Then there were the things that had nothing to do with the school. They found two silver badges and uniforms, the kind worn by Brink’s security guards. In Jay Smith’s desk they found a bogus identification card fashioned from a U.S. Army identification card. In fact, there was a whole packet of stolen army I.D. cards. The bogus Brink’s card bore a photo of Jay Smith with the name “Carl S. Williams” beneath it.
The charges against the school principal were piling up when the police found yet another uniform, that of an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. This uniform wasn’t a phony. A call verified that the educator was retired from the 79th Army Reserve Command, and that Colonel Smith had in fact carpooled to army reserve meetings with his commanding general. The general was shocked. He’d always spoken highly of his intelligent colonel. The general was John Eisenhower, son of the thirty-fourth president of the United States.
The cops in the basement that day hauled off a lot of evidence and photographed the rest. The bottles of drugs contained Valium, Librium and Placidyl, but the cops were puzzling over everything else. They found five more oil-filter silencers along with a pair of latex gloves. The basement walls were pocked with bullet holes, no doubt from target practice with the silenced guns. Along with the stolen military I.D. cards, they found a pile of blue combs bearing the name of his army reserve unit.
They learned that one of Jay Smiths guns appeared to have been bought by and registered to the assistant principal at Upper Merion, except that when they contacted the man he informed them he had never bought a gun. He told the cops that his wallet and identification had been stolen from his desk in the past year.
It appeared that Jay Smith had swiped everything from Upper Merion but the swimming pool, when he wasn’t busy terrorizing Sears stores as a bogus courier.
There were lots of other unusual things in the basement, his library for instance. Dr. Jay Smith had books with titles like The Canine Tongue, Her Bestial Dreams, Her Four-legged Lover, The Bestial Erotics and Animal Fever.
There were plenty of swinger publications, both straight and gay. There were classified ads from “modern” couples willing to exchange information with pen pals. And finally, there was a significant quantity of chains and several locks. The cops photographed the chains and figured that Dr. Jay was a world class party animal.
This was reinforced when Stephanie Smith gave her divorce lawyer a dildo described on a later police report as “pink, regular size” and another described as “extra large, black, with manual crank, squirts water.”
And what, the boys in the station house wanted to know, would General Eisenhower think of those little weapons?
7
For most of his life, Jay Smith had not been all that unattractive. He was six foot two, customarily weighed less than two hundred pounds and carried himself erectly, as befit a military man. He had a good speaking voice and an impressive command of language. But during the months preceding his arrest, a physical change had taken place and it was well documented by news photographs when the educator was in jail trying to raise bail money and facing felony charges leveled by the district attorneys of three counties. There was the Sears theft at the St. Davids store, the attempted theft at the Neshaminy Mall Sears store, the incident of car prowling with loaded guns at the Gateway Shopping Center, the theft of property from the Upper Merion school district, and the possession of contraband drugs. Enough charges to keep Dr. Jay C. Smith in courtrooms for some time to come.
The photographic story was remarkable. He had a high forehead so if there had been additional hair loss it was not noticeable, but he’d gotten heavy and soft and bent, and his face had undergone a coarsening. The Tartar eyes had grown more hooded. The flesh around those eyes collapsed and the sagging lids became reptilian. His heavy dark brows, which always had a tendency to lift cynically, now arched diabolically. Never refined, his wide mouth seemed more fleshy and sagged at the lips from the pull of swollen jowls. And with the added weight and grossening, his weak knobby chin receded noticeably within the folds of his neck.
Now the educator did not merely look dissolute, but extraordinarily sinister. Not a face likely to instill confidence in a jury.
Because of the Quaker influence, the sign at the edge of town reads: WEST CHESTER WELCOMES THEE.
“I could have been president of the United States but I lost the election for mayor of West Chester” is the way John J. O’Brien sized up his brief foray into local politics.
John O’Brien enjoyed trial work, especially criminal law, but thus far his triumphs had been limited to cases such as one involving a hobo who took upon himself the duty of picking up litter in the public park near a lovers’ lane. The litter mostly included discarded underwear and lawyer O’Brien got a kick out of successfully proving that the hobo was an environmentalist, not a voyeur.
A man given to self-deprecating humor, O’Brien was surprised and excited when his divorce client, Mrs. Stephanie Smith, asked him to defend her husband, Dr. Jay Smith, who he knew stood charged with a series of highly publicized crimes.
John O’Brien tilted his round Irish face and his dark brows gave him a pixieish look, when he recalled the request.
“I’m just a small-town lawyer,” O’Brien reminisced, settled in his front-yard rocking chair. The wooden sign suspended over the door of his Victorian office in a residential neighborhood of West Chester said: JOHN J. O’BRIEN, ATTORNEY AT LAW. And below it the word NOTARY had been added, proving that it wasn’t all that easy for a small-town lawyer to make a buck.
“Like everyone else,” the lawyer recalled, “when I first met Stephanie Smith I couldn’t believe she was the wife of a school principal. But she was a decent soul, and I really liked her. She was the kind who always gave you a hug and kiss when coming or going, whether you wanted it or not.”
It seemed that the principal could not get an impartial trial anywhere in the Philadelphia area what with the newspaper coverage of his scandalous secret life. O’Brien wanted at least to win a venue change for the most serious offense, the theft from the St. Davids Sears store, but venue changes were time-consuming.
Stephanie Smith was by then trying to keep her spirits up while her cancer advanced to more critical stages. She still wore her hair teased and sprayed but she’d changed the color to a less garish shade of auburn. And the dying woman even got plastic surgery on her hooked nose during what she knew would be her last year on earth. Possibly the attention of the press was welcomed by Jay Smith’s suffering wife who was in and out of the hospital during short periods of remission.
In the first week of the Jay Smith scandal, she held a press interview and said to reporters, “Hon, you can live with a man for twenty-seven years and not know him. Why, Jay didn’t even let me know he was in jail ’til thirty-six hours after the arrest. I was shocked! I hadn’t seen Jay since Saturday and thought he’d went to army reserves or something. He always would come and go without telling me nothing. It wasn’t unusual not to see him for days at a time.”
Then Stephanie told reporters how she’d met young Jay Smith when he was a student teacher at Chester High School and how, like Jay, she was from a poor local family and how, after they married in 1951, she helped to support him during his university years, and waited and worked while he was overseas in Korea as an army officer.