Echoes in the Darkness (10 page)

He did say you've been working very hard on your papers, but he said a couple of things that made me wonder if you'd been seeing Rachel. When I admitted jealousy yesterday you said it was good. I assume you meant it was good that I care. I hate it, a waste of time and energy. So do I have any reason to be jealous? If I do, I might as well know. I don't mind that she's typing your paper if she wants to. It's nice that she could help.

Karen and Michael had a great time while I was visiting you. Everyone was complimentary about what a pleasure they were. That really made me feel good. I'm glad I went. I also got to know Rachel better.

Glad you went to a party. We have a tendency to give fun the lowest priority. Hope that, overall, the summer has been worth the agony.

1 know you miss me, but I fear that in your loneliness you might turn to someone else who's there. I've never understood the dynamics of our relationship anyhow. When I went to Pat's to pick up Karen and Michael I discovered that Sue Myers had shown some people a very nasty reaction at the mention of my name. I wish Sue would leave Upper Merion or that you would finally leave her. I don't know what I can do. I do not want to go back to that same scenc. This summer has been great without it, which explains my present mood. But I still have lots of feelings and worries I don't like. I'd like to talk to you.

Am taking Karen and Michael to a baseball game with Parents Without Partners, so must close. Write or call. Thanks for the previous calls. They help. I love you.

Sus

From everything Roslyn Weinberger was told, Susan Reinert's sexual needs were about normal for a single woman of thirty-six years with a proper upbringing.

"She was interested in sex," the therapist said, "but only when she was emotionally involved with the person. I could never picture her going to a singles bar to pick someone up."

To Pat Schnure, who would probably become Susan Reinert's best friend, she confessed that the only thing she had learned sexually from Bill Bradfield was that physical sex could be acceptable during menstruation. There was never an indication from Susan Reinert or any other woman that Bill Bradfield was some sort of stud. Rather, there were indications he was more of a snuggler and cuddler than a sexual athlete.

It was also his custom to tell each of his close friends about his former friend Tom, the gay lodger in his first "commonlaw" marriage. He always assured his pals that he'd never succumbed to gay overtures, but, clearly, Tom meant something in his life.

Saturday night is still the best time to take a girl to the movies in a place like Tredyffrin Township. And really, there isn't a whole lot else to do on steamy August nights except to catch a movie or have a few slices of pizza. And what with the cinema in the Gateway Shopping Center being so crowded on the evening of August 19, 1978, a young couple decided on the pizzeria.

The moon was low and the young people were sitting on the curb near the Central Penn Bank munching when their attention was diverted by a brown Ford Granada that pulled slowly into the parking lot and stopped next to a Chevrolet van, probably belonging to somebody in the cinema. A man got out of the Ford and walked toward the van and peered inside.

The young couple suddenly forgot all about pizzas and movies. In the available light they could see that the tall man was wearing a cowl-like hood over his entire face and head. And it looked like he was carrying something in each handguns.

The couple didn't run away or even walk away. As the young man later put it, they "sort of crawled away."

By the time the couple got to a phone and the Tredyffrin Township police had arrived at the shopping center, the hooded gunman had gone. The young man told the police that he didn't think the gunman had spotted them, and the police concluded that perhaps he'd been planning to break into the van but changed his mind.

While the young people were still giving their report to the cop, a car pulled into the far end of the parking lot and began cruising slowly in their direction.

"I think that's the car!" the young man yelled and the driver turned abruptly and drove away.

A few minutes later, a sergeant and lieutenant from the township police were the first to spot a brown Ford Granada that resembled the one described on the radio broadcast.

The Ford was driving erratically, heading south in a northbound traffic lane. The cops went after it and pulled the car over at the Route 202 on-ramp at Valley Forge Road.

The driver was a tall middle-aged man. He got out and waited as the policemen approached with flashlights, one on each side of the car.

