Echoes in the Darkness

by Joseph Wambaugh

  By December, the FBI decided to hang out the “closed” sign. Matt Mullin and Bob Loughney were the last FBI special agents to leave. The FBI had done more lab work on this criminal investigation than on any other with the exception of the Patricia Hearst case. Jack Holtz was very depressed by the FBI report that said the Reinert murder was unsolvable.

  It was a downbeat Christmas for Jack Holtz. Of course he got to go home to his son on weekends. Still, he logged more nights in motel rooms than Willy Loman, and with Joe VanNort gone the nights were lonelier.

  Lou DeSantis was from Philly, so he slept at home most of the time. DeSantis had gotten involved with the task force in the first place because he’d been available when the call came to pick up Ken Reinert in Philadelphia and drive him to Harrisburg to identify the body of his ex-wife.

  So far, the investigation hadn’t brought any hardship for DeSantis, but he wasn’t fond of hearing Jack Holtz talk about relocating the task force to Harrisburg, where he’d be the one living in motels.

  But that’s what happened in April. And now it was a mini-task force. It included Jack Holtz, Lou DeSantis and Deputy Attorney General Rick Guida. And that was all there would be until the end. The bunch of bananas was down to three and they were getting overripe. Jack Holtz couldn’t even count his gray hairs anymore, but at least he was again living with his son. He celebrated by redecorating. That meant buying another duck.

  When asked why he had so many ducks, he looked surprised, as though the answer was obvious: they didn’t want flowers.

  The move to Harrisburg coincided with another event that would add hundreds of man-hours to the already mammoth investigation. Jay Smith’s work had been successful. Raymond Martray got released from prison on $10,000 bail, pending appeal.

  While he was free, Martray again contacted Jack Holtz and Lou DeSantis who went to meet him at his father’s house. Martray said that Jay Smith wanted him to fake a story that Joe VanNort had offered Martray a deal to frame Jay Smith. He also said that Jay Smith wanted to kill a deputy sheriff and wanted to poison the water supply at Dallas, and all of this had to do with escape plots if he got indicted for murder. Dr. Jay still had the Reinert murder very much on his mind, according to Martray.

  Before they’d left the case, the FBI had administered a lie detector test to Raymond Martray. The polygraph operator said he was possibly deceptive. After his release from prison, the cops administered another. He passed on the “key questions.” Though Joe VanNort had been a polygraph operator, Jack Holtz seldom used the machine on anyone.

  “It’s a good tool, but,” was his opinion of lie detectors.

  Jack Holtz decided that if half of what Martray said was accurate it was time to take a stab at the prince of darkness. He and Rick Guida asked Martray if he’d agree to telephone monitoring, and he signed a consent form in the presence of his lawyer.

  The state police secured a telephone number and post office box for Raymond Martray and intercepted all letters from Jay Smith. The letters from prison would always specify when Dr. Jay was going to place a phone call, since all outgoing calls had to be made collect. Martray was then to permit his phone call to be taped. There were dozens of such calls received and recorded by the state police during the next three years.

  It was clear from the very first recorded telephone conversation that it was mentor and disciple all over again. Ray Martray sounded as eager to please as Chris Pappas and Vince Valaitis had been.

  The calls were full of yard talk and legal talk because Jay Smith was busy with petitions of various kinds for other cons, including a mutual friend of theirs named Charles Montione. There was lots of escape talk with Raymond Martray pretending that he’d checked all the places that his mentor had asked him to, including the courthouse in Harrisburg, in case the state cops ever nailed him with an indictment in the Reinert murder.

  Most of the conversations were right out of Cagney and Bogart gangster epics. The cops had to endure endless jailhouse fantasies.

  “I walked all around the building trying to figure out which way they’d bring you in and out,” Martray told him on one of the early calls.

  “What you gotta do is go up and down those side steps in the courtrooms,” Jay Smith informed him.

