“I see. So, the relationship with Susan Reinert, if not romantic, was at least artistic? Is that what you’re telling us?”
“On my part?”
“Yes.”
“I guess all of my relationships are.”
“Artistic?”
“Yes.”
As to the prom night adventure and other Dr. Jay business, the testimony contained even more “we’s” and fewer “I’s” than the rest of it.
“Why did you need a silencer to protect yourself?”
“Because both Chris and I felt that if Doctor Smith were to threaten me while I was in the car I would have to try to wound him or disable him or kill him. We agreed that I’d call Chris and he’d come immediately and we’d figure out exactly what we were to do. If I’d have tried to defend myself with my.357 magnum it would’ve alerted half of Chester County.”
“When you’re talking about protecting yourself from an armed man who threatens you with a weapon, why did you need a silencer?”
“We were concerned not only with Doctor Smith, but with people in the drug world because of his daughter and so forth. And …”
“Mister Bradfield, let me interrupt you for just a second. You’re telling me about your fears. I’m asking why you needed a silencer.”
“Because I wanted to do more than simply disable him. I wanted after that to be able to call Chris, and for Chris and me to decide where we would go and take Doctor Smith.”
“Were you planning on murdering him?”
“We talked about it. Chris and I had talked about it.”
“If you had a plan to murder him and he threatened you with a weapon, why didn’t you just finish him off right there in self-defense and be done with it? Were you going to take him to a hospital? Why did you get a silencer so that no one would come around? Tell me that.”
“We didn’t know what the best plan would be. We were afraid if I had to produce the weapon quickly and tell him not to move, disable him, tie him up or whatever, and call Chris … If I produced a weapon, and if he’d come at me and I had to use it, and if it were an unsilenced.357 magnum, and we were anywhere within earshot of people, all options as to what we could do after that would then be closed. People would hear and they would rush to see us.”
And so it went. The jury, Jack Holtz noted during all of this, was slack-jawed, and he was hoping they weren’t getting fuzzy like Chris Pappas used to get. He was relieved when they hoisted their chins back up onto their faces.
Bill Bradfield testified that he had believed Dr. Jay Smith to be deranged and dangerous, but still, he was morally obligated to testify for him as an alibi witness in the one crime he had not committed. All things considered, Bill Bradfield didn’t tell it much differently than it was told by Chris Pappas, Vince Valaitis, Sue Myers and Shelly. If the disciples had believed, Bill Bradfield obviously felt that the jury would believe.
As to the neighbors of Susan Reinert seeing his car parked in front of her house at all hours, he said that he would park his car and leave it there to deter Dr. Jay Smith from creepy-crawling her house.
“Did you move your car occasionally?” the prosecutor asked.
“During the four- or five-month period I parked my VW quite often in front of Susan Reinert’s house.”
“Overnight?”
“Yes, for days and nights.”
“How did you get home?”
“I took my Cadillac to school.”
“But how did you get the Volkswagen to Susan Reinerts house?”
“Susan Reinert would come in with a lady teacher and then she would drive the Cadillac. And I would drive the VW to her house.”
“And then you would get in your red Cadillac and go home?”
“Or wherever I was going.”
“Then you must have told Susan Reinert why you were doing this?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Then you told her that Jay C. Smith was after her, and you were parking the car in front of her house as a deterrent, is that what you’re telling us?”
“No. I told her that parking at my apartment was very crowded, which it was.”
“What about the testimony of the neighbors who saw you coming out of the house at seven in the morning? Were they mistaken?”
“No, there were times, particularly on Saturdays, when I would come by very early to see Susan before I went to my eight A.M. Greek class.”
“But they saw you doing it during the week.”
“They’re mistaken.”
“That brings me to Mary Gove. Mrs. Gove said that on at least three occasions a week, she would see your car there at times when she would get up at five in the morning, and then when she’d go to work at seven-thirty your car would be gone. Was she mistaken?”
“It could have happened a couple of times.”
“Are you saying that there were occasions when you left Susan Reinerts house very late, say around midnight, and came back at five A.M.?”
“There were many times that I stayed late and there were many times that I went over early in the morning. And I think it would be easy for Mrs. Gove to feel that it happened all at once. I was taking a course at Villanova in Greek at eight o’clock in the morning and I would try, when I could, to come before class and sometimes I came early enough to make breakfast.”
“You made breakfast for them? You would drive all the way over to Susan Reinerts house early in the morning on Saturday just to have breakfast with the kids?”
“Yes.”
“Can you explain your comment to Sharon Lee when she called you on the phone and you said, ‘Oh, yes, how old were the children?’ ”
“I knew that Karen and Michael were grade-school children but I didn’t know what age. I really didn’t know them that well.”
“Why did you use the word ‘were’? Why did you refer to the children in the past tense on June twenty-sixth, 1979?”
“The assumption was that something awful had happened to the children.”
One clever bit of business that Rick Guida conceived was to subpoena the court reporter and prosecutor who’d been at the Jay Smith trial of May 30, 1979, when Bill Bradfield had been an alibi witness.
