Echoes in the Darkness

22

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 during 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.

By December, the FBI decided to hang out the “closed” sign. Matt Mullin and Bob Loughney were the last FBI special agents to leave. The FBI had done more lab work on this criminal investigation than on any other with the exception of the Patricia Hearst case. Jack Holtz was very depressed by the FBI report that said the Reinert murder was unsolvable.

It was a downbeat Christmas for Jack Holtz. Of course he got to go home to his son on weekends. Still, he logged more nights in motel rooms than Willy Loman, and with Joe VanNort gone the nights were lonelier.

Lou DeSantis was from Philly, so he slept at home most of the time. DeSantis had gotten involved with the task force in the first place because he’d been available when the call came to pick up Ken Reinert in Philadelphia and drive him to Harrisburg to identify the body of his ex-wife.

So far, the investigation hadn’t brought any hardship for DeSantis, but he wasn’t fond of hearing Jack Holtz talk about relocating the task force to Harrisburg, where he’d be the one living in motels.

But that’s what happened in April. And now it was a mini-task force. It included Jack Holtz, Lou DeSantis and Deputy Attorney General Rick Guida. And that was all there would be until the end. The bunch of bananas was down to three and they were getting overripe. Jack Holtz couldn’t even count his gray hairs anymore, but at least he was again living with his son. He celebrated by redecorating. That meant buying another duck.

When asked why he had so many ducks, he looked surprised, as though the answer was obvious: they didn’t want flowers.

The move to Harrisburg coincided with another event that would add hundreds of man-hours to the already mammoth investigation. Jay Smith’s work had been successful. Raymond Martray got released from prison on $10,000 bail, pending appeal.

While he was free, Martray again contacted Jack Holtz and Lou DeSantis who went to meet him at his father’s house. Martray said that Jay Smith wanted him to fake a story that Joe VanNort had offered Martray a deal to frame Jay Smith. He also said that Jay Smith wanted to kill a deputy sheriff and wanted to poison the water supply at Dallas, and all of this had to do with escape plots if he got indicted for murder. Dr. Jay still had the Reinert murder very much on his mind, according to Martray.

Before they’d left the case, the FBI had administered a lie detector test to Raymond Martray. The polygraph operator said he was possibly deceptive. After his release from prison, the cops administered another. He passed on the “key questions.” Though Joe VanNort had been a polygraph operator, Jack Holtz seldom used the machine on anyone.

“It’s a good tool, but,” was his opinion of lie detectors.

Jack Holtz decided that if half of what Martray said was accurate it was time to take a stab at the prince of darkness. He and Rick Guida asked Martray if he’d agree to telephone monitoring, and he signed a consent form in the presence of his lawyer.

The state police secured a telephone number and post office box for Raymond Martray and intercepted all letters from Jay Smith. The letters from prison would always specify when Dr. Jay was going to place a phone call, since all outgoing calls had to be made collect. Martray was then to permit his phone call to be taped. There were dozens of such calls received and recorded by the state police during the next three years.

It was clear from the very first recorded telephone conversation that it was mentor and disciple all over again. Ray Martray sounded as eager to please as Chris Pappas and Vince Valaitis had been.

The calls were full of yard talk and legal talk because Jay Smith was busy with petitions of various kinds for other cons, including a mutual friend of theirs named Charles Montione. There was lots of escape talk with Raymond Martray pretending that he’d checked all the places that his mentor had asked him to, including the courthouse in Harrisburg, in case the state cops ever nailed him with an indictment in the Reinert murder.

Most of the conversations were right out of Cagney and Bogart gangster epics. The cops had to endure endless jailhouse fantasies.

“I walked all around the building trying to figure out which way they’d bring you in and out,” Martray told him on one of the early calls.

“What you gotta do is go up and down those side steps in the courtrooms,” Jay Smith informed him.

“I already did that. I didn’t use the elevator at all.”

“Right, but if you go all the way down to the basement where they sell the coffee, they bring you in through that side door. The entrance is to the rear.”

“Uh huh.”

“When they come in there, they’re by themselves. Someone could put a gun on them and take their guns away. You could easily get a guy out of there.”

