“This is an anniversary,” he told the former educator when he walked into his cell.
The cell of Dr. Jay C. Smith contained more files than he’d possessed as a school principal. There were shelves full of books and dozens of boxes containing thousands of documents and articles and notes, pertaining not just to his own affairs, but to those of the many other inmates who came to him for legal work.
Their search warrant was based on the statements by Charles Montione, especially in regard to the Penthouse magazine of August, 1983, but there was simply too much for Holtz and DeSantis to search.
They hauled all of Jay Smiths files and belongings to the security lieutenant at Dallas prison for safekeeping and transported Jay Smith to Camp Hill where he was housed until his preliminary hearing.
After his arraignment, Holtz and DeSantis were leaving Troop H in Harrisburg with their prisoner when a reporter from a Philadelphia newspaper yelled to Jay Smith, asking if he’d ever heard of Raymond Martray or Charles Montione.
Jay Smith answered that they were inmates, but he’d never spoken to them.
It was just awfully hard for Jay Smith and Bill Bradfield to be truthful, even when it was foolish to lie.
Holtz and DeSantis returned to Dallas prison in July to complete their search.
They seized a letter to Jay Smith’s private investigator Russell Kolins, wherein he outlined his alibi on the murder weekend.
He wrote, “I was with my daughter Sheri. Now this is her birthday so she and I went out to dinner that evening for her birthday. She left me at about ten o’clock. The next day, Saturday, Mrs. Gilmore comes again. She’s working upstairs. She gives me coffee and then goes down to the lower level. So Saturday I’m there with Grace Gilmore.”
It was another link because it totally contradicted what he’d told the FBI in 1979. A written lie is more damaging than a spoken lie that’s subject to the ear of the listener.
They found the Penthouse magazine during that search and other things which had no admissible evidentiary value, but were interesting. Jay Smith had books dealing with serial killer Ted Bundy. He’d underlined the passage in one book that dealt with a murdered woman who’d been struck in the right eye. Just as Susan Reinert had been.
The preliminary hearing for Jay Smith was held on July 30th. A Philadelphia lawyer named Glenn A. Zeitz appeared for Jay Smith and Rick Guida was the prosecutor. The purpose of the hearing was not to establish guilt but to determine if there was sufficient cause to bind over the defendant for trial.
Zeitz had a style that was something like Guida’s: argumentative, aggressive and sarcastic. They might have made an interesting match in a later trial, but it was not to be. After Jay Smith was held to answer, and ordered to trial, he accepted counsel appointed and paid by the commonwealth.
Zeitz was paid twice as much by Jay Smith for the preliminary hearing as Josh Lock received from the commonwealth for his fifteen hundred hours of work.
The only change in witness testimony from the Bill Bradfield trial came when Susan Reinert’s neighbor said for the first time that she’d seen Jay Smith enter the Reinerts’ house on one occasion two years before Susan’s death. Mary Gove said that in all the prior years, no one had asked her if she’d ever seen Jay Smith.
Mrs. Gove was pushing seventy and had a cataract. Holtz and Guida weren’t convinced that she was correct, or even if it had any significance. Jay Smith could have dropped by once when he’d still been a respectable principal. Guida viewed this as one more instance where he could indicate that Jay Smith possibly had lied. In short, his case was not strong and he was ready to accept any old pebble for his pile.
As to Martray and Montione, the prosecutor just didn’t know how it would go. Martray was forty-one now, and with distinguished gray hair and a business suit he looked more respectable than Montione. But he tended to testify with that vaguely impatient and irritated tone of a cop who’d worked the graveyard shift and wanted to get on with it.
Montione had penitentiary written all over him, and it wasn’t easy to say whether he’d be an effective witness in front of a jury.
At one point in the preliminary hearing Martray had told of a moment when he and Jay Smith were coming out of the prison movie theater and Jay Smith “just flipped off” and made his index finger into a hook and told Martray he could take his eye out of his head if he chose to. Martray said that Jay Smith frightened him. But would a jury believe that an ex-cop as big and young as Raymond Martray would fear Jay Smith?
