Echoes in the Darkness (20 page)

Another English teacher might notice that it was like the scene in Moby Dick where Ishmael and Queequeg are kneading the ambergris, and its all so intoxicating: the smell of ambergris and the silkiness of it as it slides between the fingers. And once in awhile the whalers accidentally squeeze each other's hands and that served to strengthen the male bonding.

So they wiped and wiped and wiped the day away, smelling the long green as it slid through their fingers. It was not an unpleasant way to spend a spring afternoon.

Sue Myers couldn't avoid talking with Vince Valaitis about the frantic coming and going of Bill Bradfield. But when Vince started babbling about something new in the life of Jay Smith, Sue Myers would give him a blank stare, and her darting brown eyes would get as placid as mud and she'd just tune him out. Simple as that. Sue Myers had honed her ability to turn deaJf as a snail. But she could still sneak and peek with the very best of them.

Her lawyer had told her to advise William Bradfield what he could do with the cohabitation agreement, and he said that the whole business sounded nuts. But Sue had started keeping a lookout for anything that might be lying around the house, because there were surprises written on that cohabitation

agreement. One, of course, was the reference under "assets of William S. Bradfield, Jr." that consisted of very large insurance policies in his favor with the name of the insured person unlisted. The other was an asset of $20,000 that he supposedly had in the hank.

Now, Sue Myers didn't know anything about a pile of money in some bank. In fact, she'd been forced to raid a savings account that he knew nothing about in order to pump some life into the art store. She'd depleted the secret account and figured that they now stood to lose $80,000. On one memorable day the store took in 84 cents worth of business. Sue Myers was starting to foresee a future as an indebted old maid, saving grocery coupons.

She also started wondering why he was suddenly locking the filing cabinet At first she thought he might be keeping Jay Smith paraphernalia in there: tape, or rope, or chain, or other nonsense that in his mid-life fantasy had become instruments of torture and death. Now she wasn't so sure about anything.

As usual, she waited until he was sleeping and then she lifted his key ring and opened the cabinet drawer. And lo, he had some hideout money! A lot of hideout money. In fact, he had a two-inch stack of crisp U.S. currency. On top was a picture of Benjamin Franklin.

Two weeks later she repeated the exercise and this time she found a will. She later claimed that she'd only read the first page and seen that the beneficiary was William S. Bradfield, Jr. But the beneficiary's name was on the third page of the will, so no matter what she said, Sue Myers had taken a closer look at the will than she would ever admit. Without a doubt, she knew that there was some very funny business going on between Bill Bradfield and the woman she hated, Susan Reinert.

Sue Myers always said she didn't want to know too much about his business, but the fact is, she already did know quite a bit more than she wanted to know.

Bill Bradfield may have sensed that the will or the envelope full of money in the file drawer had been disturbed. In any case, Chris Pappas got a call to report for duty. Bill Bradfield told Chris that he'd decided that the money should no longer be kept in a file cabinet in his apartment, but should be tucked away in a safety deposit box.

Bill Bradfield said, "If something does happen, and if the police start making inquiries at local banks, I hope they don't discover my name on a safety deposit box."

And Chris found himself staring into those brooding, poet's eyes, and the pondering bard was twisting his whiskers and trying to figure a way to handle all this when Chris said, "111 go and rent a safety deposit box in my name, Bill."

What an idea! Bill Bradfield told him.

Did Chris Pappas get a chance to walk into a bank and rent a safety deposit box like anybody else? Not a chance. Bill Bradifield wanted little Shelly to have access to the box.

That afternoon Chris Pappas went to the Southeast National Bank in West Chester and signed a contract for a safety deposit box. He signed the signature card and took additional cards for Bill Bradfield and Shelly.

A friend of Shellys had been planning to visit her in California so Chris asked her to deliver the signature card. And, naturally, Shelly blabbed all about the weird goings-on between Jay Smith and Susan Reinert to her pal.