“Okay. I’ll maybe check that out again the next time I’m down that way.”

And then there were the conversations that drove the cops and Rick Guida absolutely bonkers because Jay Smith would say something that should be followed by an incriminating remark, but he’d just back off.

Raymond Martray claimed that he’d been taught by his mentor that “self-serving statements” should always be tossed right in the midst of incriminating statements. Just in case there were electronic eavesdropping devices around.

For example, in one conversation, Jay Smith said, “My defense is going to be that I had nothing to do with the Reinert murder. They can’t prove anything because I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

And Raymond Martray, sounding as frustrated as the cops, asked, “Is there anybody close there, or something?”

“Is anybody what?”

“Anybody close to you, or anything there?”

“No.”

“ ’Cause I want to … you think there’s anything on these phones, or what?”

“Oh well, I think that if anything … yeah, I think we always have to be careful.”

“Yeah, okay. I couldn’t understand what was going on,” Martray said.

All of these contradictions were repeatedly attributed to the “self-serving” explanation. But the cops were starting to imply that maybe Martray had never been told diddly regarding the Reinert murder. And that he was trying to use the cops to influence the court during his appeals.

When Martray once again took the subject from escape directly to the Reinert murder, Jay Smith said, “Remember, I got a lot of things going for me. One, the woman who bought my house moved into it on the day that Reinert disappeared, and she was there with me, you know what I mean?”

“Uh huh.”

“Second, I had my daughter, whose birthday it was, there with me. See, we were moving out of the house.”

“Uh huh.”

Well, that was demonstrably false. Jack Holtz could prove that Grace Gilmore had not been with him, nor had his daughter Sheri. So at least Raymond Martray was correct when he said that Jay Smith would make self-serving statements that were downright lies whenever he felt there might be eavesdroppers.

And the cops became convinced that they should keep recording the calls until Jay Smith gave them enough to put him in the electric chair. At least he was talking a lot about escapes if he got indicted for murder. And escape tended to show a consciousness of guilt.

One call introduced Harry Gibson.

“If I mention the name Harry Gibson,” Jay Smith said to his bogus disciple, “then we’re starting to think about an escape.”

“Okay. We don’t have to worry about that unless there’s an indictment coming.”

“Remember, Ray, this place is confused now. It’s not like when they had it organized. You could come in to visit with a long pair of pants, and inside a pair of thin pants. So look around for very thin pants and what we would do is change and I’d go out with some visitor.”

During one of the more important calls, Jay Smith started fantasizing about his budding literary career. He was going to write a book called The Valley Forge Murders.

In that call, he said, “And just suppose I’m lucky and this book gets off? Then we’ve got money without any kind of problem. A lot of money.”

“In the same respect,” Martray answered, “what happens if they nail you for Reinert? Then whadda we do?”

“Well …”

“Where am I gonna be at?”

“If they convict me?”

“Yeah.”

“They’ll probably send me to the electric chair.”

“No shit!” Martray said. “Look what it does to me!”

“It’s a problem,” Jay Smith said, sympathetically.

“It’s a loose end,” Martray said. “Just like you said before, get rid of loose ends.”

“I think if they were to arrest me for Reinert, the best thing for you to do is to go kill Bradfield and make him disappear,” Jay Smith said, casually.

“He would disappear. That’s it. You made the comment. That’s it.”

“But see …”

“You don’t have to say any more,” said Martray.

But Jay Smith had more to say. “Get him back in your car. Kill him and take his body up into some woods, up in Fayetteville or someplace, but nobody, see, nobody should know where his body is but you. When you deal with a body, only you should know. You should never let anyone else know. Do you see the advantage to that?”

“Yeah.”

And then, just when it looked as though Martray had Dr. Jay on the verge of an all-out admission, the former principal said, “There’s nothing that Bradfield could do to hurt me other than lie, and that’s it.”

Then the talk turned to more mundane matters such as escaping from jail with electric hacksaws.