They had many doubts about their case. They talked about fifty-fifty odds.
Jay Smith needed several months to confer with the attorney that the court appointed for him. The lawyer, William C. Costopoulos, was well known and successful and couldn’t have taken this case for the small amount of money. He did see in it a chance for publicity, and criminal lawyers rank right behind Hollywood actors in their need for that commodity. Actually, Jay Smith was lucky to get a lawyer of his stature.
The defense wouldn’t be able to go to trial until the following spring, so the three-man task force prepared their case by contacting all the witnesses. Everyone seemed constant, even as to old opinions.
Shelly now held a master’s degree from Notre Dame. She was a fetching, articulate young woman. But when she talked to Rick Guida she admitted that she still couldn’t believe that Bill Bradfield could commit murder.
Rick Guida said he felt like strangling her to show that it happens.
Just prior to going to trial in April of 1986, Jack Holtz was trying to take care of last-minute business in a desperate attempt to bolster a case that wasn’t half as strong as the Bill Bradfield case, thanks to Bill Bradfields need for confidants.
In going through all the old reports one last time, Jack Holtz saw a note that he’d never followed up. A hunter in 1979 had seen two depressions in the ground and didn’t report it to the police until the fall of 1985 when the publicity made him realize that it had been near the home of Jay Smith. The ground had been frozen, and now that spring had arrived Jack Holtz donned the digging duds one last time.
They took the hunter to the spot and dug a crater the size of a swimming pool. They found nothing.
The very last piece of business that Jack Holtz was able to perform, other than giving testimony, took place a few days before the jury selection was to begin. They needed something more, something to impress a jury that here was just one coincidence too many. They needed to lock the links in the circumstantial chain. They needed one more pebble for Rick Guida’s rock pile.
Jack Holtz had gone over and over the reports hoping to find some tiny detail he might have forgotten. He was about to quit when it hit him so hard it almost unscrewed his glasses. It was a report that he’d read a dozen times. Karen and Michael had been playing with a teenager on the day they’d disappeared. They were gathering hailstones with the granddaughter of their next-door neighbor, Mary Gove.
The FBI had interviewed Elizabeth Ann Brook in 1979 and she’d given a description of the clothing the children had on that day, but he’d never personally talked to her. So no one had ever asked her about a green pin.
He mentioned it to Rick Guida who shrugged and said, “Might as well give her a call. Maybe we can add her to the ones we have who say Karen owned a pin like that.”
Jack Holtz called Mary Gove and was put in touch with her granddaughter, now a young woman of twenty-two, living in Delaware County.
He had a telephone conversation with Beth Ann Brook and when he was finished, he said, “Hold the phone. I want you to tell this to Mister Guida.”
After Rick Guida finished talking to Beth Ann Brook, Jack Holtz looked at him and said, “I’d marry that girl.”
Jack Holtz had secured the links. The only question now was whether or not the chain was strong enough to tether a goat, which is, after all, a strange and independent creature of mythic power.
26
Performers
Owing to pretrial maneuvering th
ere was certain information the jury would never know. They would never hear tapes in which Jay Smith and Raymond Martray discussed future armed robberies. Nor would they learn about the defendants alleged scheme to pin the blame for one of the Sears crimes on David Rucker.
They wouldn’t know about things that the police had found in his basement back in 1978. Things like silencers and chains.
Most frustrating to Jack Holtz, they wouldn’t know about the things in Jay Smith’s possession when he was arrested in 1978. Such as tape and a syringe containing a sedative, things that would dovetail right into the murder of Susan Reinert. They would never know about any of these things because they were deemed to be prejudicial.
The private investigator working for William Costopoulos referred to him as a “magician,” and he certainly looked the part. The newspaper artists found him easy to sketch. Costopoulos had the muscular good looks of the Greek islanders, tailored to fit his courtroom image. A leonine head and a rugged jaw decorated with a salt-and-pepper Venetian goatee made you think he’d make a great Iago if he could act.
