Echoes in the Darkness

by Joseph Wambaugh

  The best part of the trial for Jack Holtz had occurred right after Chris Pappas testified. Bill Bradfield had gone out to vomit. He said it must have been something he ate.

  At a bar in Media that night there was a celebration involving Joe VanNort, Jack Holtz, Lou DeSantis, prosecutor Ed Weiss and Ken Reinerts attorney from Orphans Court. They saw Bill Bradfield on the news, and all the celebrants drank a toast to his next trial. Which they hoped would be for murder.

  When Vince was eased back into his teaching post he was warned that his job would depend on how people responded to him.

  On the first day that he was allowed to teach, he walked up to every teacher in the department and said, “Okay, ask me any question you want. Anything!”

  When Sue Myers was finally allowed to teach again she developed a posture of answering questions with such a look of exhaustion that people thought she might expire. It discouraged them.

  Chris Pappas went to work on another construction job, which may have been what he was always meant to do.

  Chris was never really able to believe in his heart and head that Bill Bradfield could have murdered Susan Reinert. As to the children, such a thought was out of the question.

  Vince Valaitis could intellectually accept that Bill Bradfield had committed certain misdeeds, but could never accommodate the notion that a loving friend could have committed murder.

  Sue Myers would only shrug or nod when she was asked. It was impossible to know if she believed that he’d conspired to kill Susan Reinert. Like the others, she couldn’t begin to think that the children would have been in murder plans.

  Sue Myers received at least one telephone call a week from Bill Bradfield while he lived quietly in his mothers house. The calls would be about his belongings. Sometimes he’d demand and other times he’d beg her to return them.

  “You’re holding my books hostage!” he roared during a memorable call.

  In one of the strangest calls, he did something he’d never done. He talked about the children. He theorized to Sue Myers that perhaps they’d been “sold.” He said that he feared Karen had been bartered into “white slavery.”

  On still another occasion he demanded that she return some of his books. When she refused, he said he’d settle for the return of his old football pictures, but she said nix on the pix.

  One night she received four calls between the hours of 2:30 and 3:00 A.M. He demanded his marriage certificate to Muriel. She refused. He called again and asked for the divorce papers. Ditto response. He called another time and said he had to have the cowboy suit he’d worn as a tiny tyke, but Sue said, sorry, little wrangler.

  The last time he called he sounded like he’d sucked helium. In a quivering grandma voice he said, “You’ve betrayed me! You’ve abandoned me! You’ve wronged me! Why won’t you meet me for a soda?”

  Some might wonder why Sue Myers didn’t have her telephone number changed and unlisted. But after seventeen years of lost hopes and shattered dreams, and now poverty-after being unmarried and childless and only now being allowed back in a classroom-would she give up the last pleasure left to her? Bill Bradfield had saved everything but old toenail clippings and she was keeping it all.

  In the fall, when she got back to Upper Merion, she was able to cut down on the Librium. She started feeling a little better. She began going to a chiropractor. She began getting facials. Sue Myers needed touching.

  Someone told her that if they ever made a movie about the Reinert murder case maybe Jane Fonda would play her part. That lifted her spirits.

  22

  Blood Crimson

  One of thousands of contacts made by the Reinert task force came by way of a registered letter to Joe VanNort. The writer of the letter was Raymond Martray, an inmate of the state correctional institution at Dallas, who claimed to be a friend of inmate Jay C. Smith.

  The writer said that he could not talk at Dallas but if a short transfer could be arranged he’d tell them what was on his mind. He’d sent a similar letter to the FBI, but had gotten no response.

  He was transferred for two weeks to the state prison at Pittsburgh and was taken by VanNort and Holtz to the Holiday Inn in Uniontown where they held a short meeting.

  Martray was a thirty-seven-year-old ex-cop from Connellsville, Pennsylvania, who was serving a prison sentence for perjury and burglaries, stemming from an arrest by state police while he was still a policeman in Connellsville. He’d been in Dallas prison since 1979 and didn’t go around bragging that he’d been a cop, because former lawmen are only a little more popular in the prison yard than child murderers, or “baby killers” as the cons refer to them.

