Echoes in the Darkness

by Joseph Wambaugh

  With Nowell as the last link in their circumstantial chain, they decided it was time to arrest Bill Bradfield, this time for three counts of murder. The arrest plan was only a little less complicated than the Falklands invasion, and about as necessary.

  The date was April 6th, the time was 5:00 A.M. Bill Bradfield, according to their intelligence reports, was living with Rachel in a guesthouse on his mothers property. Reports from neighbors said that he had a large attack dog, and from Chris Pappas they learned that he had other hunting weapons in the farmhouse.

  The arrest team was composed of Jack Holtz, Lou DeSantis, another trooper, and a woman trooper to make the call just as before. Prosecutor Rick Guida went along, and by 5:00 A.M. he’d already smoked half a pack of cigarettes, but after all, it was his first arrest.

  Before daybreak they started watching the house with a nightscope they’d borrowed for the occasion. It outweighed two bowling balls and through the thing they could see nothing but green haze.

  Jack Holtz and the woman trooper went to a neighbor and awakened the household. Not wanting to alarm the folks in rural Chester County unduly, they said they were working a burglary investigation and needed to use the phone.

  But the neighbor said, “You shouldn’t waste your time with burglars. We have murderers around here.”

  And while the woman trooper called, the neighbor proceeded to tell them all about this fellow Bill Bradfield. He said they should throw him in jail instead of some burglar.

  Rachel answered the phone and said that Bill Bradfield was in Birdsboro and wouldn’t be back until the next day. She seemed used to female callers.

  So the whole shooting match was off to a house in Birdsboro where they’d already heard he was spending time with a friend and was selling diet products.

  The police code was “We’ve located the package,” presumably because they feared the master criminal was tuned in to the police frequency Actually, Bill Bradfield would probably have approved of this caper.

  It was still dark when they arrived. Their quarry was a notoriously bad driver and they spotted a VW Beetle parked half on the sidewalk. It was a quiet neighborhood. They said their code words and synchronized their watches and got all dressed up in their flak vests and jacked rounds into their shotguns.

  The chief of police of this little place moseyed by in his car, and wondered what in hell was going on. The only thing they didn’t have were helicopters and a chaplain.

  When they knocked at the door and scared the living crap out of the resident, he admitted that he was forming a company to sell diet products with his pal Bill who was in bed sleeping. They pushed by him and crept into the back of the house with enough firepower to knock down the Luftwaffe.

  The first thing Jack Holtz saw in the darkness when his pupils dilated was a set of flashing teeth. Canine teeth. Large.

  He yelled, “If it moves, shoot it!”

  And Bill Bradfield, who was awake in bed, thought they were talking about him. He went as rigid as Lenins mummy. He wasn’t even breathing as the cops crept toward the flashing teeth. He didn’t twitch when Jack Holtz yelled, “Show me your hands!”

  Somebody turned on the lights. The “attack” dog was an English setter named Traveler who needed attention and cuddling almost as much as the guy in bed. Traveler was so happy he leaped up on Jack Holtz and started licking his face. Bill Bradfield almost turned blue before someone told him it was okay to inhale.

  Jack Holtz got a great deal of joy out of reading the arrest warrant to Bill Bradfield. He read it with verve. He wanted to read it twice. He was crazy about the part where it said conspiracy to commit murder with person or persons unknown.

  He finished it when Bill Bradfield was standing and dressed. Big Bill gave his famous stare to Rick Guida who’d been told by an FBI agent that the Bradfield stare had once made him fall back two steps.

  The stare practically demolished Guida. He was literally floored. He sat down on the floor and played with Traveler.

  When Jack Holtz got Bill Bradfield back to the lockup in Harrisburg and took off the handcuffs, his prisoner, who’d been as silent as fungus, decided to make life hard for him. Bill Bradfield just dropped down on the floor and lay there on his back.

  Jack Holtz said, “If you’re gonna act like a baby, I’ll treat you like one.”

  But no baby ever got this treatment. Holtz reached down and grabbed two handfuls of Bill Bradfields whiskers and curled him straight up until they were nose to nose.

