Federal prosecutors rested their case Friday in the trial of two men accused of conspiring in 2016 to murder a confidential informant who had bought methamphetamine from one of the men as part of a drug investigation in Hot Spring County.
Donald Bill Smith, 37, of Malvern and Samuel Sherman, 38, of Batesville were indicted by a federal grand jury in September 2019 on several charges connected to the shooting death of 44-year-old Suzen Cooper.
The indictment charges Smith with killing Cooper to prevent her from testifying against Sherman.
It charged both men with conspiracy to commit witness tampering causing death. It also accuses the pair of conspiring to possess with the intent to distribute, and distributing, methamphetamine and cocaine and of brandishing a firearm -- a .22-caliber gun -- in relation to a drug-trafficking crime that led to murder.
Smith is represented by Blake Hendrix and Annie Depper. Sherman is represented by Jeff Rosenzweig and Birc Morledge.
U.S. attorneys Anne Gardner and Bart Dickinson are prosecuting the case.
Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. is presiding over the case.
Cooper, who federal officials said was a confidential informant at the time of her death, was last seen on Sept. 26, 2016, in Malvern and was reported missing shortly after. Her skeletal remains were discovered in early August 2018 in a field off Grigsby Ford Road, a few miles west of Malvern. It is believed that she was killed sometime the night she disappeared.
On Friday, Hendrix and Morledge cross-examined Jason Frazier, 49, of Hot Springs, who had testified earlier in the week that Smith had confessed in 2019 his role in Cooper's killing while the two men were incarcerated in the Saline County jail.
Frazier, who pleaded guilty to a federal count of aiding and abetting distribution of methamphetamine in 2018 in exchange for the government dismissing six other counts, was sentenced to 96 months in prison after providing information to federal officials that implicated Smith in the Cooper murder. Frazier had been facing 151 to 181 months in prison.
Frazier -- who said he has been convicted of 13 felonies "that I know of" and has been sentenced to terms in prison on nine separate occasions in Arkansas and Mississippi -- was often combative during his testimony on Friday as he and Hendrix sparred. The attorney questioned him about his extensive criminal history and being a "jailhouse snitch" to get his sentence reduced.
"So you end up snitching on people," Hendrix said. "You cooperated."
"I told the truth," Frazier said.
"You cooperated with the government," Hendrix said. "Essentially you began to snitch people out, right?"
"That's a harsh word," Frazier protested.
Pointing out that Frazier had earlier testified to his knowledge of the prison system and ability to navigate it as an inmate, Hendrix asked, "Are you a jailhouse lawyer?"
"If it's not obvious," Frazier said, with a laugh, "I don't know anything about the law."
"But you are a snitch, aren't you?" Hendrix asked. "You snitch people out to get a reduced sentence."
"Absolutely," Frazier said.
Then, Hendrix pivoted to Frazier's cooperation with federal authorities that earned him the reduced sentence on his current conviction by telling investigators that Smith had confessed to Cooper's murder while the two were in jail.
"Suzen [Cooper] tried to snitch you out, didn't she?" Hendrix asked. "Where were you on the night of Sept. 26, 2016?"
"I don't know where I was last year on that date," Frazier said, angrily. "I have no idea."
Hendrix pointed out that Frazier, having been arrested in February 2018, was not in jail at the time of Cooper's murder.
A key part of the defense put on by Hendrix and Depper for Smith is that Cooper was known to have informed on more than two dozen people in the Malvern area and there were a number of active threats on her life at the time she was killed.
Rosenzweig and Morledge have both maintained that Sherman had already agreed to plead guilty to the charges he was facing, told his children that he would be going to prison and had no incentive to seek Cooper's death.
But earlier, Yvonne Meier, a data analyst with the FBI, gave an exhaustive look at cell phone data that indicated a flurry of phone calls and text messages between phones belonging to Smith, Sherman, Cooper and her former sister-in-law, Racheal Cooper, in the days leading up to Suzen Cooper's death.
A timeline of events on the day Cooper disappeared showed that cell phone tower data had tracked Smith's cell phone from near Benton to the south side of Batesville between 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m., then back to Malvern by 9:45 p.m.
Cell phone tower data the following day tracked Sherman's cell phone from near Searcy at 7 a.m. to Malvern by 9 a.m. Cell phone toll information showed 13 calls and texts between Smith's and Sherman's cell phones between 6 p.m. on Sept. 26, 2016, and 9:30 a.m. the following day.
Cell phone data showed at least 12 phone calls and texts between Suzen Cooper's phone and Racheal Cooper's phone between 8:13 p.m. and 11:20 p.m. on Sept. 26, 2016, then showed that at 11:41 p.m., both women's phones were tracked to Grigsby Ford Road where Suzen Cooper's body was found two years later.
The final activity shown on Suzen Cooper's cell phone, according to cell phone records, was a phone call lasting 1:22 at 12:13 a.m. on Sept. 27, 2016, from her phone to a phone belonging to a man identified as Jeff Sherman (no relation to Samuel Sherman).
On Sept. 26, 2016, between 8:17 p.m. and 9:48 p.m., records showed seven calls and texts between phones belonging to Smith and Racheal Cooper and another 25 calls and texts between the same two phones between 12:11 a.m and 3 p.m. the next day.
Under questioning by Depper, Meier said several of the calls and texts were duplicated in the raw data, which she said she tried to account for by removing the duplicates. However, she said not all duplicates were removed, making it possible the numbers were inflated.
Attorneys for both men will commence with defense evidence and witnesses at 9 a.m. Monday. Marshall said he anticipates the case to go to the jury by Tuesday afternoon.