Echoes in the Darkness

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Joe VanNort on the other hand pointed out that the Bill Bradfield gang had a whole bushel of college degrees and not one of them could tell a cat turd from a Candy Kiss. He wasn’t intimidated by sheepskins and mortarboards. He was a confident top banana.

  The comb found in the trunk of Susan Reinert’s car got worked during July. Information arrived in bits and pieces. A call to the War College in Carlisle identified the acronym, 79th USARCOM. A call from a cop in the King of Prussia area gave them a lead on a former principal named Dr. Jay C. Smith who’d taught at the same school where Susan Reinert had worked. Another call to the 79th Army Reserve Command brought the news that Jay C. Smith had been a colonel in the command prior to his retirement. Then they learned that Jay Smith had gone to prison on Monday, June 25th, from a Harrisburg courtroom.

  When the comb and the Jay Smith connection was explained to Joe VanNort, he wasn’t impressed.

  “It’s too obvious,” he said. “This Jay C. Smith is in a whole pack of trouble and a comb from his army outfit ends up under the body. Too obvious. Sounds like something our pal Bradfield might dream up to throw suspicion on his old nut-case principal.”

  Joe VanNort stuck with that notion for several months.

  While Bill Bradfield and Chris were winding up their summer studies Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz made another trip to St. John’s. Only this time they made a prearranged visit to a New Mexico judge and had a court order when they arrived, an order requiring Bill Bradfield and Chris Pappas to submit to fingerprinting so that their prints could be compared to unidentified lifts taken in the Reinert home and car.

  Bill Bradfield didn’t like any of it, paricularly the ride to the state police headquarters where he was mugged and printed like a thug. And he really didn’t like being driven in a separate car from Chris Pappas. And Chris didn’t like being photographed, because the mug shot had nothing to do with fingerprint comparison.

  When Bill Bradfield next called home he told Vince Valaitis that Joe VanNort was an extremely “unintelligent” man, and that as far as VanNort’s partner was concerned, he’d like to have thrown Holtz into the school fountain.

  He was incensed with Holtz because when he was trying to explain to the cretinous cop about the Great Books Program at St. John’s, and how demanding it was, and how he resented being subjected to police harassment, Jack Holtz had said, “The Bible’s a great book. I don’t read it myself, but I know it says in there, thou shalt not kill.”

  Bill Bradfield asked only one question the whole time he was with the cops during their second visit to Santa Fe.

  He asked, “How long do the state police stay on a murder case?”

  When the cops had made their second appointment at St. John’s a college staff member informed Chris Pappas they were coming, and Chris told his mentor who ordered him to get the IBM typewriter out of Bill Bradfields room and into his own.

  After the cops went home, Bill Bradfield visited the Olsens after class and brought a small metal strongbox with him.

  “I’ve got some papers in here,” he told Jeff Olsen. “They’re not really important, but the police might find them and manipulate them to try to manufacture some evidence. Could you hold this box for me?”

  “Sure,” Jeff Olsen said. “I’ll lock it in the trunk of my car.”

  “And I’d like you to keep a typewriter for me,” Bill Bradfield said. “It was used to write some letters to Susan Reinert. They were nothing of course, but you know the cops.”

  “Just leave it in this apartment,” Jeff Olsen said. “Put it right there on the dining room table.”

  Naturally, Chris got the assignment of lugging the heavy typewriter to the Olsen apartment. These days he was all muscle and faith.

  Later, Bill Bradfield, accompanied by Rachel, came again to the apartment of Jeff Olsen, with another important request. He wanted to use the fireplace. Bill Bradfield was carrying a wastebasket filled with documents of one sort or another.

  “These’re just school papers and things belonging to Susan Reinert,” Bill Bradfield explained. “I don’t know why I save everything. It’s mostly stuff from her students.”

  Young Olsen told him to fire away and Bill Bradfield fed the papers into the fireplace and burned them and stirred up the ashes.

