He’d gotten a sentence of six to twenty years for armed robbery and had gotten out in five. He was living in a halfway house when the cops had a secret meeting with him at the Holiday Inn in Scranton.
He was a friend of Martray’s, and had been a passing acquaintance of Jay Smiths while Martray was still in prison. Jay Smith helped Montione too with his legal work. Dr. Jay, according to Montione, never turned down any of the cons who needed legal assistance. They started getting close after Martray got out.
One day, Jay Smith had some bad feelings and wanted to talk about them. He told Charlie Montione that someone named Bradfield had just been arrested for the murder of a woman and her two children and was attempting to implicate him in the murders. If Bradfield was successful and got Jay Smith in trouble, there’d be an escape with some help from Raymond Martray. And hopefully from his pal Charlie, if he was on the outside by then.
According to Montione, Jay Smith had three plans. One entailed Montione and Ray Martray coming to see him on visiting day. They were to enter the canteen where visitors can get cooked food. They were then to do a “DIC,” which Montione explained was Jay Smith lingo for “disarm, immobilize and cover.”
His second plan was to wait for his court appearance and to escape from the prison on Camp Hill where the transporting officers have to take off their guns to go inside. This plan involved a shootout: Charlie and Ray would come in like Bonnie and Clyde and shoot out tires, then take the transporting officers as hostages and kill them later. If Jay was arrested for murder, the officers would be a couple of state police investigators named Holtz and DeSantis, Montione was told.
The third plan involved a breakout from the Dauphin County Courthouse itself, where prisoners are housed in the basement cells while awaiting court.
And Jay Smith thought he should also bump off the deputy warden at Dallas because he figured this guy was telling the cops every move he made. Jay Smith made a lot of gangsterish plans while daydreaming in the yard.
According to Montione, Jay Smith gave him a lecture on murder that sounded a lot like the ones he’d allegedly given to Bill Bradfield. He said that you should use drug injections to overdose your victims. And that it was best to let a body lie around for a couple of days so the blood could coagulate before you started cutting it up and disposing of the parts in different places. He said the small parts fit nicely in drums or buckets and you could weigh the pieces down with chains before dumping them in rivers or lakes.
Montione claimed that Jay Smith had another talk with him at the end of October, telling him that Bill Bradfield had been convicted. He went over an escape plan in more detail. Since it was hunting season the guards were often set out on the road to watch for trespassers, and so it might be a great time to vanish.
But he was very mad at Bill Bradfield that day and allegedly told Montione that nearly five years had passed and in only two more years Susan Reinert would have been declared legally dead.
According to Montione, Jay Smith said, “We would have been okay.” And that Bradfields greed in making her body appear had caused all these problems.
Furthermore, he was furious that Bill Bradfield was trying to set him up. He said he should have taken care of Bill Bradfield a long time ago. As to the missing children, he said that he wasn’t worried about Bill Bradfield making a deal with police because Bradfield didn’t know where the bodies were.
And then, Montione claimed that Jay Smith had back-pedaled and began making the same sort of self-serving statements that the task force was so familiar with in his conversations with Martray. Jay Smith later told Montione that he believed that the children’s murder had been a “mistake,” that they shouldn’t have been present. But that sometimes when you’re dealing with large sums of money you have to do such things.
“What would you do if there were witnesses?” was how it was put, according to Montione.
Jay Smith offered a theory to Montione that Bill Bradfield had probably had someone call Susan Reinert on the evening she disappeared to say that he’d been in a bad accident and was dying. That way she would probably just drop everything and rush out of the house without leaving a note for anyone.
Montione said that all these theories were too complicated for him, so on one occasion he’d just asked Jay Smith directly if he’d killed Susan Reinert and the kids. Dr. Jay didn’t answer.
“He only smirked,” according to Montione.
Montione said that he’d performed an unusual service for the former educator. He said that Jay Smith wanted him to look through Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler and find him a picture of a naked woman “lying on her side with her knees pulled up and her cunt closed.”
He was very particular about it.
So Montione searched lots of back issues that he traded around with other cons, and Jay Smith rejected several.
He kept saying, “No, no, that’s not it.”
Finally Montione came up with the August, 1983, issue of Penthouse and Jay Smith looked through it until he got to page 97, and said, “That’s it. That’s the one.”
Jack Holtz acquired that issue of Penthouse. Other than lying on the wrong side, the model was posed very similarly to Susan Reinert on the day she was found in the luggage compartment.
Holtz recalled the psychological profile he’d been given in 1980 suggesting that the killer might retain something from the crime so that he could relive the moment.
After the Bill Bradfield murder trial began getting big write-ups implicating Jay Smith, Montione said that Jay Smith was seen standing naked in his cell staring at the wall. And screaming.
Jay Smith was also seen lying in the yard like a dead man with a newspaper over his face. An old con shuffled by, picked up the newspaper and said, “You can’t hide under that paper, Jay.”
In 1984, they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. They had Montione, but what he had to say wasn’t enough. They had Martray, but he was a convicted perjurer. They actually thought about shutting down the operation.
Then they decided they ought to do some more excavation on the basis of what Montione had told them.
In a conversation, Jay Smith had said that a way to dispose of bodies is to find a freshly dug grave and drop the bodies in on top. Jack Holtz started thinking about the call Bill Bradfield had made to someone when they’d stopped at the pay phone in Valley Forge Park upon their return from Cape May on June 25, 1979. He checked with local cemeteries and discovered that there had been a man buried on June 23rd near Valley Forge.
On a cool spring day that was just perfect for gravedigging, the cops and Rick Guida and an operator with a backhoe were out there in a cemetery in their digging duds. It was one of the more macabre moments in a thoroughly macabre investigation.
They’d received permission from the next of kin of the deceased, and so they started tearing up the grave site. As the day wore on and they’d exhausted all their Boris Karloff jokes, they were getting tired and cranky because they’d found nothing. Not even the casket.
They dug six feet, seven feet, and finally, at eight feet, they’d used up all the one-liners about discovering a table for eight with chopsticks.
Jack Holtz had to get down there, and with a fancy Japanese probing device they’d acquired for the purpose, he started fishing around for coffins. He found one, all right. They’d missed the actual grave by six inches.
They were really cranky by the time they filled in an eight-foot grave and started digging a new one. For Rick Guida it was a five-pack dig. He had to send out for more cigarettes.