Echoes in the Darkness

by Joseph Wambaugh

  He had one project left before he’d be satisfied with the house he’d built. He wanted a Madonna, with a pool of water at her feet. He had the spot picked but he couldn’t decide what the pool around her should look like. He didn’t want it round or oval or kidney-shaped like some goddamn Hollywood swimming pool. It had to look natural, and had to be fed by a little waterfall. He was going to light her with a spotlight so she could be seen at night. He was a devout Catholic and this project was so important to him he was uncertain how to begin.

  Despite the strawberry patch and a Madonna and the cat named Snookie, Joe VanNort was not a sentimental man, certainly not as far as people were concerned. Nearly thirty years of policing people was right there in the lopsided cynical grin that passed for a smile.

  It was a three-hour drive from the state police barracks in Harrisburg. Sergeant Joe VanNort hoped someday to get a transfer to Dunmore Barracks so he could live in his log house all the time. Instead, the telephone call about a lonely little corpse at the Host Inn took him away from the log house and even away from Betty.

  The aftermath of that phone call would age and consume Sergeant Joe VanNort. He often felt that his next hunt would never end, that it would last the rest of his life.

  The partner of Joe VanNort was a thirty-two-year-old trooper named John J. Holtz who had joined the Pennsylvania State Police in 1968 and who had been working for VanNort as a criminal investigator out of Troop H in Harrisburg since 1975. Joe VanNort had always said that Jack Holtz had the makings of a top-notch “crime man.” Jack Holtz enjoyed working “crime,” but many investigations were time consuming and the hours were bad.

  A lot of the older troopers said that Jack Holtz reminded them of Joe VanNort when Joe was young. Although he never admitted it, VanNort probably agreed, and maybe that’s why he picked Holtz to be his partner and protégé.

  They had a lot in common, really. Neither was a talker, but Holtz was much quieter and very shy. VanNort got to the point without subtlety when he had something to say. They both liked hunting in the Pennsylvania mountains, although Jack Holtz was happy just to be in the woods, whether he bagged a pheasant or not. He never cared about trophies.

  When it came to homicide investigation each had a perfectionist streak that would keep him awake worrying about details. During a stressful investigation the older man chain-smoked Marlboros, lighting each one with the butt of the last. The younger dipped snuff and called himself a “country boy” because of his admittedly disgusting habit. Holtz used to make other investigators queasy with his gum load of snuff and the paper cup or Coke bottle or tin can he used for a spittoon.

  The quality they shared that was most telling as far as their professional life was concerned was evident in their faces: Joe VanNort with that cynical lopsided grin, Jack Holtz with his aviator eyeglasses attached so snugly to his face that the metal rims cut into his cheeks when he smiled. And that wasn’t too often, not in public during a homicide investigation. Even more than Joe VanNort, Jack Holtz took his job very seriously, and was obsessively self-controlled. Those glasses weren’t about to fall off or even slip down.

  Jack Holtz arrived at the Host Inn two hours after the body was discovered. The first thing he noted was that the 1978 Plymouth Horizon was parked in the third row, just a few spaces east of the main entrance. And what with somebody leaving the hatchback open, somebody who was probably the suspicious telephone caller named “Larry Brown,” it was apparent that the killer had done everything but light flares to call attention to the body. And that never happened in ordinary homicides.

  Before and after the corpse that used to be Susan Reinert was removed to Osteopathic General Hospital in Harrisburg, Holtz took a close look at it. There were abrasions and bruises on both forearms. There was dried blood in the mouth and nose. There were discolored bruises around the right eye. There were abrasions behind both knees, behind the neck, and on the ankle. There were bruises on the buttocks and between the shoulder blades.

  Jack Holtz learned from the cops at the scene that the registered owner of the car was Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore, but no one knew if she was this victim. There was no clothing, no purse, no keys.

  Dew covered the car uniformly and Holtz could clearly see the swipes across the roof by the driver’s door, obviously intended to wipe any fingerprints from that side of the car. Looking closer he saw that everything around the driver’s side of the car had been wiped. And instead of just wiping down the rearview mirror, the suspect had removed it. Jack Holtz doubted that they’d get any relevant latent prints.

