What they could deduce about Susan Reinert’s death was this: she’d been called away from her house suddenly. When she and her children arrived at their rendezvous, they were met by more than one executioner. It took more than one to control a desperate mother and two hysterical children.
The one-hundred-pound woman fought back but was beaten severely, possibly with fists. Her mouth was taped and she was lashed in chain and cinched so tight that the links gouged a trail around her body.
As she lay helpless she may well have seen and heard her children being murdered. She may have seen and heard more than that.
She could not die until such time as a killer could establish an unshakable alibi. It was at least twenty-four hours, perhaps thirty-six, before Susan Reinert was murdered, in order to fix an acceptable time of death.
One could speculate about the night and day and night of unimaginable agony this mother suffered as she came to understand the folly that brought her and Karen and Michael to this. When the lethal injection came, she probably welcomed it.
Task force members in frustration would often say, “That woman’s stupidity was a crime.”
To call Susan Reinerts pathetic love for a man a “crime” was acceptable cop hyperbole, but no crime deserved this punishment. To devise a death as cruel as Susan Reinerts required a supremely Gothic imagination.
20
Rebirth
The New Year was a time for diving and digging. They dove when lakes were not frozen. They dug when the ground thawed.
Desperation was driving the task force to follow leads from tipsters, seers and lunatics in Maryland and New Jersey as well as Pennsylvania. They once went down twenty-five feet in a landfill. There were theories that the children had been put into fresh graves in cemeteries. So even the hallowed ground was searched by the task force.
Acting on tips from a former boyfriend of young Stephanie, the state police divers searched a water-filled limestone quarry in Valley Forge Park. This, because a tipster told them of seeing Jay Smith kill cats by dousing them with nitric acid and driving their bodies toward the park.
They even spent several man-days on a lead from a seer who described in detail where the children had been buried by “two men.”
Joe VanNort said, “Well, after thirty years, police work’s come down to throwing your hands up in the air to catch vibrations.”
Bill Bradfield, Chris Pappas and Sue Myers still weren’t talking, and what Vince had given the task force was hearsay on top of hearsay. They hadn’t any way of really linking Jay Smith to Bill Bradfield, let alone to the murder of Susan Reinert.
Agent Matt Mullin had secured photos of all the evidence seized in the basement of Jay Smith in August 1978 as well as photos of several things from his secret life that at that time had no evidentiary value to the local cops: the 79th USARCOM combs and the loops of chain and locks that had been draped over a hall tree and coiled on a chair. The FBI was able to determine the lock brand from the photos.
Luckily, it was possible to size the link marks on Susan Reinert’s body because the way she’d been photographed in the luggage compartment of her car, the marks could be compared to the print size on a Time magazine lying beside her.
Matt Mullin sent blow-up photos of the chains along with the photos of Susan Reinerts wounds to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Four forensic pathologists were able to determine the link size by comparing them to the known size of the locks.
They couldn’t prove anything in a court of law, but those chains that were once in Jay Smith’s basement were exactly the size of the chains that had bound Susan Reinert. The FBI said thank you to the local cops, thank you to Walter Reed, and a silent thank you to Henry Luce.
Though he always referred to Matt Mullin as a “social worker” or “schoolteacher,” Joe VanNort was impressed with the super-prep on this one.
He took his state cops aside privately and said, “Okay, we’re gonna start takin’ a close look at Jay C. Smith.”
In the spring, a tow truck driver named Kramer received a routine call to tow an abandoned car that had been parked too long at the rear of an apartment building near Valley Forge.
The driver found the car, hooked it up and took it to the tow garage where he opened up the trunk and searched for valuables. What he found was very valuable to a squad of lawmen at Belmont Barracks. The car belonged to Sheri, the youngest daughter of Jay C. Smith, and the truck driver recognized her father’s name from the publicity.
