Sex&Murder

Eslava declined to say much about the case to SF Weekly, but he says he knows Frazier to be a kind and wonderful person who would never want to harm anyone. Still, he describes him as scrappy. "He would fight if he had to," Eslava says. "But he wouldn't want to kill anyone."

Another friend of Frazier's says that while Frazier may be a heroin addict, he's no murderer. John "Tommie" Henry, who says he's known Frazier for about seven years, describes him as shy and a "caring, sharing, a loving person" who got into the bondage and discipline escort business not because he likes to inflict pain, but because he needed money.

Sitting on the bed next to his white stuffed animal — a prim kitten named "Marie" from the movie The Aristocats — inside his small room at the Drake Hotel, Henry says Frazier barely talked about his bondage work. Henry said he suspects his friend got into bondage only recently, because the Top Menace ad in the Reporter was "the first time that I'd heard of him doing such a thing." He added that he knows one of Frazier's exes and says "that was not what was going on" in that relationship. In any event, Henry says people who responded to Frazier's ad were "legitimate consumers" rather than prank callers, and so his business was going quite well.

But Henry says Frazier was definitely using drugs heavily when he stayed with him for a few nights at the Drake in mid-July. "He was strung out," he says.

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.