  There wasn’t much in the car that seemed particularly helpful. There was a pamphlet from the First Presbyterian Church of Ardmore. There was a deck of playing cards, and some soft-drink containers and hamburger wrappers and a cub scout pamphlet.

  They found some notes, a road map, a hairbrush, some candy wrappers, a matchbook from a Carlisle motel and a girl’s barrette. There were three stuffed animals: a lion, a duck and a monkey.

  There were a couple of items that seemed not to belong in a car with stuffed animals and church pamphlets: there was a rubber dildo under the front seat. And beneath the body in the trunk was a brand-new blue comb and on it was inscribed in white: 79th USARCOM, along with an insignia of the cross of Lorraine.

  Also beneath the victim was a green plastic trash bag.

  While Susan Reinert’s body was being taken to the hospital for the autopsy, Jay Smith was only ten minutes away in the Dauphin County Courthouse in Harrisburg for sentencing on weapons and drug and stolen-property charges.

  Jay Smith was twenty minutes late that morning and apologized to the judge. He was impassive as he stood to accept the sentence of the court. He got two to five years in the state correctional institution at Dallas, Pennsylvania.

  When the judge had finished, Dr. Jay C. Smith simply flipped his car keys to his lawyer, John O’Brien, and said, “My car’s in the lot.”

  And that was that. Jay Smith was taken from the courtroom to begin serving his sentence and to await court dates for the other criminal matters.

  Jay Smith didn’t appear to notice the gray-haired couple in the courtroom who never missed a day when he was scheduled to appear-the couple still searching for a clue to the whereabouts of their missing son, Edward, and his wife, Stephanie Smith Hunsberger.

  The county had a new coroner who refused Joe VanNort’s request for an experienced forensic pathologist. The doctor who did the autopsy took samples of pubic and head hair, both pulled and cut. He took scrapings of the nails and vaginal swabs and blood samples.

  When the pathologist put the ultraviolet light on Susan Reinerts dark brown hair, some half-dozen tiny red fibers not visible to the naked eye “lit up like a Christmas tree,” in his words. And he found a blue fiber in the hair of her temple and another blue fiber behind a knee. The pathologist found a white sticky substance, probably from adhesive tape, stuck to her mouth, hair, and around her nose.

  A corporal from Troop H took fingerprints, and using silver nitrate, rolled an index card on her back. He found some ridge detail on the flesh of Susan Reinert but it wasn’t promising. It was a double-loop whorl pattern, but unfortunately, the pathologist had the same pattern on his right thumb.

  The deceased was found to measure five feet two inches in height and to weigh just one hundred pounds. There was an absence of rigor. There was post-mortem lividity producing bluish discoloration where the blood had obeyed the law of gravity. There was fixed lividity on the front and the back so that the pathologist reckoned she’d lain about eight hours on each side after death.

  Since rigidity from rigor mortis lasts about twenty-four hours, the secondary flacidity found in the body of Susan Reinert, plus the lividity and other objective signs, allowed the pathologist to make a ballpark guess that she’d died late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning.

  The abrasions on the back looked to the doctor like marks from the links of a chain. He checked her entire body for any sign of a
n intravenous injection, but could find no needle mark, though a single needle mark could easily be lost in the many contusions on that body.

  When Jack Holtz asked the pathologist if he could take a guess as to cause of death, the doctor said, “Asphyxiation.” Which wasn’t super-helpful in that he could see that she’d stopped breathing. And that she hadn’t been shot, stabbed, slugged, and probably hadn’t been strangled. But that’s all Holtz got until the lab reports came back to tell them whether something other than smothering had caused the shutdown in respiratory functions.

  By Monday evening the state police investigators had contacted neighbors and friends of Susan Reinert and were reasonably sure by their description of her that the body in the morgue was Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore. Through information from her friends they’d called Ken Reinert and asked him to come to Harrisburg to make a positive identification.