And he could. Costopoulos was a flamboyant trial lawyer who kept his working-class background in his speech. His suits and shoes were unmistakably Italian, and his high-waisted pants were fastened to striped suspenders.
Whenever he’d come into court looking particularly dapper, his private investigator Skip Gochenour would say, “Goddamnit, I wish he didn’t always have to dress like a pimp.”
But it worked. A guy like Jack Holtz was larger than he looked. Bill Costopoulos looked larger than he was. It was a matter of theater. He handed out black-and-white glossies to the reporters and everyone seemed to like him.
Courtroom number one in the Dauphin County Courthouse suited the style of Bill Costopoulos. It was a great legal theater of Italian marble and walnut paneling. Art deco sconces lined the walls, and it had a high ceiling with a skylight. A huge gold crest behind the judges bench bore the coat of arms of the commonwealth.
The judges bench was massive and could accommodate a tribunal of judges. Beneath the bench of Judge William W. Lipsitt was carved: NO MAN CAN BE DEPRIVED OF HIS LIFE, LIBERTY OR PROPERTY UNLESS BY JUDGMENT OF HIS PEERS OR THE LAW OF THE LAND.
The security, due to all the escape talk, was very heavy. There were always two deputy sheriffs in plainclothes sitting behind Jay Smith, and other officers from the state police or attorney generals office scanned the courtroom.
Across the courtroom from the jury seats was yet another jury box of equal size. In this trial it was used to accommodate the press.
Seeing the 1986 version of Jay C. Smith was a shock. It made one recall what had been said years earlier by the wife of his first attorney: “He seemed to change each time I saw him. He could even change his size.”
This time the change of size was explainable. He’d lost fifty pounds or more from the time back in 1978 when his secret life was exposed. And this Jay Smith looked ten years younger than that one!
He was tall, gaunt, balding, middle aged. He wore black frame glasses and a blue-gray business suit. Other than the blanched prison pallor, he looked to be in excellent physical health for a prison inmate fifty-seven years old.
This didn’t look like the sinister prince of darkness with layers of jowls falling into terraced slabs. This wasn’t an acid rocker dancing alone to a tune played on an electric bass with a hatchet. This Jay Smith was a mild, middle-aged schoolteacher.
He usually sat motionless, moving only to cross his legs or occasionally to write a note, or whisper to his lawyer.
The most notable Jay Smith mannerism was observable when he was touched. If a member of the four-man defense team approached to whisper in his ear, he would jerk his face away. If he’d been wearing a hat it would’ve gone sailing every time.
Jay Smith did not like having the faces of other human beings close to his. He was obsessive about it, and his reaction never varied. It was as though Jay Smith couldn’t bear intimacy.
Bill Costopoulos had the same problem that John O’Brien had had back in the Jay Smith theft trial of 1979. Do you put him on the stand? It’s hard to win a murder trial when the defendant doesn’t testify. Juries want to hear the accused answer for himself. But Jay Smith had relentlessly denied every bit of wrongdoing with which he’d ever been charged. The only infraction he’d ever admitted was that he owned guns that were not properly registered.
As far as Dr. Jay was concerned, he’d been slandered and prejudged from the first because of his research into doggie sex. He might even say that on the stand. So the strategy of the defense was to admit to the earlier theft convictions and get on with it. Later the jury could be told that he’d not taken the stand at his theft trial on bad advice and been wrongly convicted as a result.
Guida countered that strategy by bringing in the Sears witnesses and once again reenacting Bill Bradfield’s alibi testimony. And since Jay Smith would unquestionably get up there and still deny the Sears crimes, Bill Costopoulos didn’t dare let his client testify.
The opening remarks of Rick Guida were brief. He told the jury that the case involved the “heinous, brutal murder of a woman and two children.” Then he repeated, “Two children.”
He said, “This case involves the most massive criminal investigation in the history of Pennsylvania. Though there is only one defendant present, we will actually try two. For the first two or three weeks you will hardly hear Mister Smith’s name mentioned.
“But we’re going to ask you to find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree, and, if you should do that, to sentence him to death.
