“We were concerned not only with Doctor Smith, but with people in the drug world because of his daughter and so forth. And …”
“Mister Bradfield, let me interrupt you for just a second. You’re telling me about your fears. I’m asking why you needed a silencer.”
“Because I wanted to do more than simply disable him. I wanted after that to be able to call Chris, and for Chris and me to decide where we would go and take Doctor Smith.”
“Were you planning on murdering him?”
“We talked about it. Chris and I had talked about it.”
“If you had a plan to murder him and he threatened you with a weapon, why didn’t you just finish him off right there in self-defense and be done with it? Were you going to take him to a hospital? Why did you get a silencer so that no one would come around? Tell me that.”
“We didn’t know what the best plan would be. We were afraid if I had to produce the weapon quickly and tell him not to move, disable him, tie him up or whatever, and call Chris … If I produced a weapon, and if he’d come at me and I had to use it, and if it were an unsilenced.357 magnum, and we were anywhere within earshot of people, all options as to what we could do after that would then be closed. People would hear and they would rush to see us.”
And so it went. The jury, Jack Holtz noted during all of this, was slack-jawed, and he was hoping they weren’t getting fuzzy like Chris Pappas used to get. He was relieved when they hoisted their chins back up onto their faces.
Bill Bradfield testified that he had believed Dr. Jay Smith to be deranged and dangerous, but still, he was morally obligated to testify for him as an alibi witness in the one crime he had not committed. All things considered, Bill Bradfield didn’t tell it much differently than it was told by Chris Pappas, Vince Valaitis, Sue Myers and Shelly. If the disciples had believed, Bill Bradfield obviously felt that the jury would believe.
As to the neighbors of Susan Reinert seeing his car parked in front of her house at all hours, he said that he would park his car and leave it there to deter Dr. Jay Smith from creepy-crawling her house.
“Did you move your car occasionally?” the prosecutor asked.
“During the four- or five-month period I parked my VW quite often in front of Susan Reinert’s house.”
“Overnight?”
“Yes, for days and nights.”
“How did you get home?”
“I took my Cadillac to school.”
“But how did you get the Volkswagen to Susan Reinerts house?”
“Susan Reinert would come in with a lady teacher and then she would drive the Cadillac. And I would drive the VW to her house.”
“And then you would get in your red Cadillac and go home?”
“Or wherever I was going.”
“Then you must have told Susan Reinert why you were doing this?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Then you told her that Jay C. Smith was after her, and you were parking the car in front of her house as a deterrent, is that what you’re telling us?”
“No. I told her that parking at my apartment was very crowded, which it was.”
“What about the testimony of the neighbors who saw you coming out of the house at seven in the morning? Were they mistaken?”
“No, there were times, particularly on Saturdays, when I would come by very early to see Susan before I went to my eight A.M. Greek class.”
“But they saw you doing it during the week.”
“They’re mistaken.”
“That brings me to Mary Gove. Mrs. Gove said that on at least three occasions a week, she would see your car there at times when she would get up at five in the morning, and then when she’d go to work at seven-thirty your car would be gone. Was she mistaken?”
“It could have happened a couple of times.”
“Are you saying that there were occasions when you left Susan Reinerts house very late, say around midnight, and came back at five A.M.?”
“There were many times that I stayed late and there were many times that I went over early in the morning. And I think it would be easy for Mrs. Gove to feel that it happened all at once. I was taking a course at Villanova in Greek at eight o’clock in the morning and I would try, when I could, to come before class and sometimes I came early enough to make breakfast.”
“You made breakfast for them? You would drive all the way over to Susan Reinerts house early in the morning on Saturday just to have breakfast with the kids?”
“Yes.”
“Can you explain your comment to Sharon Lee when she called you on the phone and you said, ‘Oh, yes, how old were the children?’ ”
“I knew that Karen and Michael were grade-school children but I didn’t know what age. I really didn’t know them that well.”
“Why did you use the word ‘were’? Why did you refer to the children in the past tense on June twenty-sixth, 1979?”
“The assumption was that something awful had happened to the children.”
One clever bit of business that Rick Guida conceived was to subpoena the court reporter and prosecutor who’d been at the Jay Smith trial of May 30, 1979, when Bill Bradfield had been an alibi witness.
Guida staged a reenactment of that testimony. He played the part of Jay Smith’s attorney, and on cross-examination he played the part of prosecutor Jackson M. Stewart, Jr.
Stewart himself played the role of William Bradfield and with each of the performers holding a certified copy of the transcript of that proceeding, they reenacted Bill Bradfields alibi testimony for this jury, just as it had happened then, without editorial comment.
This was a very effective piece of lawyering. The testimony didn’t sound any more believable coming from Jackson Stewart’s lips than it had from Bill Bradfields back in 1979. This jury got a very good idea of what that alibi tetimony had been all about and what it meant to this trial.
One of the scores of witnesses against William Bradfield was Special Agent Matt Mullin of the FBI. While he was waiting to testify, he walked up to Jack Holtz and said that he’d been wrong with Joe VanNort, and that the arrest of Shelly had helped turn the case around.
Jack Holtz thought that was a decent thing to say and told him so. He said that Joe would’ve appreciated it.
By far, the saddest testimony in the William Bradfield murder case was given by Ken Reinert and his mother.
Once when Florence and John Reinert were on vacation in Vermont they’d seen a boy who resembled their grandson Michael. They’d tried to follow his school bus. They’d reported it to the FBI.
They were still unable to celebrate Christmas.
When Ken Reinert had first read in the newspapers that a murder charge was being filed, he was as happy as he’d been in four years. Until he saw that three murder charges were being filed. He’d called the state police in tears.
He said, “But you can’t file three murder charges! Not three murder charges!”
Just before that time, in a newspaper interview Ken Reinert had said, “I’m optimistic that the children are still alive. I know there’re people in the world who murder children, but I can’t really believe that anyone would kill these children. Not these children.”
It wasn’t until the murder trial in 1983 that Ken, Florence and John Reinert were able to describe the children in the past tense. The children were no more. It had been decreed by the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
24
By the time the fourteen-day trial was concluding, Rick Guida was up to five packs of cigarettes a day and down fifteen pounds in body weight. But Josh Lock was in worse shape. The case had consumed him and he was near collapse, by his own assessment.
Lock felt that toward the end he was too exhausted to respond quickly enough to Guida, but the court record doesn’t support the self-doubt. What was very hard to respond to was being offered from the lips of William Bradfield as his explanation for wills and insurance and silencers, and murder schemes against Susan Reinert by Jay Smith.