The hair and fiber expert from the FBI testified that in the dust ball presented to him by Jack Holtz and Matt Mullin during their search of Jay Smiths basement, he’d found fifty head hairs but only one was identical to Susan Reinert’s. He said that it matched in more than twenty characteristics.
As to the rug fibers, he said that less than 7 percent of rugs are made of polyester and that he’d found “lustrous” and “de-lustrous” fibers. He said that fibers clinging to human beings are generally lost after four hours. His conclusion was that she’d picked up the fibers just prior to being thrown into the back of her car.
Jay Smith’s lawyer did a job on the FBI’s hair and fiber expert. Bill Costopoulos asked questions for which the expert didn’t have ready answers. He got him to admit that he didn’t know there were four kinds of polyester fibers. Without knowing much about hair and fiber evidence, Costopoulos looked as well versed as the FBI expert in this, the most subjective of the forensic sciences.
When he got back to the council table he whispered to Jay Smith, “How’d I do, teach?”
To which Jay Smith answered dryly, “You get a B-plus in science.”
The defense put on its own hair and fiber experts who had far more impressive scientific credentials than the FBI witness, the substance of their testimony being that the hair could be Susan Reinert’s or any other brunette’s. And that the fiber was red polyester but no more could be said.
It seemed certain that hair and fiber testimony was not going to convict or acquit Jay Smith.
The days passed slowly as the parade of a hundred witnesses repeated testimony that they’d given in other courtrooms over the years.
There was a marked difference in the style of opposing counsel. Costopoulos was never argumentative and seldom objected. He could be indignant with witnesses, even scornful, but not toward Guida. He always looked at Guida’s multiple objections with a faint smile as though he was trying to be more than reasonable with the prosecutor.
Rick Guida was constantly drinking water and dying for a cigarette and rolling his eyes in disgust at what he perceived as the indecisiveness of the judge, who obviously hated Guida’s many objections.
Judge William Lipsitt was sixty-nine years old and during the course of the trial marveled that Bill Bradfield had had four women going at one time while he himself didn’t even have one until he got married at the age of fifty-five. Judge Lipsitt wore oversized black frame glasses. His slicked-down hair looked suspiciously black. He walked as though he were on the deck of a rolling ship, listing from side to side. The judge was quaint and gentle, and Rick Guida was annoying him.
The prosecutor constantly asked to come to the sidebar where he and Bill Costopoulos could argue out of the jury’s earshot. Guida was so uncertain about the strength of his case that he had a tendency to overtry it.
The way Judge Garb had handled such requests for sidebar discussion was simple. He’d say no
Judge Lipsitt would say something like, “Uh … oh … well … naturally I try to avoid the sidebar.”
But he couldn’t say no. He’d look as though he’d like to say, “Oh, fudge!”
When Guida would object, he’d often say, “Yes, I guess it calls for a conclusion, but, oh, I’ll overrule the objection.”
The odd thing was that a great deal got admitted into the record from both sides, yet the trial moved swiftly. Even with Rick Guida doing more eye rolling than Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest.
To a jury who wondered what the Bill Bradfield alibi testimony was all about, Rick Guida once more used the clever device of reenacting the testimony at Jay Smith’s trial, with the prosecutor of that trial portraying Bill Bradfield while reading from the official transcript.
And he brought in the Sears employees again to identify Jay Smith as the bogus Brink’s courier. Suddenly, the jury was getting the idea that this fellow William Bradfield had told a very big lie for Jay Smith. For some reason.
When the day arrived, Bill Costopoulos, as promised, did a good job of trying to discredit the testimony of Jay Smith’s prison buddy Raymond Martray. Martray admitted under cross-examination that he did not tell in earlier interviews that Jay Smith had said he’d killed Susan Reinert.
There were a lot of people in the courtroom including most of the reporters who doubted him when he said now that Jay Smith had blurted, “I killed that fucking bitch.”
