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In late May of this year, Frazier was busted with heroin, methamphetamine, a hypodermic needle and syringe, as well as a knife. He spent a few days in jail, but a judge granted him supervised pretrial release. After failing to appear at several hearings, however, Frazier was declared a fugitive. A bench warrant for his arrest was issued July 9, two days before Joe Konopka's death.
Just before 7:15 on the night of July 11, a 911 caller reported that Joe Konopka had taken drugs and had a heart attack, according to the police search warrant affidavit. Then someone from the same number called back about 45 minutes later to say Konopka's death was sex-related. Mrs. Konopka recognized the phone number when she later spoke with police — the calls were placed from her husband's cell phone.
It's unclear when police made it to the scene — the department refused to authorize the release of the 911 tapes as well as the dispatch records indicating when first-responders arrived at the Konopka's Ashbury Street home. But when homicide investigators did arrive, the place was turned upside down.
Late that night, police walked through the disheveled house with Ethel Konopka, who pointed out a brown jacket on the floor in the kitchen and told them it didn't belong to her or her husband. Nearby she looked inside a big black bag full of bondage equipment — adding that she'd never seen the bag nor the equipment in her house before. She also checked her jewelry boxes and found much of her jewelry, as well as her laptop, gone.
Even blankets had been moved around the house.
An identification card left inside the mysterious brown jacket led inspectors to Frazier's friend Mario Eslava. Eslava told police that his wallet — including his driver's license, credit cards, and Social Security card — had been stolen. A police report filed earlier this year corroborated his story.
Eslava told police about Frazier and noted that his friend "puts his name in a magazine to get dates for money," the affidavit reads.
Police arrested Frazier at the corner of Seventh and Market streets a week later, on July 18, on his outstanding narcotics warrant. He'd apparently been staying with Tommie Henry at the Drake Hotel on Eddy Street, and he had a room at the Henry Hotel near Sixth and Mission streets.
After Frazier was brought to the homicide detail at the Hall of Justice he told Inspector Philpott and another detective that he'd met Joe Konopka through the sex ad he'd placed in the Reporter, and that Konopka had paid Frazier for sex on at least two occasions before July 11.
According to Philpott's July 18 search warrant affidavit, Frazier said that day at about noon he went to the Konopka home and started to engage in a bondage act about an hour later. He put Konopka in restraints, he said, placing a mask over his head and tying him to the bed. He then began fisting him and spanking him with a paddle. But after 20 minutes, he said, he didn't hear any sounds and checked him for a pulse. After he noticed Konopka didn't have a heartbeat and wasn't breathing, he told them, he panicked and spent 20 minutes ransacking the house to make it look like a burglary had taken place. Then Frazier said he called 911 and slipped out a side door.
However, the sequence of events Frazier described to inspectors doesn't seem to match with the timing of the 911 call. If Frazier arrived at the Konopka home at about noon, then waited another hour before beginning a 20-minute bondage session, he would have called in the emergency long before 7:12 p.m. — even if he did spend another 20 minutes ransacking the house.
While talking to police, the warrant says, Frazier denied taking any jewelry, the laptop, or anything else — except for Konopka's cell phone, which he told them he threw away in a Drake Hotel garbage can. Police apparently found that hard to believe, explaining that there was jewelry found on the steps near the exit where Frazier admitted leaving the house.
Not long after the interrogation, authorities charged Frazier with false imprisonment, burglary, robbery, and murder.
When a guard led Frazier into the Department Nine courtroom last week for an early pretrial hearing, Frazier didn't look menacing. As his close-set eyes scanned the courtroom, he looked more like a scared kid waiting at the principal's office than a cold-blooded killer. His tattoos barely showed under his orange jail jumpsuit as he sat waiting along the edge of the courtroom, his shoulders sloped, while his public defender, Susan Kaplan, asked Superior Court Judge Curtis Karnow whether she and Deputy District Attorney George Butterworth could approach the bench.
When Frazier did approach the podium with Kaplan, his responses to the judge were barely audible.
"He is soft-spoken," Kaplan told the judge.
If convicted, Frazier could face life in prison. Frazier and his attorney both declined to speak with SF Weekly about the case. Court documents indicate Frazier has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The medical examiner's report was still pending at press time. But on the night of Konopka's death, the medical examiner at the scene did tell an inspector that it was a homicide, and that Konopka "died at the hands of another person."
Police investigators refused to comment for this story. A spokesperson for the district attorney's office said Frazier is being charged with first-degree murder because Konopka died during the commission of dangerous felonies — in this case, robbery and murder.
But Frazier's friend, Tommie Henry, insists that his pal wasn't capable of murder. "If anything, it was some kind of accident," Henry says. "Either the person that he was with went too far or wanted to go too far, or something in the process of their contact went wrong."
If Frazier is telling the truth, it wouldn't be the first time a bondage session has gone awry. (See "Safe Words" sidebar for details.) Bondage and sadomasochistic activities rely on consent and trust — and it's the responsibility of the dominant person, or "top," to respect the "safe word" decided with the other person, or "bottom," and not hurt that person more than he or she really wants. A man named Master J, for example, says that after 10 years of experience he has learned to read a situation by looking in the bottom's face and eyes.
