Echoes in the Darkness (36 page)

Sue Myers dropped her needlepoint one day and walked calmly to the telephone and called a locksmith. When he came home, Bill Bradfield couldn't get in his own apartment. Bill Bradfield roared. He sounded like Oedipus with his eyeballs bleeding into his beard, but she wouldn't open that door.

Bill Bradfield was without a roof over his head and had to go home and live with his parents, and be reminded that he'd wanted a piano and what did they give him? A goddamn stinking miserable little toy truck.

A most unbelievable break came at the time of Jay Smith's sentencing. William Bradfield tried to probate the estate of Susan Reinert. As soon as he filed for probate, Ken Reinert and Pat Gallagher joined forces and filed to block him.

In the Court of Common Pleas of Delaware County, there's a court division with the Dickensian title of Orphans Court. In that the ex-husband and brother of Susan Reinert had immediately challenged her will, the court appointed a deputy district attorney, John A. Reilly, as administrator of the estate to safeguard the rights of the missing children.

Reilly was a veteran prosecutor with a good reputation, a Civil War buff who'd been around the courts a long time. Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz felt good about him, but he warned them not to get their hopes up.

One of the functions of the court in this estate case was to ascertain the total assets of the estate. There was the missing $25,000 that Susan Reinert had "invested," and there was a matter of a missing diamond ring that her mother had given her. The court would try to determine what happened to them but Bill Bradfield could stop the bus by agreeing to reimburse the estate on his own. That in itself would cure a big part of the estate dispute even without any admission of misappropriation or criminal conduct.

Sort of a nolo contendere situation, as the cops understood it. And that would send them back to sweeping cellars and digging in graveyards.

Jack Holtz had hoped that in Orphans Court Bill Bradfield would at least be compelled to make incriminating statements. He'd fantasized that Bill Bradfield would take the stand, but now he feared it was going to tum into a drawn-out estate squabble that would never allow them to compel Bill Bradfield to talk.

At the time, Joe VanNort showed his lopsided grin and said,"I ain't so sure Bill Bradfield's smart in the first place. And in the second place I ain't so sure he could keep his mouth shut if John Curran gagged him with a lawbook. Let's wait and see if we get a break."

They got a break.

The Orphans Court hearing was held at the courthouse in Media, Pennsylvania.

Bill Bradfield showed up in a three-piece blue pinstripe, and on that cool summer day he carried a topcoat over his arm and had all the wisps trimmed from his beard, and had a fresh preppy haircut. To Joe VanNort he looked like an FBI agent with whiskers.

He'd gained some weight from nervous eating, and the cops saw fear in his eyes, or hoped they did. To their amazement and joy, Bill Bradfield not only took the stand, but after "affirming" an oath on the Bible, he denied everything.

He had this to say about Susan Reinert:

"She was a sensitive, easily hurt, intelligent young lady, but very troubled. She was troubled about many things in life and would ask my opinion about a lot of things. But she often did the opposite. She dated people I thought she ought not to date. She went to places I thought she ought not to go."

He told the court in response to John Reilly's questions that he'd spent many evenings with his friend Susan Reinert, but he'd never "dated" her.

"The frequency of my contacts with Mrs. Reinert grew with her demands," he told those assembled in Orphans Court. "The term 'date' implies the kind of relationship Mrs. Reinert and I didn't have."

As in the Jay Smith trial, Bill Bradfield's husky, sometimes gravelly voice flattened out when he was testifying. It added to an overall impression of distance that caused reporters to refer to his "cold blue eyes" when actually he'd raced through life with all the fluttery heat of Scarlett O'Hara.

Reilly asked, "Did you ever stay overnight with her?"

Bill Bradfield answered, "Never."

When Reilly asked, "Did she ever discuss an investment with you?" Bill Bradfield answered, "What investment?"

"You didn't know she had money in the bank?" Reilly asked.

"No, sir." "Did Mrs. Reinert give you sums of money for an investment or any other purpose prior to her death?"

"No, sir, Bill Bradfield said. "I would often give money to her. To make ends meet. As did Mr. Valaitis."

When Bill Bradfield even took from Vince the credit for buying Michaels cub scout uniform, Jack Holtz's grin got wider than the Delaware.

"Were you aware that she took out insurance policies naming you as beneficiary?"

"No, sir," Bill Bradfield said.

"Were you aware prior to her death that she named you as a beneficiary in her will?"

"No, sir."

As to the Jay Smith trial where he had been an alibi witness, it seemed so unimportant that it almost slipped his mind.

Reilly said to him, "Immediately after leaving Harrisburg on May twenty-ninth of last year, you went to Mrs. Reinerts house, did you not?"

"Could you refresh my memory," Bill Bradfield said. "Why was I in Harrisburg?"

"I can refresh your memory," Reilly said. "But I think you know why you were in Harrisburg."

"No."

"Were you in Harrisburg testifying at the trial of Jay Smith?"

"Yes, I remember," Bill Bradfield said.

The gate wasn't just opened to them, it was blown off the hinges. Reilly could now call all of Susan's friends and confidants.

As to the missing ring, Pat Schnure could testify that Susan Reinert was going to have her mothers diamond ring reset and wear it at her wedding in England, and that Susan had said that Bill Bradfield knew a jeweler who could do the job.

The cops could testify that they'd taken the "ring to courier" notation on Susan Reinerts calendar and checked every courier in the Philadelphia area, and that the ring was gone.

The cops could bring in all the evidence of the "investment" with Bache and Company and produce company executives to testify that it was bogus.

Susan Reinerts former banker could tell of her extraordinary cash withdrawal. And her brother could tell of her offer to let him in on Bill Bradfields investment.

Tlie neighbors could tell of his car being there at all hours and even overnight.