  To Joe VanNort, any husband, even an ex-husband, is always a prime suspect. Ken Reinert reacted pretty much as one would expect after receiving the shocking news. He was saddened, confused, disbelieving, apprehensive. After he identified the body of his ex-wife, Jack Holtz took him out for some coffee. He was in the company of the state police for two hours answering questions and trying to adjust to the shock of violent death.

  Suddenly, he looked at the investigators and had a thought. He wondered if the kids were with the neighbors or Pat Schnure or …

  “Who’s taking care of the kids?” Ken Reinert asked.

  And an investigator said, “What kids?”

  Ken Reinert called his parents to learn if his children were with them. He found they were not. When he informed his parents that Susan was dead, he was astonished to discover that he couldn’t tell the truth. He told his parents that she’d been killed in a car accident.

  Joe VanNort later heard about it and moved Ken Reinert up a notch on his suspect list. Why would he lie about it? the old cop wondered. But Joe VanNort had been a bachelor nearly all his life, and was childless. He didn’t understand how it would be for a father to utter a certain word when his own children were missing. It was impossible for Ken Reinert even to think the word at that time. Finally he had to.

  He called his parents back and said, “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t say it. Susan. She was murdered.”

  When Ken got home that night his wife Lynn was waiting. They’d called everyone they could think to call and still hadn’t located his children.

  His wife dug through the trash and located two greeting cards that he’d recently received. They were homemade, one from each child. One message said:

  Nobody else may know that you are the world’s greatest dad, but I know you are. Happy Father’s Day.

  Love,

  Karen

  The other said:

  There is no one better than you for a dad.

  Love,

  Michael

  Without mentioning the cards she put them in a safe place. There was a horrifying possibility that they might become priceless.

  By Tuesday afternoon Jack Holtz and the crime man designated as evidence officer were on their way to the Reinert home in Ardmore. The evidence officer was Trooper Lou DeSantis. He was a little taller and a little older than Jack Holtz and looked and sounded like a game of stickball in the old Italian neighborhoods of South Philly. He was a city guy and Philadelphia was home, as opposed to VanNort and Holtz, who rated an assignment in Philly right up there with sandhogging and gassing stray cats. Harrisburg was plenty big for them.

  It was usually Joe VanNort’s style, as the sergeant in the criminal investigations unit, to come into a case after the preliminaries were finished and they’d focused on a suspect. He was the best they had at interrogation. But this one involved missing kids. He was in on the legwork from the start.

  Before it was over, Jack Holtz would be inside the Reinert home a dozen times. On this first trip it was to try to determine what had caused them to leave the house so abruptly on Friday night, just after the hailstorm. He found that the house was full of cardboard boxes packed with things for the coming garage sale. In the kitchen he found cereal bowls and milk glasses with milk still in them.

  He checked the children’s rooms. Karen had a Bambi bedspread. She liked books and stuffed animals close to her. Michael had a Star Wars bedspread. He preferred his favorite toys nearby, and his baseball mitt.

  Both children had neat piles of clothing, enough for a day or two, folded on the foot of their beds. Michael had changed clothes after the game. The cops found his Phillies baseball shirt in the clothes hamper.

  Wherever they had gone that night, they couldn’t have intended to go far. They obviously planned to return shortly.

  Susan Reinert’s brother Pat Gallagher had insisted on meeting the police at his sister’s home. He sat and waited as the cops searched and took photos and tried to lift latent fingerprints in all the rooms.

  Pat Gallagher was distant, cool, and not friendly. He was several years older than his sister. Jack Holtz thought he was there to keep an eye on the silverware. Of course he was a suspect. To Jack Holtz and the man who trained him, everybody’s a suspect.

  Bill Bradfield received lots of notifications about the death of Susan Reinert. An early notification came from a woman teacher with whom he’d been romantically involved in the past.

  Another came from little Shelly who informed Chris and Bill Bradfield of the news, exclaiming, “Guess whose name’s in the paper?”

  She was obviously not going into mourning.