“Much of the case is circumstantial evidence. The witnesses will take you where you are going. I’m only a guide. At the end, I’ll tell you where the witnesses took you. And where you should take him.”
The opening of Bill Costopoulos informed the jury that there was a deceptive man involved in this case and his name was “William Sidney Bradfield.” Costopoulos often used Bill Bradfield’s middle name, and always referred to him with scorn.
He said, “Jay Smith was targeted by a man who was very good at deception. He was made a target of exploitation by a man who was a master of exploitation. I refer to none other than William Sidney Bradfield.”
He told the jury that they were going to hear from a man named Raymond Martray, whom the prosecution “pulled from the bowels of the prison system.”
He said ominously, “I will deal with Raymond Martray when he gets up here and it will be easy.”
Speaking quietly, but appearing to subdue great emotion, Costopoulos said, “The evidence will indicate that these charges should not have been brought. The prosecution in October, 1983, had insufficient evidence to try Jay Smith with William Bradfield, and since then have only added Raymond Martray.”
Then he allowed a little sarcasm when he said very neatly, “And with that I will ask Mister Guida to call his first witness … for the second time.”
Costopoulos was the performer, and private investigator Skip Gochenour fed him the lines. They worked as a team at the council table, whereas Guida seldom referred to his legal assistant, or even to Jack Holtz.
Gochenour was a red-bearded ex-cop, built like a Coke machine. He was a savvy investigator who’d worked for Costopoulos on dozens of cases. The private investigator was not reluctant to tell anyone that he believed the Reinert children had been doomed from the moment their mother took out the insurance policies in favor of Bill Bradfield.
He said, “Bill Bradfield had no intention of being a daddy, and couldn’t even if he’d wanted to. They already had a daddy and the real one would’ve helped his children break their mother’s will. Those kids were sentenced to death from the start.”
He and Bill Costopoulos got Rick Guida’s attention within the first two days. One of the prosecution witnesses who’d testified several times over the years in regard to the Reinert murder was a former fingerprint expert who was now retired from the state police.
When Bi
ll Costopoulos was cross-examining him on what appeared to be routine matters at the Susan Reinert autopsy, he innocently asked, “By the way, did you look between her toes?”
And when the witness answered that he had, Bill Costopoulos asked, “And did you find anything?”
The witness said that he had, there was a little bit of debris that looked like … sand.
“Beach sand?” Bill Costopoulos asked.
“Yes, beach sand,” the witness said, with emphasis.
When it was Guida’s turn to redirect, he didn’t ask how the witness knew beach sand from desert sand. Guidas head was stuck to that high ceiling. Guida was enraged.
He spent much of that day and the next practically impeaching his own witness who admitted that as a private investigator he’d worked with Skip Gochenour. Guida brought in half of the task force to testify that at no time had this former state police corporal ever mentioned to anybody that there were any granules of sand between Susan Reinerts toes.
But that was only half of it. Bill Costopoulos implied that a note found in Susan Reinerts car, with “Cape May” in her handwriting, was further evidence that she could have gone to the beach and been murdered by the Bill Bradfield gang in some sandy place, with one of them transporting her to Harrisburg afterward.
Jack Holtz testified that the note had been thoroughly investigated and referred to a turnoff on the way to teacher Fred Wattenmaker’s house where Susan Reinert and her children had been houseguests in the spring of 1979.
Bill Costopoulos and Skip Gochenour had disrupted Rick Guidas methodical, orderly approach.
As Bill Costopoulos put it, “We introduced a couple of grains of sand and Rick Guida brought in sand by the truckload before he was finished.”
Rick Guida wasn’t going to underestimate these fellows, he said.
As to that Cape May murder theory, it was never seriously a part of the strategy of Bill Costopoulos. He privately admitted that he couldn’t go very far with it because of Vincent Valaitis. The thought was that he could sell Sue Myers and Chris Pappas to the jury as possible murder conspirators, but Vincent Valaitis screwed up everything. How do you sell the jury a homicidal hamster?
Echoes in the Darkness Page 37