Bill Bradfield said, "If something does happen, and if the police start making inquiries at local banks, I hope they don't discover my name on a safety deposit box."
And Chris found himself staring into those brooding, poet's eyes, and the pondering bard was twisting his whiskers and trying to figure a way to handle all this when Chris said, "111 go and rent a safety deposit box in my name, Bill."
What an idea! Bill Bradfield told him.
Did Chris Pappas get a chance to walk into a bank and rent a safety deposit box like anybody else? Not a chance. Bill Bradifield wanted little Shelly to have access to the box.
That afternoon Chris Pappas went to the Southeast National Bank in West Chester and signed a contract for a safety deposit box. He signed the signature card and took additional cards for Bill Bradfield and Shelly.
A friend of Shellys had been planning to visit her in California so Chris asked her to deliver the signature card. And, naturally, Shelly blabbed all about the weird goings-on between Jay Smith and Susan Reinert to her pal.
Chris Pappas borrowed $1,300 of the money to buy his brother's 1973 Datsun, which was about to be traded in on a new car.
So by now there were several teachers and former students and parents and at least one lawyer and maybe Norman the janitor who'd heard that Susan Reinert might be in jeopardy.
One might think that somebody would just accidentally slip and say something like "Morning, Susan. Nice to see Jay Smith didn't cut your throat over the weekend."
Yet the fact is that nobody at any time so much as hinted to Susan Reinert or to any of her close friends that Bill Bradfield had been saying for months that Jay Smith or "Alex" wanted her dead.
And if a Gothic tale needs an element of the bizarre, many outsiders would later say that this was probably the most bizarre and incredible thing of all.
Chapter 12
Witness
The day had finally arrived: William Bradfield was subpoenaed to give his alibi testimony for Dr. Jay C. Smith in Dauphin County on the 30th of May. John J. O'Brien was attorney for the defendant, and deputy district attorney Jackson M. Stewart, Jr., represented the commonwealth.
Because of the pretrial publicity, O'Brien had been successful in gaining a change of venue for this, the most serious crime, the 1977 theft at the Sears store in St. Davids. The trial was held in Harrisburg.
But John O'Brien's attempt to discredit the eyewitness testimony failed. There was something about Jay Smith. Although he was now wearing his hair longer and had sprouted a mustache, although he wore eyeglasses instead of contacts during the trial, although his hair was black while the bogus courier had had some gray in his hair, none of the witnesses showed the slightest hesitation when it came to indentifying him.
This, even despite the substantial weight gain that had turned his features gross as he awaited trial. The puff and sag of jowls, the enlarged pouches under the hooded eyes, and now a stoop in a former military officer who had always stood tall and erect did indeed make him look different from two years earlier.
Still eyewitnesses, more often than not, would say, "I'm one hundred percent sure."
Such certainty is rare in criminal cases, especially with so many eyewitnesses who had had such a brief look at the bogus messenger. But as one of them said from the witness box, "There was something about his (ace. It's not an ordinary face."
Positive indentification by the witnesses was probably explained by the wife of the defense lawyer who said that she had feared her husbands client when she was pregnant with their first child.
"Those eyes," she said. "There was so much depravity in them."
She'd had an unreasonable eerie feeling that her pregnancy could be threatened by whatever essences surrounded him. She also felt that he literally changed size from one meeting to the next. To be sure, there was something different about Dr. Jay C. Smith.
Stephanie Smith was now in an advanced stage of stomach and liver cancer. During the months awaiting trial she'd been unable to discern which produced the most misery, the rampant cancer or the futile chemotherapy. The scandal and attention of the press might have been a welcome respite.
Only two months from death, she, who had labored for her husband for twenty-eight years, served him one last time.
The desperately ill wife of Jay Smith took the stand as an alibi witness to her husband's whereabouts when the crime occurred.
"August was a very busy month," she began. "The summer school was ending, see, and then he had to pick teachers, like I said. And with this basketball, see, they had to have a basketball coach at that time."
