But Jack Holtz was never prouder of his idea to look for a Bill Bradfield “protector” in the Delaware County prison. He thought that Proctor Nowell had done just fine.
His moment came. Bill Bradfield wore black frame glasses for the trial, and the day he testifed he had on his most dignified three-piece blue suit and a subdued striped necktie. His testimony was flat, as unemotional as before. But this time his voice kept fading and the judge had to continually remind him to speak up.
“State your full name, please,” Josh Lock said when the direct examination began.
“William S. Bradfield, Jr.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifty.”
“And can you tell us your educational background, please.”
“I graduated from Haverford College in 1955, and have a masters in liberal education from St. Johns. I’ve done other graduate work at various institutions.”
When Lock asked him to describe his relationship with Sue Myers, he said, “We had not been living as a real romantic pair for many many years.”
“Do you remember when your relationship with Miss Myers ceased to be intimate?”
“Nineteen seventy-three or seventy-four,” he said.
Poor old Sue. That was when they’d first started living together. She always claimed that the sex hadn’t stopped until 1978. No wonder she needed facials and chiropractors.
Of his early relationship with Jay Smith, he said, “He was a very very intelligent man, very intelligent. And he liked to indulge in a kind of intellectual combat. During teachers’ meetings he’d come up to you in the hall and begin talking tongue-in-cheek about some item of education. And he’d use very big words and if I’d ask him what the word meant, Doctor Smith would say, ‘Mister Bradfield, I don’t get paid to teach you vocabulary.’ And I would go look it up and there wasn’t any such word. He’d say it was Hindustani or Old English.
“The most characteristic thing he did in the cafeteria or in the halls was to interlude very elaborately embroidered conceits. A conceit is a kind of extended metaphor in literature. He would, for example, begin by saying to me that the essence of civilization is the foot, and that it’s the most important organ of the human body, and massage of the foot is the most important thing that one person can do for another.
“Another time he talked about the central importance of boots, and it turned out that he’d sold cowboy boots at one time. He wasn’t serious, but it was a kind of practice of his skill in rhetoric without reference to the substance of the idea.
“And sometimes if I went down to him with a grievance from a student, Doctor Smith would say, ‘Mister Bradfield it’s really not incumbent on me to speak. Let’s go back and discuss it in my office.’ We’d go back and close the door and his language changed into a basic kind of street language. And never have I heard obscenities come together in quite the way that he would do it.”
Bill Bradfield testified that he had never taken Susan Reinert to a movie, show, dance, party, play, concert, or on a boat. He said that he’d done all these things with other women friends such as Rachel, and he admitted to being romantically involved with Shelly.
There was a danger to the defense in all this, because the prosecution might run with it by showing that, yes indeed, he’d treated Susan Reinert differently from all his others. The prosecution’s inference could be that there was a “five-year plan” for this one, and that the five years had ended abruptly in 1979.
Bill Bradfield gave his own version of the business of trying to protect Susan Reinert from Jay Smith, but it didn’t differ considerably with the Chris Pappas version, though he glossed over the wiping of the money, things like that. He said that he was so distraught that he’d begun to look haggard from all that protecting.
Once, he said, he baby-sat for Susan Reinert in his capacity as adviser, and she came home at 4:00 A.M., and he warned her then and there that she was dating some bad folks.
He said that she’d never admitted dating Jay Smith, but that she’d admitted dating a man named Jay, and he’d put two and two together and got goat vibes. He did not mention the Tweetie Bird term of endearment.
He admitted to taking Shelly to motels, and claimed never to have had sex with her, and by then the prosecution believed that much, at least.
The direct testimony ended like this:
“Did you kill Mrs. Reinert?”
“No, I did not.”
“Did you plan to kill Susan Reinert?”
“No.”
“Did you kill either of her children?”
“No.”
“Did you plan to do either of those things?”
“No, I did not.”
“Are you responsible for the deaths?”
“Absolutely not. I never hurt Mrs. Reinert or her children in any way.”
“Are you guilty of these crimes?”
“I am not.”
Rick Guida was one of those prosecutors who live for cross-examination, and possibly in his entire career he’d never looked forward more to one.
Since Josh Lock’s last question had solicited denials of murder and conspiracy, he began with the next logical question:
“Who did kill Mrs. Reinert, Mister Bradfield?”
“I don’t know,” Bill Bradfield said.
“Now, in 1979 you told a number of people that Jay C. Smith was going to kill her, and you were so afraid that you went to the shore just to have an alibi. Don’t you think Jay C. Smith killed Susan Reinert?”
“I don’t know who killed Susan Reinert.”
“Do you believe that he did, Mister Bradfield?”
“Do you want me to speculate?”
“Sure, just tell us what you think.”
“Objection,” Josh Lock said.
“Overruled,” said the judge.
“He may have,” Bill Bradfield answered.
