Echoes in the Darkness (49 page)

And then, Montione claimed that Jay Smith had backpedaled 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 , and said, "That's it. That's the one."

jack Ioltz acquired that issue of Penthouse. Other than lying on the wrong side, the model was posed very similarly to Susan 1 .'inert 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 writeups 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 eightfoot grave and started digging a new one. For Rick Cuida 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, hows 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. Tliis 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, Jav. 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 P3933, 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.

"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 Smith's 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.