And so it went. Her husband could not have committed the crime, she finally got around to saying, because she and Jay were in Ocean City that day in August, 1977, when someone posing as an armed courier victimized the St. Davids store. She testified that with them in Ocean City had been her eldest daughter, Stephanie Hunsberger, and young Stephanies husband, Edward.
Stephanie Smith told the Harrisburg jury that Jay had dropped them at the pier in Ocean City to go off for a few hours to contact an "educational consultant."
When it was his turn, the assistant district attorney pursued a line of questioning that had to do with the missing Hunsberger couple.
"Your husbands lawyer asked you several questions about a phone conversation you had with your daughter sometime around Mother's Day which was two or three weeks ago," he began.
"Yes?"
"At that time you knew your husband was coming up for trial, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Did you think to ask your daughter whether they would come back here about that Ocean City alibi?"
"Well, it was more of a Mother's Day conversation," Stephanie Smith said. "I didn't want to go into details about this trial. It was more sentimental. That was a sentimental phone call."
"Sometime after that phone call were you trying to get in touch with her?"
"Like, we couldn't find her."
"Are you stating to the jury that you have no idea where she is?;
"Well, see, she said she was calling up from California. She was making telephone calls from different places. Say, from L.A. to Oregon. See, they travel a lot."
Stephanie Smith was then asked if her husband had mentioned meeting anyone in Ocean City on the day of the crime, and she responded, "When we came back and we were driving back he mentioned that he bumped into a Mr. Bradview. My daughter said he was a teacher of hers ... Mr. Bradfield,'' she quickly added.
And when asked about the most damaging physical evidence, a bogus identification card found in their basement apartment, Stephanie Smith said, "Oh that thing. My daughter's husband was reading a book on Brinks. They read a lot. So we just humored him. He brought out this card. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'I'm making an I. D. card.' I said, 'I. D. card? It looks like a Walt Disney thing, that blue paper around that. It's not an I.D. card. You'd never get away with anything with that!'"
"Was he trying to get away with something?" the prosecutor asked.
And then Stephanie Smith offered one of her many non sequiturs: "He was trying to invent some patent on something."
There was no need to badger her. The dying woman spoke her piece for her man: "I'm sorry they had to go to all that trouble, the D.A.'s people. See, Ed made that card. It was a joke, hon."
But the disappearance of Edward Hunsberger was no joke, not to a sixty-year-old woman in the courtroom, who would attend every trial of Jay C. Smith. Dorothy Hunsberger waited for something. For anything. Any news of her son, Edward, and his wife, Stephanie.
* * *
Bill Bradfield apparently presumed that his style of testimony was dignified and professional, but many courtroom observers thought his delivery was flat and lifeless and rigid. The journalistic references to "cold blue eyes," which were inaccurate, came as a result of his courtroom demeanor.
He wasn't sworn. Being a Quaker he "affirmed" to tell the truth. After giving his name and being asked what he
taught at Upper Merion, the English teacher replied, "English, Latin and Greek."
Then Bill Bradfield gave an account of how on August 27, 1977, he'd had occasion to be in Ocean City to visit fellow teacher Fred Wattenmaker, and how he happened to run into Dr. Smith at the entrance to a restaurant at 12:25 in the afternoon. And he said that Dr. Smith decided to accompany him to visit Fred, and how Fred wasn't home and he left a note. They went back to the restaurant and ate lunch and said good-bye at 3:00 p.m., which of course would have made it impossible for Jay Smith to be impersonating a courier at the Sears store back on The Main Line.
Bill Bradfield, who admitted to the jury that he had no head for dates, was nevertheless positive about this one because it was the Saturday before Labor Day and he'd been opening his Terra Art store in Montgomery Mall.
