Dance of Death (25 page)

The trial Court TV had already dubbed the “Love Triangle Murder” was to be held at the Horry County Courthouse in Conway. The town of Conway, Horry County's seat, is exactly fifteen miles west of Myrtle Beach. Conway's population in 1998 was elven thousand, as compared to Myrtle Beach's 165,000. There are no high-rise hotels, fast-paced lifestyle, or adult entertainment clubs in Conway. People talk and move at a slower pace, and there are as many churches as there are businesses in this small Southern town. Bill Diggs wondered if his client could get a fair trial in Conway.

Renee missed her daughter greatly and was eager to be able to tell her side of the story finally. Renee's parents still had visitation rights, but it was very unlikely that Katie would spend any time with her mother at the Horry County Jail or at her trial. Oddly enough, Renee would celebrate her twenty-third birthday on her first day in court.

When Dee Mishler was asked before court began how Katie was doing, she answered, “Katie is wonderful and is doing great. She has held up well. Raising Katie has kept our family strong.”

Renee's road to justice, however, would take a short detour.

Two days before Renee's trial was to begin, solicitor Hembree announced he was dropping the death penalty against Renee Poole. The solicitor believed a jury would agree with him that Renee had not only witnessed the entire scenario of Brent's murder, but had also willingly participated in the planning of it. And most jurors would probably understand, after having been explained the legal definition of “one hand is the hand of all,” that she was just as culpable under the law as John Frazier. But would they feel comfortable enough to hand down a verdict of death? Renee was young, had no previous history of any crime and was still, after all, the mother of a 3½-year-old daughter. That had to mean something.

Brent Poole's family was not taken aback by the prosecution's decision not to seek the death penalty. “It's not an issue for us,” Dee Mishler said. “This does not change the proof and the evidence. Our family has never said we wanted the death penalty for Renee. Brent's life cannot be brought back, regardless of what Renee's penalty is. We do not want revenge; we just want Renee and John to pay for what they did. We want justice.”

Renee's mother, Marie Summey, said she was happy with the decision, but still believed that the call for the death penalty was only made to keep Renee in jail and away from Katie. If the prosecutors had not sought the death penalty, she may have been released on bond and could have been with her daughter all this time. Marie wondered what took the prosecution so long in deciding this.

“We have put it all in God's hands and Bill's hands and let it go,” she said. “I know Renee is innocent and this just goes to prove how weak the prosecution's case really is.”

But as the opening of the trial drew closer, the prosecution had actually grown much more confident in its case. They firmly believed they could weave a basket of physical and circumstantial evidence that could convince a jury that Renee Poole and John Frazier were lovers and they had conspired to murder her husband. It wasn't a matter of John just acting off his cuff because he wanted to have Renee. They could prove by her own admissions that they had had more than just a conversation about it. After all, she had, in the presence of her lawyer, admitted John had killed her husband, then later confessed she had helped him plan it.

The prosecution planned on playing Renee's taped interviews with the police and let her own statements be her own undoing. Even though they couldn't produce the murder weapon, they were convinced they could string enough facts and technical information together to prove Brent had been killed with a gun that John previously had owned. And because she and John had acted in concert, she was just as guilty as if she had pulled the trigger.

Of course, problematic for the defense were the statements Renee had made to the police. Her attorneys would have no alternative but to try and construct a defense around the age-old scenario that she had been coerced by the police into a confession. Diggs admitted before the trial that Renee's life was a tangled tale, but claimed her case was a classic example of false confession. Tight-lipped John Frazier had said nothing to the police and they had not one iota of physical evidence linking him to the crime scene. Outside of Renee's confession and a possible eyewitness, who looked shaky, Diggs thought their case against Renee was based solely on speculation and innuendo. What motive did Renee have for killing her husband? And if she had wanted to, couldn't she have easily blamed it on Frazier and walked away?

Although Court TV had already announced it would televise the Renee Poole trial at a later date, all the major-network news reporters still planned to cover the trial. Horry County's judicial junkies predicted a lackluster event. The interest in the case stirred heavily from western North Carolina, but produced little-to-no interest from Horry County. Horry County's biggest trial of the century had already taken place six years earlier in 1993 with the conviction of Ken Register. Nineteen-year-old Register had been arrested and tried for the murder of Conway High School senior Crystal Todd, a friend. Crowds of two-hundred or more spectators stood in line every day for a seat at the controversial two-week death penalty trial. In a courtroom overflowing and bursting at its seams, solicitor Ralph Wilson convinced the jury that Register was the only person in the world who could have killed Todd. Working against Register was his own admission to the crime and a collected DNA sample identifying him as the killer. The jury found him guilty, but thanks to the efforts of defense counsel Morgan Martin and Tommy Brittain, the jurors showed mercy and spared his life.

The Poole case, so sensational in the “Tar Heel State,” raced on toward a trial in South Carolina with much work for both sides still needing to be done. The prosecution wanted to make sure they had tied up all loose ends and had all their evidence and presentation materials ready for trial. The defense would argue then—and throughout the trial—that they felt rushed and had not been given enough time to prepare their case and schedule their expert witnesses.

Nevertheless, when the Honorable Edward B. Cottingham called the court to order on Monday morning, nearly two hundred jurors-to-be were ready and seated in the second-floor auditorium. The old courthouse resembled a refurbished schoolhouse auditorium. The seats squeaked and squawked every time someone stood up and sat down, but it didn't seem to bother Cottingham.