  Then he said, “Jeffrey, if the police should come here or contact you at any time, you don’t have to cooperate with them. They’ll try to trick you. But don’t tell them that I warned you of that because then they’ll twist what you say and try to make me look as though I’m obstructing their investigation.”

  And the student nodded and said, “Gotcha.”

  “I simply trusted Bill Bradfield completely. I believed he was not guilty,” Jeff Olsen reported at a later time.

  “I need a favor,” Bill Bradfield said to Chris as they were preparing for departure from Santa Fe. “Could you switch typing elements for me? You have a machine just like it, and I’m sure the typing balls are interchangeable.”

  But now for the first time Chris was thinking about saving his own skin. He was starting to get some very funny feelings about the whole business.

  He said, “Bill, why don’t you just throw the typing ball away if it bothers you?”

  The answer was pure Bradfield. “I’m afraid to,” he said. “You never know when you might need something and if you throw it away it’s gone for good. I’d feel so much better if you kept it. You know how to remove them, don’t you?”

  “After we get home I’ll see what I can do,” Chris Pappas said.

  But the handyman realized it didn’t take a Wernher von Braun to replace typing balls. Chris had started worrying a whole lot when Bill Bradfield first said that he’d loaned the typewriter to Susan Reinert. And it goosed Chris a bit when he heard about a $25,000 “money receipt.”

  He’d read a news report that Susan Reinert had been unable to remove her $25,000 in large increments, and had to withdraw it in smaller increments. He started thinking about Bill Bradfield claiming that his life savings of $28,000 had to be removed in increments of $5,000.

  Chris Pappas felt like a cripple who didn’t want to walk, but some hairy gorilla in a white smock kept dumping his wheelchair and forcing those baby steps.

  He was beginning to put Bill Bradfields stories under a bright light for a little third degree. And the answers were not in English, Latin or Greek. Bill Bradfield just might have had a little something to do with misappropriating the $25,000 investment of Susan Reinert.

  As to Bill Bradfield having something to do with the murder of Susan Reinert and the disappearance of her children, Chris Pappas wasn’t ready to deal with that one yet. He was protected by deductive reasoning. To Chris Pappas it was a simple syllogism. If Bill Bradfield revered Thomas Aquinas, then he could never be a truly bad man. At worst he could be a flawed good man. A flawed good man might be tempted to misappropriate a sum of money that he intended to repay, but only a truly evil man could do the other thing.

  It can be theorized that Chris Pappas suffered a bit of added torment over the whole business of the “flawed good man” and the “misappropriation” of money. It is not precisely clear whether he actually informed Bill Bradfield that he was taking $1,300 out of the safety deposit box to buy his brothers trade-in car.

  Flawed good men. The concentric circles around William Bradfield were full of them, and Chris Pappas was beginning to indulge some uncomfortable ideas. He absolutely refused to give Bill Bradfield his own typing ball. The typeface style on Bill Bradfields typewriter was Gothic, of course.

  The commandant of the Pennsylvania state troopers, a recent appointee of Governor Thornburgh, was a former special agent of the FBI from the Pittsburgh office. The governor had served western Pennsylvania for several years as a U.S. attorney so they knew each other pretty well.

  Ken Reinert had been calling his congressman and the U.S. attorney trying to persuade somebody to bring the FBI into the case. He didn’t have faith in Joe VanNort and his state trooper
s. So whether it was pressure from the congressman or from Senator Schweiker or Governor Thornburgh, the FBI agreed to enter the Reinert case on the pretext that the children were possibly kidnap victims being held in some other state for a future ransom demand. Farfetched, but it satisfied federal requirements for the time being.

  Joe VanNort treated the news that the feds were coming as if the Reds were coming. He had a little talk with his team of five cops telling them what to expect.

  “Okay, we gotta cooperate with them,” he said. “But they ain’t never goin’ in the Reinert house unless there’s a trooper with them. Got that? And if anybody tries to push you around, you come to me and tell me right now! Remember, they know nothin’ about homicide. They’re glory boys. They come in and give press conferences, and like that. They got no real field experience. They got no real court experience. No real police experience. They’re not cops. They’re a bunch of lawyers and bookkeepers. No, they’re a bunch a … schoolteachers, is what they are!”

