Dance of Death (29 page)

“That's correct.”

Now that Diggs finally had a bite into him, he wasn't about to let up. “And you knew that she did not know that they weren't true?”

“That's correct.”

“All right. And why did you do that? Why did you . . . I say lie . . . Why did you tell her certain things you know that were not true?”

“Because what we were looking for with the defendant was the truth—”

Diggs didn't let him finish, and inserted the words “a confession.”

The prosecution protested. “Whoa, Judge. Whoa, whoa, whoa. He's got to be allowed to answer his question.”

“Yes, sir,” Cottingham agreed. “You didn't permit him to finish his answer.”

“Like I said,” Altman continued, “what we were trying to find from the defendant was the truth, and telling her certain things would make her feel more comfortable, and if she thought we knew things that were true, then she would tell us the truth.”

When Diggs accused Altman of staging all the interviews for late at night, he said that it wasn't true. He stated there were no promises made to Renee. It was just the way it happened. They hadn't specifically set up times to talk to her. It was just when she was brought to the police department. Just the way the facts of the day panned out.

Diggs kept at him. “You knew it would be the weakest, the most vulnerable time for her, did you not?” When Altman disagreed, he quickly shot back, “And you would not have done that, had it entered into your mind? You would not have wanted to take advantage of her?”

“I would not have taken advantage of her if I [had] interviewed her at seven o'clock in the morning,” Altman insisted. “It might have been too early and she wasn't awake. It's just that's the time she got there. That's the time we interviewed her.”

“Okay, so your testimony is these late-night—three in a row—interviews with Renee were not done by design?”

“No, they were not.”

“And they were not done to get a tactical advantage over her?”

“No,” Altman said again.

Altman then told Diggs the reason why Renee was interviewed again—even though she had told who the shooter was and told all the details she could remember. What bothered them the most was how John Frazier knew they were in Myrtle Beach and at what hotel they were staying. They speculated she knew more and was withholding that information. They felt she knew how he got there, and when and where he was supposed to appear on the beach.

Diggs attempted to trip him up. “Okay, and so you were thinking, ‘She knows Frazier might have acquired knowledge of this trip through some source,' and so you had her there from ten-thirty until midnight, raising your voice at her. I'm not gonna say screaming, but forcing her to go ahead and tell you the truth about the case, even though she wasn't a murder suspect.”

“We did raise our voices at her,” Altman agreed, “but to get her to tell us the truth, which she did.”

“And your testimony is that you did that because Renee's parents, of all people, told you you'd have to do that, earlier the previous day; is that correct?”

Altman said it was the information they had received.

“Who told you you had to be rough with Renee to get her to tell you the truth?”

“Well, nobody told me to be rough,” Altman confessed. “They just said you had to be more assertive with her.”

At this point, Diggs got everyone confused, including himself, as to during which interview the note had been passed from Sergeant King with that information from her mother on it. It had been a long day for everyone.

Diggs then tried a new approach he hadn't used, but probably wished he had, especially during King's testimony. He had Altman read from several excerpts of the transcript and comment on them. Each question he asked was directed at Altman's intent to coerce Renee into a confession.

“‘I'm just saying I don't want you to find yourself in a bind from what he's telling us, because I'm telling you he's saying it's all your idea,'” Diggs had Altman read his own words to Renee. He then asked, “That is an absolute false representation, isn't it?”

Altman admitted John Frazier had never told them that. And that he had told Renee something that wasn't true.

A few questions later, Diggs fell into the same trap as he had with King, when the answers didn't come out quite as he had hoped, prompting the judge to call him down again. “Wait a minute, now,” Cottingham warned. “You can't require him to answer the way you want him to answer. He's entitled to answer you and you can ask the next question.”

“He's entitled to answer and explain,” Diggs stated.

“No, sir,” Cottingham corrected him. “He can answer and explain, but not yes or no if he doesn't care to. There's no rule that says he's got to say yes or no.”

Diggs was able to bounce back and get Altman to admit a second time to where he hadn't told her the truth. Reading again from the transcript, “‘We've talked with him. We know the whole deal. But make yourself come clean of all this, Renee. This is the only thing you can do right now, because I'm telling you, we've talked with him. We know the whole deal. But we've got to hear it from you. Save yourself, don't make him come out smelling like a rose, because he's a piece of shit.' ”

Diggs jumped on Altman with both feet. “The fact of the matter is, again you hadn't talked to Frazier on the first instance about this shooting, had you?”

