Echoes in the Darkness

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Given all they had learned about Jay Smith, Guida had other thoughts, not shared by Jack Holtz, that the children had not been a mistake at all. By virtue of practicing law, he knew how difficult it would’ve been for Bill Bradfield to probate that will if the children had been alive.

  Two minor children-excluded by their mother in favor of a friend, and this within days of her murder after she’d overloaded on insurance-would have put a very great burden on Bill Bradfields probate attempt. There was every chance that such a will would be set aside in favor of the children, especially since there wasn’t even specific language in the will to exclude them.

  William Bradfield, and certainly Jay Smith, must have known what a difficult probate that would have been. But then, why not leave the bodies of the children with their mother’s? Guida believed that one would have to consider everything they knew so far about Jay Smith and his penchant for making people disappear, and his obsession with forensic clues. It must’ve been difficult enough to get him to leave one body for the lab technicians, let alone three.

  Given the way Jay Smiths mind worked, the disappearance of the children was not inconsistent with the planning of their deaths from the beginning. The motive was the same as for Bill Bradfield: his share of the insurance upon release from prison.

  That probability was advanced by the fact that her copy of the policy had disappeared. Guida was reminded that Susan Reinert had asked her insurance agent for an extra copy for her “executor” to keep, but was refused as a matter of company routine. Guida suggested that Jay Smith may have demanded to see that policy with his own eyes before fulfilling his part of the bargain. The “executor” may have actually been the executioner.

  Moverover, Bill Bradfield, a world-class grandstand player, could then offer huge rewards from his “inheritance” for information leading to the missing children.

  Though Jack Holtz stayed with the simplicity of the panic killing of the children, Guida thought that the conspirators may have ordained the murder of Karen and Michael Reinert right along with their mother from the day the insurance policies were obtained. But this was intricate and very diabolical, and it was far easier for the prosecutor to conclude for the sake of a jury that the children were an afterthought, that they’d been witnesses killed in panic. There was less to prove.

  The irony is that it was better for everyone concerned if there was always a shadow of a doubt as to what happened to the children. The absence of little corpses made it more difficult for other inmates to hang the jacket: baby killer.

  When Holtz and DeSantis met Charles Montione in December, 1983, he was twenty-four years old. He wore Cuban heels and silk shirts and looked like he could’ve been an extra in Al Pacino’s version of Scarface. The task force found his name in a letter from Jay Smith to Ray Martray, care of the P.O. box they controlled.

  He’d gotten a sentence of six to twenty years for armed robbery and had gotten out in five. He was living in a halfway house when the cops had a secret meeting with him at the Holiday Inn in Scranton.

  He was a friend of Martray’s, and had been a passing acquaintance of Jay Smiths while Martray was still in prison. Jay Smith helped Montione too with his legal work. Dr. Jay, according to Montione, never turned down any of the cons who needed legal assistance. They started getting close after Martray got out.

  One day, Jay Smith had some bad feelings and wanted to talk about them. He told Charlie Montione that someone named Bradfield had just been arrested for the murder of a woman and her two children and was attempting to implicate him in the murders. If Bradfield was successful and got Jay Smith in trouble, there’d be an escape with some help from Raymond Martray. And hopefully from his pal Charlie, if he was on the outside by then.

  According to Montione, Jay Smith had three plans. One entailed Montione and Ray Martray coming to see him on visiting day. They were to enter the canteen where visitors can get cooked food. They were then to do a “DIC,” which Montione explained was Jay Smith lingo for “disarm, immobilize and cover.”

  His second plan was to wait for his court appearance and to escape from the prison on Camp Hill where the transporting officers have to take off their guns to go inside. This plan involved a shootout: Charlie and Ray would come in like Bonnie and Clyde and shoot out tires, then take the transporting officers as hostages and kill them later. If Jay was arrested for murder, the officers would be a couple of state police investigators named Holtz and DeSantis, Montione was told.

  The third plan involved a breakout from the Dauphin County Courthouse itself, where prisoners are housed in the basement cells while awaiting court.

  And Jay Smith thought he should also bump off the deputy warden at Dallas because he figured this guy was telling the cops every move he made. Jay Smith made a lot of gangsterish plans while daydreaming in the yard.

  According to Montione, Jay Smith gave him a lecture on murder that sounded a lot like the ones he’d allegedly given to Bill Bradfield. He said that you should use drug injections to overdose your victims. And that it was best to let a body lie around for a couple of days so the blood could coagulate before you started cutting it up and disposing of the parts in different places. He said the small parts fit nicely in drums or buckets and you could weigh the pieces down with chains before dumping them in rivers or lakes.

