Someone told her that if they ever made a movie about the Reinert murder case maybe Jane Fonda would play her part. That lifted her spirits.
22
One of thousands of contacts made by the Reinert task force came by way of a registered letter to Joe VanNort. The writer of the letter was Raymond Martray, an inmate of the state correctional institution at Dallas, who claimed to be a friend of inmate Jay C. Smith.
The writer said that he could not talk at Dallas but if a short transfer could be arranged he’d tell them what was on his mind. He’d sent a similar letter to the FBI, but had gotten no response.
He was transferred for two weeks to the state prison at Pittsburgh and was taken by VanNort and Holtz to the Holiday Inn in Uniontown where they held a short meeting.
Martray was a thirty-seven-year-old ex-cop from Connellsville, Pennsylvania, who was serving a prison sentence for perjury and burglaries, stemming from an arrest by state police while he was still a policeman in Connellsville. He’d been in Dallas prison since 1979 and didn’t go around bragging that he’d been a cop, because former lawmen are only a little more popular in the prison yard than child murderers, or “baby killers” as the cons refer to them.
Ex-cops and baby killers pick their friends carefully. Raymond Martray was one of the first inmates that Jay Smith met on the day of his arrival at Dallas. The property room officer asked Martray to show Jay Smith around because he was being put in F Block where Martray also lived.
Martray and Jay Smith had only a nodding acquaintance for about six months because the former educator seemed wary of everyone. Martray was about as tall as Jay Smith, but huskier and much younger. Yet Martray told the cops that he was afraid of the former educator.
Martray said that he’d been asked by Jay Smith to alter a property record to read that his clothes had not been sent to his brother, but were still at Dallas. This, according to Martray, was because Dr. Jay feared that the clothing might contain “forensic evidence” of an unspecified kind, if the cops should search his brothers house and find it.
VanNort and Holtz weren’t all that impressed with his information. After all, the Reinert murder had gotten lots of publicity and through his friendship with Jay Smith, Martray would know quite a bit about the investigation. Besides, Martray was serving three and a half to seven years on his perjury conviction and in Pennsylvania a person convicted of perjury can’t be a commonwealth witness in another criminal case, so anything he might give them would be tainted.
Before they left him, Martray said that both his perjury and burglary convictions stood a good chance of being reversed on appeal, and if his perjury conviction was overturned, he could then give testimony against the former educator. And the legal counsel who had framed the appeal for Raymond Martray was none other than Jay Smith, jailhouse lawyer.
That had such a nice touch of irony that Joe VanNort gave him their phone number and said to call collect if he got anything good from Dr. Jay. And Martray was transferred back to Dallas.
The second visit with Raymond Martray took place in September after he was transferred to Fayette County Prison where he was housed during his appeal. VanNort and Holtz took Martray to a hotel in Uniontown for a long private conversation. This time it was much more interesting. Martray told the cops that while he was being brought back to Dallas after their meeting in April, he had seized the occasion to be of tremendous service to Jay Smith.
It seems that Dr. Jay had told Martray to watch for an inmate named David Rucker who might shuffle into his life during his prison travels. Jay Smith said Rucker had been an armored-car robber with an M.O. similar to the one he’d been convicted of using, and Jay Smith had not given up hope for a successful appeal on at least one of the Sears convictions.
He described David Rucker to Martray, but he needn’t have gone into detail. When Martray got on the prison van that day he was certain that the con sitting behind him was either Wayne Gretzky or David Rucker. The inmate was wearing a hockey helmet.
Rucker had to spend the rest of his life helmeted because he fell down a lot. The reason he fell down was that when the police had captured him he didn’t want to go back to jail and had stuck his gun in his mouth and tried to see how many times he could pull the trigger. He managed it once, but botched the job. He had a horseshoe scar on his face and a brain like a milk cow. He just did as he was told and tottered through life. As Martray put it, “He was a very mellow individual.”
So David Rucker just sat there like a kindergartner on a school bus and grinned obligingly during a long conversation with Raymond Martray. Another inmate on the bus and a prison guard witnessed the conversation, but did not hear it.
So Martray got to run to Jay Smith with the great news that not only had he met Rucker but a guard had seen him talking to Rucker. Jay Smith had suddenly gotten himself another alibi witness. Martray was asked to say that Rucker had confessed to him that he’d been the actual armored-car courier at the Sears store.
Jay Smith really started working hard on Ray Martray’s perjury conviction, so that Martray could testify in a court of law. And then, as luck would have it, David Rucker got hit with one too many hockey pucks, as it were, and expired. So he wasn’t around to refute the phony confession that he’d never made in the first place.
Well, it wasn’t the most promising basis for overturning Dr. Jay’s conviction, but jailhouse lawyers have nothing but time. Ray Martray had taken Bill Bradfields place as Jay Smith’s favorite alibi witness.
Jay Smith and Martray became constant buddies that summer. Jay Smith hired a private investigator named Russell Kolins to take a sworn statement from Martray in the presence of a stenographer. But before that could be done, Jay Smith had to prepare Martray for the interview so that Kolins would believe in him completely, along with the authorities later.
He insisted on giving Martray a “stress test” in case the Kolins affidavit resulted in his being hooked up to a polygraph. He took Martray up into the bleachers in the yard where the cons play ball, and wrapped an electrical cord around Martray’s chest and put paper clips on his fingers. He gave him a play-poly right there with Martray answering various test questions about David Rucker and his own friendship with Jay Smith.
Martray said that a young inmate strolling by the bleachers that afternoon spotted them and did a double take, but you see all sorts of weird things in prison yards, and two grown men playing polygraph with paper clips and extension cords probably wasn’t all that loony.
The upshot was that Ray Martray had in his possession the make-believe polygraph charts and an envelope containing “stress questions” for Russell Kolins. Martray had something else. He had a very incriminating statement to whet the cops’ appetite, but it had taken place in private, and there was no one to corroborate it.
According to Martray, Jay Smith said that Bill Bradfield had asked Dr. Jay to help kill Susan Reinert because she was going to blow the whistle on Bill Bradfield for the perjury at Jay Smiths trial. Moreover, Martray said that he’d asked Jay Smith about the Reinert children and Dr. Jay had volunteered the statement “I took care of it.”
And if that wasn’t enough, on another occasion, also in private, Jay Smith had gotten upset about something when they were discussing the Reinert case, and blurted, “I killed the fucking bitch.”
On Raymond Martray’s make-believe polygraph chart with the typed questions was “Did Jay Smith ever tell you he killed Reinert?”
And “Did Jay Smith ever tell you he was a friend of Bradfield?”