Dance of Death (38 page)

Looking over at Frazier sitting uncomfortably at the defense table, dabbing himself with a large white handkerchief and living up to his personification emblazoned across his license tag, the jury may have misinterpreted that statement. His mother had stated that John had always sweat profusely, and even as a little boy, he would sweat heavily on a cool day. No one was disputing her word, but it was hard to believe one man could sweat so much without having a valid reason to do so.

The prosecution meant to turn up the heat on Frazier with their next witness.

Since Hembree had taken office in January 1999, he had had ample opportunity to have studied Martin and Brittain's style and learned their trial techniques and strategies. He had not underestimated his two worthy opponents and swore he would not make the same mistakes twice. That was one of the reasons why he called Bruce Wolford, the bartender at the Silver Fox, to the witness stand. Wolford had befriended both Renee and Frazier at one time, but he was willing to provide damaging evidence for the prosecution. The young man whom private investigators working for both defendants had implicated as Brent's killer would testify that John had tried to fight Brent on May 30, 1998, when he took a pair of Renee's panties and a videotape to the club where she had worked as a topless dancer.

“He was wiping the sweat off his face with the panties,” Wolford recalled for the jurors. “He tried to get him to fight him in the parking lot and Brent wouldn't get out of his truck. John didn't like Brent. He said he hated him and that Brent had control over Renee, and he was using their daughter to control her.”

Wolford did admit to having his own sexual encounter with Renee while he was married and the filming of that affair, just before Renee began a relationship with John. But the prevailing thought among the jurors was that he had convinced them thoroughly he had no desire to be with Renee after their affair, nor to see her husband dead.

The prosecution supplied fact of the matter to end all questionable doubt when they called John's coworker Bruce Sovereign to testify.

“John stormed back into the computer room one night,” the jurors would hear from Sovereign. “‘Somebody should kill that son of a bitch or I'm going to kill that son of a bitch.' I said simply, ‘John, you can't be serious about that?' He didn't say anything; he just shook his head and walked away to the other side of the computer room.” He told jurors further that John would often spend more than an hour on the telephone with Renee soon after arriving at work at the manufacturing plant and that Renee and John were lovers.

Frazier didn't show any emotion as his former coworker spoke against him. He continued wiping his forehead and speaking quietly to his attorneys while Martin protested and asked the judge to strike the statement from the record. He said Sovereign was not directly involved in the telephone conversation, and that “you have to put assumption upon assumption upon assumption” to come to that conclusion.

Under cross-examination from Martin, Sovereign said that John had threatened Brent after he hung up during a telephone call. He said John had told him he had been speaking to Renee Poole.

But once again, the most important stage of the prosecution's case was the eyewitness testimony of the couple from Virginia. Martin had succeeded in defusing the testimony of SLED firearms expert David Collins, getting him to admit he had no proof that the TZ-75 9mm pistol John had once owned was the murder weapon. But, in spite of a relentless cross-examination of Mark and Donna Hobbs, he could not get the jury to doubt what they were saying was true. The Hobbses' memory was crystalline in that Frazier was definitely the man they saw on the beach the night Brent was shot.

Martin believed he could add enough question marks on the jurors' yellow legal pads about the couple's accounts and events from nearly twenty months ago, but he never could seem to make a stand against them. This time around, Hembree had seen to it that there would be no controversy relating to a missing ponytail and the Hobbses' identification of Frazier, coupled along with Renee's implication that John was the shooter on the beach dressed in black. It was just too big an obstacle for the defense to hurdle.

Feeling very good about their presentation, the prosecution rested.

There had been a few hints of the direction Martin and Brittain would take for Frazier's defense, but having John testify was not one of them. His attorneys knew Renee was going to be subpoenaed to testify against him, but they doubted she ever would. They did not view the sexual details about her and John's affair as very important to this case, but they didn't want John to have to face cross-examination from prosecution. Like Renee, he had far too many skeletons in his closet to survive a brutal attack and be skewered by the prosecution in front of the jurors.

Martin moved the defense's case ahead in full throttle on the fourth day. Presenting their case with a total of only eight witnesses, he admonished them to keep an open mind and remember the operative words “a reasonable doubt.” He insisted that John had not been at Myrtle Beach the night Brent had been murdered, and he and Brittain spent a lot of time trying to convince the jury that the Hobbses were not close enough to get a good look at the suspect.

“Special circumstances would undoubtedly bring about factors that weaken people's memory,” Tommy Brittain argued, standing in front of the jury. He then presented a videotaped deposition of himself and Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of Washington at Seattle, to repudiate further the eyewitness accounts. “Witnesses who have a brief exposure to an event often do not remember it well,” Loftus added. “Lighting and distance also affect memory.”

It had cost Frazier's defense team $11,600 for her testimony, but it would be considered a small price to pay if it could work the magic they needed. In a nutshell, Dr. Loftus's testimony theorized that people's memories can be skewed by suggestions given to them after the event, and their memory fades as time passes.

It sounded like a throwaway question when Hembree asked the acclaimed Dr. Loftus how many times she had testified in the past twenty-five years. But several of the jury members winced when she later admitted that of her 225 testimonies, not once had she ever testified that an eyewitness was reliable. Her words hung in the courtroom.

In an attempt to chip away further at the prosecution's eyewitness testimony, Martin had secured the expert opinion of Donald Smith, owner and operator of a local television production company known as Lucky Dog. Smith was there to testify to the difficulties of someone being identified on the beach under the same conditions the night Brent was killed. Martin moved to introduce a video of the location Smith had made and requested officially that the jury be allowed to visit the very spot on the beach where the Hobbses said they had seen John.