Guida staged a reenactment of that testimony. He played the part of Jay Smith’s attorney, and on cross-examination he played the part of prosecutor Jackson M. Stewart, Jr.
Stewart himself played the role of William Bradfield and with each of the performers holding a certified copy of the transcript of that proceeding, they reenacted Bill Bradfields alibi testimony for this jury, just as it had happened then, without editorial comment.
This was a very effective piece of lawyering. The testimony didn’t sound any more believable coming from Jackson Stewart’s lips than it had from Bill Bradfields back in 1979. This jury got a very good idea of what that alibi tetimony had been all about and what it meant to this trial.
One of the scores of witnesses against William Bradfield was Special Agent Matt Mullin of the FBI. While he was waiting to testify, he walked up to Jack Holtz and said that he’d been wrong with Joe VanNort, and that the arrest of Shelly had helped turn the case around.
Jack Holtz thought that was a decent thing to say and told him so. He said that Joe would’ve appreciated it.
By far, the saddest testimony in the William Bradfield murder case was given by Ken Reinert and his mother.
Once when Florence and John Reinert were on vacation in Vermont they’d seen a boy who resembled their grandson Michael. They’d tried to follow his school bus. They’d reported it to the FBI.
They were still unable to celebrate Christmas.
When Ken Reinert had first read in the newspapers that a murder charge was being filed, he was as happy as he’d been in four years. Until he saw that three murder charges were being filed. He’d called the state police in tears.
He said, “But you can’t file three murder charges! Not three murder charges!”
Just before that time, in a newspaper interv
iew Ken Reinert had said, “I’m optimistic that the children are still alive. I know there’re people in the world who murder children, but I can’t really believe that anyone would kill these children. Not these children.”
It wasn’t until the murder trial in 1983 that Ken, Florence and John Reinert were able to describe the children in the past tense. The children were no more. It had been decreed by the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
24
Widgets
By the time the fourteen-day trial was concluding, Rick Guida was up to five packs of cigarettes a day and down fifteen pounds in body weight. But Josh Lock was in worse shape. The case had consumed him and he was near collapse, by his own assessment.
Lock felt that toward the end he was too exhausted to respond quickly enough to Guida, but the court record doesn’t support the self-doubt. What was very hard to respond to was being offered from the lips of William Bradfield as his explanation for wills and insurance and silencers, and murder schemes against Susan Reinert by Jay Smith.
The most famous criminal defense lawyers in America admit that because of our system of safeguarding the rights of the accused, they don’t often get a chance to defend clients who are “innocent” in the sense that the public defines innocence. If they’re going to make a living in criminal defense they have to be content with making the best of a client’s story and protecting his rights despite what they might personally believe.
In law school they’re told that they can have a satisfying career doing just that, and on the rare occasions when they believe in their hearts that they do have an innocent criminal client they can permit a bit of personal passion.
But the vast majority of lawyers are the products of middle-class American society that grew up on Perry Mason, and they aren’t satisfied with the caveats of law school. They need to believe in innocence.
The defense had to make a decision whether to call Jay Smith as a witness, but Dr. Jay told Josh Lock that he refused to “proffer.” That is, Jay Smith said that he’d testify if subpoenaed, but as to what that testimony would be they’d have to wait and see.
It was too unpredictable and dangerous. Lock did not subpoena the prince of darkness.
The closing arguments took place on October 28th. Josh Lock was first. After his opening remarks he said, “At the beginning of the trial I suggested that you would be presented with a facade, an appearance, an illusion of wrongdoing. The question is whether the facade is a real structure or merely an illusion.”
He began with a summation of his attack on the pathologist, who was not a forensic pathologist in the first place, and used his impressive knowledge of all forensics. He said that the actual anoxia, or oxygen starvation, could not have taken place before Sunday afternoon, when his client had already been at the beach for many hours.
He hit hard on the fact that no one had ever seen Bill Bradfield in a romantic moment with the murder victim. He pointed out that there was evidence that Susan Reinert had dated a couple of other people, and she probably had sexual relations with one of them in her home. He suggested that Susan Reinert was a bit schizoid, and had fantasized the unrequited love affair with Bill Bradfield. He said that there was no evidence that Susan Reinert had made adequate preparations to go to Europe so even that could have been her fantasy.
He suggested that not only “Alex,” whoever he was, but even Sue Myers could have drawn Susan Reinert from her home that night by calling her and repeating some of the old threats. Sedate Sue was in it again.
He pointed out that a car very similar to Susan Reinerts had been seen parked at Jay Smiths house in the spring of 1979, and it was not too farfetched to think that she may have been seeing Dr. Jay on the sly. He didn’t dispute the hair on Dr. Jay’s floor, but pointed out again that since the root was intact it had not been pulled out but had fallen out. And who knew what they were doing down there.
He said that convicts like Proctor Nowell were not to be believed.
He did what he’d planned to do all along; gave the jury other possibilities to explain-and he had to use the word-the “bizarre” circumstances surrounding this case.