“He may have,” Guida said, with a double dollop of sarcasm. “Now what about this other person that you identified in the summer of 1979, do you think he may have killed Mrs. Reinert?”
“I think he may have.”
“What was his name? If you think he killed her I’d like to know how you know that.”
“Mrs. Reinert mentioned the name in the winter of 1979, the name Alex. The only details I knew were that Alex was tall, very well spoken, from the Harrisburg area. And one of the others mentioned was Ted or Jay, I don’t remember which, but one was extremely well educated. The other three, she said, were into group sex. They were advocates of bondage and discipline, and deviate sexual practices such as urination during the sex act, and oral sex, and such as that.”
“Do you think somebody else did it, other than Jay C. Smith?”
“I think somebody else may have, yes.”
“Even in spite of all these threats that Jay C. Smith made, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think that Jay Smith didn’t do it?”
“Because I found out from the newspapers that her body was found in Harrisburg. That’s where she said Alex was from. Secondly, it seemed to involve some kind of sexual misuse. There was a dildo found in the automobile. And thirdly, the thing that made me really wonder about Doctor Smith doing it is that nothing he ever told me indicated that he would kill in this way. There were chain marks on her as it was reported to the press, and in addition to this, under the body was found a comb from his same outfit. That certainly didn’t make any sense to me.”
“Does it make any sense that Alex, an unnamed person, would come all the way from Harrisburg to get Jay C. Smith’s comb to plant in Susan Reinert’s car? If Alex killed her and Jay C. Smith wasn’t involved, how did Jay C. Smith’s comb get in the car unless it was planted there by Alex from Harrisburg?”
“My wonder about it is that if it was in her car it means that Mrs. Reinert and Doctor Smith had been in the car and perhaps he’d lost his comb. Why the comb was where it was, I’m not sure.”
“It was in the whee
lwell storage area. Would it make sense that he might have been in the hidden luggage area where his comb was found?”
“I didn’t know where the comb was found.”
On the subject of untouchable Sue Myers, Guida asked, “Why did you move in with Sue Myers for six or seven years if you were no longer lovers and not intimate?”
“Sue Myers offered me the first real comfortable home base that I’ve had since leaving home for college. We had what I thought was a close, warm and comfortable relationship. That was the place where I felt the most at home, in that apartment.”
“You were not in love with her?”
“I loved her.”
“You were not intimate with her?”
“Correct.”
As to the money he’d put into the Terra Art store, he said that Sue Myers didn’t like teaching very much and it was a “privilege” to put up $45,000 to help her ease out of the profession and begin as an entrepreneur. As to where he’d gotten the money he said that he’d mortgaged a house for $25,000 and took out a second mortgage for an additional $25,000.
It was all getting down to the stash of $25,000 that everyone was hiding and wiping. He called that his “boat fund” and said that he’d been saving it secretly for years.
“Why didn’t you use the boat fund for the art store?” Rick Guida wanted to know.
“Because I wanted to retain it.”
“Why didn’t you put that money into Terra Art? Because you weren’t getting any interest on it anyway, and you could’ve used that instead of paying interest on these loans. Why didn’t you do that?”
“Because Sue Myers, for all her good points, was impossible when it came to money.”
“Mister Bradfield,” Guida interrupted, “money is money, whether it comes from selling land, or borrowing it, or if it comes from your boat fund. It’s the same thing. Now, again my question is, why didn’t you use the boat fund instead of borrowing at ten or twelve percent?”
“Because the ten or twelve percent interest that I would pay back on the loan would be paid through monies that were controlled by Sue Myers and me. If, on the other hand, I used the boat fund for the business, I never would have seen that money again for my own use.”
Guida didn’t bother to ask why he didn’t put the secret money in an interest-bearing account, but moved along to the alibi testimony. Bill Bradfield said that the court reporter in that case had misquoted him in his testimony.
And then they moved along to the chains and acid that Jay Smith showed Bill Bradfield during the lazy crazy days of summer.
Guida’s tone during the cross-examination of Bill Bradfield never varied. His incredulity was blended with only as much sarcasm as he figured the judge would permit. If you could bottle it, it would’ve been about 80 proof.
“That brings up something interesting,” he said. “You saw tape and you saw chains and yet you said you didn’t believe Jay C. Smith had anything to do with the death of Susan Reinert. Did you hear the testimony that there was tape residue around her face and chain marks on her back?”
“Yes.”
“To this day you have a relationship with Rachel, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“You lived with her in 1981 through 1982, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hear her testimony that you had a romantic relationship during the summer of 1978?”
“I don’t recall.”
“If she did say it she would have been wrong, is that right?”
“I didn’t view our relationship as romantic. My relationship with Rachel has been of a different sort than that which you would accurately characterize as romantic or sexual. It’s not what we really had, I would say.”
“Over all this time you never had any sexual and/or romantic relationship?”