When asked by Jay Smith's attorney to describe his relationship with Dr. Smith, he said to the jury, "I've been a leader of the teacher's association of Upper Merion. I've been a student advocate and a student adviser. That put me working with Doctor Smith for twelve years, under constant conflicts with him. After Doctor Smith was arrested, it occurred to me I ought to testify to this. The date didn't mean anything to me at first and then I proceeded to think. It occurred to me that that was the day we went to see my friend. And then I proceeded to think whether I wanted to get involved in all this. For a number of days I was tortured over that. Doctor Smith meant nothing to me, nor I to him. I decided that, like it or not, I had no choice."
Lawyer O'Brien asked, "Have you ever socialized with Doctor Smith?"
And Bill Bradfield replied, "Never."
Then Bill Bradfield gave a great deal of testimony regarding a mustache that Jay Smith had had in August of 1977 at Ocean City (the courier was clean-shaven) and how his hair never had any gray in it (as the bogus courier's did) and how Jay Smiths mustache then had been the same as it was this day in court. And since no one else had ever seen Jay Smith with a mustache until this very day in court, Bill Bradfield went on to say that they had joked about his growing a summer mustache on that August day.
When it was the prosecutor's turn to cross-examine, there was a great deal of testimony as to how Bill Bradfield got around to remembering the date that he'd seen Jay Smith at the shore, but he didn't tell his "I had a dream" experience.
He had to repeat it all again, about how he'd been driving along in the Cadillac, and how he stopped at a restaurant because he hadn't eaten all day. And there was Dr. Smith, and they talked, and decided to visit Fred because Dr. Smith "suggested we not eat."
"That's why you didn't eat?" the prosecutor asked.
"That's correct," Bill Bradfield testified.
"Not to be facetious," the prosecutor said, "Doctor Smith's judgment overprivileged you?"
And there he was, Bill Bradfield, in front of twelve good men and true, and a courtroom full of people, and members of the press, and a few teacher witnesses who knew him. He was being asked publicly if Dr. Jay C. Smith could overrule Bill Bradfield's hunger pangs with a mere suggestion.
Bill Bradfield lost his professional demeanor. He got mad. He said, "It wasn't a judgment of privilege!" And he started stammering. "That didn't . . . the present interest was . . ."
The prosecutor tried to speak but got cut short by Bill Bradfield who said, "I don't think that is relevant at all! I don't think it was a judgment of privilege!"
"Just answer the questions," the judge advised. "Just answer the questions."
Bill Bradfield eventually testified to driving around lost with Jay Smith as his helpmate. (The prosecutor asked if Dr. Smith was his "co-pilot." It was droll, rather the opposite of having God as your co-pilot.) And they drove around and around until they found a man working in his garden. His named turned put to be Rudy. And they were directed to Fred's and knocked and left a note and departed.
"Can you identify Rudy here in the courtroom?" the prosecutor asked.
"I don't know," Bill Bradfield replied.
"Would you know Rudy if you saw him?"
"I don't know that I would."
Then the prosecutor said, "Isn't it a feet, Mr. Bradfield, that you didn't meet Rudy until 1978? And never saw him in the summer of 1977? Isn't that a fact?"
"I saw Rudy with Doctor Smith on August 27th of 1977!" Bill Bradfield said. "Mr. Wattenmaker told me that Rudy said two tall men in a red Cadillac came looking for directions."
"So if Rudy said he didn't meet you until 1978, that would be inaccurate?"
"That's correct," Bill Bradfield testified.
And then Bill Bradfield added a little detail that made it as vivid as alligator shoes. He said that when they returned to the restaurant Dr. Jay Smith had stuck him with the check. He looked toward the jury, but no one smiled.
Fred Wattenmaker's neighbor Rudy was called as a witness by the commonwealth and testified that he had seen Bill Bradfield at the shore. But it was last year. He denied that he'd seen William Bradfield or Jay Smith or anybody else in 1977.
"I'm in my seventies," Rudy testified. "But I still have a good working mind."
After less than two hours of deliberation the jury returned with a verdict of guilty in the theft at the Sears store in St. Davids.
That wasn't the worst of it, not for Bill Bradfield. The jury foreman was interviewed by the press as to the alibi testimony of William S. Bradfield, Jr., and the juror said, "We sure didn't believe that teacher!"