Bill Bradfield had made so many demonstrably false statements under oath that the cops at last had enough evidence to consider a prosecution based on the theft of the investment.

About the extraordinary performance in Orphans Court, Sue Myers said, "Because all of his friends believed him utterly, he thought that everyone else should believe him utterly."

Jack Holtz said to Joe VanNort, "We were dead, but now we're born again!"

The Philadelphia Daily News had this to say in an editorial:

Putting it gently, Susan Reinert had an impressive amout of life insurance. Spectacular Bid is insured for more. So, presumably, is Streisand. But for a schoolteacher the figures a bit high.

What Bradfield is suggesting has a charm all its own. Susan Reinert, under the mistaken impression that she was going to marry Bill Bradfield, tiptoes out, purchases three quarters of a million dollars worth of insurance, didn't tell him a thing about it, didn't tell him about her estate, didn't tell him she changed her will, didn't tell him she had made him sole beneficiary of the estate and the insurance. Now if Mr. Bradfield could only put that to music we could all dance down the yellow brick road.

Bill Bradfield called Sue Myers the night that editorial ran. He was weeping. He said, "Why have you forsaken me?"

In August, the cops obtained a search warrant from the state of Delaware to search Jay Smith's blue Capri, now in the custody of his brother.

Joe VanNort, Jack Holtz, a Delaware state cop and another trooper went to the home of the assistant attorney general of the state of Delaware to get a warrant drawn up. The next day it was signed by a magistrate and they waited until Jay Smith's brother returned home in the evening to serve it. They'd brought a deputy attorney general with them.

Mr. Smith was clearly embarrassed by the presence of all the cops and protective of his niece, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of Jay who was without a real home. The cops searched through all of the belongings that he was holding for his imprisoned brother.

In a filing cabinet, Joe VanNort found another bogus Brinks identification card with Jay Smiths picture on it. The deputy attorney general didn't think it fell under the scope of the search warrant, and Joe VanNort handed the card to Mr. Smith.

That bothered Jack Holtz. Maybe they couldn't use it in a subsequent court case against Jay Smith, but maybe they could. In any event, why give away potential evidence or contraband? They were outside at the time and he spoke to Joe VanNort about it. He knocked on the door and asked for the card back.

But Jay Smith's brother had already bumed it on the kitchen stove. He said that all of that theft business had humiliated his family.

Jack Holtz later felt troubled that Joe VanNort had lost that card. In the old days Joe VanNort would never have done something so careless. Jack Holtz didn't say a word to anyone, but he was concerned.

"I hated to think it at the time," he later said. "But I was starting to feel that Joe was losing it."

In the blue Capri they found more red fibers, but all that proved was that he could have used the Capri to haul away the carpet remnant they believed had been in the basement on that weekend last year.

The interior of the trunk had been painted with a sticky substance that looked like some sort of rust inhibitor or sealant, and the car had been outside in the weather. The cops were very disappointed with the search.

Then Trooper Dove of the identification unit walked up to Jack Holtz and said, "I found this pin under the right front passenger seat."

It was dusted for prints but they couldn't lift anything from it. Jack Holtz took it in his hand and examined it.

It was just a little lapel tab. A green metal pin with a white P on it. At first Jack Holtz thought it might be something they handed out at the ballpark, but it wasn't the right color and the P was wrong to be part of the Philadelphia Phillies logo.

He didn't know what it was, but his investigator's intuition told him that it didn't belong in this car. Something about that pin wasn't right.

For two weeks he worked on it in his spare time. The more he looked at the little metal tab, the more he believed it was something a child would keep. He went to the residence of

Susan Reinerts neighbor Donna Formwalt and talked to her eight-year-old daughter

The little girl said, "Karen wore a pin like that. I think she got it on a school trip."

Jack Holtz started devoting more than spare time to it. He found another neighbor who told him that the pin looked like something she'd seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

It was a hopeful cop who arrived at the museum that afternoon in August and climbed the steps made famous in Rocky. He talked to the director who verified that the pins had been in use in June of last year, and were given to show that admission was paid. They were handed out by museum guards who used eight different colors on various days.

Jack Holtz went to Karen Reinerts neighborhood school and learned that the fifthand sixth-grade classes had gone to the museum on a field trip in the spring of 1979. The principal informed Jack Holtz that Karen Reinhert had, in fact, attended school on the day of the museum field trip. Then he learned that four boys from her class remembered the pins. They'd been green. Two remembered Karen being along on the trip. One boy had saved his pin and turned it over to the police. It was identical to the one they had.

Their chain was getting longer. Not long enough to bind. But longer.

The last real duty Chris Pappas ever performed for Bill Bradfield had to do with closing out the safety deposit box. He did an extra-swell job on that mission.

When the bank teller had concluded their business and told him to have a good day, she'd left the signature cards on the counter. Chris Pappas leaned over and snatched three of the four signature cards, so that if the authorities found the box they wouldn't be able to prove that Bill Bradfield had anything to do with the rental.

His mentor was very proud of him.

Chris Pappas was at Shellys house when he saw a news report that detailed Bill Bradfield's testimony in Orphans Court. Chris was stunned. Bill Bradfield had lied under oath about everything.

An hour later, Bill Bradfield and Chris and Shelly were strolling through Valley Forge Park having a little rehearsal. Bill Bradfield was positive that when the grand jury sat in

September, they'd all get a subpoena. He asked Shelly if she'd take a walk and let him talk privately with Chris.

When they were alone Bill Bradfield asked, "How do you feel?" "Okay. I feel okay." ^Will you stand by me?" "Haven't I always?"

"Vince deserted me. I think Sue might desert me. You won't, will you?" "Desert you? No."