  It was the worst thing Joe VanNort could think of to describe a special agent of the FBI.

  Civilians have seldom understood the real danger inherent in police work. It has never been particularly hazardous to the body, not since Sir Robert Peel first organized his corps of bobbies. This line of work has always been a threat to the spirit.

  That summer it was dramatized. It was a night like other nights since the investigation had started: frustrating, fruitless, maddening. And now they were awaiting the arrival of eighteen special agents to form a joint task force.

  There they sat long after they should have gone home: Joe VanNort, Jack Holtz and a few other troopers. No one remembers who started it, but it was a night when the spirit of a cop could burst loose and show itself without the badge and veneer of cynicism. That scarred-up cop spirit can turn as panicky as a colt in a barn fire.

  One of the troopers had a bad thought, just a little jock-itch of a thought, but within five minutes it was like a raging syphilis epidemic.

  The trooper said, “Do you know something? Our photos of the corpse aren’t all that recognizable. I mean, she was beat up pretty bad. I mean, a person who knew her could look at our photos and think it was Susan Rienert. But what if it was somebody else?”

  Everybody laughed.

  But then Jack Holtz said, “You know, that mortician who cremated her said he was a little mixed up by what her brother told him to do. What if Pat Gallagher told him to burn the body, and after it was done tried to convince the mortician that he misunderstood the instructions?”

  “You mean what if Pat Gallagher is in on it with …”

  “Bill Bradfield!”

  “And Ken Reinert is …”

  “Also in on it! He identified the wrong corpse on purpose!”

  “And Susan Reinert is …”

  “In England with her kids waiting for her boyfriend to inherit seven hundred and thirty G’s!”

  “And the body we have is …”

  “Maybe some poor hooker that could pass for Susan Reinert in morgue photos!”

  “And then Bradfield …”

  “Gives Gallagher and Ken Reinert their quiet money and goes off to England and meets his new family and they buy a boat and go sailing off to …”

  “The Greek islands or the Aegean Sea or some canal in Venice where Ezra Pound mighta flushed his freaking toilet one time!”

  Well, there it was. The homicide investigator’s nightmare. All the cops were sitting around stunned. And Joe VanNort’s cynical blackjack mouth was hanging open, about to lose his eighty-first Marlboro of the day.

  Jack Holtz was beating his snuff to death and spitting juice into a Coke bottle at a rate of forty globs per minute. He was also pressing the nose piece on his glasses, which is a laugh because he was so cautious and controlled you could heave him off a cliff in Acapulco and he’d come up with his Timex and those glasses digging into his cheeks like surgical implants.

  Every cop in the room had a nightmare vision of eighteen FBI agents strutting in long enough to have lunch. Then in forty-eight hours they’d load the real Susan Reinert and her kids on a London Concorde heading for JFK and a press conference where Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz and all the others wouldn’t be heard over the thunder of cackles, snorts and guffaws. The horror of it all was professional humiliation.

  A telephone call was made. The latent-prints specialist verified that the fingerprints on the corpse matched the lifts found all over the bedroom and bathroom of Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore.

  The cops all looked at each other with shit-I-knew-it-all-the-time grins.

  And that’s how a cop’s mind works.

  17

  Dr. Jekyll

  As FBI agents go, the state cops could have done far worse. In the first place, the special agent in charge, Don Redden, was almost as young as Jack Holtz, and younger than several of the agents he was supervising. And he wasn’t one of those FBI agents whose secondary mission in life is to look preppier than George Bush.

  Don Redden was more of a Harrisburg kind of guy. In fact, he’d worked in the Harrisburg office and knew Jack Holtz. He was a Kentuckian and sounded like chicken-fried-steak, and looked as though he’d be right at home dipping snuff with Holtz or tramping around on VanNort’s mountain with a twelve gauge.

  But it was tough for Special Agent Don Redden or any of them to get chummy with Joe VanNort. Every other day he was having a faceoff with somebody.