  Bill Bradfield gave Jack Holtz the stare, but Jack Holtz stared back and said, “That bullshit only works on intelligent people.”

  Tack Holtz had called Betty VanNort earlier to tell her they were going to arrest William Bradfield for murder, and he went to her house at 7:30 A.M. after they had him in custody.

  Betty VanNort said that she’d been awake half the night praying for them. They had a cup of tea together.

  Bill Bradfield was sent to the state correctional institution at Camp Hill. He was placed in “Mohawk,” the administrative custody section for new fish who haven’t been placed in the general population yet, or who need special protection. Prisoners in Mohawk are in individual cells and shout messages down the corridor to each other.

  According to the information relayed to Jack Holtz, Bill Bradfield was trying to sleep when a black convict yelled, “Braaaaadfield, you killed my schoolteacher. Braaaaadfield, you killed those little babies.”

  Courtroom number four in the Dauphin County Courthouse was far too small to accommodate the spectators and reporters.

  Judge Isaac S. Garb was highly respected in Harrisburg, known for keeping a trial moving and for being fair to both sides. He was a very diminutive man and once when Rick Guida said, “Your honor, I need a few minutes. I have just one short witness,” the judge replied, “Mister Guida, there aren’t any short witnesses in this case. There are brief witnesses.”

  The defense attorney for Bill Bradfield was a nice-looking young fellow, Guidas age. Joshua Lock was a second-generation Harrisburg lawyer, his father having been a county district attorney.

  By his own admission he became “personally involved” almost from his first meetings with Bill Bradfield. It isn’t the best idea in the world to become personally involved with clients, and he knew that, but he truly admired Bill Bradfield. Once during a strategy session, apropos of something they were discussing, Bill Bradfield gave him a thumbnail sketch of the study of grammar and linguistics, as well as literary criticism that the lawyer wished he could’ve put before the jury.

  Unlike Guida, Lock believed that Bill Bradfield was highly intelligent, as was the one remaining disciple, Rachel. But Lock found Rachel to be “very very very very very very strange.” And that’s all he’d say for the record.

  There may have been trial lawyers who worked harder for their clients in 1983, but if so, they probably didn’t live to tell of it. Lock personally, and without assistance, compiled notebooks bigger than the Philadelphia telephone directory on virtually every important witness for the prosecution. With the most elaborate and precise cross-references to each FBI report, state police report, and every bit of testimony given before state or federal grand juries or during any other proceedings thus far. His idea was to present a dozen different possibilities for the jury as to where to look for killers.

  Naturally, one possibility was Dr. Jay C. Smith. Lock viewed him as a depraved maniac, street-smart and complicated, who’d battled his way up in ways that Bill Bradfield never had. As far as Lock was concerned, Jay Smith had proved himself a liar a hundred times over. He hoped to provide other suspects for the jury to consider, and to point out that a circumstantial case could be viewed many ways. His approach was to be intellectual and scholarly.

  He’d spent twenty-eight days in the prison visiting room with William Bradfield. He would spend a total of fifteen hundred hours on the defense of his client.

  Lock respected Rick Guida, because when other prosecutors were backing away
from the notorious circumstantial case, he’d seized the opportunity. He saw Guida as an egocentric, ambitious, aggressive prosecutor, and he was probably right on all counts.

  In fact, Guida was too egocentric to analyze the opposition. Josh Lock was obviously a competent lawyer and that was that. Guida didn’t spend much time thinking about the other guy’s strengths and weaknesses. As far as he and Jack Holtz were concerned, their case could almost rest on the credibility of only one witness. Jack Holtz said that he would be Guidas best witness: that was William Bradfield.

  Rick Guidas strategy was to put on the weakest first, and that would encompass all of the forensics. Josh Lock was very strong on forensics. By the time Lock got through with the pathologist, it sounded as though Lock could have done the autopsy.

