Their search warrant was based on the statements by Charles Montione, especially in regard to the Penthouse magazine of August, 1983, but there was simply too much for Holtz and DeSantis to search.
They hauled all of Jay Smiths files and belongings to the security lieutenant at Dallas prison for safekeeping and transported Jay Smith to Camp Hill where he was housed until his preliminary hearing.
After his arraignment, Holtz and DeSantis were leaving Troop H in Harrisburg with their prisoner when a reporter from a Philadelphia newspaper yelled to Jay Smith, asking if he’d ever heard of Raymond Martray or Charles Montione.
Jay Smith answered that they were inmates, but he’d never spoken to them.
It was just awfully hard for Jay Smith and Bill Bradfield to be truthful, even when it was foolish to lie.
Holtz and DeSantis returned to Dallas prison in July to complete their search.
They seized a letter to Jay Smith’s private investigator Russell Kolins, wherein he outlined his alibi on the murder weekend.
He wrote, “I was with my daughter Sheri. Now this is her birthday so she and I went out to dinner that evening for her birthday. She left me at about ten o’clock. The next day, Saturday, Mrs. Gilmore comes again. She’s working upstairs. She gives me coffee and then goes down to the lower level. So Saturday I’m there with Grace Gilmore.”
It was another link because it totally contradicted what he’d told the FBI in 1979. A written lie is more damaging than a spoken lie that’s subject to the ear of the listener.
They found the Penthouse magazine during that search and other things which had no admissible evidentiary value, but were interesting. Jay Smith had books dealing with serial killer Ted Bundy. He’d underlined the passage in one book that dealt with a murdered woman who’d been struck in the right eye. Just as Susan Reinert had been.
The preliminary hearing for Jay Smith was held on July 30th. A Philadelphia lawyer named Glenn A. Zeitz appeared for Jay Smith and Rick Guida was the prosecutor. The purpose of the hearing was not to establish guilt but to determine if there was sufficient cause to bind over the defendant for trial.
Zeitz had a style that was something like Guida’s: argumentative, aggressive and sarcastic. They might have made an interesting match in a later trial, but it was not to be. After Jay Smith was held to answer, and ordered to trial, he accepted counsel appointed and paid by the commonwealth.
Zeitz was paid twice as much by Jay Smith for the preliminary hearing as Josh Lock received from the commonwealth for his fifteen hundred hours of work.
The only change in witness testimony from the Bill Bradfield trial came when Susan Reinert’s neighbor said for the first time that she’d seen Jay Smith enter the Reinerts’ house on one occasion two years before Susan’s death. Mary Gove said that in all the prior years, no one had asked her if she’d ever seen Jay Smith.
Mrs. Gove was pushing seventy and had a cataract. Holtz and Guida weren’t convinced that she was correct, or even if it had any significance. Jay Smith could have dropped by once when he’d still been a respectable principal. Guida viewed this as one more instance where he could indicate that Jay Smith possibly had lied. In short, his case was not strong and he was ready to accept any old pebble for his pile.
As to Martray and Montione, the prosecutor just didn’t know how it would go. Martray was forty-one now, and with distinguished gray hair and a business suit he looked more respectable than Montione. But he tended to testify with that vaguely impatient and irritated tone of a cop who’d worked the graveyard shift and wanted to get on with it.
Montione had penitentiary written all over him, and it wasn’t easy to say whether he’d be an effective witness in front of a jury.
At one point in the preliminary hearing Martray had told of a moment when he and Jay Smith were coming out of the prison movie theater and Jay Smith “just flipped off” and made his index finger into a hook and told Martray he could take his eye out of his head if he chose to. Martray said that Jay Smith frightened him. But would a jury believe that an ex-cop as big and young as Raymond Martray would fear Jay Smith?
They had many doubts about their case. They talked about fifty-fifty odds.
Jay Smith needed several months to confer with the attorney that the court appointed for him. The lawyer, William C. Costopoulos, was well known and successful and couldn’t have taken this case for the small amount of money. He did see in it a chance for publicity, and criminal lawyers rank right behind Hollywood actors in their need for that commodity. Actually, Jay Smith was lucky to get a lawyer of his stature.
The defense wouldn’t be able to go to trial until the following spring, so the three-man task force prepared their case by contacting all the witnesses. Everyone seemed constant, even as to old opinions.
Shelly now held a master’s degree from Notre Dame. She was a fetching, articulate young woman. But when she talked to Rick Guida she admitted that she still couldn’t believe that Bill Bradfield could commit murder.
Rick Guida said he felt like strangling her to show that it happens.
Just prior to going to trial in April of 1986, Jack Holtz was trying to take care of last-minute business in a desperate attempt to bolster a case that wasn’t half as strong as the Bill Bradfield case, thanks to Bill Bradfields need for confidants.
In going through all the old reports one last time, Jack Holtz saw a note that he’d never followed up. A hunter in 1979 had seen two depressions in the ground and didn’t report it to the police until the fall of 1985 when the publicity made him realize that it had been near the home of Jay Smith. The ground had been frozen, and now that spring had arrived Jack Holtz donned the digging duds one last time.
They took the hunter to the spot and dug a crater the size of a swimming pool. They found nothing.
The very last piece of business that Jack Holtz was able to perform, other than giving testimony, took place a few days before the jury selection was to begin. They needed something more, something to impress a jury that here was just one coincidence too many. They needed to lock the links in the circumstantial chain. They needed one more pebble for Rick Guida’s rock pile.
Jack Holtz had gone over and over the reports hoping to find some tiny detail he might have forgotten. He was about to quit when it hit him so hard it almost unscrewed his glasses. It was a report that he’d read a dozen times. Karen and Michael had been playing with a teenager on the day they’d disappeared. They were gathering hailstones with the granddaughter of their next-door neighbor, Mary Gove.
The FBI had interviewed Elizabeth Ann Brook in 1979 and she’d given a description of the clothing the children had on that day, but he’d never personally talked to her. So no one had ever asked her about a green pin.
He mentioned it to Rick Guida who shrugged and said, “Might as well give her a call. Maybe we can add her to the ones we have who say Karen owned a pin like that.”
Jack Holtz called Mary Gove and was put in touch with her granddaughter, now a young woman of twenty-two, living in Delaware County.
He had a telephone conversation with Beth Ann Brook and when he was finished, he said, “Hold the phone. I want you to tell this to Mister Guida.”
After Rick Guida finished talking to Beth Ann Brook, Jack Holtz looked at him and said, “I’d marry that girl.”
Jack Holtz had secured the links. The only question now was whether or not the chain was strong enough to tether a goat, which is, after all, a strange and independent creature of mythic power.