The cops weren't yet certain they had the right suspect and the sergeant asked for a driver's license.

"It's in the car," the driver answered calmly. He turned toward the open door and reached down toward the front seat.

Then, every cops recurring nightmare. The sergeant heard the lieutenant yell something at him. The lieutenant from his side of the car saw it in the flashlight beam: a .22 Ruger.

"Drop it!" the lieutenant screamed.

A memory in fragments. A finger slid inside the trigger guard. The gun began rising up. The lieutenant could not shoot.

"Drop it now!" he screamed.

A microsecond. Finger pads turned white against blue steel. Then the man said something out of character for a gunman.

He said, "Oh, my goodness!"

He dropped the Ruger and was not shot to death.

The lieutenant later said, "I couldn't fire even after the first command. I was carrying a hot load in my gun and my sergeant was right behind the guy. I was scared I'd blast through him and blow away my partner. That guy was very lucky."

The township police found some unusual items in the car of the lucky guy. There was a black leather pouch on the front seat containing four loaded handguns. There was a sleeve of a football jersey fashioned into a hood mask. There was a bolt cutter and other tools that the police assumed were to be used to break into the car in the parking lot.

There was, strangely enough, an oil filter with two bullet holes in the top. Then the cops noticed that the Ruger's front sight had been filed off and on the barrel of the pistol was a cylinder of rubber, the kind used to insulate a screwdriver against electrical shock. With the front sight gone and the rubber cylinder acting as a gasket sleeve, the barrel of the weapon fit perfectly into the oil filter. The gunman had devised an effective silencer.

There were things in the car that at a later time would be of great interest to other police during the investigation of a crime of far greater importance. There was a syringe in that car, and another syringe in the gunman's pocket. A lab report showed the syringe was loaded with ethchlorvynol, also called Placidyl, a tranquilizing drug that, taken orally, can induce sleep. A bloodstream injection can produce unconsciousness within a minute.

The gunman told the cops that he was merely carrying guns to "scare some kids" who'd been bothering him. He said that the drug-loaded syringe belonged to his son-in-law who was an addict. What the son-in-law was doing with such a massive dose was not clear. It was one of the most bizarre aspects of this incident that was not explained.

There was an ordinary plastic trash bag in the backseat of the car and more bags in the trunk. There was a blue plaid jacket in the car with rolls of strapping tape in the pockets. There was a pair of gloves.

The Tredyffrin Township police were the first to receive a piece of news that would occupy the local newspapers for months to come. Their hooded gunman was Dr. Jay C. Smith, the fifty-year-old principal of Upper Merion Senior High School in nearby King of Prussia.

Of course, the police station was humming that night. Yet the cops weren't even beginning to sense the imminent revelations in the secret life of the local educator.

It was near midnight when the arresting officer was walking past Dr. Jay Smith in the booking office. He overheard a remark that the prisoner whispered into the telephone.

Jay Smith said to his listener, ". . . even before the bailbondsman. Get over to the house and take everything out. Including the files!"

The blue metal sign at the township limit reads: named for frederick the great, king of prussia. Jay Smith lived in King of Prussia, only a few minutes from Upper Merion Senior High School. It was well past midnight when township police started acting upon information received from the arresting officers.

At 1:00 a.m. a detective was staked out at the residence of Jay Smith on Valley Forge Road. The cops couldn't imagine who would arrive at the house of the principal to "get everything out." And what would "everything" consist of?

At 2:00 a.m. a car entered the Smith driveway. The driver of the car held four university degrees. He was short and slight and looked as threatening as Woody Allen. In fact, he looked very much like the school librarian, which is what he'd been until the recent Philadelphia layoffs. The librarian had been 2 close friend of Jay Smith's for many years.

