Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, and spent his childhood and teenaged years in Stamford. He began playing drums, and by junior high was organizing local drum and bugle parades with his neighborhood friends. He later joined his high school's marching and jazz bands and the orchestra. He played for the Connecticut and Norwalk Symphony Orchestras as part of their youth orchestra program.

At the 1994 trial, Crane's son Robert testified that in the weeks before his father's death, Crane had repeatedly expressed a desire to sever his friendship with Carpenter. He said Carpenter had become "a hanger-on" and "a nuisance to the point of being obnoxious". "My dad expressed that he just didn't need Carpenter kind of hanging around him anymore," he said. He testified that Crane had called Carpenter the night before the murder and ended their friendship. Carpenter's attorneys attacked the prosecution's case as circumstantial and inconclusive. They presented evidence, including witnesses from the restaurant where the two men had dined the evening prior to the murder, that Carpenter and Crane were still the best of friends. They noted that the murder weapon had never been identified or found; the prosecution's camera tripod theory was sheer speculation, they said, based solely on Carpenter's occupation. They disputed the claim that the newly discovered evidence photo showed brain tissue, and presented many examples of "sloppy work" by police, such as the mishandling and misplacing of evidence--including the crucial tissue sample itself. They pointed out that Crane had been videotaped and photographed in compromising sexual positions with numerous women, implying that any one of them, fearing blackmail, might have been the killer. Other potential suspects proposed by defense attorneys included angry husbands and boyfriends of the seduced women, and an actor who had sworn vengeance after a violent argument with Crane in Texas several months earlier. Carpenter was acquitted. He continued to maintain his innocence until his death four years later, in 1998. After the trial, Robert Crane speculated publicly that Crane's widow, Patricia Olson, might have had a role in instigating the crime. "Nobody got a dime out of [the murder]," he said, "except for one person," alluding to Crane's will, which excluded him, his siblings, and his mother, and left the entire estate to Olson. Robert Crane repeated his suspicions in a 2015 book. Maricopa County District Attorney Rick Romley, who prosecuted the case, responded, "We never characterized Patty as a suspect." He added, "I am convinced John Carpenter murdered Bob Crane." Officially, Crane's murder remains unsolved.

Answer the following question by taking a quote from the article: What was his role in the Trial?
Crane's son Robert testified that in the weeks before his father's death,