Echoes in the Darkness (1987)

  They were really cranky by the time they filled in an eightfoot grave and started digging a new one. For Rick Cuida it was a five-pack dig. He had to send out for more cigarettes.

  When they got down to the casket, they found nothing but the casket. Well, they'd gone this far. They started talking about the possibility of Jay Smith having put the bodies in the freshly dug hole the night before the funeral, and having covered them with a small amount of earth. They might be underneath the coffin.

  So the casket got hooked to chains and raised up by the backhoe. It had been a long day in that graveyard by the time they got the casket out of the grave and swinging around in the crisp spring air. Then the chain slipped, and the coffin shifted, and it was like someone dropped ice cubes down their backs that slipped right into their underwear. It was the sound of the resident of that coffin when he did a 360-degree roll.

  A couple of cops and a lawyer got cold chills and hot flashes, and queasy tummies. And they were scared that the next of kin might show up while they were tossing the loved one around like Chinese acrobats.

  They dropped that guy back in the ground and got the hell out of that graveyard before nightfall.

  By December, Ray Martray was sounding desperate enough on the recorded telephone calls to risk alarming Jay Smith by pushing him into an incriminating statement.

  He said, "I'll tell you, Jay, I mean you remember what I told you before about Bradfield?"

  "Yeah." "If he's talking, if he's telling them something, bingo!"

  "Yeah, but there's nothing he can tell them."

  "The finger, I'm telling you the finger is pointing at that

  man."

  "Yeah, but there's nothing he can say. I mean, he'll have to make up something and when they check it, it'll be false. See, everything he said about me was false. And I'm certain they know I wasn't involved. You know what I mean?"

  Frustrated again, Martray turned the conversation to a little escape talk, featuring the code words Harry Gibson.

  "You still got the code?" he asked.

  "Oh yeah."

  "Okay, I didn't know if you remembered it."

  "Harry, right?"

  "Yeah, hows Harry doing?"

  "Good. He really is. I got a letter from him. He's at Arizona State."

  "Glad to hear it."

  "He's a barber out there."

  General John Eisenhower was right. His former colonel had a sardonic sense of humor.

  Jack Holtz had been able to send his son Jason to visit the boy's mother in Florida that year. And with the investigation slowing to a standstill he'd been able to spend more time with his son. They pumped iron together and went to Penn State football games. He was starting to think that the most significant event of the year was that his hair turned gray.

  But then something happened. When it looked as though they might close the store, Raymond Martray was successful in having his perjury conviction overturned.

  Jay Smith couldn't have been more delighted. Martray was no longer a convicted perjurer. Martray could now testify for him that David Rucker of the hockey helmet had confessed to the attempted theft at the Sears store at Neshaminy Mall. Jay Smith had already served his time on the St. Davids theft.

  The irony was that now Raymond Martray could also testify against Jay Smith. Jack Holtz knew that Joe VanNort would have loved that one.

  After the New Year, Jay Smith was not only still repeating the Bill Bradfield frameup routine, he was turning author.

  In a telephone conversation to Martray, he said, "See,

  Bradfield said that this woman Reinert was a whore. He said that she was a bad person. He said that she went out with kooks. She was kinky, you know? He said she smelled bad. And then he said these things about me.

  "They found out the things he said about her weren't true and he robbed her of twenty-five thousand dollars, and now I think they've seen that the things he said about me weren't true. I've got a pretty good idea what was on his mind in trying to set me up. Tliis is the kind of thing I hope I'm able to write about in the future."

  The cops wondered if he threw that last part in just in case any potential publishers or literary agents were listening. They were getting sick of it. They gave Martray a script for the next call, and said it was now or never.

  The last of the recorded telephone conversations came on February 3, 1985. It started out as usual.

  Jay Smith said, "Good evening, Mister Martray."

  Raymond Martray said, "Good evening. Mister Smith."

  But when Jay Smith asked, "How you doing?" Raymond Martray answered, "Well, not so good."

  "What's up?"

  "We got a few problems."

  "Okay."

  "Some people came to pay me a visit."