  Montione claimed that Jay Smith had another talk with him at the end of October, telling him that Bill Bradfield had been convicted. He went over an escape plan in more detail. Since it was hunting season the guards were often set out on the road to watch for trespassers, and so it might be a great time to vanish.

  But he was very mad at Bill Bradfield that day and allegedly told Montione that nearly five years had passed and in only two more years Susan Reinert would have been declared legally dead.

  According to Montione, Jay Smith said, “We would have been okay.” And that Bradfields greed in making her body appear had caused all these problems.

  Furthermore, he was furious that Bill Bradfield was trying to set him up. He said he should have taken care of Bill Bradfield a long time ago. As to the missing children, he said that he wasn’t worried about Bill Bradfield making a deal with police because Bradfield didn’t know where the bodies were.

  And then, Montione claimed that Jay Smith had back-pedaled and began making the same sort of self-serving statements that the task force was so familiar with in his conversations with Martray. Jay Smith later told Montione that he believed that the children’s murder had been a “mistake,” that they shouldn’t have been present. But that sometimes when you’re dealing with large sums of money you have to do such things.

  “What would you do if there were witnesses?” was how it was put, according to Montione.

  Jay Smith offered a theory to Montione that Bill Bradfield had probably had someone call Susan Reinert on the evening she disappeared to say that he’d been in a bad accident and was dying. That way she would probably just drop everything and rush out of the house without leaving a note for anyone.

  Montione said that all these theories were too complicated for him, so on one occasion he’d just asked Jay Smith directly if he’d killed Susan Reinert and the kids. Dr. Jay didn’t answer.

  “He only smirked,” according to Montione.

  Montione said that he’d performed an unusual service for the former educator. He said that Jay Smith wanted him to look through Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler and find him a picture of a naked woman “lying on her side with her knees pulled up and her cunt closed.”

  He was very particular about it.

  So Montione searched lots of back issues that he traded around with other cons, and Jay Smith rejected several.

  He kept saying, “No, no, that’s not it.”

  Finally Montione came up with the August, 1983, issue of Penthouse and Jay Smith looked through it until he got to page 97, and said, “That’s it. That’s the one.”

  Jack Holtz acquired that issue of Penthouse. Other than lying
on the wrong side, the model was posed very similarly to Susan Reinert on the day she was found in the luggage compartment.

  Holtz recalled the psychological profile he’d been given in 1980 suggesting that the killer might retain something from the crime so that he could relive the moment.

  After the Bill Bradfield murder trial began getting big write-ups implicating Jay Smith, Montione said that Jay Smith was seen standing naked in his cell staring at the wall. And screaming.

  Jay Smith was also seen lying in the yard like a dead man with a newspaper over his face. An old con shuffled by, picked up the newspaper and said, “You can’t hide under that paper, Jay.”

  In 1984, they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. They had Montione, but what he had to say wasn’t enough. They had Martray, but he was a convicted perjurer. They actually thought about shutting down the operation.

  Then they decided they ought to do some more excavation on the basis of what Montione had told them.

  In a conversation, Jay Smith had said that a way to dispose of bodies is to find a freshly dug grave and drop the bodies in on top. Jack Holtz started thinking about the call Bill Bradfield had made to someone when they’d stopped at the pay phone in Valley Forge Park upon their return from Cape May on June 25, 1979. He checked with local cemeteries and discovered that there had been a man buried on June 23rd near Valley Forge.

  On a cool spring day that was just perfect for gravedigging, the cops and Rick Guida and an operator with a backhoe were out there in a cemetery in their digging duds. It was one of the more macabre moments in a thoroughly macabre investigation.

  They’d received permission from the next of kin of the deceased, and so they started tearing up the grave site. As the day wore on and they’d exhausted all their Boris Karloff jokes, they were getting tired and cranky because they’d found nothing. Not even the casket.

  They dug six feet, seven feet, and finally, at eight feet, they’d used up all the one-liners about discovering a table for eight with chopsticks.

  Jack Holtz had to get down there, and with a fancy Japanese probing device they’d acquired for the purpose, he started fishing around for coffins. He found one, all right. They’d missed the actual grave by six inches.

  They were really cranky by the time they filled in an eight-foot grave and started digging a new one. For Rick Guida 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, how’s 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. This 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, Jay. 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 P-3933, 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.