  “I already did that. I didn’t use the elevator at all.”

  “Right, but if you go all the way down to the basement where they sell the coffee, they bring you in through that side door. The entrance is to the rear.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “When they come in there, they’re by themselves. Someone could put a gun on them and take their guns away. You could easily get a guy out of there.”

  “Okay. I’ll maybe check that out again the next time I’m down that way.”

  And then there were the conversations that drove the cops and Rick Guida absolutely bonkers because Jay Smith would say something that should be followed by an incriminating remark, but he’d just back off.

  Raymond Martray claimed that he’d been taught by his mentor that “self-serving statements” should always be tossed right in the midst of incriminating statements. Just in case there were electronic eavesdropping devices around.

  For example, in one conversation, Jay Smith said, “My defense is going to be that I had nothing to do with the Reinert murder. They can’t prove anything because I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  And Raymond Martray, sounding as frustrated as the cops, asked, “Is there anybody close there, or something?”

  “Is anybody what?”

  “Anybody close to you, or anything there?”

  “No.”

  “ ’Cause I want to … you think there’s anything on these phones, or what?”

  “Oh well, I think that if anything … yeah, I think we always have to be careful.”

  “Yeah, okay. I couldn’t understand what was going on,” Martray said.

  All of these contradictions were repeatedly attributed to the “self-serving” explanation. But the cops were starting to imply that maybe Martray had never been told diddly regarding the Reinert murder. And that he was trying to use the cops to influence the court during his appeals.

  When Martray once again took the subject from escape directly to the Reinert murder, Jay Smith said, “Remember, I got a lot of things going for me. One, the woman who bought my house moved into it on the day that Reinert disappeared, and she was there with me, you know what I mean?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Second, I had my daughter, whose birthday it was, there with me. See, we were moving out of the house.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Well, that was demonstrably false. Jack Holtz could prove that Grace Gilmore had not been with him, nor had his daughter Sheri. So at least Raymond Martray was correct when he said that Jay Smith would make self-serving statements that were downright lies whenever he felt there might be eavesdroppers.

  And the cops became convinced that they should keep recording the calls until Jay Smith gave them enough to put him in the electric chair. At least he was talking a lot about escapes if he got indicted for murder. And escape tended to show a consciousness of guilt.

  One call introduced Harry Gibson.

  “If I mention the name Harry Gibson,” Jay Smith said to his bogus disciple, “then we’re starting to think about an escape.”

  “Okay. We don’t have to worry about that unless there’s an indictment coming.”

  “Remember, Ray, this place is confused now. It’s not like when they had it organized. You could come in to visit with a long pair of pants, and inside a pair of thin pants. So look around for very thin pants and what we would do is change and I’d go out with some visitor.”

  During one of the more important calls, Jay Smith started fantasizing about his budding literary career. He was going to write a book called The Valley Forge Murders.

  In that call, he said, “And just suppose I’m lucky and this book gets off? Then we’ve got money without any kind of problem. A lot
of money.”

  “In the same respect,” Martray answered, “what happens if they nail you for Reinert? Then whadda we do?”

  “Well …”

  “Where am I gonna be at?”

  “If they convict me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’ll probably send me to the electric chair.”

  “No shit!” Martray said. “Look what it does to me!”

  “It’s a problem,” Jay Smith said, sympathetically.

  “It’s a loose end,” Martray said. “Just like you said before, get rid of loose ends.”

  “I think if they were to arrest me for Reinert, the best thing for you to do is to go kill Bradfield and make him disappear,” Jay Smith said, casually.

  “He would disappear. That’s it. You made the comment. That’s it.”

  “But see …”

  “You don’t have to say any more,” said Martray.

  But Jay Smith had more to say. “Get him back in your car. Kill him and take his body up into some woods, up in Fayetteville or someplace, but nobody, see, nobody should know where his body is but you. When you deal with a body, only you should know. You should never let anyone else know. Do you see the advantage to that?”