And yet, three women on the jury jerked their heads in the direction of Jay Smith when Martray said those words. It appeared that at least those three did believe Raymond Martray.
Martray said finally that he’d decided to cooperate with the police because he had children of his own.
“People say that I was a bad cop,” Martray said. “I wasn’t that bad.”
Bill Costopoulos implied that Martray had told the cops that Jay Smith used a “Spanish accent” because he’d read a magazine account of the call to police on the night the body was discovered, wherein the reporter had erroneously claimed that the caller had a Spanish accent.
Bill Costopoulos was all over the courtroom in flourishes, and at one point was right up in Martray’s face when Guida jumped up and demanded that he be ordered to back away from the witness.
Judge Lipsitt said, “It’s his style,” but ordered Costopoulos to ease off.
Apparently, the judge liked Costopoulos personally, and didn’t like Rick Guida.
After that testimony was over, Bill Costopoulos said that it was his best day.
Charles Montione was another story. He came in like an extra from Miami Vice, pinkie ring and all. Montione wore a trim goatee similar to the defense lawyer’s. He had street-corner good looks and sported a hairdo like the Wolf Man’s. He seemed as though he wouldn’t be credible.
Montione testified in a soft cellblock voice. He told of Jay Smith escape plans which added to the consciousness of guilt, but then he told the jury about Jay Smith’s “smirking” when Montione asked if he’d killed the Reinerts.
He described the remarkable business of Jay Smith wanting a magazine with a model who was posed in a very particular way.
Montione’s attitude as a witness was “I don’t want to be here, but I am, and you can believe me or not.”
Most people in that courtroom obviously did. The defense was worried about Montione’s apparent credibility.
Jack Holtz testified about a nine-page letter he’d seized when he arrested Jay Smith in 1985. It was a letter to attorney Glenn Zeitz, care of private investigator Russell Kolins. It was dated January 14, 1981.
The letter from Jay Smith outlined his whereabouts on the weekend of June 22, 1979. He informed his attorney that Grace Gilmore, the new owner of the house, had agreed to let him stay until July 1st, and that he was either visiting or telephoning his wife, and visiting or telephoning his lawyer over much of the murder weekend.
As to the night of Susan Reinerts disappearance, Jay Smith wrote, “On Friday, June 22, sometime in the late afternoon Grace Gilmore came. I heard movement upstairs and went to see what was up. I thought it was my daughter Stephanie returning for some clothes. Grace said she cancelled the trip to shore with sister.”
It was extraordinary how casually he tossed in the name of his daughter for his new lawyer, since at the time Stephanie and Edward Hunsberger had not been seen for three years.
He then described his daughter Sheri coming into the house and said he was uncertain if she’d seen Grace Gilmore. It was Sheri’s twenty-second birthday, he wrote, and they went out to supper. They returned and moved some of her things to her new apartment at about 7:00 P.M.
Jay Smith claimed in that letter that Grace Gilmore had returned on Saturday and they had coffee and a talk about what furniture he would leave. He maintained that she went down to the lower level of the house to look at the heater. Then she went back to work upstairs and he remained below in the basement apartment. Jay Smith wrote that Grace Gilmore had left in the afternoon but his daughter returned and stayed until after dar
k. He wrote that his brother came during the late morning on Sunday to determine what furniture was to be taken.
A letter to his brother that was also seized by Jack Holtz pursuant to his search warrant was simply an attempt to coach the brother on testimony regarding that weekend if he ever had to take the stand.
He told his brother that Grace Gilmore had come on Friday and Saturday, but did not mention her presence on Sunday. As to Sunday he wrote, “You came in the late morning or early afternoon. You had granddaughter with you. Sher came late in afternoon and left 8:30 or 9:30 P.M.”
As to events after that weekend that he hoped his brother could corroborate, Jay Smith wrote:
1) You moved my stuff.
2) Stuff had been kept intact since you got it.
3) I told you to get rid of clothes.
4) Car remains the same except for normal cleanup and maintenance. Many have driven it.