  Through his cross-examination the jury learned that lividity becomes irreversible after four to six hours and that one way to determine if the lividity is fixed is to press the flesh and see if it blanches. Josh Lock knew all the terminology and could refer to “hemolysized portions of red blood cells.” Lock extracted an admission that the time of death could have been Sunday afternoon or evening when Bill Bradfield had been at the beach for a longer time.

  Lock got it into the record that there were as many as twenty thousand blue combs disseminated by the army reserve in eastern Pennsylvania, and that there was a fingerprint or two on the outside of the car that didn’t belong to anybody else in the case. So whether they belonged to “kinky Alex” or somebody else, no one would ever know. He was extending the possibilities from a killing by Jay Smith to persons unknown, not necessarily having anything to do with Jay Smith.

  As far as the hair that the prosecution believed came from Susan Reinert’s head, he didn’t spend time refuting that, but rather he used it by pointing out that the entire root was intact and therefore it had fallen out naturally rather than being pulled out. He had a theory saved for his closing argument.

  If the case had been based solely on forensics, the prosecution would never have filed it. The troubles for the defense started when the neighbors of Susan Reinert started taking the stand and talking about Bill Bradfields car being there at night and in the morning. Lock did a good job of spreading a little confusion as to the days of the week and the times they’d seen the cars.

  Susan Reinerts friends testified, and Lock got everyone to say that Bill Bradfield had never admitted that he was romantically involved with Susan Reinert and had certainly never hinted that he intended to marry her.

  All of Susan Reinerts financial transactions were described by witnesses, as well as the alibi testimony for Jay Smith, and the missing $25,000, and the huge insurance policies, and the will.

  And then came the disciples. The jury started giving those “Are you kidding me?” looks as Vince Valaitis and Chris Pappas and Shelly and Sue Myers started talking about silencers and acid and money wiping and all the rest of it. Everybody on the jury at sometime or other kept hearing one word and that word was “bizarre.”

  Sue Myers said, in private, that two years after she’d locked out Bill Bradfield, she happened to be cleaning out the bookshelves when she found a large cache of meticulously catalogued packages of hardcore pornography. She said he must have spent days cutting out pictures and subdividing photos, and swinger ads and telephone numbers. It was as detailed and methodical as his lesson plans and seating charts. She was shocked by the discovery.

  Jack Holtz believed what Proctor Nowell had told him and thought that the jury would too.

  When the witness was called, the prosecutor got the criminal record over with in a hurry.

  “What particular institution are you in at the present time?” Rick Guida asked.

  “The ABRAX program, an alcohol drug program.”

  “Are you sentenced there as a condition of a criminal charge?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “What sentence are you currently serving?”

  “Eighteen months to five years.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “Two.”

  “Tell us what trouble you’ve been in.”

  “When I was sixteen I was incarcerated for aggravated assault. I served four to twenty-three months. I did, like seven months, and I got out. I was arrested for burglary twice but I wasn’t convicted. I was charged with receivin’ stolen goods, possession with intent to deliver, and two gun charges.”

  “What was the disposition of all your cases? Did you have a trial or plead guilty?”

  “I pled guilty.”

  “Are you an alcoholic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any outside hobbies?”

  “Yes. Amateur boxin’. I boxed Golden Gloves. Ten wins and one loss.”

  “Mister Nowell, can you associate your criminal problems with your drinking problem?”

  “That’s the only time I would get in trouble was when I had got intoxicated.”

  “When did you first meet Mister Bradfield?”

  “I was sittin’ in the dayroom on B block and I was playin’ chess with another inmate. Mister Bradfield walked up to me and asked me when I got time would I teach him how to play the game.”

  “Did you eventually play chess with him?”

  “Yes. It was about one or two days later. I was in my room, me and this guy Stanley. We were sittin’ on the bed playin’ chess and William Bradfield walked past the cell. I hollered. I told him, I said, ‘Bradfield, I got time to show you how to move the pieces, but, you know, the rest got to come from you mentally.’ ”

  “How many games did you play over the time that you knew him?”

  “Approximately twelve times.”

  “How did he do?”

