CHAPTER 35
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.
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.
Bollow further testified the Saturday before the trip at the beach, he had seen the black Blazer at the house on that day for a couple of hours somewhere around nine in the morning. He also made a big deal about a check Brent had received in the mail the day after he had been murdered.
Renee never took notes, nor did she whisper anything to her defense team. She just sat there and looked straight ahead as Bollow continued dropping his pearls of wisdom.
“Renee was really concerned about finding a check in the mail. She was standing there rifling through the mail looking for this check, and when she came across it, she was very delighted. She immediately opened it up. I saw that there was a handwritten note with the check in the envelope, and she kind of crumpled everything up and took the check.”
Under cross-examination by West, Jim Bollow said the check was, he thought, in the amount of $750. He believed it had been one of the side jobs Brent had done repairing an eighteen-wheeler. For some reason, the truth was never published to the jury that the check was not written for $750, as Bollow had estimated, but for $110. This incident supported the prosecution’s theory that Renee was using Brent and his money to support her wicked lifestyle.
Renee Bollow followed her husband to the stand and testified that she had talked with Renee Poole two weeks before they had gone to the beach and the topic of the conversation was John Boyd Frazier.
“She told me that she was in a relationship with John. She was having an affair, and that . . . she was real, real head over heels over him. She said he treated her real nice, that he would paint her nails and he would let her lie down while he watched Katie.”
“Just generally speaking,” Hembree advised, “we don’t have to go into all the blow by blow.”
Renee Bollow shook her head. “Every time, I’d talk about something else, usually it wound back to being about John.”
“Did she indicate to you that she was teaching her daughter something?”
“Yeah,” Renee Bollow answered. “She was teaching her daughter to say, ‘I love you’ to John.”
Bollow also explained that she had purchased her kids a blow-up swimming pool for the backyard during the summer. Renee Poole had brought Katie and her portable phone over to their backyard. She had heard her trying to call the baby-sitting service in Myrtle Beach. It was maybe eight to ten times, and she was upset when she couldn’t get through.
“Did she receive any calls?” Hembree asked.
“Yes, she did. John called her while she was sitting on my deck with me.”
“And she’s the one who told you this?”
“Yes. She said that was John, when she got off the phone.”
Bollow said Poole had had a discussion with John sitting on her back porch. She didn’t hear any of that conversation, that she was holding her hand over the phone and talking real low. But toward the very end she had said, “I love you. I miss you. Won’t you please come over?”
Bollow talked about speaking with Poole after her husband had been killed and when she came over to get her mail on Wednesday night and again on Thursday.
Hembree looked toward the jury, then asked, “And did you have a conversation with her out on your front porch?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hembree took a few steps in line with the jury so the witness would be looking directly at them when she answered. “What did she say? Tell this jury what the defendant said.”
Renee Bollow paused, then looked directly in the eyes of the jurors. “She said, ‘He was a shit. But I feel bad anyhow.’ ”
An ominous feeling crept across the floors of the courtroom. Once again, Renee’s words had come back to haunt her. Only this time, the prosecution used them to drive the final wooden stake through what they wanted the jury to believe was a calloused heart.
On cross-examination, the defense attempted to downplay Renee Bollow’s last statement by asking if this was the only time she had ever heard Renee Poole say anything derogatory about her husband.
“No,” Bollow simply replied. “She griped a lot. That wasn’t the only time I had ever heard it.” For good reason, West didn’t get into any further discussion with Bollow about what else Poole had said about her husband.
After three days of testimony, solicitor Hembree announced to the judge, “The prosecution rests.” The television news reporter Adam Shapiro, who had jokingly bet at the beginning of the trial that Renee would be found innocent, had now changed his mind. He admitted that the defense had to present a very strong case if they were going to overcome the odds.
No one in the courtroom wanted Bill Diggs’s job. What hat trick could he possibly score that would refute the damning testimony against his client—the most damaging, perhaps, being her own words?