Prior to the first day of testimony, Jack Holtz had admitted to being scared of Bill Costopoulos who had a reputation for being able to rattle police witnesses and make them look foolish. But Jack Holtz wasn’t the same fellow he’d been back in 1979 when he was second banana to Joe VanNort-when he was only thirty-two years old and his hair was black.
He still had those glasses screwed to his face, but he evinced a lot of confidence when he took the stand to describe the seizing of the letters in Jay Smith’s cell.
He answered all of the questions on cross-examination in an articulate and careful fashion. He’d answer “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” whenever possible, and remained unruffled when the defense lawyer stalked to the witness box to discuss the seizure of a man’s personal correspondence.
Bill Costopoulos was very effective in his use of righteous indignation. He had good timing and didn’t pull it from the bag of tricks all that often. In fact he had a gift for creating smokescreens even when he had little substance to work with.
But this time he asked one question too many. It was a mistake and he knew it immediately.
As though the letter was irrelevant, he asked Jack Holtz, “Is there anything in this nine-page letter that would be significant to your investigation?”
Holtz was too serious about his job ever to grin openly on the witness stand, but he came close. He said, “It was all significant.” Then he launched into all the things about the letter that differed from his findings.
He testified that Grace Gilmore had been at the shore from Friday until Sunday, and that Jay Smith’s daughter had not been at the house, and that everyone except comatose patients had been interviewed and Jay Smith was not seen visiting his dying wife at the hospital, and he had not visited his attorney, and that his brother had not been at his house, and in fact nobody had seen Jay Smith’s face from Friday afternoon until Grace Gilmore heard his car drive away on Sunday afternoon.
The inescapable conclusion was that the letter showed a tremendous consciousness of guilt.
Bill Costopoulos came back to the counsel table and could be heard by the reporters saying, “Aw, shit!”
It was his worst day. He was more careful with Jack Holtz after that.
Guida kept the witnesses streaming in. Grace Gilmore took the stand and directly refuted the Jay Smith letter by saying she had gone to the shore and hadn’t returned until Sunday afternoon.
Agent Hess of the FBI testified to interviewing Jay Smith shortly after the crime occurred when Jay Smith told it differently, saying he had not gone to dinner with Sheri on Friday, June 22nd.
A representative of Bell Telephone testified that Jay Smith had placed five calls to his attorney over that weekend, but there was a gap between 3:43 P.M. Friday and 8:37 P.M. Sunday, which was ninety-seven minutes after the men from Three Mile Island saw Susan Reinerts car in the parking lot.
And Holtz told the jury that the driving time from the Host Inn to the house on Valley Forge Road was ninety minutes.
Bill Costopoulos had an impressive group of lawyers in his law firm. They all resembled him in that they brought a little passion to their work, but as Josh Lock learned, it’s okay as long as you don’t get too emotionally involved with criminal defendants.
During the Jay Smith trial, one of his lawyers was defending another murder case. A defendant was on trial for killing his mother in her bed. Like Jay Smith, this defendant had a sardonic sense of humor. He called it “mattress-cide.”
And in the same spirit of punsmanship he’d torched her saying it was an act of “our-son.”
The lawyer was working on this one almost as hard as Bill Costopoulos. During the presentation of his case, the punster happened to ask the Costopoulos law clerk to get him a copy of a martial arts book. He said it might come in handy in prison to learn a few self-defense tricks.
The law clerk obliged, and after the punster was convicted of matricide he demonstrated what he’d learned.
Right there in the courtroom he hauled off and threw a kung-fu special from the direction of Pittsburgh and almost coldcocked his ardent young lawyer.
Shortly after that, the members of the press asked the lawyer if he was now selling tickets at scalpers’ prices to the execution.
* * *
Reporters need controversy. Most felt that Jay Smith would be acquitted. None believed the comb clue. They thought it had been planted by either Bill Bradfield or a disciple.
