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 Smiths 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 turn 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 Bradfields 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. Reinert’s 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 mother’s 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 Reinert’s 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.
The 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 editoriaclass="underline"
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?”