  “Yeah.”

  And then, just when it looked as though Martray had Dr. Jay on the verge of an all-out admission, the former principal said, “There’s nothing that Bradfield could do to hurt me other than lie, and that’s it.”

  Then the talk turned to more mundane matters such as escaping from jail with electric hacksaws.

  In July, Jay Smith wanted Ray Martray to drive up to Dallas to pay him a visit. Martray contacted the task force in Harrisburg and agreed to wear a body wire. They videotaped Martray and Jay Smith standing in the prison visiting area. It was nearly 100 degrees outside. Inside the panel truck where the electronics technician and Jack Holtz were hiding it was a lot hotter. They shot the visiting area with a telephoto lens from outside the fence.

  It wasn’t a great performance by their man. He was overacting from the moment he stepped back inside the walls of Dallas prison. One of the first moves Martray made after the handshakes were over was to playfully give Dr. Jay a little bump with his hip after he’d said something that wasn’t particularly funny in the first place.

  Cute, Jack Holtz thought. Showing off because he’s wearing a body wire.

  Then he made Holtz even madder by hopping around Jay Smith like some kind of oversized puppy, nervously talking over the top of everything Jay Smith was saying. He was too hyper to let Jay Smith complete a single phrase that afternoon.

  Jay Smith just stood there and put his hand up in front of his mouth in case a guard in a tower could read lips with binoculars. And he pretty well said the same things that they’d been hearing on the telephone tapes. The cops were really sick of the bullshit.

  The temperature in the van soared up over 140 degrees and the camera lens started sweating and they lost their video for a while.

  On that video, Jay Smith looked for all the world like what he’d been trained to be, a schoolteacher. He gave out lots of advice and acted as though he were humoring his boy by talking about some robberies he was going to pull with Martray to make them both rich. And he figured he wouldn’t have too much longer to do, what with a good shot at a favorable appeal. He just chatted as little kids scampered around the area while their mommies visited daddies and boyfriends.

  Jay Smith was absolutely avuncular through most of it, but since no Jay Smith meeting would be complete without a little sex talk he told Martray about a mutual friend who was starting to disappoint him a whole lot. He’d started using drugs. And as Uncle Jay put it, “He likes to suck black cocks when he’s high.”

  The cops figured they’d sweated off a combined total of twenty-five pounds while Raymond Martray chewed more scenery than Olivier in Richard III.

  Three months later, Martray got a chance to redeem himself with yet another videotaping. It was a lot cooler for the cops inside the panel truck. Jay Smith was wearing a long-sleeved shirt this time, carrying glasses and a couple of pencils in his shirt pocket. You’d swear he was the pious chaplain making his rounds.

  This time Martray’s performance, even though he’d been coached by Jack Holtz, went more over the top. He was just too anxious.

  Martray blurted out that he was going to “take care” of Bill Bradfield, and it was clear that Jay Smith was very wary of this kind of talk.

  Jay Smith said, “But I had nothing to do with the murder, Ray.”

  Then Raymond Martray danced around and promised that he’d never let Jay down. He referred to him as a criminal genius, but Jay Smith kept repeating that he had nothing to do with the Reinert murder, and all the while Martray still never let him finish a sentence.

  The cops figured they’d better sprinkle Valium on Martray’s waffles before they tried this again. He was so breathless Jay Smith might have to give him CPR.

  After about a hundred “like you said’s” and “like you told me’s” that Jay Smith didn’t seem to be buying, the older man apparently decided to quiet his disciple down with, what else? A little sex talk. Jay Smith gave Raymond Martray graphic advice on how to please a lady with cunnilingus.

  As relevant film making, these two shows ranked with a Sylvester Stallone movie. The mini-task force was not thrilled.

  Bill Bradfield, still out on bail while appealing his conviction, had lost his job with the school district and been forced to withdraw his claim against the estate of Susan Reinert.