  Ex-cops and baby killers pick their friends carefully. Raymond Martray was one of the first inmates that Jay Smith met on the day of his arrival at Dallas. The property room officer asked Martray to show Jay Smith around because he was being put in F Block where Martray also lived.

  Martray and Jay Smith had only a nodding acquaintance for about six months because the former educator seemed wary of everyone. Martray was about as tall as Jay Smith, but huskier and much younger. Yet Martray told the cops that he was afraid of the former educator.

  Martray said that he’d been asked by Jay Smith to alter a property record to read that his clothes had not been sent to his brother, but were still at Dallas. This, according to Martray, was because Dr. Jay feared that the clothing might contain “forensic evidence” of an unspecified kind, if the cops should search his brothers house and find it.

  VanNort and Holtz weren’t all that impressed with his information. After all, the Reinert murder had gotten lots of publicity and through his friendship with Jay Smith, Martray would know quite a bit about the investigation. Besides, Martray was serving three and a half to seven years on his perjury conviction and in Pennsylvania a person convicted of perjury can’t be a commonwealth witness in another criminal case, so anything he might give them would be tainted.

  Before they left him, Martray said that both his perjury and burglary convictions stood a good chance of being reversed on appeal, and if his perjury conviction was overturned, he could then give testimony against the former educator. And the legal counsel who had framed the appeal for Raymond Martray was none other than Jay Smith, jailhouse lawyer.

  That had such a nice touch of irony that Joe VanNort gave him their phone number and said to call collect if he got anything good from Dr. Jay. And Martray was transferred back to Dallas.

  The second visit with Raymond Martray took place in September after he was transferred to Fayette County Prison where he was housed during his appeal. VanNort and Holtz took Martray to a hotel in Uniontown for a long private conversation. This time it was much more interesting. Martray told the cops that while he was being brought back to Dallas after their meeting in April, he had seized the occasion to be of tremendous service to Jay Smith.

  It seems that Dr. Jay had told Martray to watch for an inmate named David Rucker who might shuffle into his life during his prison travels. Jay Smith said Rucker had been an armored-car robber with an M.O. similar to the one he’d been convicted of using, and Jay Smith had not given up hope for a successful appeal on at least one of the Sears convictions.

  He described David Rucker to Martray, but he needn’t have gone into detail. When Martray got on the prison van that day he was certain that the con sitting behind him was either Wayne Gretzky or David Rucker. The inmate was wearing a hockey helmet.

  Rucker had to spend the rest of his life helmeted because he fell down a lot. The reason he fell down was that when the police had captured him he didn’t want to go back to jail and had stuck his gun in his mouth and tried to see how many times he could pull the trigger. He managed it once, but botched the job. He had a horseshoe scar on his face and a brain like a milk cow. He just did as he was told and tottered through life. As Martray put it, “He was a very mellow individual.”

  So David Rucker just sat there like a kindergartner on a school bus and grinned obligingly durin
g a long conversation with Raymond Martray. Another inmate on the bus and a prison guard witnessed the conversation, but did not hear it.

  So Martray got to run to Jay Smith with the great news that not only had he met Rucker but a guard had seen him talking to Rucker. Jay Smith had suddenly gotten himself another alibi witness. Martray was asked to say that Rucker had confessed to him that he’d been the actual armored-car courier at the Sears store.

  Jay Smith really started working hard on Ray Martray’s perjury conviction, so that Martray could testify in a court of law. And then, as luck would have it, David Rucker got hit with one too many hockey pucks, as it were, and expired. So he wasn’t around to refute the phony confession that he’d never made in the first place.

  Well, it wasn’t the most promising basis for overturning Dr. Jay’s conviction, but jailhouse lawyers have nothing but time. Ray Martray had taken Bill Bradfields place as Jay Smith’s favorite alibi witness.