The cops hid by a line of trees and watched the librarian carrying boxes from the basement of the Smith house. Among the items he carried to his Plymouth were some file boxes containing two packets of marijuana weighing a total of 818 grams. The cops pounced on the unsuspecting librarian who said that he was only do;ng what his friend Jay Smith had asked, and the authorities later decided not to charge him with any crime. But the marijuana in the box allowed them to get the local magistrate out of bed and swear out a search warrant.

At seven o'clock that morning the secret basement apartment of Jay Smith was full of cops. They found an additional 580 grams of marijuana and some vials of contraband pills and capsules, but the drugs were eventually of minimal interest to the police. Far more intriguing were other things that caused many excited calls to other police stations around The Main Line.

Another search warrant was served the next day, a warrant that covered a search more far-reaching than anticipated. The, superintendent of schools was asked to come to the Jay Smith home where he identified office machines and other equipment stolen from the Upper Merion school district, as well as reproductions of famous paintings snatched off the walls in the district office. And also something that made absolutely no sense to the cops: Dr. Jay Smith had apparently stolen four gallons of nitric acid from the school. For what?

Then there were the things that had nothing to do with the school. They found two silver badges and uniforms, the kind worn by Brink's security guards. In Jay Smith's desk they found a bogus identification card fashioned from a U.S. Army identification card. In fact, there was a whole packet of stolen army I.D. cards. The bogus Brinks card bore a photo of Jay Smith with the name "Carl S. Williams" beneath it.

The charges against the school principal were piling up when the police found yet another uniform, that of an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. This uniform wasn't a phony. A call verified that the educator was retired from the 79th Army Reserve Command, and that Colonel Smith had in fact carpooled to army reserve meetings with his commanding general. The general was shocked. He'd always spoken highly of his intelligent colonel. The general was John Eisenhower, son of the thirty-fourth president of the United States.

The cops in the basement that day hauled off a lot of evidence and photographed the rest. The bottles of drugs contained Valium, Librium and Placidyl, but the cops were puzzling over everything else. They found five more oil-filter silencers along with a pair of latex gloves. The basement walls were pocked with bullet holes, no doubt from target practice with the silenced guns. Along with the stolen military I.D. cards, they found a pile of blue combs bearing the name of his army reserve unit.

They learned that one of Jay Smiths guns appeared to have been bought by and registered to the assistant principal at Upper Merion, except that when they contacted the man he informed them he had never bought a gun. He told the cops that his wallet and identification had been stolen from his desk in the past year.

It appeared that Jay Smith had swiped everything from Upper Merion but the swimming pool, when he wasn't busy terrorizing Sears stores as a bogus courier.

There were lots of other unusual things in the basement, his library for instance. Dr. Jay Smith had books with titles like The Canine Tongue, Her Bestial Dreams, Her Four-legged Lover, The Bestial Erotics and Animal Fever.

There were plenty of swinger publications, both straight and gay. There were classified ads from "modern'' couples willing to exchange information with pen pals. And finally, there was a significant quantity of chains and several locks. The cops photographed the chains and figured that Dr. Jay was a world class party animal.

This was reinforced when Stephanie Smith gave her divorce lawyer a dildo described on a later police report as "pink, regular size" and another described as "extra large, black, with manual crank, squirts water."

And what, the boys in the station house wanted to know, would General Eisenhower think of those little weapons?

Chapter
7

Mr. Hyde

For most of his life, Jay Smith had not been all that unattractive. He was six foot two, customarily weighed less than two hundred pounds and carried himself erectly, as befit a military man. He had a good speaking voice and an impressive command of language. But during the months preceding his arrest, a physical change had taken place and it was well documented by news photographs when the educator was in jail trying to raise bail money and facing felony charges leveled by the district attorneys of three counties. There was the Sears theft at the St. Davids store, the attempted theft at the Neshaminy Mall Sears store, the incident of car prowling with loaded guns at the Gateway Shopping Center, the theft of property from the Upper Merion school district, and the possession of contraband drugs. Enough charges to keep Dr. Jay C. Smith in courtrooms for some time to come.