  Sharon Lee, Susan’s friend and former colleague at Upper Merion, got the word on Tuesday from another teacher who’d heard a news broadcast. She immediately called Bill Bradfield at St. John’s, but was told he was in class. She left her name and number.

  He called her at 7:00 P.M. He was whispering. He admitted he was not shocked to hear about Susan Reinert because another teacher had already told him the sad story.

  Sharon Lee asked when he had planned to see Susan again and Bill Bradfield said, well, when school started in September.

  And that stunned Sharon Lee. Then she got mad. Very mad, because she’d been told by Susan all about the trip to England, and the marriage plans.

  When she began pointing out a few of those things to Bill Bradfield, he simply said that Susan Reinert had been pursuing him, but he had always told her he wasn’t interested.

  When Sharon Lee asked if he had any idea what Susan was doing in Harrisburg, Bill Bradfield said that he believed she had a friend named Don Jones in the Harrisburg area.

  By then, Sharon Lee was having trouble maintaining composure and she said, “All right, Bill, well how about the children? Do you have any idea where they might be? Is someone we don’t know taking care of them? What do you think?”

  And Bill Bradfield said, “Oh yes. How old were the children?”

  After Sharon Lee had hung up, she was confused and upset to think that he was trying to deny involvement with Susan Reinert. She was more upset to think that he was pretending not to know anything about the kids.

  Sharon Lee had been at Susan Reinerts house once when Bill Bradfield showed up unexpectedly. She saw him making a fuss over Karen who seemed to enjoy all his attention. He had given her an autograph book for her birthday and inscribed a little message in Greek.

  She was most upset when she belatedly realized that he had spoken of the children in the past tense.

  “How old were the children?”

  They knew about the insurance very quickly. An agent from New York Life called the state police barracks and presented them with a motive when the first news flashes hit the tube.

  They also realized that this investigation probably had little or nothing to do with the Harrisburg area, for whatever reason the body was dumped there. Joe VanNort had to bite the bullet and move his team of eight investigators to Belmont Barracks in Philadelphia.

  By the end of the first week, he was living in a Holiday Inn near Philly along with Jack Holtz who was stewing ov
er having to raise his eleven-year-old son long-distance. Like Susan Reinert he was a divorced parent with custody of his only child. Fortunately, Holtz’s mother only lived a few minutes from his home and could take over temporarily. He figured the investigation would be over before the holidays.

  Joe VanNort had a lot of questions for Sue Myers and made an appointment with her for Tuesday night. He said that love and murder go together like Fred and Ginger and figured she’d have something to tell them. They’d already heard about the fight in the faculty lounge.

  When the cops got to Phoenixville they found Sue Myers waiting in her apartment with Vince Valaitis whom she’d called home from work. And when Vince saw them he looked as if he’d been caught in the bathtub by Jay Smith with a shampoo bottle full of acid. Wearing his hairnet.

  Vince was as blanched as a dead azalea. His ear was glued to the telephone into which Bill Bradfield was saying, “You don’t have to talk to the police! You’ll get yourself in trouble! Let Sue talk to them! Keep your mouth shut!”

  Sue Myers invited Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz to sit and said, “Vince, that phone isn’t working very well, why don’t you use the one in the bedroom?”

  And Vince nodded and tried to mumble a hello to the cops and sidled into the bedroom because he was so terrified he was losing feeling in his limbs.

  He talked to Bill Bradfield a bit longer while Sue Myers told the cops the lie she’d been ordered to tell by Bill Bradfield, namely that they’d left for Cape May at four o’clock Friday afternoon.

  When Bill Bradfield said good-bye and Godspeed and hung up, Vince began to discover that lying to the cops was like ski jumping. You can’t get hurt as long as you stay in the air. And as one would guess, Vince was out of practice. The last time he’d tried lying to an authority figure was in the fourth grade and a nun rapped him with a ruler for it.

  Now he was trembling before Joe VanNort whose ruler would probably turn out to be a leather strap, and Vince was expecting a thump or two across the nose as soon as he told his first whopper.