  Jay Smith and Martray became constant buddies that summer. Jay Smith hired a private investigator named Russell Kolins to take a sworn statement from Martray in the presence of a stenographer. But before that could be done, Jay Smith had to prepare Martray for the interview so that Kolins would believe in him completely, along with the authorities later.

  He insisted on giving Martray a “stress test” in case the Kolins affidavit resulted in his being hooked up to a polygraph. He took Martray up into the bleachers in the yard where the cons play ball, and wrapped an electrical cord around Martray’s chest and put paper clips on his fingers. He gave him a play-poly right there with Martray answering various test questions about David Rucker and his own friendship with Jay Smith.

  Martray said that a young inmate strolling by the bleachers that afternoon spotted them and did a double take, but you see all sorts of weird things in prison yards, and two grown men playing polygraph with paper clips and extension cords probably wasn’t all that loony.

  The upshot was that Ray Martray had in his possession the make-believe polygraph charts and an envelope containing “stress questions” for Russell Kolins. Martray had something else. He had a very incriminating statement to whet the cops’ appetite, but it had taken place in private, and there was no one to corroborate it.

  According to Martray, Jay Smith said that Bill Bradfield had asked Dr. Jay to help kill Susan Reinert because she was going to blow the whistle on Bill Bradfield for the perjury at Jay Smiths trial. Moreover, Martray said that he’d asked Jay Smith about the Reinert children and Dr. Jay had volunteered the statement “I took care of it.”

  And if that wasn’t enough, on another occasion, also in private, Jay Smith had gotten upset about something when they were discussing the Reinert case, and blurted, “I killed the fucking bitch.”

  On Raymond Martray’s make-believe polygraph chart with the typed questions was “Did Jay Smith ever tell you he killed Reinert?”

  And “Did Jay Smith ever tell you he was a friend of Bradfield?”

  Typed charts and questions that anyone could’ve typed didn’t do anything to corroborate Martray, but the ex-cop handed the investigators an envelope on which he’d jotted notes during his meeting with David Rucker.

  There was some other writing on that envelope that read, “Sears St. Davids, August 1977” and, on the other side, “Sears Neshaminy Mall, December 1977.”

  These were written in the hand of Jay Smith. So far, it was the only thing that tended to corroborate their informant.

  On October 1, 1981, Jack Holtz was celebrating his sixth anniversary as an investigator for Joe VanNort. That was also the day that Joe VanNort had to do his shooting qualification on the pistol range.

  The old cop failed to qualify that morning. He was irritated, since that meant he had to come back in the afternoon and shoot the pistol range all over again. Joe VanNort, former hunter, former police rodeo rider, was not a guy who wanted to fail on a routine shoot at the state police range. But Joe wasn’t his old self and there was no hiding it, not from Jack Holtz nor from Joes wife Betty, who’d been begging him long-distance to take his vitamin pills since she couldn’t be there in that Philly motel watching over him.

  Jack Holtz, after the incident at the courthouse when Joe VanNort didn’t seem to know where he was, had asked Joe when he’d be taking his next physical exam. Joe had said he’d do it as soon as the goddamn investigation slowed up. He complained of having gout attacks that were causing some pain in his joints.

  Now he told Jack to take the car. He’d call after he qualified on the range.

  That afternoon, Sergeant Joseph A. VanNort, age fifty-seven, with nearly thirty-two years as a cop, tried again on the police pistol range. He took a tool of his trade and did his best to hit the targets but they wouldn’t hold still. He showed the world his cynical lopsided grin for the last time. The heart attack hit like a.357 magnum. And just as in the folksong, this old workingman laid down his iron and he died.

  Jack Holtz heard on the police radio that a car was being sent to the residence of Betty VanNort in Harrisburg. He raced back to the barracks and got the news. Jack Holtz couldn’t keep his glasses welded on his face on that afternoon.

  He did his weeping in private and then he drove straight to the home of Betty VanNort and tried not to cry again because Joe VanNort wasn’t the kind of guy who would want you playing the baby in his house.