The juror's comment was in all the newspapers the next day.
Sue Myers said that Bill Bradfield was furious. It wasn't so much that Jay Smith had been convicted. It was that the jury hadn't believed him. He was depressed for days.
William Bradfield was too busy in June to remain depressed for long. He had arrangements to make with Shelly and Rachel who were both finishing their college semesters.
His unique relationship with each of the women in his life is best described by the women in question, and can be because of his reluctance to discard any proof of their love and devotion.
Whereas Susan Reinert's letters often contain references to sexual love and her need for more of it than he was willing to
give, and Rachels letters are loaded with obscure sentiments as to philosophical and psychological need, Shellys letters are written by a nineteen-year-old girl in love with religion and books and love itself:
Dear Mentor,
In reference to your letter of the fifth, this from Sonnet 25: "Then happy I that love and am belov'd ..."
I thank you for the Kenner reference list. What is my library going to look like when I've finished the book? My husband may have to cut my chocolate chip allowance to give me more book money. I haven't gone any farther in The Pound Era than the first chapter, but I've read that twice. Maybe when I get to the last chapter I'll understand his English even if I don't know what he's referring to.
I knew some of the terms you wanted me to look up from Greek, and I'm pretty sure I understand the others. You'll just have to see me in person to quiz me, won't you? (Heh heh. Devilish laugh. I'm so devious.) When we're bound for Greece, I'll get up every morning and declaim from "The Seafarer" or "The Wanderer."
I was reading a book by C.S. Lewis the other day and it captures perfectly a certain type of happiness. What I'm building up to is that if your letters or visits or love makes me cry, it also makes me feel like having a great deal of buttered toast.
Love always
Chastity until their inevitable marriage is also on the girl's mind, even as passion awakens.
Dearest Love,
I've been to see the monsignor about your annulments. He says there should be no problem about Fran since she married outside the Catholic Church. The problem comes up with Muriel. The Church considers a civil marriage between two Protestants valid, so we have to know if you were validly married according to civil law. On to more pleasant topics. I love you madly, passionately, eternally, and infinitely. There, I've been wanting to get that off my chest. Seriously, I miss you so terri
bly. Do you know what I've been doing? Whenever I come into my room, if there's no one there, I kiss my pillow and pretend it's you. I can't believe how silly I am.
I tell myself I will not be ruled by my passions, that it's silly to think I'm not strong enough to get through college without you, but I'm lying through my teeth. I want you, heart's-all-beloved-my-own, and I need you to be with me. I don't see how I can survive days, let alone years.
Will anyone ever recognize the quality of our love? I think not, but somehow I don't care.
I'm enclosing St. Josephs prayer for you to replace the copy I gave you. You are my dearest darling.
Always and all ways yours,
Shelly's letters also reflect her concerns about his holy war, namely to protect his colleague Susan Reinert from the evil Dr. Smith.
Sweetheart,
Your letter came yesterday. I was so happy to get it that I almost kissed it right there in the dining hall.
I'm so sorry that school is troublesome and that Dr. Smith is such a worry to you. As for that teacher, my claws start unsheathing when I think of her. Please be careful, William. We have a long time still to go and if you should get hurt before you are mine in everyone's eyes I don't know what I would do. It's hard enough to be circumspect as it is. Won't it be nice when I can be at your back as you fight your battles?
In May, Susan Reinert had to see her friend Pat Schnure on a matter of urgency. She was agitated to the point of tears.
"I've heard that Sue Myers is also going to England this summer!" Susan confided. "What's that mean?"
"I don't know! But that's not the worst part. I can hardly believe Bill did it!" "What?"
"The testimony at the Jay Smith trial. He lied. You see, I was with him at the shore when he says he saw Jay Smith. He never mentioned seeing Jay Smith at that time. He would've mentioned it to me. We were together almost constantly."
Echoes in the Darkness (1987) Page 15