  "Who's that?"

  "Guess."

  "I don't know."

  "Holtz and DeSantis."

  "Mmm."

  "I tried to do like you told me, Jav. I took notes after they left."

  "Sure."

  "I remembered them from court. That's how I knew who it was."

  "Sure."

  "I went through the whole routine. Made 'em show I.D. and all. But they called me by my number. They said, 'Are you P3933, Raymond Martray, and were you housed with Jay Smith at Dallas?*"

  "Right."

  "Then they go, 'Did you ever, uh, hear of, uh, the Reinert murders?' I said, 'Yeah.' Then he says, 'What did Smith tell you about the Reinert case?' And I said, 'Smith said he didn't have anything to do with it.'"

  But Jay Smith didn't sound too worried. He said, "There's not much you can do. I've been through six years of this stuff. I don't expect it'll ever end, you know."

  And then after talking about reporting the cops' visit to private investigator Russell Kolins, Raymond Martray followed his script designed to drag Jay Smith into the courtroom by the tail.

  He asked, "What if Holtz and DeSantis come back to me?"

  Jay Smith paused for a second and said, "Tell them that you want to talk to them openly, but you want a videotape and somebody representing Jay Smith present."

  "Okay, what if they ask me to take a lie detector?"

  "Well, say you'll take a lie detector, but you don't want to take a lie detector unless you consult with someone from the other side."

  "Okay, how do I handle it?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "Well, I mean, you know, we went over that, but ..."

  "It's certainly in order."

  And then Raymond Martray said, "Jay, I'm . . . I'm worried about the big question. You know, 'Did Smith tell you he did it?'"

  "What I'll do is this: then I'll have my people tell them that you're not taking any lie detector test."

  "I gotcha!" said Raymond Martray.

  "See, you're not going to do anything unless it's consulted with Jay Smith's lawyer."

  And that was as close as they were ever to get to an incriminating statement from Dr. Jay C. Smith.

  They went over old leads and telephoned old witnesses. Rick Guida worried about Mary Gove, the next-door neighbor of Susan Reinert, and Grace Gilmore, the buyer of Jay Smith's house. He needed them and they weren't getting any younger.

  "It's never going to get any better," Rick Guida said in March. "Let's go to the grand jury in June. Let's arrest Jay Smith for murder."

  The last irony that Joe VanNort would have liked is that Jack Holtz went to Dallas prison to arrest Jay Smith on June 25, 1985, six years to the day since he'd found the body of Susan

  Reinert in the Host Inn parking lot and begun his investigation.

  "This is an anniversary," he told the former educator when he walked into his cell.

  The cell of Dr. Jay C. Smith contained more files than he'd possessed as a school principal. There were shelves full of books and dozens of boxes containing thousands of documents and articles and notes, pertaining not just to his own affairs, but to those of the many other inmates who came to him for legal work.

  Their search
warrant was based on the statements by Charles Montione, especially in regard to the Penthouse magazine of August, 1983, but there was simply too much for Holtz and DeSantis to search.

  They hauled all of Jay Smith's files and belongings to the security lieutenant at Dallas prison for safekeeping and transported Jay Smith to Camp Hill where he was housed until his preliminary hearing.

  After his arraignment, Holtz and DeSantis were leaving Troop H in Harrisburg with their prisoner when a reporter from a Philadelphia newspaper yelled to Jay Smith, asking if he'd ever heard of Raymond Martray or Charles Montione.

  Jay Smith answered that they were inmates, but he'd never spoken to them.

  It was just awfully hard for Jay Smith and Bill Bradfield to be truthful, even when it was foolish to lie.

  Holtz and DeSantis returned to Dallas prison in July to complete their search.

  They seized a letter to Jay Smith's private investigator Russell Kolins, wherein he outlined his alibi on the murder weekend.

  He wrote, "I was with my daughter Sheri. Now this is her birthday so she and I went out to dinner that evening for her birthday. She left me at about ten o'clock. The next day, Saturday, Mrs. Gilmore comes again. She's working upstairs. She gives me coffee and then goes down to the lower level. So Saturday I'm there with Grace Gilmore."

