Lou DeSantis was from Philly, so he slept at home most of the time. DeSantis had gotten involved with the task force in the first place because he’d been available when the call came to pick up Ken Reinert in Philadelphia and drive him to Harrisburg to identify the body of his ex-wife.
So far, the investigation hadn’t brought any hardship for DeSantis, but he wasn’t fond of hearing Jack Holtz talk about relocating the task force to Harrisburg, where he’d be the one living in motels.
But that’s what happened in April. And now it was a mini-task force. It included Jack Holtz, Lou DeSantis and Deputy Attorney General Rick Guida. And that was all there would be until the end. The bunch of bananas was down to three and they were getting overripe. Jack Holtz couldn’t even count his gray hairs anymore, but at least he was again living with his son. He celebrated by redecorating. That meant buying another duck.
When asked why he had so many ducks, he looked surprised, as though the answer was obvious: they didn’t want flowers.
The move to Harrisburg coincided with another event that would add hundreds of man-hours to the already mammoth investigation. Jay Smith’s work had been successful. Raymond Martray got released from prison on $10,000 bail, pending appeal.
While he was free, Martray again contacted Jack Holtz and Lou DeSantis who went to meet him at his father’s house. Martray said that Jay Smith wanted him to fake a story that Joe VanNort had offered Martray a deal to frame Jay Smith. He also said that Jay Smith wanted to kill a deputy sheriff and wanted to poison the water supply at Dallas, and all of this had to do with escape plots if he got indicted for murder. Dr. Jay still had the Reinert murder very much on his mind, according to Martray.
Before they’d left the case, the FBI had administered a lie detector test to Raymond Martray. The polygraph operator said he was possibly deceptive. After his release from prison, the cops administered another. He passed on the “key questions.” Though Joe VanNort had been a polygraph operator, Jack Holtz seldom used the machine on anyone.
“It’s a good tool, but,” was his opinion of lie detectors.
Jack Holtz decided that if half of what Martray said was accurate it was time to take a stab at the prince of darkness. He and Rick Guida asked Martray if he’d agree to telephone monitoring, and he signed a consent form in the presence of his lawyer.
The state police secured a telephone number and post office box for Raymond Martray and intercepted all letters from Jay Smith. The letters from prison would always specify when Dr. Jay was going to place a phone call, since all outgoing calls had to be made collect. Martray was then to permit his phone call to be taped. There were dozens of such calls received and recorded by the state police during the next three years.
It was clear from the very first recorded telephone conversation that it was mentor and disciple all over again. Ray Martray sounded as eager to please as Chris Pappas and Vince Valaitis had been.
The calls were full of yard talk and legal talk because Jay Smith was busy with petitions of various kinds for other cons, including a mutual friend of theirs named Charles Montione. There was lots of escape talk with Raymond Martray pretending that he’d checked all the places that his mentor had asked him to, including the courthouse in Harrisburg, in case the state cops ever nailed him with an indictment in the Reinert murder.
Most of the conversations were right out of Cagney and Bogart gangster epics. The cops had to endure endless jailhouse fantasies.
“I walked all around the building trying to figure out which way they’d bring you in and out,” Martray told him on one of the early calls.
“What you gotta do is go up and down those side steps in the courtrooms,” Jay Smith informed him.
“I already did that. I didn’t use the elevator at all.”
“Right, but if you go all the way down to the basement where they sell the coffee, they bring you in through that side door. The entrance is to the rear.”
“Uh huh.”
“When they come in there, they’re by themselves. Someone could put a gun on them and take their guns away. You could easily get a guy out of there.”
“Okay. I’ll maybe check that out again the next time I’m down that way.”
And then there were the conversations that drove the cops and Rick Guida absolutely bonkers because Jay Smith would say something that should be followed by an incriminating remark, but he’d just back off.
Raymond Martray claimed that he’d been taught by his mentor that “self-serving statements” should always be tossed right in the midst of incriminating statements. Just in case there were electronic eavesdropping devices around.
For example, in one conversation, Jay Smith said, “My defense is going to be that I had nothing to do with the Reinert murder. They can’t prove anything because I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
And Raymond Martray, sounding as frustrated as the cops, asked, “Is there anybody close there, or something?”
“Is anybody what?”
“Anybody close to you, or anything there?”
“No.”
“ ’Cause I want to … you think there’s anything on these phones, or what?”
“Oh well, I think that if anything … yeah, I think we always have to be careful.”
“Yeah, okay. I couldn’t understand what was going on,” Martray said.
All of these contradictions were repeatedly attributed to the “self-serving” explanation. But the cops were starting to imply that maybe Martray had never been told diddly regarding the Reinert murder. And that he was trying to use the cops to influence the court during his appeals.
When Martray once again took the subject from escape directly to the Reinert murder, Jay Smith said, “Remember, I got a lot of things going for me. One, the woman who bought my house moved into it on the day that Reinert disappeared, and she was there with me, you know what I mean?”
“Uh huh.”
“Second, I had my daughter, whose birthday it was, there with me. See, we were moving out of the house.”
“Uh huh.”
Well, that was demonstrably false. Jack Holtz could prove that Grace Gilmore had not been with him, nor had his daughter Sheri. So at least Raymond Martray was correct when he said that Jay Smith would make self-serving statements that were downright lies whenever he felt there might be eavesdroppers.
And the cops became convinced that they should keep recording the calls until Jay Smith gave them enough to put him in the electric chair. At least he was talking a lot about escapes if he got indicted for murder. And escape tended to show a consciousness of guilt.
One call introduced Harry Gibson.
“If I mention the name Harry Gibson,” Jay Smith said to his bogus disciple, “then we’re starting to think about an escape.”
“Okay. We don’t have to worry about that unless there’s an indictment coming.”
“Remember, Ray, this place is confused now. It’s not like when they had it organized. You could come in to visit with a long pair of pants, and inside a pair of thin pants. So look around for very thin pants and what we would do is change and I’d go out with some visitor.”
During one of the more important calls, Jay Smith started fantasizing about his budding literary career. He was going to write a book called The Valley Forge Murders.
In that call, he said, “And just suppose I’m lucky and this book gets off? Then we’ve got money without any kind of problem. A lot of money.”
“In the same respect,” Martray answered, “what happens if they nail you for Reinert? Then whadda we do?”
“Well …”
“Where am I gonna be at?”