Chris Pappas borrowed $1,300 of the money to buy his brother's 1973 Datsun, which was about to be traded in on a new car.

So by now there were several teachers and former students and parents and at least one lawyer and maybe Norman the janitor who'd heard that Susan Reinert might be in jeopardy.

One might think that somebody would just accidentally slip and say something like "Morning, Susan. Nice to see Jay Smith didn't cut your throat over the weekend."

Yet the fact is that nobody at any time so much as hinted to Susan Reinert or to any of her close friends that Bill Bradfield had been saying for months that Jay Smith or "Alex" wanted her dead.

And if a Gothic tale needs an element of the bizarre, many outsiders would later say that this was probably the most bizarre and incredible thing of all.

Chapter
12

Witness

The day had finally arrived: William Bradfield was subpoenaed to give his alibi testimony for Dr. Jay C. Smith in Dauphin County on the 30th of May. John J. O'Brien was attorney for the defendant, and deputy district attorney Jackson M. Stewart, Jr., represented the commonwealth.

Because of the pretrial publicity, O'Brien had been successful in gaining a change of venue for this, the most serious crime, the 1977 theft at the Sears store in St. Davids. The trial was held in Harrisburg.

But John O'Brien's attempt to discredit the eyewitness testimony failed. There was something about Jay Smith. Although he was now wearing his hair longer and had sprouted a mustache, although he wore eyeglasses instead of contacts during the trial, although his hair was black while the bogus courier had had some gray in his hair, none of the witnesses showed the slightest hesitation when it came to indentifying him.

This, even despite the substantial weight gain that had turned his features gross as he awaited trial. The puff and sag of jowls, the enlarged pouches under the hooded eyes, and now a stoop in a former military officer who had always stood tall and erect did indeed make him look different from two years earlier.

Still eyewitnesses, more often than not, would say, "I'm one hundred percent sure."

Such certainty is rare in criminal cases, especially with so many eyewitnesses who had had such a brief look at the bogus messenger. But as one of them said from the witness box, "There was something about his (ace. It's not an ordinary face."

Positive indentification by the witnesses was probably explained by the wife of the defense lawyer who said that she had feared her husbands client when she was pregnant with their first child.

"Those eyes," she said. "There was so much depravity in them."

She'd had an unreasonable eerie feeling that her pregnancy could be threatened by whatever essences surrounded him. She also felt that he literally changed size from one meeting to the next. To be sure, there was something different about Dr. Jay C. Smith.

Stephanie Smith was now in an advanced stage of stomach and liver cancer. During the months awaiting trial she'd been unable to discern which produced the most misery, the rampant cancer or the futile chemotherapy. The scandal and attention of the press might have been a welcome respite.

Only two months from death, she, who had labored for her husband for twenty-eight years, served him one last time.

The desperately ill wife of Jay Smith took the stand as an alibi witness to her husband's whereabouts when the crime occurred.

"August was a very busy month," she began. "The summer school was ending, see, and then he had to pick teachers, like I said. And with this basketball, see, they had to have a basketball coach at that time."

And so it went. Her husband could not have committed the crime, she finally got around to saying, because she and Jay were in Ocean City that day in August, 1977, when someone posing as an armed courier victimized the St. Davids store. She testified that with them in Ocean City had been her eldest daughter, Stephanie Hunsberger, and young Stephanies husband, Edward.

Stephanie Smith told the Harrisburg jury that Jay had dropped them at the pier in Ocean City to go off for a few hours to contact an "educational consultant."

When it was his turn, the assistant district attorney pursued a line of questioning that had to do with the missing Hunsberger couple.

"Your husbands lawyer asked you several questions about a phone conversation you had with your daughter sometime around Mother's Day which was two or three weeks ago," he began.

"Yes?"

"At that time you knew your husband was coming up for trial, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Did you think to ask your daughter whether they would come back here about that Ocean City alibi?"

"Well, it was more of a Mother's Day conversation," Stephanie Smith said. "I didn't want to go into details about this trial. It was more sentimental. That was a sentimental phone call."