But Peeples would have none of it. When he denied all defense requests for admission of the tape and the jury's visit to the beach, Martin asked to approach the bench. Those who knew Martin best could see he was scathing. With both parties at the bench, he argued John was entitled to a proper defense and this was one of their efforts to get at the truth. Some of the jurors watched Martin for a reaction. Others looked away or at their notes in their laps. Only a very few looked at John, who kept his eyes fastened on his attorneys. Clearly, he had trusted them with his life.

John had come to despise this courtroom. The Pooles were always there, watching and staring, and their eyes burned into him from across the courtroom. And he had a gnawing worry that the jury might confuse their own emotions about the Pooles' grief over their son's death with the lack of evidence against him.

The defense long ago had realized the Hobbses were the only two accusing witnesses that could actually pin John to Brent Poole's murder, and the defense had planned with Smith's testimony and the video to knock the credibility out of what they thought they had seen. Martin once again asked the judge for consideration of this vital evidence, but he was flatly denied.

During a brief recess, Martin asked members of the gallery and press how they thought the case was going. Although he didn't admit it, it was obvious that he was not happy with it. His sulky expression let on that he was not pleased with Judge Peeples' courtroom decisions. He didn't need Willard Scott to tell him which way the wind was blowing. After seeing the wind knocked out of his sails, the jurors' faces told him the verdict was already a foregone conclusion in their minds. Martin would have no choice but to dismiss his witness, rest his case and hope to regain what little ground he thought he had left in closing arguments.

Tommy Brittain addressed the jurors, in hopes he would be able to pick up the broken pieces of their case. Telling the jurors he was the son of a Methodist minister, Brittain again singled out the Hobbses' “false identification” of their client as misconstrued.

“The Virginia couple made a mistake when they identified John as the man they saw near the hotel before the shooting,” he said softly. “They saw the man for only a few seconds in a dimly lit area, and investigators helped the couple pick John out of a photographic lineup by putting his picture in the lineup's first position.”

Both Brittain and Martin would urge the jurors to acquit John Frazier of all charges because the prosecutors did not prove their case against him. These were headline words.

“A case of circumstantial evidence has sand for a foundation,” Martin turned and told the jurors, as if he expected his words to trigger some intense reaction from them. “John Frazier has been wrongly accused. He had no motive to kill Brent Poole. . . . There is no evidence that John Frazier wanted to marry Renee Poole or that Renee Poole wanted to marry John Frazier. He had a short relationship with Renee Poole.”

Prosecutors asked the jury to convict Frazier. “There was no physical evidence that linked Frazier to the shooting because he was smart enough to get rid of any items that connected him to the crime,” Humphries had said in his closing summation.

“John Frazier wanted Renee Poole,” Hembree reminded them. “For the love of a bad woman, he was willing to commit a lot of sins.” Utilizing the same speech he had used at Renee's trial, he emphasized, “John Frazier robbed Katie Poole of her daddy. Brent Poole will not be there when Katie starts her first day in kindergarten.”

The second jury now had heard the story of how Renee Poole and John Frazier had plotted to kill her husband. It was easy to see what the jurors had thought about John Boyd Frazier's guilt. They found it odd that the defense had not found outside of Frazier's own family one single witness who would be willing to take the stand and extol his virtues. No Boy Scout leaders, Little League coaches, high-school teachers or former employers to speak of his goodness or praise his acts of kindness. There had been plenty of people to testify against him, but not one there to connect with the jury in a real way. The jurors didn't like him, either; they found him arrogant, transparent and void of all conscience. In spite of the fifty-eight motions made by the defense on Frazier's behalf, there was nothing his high-dollar dream team could do or say to convince them otherwise.

It took the jurors only forty-five minutes to decide the fate of John Boyd Frazier. Brent's family sat behind the prosecution's table, silently weeping and holding hands as the verdicts were read. Sitting directly behind the defense table, John's family also held hands but showed no emotion as they waited on the final outcome.

“On the count of murder,” the court clerk read, “guilty. . . .”

At hearing the announcement of the jury's verdict, Fran Humphries slid back in his chair and pulled both hands to his chest in a gesture of thankfulness. Greg Hembree took a deep breath, smiled, then dropped his head. He would tell reporters after the proceedings that it had been a long wait for the Poole family, but it had been worth the wait to get justice for William Brent Poole.

Two juries now had believed that Poole and Frazier had plotted to kill Brent Poole. In addition to the murder charge, John was also found guilty of armed robbery and conspiracy. He showed no emotion when the verdict was read, but wiped the sweat from his eyes and face with his handkerchief when the judge asked him to approach the bench for sentencing.

For those caught up in the emotions of this trial, Bill Poole would not miss the opportunity to speak before the judge this time. “Nobody should go through the evils that have been portrayed in these trials,” he said after asking Peeples not to show Frazier any mercy.

It was difficult to assess Agnes Poole's emotions as she stood before the judge. She wiped the tears away from her eyes and discussed how horrible it had been on her family to lose their son and how much they missed him. “My husband and I are raising Brent's four-year-old daughter, Katie. It's going to be horrible when she learns what has happened to her father.” She began to sob again.

Listening intently, Brent's brother was poised. Craig Poole said his daughter and Katie were born seventeen hours apart and it was going to be tough on his family for Katie to grow up without her father. “I've got a little girl who spent a year praying every night that no one would come and shoot her father,” he growled at the judge.

Like Renee, John had refused to testify on his own behalf. But he was quick to tell the judge that he was no murderer. “I didn't do this. I had no love for Renee Poole. And I had no hatred for Brent Poole. Me and Brent had become friends, and I tried to tell him how his wife was. I have a three-year-old daughter, who will never know me.”

Jane Lovett still insisted her son was not guilty and that his family still supported him. “He didn't take another person's life for a woman,” she said, annoyed at even the thought of such a ludicrous idea. “And, especially not for Renee Poole.”