  Bill Bradfield now knew that he would not be following the trail of Achilles and Hector and the thousand black ships. He would not be playing the lyre on the bridge of a ketch with some young disciple peeping up his tunic. He’d have to content himself with sailing boats in his mother’s bathbub.

  But he was hoping to continue to breathe the free air of Chester County.

  During a small dinner party at a lawyers’ club in Philadelphia just after his conviction, Bill Bradfield said, “The key to my dilemma is to be found in Ezra Pound, two cantos in particular. It’s that I’ve loved my friends imperfectly.”

  When he was offered the wine list he refused to choose, saying, “I have no palate for wine.”

  One was reminded that it was Ezra Pound who wrote: “There’s no wine like the blood’s crimson!”

  23

  The Decree

  They decided in the fall of 1981 to try for a murder indictment against William Bradfield. From October of that year until March of the next, Jack Holtz and Rick Guida had to contend with the aggravation of running back and forth on the turnpike between Harrisburg and Philly to interview witnesses for grand jury testimony.

  The grand jury term ran for five months, but each months session lasted only a few days. Because their case was so complicated they never had enough time, and actually had to present their evidence piecemeal and hope they could finish by March.

  In November Bill Bradfields day arrived. He had to begin serving a four-month jail sentence for the theft of Susan Reinerts money. He was sent to Delaware County Prison but knew he had a good chance of getting out on bail pending his appeal. Cops have long suspected that the law dictionaries of America have omitted the F’s, as in “final,” “finish,” etc.

  Jack Holtz made an uncannily accurate prediction, He told Rick Guida that Bill Bradfield would find himself a friend in prison, and he described the friend. He said it would be a big, street-smart black guy, and that Bill Bradfield would have to talk about the case sooner or later because he always had to tell his troubles to somebody.

  Jay Smith had been in prison quite a while before he made any friends at all, but Bill Bradfield was no soloist. He needed friends worse than Mary, Queen of Scots. He started looking around.

  It wasn’t long before he was playing chess with a twenty-four-year-old black inmate named Proctor Nowell. And it wasn’t long before Proctor Nowell stepped between another black con and Bill Bradfield in the role of protec
tor. Nowell later said that Bill Bradfield had promised that when they got out of jail he’d buy an apartment house in Philly and let Nowell manage it.

  After a month in jail, Bill Bradfield was successful in getting a release from prison on bail pending his appeal. Jack Holtz figured that a month had been plenty of time for a man as garrulous as Bill Bradfield. Lou DeSantis called Franklin Center, the state police station closest to the prison, and discovered that Bill Bradfield had been friends with two black inmates, one of whom was Nowell.

  During the months that the grand jury was hearing portions of their case, Jack Holtz and Lou DeSantis paid a visit to Nowell at the prison.

  Nowell was an alcoholic who’d been convicted of robbery and had a history of petty crimes.

  Jack Holtz learned that Nowell had kids, and he played on that angle, describing Karen and Michael Reinert to the convict. It was a short interview in which Nowell admitted that Bill Bradfield had told him “things,” but said he didn’t want to talk about it.

  The cops said to call them if he changed his mind, and that was that. Jack Holtz wasn’t holding out too much hope, but within two days he got the call.

  It was Nowell who, like Raymond Martray, said, “I know stuff, but it scares me.” He didn’t want to talk to them in prison.

  Jack Holtz went to the district attorney’s office in Delaware County to see his old friend from Orphans Court, John Reilly, and had Nowell placed on a court list. The convict was brought in with prisoners who’d be attending hearings.

  They met in a private room in the court house, and Proctor Nowell told them of conversations with Bill Bradfield. Jack Holtz called Rick Guida and they arranged yet another session with Nowell who remained constant throughout their questioning.

  Proctor Nowell also needed a friend. He was committed to the alcohol rehabilitation program as an alternative to jail, and agreed to appear before the grand jury.