"Sometime after that phone call were you trying to get in touch with her?"

"Like, we couldn't find her."

"Are you stating to the jury that you have no idea where she is?;

"Well, see, she said she was calling up from California. She was making telephone calls from different places. Say, from L.A. to Oregon. See, they travel a lot."

Stephanie Smith was then asked if her husband had mentioned meeting anyone in Ocean City on the day of the crime, and she responded, "When we came back and we were driving back he mentioned that he bumped into a Mr. Bradview. My daughter said he was a teacher of hers ... Mr. Bradfield,'' she quickly added.

And when asked about the most damaging physical evidence, a bogus identification card found in their basement apartment, Stephanie Smith said, "Oh that thing. My daughter's husband was reading a book on Brinks. They read a lot. So we just humored him. He brought out this card. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'I'm making an I. D. card.' I said, 'I. D. card? It looks like a Walt Disney thing, that blue paper around that. It's not an I.D. card. You'd never get away with anything with that!'"

"Was he trying to get away with something?" the prosecutor asked.

And then Stephanie Smith offered one of her many non sequiturs: "He was trying to invent some patent on something."

There was no need to badger her. The dying woman spoke her piece for her man: "I'm sorry they had to go to all that trouble, the D.A.'s people. See, Ed made that card. It was a joke, hon."

But the disappearance of Edward Hunsberger was no joke, not to a sixty-year-old woman in the courtroom, who would attend every trial of Jay C. Smith. Dorothy Hunsberger waited for something. For anything. Any news of her son, Edward, and his wife, Stephanie.

* * *

Bill Bradfield apparently presumed that his style of testimony was dignified and professional, but many courtroom observers thought his delivery was flat and lifeless and rigid. The journalistic references to "cold blue eyes," which were inaccurate, came as a result of his courtroom demeanor.

He wasn't sworn. Being a Quaker he "affirmed" to tell the truth. After giving his name and being asked what he taught at Upper Merion, the English teacher replied, "English, Latin and Greek."

Then Bill Bradfield gave an account of how on August 27, 1977, he'd had occasion to be in Ocean City to visit fellow teacher Fred Wattenmaker, and how he happened to run into Dr. Smith at the entrance to a restaurant at 12:25 in the afternoon. And he said that Dr. Smith decided to accompany him to visit Fred, and how Fred wasn't home and he left a note. They went back to the restaurant and ate lunch and said good-bye at 3:00 p.m., which of course would have made it impossible for Jay Smith to be impersonating a courier at the Sears store back on The Main Line.

Bill Bradfield, who admitted to the jury that he had no head for dates, was nevertheless positive about this one because it was the Saturday before Labor Day and he'd been opening his Terra Art store in Montgomery Mall.

When asked by Jay Smith's attorney to describe his relationship with Dr. Smith, he said to the jury, "I've been a leader of the teacher's association of Upper Merion. I've been a student advocate and a student adviser. That put me working with Doctor Smith for twelve years, under constant conflicts with him. After Doctor Smith was arrested, it occurred to me I ought to testify to this. The date didn't mean anything to me at first and then I proceeded to think. It occurred to me that that was the day we went to see my friend. And then I proceeded to think whether I wanted to get involved in all this. For a number of days I was tortured over that. Doctor Smith meant nothing to me, nor I to him. I decided that, like it or not, I had no choice."

Lawyer O'Brien asked, "Have you ever socialized with Doctor Smith?"

And Bill Bradfield replied, "Never."

Then Bill Bradfield gave a great deal of testimony regarding a mustache that Jay Smith had had in August of 1977 at Ocean City (the courier was clean-shaven) and how his hair never had any gray in it (as the bogus courier's did) and how Jay Smiths mustache then had been the same as it was this day in court. And since no one else had ever seen Jay Smith with a mustache until this very day in court, Bill Bradfield went on to say that they had joked about his growing a summer mustache on that August day.