* * *
It was during Rick Guida’s closing that Josh Lock decided that Guida, though irritating and egocentric, was the best prosecutor he’d ever seen.
Guida began by telling the jury that the complex part of their job would be in fitting together the facts. He said that the most important tool at their disposal would be common sense. He told them that was what he’d looked for in selecting them, and he came back to it again and again: use your common sense.
In jury cases involving circumstantial evidence, prosecutors often use metaphors such as “weight and counterweights.” The presumption of innocence weighs a lot; the circumstantial evidence weighs little until you start tossing each little chunk onto the scale. Guida used “pebbles on the pile.”
There were the forensics: the comb, the fibers, the hair in Jay Smith’s basement, all pebbles onto the pile. The methods of taping and chaining and injecting morphine were more pebbles. There was the insurance that Bill Bradfield didn’t want and had never expected, but nevertheless sued for.
There was the filing-off of gun serial numbers, and Guida implied that the gun was to be the murder weapon and that’s the only sensible reason why Bill Bradfield wanted the numbers removed, but Chris Pappas had botched that job.
The dildo under the seat, he said, was to implicate nonexistent Alex, and tied in nicely with Bill Bradfield deciding three days after the murder that Jay Smith couldn’t have done it after all.
Halfway through, he said, “Mister Lock believes that the crime scene does not point to the defendant. At the end of this argument, I’m going to show you the circumstances point to no one else in the entire world.”
All the business with the cash withdrawals and calling her brother to take part in the “investment,” and the missing ring that was to be reset for the wedding, all added pebbles.
Then he got to the money wiping.
“What happened to the bills?” he asked. “What did Chris Pappas tell you? When they were in the attic, Bill Bradfield said they’d better wipe fingerprints off the money. Why? Who wipes fingerprints off money? Is it because Susan Reinerts fingerprints were on the money? Are any of these actions of an innocent man?”
He went to the quickie divorce which he attributed to greed, since Bill Bradfield was about to come into money. He proceeded to the weekend at Cape May where Bill Bradfield had assembled all the players and said that Susan Reinert might die, and just by coincidence she did.
When he went back to the crime scene, he said it was the biggest circumstance of all.
“Bradfield said that two people could have killed Susan Reinert,” he said. “Jay C. Smith because she had an affair with him and was interfering with his alibi testimony, or a crazy man named Alex who was having kinky sex with her. Why is this so important? It wouldn’t be if Susan Reinert had been the only one killed, but it is important because her children were with her and they were not found in the car. What were the children worth to this defendant as opposed to the rest of the six billion people in the world? Who benefits from this scenario? Why weren’t the three of them in the car? Or in the alternative, if you’re talking about Smith, why isn’t Susan Reinert in the same place with her children who have never been found?
“Whoever did this, whoever helped in the commission of this crime, was savvy enough to make sure that those children’s bodies would never be found, but he took the awful chance of driving a dead body all the way to Harrisburg and parking it in a public parking lot, and walked around behind that car and opened the hatch for the world to see the exposed body of Susan Reinert, and then pirouetted and walked away.
“Does Jay C. Smith benefit from that according to the way Bradfield has explained the situation? Of course not. If he’d killed Susan Reinert because she was his mistress or interfering with his alibi, her body would be in the same hole with the children. Wh
at if Alex had done it? Would he transport her to the Host Inn and expose her body to the world?
“Do you know why the body was exposed? Because this body is worth to one person in the world seven thousand dollars a pound, and it had to be found during the alibi weekend so that he can say to the world, ‘I couldn’t possibly have done it.’
“No one else benefits from this scenario. No one would have taken this chance unless they did it for Bill Bradfield, because nobody collects on insurance unless they have a body. Perhaps that’s the final irony. The big mistake was when he killed the children, because I couldn’t make this argument to you if it was Susan Reinert alone.
“But they panicked. The children weren’t worth anything. A real measure of irony, a real measure of justice is that the children’s lives were perhaps not sacrificed in vain because their absence at this scene speaks so loudly of the defendants guilt that I submit to you it is impossible to ignore. No one else benefits in this terrible chance of exposing the body except the defendant.
“Today is October twenty-eighth, 1983. Five years ago today Susan Reinerts mother died and the plan to kill her began. And today the conspiracy ends and we are going to leave this to you.”
Joshua Lock had married late, but had made up for it. He and his wife had one baby after another, beautiful enchanting children. He believed so completely that Bill Bradfield was not a child murderer that he hoped one day to sail with him in the Chesapeake. And he wanted his daughters to meet this teacher who had such a captivating way about him.
Lock thought that the jury would be out for days even though he had great admiration for the methodical way that Rick Guida had presented the complex case. He was told by many reporters in the courtroom that they were not impressed by Guida. He was later told by some of the jurors that they were not impressed. But he was impressed. This was a brilliant organization, he said, and as a professional he recognized it even if they didn’t.
Echoes in the Darkness Page 34