  The funeral mass was held at a church in Jermyn, Pennsylvania, near the mountains Joe had loved. He was buried in his family cemetery. Jack Holtz was a pallbearer. It was the first time in six years that he’d worn a uniform.

  Betty VanNort was provided for by Joe’s insurance and pension, but she couldn’t bear to go to the cabin anymore. She turned it over to his nephew with the stipulation that they not sell it until her death.

  Joe VanNort never got his Madonna with the pool of water at her feet.

  When Jack Holtz got back to work he found that it was very different without the top banana. The FBI had already cut its task force participation to just a few full-time agents, and didn’t seem to think that a murder indictment against Bill Bradfield was all that probable. Jay Smith seemed totally out of the question. However, they wanted to take over now that Joe VanNort was dead.

  But Jack Holtz showed that in a quieter way he could be just as intractable as the man who had trained him. The state police were not surrendering their authority in this case, not even a little of it. He told the feds that he was now in charge.

  One of the first things he did was to go through all of Joe’s personal files. He could have wept again. He found a note that Joe had obviously mislaid back in 1979, a note from a couple of guys in South Carolina who’d been working at Three Mile Island and saw a hatchback open and called the police after they’d read about the case in the papers.

  Jack Holtz telephoned the men who established that Susan Reinert’s body had been left at the Host Inn as early as seven o’clock on Sunday evening. For the first time it was clear why Jay Smith had made calls to his attorney’s office and residence anxious to establish the time of 8:37 P. M., when he was far from Harrisburg.

  Their driving tests showed that it was a ninety-minute drive from the Host Inn in Harrisburg to the house on Valley Forge Road, so Holtz figured that Jay Smith must have narrowly missed being seen by the men from Three Mile Island.

  He hated to tell the others, but he had to. He explained how Joe had been losing it for some time and was obviously a very sick man. He wanted to ask Betty if Joe’s death had been related to a cerebral hemorrhage, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  He told the remaining FBI agents that they’d never met the old Joe VanNort, the man who made him an investigator, still the best interrogator he’d ever seen. They just hadn’t known the real Joe VanNort, he assured them.

  Jack Holtz was a very lonely top banana.

  It was time to reassess. Since there were so many counties involved in the investigation, the attorney general of Pennsylvania opted to assign one of his own
prosecutors as the legal coordinator.

  Richard L. Guida was a very aggressive, organized, nervously energetic young guy who could’ve outsmoked Joe VanNort, particularly at trial time. At thirty-four, he was one month older than Jack Holtz but looked five years younger. He was a natural middleweight but would drop down to a welterweight during a trial because he’d forget to eat.

  Guida had originally been a prosecutor but had left to try his hand at private practice. He wasn’t cut out to be a defense lawyer. There are many trial lawyers who claim they can do each job with equal enthusiasm, but that’s something like a macho celebrity who gets caught in a homosexual tryst and says, “Well, I’m bisexual.” And the gay tabloids say, “Oh sure. Oscar Wilde used that old line.”

  Lawyers can do both jobs, but not with the same gusto.

  A good prosecutor needs to be about half-Doberman. Rick Guida qualified. He was one of those prosecutors who always look like they may die of heartburn if the defendant tells just one more lie. And in a year when half the guys his age in America had a Tom Selleck mustache, it was a good thing he had one, because it helped hide his deadly sneer when a defense witness told a whopper.

  Since the FBI presence had been dribbling away for several months, it was decided that another task force should be formed, a little one. Special Agent Matt Mullin stayed on, as did Special Agent Bob Loughney who’d done extensive work on the slag samples taken from Susan Reinert’s car, but who had never been able to discover from whence they came. The little task force included another police detective from Montgomery County, and a deputy district attorney to act as special prosecutor. And of course Jack Holtz and Lou DeSantis from the state police.

  They worked from a command post in Norristown, with Rick Guida remaining in Harrisburg and coming east when required. But the little task force didn’t accomplish much. The momentum was gone. Lots of days they just sat around and shuffled their reports and looked for things that weren’t there, things to move Bill Bradfield from the category of convicted thief to a murder indictment.