They got very excited at Belmont Barracks after the truck driver handed over a letter from Jay Smith to his wife, Stephanie. It was written from Dallas prison one day following his incarceration, one day after Susan Reinerts body was found.
It was a letter within a letter. He’d prefaced the long message by informing his wife that his mail was probably read by prison officials.
Steph,
I hope they are knocking off that cluster near your spine and you are feeling better. I didn’t want to burden you with a lot of tasks so don’t worry if you can’t get to them. When you get well enough, then give these things some attention.
Among things to take care of:
Capri. First, clean it up thoroughly. We will try to sell but not give away. I might use it to store books so don’t sell it too fast.
Steph, we must throw away most of the stuff. Don’t keep things because they just seem too good to throw away. We will replace at an auction or other place cheaply. I can’t stress the importance of this: Clean out and then clean up.
Rug. Downstairs rug is full of matchsticks, cigarettes, old strands of marijuana, etc. from Eddie and Steph and their friends. Every time I walk on that rug something new pops out. It MUST go. I’ll write more later about disposal.
I love you,
Jay
The letter within a letter to his dying wife wasn’t much by itself, but the task force was even more interested in chains than Jay Smith was. They were trying to forge a chain of circumstantial evidence and when it was long enough they wanted to see how Bill Bradfield and Jay Smith liked being hog-tied by links of steel.
The troopers went to the state prison to take a handwriting exemplar from Jay Smith. He didn’t know why they wanted it, but he didn’t like the idea. He tried to fake his handwriting. Dr. Jay gave them an exemplar that was so shaky it looked like it was written by Howard Hughes after he was gooned out from watching Ice Station Zebra ninety-two times.
Matt Mullin was on a roll. The next lead he developed had to do with the fiber samples found on the body and in the trunk of Susan Reinert’s car. Jack Holtz went to the former home of Jay Smith and got permission from Grace Gilmore to cut samples from her upstairs red carpet.
The fiber samples matched the fibers found in Susan Reinert’s hair. The FBI lab reported that they were polyester fibers and that less than 7 percent of America’s carpets are polyester. However, hair and fiber analysis is the most subjective of forensic sciences and the task force knew that any defense lawyer could come up with a couple of experts who would say that they couldn’t tell for certain if the fibers were from the same dye lot or even if they were polyester. But they looked like the same dye lot and they looked like polyester.
Matt Mullin and Jack Holtz later went back to the house on Valley Forge Road, this time with lights and brushes and vacuums.
When Grace Gilmore had gotten rid of the beige carpet in the basement she’d decided to leave the carpet pad. The lawmen divided the basement into quadrants, took out their soft little sweeping brushes and started cleaning that pad. They swept and crawled and vacuumed that basement for hours. They had knees like medieval nuns’ when they were through with that job.
Poor Grace Gilmore. Instead of a Welcome Wagon hostess she got cops snipping at her carpet. And what did they have to show for a brutal day’s work? Four big dust balls. That was it: huge balls of dust and grime and fuzz that she could’ve handed them right out of her Hoover any day of the week. But they looked happy with their dust
balls.
The task force sent the sweepings off to the FBI lab in Washington, and went about their trips to communes where the children were allegedly being held. There were more landfills to excavate and more lakes to drag.
One year after the murder of Susan Reinert, and one day before the fifty-second birthday of Jay C. Smith, American justice finally got around to his peccadilloes of 1977.
Jay Smith and his brothers and sisters gave testimony before Judge Warren G. Morgan as to his accomplishments in life. They told how they’d lost their father when they were children and worked very hard to better themselves. They described how Jay Smith had risen through the ranks in the army reserve and very nearly became a general, and detailed how he’d continued his lifelong formal education until he was awarded his doctorate.
The judge had this to say: “The devotion of this family is of course impressive. Touching. And we are saddened that this defendant has brought such discredit upon his family. As I listened attentively to members of his family testify, I had to think that they seem to be talking about a man who is now really two different persons: the brother they grew up with who worked hard to educate himself and this man who has been tried in this courtroom and other courtrooms of the commonwealth.