“Well, we have had some sexual incidents. What I’m trying to do is characterize it fairly for you. It was not the essential relationship with Rachel, and never with me, and never had been. It wasn’t in the summer of 1978 and it isn’t now.”
“I believe you’ve described your relationship with Rachel as artistic and intellectual, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Was it that same with Shelly? Sex was not at the center of her universe either?”
“It was not.”
“How did you rekindle the relationship when you spent a four-day weekend with Rachel over Thanksgiving, 1978?”
“It was not a sex holiday, as you’re suggesting.”
“A romantic holiday then. What happened?”
“We went to see a number of art films in Cambridge. We went to see the glass flowers at Harvard in the exhibit there. We attended a lecture. We went to the museum of art.”
“Where did you stay?”
“With Rachel.”
“In her bedroom.”
“Yes.”
“But you wouldn’t characterize this weekend as intimate?”
“I don’t mean to suggest that the relationship with her or with any of the other people in my life was either orthodox or proper.”
“Now speaking of that weekend, what did you do to protect Susan Reinert?”
“Nothing.”
“You told this jury that you drove around her house and did many things over that time period when you found out about the threat, even to the point of sending Sue Myers away because Smith would kill on holidays. Why did you take that critical weekend off and go to Massachusetts if Susan Reinert was in such danger?”
“I tried to spend as much time as I could, do what I could about the situation with Doctor Smith. I couldn’t do so much that I gave up my life. And by Thanksgiving I was alarmed and concerned and afraid. By Christmas I went away again and I was even more alarmed and desperately tired. I couldn’t park in front of Susan Reinerts house during the whole holiday weekend without simply moving in. I couldn’t do it.”
“So you just gave up on the critical weekends and went someplace else so you wouldn’t even be anywhere near her house or near Jay C. Smith, is that right?”
“It was more than I could do. I really don’t know how I could’ve done much more and not ended up in the hospital.”
“How about calling the police?”
“Looking back, I wish I had done that. I think we all wish that.”
“Why didn’t you go to Susan Reinert and say, ‘Jay C. Smith has chains, he has locks, he has guns, he has silencers, he has all these things. And by the way, he’s threatening to kill you. You better do something about it.’ Did you ever say that to her?”
“No.”
“That would’ve been another way you could’ve protected her, could it not have been?”
“I don’t know that it would’ve worked, but it could have. I was not sure that there was a relationship between Susan Reinert and Doctor Smith. I could never find out for sure.”
“Wouldn’t that be all the more reason to tell her if this person you think she’s having a relationship with was going to kill her?”
“Looking back, I think it was.”
“But that didn’t occur to you at the time?”
“No.”
“It occurred to you to tell the police, but you dismissed it, is that right?”
“It occurred to us to speak, but we decided not to do that.”
“We. You keep saying we. Wasn’t it you that was bringing all this information to Mister Pappas, Miss Myers and Mister Valaitis? You were the one that brought all the information back, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“You were the one that was making decisions. You were the leader, weren’t you?”
“I was not making the decisions solely. I sought their advice in everything I did.”
“The group was making decisions on the basis of your facts, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“You indicated that you didn’t want to tell the police because they were corrupt, is that right?”
“Correct
, and involved with Doctor Smith.”
“How many police departments did he control?”
“Not just the Upper Merion Township police. He mentioned that he knew someone with the West Chester police. He mentioned several people in the Philadelphia police. And he mentioned the police in Bucks County.”
“In other words, he had connections, so that nothing would happen to him and you’d be in trouble if you told?”
“Nothing would happen to him, but something would happen to me.”
“In other words, they’d tell him and he’d come and get you, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever hear of the Pennsylvania State Police, Mister Bradfield?”
“Yes.”
“Are they listed in your telephone book at home?”
“Looking back I wish I had gone to them.”
“You could’ve picked up the phone and called the Pennsylvania State Police and said I don’t trust the Upper Merion Township police and I’m going to tell you people about these strange goings-on. You could’ve done that, is that right?”
“Any one of us could have done that.”
“You could have, couldn’t you?”
“We all could have.”
“But you could have.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“You didn’t, did you?”
“None of us did.”
“Have you heard of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”
“Yes.”
“Did you call them?”
“No.”
“Did Jay C. Smith have contacts in the state police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”
“He never indicated that.”
As to the character of his relationship with Susan Reinert, William Bradfield said, “In 1976, Sue Myers had already had a confrontation with Susan Reinert and she said to me, ‘You’re wasting your life on this woman. She’s not worth your time.’ But I told her that anyone who is interested in literature to the point of teaching it, let alone of trying to write poetry as I was trying to do, should feel that any other person who is willing to be open with him in a real and honest way, in a personal way, is someone that anybody who’s interested in the arts can’t turn his back on.”
Echoes in the Darkness Page 33