  “He beat me eight out of twelve. I started playin’ when I was, like twelve years old, and it was, you know, not easy to get beat like that. I took for granted that he already knew how to play.”

  “Did you have the opportunity to help Mister Bradfield with regard to another inmate?”

  “Yes. Me and Bradfield was comin’ from upstairs. Another inmate asked him somethin’. He says somethin’ about doin’ somethin’ to him. I said, ‘No, man, you ain’t gonna do nothin’ to him because that’s my friend.’ He walked on about his business.”

  “Did you have an occasion to get a letter from your wife and make a comment to him?”

  “Well, I received a letter from my wife that day and I read the letter and I got upset, you know, and she’s tellin’ me, like ‘I’m tired, baby,’ you know? ‘I don’t think I’m gonna wait this time.’ I got angry. I told Bradfield, I said, ‘Good a provider as I have been.’ I said, ‘You know, I’m goddamn gonna kill that … that … I don’t wanna say what I said. ‘I’m gonna kill that hussy,’ or whatever.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘No, no, no. You don’t ever wanna kill anyone. They never get off your ass.’ ”

  “Did you have the occasion to speak with Mister Bradfield when he got back from a court proceeding?”

  “Well, I was lookin’ for him because I had some coffee for him. I walked outta my room and he was standin’ on the tier. He was standin’ there lookin’ up to the ceilin’ with his finger pointed in his head, you know, like real angry and disgusted. And I called him, I said, ‘Bradfield, come here.’ He came in the room. And I said, ‘What’s wrong, man?’ ”

  “What did he look like when he was standing out there and what did he look like when he came in your cell in terms of his facial expression?”

  “Like, the veins was up in his head, poppin’ up. Like, he really had a major problem, like real frustrated and real angry. He came on in the cell.”

  “What did he do when he was in the cell?”

  “He was walkin’ around in the cell lookin’ up, lookin’ out the window and stuff. And he said, ‘They’re fuckin’ over me, man. They’re fuckin’ over me. They denied my bail reduction.’ Then after he said that
, he said, ‘You know, if I wasn’t in a financial bind I wouldn’t be here nor would this have had to happen to Susan.’

  “I didn’t really know what he was talkin’ about. He said, ‘I was there when they were killed but I didn’t kill them.’ And I said, ‘Damn, Bradfield! The children too?’ And he said, ‘None of this was meant for the kids, only for Susan. But there couldn’t be a stone left unturned. You have to tie up all the loose ends.’ ”

  And that, Guida and Holtz noted, was a Jay Smith expression from way back. Bill Bradfield had used the same words to Vince and Chris describing what Dr. Jay had told him. And Raymond Martray had used the same words as well when he described conversations with Jay Smith.

  “After he made that statement did you speak with him very much anymore?”

  “No, I limited my association with him.”

  “Did any law enforcement officer or deputy attorney general make any promises with regard to testifying in this matter?”

  “No, the only thing I was told was, you know, that my judge would be made aware of my cooperation. That’s it.”

  “When the police first came to you and talked to you, did you tell them about this situation?”

  “No, I didn’t. I told them I didn’t know nothin’ because I really didn’t want to get involved in it. You know, the name the people start callin’ you while you’re incarcerated. And man, I was just scared, really.”

  “Why did you come forward with your story, Mister Nowell?”

  “Because they told me to sit down and think about it. They said, ‘Okay, we’re not gonna pressure you, but think about it. It was two innocent children involved.’ I went back to my room and I was just layin’ there thinkin’ about it, you know? I finally started thinkin’, like, damn, what would happen, you know, if this was my kids? Would I want somebody to do this for mine? That’s when I got up and I went in my box and got the number and called them.”

  “Are you telling us the truth today?”

  “Yes.”

  “So help you God?”

  “So help me God.”

  On cross-examination, Josh Lock attacked Nowell’s credibility by trying to show that he was seeking favors from the authorities. He dissected the statement “I was there when they were killed,” because he’d already shown and the prosecution stipulated that Bill Bradfield could not have been there when Susan Reinert actually stopped breathing.