In July, Jay Smith wanted Ray Martray to drive up to Dallas to pay him a visit. Martray contacted the task force in Harrisburg and agreed to wear a body wire. They videotaped Martray and Jay Smith standing in the prison visiting area. It was nearly 100 degrees outside. Inside the panel truck where the electronics technician and Jack Holtz were hiding it was a lot hotter. They shot the visiting area with a telephoto lens from outside the fence.

It wasn’t a great performance by their man. He was overacting from the moment he stepped back inside the walls of Dallas prison. One of the first moves Martray made after the handshakes were over was to playfully give Dr. Jay a little bump with his hip after he’d said something that wasn’t particularly funny in the first place.

Cute, Jack Holtz thought. Showing off because he’s wearing a body wire.

Then he made Holtz even madder by hopping around Jay Smith like some kind of oversized puppy, nervously talking over the top of everything Jay Smith was saying. He was too hyper to let Jay Smith complete a single phrase that afternoon.

Jay Smith just stood there and put his hand up in front of his mouth in case a guard in a tower could read lips with binoculars. And he pretty well said the same things that they’d been hearing on the telephone tapes. The cops were really sick of the bullshit.

The temperature in the van soared up over 140 degrees and the camera lens started sweating and they lost their video for a while.

On that video, Jay Smith looked for all the world like what he’d been trained to be, a schoolteacher. He gave out lots of advice and acted as though he were humoring his boy by talking about some robberies he was going to pull with Martray to make them both rich. And he figured he wouldn’t have too much longer to do, what with a good shot at a favorable appeal. He just chatted as little kids scampered around the area while their mommies visited daddies and boyfriends.

Jay Smith was absolutely avuncular through most of it, but since no Jay Smith meeting would be complete without a little sex talk he told Martray about a mutual friend who was starting to disappoint him a whole lot. He’d started using drugs. And as Uncle Jay put it, “He likes to suck black cocks when he’s high.”

The cops figured they’d sweated off a combined total of twenty-five pounds while Raymond Martray chewed more scenery than Olivier in Richard III.

Three months later, Martray got a chance to redeem himself with yet another videotaping. It was a lot cooler for the cops inside the panel truck. Jay Smith was wearing a long-sleeved shirt this time, carrying glasses and a couple of pencils in his shirt pocket. You’d swear he was the pious chaplain making his rounds.

This time Martray’s performance, even though he’d been coached by Jack Holtz, went more over the top. He was just too anxious.

Martray blurted out that he was going to “take care” of Bill Bradfield, and it was clear that Jay Smith was very wary of this kind of talk.

Jay Smith said, “But I had nothing to do with the murder, Ray.”

Then Raymond Martray danced around and promised that he’d never let Jay down. He referred to him as a criminal genius, but Jay Smith kept repeating that he had nothing to do with the Reinert murder, and all the while Martray still never let him finish a sentence.

The cops figured they’d better sprinkle Valium on Martray’s waffles before they tried this again. He was so breathless Jay Smith might have to give him CPR.

After about a hundred “like you said’s” and “like you told me’s” that Jay Smith didn’t seem to be buying, the older man apparently decided to quiet his disciple down with, what else? A little sex talk. Jay Smith gave Raymond Martray graphic advice on how to please a lady with cunnilingus.

As relevant film making, these two shows ranked with a Sylvester Stallone movie. The mini-task force was not thrilled.

Bill Bradfield, still out on bail while appealing his conviction, had lost his job with the school district and been forced to withdraw his claim against the estate of Susan Reinert.

Bill Bradfield now knew that he would not be following the trail of Achilles and Hector and the thousand black ships. He would not be playing the lyre on the bridge of a ketch with some young disciple peeping up his tunic. He’d have to content himself with sailing boats in his mother’s bathbub.

But he was hoping to continue to breathe the free air of Chester County.

During a small dinner party at a lawyers’ club in Philadelphia just after his conviction, Bill Bradfield said, “The key to my dilemma is to be found in Ezra Pound, two cantos in particular. It’s that I’ve loved my friends imperfectly.”

When he was offered the wine list he refused to choose, saying, “I have no palate for wine.”

One was reminded that it was Ezra Pound who wrote: “There’s no wine like the blood’s crimson!”