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.
12
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 face. 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 husband’s 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 Stephanie’s 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 husband’s 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 Mothers 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 Brink’s. 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.”