“No, but I had talked to him before she was in there,” Altman tried to explain.

“But he certainly hadn't come clean, according to your statement here, had he?”

“No. He had not told us anything about the incident.”

“He didn't tell you anything?”

“That's correct,” Altman answered.

Diggs thought he had him up against the ropes again. “And you were telling another untruth to Renee to get her to do what?”

“To make her feel more uncomfortable and to make her think that we knew what he had told us and, therefore, then she would tell us the truth.”

Diggs then accused Altman of making promises to Renee in order to get her to confess. In a succession of readings, he pointed out six different incidents perceived to be promises made by Altman to help her out if she confessed.

Altman said he knew he couldn't help her, but he wanted her to feel comfortable enough to tell him the truth.

“You told her you were gonna help her,” Diggs admonished, “but you admit, not only is that another lie, but you didn't want to help her. You wanted to put her in either the electric chair or prison for life?”

Altman insisted all he wanted was the truth.

Diggs took another stab at him. “You wanted her to feel comfortable by lying to her and making promises to her; isn't that correct?”

“I made no promises to her,” Altman defended himself. “I wanted to talk to her so she would talk to us and tell us the truth.”

“I'm not gonna beat a horse to death at this point over it,” Diggs concluded. “But you did say, ‘I want to help you,' in your testimony, and is that not a promise?”

“I don't perceive it as a promise,” Altman said. “There's nowhere in here that I said that I would promise her anything.”

Before he was finished with Altman, Diggs would accuse him and Lieutenant Frontz of playing good cop and bad cop, too. He also claimed Altman had used Renee's daughter as a trump card: “You're not gonna lose your daughter if you're honest,” Altman had said to Renee in her last interview before she was charged with murder.

“You gave her your version of the truth and that was he planned it,” Diggs attempted to point out to the jurors in his last questions to Altman. “And that was the only way that she was not going to lose her daughter was to admit that?”

At first, it appeared Diggs was striking a chord pleasing to the jurors. While they had seemed restless during King's tedious chiding, they seemed reenergized during his document-f illed cross-examination of Altman, in spite that it was nearly 6:00
P.M
. It looked as though Diggs had finally found a style that worked.

However, would the jurors actually believe that an adult like Renee, the mother of a 2½-year-old then, was so naive as to believe that if she confessed to conspiring to murder her husband, then the police would see to it she wouldn't lose custody of her daughter, or that they were there to help her construct her story so as not to go to jail? It was not unconstitutional for police to trick the defendants into a confession. Surely, every juror had seen, read or heard about bail jumpers being rounded up by police with the promise of being sweepstakes winners?

The next witness of the evening was Mike Fultz, who had lived with John Frazier's friends Bruce and Courtney Wolford. Fultz testified that in March or April 1998, John and Renee had been over at Bruce's home with a 9mm pistol and he had overheard a conversation between them after dinner about Brent and Renee going to the beach. He was asked to pen the date on the Styrofoam board.

Other witnesses called to the stand were Calvin Harris, a senior manager at Champion who supervised John Frazier, who testified to Frazier's asking for and then not working the days of June 8 through June 10, and Kayle Schettler, the friend/ mechanic who had loaned John his 1990 Model Acura Integra those same dates. Schettler was most damaging in that he revealed John had never asked to borrow his car overnight before; John also had not asked if Kayle had fixed or checked out his vehicle when he had brought it back to him prematurely the morning police had visited him. In addition, Schettler also told the jury he knew John to have two guns. One was a TZ-75 and the other was a 9mm Glock. He had been present with John when he shot the TZ-75, and John had experienced difficulties with that handgun jamming and failing to chamber the round.

Both testimonies from Harris and Schettler provided the prosecution's opportunity for John Frazier to kill Brent Poole.

Diggs countered Schettler by asking him if there was anything unusual about John borrowing his car. He admitted John had done that before. Diggs also asked if there was anything out of the ordinary about his car when he got it back from Frazier.