  Once he grabbed three feds and said, “I hear somebody in this group was reinterviewin’ witnesses and said the statie’s done a piss-poor job!”

  And of course the agents denied it, and maybe they hadn’t said it, but Joe VanNort went to Don Redden and said, “We’re gettin’ it together here. I want everybody to know who’s in charge of this investigation. Me. That’s who’s in charge.”

  Don Redden knew Joe VanNort was a daddy cop from the old school and he understood the resentment and jealousy that goes with these cases, and he didn’t say too much when VanNort braced his agents with embarrassing questions.

  “Any a you people ever investigated a murder?” Joe VanNort challenged. “I mean, even one little murder?”

  Of course VanNort knew that the FBI rarely had the opportunity, but he even accused the “goddamn schoolteachers” of never having seen a dead body in all their lives.

  You had to be careful with Joe VanNort because you couldn’t be certain which group of goddamn schoolteachers he was talking about. Bill Bradfield, et al., or the feds.

  When any of the special agents wanted to go to the Reinert house, VanNort demanded that a trooper be present. When the agents wanted to bring Ken Reinert or Pat Gallagher into the house for any reason, Joe VanNort would get so hot he could set off sprinklers because those two still hadn’t been officially cleared as far as he was concerned.

  The feds weren’t around a week before he turned to Jack Holtz and said, “When this case is over I ain’t never workin’ with the FBI again. No matter who orders me.”

  The FBI agents immediately liked the blue comb lead and the other Jay Smith connections. Despite Joe VanNort, they began working in that direction.

  As far as VanNort was concerned, Bill Bradfield was a hugger-mugger, acting alone. The kind that picks on plain or homely women, turns on the charm and gives them some cuddles while he picks their purses.

  There was something else that Joe VanNort maintained from his first encounter with Bill Bradfield and from everything he’d learned.

  “I can get that guy,” he promised, “because he’s got a mouth he can’t control. And he’ll never be able to control it. He’ll talk his way right into the joint.”

  While Stephanie Smith lay dying of cancer, a former coworker at the dry cleaner’s released Stephanie’s diary to a local newspaper. And it was full of lurid fact and fantasy.

  The newspaper accounts in August were enough in themselves to keep a task force busy.

  One headline said: SEX RING LINKED TO MURDER. SWINGER’S GROUP
PROBED.

  State police have uncovered explosive new evidence in the Susan Reinert murder case linking the Upper Merion teacher to a bizarre sex ring. Officials have categorically refused to disclose any details publicly about the group. But sources said yesterday that Mrs. Reinert’s knowledge of the love cult may have been a motive in the slaying.

  The individuals contacted by reporters have said that as many as 20 to 30 men and women regularly participated in “swinging sessions” that included homosexual and sado-masochistic acts. However, it could not be determined whether Mrs. Reinert actually participated in any of the orgies.

  One police source said that Mrs. Reinert may have been killed because she was about to expose the existence of the group and its members, most of whom are “professionals.”

  A Sunday edition of a Philadelphia paper printed an interesting story that caught Jay Smith’s attention in his cell at Dallas prison.

  The headline read: SATAN CULT DEATH?

  Teacher may have been sexually assaulted, tortured, before she was slain, probers say. The murderers of Upper Merion High School teacher Susan Reinert may have been members or associates of a Satan worship cult, investigators have told reporters. Mrs. Reinert may have been stripped, tortured and sexually assaulted as she lay on a makeshift sacrifice altar during a black Mass devil worship ceremony on the weekend of her murder last June. Federal and state investigators have found evidence of the existence of the cult in the Upper Merion area.

  Cult members were described by one investigator as “intellectual professionals.” They did not balk at using animals in sex exhibition and encounters, the investigators said. Investigators said they were not sure if Susan Reinert was actually a member of the cult or whether she attended the black Mass rituals and other ceremonies out of curiosity, but they said they were certain Mrs. Reinert knew about the cult and the identity of many of its members.