, Hembree asked, “How would you describe the relationship as you observed it between the defendant and her husband, from your personal observations?”

“When I would talk to her on the phone, they were a lot . . . Well, most of the time, they were at each other's throats.”

Cynthia further described in detail the conversations she had had with John on the phone and at her house the morning of the murder. She also talked about her conversations with Renee on the phone.

“I was relieved to hear Renee say John wasn't a suspect,” she said. “I had called John and had told him that. He asked to speak with Renee, if he could talk to her or if he could see her. If there was anything he could do.”

Said she had called Renee to say John wanted to see her.

“She said no right away. That this wasn't a good time. She wasn't crying. She was a totally different person. She was acting like the perfect wife, like ‘I haven't eaten. I haven't slept. The only thing that you can do is pray.'”

“Did this strike you as strange?” Hembree asked.

“Totally,” Cynthia said. “Because I knew her. I knew where she worked. I knew that she wasn't ‘Little Miss Christian.' ”

It was important for the defense to blow this witness off the stand. He needed to prove she had believed John was innocent, but the police had manipulated her into believing he was guilty. But before Diggs cross-examined the witness, he asked to take up a matter of law with the judge. Cottingham dismissed the jury and called a fifteen-minute recess so he could hear the pleadings.

Diggs proffered that Cynthia's testimony had been unduly influenced by the fact that Renee had not been granted bond and John Frazier had, and the police had used this against her in their interviews. “I would submit that this might shade or influence or color her testimony in a certain way,” he argued, “especially given the fact that she knew, this witness knew that this defendant was under the notice of a death penalty while Frazier was not.”

“No, sir,” Cottingham stated, “I'm gonna tell you right now two things are not gonna happen. We're not going into the fact that they withdrew the death penalty. That has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. We've said that about ten different times. Now, Judge John Breeden, in his discretion, refused her bond, gave him two hundred thousand dollars. That has nothing to do with any issue in this case.”

Diggs kept beating his chest, stating the police had influenced Cynthia to change her mind. “She starts out in this interview as a friendly witness for the defense, and now all of a sudden, at the end of about eight pages of transcript, she's totally against the defendant. And it's all based on what those detectives told her in that interview. She's changing her testimony and there are a lot of things, including the bond question that went into . . . that was told to his witness before she took the stand. I'm just saying I have a right to go into all of those things.”

The judge was losing his patience again with Diggs and wanted to know what relevance it had to the credibility of the witness on the stand. In typical fashion, he leaned across his desk, raised his eyebrows and scolded Diggs. After a fairly heated exchange, the judge did agree for Diggs to cross-examine the witness on interviews that she had with agents of the prosecution, but nothing about the bond or the death penalty notice.

“It's got nothing to do with any issue in this case,” Cottingham said. “Nothing to do with the guilt and innocence of this client— and you're not going to do that. That's a matter of law. . . . No, sir, not going to get into the bond, not gonna—we're definitely not gonna get into any death penalty notice.”

“I won't bring it up again,” Diggs said heavily. “Please note my exception.”

When the courtroom filled, Diggs's first question to Cynthia was “Do you remember telling one of the interviewers that you didn't believe John Frazier could do something like this because [he was]—and I apologize, but this came off of your interview tape—chickenshit?”

“Yes.”

“And why did you tell him that?”

“Because the way he always treated us; he was like a big teddy bear. He was very gentle, had a very big heart, and I, up to this point, could never believe that he would do something like that.”

“And when you say, ‘Up to this point,' what do you mean?”

Cynthia said the evidence showed differently. Based on what the detectives had told her, she changed her mind about John's innocence. They had told her John was guilty and that they could prove he'd done it.

Diggs brought out other statements where police unduly influenced Cynthia. With a lot of passion and protest to the judge, he fought—like he'd never fought before—just to get this in.

“This young lady is on trial for murder, and if she's convicted, she's gonna be sentenced probably for the rest of her life in prison.” Diggs thought it would help to remind Cottingham of that. “I'm trying to go through this and I understand the time constraints that we have, but the point is we're simply not being able to defend her the way that she needs and deserves to be.” He insisted it was appropriate to be able to go into the detailed examination of this witness as to the interview that she had with the police.

Diggs won the argument for the opportunity to beat up on the police for what they had said to Cynthia. “Did not the police say to you, ‘I'm going to tell you something, believe it or not, John shot Brent'? In reference to what you had heard, did they not say, ‘I'm going to tell you that's not the truth because Renee has confessed to us and told us exactly what's happened from Plan A to Plan B'? Didn't they say, ‘But like you know the path that you're heading down right now, don't you know you're only gonna be in the courtroom in the defense corner for a murder suspect?' ”

And after each question, Diggs asked Cynthia in some form of another, “Now, did that type of information that was relayed to you by the police detectives tend to make you change your mind about the innocence of John Frazier?”