“No beach sand, no bug splatters on the front, no trash or anything in it,” Schettler told the jury. “Nothing to indicate it had been driven a long way.”

Officer Darrell Mills, of the WSPD, would testify about having responded to John's house the morning of Brent's murder, and how he had been detained by a car that ran a red light in front of him and narrowly hit him. Mills said he saw only the Acura Integra parked in the backyard at 5:25
A.M
. on June 10. And it was within a closed fence, so that was why he had not checked it.

Through it all, Renee continued to show little emotion. During breaks, she would huddle with her family and friends, then start to tear up. She sensed her defense team was having problems, but she didn't know how to get herself out of this bind. Her lawyers' efforts had been fully eviscerated before her at times, but all she knew how to do was make mental notes and answer questions asked of her. She didn't think the problem with her trial was lack of time and effort spent on her case. It was just so complicated and involved a lot of witnesses who, for some unknown reason, seemed to have it in for her.

It was 7:30
P.M
. The judge apologized for keeping the jury so long, but he stated that under the circumstances, since they were sequestered, he thought it was in their best interest to move the case along expeditiously. They had accomplished a lot in two days—and with any luck, they would be finished by the weekend.

There were additional witnesses and issues the prosecution would introduce on Friday that Renee wasn't even aware of. The state had a lot more information to present to the jury and the trial would become even more complicated than she had ever imagined.

The crowd had picked up in the gallery, mostly from people who had already testified and decided to hang around. Kathy Ropp, editor of the
Horry Independent,
in Conway
,
and reporter Tanya Root, from the
Sun News,
in Myrtle Beach, had joined reporter John Hinton in the press box. As the prosecution began to push through the last days of Renee's trial, everyone in the courtroom knew, sooner or later, it would eventually come to a head. The big question was: how would it all end?

Dawn Albumani, the night office manager at the Carolina Winds, was the prosecution's first witness of the day. She told the jury she had received a phone call in late May 1998 from someone identifying herself as Kimberly Renee Poole for the purpose of inquiring about the motel and then later making reservations. She remembered Mrs. Poole because she had made an inquiry regarding baby-sitting. She had told Dawn it was her and her husband's anniversary and she inquired if there was a way she could have an evening alone with her husband. She had given Renee the number for the baby-sitting service and she had called back later that evening and made the reservations.

Carolyn Murphy, the baby-sitter for the Pooles on the night of the murder, next took the stand. She testified it had been Renee Poole who had called her in early June asking about baby-sitting. She specifically remembered Renee had asked for someone from ten until two in the morning.

“Well, I said the sitters won't start a job after eight-thirty, if I got a sitter. She seemed kind of disappointed and I said, ‘The only one that would go out that late is myself, but I couldn't stay until two in the morning, because I get up at five in the morning. . . .' And she said, ‘From nine till twelve then.' And I said, ‘That would be fine.' ” Murphy said she agreed to baby-sit for the Pooles and that Renee had called back on Tuesday, June 9, to tell her she had changed the time from eight-thirty to twelve.

Murphy said she had gotten lost that evening and didn't arrive at the hotel until almost 8:40
P.M
. Renee had opened the door and Brent was sitting on the couch holding the little girl. She said when the couple got ready to go, the little girl started crying and he went over to her and said, “That's okay, Daddy will be back. Daddy will take you to the big sandbox tomorrow.”

It was an emotional moment for nearly everyone in the courtroom. Brent's family was in tears; Murphy even found it difficult to talk about it. She had to fight to control her emotions. She cut her eyes toward Renee several times, but Renee never looked up. Renee never expressed any emotion.

“Did the little girl say anything when she woke up the next morning?” Humphries would ask several questions later.

“Yes, she did,” Murphy said, holding back her tears. “She kind of sat up in the little beanbag chair and she was sleeping. I could tell she was kind of sleeping, but all she said was ‘I want my daddy to hold me. I want my daddy to hold me.' So I went over there, and I knew she was asleep, and I thought, ‘I can't handle this.' So I just laid her down and rubbed her back and she went back to sleep. So when Renee came, she was still sleeping. And I told Renee's parents and they said, ‘Yes, she is a daddy's girl.'”

Brent's mother and sister were bent over, crying softly.