  It was another link because it totally contradicted what he'd told the FBI in 1979. A written lie is more damaging than a spoken lie that's subject to the ear of the listener.

  They found the Penthouse magazine during that search and other things which had no admissible evidentiary value, but were interesting. Jay Smith had books dealing with serial killer

  Ted Bundy. He'd underlined the passage in one book that dealt with a murdered woman who'd been struck in the right eye. Just as Susan Reinert had been.

  The preliminary hearing for Jay Smith was held on July 30th. A Philadelphia lawyer named Glenn A. Zeitz appeared for Jay Smith and Rick Guida was the prosecutor. The purpose of the hearing was not to establish guilt but to determine if there was sufficient cause to bind over the defendant for trial.

  Zeitz had a style that was something like Guida's: argumentative, aggressive and sarcastic. They might have made an interesting match in a later tr d, but it was not to be. After Jay Smith was held to answer, and ordered to trial, he accepted counsel appointed and paid by the commonwealth.

  Zeitz was paid twice as much by Jay Smith for the preliminary hearing as Josh Lock received from die commonwealth for his fifteen hundred hours of work.

  The only change in witness testimony from the Bill Bradfield trial came when Susan Reinert's neighbor said for the first time that she'd seen Jay Smith enter the Reinerts' house on one occasion two years before Susan's death. Mary Gove said that in all the prior years, no one had asked her if she'd ever seen Jay Smith.

  Mrs. Gove was pushing seventy and had a cataract. Holtz and Guida weren't convinced that she was correct, or even if it had any significance. Jay Smith could have dropped by once when he'd still been a respectable principal. Guida viewed this as one more instance where he could indicate that Jay Smith possibly had lied. In short, his case was not strong and he was ready to accept any old pebble for his pile.

  As to Martray and Montione, the prosecutor just didn't know how it would go. Martray was forty-one now, and with distinguished gray hair and a business suit he looked more respectable than Montione. But he tended to testify with that vaguely impatient and irritated tone of a cop who'd worked the graveyard shift and wanted to get on with it.

  Montione had penitentiary written all over him, and it wasn't easy to say whether he'd be an effective witness in front of a jury.

  At one point in the preliminary hearing Martray had told of a moment when he and Jay Smith were coming out of the prison movie theater and Jay Smith "just flipped off" and made his index finger into a hook and told Martray he could take his eye out of his head if he chose to. Martray said that Jay Smith frightened him. But would a jury believe that an ex-cop as big and young as Raymond Martray would fear Jay Smith?

  They had many doubts about their case. They talked about fifty-fifty odds.

  Jay Smith needed several months to confer with the attorney that the court appointed for him. The lawyer, William C. Costopoulos, was well known and successful and couldn't have taken this case for the small amount of money. He did see in it a chance for publicity, and criminal lawyers rank right behind Hollywood actors in their need for that commodity. Actually, Jay Smith was lucky to get a lawyer of his stature.

  The defense wouldn't be able to go to trial until the following spring, so the three-man task force prepared their case by contacting all the witnesses. Everyone seemed constant, even as to old opinions.

  Shelly now held a master's degree from Notre Dame. She was a fetching, articulate young woman. But when she talked to Rick Guida she admitted that she still couldn't believe that Bill Bradfield could commit murder

  Rick Guida said he felt like strangling her to show that it happens.

  Just prior to going to trial in April of 1986, Jack Holtz was trying to take care of last-minute business in a desperate attempt to bolster a case that wasn't half as strong as the Bill Bradfield case, thanks to Bill Bradfield's need for confidants.

  In going through all the old reports one last time, Jack Holtz saw a note that he'd never followed up. A hunter in 1979 had seen two depressions in the ground and didn't report it to the police until the fall of 1985 when the publicity made him realize that it had been near the home of Jay Smith. The ground had been frozen, and now that spring had arrived Jack Holtz donned the digging duds one last time.

  They took the hunter to the spot and dug a crater the size of a swimming pool. They found nothing.

