They had a lot in common, really. Neither was a talker, but Holtz was much quieter and very shy. VanNort got to the point without subtlety when he had something to say. They both liked hunting in the Pennsylvania mountains, although Jack Holtz was happy just to be in the woods, whether he bagged a pheasant or not. He never cared about trophies.
When it came to homicide investigation each had a perfectionist streak that would keep him awake worrying about details. During a stressful investigation the older man chain-smoked Marlboros, lighting each one with the butt of the last. The younger dipped snuff and called himself a “country boy” because of his admittedly disgusting habit. Holtz used to make other investigators queasy with his gum load of snuff and the paper cup or Coke bottle or tin can he used for a spittoon.
The quality they shared that was most telling as far as their professional life was concerned was evident in their faces: Joe VanNort with that cynical lopsided grin, Jack Holtz with his aviator eyeglasses attached so snugly to his face that the metal rims cut into his cheeks when he smiled. And that wasn’t too often, not in public during a homicide investigation. Even more than Joe VanNort, Jack Holtz took his job very seriously, and was obsessively self-controlled. Those glasses weren’t about to fall off or even slip down.
Jack Holtz arrived at the Host Inn two hours after the body was discovered. The first thing he noted was that the 1978 Plymouth Horizon was parked in the third row, just a few spaces east of the main entrance. And what with somebody leaving the hatchback open, somebody who was probably the suspicious telephone caller named “Larry Brown,” it was apparent that the killer had done everything but light flares to call attention to the body. And that never happened in ordinary homicides.
Before and after the corpse that used to be Susan Reinert was removed to Osteopathic General Hospital in Harrisburg, Holtz took a close look at it. There were abrasions and bruises on both forearms. There was dried blood in the mouth and nose. There were discolored bruises around the right eye. There were abrasions behind both knees, behind the neck, and on the ankle. There were bruises on the buttocks and between the shoulder blades.
Jack Holtz learned from the cops at the scene that the registered owner of the car was Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore, but no one knew if she was this victim. There was no clothing, no purse, no keys.
Dew covered the car uniformly and Holtz could clearly see the swipes across the roof by the driver’s door, obviously intended to wipe any fingerprints from that side of the car. Looking closer he saw that everything around the driver’s side of the car had been wiped. And instead of just wiping down the rearview mirror, the suspect had removed it. Jack Holtz doubted that they’d get any relevant latent prints.
There wasn’t much in the car that seemed particularly helpful. There was a pamphlet from the First Presbyterian Church of Ardmore. There was a deck of playing cards, and some soft-drink containers and hamburger wrappers and a cub scout pamphlet.
They found some notes, a road map, a hairbrush, some candy wrappers, a matchbook from a Carlisle motel and a girl’s barrette. There were three stuffed animals: a lion, a duck and a monkey.
There were a couple of items that seemed not to belong in a car with stuffed animals and church pamphlets: there was a rubber dildo under the front seat. And beneath the body in the trunk was a brand-new blue comb and on it was inscribed in white: 79th USARCOM, along with an insignia of the cross of Lorraine.
Also beneath the victim was a green plastic trash bag.
While Susan Reinert’s body was being taken to the hospital for the autopsy, Jay Smith was only ten minutes away in the Dauphin County Courthouse in Harrisburg for sentencing on weapons and drug and stolen-property charges.
Jay Smith was twenty minutes late that morning and apologized to the judge. He was impassive as he stood to accept the sentence of the court. He got two to five years in the state correctional institution at Dallas, Pennsylvania.
When the judge had finished, Dr. Jay C. Smith simply flipped his car keys to his lawyer, John O’Brien, and said, “My car’s in the lot.”
And that was that. Jay Smith was taken from the courtroom to begin serving his sentence and to await court dates for the other criminal matters.
Jay Smith didn’t appear to notice the gray-haired couple in the courtroom who never missed a day when he was scheduled to appear-the couple still searching for a clue to the whereabouts of their missing son, Edward, and his wife, Stephanie Smith Hunsberger.
The county had a new coroner who refused Joe VanNort’s request for an experienced forensic pathologist. The doctor who did the autopsy took samples of pubic and head hair, both pulled and cut. He took scrapings of the nails and vaginal swabs and blood samples.
When the pathologist put the ultraviolet light on Susan Reinerts dark brown hair, some half-dozen tiny red fibers not visible to the naked eye “lit up like a Christmas tree,” in his words. And he found a blue fiber in the hair of her temple and another blue fiber behind a knee. The pathologist found a white sticky substance, probably from adhesive tape, stuck to her mouth, hair, and around her nose.
A corporal from Troop H took fingerprints, and using silver nitrate, rolled an index card on her back. He found some ridge detail on the flesh of Susan Reinert but it wasn’t promising. It was a double-loop whorl pattern, but unfortunately, the pathologist had the same pattern on his right thumb.
The deceased was found to measure five feet two inches in height and to weigh just one hundred pounds. There was an absence of rigor. There was post-mortem lividity producing bluish discoloration where the blood had obeyed the law of gravity. There was fixed lividity on the front and the back so that the pathologist reckoned she’d lain about eight hours on each side after death.
Since rigidity from rigor mortis lasts about twenty-four hours, the secondary flacidity found in the body of Susan Reinert, plus the lividity and other objective signs, allowed the pathologist to make a ballpark guess that she’d died late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning.
The abrasions on the back looked to the doctor like marks from the links of a chain. He checked her entire body for any sign of an intravenous injection, but could find no needle mark, though a single needle mark could easily be lost in the many contusions on that body.
When Jack Holtz asked the pathologist if he could take a guess as to cause of death, the doctor said, “Asphyxiation.” Which wasn’t super-helpful in that he could see that she’d stopped breathing. And that she hadn’t been shot, stabbed, slugged, and probably hadn’t been strangled. But that’s all Holtz got until the lab reports came back to tell them whether something other than smothering had caused the shutdown in respiratory functions.
By Monday evening the state police investigators had contacted neighbors and friends of Susan Reinert and were reasonably sure by their description of her that the body in the morgue was Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore. Through information from her friends they’d called Ken Reinert and asked him to come to Harrisburg to make a positive identification.
To Joe VanNort, any husband, even an ex-husband, is always a prime suspect. Ken Reinert reacted pretty much as one would expect after receiving the shocking news. He was saddened, confused, disbelieving, apprehensive. After he identified the body of his ex-wife, Jack Holtz took him out for some coffee. He was in the company of the state police for two hours answering questions and trying to adjust to the shock of violent death.