Renee's co-counsel, Orrie West, attempted to downplay Murphy's emotion-packed statements on cross-examination. “Is it unusual that one parent will be more than likely the one that will be able to calm them down more so than another? Is that unusual?”

“Not unusual, right,” Murphy agreed.

“So, their whole conduct at the time you were there, there just really wasn't anything that struck you as odd, was there?”

“Right,” Murphy answered, without further explanation.

Following the baby-sitter's testimony, the prosecution then launched a series of key witnesses they believed would drive the final nails into Renee's coffin. The damaging information from these witnesses would be a gigantic midtrial boost to the prosecution's case and leave the defense dancing on a tightrope.

The two young men who were visiting Myrtle Beach on a senior trip, Christopher Hensley and Thomas Hudnall, told the police they had seen Renee and Brent Poole having sex on the beach the night of the murder, as well as the man dressed in black. Hensley had agreed to testify in court.

Diggs did his best to rattle Hensley on cross-examination. Using his usual tough tactics and some very suggestive questions, he asked Hensley how they could identify someone they had only seen for two or three seconds as he walked by? Didn't the police repeatedly go over their story until they finally picked out the right one? Didn't the police tell them they knew who the murderer was? Didn't they tell them that pretty much the crime had been solved? And didn't the police tell them that they were simply trying to use them to corroborate what they already knew about this case?

But the young man never backed down, answering no on all accounts.

The jury also heard from Lieutenant Kent Robey, police officer with the Bedford County Sheriff's Office, in Virginia. In late June, he had assisted the Myrtle Beach Police Department in showing a lineup to a couple that was on the beach at the time of the murder, Mark and Donna Hobbs.

Normally, there's a great deal of skepticism about eyewitness testimony. But the prosecution had the good fortune to have two of the most reliable witnesses they could have ever hoped for dropped into their laps like a gift from above. The Hobbses
were
the state's star witnesses. Nicknamed “Andy and Helen of Mayberry” by the police and prosecution, the good-natured couple were also celebrating their honeymoon in Myrtle Beach at the same time as the Pooles. The night of the murder, they had seen the man in black, and several circumstances had caused them to be more observant than usual. The man had frightened them as he hung around the hotel, and they felt as if their own safety was at risk, enough to cancel their own walk on the beach. The man had stood out so much in their minds that even after all this time, there was no question it was John Boyd Frazier.

Diggs had even less luck with the Hobbses on cross-examination than he had had earlier with Hensley. He insisted it was near impossible to identify someone at a distance of approximately eighty feet. “How could someone get a good look at his eyes and his forehead?” he suggested to both of them.

Diggs had asked Mark Hobbs to read from the transcript of his earlier testimony when he identified John Frazier as the man they had seen on the beach. “You say there's like a ponytail down his [back], or something? You remember that?”

Mark titled his head. “No, sir, it was hard to tell,” he said in his deep Southern drawl. “I mean, there was something behind his head. It was hard to tell the way the light was shining. You could see his face plain, but behind him was dark and there was something there. I couldn't see what it was. It was kind of flapping really when he was walking fast, or something was.”

From the transcript, Diggs read Mark's testimony when he had been asked what he actually most remembered that would make the suspect stick out in his mind. His response had been: “[He] had a ponytail down his hair; high forehead stood out. His eyes were big and round. His eyes and his forehead really is what I remember the most.”

Diggs asked, “At that time or thereafter, did anybody ever ask you to expound on this ponytail?”

“No, sir,” Mark answered politely. “I don't remember. I don't recall, but they might have. Uh, I mean, I don't recall that anyhow.”

“Your testimony is today, though, you're not sure he had a ponytail?”

“Well, there was something behind his head when he was running fast. You could see something back there kind of flapping.”

“And it looked like a ponytail to you?”

“Well, it was something,” Mark said, squirming in the witness seat. “I'm not . . . I really couldn't see exactly what it was.”

The thrust of the cross-examination was the contention that the suspect the Hobbses had seen on the beach had a ponytail. John Frazier had never had a ponytail, but Bruce Wolford had.

On redirect by Humphries, Hobbs was asked, “Could it just as easily have been a hood on a sweatshirt?” To which, he replied, “Yes, sir.”