  The very last piece of business that Jack Holtz was able to perform, other than giving testimony, took place a few days before the jury selection was to begin. They needed something more, something to impress a jury that here was just one coincidence too many. They needed to lock the links in the circumstantial chain. They needed one more pebble for Rick Guida's rock pile.

  Jack Holtz had gone over and over the reports hoping to find some tiny detail he might have forgotten. He was about to quit when it hit him so hard it almost unscrewed his glasses. It was a report that he'd read a dozen times. Karen and Michael had been playing with a teenager on the day they'd disappeared. They were gathering hailstones with the granddaughter of their next-door neighbor, Mary Gove.

  The FBI had interviewed Elizabeth Ann Brook in 1979 and she'd given a description of the clothing the children had on that day, but he'd never personally talked to her. So no one had ever asked her about a green pin.

  He mentioned it to Rick Guida who shrugged and said, "Might as well give her a call. Maybe we can add her to the ones we have who say Karen owned a pin like that."

  Jack Holtz called Mary Gove and was put in touch with her granddaughter, now a young woman of twenty-two, living in Delaware County.

  He had a telephone conversation with Beth Ann Brook and when he was finished, he said, "Hold the phone. I want you to tell this to Mister Cuida."

  After Rick Guida finished talking to Beth Ann Brook, Jack Holtz looked at him and said, "I'd marry that girl."

  Jack Holtz had secured the links. The only question now was whether or not the chain was strong enough to tether a goat, which is, after all, a strange and independent creature of mythic power.

  Chapter 26

  Performers

  Owing to pretrial maneuvering there was certain information the jury would never know. They would never hear tapes in which Jay Smith and Raymond Martray discussed future armed robberies. Nor would they learn about the defendants alleged scheme to pin the blame for one of the Sears crimes on David Rucker.

  They wouldn't know about things that the police had found in his basement back in 1978. Things like silencers and chains.

  Most frustrating to Jack Holtz, they wouldn't know about the things in Jay Smith's possession when he wa
s arrested in 1978. Such as tape and a syringe containing a sedative, things that would dovetail right into the murder of Susan Reinert. They would never know about any of these things because they were deemed to be prejudicial.

  Hie private investigator working for William Costopoulos referred to him as a "magician," and he certainly looked the part. The newspaper artists found him easy to sketch. Costopoulos had the muscular good looks of the Creek islanders, tailored to fit his courtroom image. A leonine head and a rugged jaw decorated with a salt-and-pepper Venetian goatee made you think he'd make a great Iago if he could act.

  And he could. Costopoulos was a flamboyant trial lawyer who kept his working-class background in his speech. His suits and shoes were unmistakably Italian, and his high-waisted pants were fastened to striped suspenders.

  Whenever he'd come into court looking particularly dapper, his private investigator Skip Cochenour would say, "Goddamnit, I wish he didn't always have to dress like a pimp."

  But it worked. A guy like Jack Holtz was larger than he looked. Bill Costopoulos looked larger than he was. It was a matter of theater. He handed out black-and-white glossies to the reporters and everyone seemed to like him.

  Courtroom number one in the Dauphin County Courthouse suited the style of Bill Costopoulos. It was a great legal theater of Italian marble and walnut paneling. Art deco sconces lined the walls, and it had a high ceiling with a skylight. A huge gold crest behind the judges bench bore the coat of arms of die commonwealth.

  The judges bench was massive and could accommodate a tribunal of judges. Beneath the bench of Judge William W. Lipsitt was carved: no man can be deprived of his life, liberty or property unless by judgment of his peers or the law of the land.

  The security, due to all the escape talk, was very heavy. There were always two deputy sheriffs in plainclothes sitting behind Jay Smith, and other officers from the state police or attorney generals office scanned the courtroom.

  Across the courtroom from the jury seats was yet another jury box of equal size. In this trial it was used to accommodate the press.

  Seeing the 1986 version of Jay C. Smith was a shock. It made one recall what had been said years earlier by the wife of his first attorney: "He seemed to change each time I saw him. He could even change his size."