“Yes, it did,” Cynthia admitted. She told they jury it had made her feel like she had to choose between siding with the police or siding with a murderer.

“And did that influence your opinion in the way you feel about the possible guilt of Mr. Frazier?” Diggs asked.

She said it had.

It was a small victory for the defense team and came just in the nick of time. One of the witnesses coming from Winston-Salem was going to arrive late, so the prosecution had asked if they could call Brent's mother, Agnes Poole, to the stand. After taking the oath, and sitting down in the witness chair, she looked as if she would have given her life not to be in that position. She wore a white dress trimmed with a black collar. Pinned to her dress was her angel pin.

Agnes began by telling the court that Brent was very crazy about Renee and that he loved her very, very much. “They moved in with us and everything seemed to be fine until January 1997,” she said in a raspy voice. “That was the time she was a dancer at the Silver Fox. Renee was always complaining that Brent didn't do enough for her. She just never seemed to be happy.”

Renee stared straight ahead at her mother-in-law and never batted an eye. Occasionally Agnes would dart her eyes in Renee's direction.

Agnes related an incident after Renee and Brent had just gotten back from their Chicago trip. She and her husband had kept Katie, and on May 1 (it was her daughter Dee's birthday), she and Bill had driven to a local pantry-type store, the Texaco Mart. They pulled in and immediately saw Renee's red truck. Renee was pumping gas and on the opposite side was John Boyd Frazier and his black Blazer. Two young boys sat in his front seat.

Agnes said she didn't know John at the time, but they were whispering back and forth. It looked so suspicious that she went up to Renee and asked who that man was. She said it was a friend of her dad's who had just followed her up there to make sure she didn't run out of gas. The next morning, she said, May 2, at three, Brent called hysterically. Renee had moved out on him and taken Katie and all of their furniture, except for his bed and a chest of drawers, a few other items.

Witnesses in the trial were allowed to stay in the courtroom throughout all the proceedings. Many of them had a connection with Brent Poole or the Poole family. When Agnes aired their dirty laundry, there was a collective breath taken in the courtroom. It would get worse.

“May tenth was Mother's Day,” Agnes continued, “and Brent went to church and heard a very moving message. And it really meant a lot to him. I told him later that I would get the tape for that service if he would like. And I did. I got two, one for Renee and one for Brent, and we gave them to them on the thirteenth. She moved back in on the fourteenth.

“They came over to our home on May thirtieth and they discussed going to the beach to celebrate their anniversary. They wanted to borrow some money and we loaned them three hundred dollars to make this trip to the beach. Sort of an anniversary present. We said it was a loan, but we later told him he didn't have to pay it back. He picked it up on the seventh, the day before they left.”

Hembree watched the jurors. They were hanging on Agnes's every word. “Did you have occasion to speak with the defendant and your son after they got to the beach?” he asked gingerly.

“Yes, I did,” she answered softly. “We had asked them that morning to call us when they got in and give us a phone number, and they called late that afternoon or evening and Renee came on the phone first.”

“And what did she say?”

“She immediately started complaining. She said she had a bad headache, Brent was sunburned and Katie was up her butt.”

“Kind of a bad mood?” Hembree snapped, his question dripping with sarcasm like nectar from a honeycomb.

“Yeah,” Agnes said weakly.

“Did you speak with your son?”

“Yes . . . I normally . . . for three years.” Agnes searched for words. “I would speak to Renee and try to encourage her and ask her questions, but I don't . . . I really don't to this day know why I just . . . I said, ‘Let me speak to Brent,' and that's . . . We [then] got on the phone with him.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Yes,” Agnes choked back. “He was having a great time.” “Did you ever speak with him again?”

This time, she couldn't get the words out. All she could do was shake her head no. It was the last time she had spoken to her son.

It seemed the prosecution would have pulled up stakes and quit while they were way ahead, but they kept piling it on. Renee's neighbors of two years, Jim and Renee Bollow, were two more of her acquaintances called to testify against her.

Jim Bollow had said he'd seen it all: John's black Blazer at the Pooles' house every evening Brent was working; John helping Renee move out on May 1; Renee moving back in a week later and him offering to move the boxes on her front porch, only to be told they weren't gonna be there for long.

When Bollow asked if he had had any other conversations with the defendant, his testimony became a sideshow. In Jerry Springer fashion, he related to the jury a conversation with Renee about her wanting to dance fully nude at another nightclub. That brought the defense to its feet and a strike from the judge. Strike one! Jim Bollow then spoke of another incident, where Renee and John had their genitals pierced. Both the defense and the judge were furious at that remark. Strike two! Cottingham ruled these issues were not relevant and ordered that his answers be stricken by the court. But were they forgotten? They had to have shaded Renee's character. It was yet another lesson in how to guard your privacy, lest it comes back to haunt you.