“It was the duty of this school principal to provide an example of probity to the young minds who were committed to his charge. He has dishonored his profession in a monstrous way. It is rather interesting that we do not sense today in this defendant any real remorse.
“The court sentences the defendant to pay the costs of prosecution and to make restitution to Sears, Roebuck stores in the sum of fifty-three thousand dollars and to undergo imprisonment in a state institution for an indefinite term, the minimum of which shall be three and a half years and the maximum of which shall be seven years. To commence and be computed consecutively to the sentence being served.”
It was a stiffer jolt than Jay Smith expected. That came to a term of five and a half to twelve years. He couldn’t expect parole until 1986. As a pretty fair jailhouse lawyer, he began doing legal research into the appeal process, but he kept being distracted by another matter. The Reinert task force was coming after him hard. He’d long since stopped sending whimsical bulletins to former colleagues. He was maintaining total silence. Prison officials and other inmates described him as a quiet loner.
Matt Mullin called Jack Holtz one day and said, “I’ve got bad news and good news.”
“Gimme the bad news,” Jack Holtz said.
“There wasn’t a blue fiber anywhere in the sweepings. We may never know how she picked up the two blue fibers.”
“Gimme the good news.”
“In quadrant number one they found a hair. It’s the same length as the hair taken out of her head at the autopsy. It’s a positive match in twenty-one out of a possible twenty-five microscopic characteristics. That’s as good as it gets.”
“It’s not a fingerprint,” Jack Holtz said. “But I’ll settle for that!”
They also found red fibers in the basement which indicated that a piece of the upstairs carpet might’ve been down there, but then again the fibers could’ve been tracked down from upstairs on someone’s shoes.
Still, it was another link, and it tied in beautifully with the letter from Jay Smith to his wife asking her on her deathbed to throw away that downstairs rug.
Jay Smith was no longer a lonesome silhouette dancing on some distant crag with little hooves. He was being forced down from the hills. He was giving off pungent goat smells, and it smelled better to Jack Holtz than a gunload of snuff.
Sue Myers was almost through doing needlepoint. She’d done needlepoint when they slashed through Europe like General Patton. She’d done needlepoint through Bill Bradfield’s sixteen and a half love affairs. She’d done needlepoint when his money and hers went down the drain at the art store. She’d done needlepoint through the months of blather about devils and guns and acid and bodies and hit men and murder. She’d sat there quietly as Madame Defarge at the guillotine and … just … done … needlepoint.
And then he went too far. It happened in the office of his Philadelphia lawyer, John Paul Curran.
Bill Bradfield would talk to a radish if he had to, and Curran was an expansive Irish type who liked to shoot the breeze too, and the meetings with Bill Bradfield got pretty windy. Sue Myers was sitting there, apparently placid, when Bill Bradfield made the devastating mistake of talking personally about Susan Reinert.
He said to Curran, “That woman was the nearest thing to a nymphomaniac that I ever met.”
Sue Myers later said, “Stars went off in my head!”
Sue Myers saw more stars than a steer in a slaughterhouse. She saw stars for weeks and weeks after that. The sniggering way he said it. It could’ve been said like that at an Elks club smoker.
Curran looked at her, and Sue Myers, with her fortieth birthday approaching, had never felt so cheap, so used, so foolish.
She’d hated Susan Reinert in life and hated her in death, and never felt much pity for her. In her own words it was an “un-Christian” way to feel, but she was getting close to understanding the core of those feelings.
If there was one thing she had been positive about, it was that Bill Bradfield had despised Susan Reinert, though Susan Reinert was certain that he loved her.
Now, for the first time, Sue Myers was beginning to think: “What if he despises Shelly? And Rachel? What if he despises them all? What if he despises me?”
It was starting to seem possible. And though she was not willing to admit consciously that he might have conspired to murder two children, she was getting ready to concede that he might have badly wanted Susan Reinert dead. So what about herself?