The mere fact the body had been driven to Harrisburg where Jay Smith was scheduled to be sentenced was evidence to many that he hadn’t done the driving.
There were also discussions about the movie Witness which had taken place there in central Pennsylvania. In the Bill Bradfield trial, Rick Guida had found it patently absurd that Bill Bradfield would feel that there was no one in the police station to whom he could tell the alleged plot by Jay Smith to kill Susan Reinert.
Yet the entire movie Witness was built upon just such a decision. The protagonist thought there was a corrupt superior officer in the Philadelphia police, so he lit out for Amish country with his witnesses. He never called the FBI. He never called the state police. He just handled it himself. Just like Bill Bradfield. And he was a cop. All the critics in America, both fat and skinny, loved the picture and saw nothing absurd about the premise. It was a good thing for Rick Guida, everyone said, that Witness had not been released prior to the Bill Bradfield trial.
The most damaging physical evidence wasn’t the comb, whether it had been lost by Jay Smith or planted by Bill Bradfield or a Bradfield disciple, or even, as some thought, planted by Jay Smith just for the perverse thrill of it.
It wasn’t even the pin identical to Karen Reinerts that had been found in that car, nor the letters from Jay Smith to Bill Bradfield.
It was probably the letter within a letter wherein Jay Smith asked his dying wife to clean the Capri thoroughly, writing, “I can’t stress the importance of this: clean out and then clean up.”
And that the downstairs rug in a house they’d already sold must go, as he explained: “Every time I walk on that rug something new pops out.”
Jay Smith, already imprisoned, was not worrying about a couple of marijuana seeds in his former house.
It was an even more damaging letter after Martray and Montione described his obsession with forensics.
The mother and father of Edward Hunsberger, now missing for eight years, attended the Jay Smith trial whenever they could. In the William Bradfield trial they’d driven two hours to and from Harrisburg every day because they couldn’t afford a hotel room.
During this Jay Smith trial Dorothy Hunsberger testified that back on June 25, 1979, when Jay Smith showed up for sentencing on the theft case, he’d arrived very late and that his hair was mussed. She said that he’d felt in his pockets and then smoothed his hair down with his hands.
Well, maybe. And maybe Mrs. Hunsberger saw and remembered what she now wanted to remember, this tragic woman, nearly seventy, haunting courtrooms for any clue to the fate of her only child.
Bill Costopoulos didn’t cross-exa
mine her. The jury knew nothing of Edward Hunsberger and Jay Smith’s missing daughter.
Without a doubt, the most memorable witness in the Jay Smith murder trial was Rachel, the ice maiden. The entire corps of reporters as well as both counsel tables were waiting for the person they had called “the mystery woman” in the William Bradfield trial. Cynics said that the greatest mystery about her was how she could still be a loyal Bradfield woman, but she was.
The reporters were not disappointed when she took the long walk to the witness box. Now in her mid-thirties, she was Charlotte Brontë. Rachel was as tiny as Susan Reinert. Her hair was very dark and straight, parted in the middle and combed severely down behind her ears. She wore a long black skirt suit and a pale, high-throated blouse with a tiny black necktie. And flat shoes, of course. She wore no makeup and no jewelry. Color her black, white and gray.
The precision with which she spoke was startling, so much so that she made each lawyer work at phrasing the questions carefully.
After Guida got past the preliminaries, he said to his witness, “At the time you formed a romantic interest with Mister Bradfield, did you know that he was living with a woman by the name of Sue Myers?”
“Yes, I did,” she answered.
“And what did Mister Bradfield tell you about his relationship with Sue Myers?”
“They shared living quarters, but there was not a romantic relationship between them at the time.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Yes, it is.”
“In the summer of 1979, did you know that Mister Bradfield had been married?”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“In terms of the fall of 1978 and spring of 1979, did he ever mention a woman by the name of Susan Reinert?”
“Yes, I do remember the name.”
“What did he tell you about Susan Reinert with regard to any romantic interest?”
Echoes in the Darkness Page 38