When they got down to the casket, they found nothing but the casket. Well, they’d gone this far. They started talking about the possibility of Jay Smith having put the bodies in the freshly dug hole the night before the funeral, and having covered them with a small amount of earth. They might be underneath the coffin.
So the casket got hooked to chains and raised up by the backhoe. It had been a long day in that graveyard by the time they got the casket out of the grave and swinging around in the crisp spring air. Then the chain slipped, and the coffin shifted, and it was like someone dropped ice cubes down their backs that slipped right into their underwear. It was the sound of the resident of that coffin when he did a 360-degree roll.
A couple of cops and a lawyer got cold chills and hot flashes, and queasy tummies. And they were scared that the next of kin might show up while they were tossing the loved one around like Chinese acrobats.
They dropped that guy back in the ground and got the hell out of that graveyard before nightfall.
By December, Ray Martray was sounding desperate enough on the recorded telephone calls to risk alarming Jay Smith by pushing him into an incriminating statement.
He said, “I’ll tell you, Jay, I mean you remember what I told you before about Bradfield?”
“Yeah.”
“If he’s talking, if he’s telling them something, bingo!”
“Yeah, but there’s nothing he can tell them.”
“The finger, I’m telling you the finger is pointing at that man.”
“Yeah, but there’s nothing he can say. I mean, he’ll have to make up something and when they check it, it’ll be false. See, everything he said about me was false. And I’m certain they know I wasn’t involved. You know what I mean?”
Frustrated again, Martray turned the conversation to a little escape talk, featuring the code words Harry Gibson.
“You still got the code?” he asked.
“Oh yeah.”
“Okay, I didn’t know if you remembered it.”
“Harry, right?”
“Yeah, how’s Harry doing?”
“Good. He really is. I got a letter from him. He’s at Arizona State.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“He’s a barber out there.”
General John Eisenhower was right. His former colonel had a sardonic sense of humor.
Jack Holtz had been able to send his son Jason to visit the boy’s mother in Florida that year. And with the investigation slowing to a standstill he’d been able to spend more time with his son. They pumped iron together and went to Penn State football games. He was starting to think that the most significant event of the year was that his hair turned gray.
But then something happened. When it looked as though they might close the store, Raymond Martray was successful in having his perjury conviction overturned.
Jay Smith couldn’t have been more delighted. Martray was no longer a convicted perjurer. Martray could now testify for him that David Rucker of the hockey helmet had confessed to the attempted theft at the Sears store at Neshaminy Mall. Jay Smith had already served his time on the St. Davids theft.
The irony was that now Raymond Martray could also testify against Jay Smith. Jack Holtz knew that Joe VanNort would have loved that one.
After the New Year, Jay Smith was not only still repeating the Bill Bradfield frameup routine, he was turning author.
In a telephone conversation to Martray, he said, “See, Bradfield said that this woman Reinert was a whore. He said that she was a bad person. He said that she went out with kooks. She was kinky, you know? He said she smelled bad. And then he said these things about me.
“They found out the things he said about her weren’t true and he robbed her of twenty-five thousand dollars, and now I think they’ve seen that the things he said about me weren’t true. I’ve got a pretty good idea what was on his mind in trying to set me up. This is the kind of thing I hope I’m able to write about in the future.”
The cops wondered if he threw that last part in just in case any potential publishers or literary agents were listening. They were getting sick of it. They gave Martray a script for the next call, and said it was now or never.
The last of the recorded telephone conversations came on February 3, 1985. It started out as usual.
Jay Smith said, “Good evening, Mister Martray.”
Raymond Martray said, “Good evening, Mister Smith.”
But when Jay Smith asked, “How you doing?” Raymond Martray answered, “Well, not so good.”
“What’s up?”
“We got a few problems.”
“Okay.”
“Some people came to pay me a visit.”
“Who’s that?”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know.”
“Holtz and DeSantis.”
“Mmm.”
“I tried to do like you told me, Jay. I took notes after they left.”
“Sure.”
“I remembered them from court. That’s how I knew who it was.”
“Sure.”
“I went through the whole routine. Made ’em show I.D. and all. But they called me by my number. They said, ‘Are you P-3933, Raymond Martray, and were you housed with Jay Smith at Dallas?’ ”
“Right.”
“Then they go, ‘Did you ever, uh, hear of, uh, the Reinert murders?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Then he says, ‘What did Smith tell you about the Reinert case?’ And I said, ‘Smith said he didn’t have anything to do with it.’ ”
But Jay Smith didn’t sound too worried. He said, “There’s not much you can do. I’ve been through six years of this stuff. I don’t expect it’ll ever end, you know.”
And then after talking about reporting the cops’ visit to private investigator Russell Kolins, Raymond Martray followed his script designed to drag Jay Smith into the courtroom by the tail.
He asked, “What if Holtz and DeSantis come back to me?”
Jay Smith paused for a second and said, “Tell them that you want to talk to them openly, but you want a videotape and somebody representing Jay Smith present.”
“Okay, what if they ask me to take a lie detector?”
“Well, say you’ll take a lie detector, but you don’t want to take a lie detector unless you consult with someone from the other side.”
“Okay, how do I handle it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I mean, you know, we went over that, but …”
“It’s certainly in order.”
And then Raymond Martray said, “Jay, I’m … I’m worried about the big question. You know, ‘Did Smith tell you he did it?’ ”
“What I’ll do is this: then I’ll have my people tell them that you’re not taking any lie detector test.”
“I gotcha!” said Raymond Martray.
“See, you’re not going to do anything unless it’s consulted with Jay Smith’s lawyer.”
And that was as close as they were ever to get to an incriminating statement from Dr. Jay C. Smith.
They went over old leads and telephoned old witnesses. Rick Guida worried about Mary Gove, the next-door neighbor of Susan Reinert, and Grace Gilmore, the buyer of Jay Smith’s house. He needed them and they weren’t getting any younger.
“It’s never going to get any better,” Rick Guida said in March. “Let’s go to the grand jury in June. Let’s arrest Jay Smith for murder.”
The last irony that Joe VanNort would have liked is that Jack Holtz went to Dallas prison to arrest Jay Smith on June 25, 1985, six years to the day since he’d found the body of Susan Reinert in the Host Inn parking lot and begun his investigation.
“This is an anniversary,” he told the former educator when he walked into his cell.
The cell of Dr. Jay C. Smith contained more files than he’d possessed as a school principal. There were shelves full of books and dozens of boxes containing thousands of documents and articles and notes, pertaining not just to his own affairs, but to those of the many other inmates who came to him for legal work.