Sue Myers dropped her needlepoint one day and walked calmly to the telephone and called a locksmith. When he came home, Bill Bradfield couldn’t get in his own apartment. Bill Bradfield roared. He sounded like Oedipus with his eyeballs bleeding into his beard, but she wouldn’t open that door.
Bill Bradfield was without a roof over his head and had to go home and live with his parents, and be reminded that he’d wanted a piano and what did they give him? A goddamn stinking miserable little toy truck.
A most unbelievable break came at the time of Jay Smiths sentencing. William Bradfield tried to probate the estate of Susan Reinert. As soon as he filed for probate, Ken Reinert and Pat Gallagher joined forces and filed to block him.
In the Court of Common Pleas of Delaware County, there’s a court division with the Dickensian title of Orphans Court. In that the ex-husband and brother of Susan Reinert had immediately challenged her will, the court appointed a deputy district attorney, John A. Reilly, as administrator of the estate to safeguard the rights of the missing children.
Reilly was a veteran prosecutor with a good reputation, a Civil War buff who’d been around the courts a long time. Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz felt good about him, but he warned them not to get their hopes up.
One of the functions of the court in this estate case was to ascertain the total assets of the estate. There was the missing $25,000 that Susan Reinert had “invested,” and there was a matter of a missing diamond ring that her mother had given her. The court would try to determine what happened to them but Bill Bradfield could stop the bus by agreeing to reimburse the estate on his own. That in itself would cure a big part of the estate dispute even without any admission of misappropriation or criminal conduct.
Sort of a nolo contendere situation, as the cops understood it. And that would send them back to sweeping cellars and digging in graveyards.
Jack Holtz had hoped that in Orphans Court Bill Bradfield would at least be compelled to make incriminating statements. He’d fantasized that Bill Bradfield would take the stand, but now he feared it was going to turn into a drawn-out estate squabble that would never allow them to compel Bill Bradfield to talk.
At the time, Joe VanNort showed his lopsided grin and said, “I ain’t so sure Bill Bradfields smart in the f
irst place. And in the second place I ain’t so sure he could keep his mouth shut if John Curran gagged him with a lawbook. Let’s wait and see if we get a break.”
They got a break.
The Orphans Court hearing was held at the courthouse in Media, Pennsylvania.
Bill Bradfield showed up in a three-piece blue pinstripe, and on that cool summer day he carried a topcoat over his arm and had all the wisps trimmed from his beard, and had a fresh preppy haircut. To Joe VanNort he looked like an FBI agent with whiskers.
He’d gained some weight from nervous eating, and the cops saw fear in his eyes, or hoped they did. To their amazement and joy, Bill Bradfield not only took the stand, but after “affirming” an oath on the Bible, he denied everything.
He had this to say about Susan Reinert:
“She was a sensitive, easily hurt, intelligent young lady, but very troubled. She was troubled about many things in life and would ask my opinion about a lot of things. But she often did the opposite. She dated people I thought she ought not to date. She went to places I thought she ought not to go.”
He told the court in response to John Reilly’s questions that he’d spent many evenings with his friend Susan Reinert, but he’d never “dated” her.
“The frequency of my contacts with Mrs. Reinert grew with her demands,” he told those assembled in Orphans Court. “The term ‘date’ implies the kind of relationship Mrs. Reinert and I didn’t have,”
As in the Jay Smith trial, Bill Bradfield’s husky, sometimes gravelly voice flattened out when he was testifying. It added to an overall impression of distance that caused reporters to refer to his “cold blue eyes” when actually he’d raced through life with all the fluttery heat of Scarlett O’Hara.
Reilly asked, “Did you ever stay overnight with her?”
Bill Bradfield answered, “Never.”
When Reilly asked, “Did she ever discuss an investment with you?” Bill Bradfield answered, “What investment?”
Echoes in the Darkness Page 26