In fact, when the searchers arrived she was chattier than they’d ever seen her. She and Jack Holtz started talking about his hobby of cooking and Sue thought he was sort of an attractive guy when you got to know him.
Sue helped them search, and along the way thought she might as well tell them a few things she’d never told them. She talked about seeing the stack of $100 bills in the file drawer, and how the date coincided pretty well with Susan Reinert’s bogus investment of $25,000. And as long as she was on the subject she added that just before Susan Reinert’s murder she’d seen a will with Bill Bradfield named as beneficiary.
And Sue Myers said, “Wait’ll you see these letters. Are they ever sickening!”
The boys got handed some Shelly letters wherein the teenager told him that he’d just have to learn to dance before they got married. And then Sue helped them locate some Rachel letters written in that tiny, precise script. For good measure, Sue threw in some Susan Reinert letters that Bill Bradfield had squirreled away.
Sue told them that she wished she’d saved his jogging diary because in it he once wrote that he’d like to kill Susan Reinert, but added that at the time she had thought it was overstatement.
Between exchanging recipes with Jack Holtz and getting it all off her chest, she was really starting to like these guys. Sue told them how Bill Bradfield sometimes made rough drafts of important letters, and voilà! they found a lulu of a rough draft. The message was written in cipher and became known to task force members as the “my danger conspiracy” letter.
It was a most pleasant day for all concerned. They had lots of little snippets and treasures to link Bill Bradfield and all his friends in a conspiracy of deceit and perjury. A case against him for stealing Susan Reinerts investment was starting to look awfully good.
So Sue Myers had climbed aboard the government bus, along with Vince Valaitis and Chris Pappas. She had a pretty swell time talking chicken cordon bleu with Jack Holtz. And she grew certain that Joe VanNort’s partner, who was seven years younger than she, was a downright flirt.
She used to get mad when Joe VanNort referred to “Bradfield.” Shed always say, “It’s Mister Bradfield.” But now she was calling them all by their first names.
Everyone was in such a great mood that Joe VanNort’s lopsided grin almost straightened itself out.
The “my danger conspiracy” letter was sent to the FBI for a cryptanalyst to examine and explain in the event they ever got to court. A code generally deals with words or phrases, and a cipher works from individual letters with number substitutes. What the cops had was a mess of numbers separated by commas, with several letters interspersed.
They knew from Chris Pappas that the key to the cipher was to be found in the Confucius translation by Ezra Pound, and Sue obligingly provided that tome. On page 12 there were Bill Bradfield’s handwritten numbers beside the lines.
The cops figured this could wow a jury. They’d get the FBI cryptanalyst to do a presentation complete with a quickie course on ciphers, and lots of big blowup charts, and maybe some slides.
It was only to wow a jury, because Bill Bradfield had obligingly written the correct letters in the English language right above each cipher on his rough draft. So every searcher could just sit right down and read the deciphered message for himself. It said:
“Does the FBI know V has it. Has V removed ball and destroyed or better claim whole thing stolen. Then get rid of it. Did I sell it to you. FBI must not get it. Does FBI know you mailed it.”
When the cops got that far they said, wait a minute, the only V in the case was Vince Valaitis. But Vince was riding the bus named Salvation and was tickled to death to be aboard.
Then they compared it to the scenario that Bill Bradfield had penned for Chris Pappas. It was in the same barely coherent style. He’d write in the third person and then switch to the second person or even the first. The V referred to a “her” so they decided that the V was a code within a code, and stood for Rachel. Then it worked as jottings to himself and to her on a rough draft of a message to her.
The garbled message continued:
“Can you think up substitution or substitute saying wait and tell V or have her say it’s stolen. Immunity improbable. My danger conspiracy.”
On the back of the message he’d scribbled “Smith,” then scratched it out and written “P of D.”
The police and the FBI did not have the authority to tap Bill Bradfield’s phones or read his mail. If the message was meant for Rachel, Bill Bradfield could have mailed her a postcard and they’d never have known. He could’ve hired a skywriter to smoke his message over the Harvard campus and they probably wouldn’t have heard of it. Or he could’ve picked up a telephone some evening and called her and told her his fears and said, “Would you please switch typing balls.”
He could’ve done that very easily. But if he had, he wouldn’t have been Bill Bradfield. And perhaps the disciples wouldn’t have remained so steadfast without all the melodrama. Ezra Pound had also loved ideograms.
Matt Mullin got the duty of securing a handwriting exemplar from Bill Bradfield, and during the process, he was asked to identify things they’d found written by him in the Reinert residence.
Among these was Karen’s autograph book with Mickey and Minnie Mouse on the cover. Bill Bradfield had written on one of the first pages. His entry was dated October 25, 1977.
It said: “To Karen, Lorelei-To-Be.” Then there was a good-luck message written in Greek, followed by “From her friend, B. Bradfield.”
Part of the exemplar procedure required him to write the names of everyone connected with the case for further comparison.
When he wrote Karen’s name he said to Matt Mullin, “Karen was a beautiful, gifted child.”
The theory of Susan Reinert being lured away from her home was based on information from her friend at Parents Without Partners. The friend said that Susan had claimed she was going to meet an attorney on Saturday, June 23rd, to “sort out” various legal matters with Bill Bradfield. The cops believed that the night she disappeared, she’d gotten a call from Bill Bradfield saying that they had to meet the attorney that night, and to bring along her will and investment certificate.
This would explain why she’d taken Michael from the cub scout meeting and made him change his baseball shirt, and why she had changed the blouse Ken Reinert had seen on her when she picked up Michael. They were dressing up to meet a lawyer, the cops believed.
If she hadn’t made a photocopy of that certificate, the police would never have known it existed. As to the will, there was the copy retained by her attorney, but it seemed possible that someone else had demanded to see it, and that’s why it was gone.
They turned Bill Bradfields alibi for June 22nd into a state trooper drive-a-thon. Various tests were conducted at different hours of the night and day. During the lightest traffic time it took more than one and a half hours to drive from Shelly’s pal’s house to Susan Reinert’s house where Bill Bradfield had allegedly “lost” Jay Smith in the hailstorm, to his ex-wife’s home in Chester County where he supposedly hung around alone for an hour or two, either inside or outside, depending on his version of the story.
When the FBI contacted Rachel at Harvard she said that she’d bought the typewriter from Bill Bradfield. She gave them a typed exemplar from the machine and this time did it so willingly that they figured she’d switched typing balls.
They weren’t able to match the exemplar with the photocopy of Susan Reinert’s investment. The FBI lab could only say that they’d both been typed by an IBM machine with a Gothic typeface.