Judge Cottingham had a reputation for maintaining firm control of his courtroom. Cottingham's forty-five years of experience as a former defense lawyer and trial judge was nearly twice as long as Renee Poole had lived. Short and broad, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair, he was a tough, no-nonsense judge with a wit as dry and quick as a late-night comedian. Throughout his trials, especially when he got excited, he would stumble through his words or refer to people by the wrong name, prompting his clerks or the attorneys to respectfully “remind” him of his error. But lawyers from both sides of the law who had challenged and bantered with Cottingham on legal issues would be the first to say he got their respect. As predictable as a summer storm that followed a formation of dark clouds, he was known to lean across his desk and gaze down at the trial participants before issuing one of his scathing reprimands, “That'll never happen in Judge Cottingham's courtroom.” However, lawyers appreciated him for his consistency. They always knew there would be no monkey business of any kind in his courtroom.

Prosecution and defense attorneys sat in comfortable leather chairs at the large, rectangular wooden tables at the front of the courtroom facing the judge and the court reporter. Family members took their seats behind the prosecution or defense, while potential jurors sat behind them in less comfortable chairs.

Renee had been brought in from the back of the courthouse, up the elevator and escorted in chains to the second-floor auditorium. She had traded her shackles and prison-issued orange jumpsuit, worn during her preliminary hearings, for a conservative, dark blue pantsuit. She donned a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses and silver earrings. Her long, dark hair had been cut, pulled back and adorned with a gold hair bow. She wore a little eye shadow, a touch of rouge and a bit of red lipstick. It was obvious she had been “toned” down for trial, looking nothing like the sultry stripper Carlee who had once danced and trolled the stage floor at the Silver Fox Gentleman's Club, collecting dollar bills like they were rose petals.

Cottingham began the trial by explaining the charges. He then asked Renee to stand and face the jury panel. She seemed nervous as the judge reminded them this was not a death penalty case. It took only one day for Cottingham to whittle down a jury from more than 225 perspective jurors to a panel of twelve jurors and two alternates, evenly divided between men and women.

The defense gave a hint as to what cards they were playing in their hand when Diggs excused the first eight male candidates. In order to give a fair and impartial rendering to his client, Diggs believed it required a jury of
her
peers. He thought he had struck pay dirt when one female candidate revealed she worked at a bar from 7:00
P.M
. to about 3:00
A.M
. in the morning. When she asked to be dismissed due to a hardship it would place on her child, Diggs protested heavily.

“Your Honor, just for the record, and not singling out this particular juror,” he pleaded, “but this is the objection that we've made before in these types of cases. When you've got a general exclusion of young women from the jury just because of their children, it impacts on the cross-sectional representation of the jury.”

Cottingham listened to Diggs's objection, but did not bend. “I understand what you're saying. But if a mother comes to me and says that there's nobody to take care of that child at night but her, what do you think this court ought to do?”

Diggs offered a knee-jerk response that the county should provide some type of child care in those situations, but Cottingham made light of it.

Where some trials take days, even weeks, for the voir dire, Judge Cottingham had his jurors already selected, had given them their instructions and dismissed them, along with the other potential jurors, shortly after lunch. By 3:45
P.M
., he announced to the lawyers he was ready to hear their motions.

It was obvious the defense still had a bee in its bonnet over their client's previous death penalty charge. When assistant solicitor Humphries reported they had not received any of the expert witness reports from the defense, Diggs stated evasively that a biographical sketch and the subject matter of their testimony had been forwarded. And he believed, under the discovery rules, that was all they were entitled to.

Cottingham wouldn't hear of it. He expected a report from every one of these witnesses regardless of what excuse they had for not providing it. He asked Diggs to send them this message: “You telephone those witnesses and tell them that before they are permitted to testify, a written report will be required. Or they will not be permitted and they certainly won't be paid.”

Diggs stirred the pot again with the death penalty issue. The problem, he insisted, was when the solicitor dropped the death penalty, it sped everything up. It had thrown a wrench in his spokes and screwed up his schedule for expert witnesses, who had already agreed to be there the following week. Furthermore, Diggs squabbled, the notice of the death penalty against their client had generated a lot of pretrial publicity and they were concerned as to what extent it would have on the outcome of this case.

“For the record,” Diggs submitted, “among other things, I believe when the death penalty was served at the bond hearing in December of 1998, it was done for one purpose. And that was to prevent this defendant from being admitted to bail and released on bond.”

Diggs pointed out that the indictment against Renee Poole didn't come until August 1999, and then the withdrawal of the bond notice came after that—two working days before the call of the case for the trial. Renee had sat in jail all that time from June 1998, while her codefendant, John Frazier, had already been released on bond.

“The shooter in this case was released on bond under the state's theory of the case and she wasn't,” Diggs went on to say. “And the only reason for that was because they wanted to squeeze her, as we put in the motion. To testify, provide evidence and certain testimony, and when that didn't happen, they served a death notice in the case just to keep her in jail—to prevent her from being released on bond. The fact that her codefendant, who is not under a death penalty notice, was released on bond—and the fact that he was the shooter—is strong evidence that she would have been admitted to bail and released on bond, and she's had a constitutional right deprived for seventeen months because of that action by the state. What other remedy do we have in that situation other than to dismiss the charge?”

It took Cottingham all of five minutes to assure Diggs that Judge Breeden had the right to refuse his client bond—even if the death penalty notice had not been there. He denied him the motion to dismiss the trial and told him in no uncertain terms that if he didn't agree, then take his arguments to another forum.

Diggs gave it one last shot. Shifting anxiously at his table, he warned, “The confidence the general public is gonna have in the procedure that was used in this case [is at stake]. And that's not where we want to go when we've got a young person's life at stake in terms of spending the rest of her life in jail. We've already got a tragic situation in the death of Brent Poole. There's no doubt about it. We've got another potentially tragic situation by having an innocent person in jail. Our point is that it undermines the confidence in the system to which Your Honor has a chance to show—”