That seemed to have taken care of the situation in the mind of the jurors, but not with Diggs. Raising his voice, he boomed out, “Mr. Hobbs, why didn't you say that, that it could have been a hood on a sweatshirt?”

“When?”

“In September of 1998?”

“I probably wasn't asked. I mean, I—”

Diggs cut him off. He told Hobbs he
had been
asked and then accused him of changing his story. Diggs grabbed the picture from the photographic lineup, and handed it to Hobbs. “Now, where in that photograph do you see a ponytail?”

“I don't see one at all.”

“You don't see anything approaching that, do you?”

“You can't see the back of the head, either,” Mark said softly.

Diggs tried his best, but never could get Hobbs to admit he had seen a ponytail. All he would say was there was something behind his head. Spectators in the courtroom would later refer to the moment as the “case of the missing ponytail.”

The defense had missed its chance to keep itself afloat in relation to the eyewitness testimonies. The first half of the Hobbses seemed to be very solid, and if they had become irritated with Mark's stubbornness for not saying what they thought he should have said, then Donna should have pushed them way beyond their boiling point. The impression was that Diggs would have continued his aggressive defense, but it seemed he had lost some of his firepower on Mark.

Donna Hobbs was very confident. She had clearly seen the suspect on the beach and immediately picked him out of the photographic lineup. As her husband had also stated, there was no question in her mind. No doubt about it, the man on the beach dressed in black was John Boyd Frazier.

Diggs did ask Donna during cross-examination, “Do you recall specifically what it is about the facial features of the individual depicted in that photo?”

“I just recall the man I seen that night,” she assured him. When he asked her about all the trouble she was having constructing the composite, she replied, “If you've ever seen somebody and you see a picture of them, you recognize it. But it's hard to make up the face if you're trying to do it by a computer. And if you've seen how many sets of eyes and eyebrows and you're trying to go through and pick out facial structures and that kind of thing, I mean [there are] millions of them. It took forever to put that composite together and we still couldn't get it right.”

Diggs had toned down his usual impatience for the prosecution's witness and let Donna slide without a lot of questioning. Both she and her husband had been unshakable witnesses. The prosecution had succeeded in undermining the defense's whole theory that Brent's murder had been a random robbery. That some wild, crazy man had bumped into this loving couple on the beach and impulsively decided to rob them. If that were so, then why hadn't he robbed the Hobbses when he had confronted them in isolation?

The prosecution brought out in Donna's testimony that the man in black was looking for somebody else when he had seen the Hobbses and that's why he had moved on down the beach until he found the Pooles. They applauded the Hobbses for being very observant and a bit more suspicious than the normal person, for they had kept a close eye on someone up to no good and had the fortitude to report it after hearing about the murder the next day. They would have no reason to lie.

The defense had little to work with after the Hobbses testified, as the jury was then subjected to a tedious technical testimony from David Collins of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. Collins was a certified firearms and tool marks examiner and had performed forensics analysis on the two fired 9mm Luger-caliber cartridge cases and four unfired cartridges submitted by the Myrtle Beach Police Department. He was there to provide a list of what possible makes and manufacturers of firearms matched with the caliber of those projectiles.

Collins opined after examining both projectiles under a comparison microscope that they had indeed been fired by the same gun and explained in ballistics terms how he had come to that conclusion. Based on the weight and the design features on those particular projectiles, he was able to determine they were most consistent with bullets commonly found in 9mm Luger-caliber ammunition, usually intended for use in semiautomatic pistols. Looking at the four unfired cartridges, he was able to determine that three of them had also been cycled through or loaded into and extracted from the same gun.

Collins produced a list of thirty-eight possible makes or manufacturers in the 9mm Luger category that could have been the murder weapon. One of those on the list was an Italian-made TZ-75, the same type and model gun witnesses in court had testified that John Frazier once had owned.

Diggs did an excellent job in getting Collins to state there were probably sixty-five to seventy different types of weapons that could have fired those bullets. And, without the weapon, it was really hard to tell what kind of murder weapon actually had been used in this case.

“Yes, if I had an actual firearm in the laboratory,” Collins told the jury, “I would test-fire that gun and then compare those tests with those items of evidence and would potentially reach a positive conclusion of that to be able to determine if that gun fired those items of evidence.” And since he had never received a firearm in this case, he couldn't do that, he said.