He said, “Bill Bradfield had no intention of being a daddy, and couldn’t even if he’d wanted to. They already had a daddy and the real one would’ve helped his children break their mother’s will. Those kids were sentenced to death from the start.”
He and Bill Costopoulos got Rick Guida’s attention within the first two days. One of the prosecution witnesses who’d testified several times over the years in regard to the Reinert murder was a former fingerprint expert who was now retired from the state police.
When Bill Costopoulos was cross-examining him on what appeared to be routine matters at the Susan Reinert autopsy, he innocently asked, “By the way, did you look between her toes?”
And when the witness answered that he had, Bill Costopoulos asked, “And did you find anything?”
The witness said that he had, there was a little bit of debris that looked like … sand.
“Beach sand?” Bill Costopoulos asked.
“Yes, beach sand,” the witness said, with emphasis.
When it was Guida’s turn to redirect, he didn’t ask how the witness knew beach sand from desert sand. Guidas head was stuck to that high ceiling. Guida was enraged.
He spent much of that day and the next practically impeaching his own witness who admitted that as a private investigator he’d worked with Skip Gochenour. Guida brought in half of the task force to testify that at no time had this former state police corporal ever mentioned to anybody that there were any granules of sand between Susan Reinerts toes.
But that was only half of it. Bill Costopoulos implied that a note found in Susan Reinerts car, with “Cape May” in her handwriting, was further evidence that she could have gone to the beach and been murdered by the Bill Bradfield gang in some sandy place, with one of them transporting her to Harrisburg afterward.
Jack Holtz testified that the note had been thoroughly investigated and referred to a turnoff on the way to teacher Fred Wattenmaker’s house where Susan Reinert and her children had been houseguests in the spring of 1979.
Bill Costopoulos and Skip Gochenour had disrupted Rick Guidas methodical, orderly approach.
As Bill Costopoulos put it, “We introduced a couple of grains of sand and Rick Guida brought in sand by the truckload before he was finished.”
Rick Guida wasn’t going to underestimate these fellows, he said.
As to that Cape May murder theory, it was never seriously a part of the strategy of Bill Costopoulos. He privately admitted that he couldn’t go very far with it because of Vincent Valaitis. The thought was that he could sell Sue Myers and Chris Pappas to the jury as possible murder conspirators, but Vincent Valaitis screwed up everything. How do you sell the jury a homicidal hamster?
The hair and fiber expert from the FBI testified that in the dust ball presented to him by Jack Holtz and Matt Mullin during their search of Jay Smiths basement, he’d found fifty head hairs but only one was identical to Susan Reinert’s. He said that it matched in more than twenty characteristics.
As to the rug fibers, he said that less than 7 percent of rugs are made of polyester and that he’d found “lustrous” and “de-lustrous” fibers. He said that fibers clinging to human beings are generally lost after four hours. His conclusion was that she’d picked up the fibers just prior to being thrown into the back of her car.
Jay Smith’s lawyer did a job on the FBI’s hair and fiber expert. Bill Costopoulos asked questions for which the expert didn’t have ready answers. He got him to admit that he didn’t know there were four kinds of polyester fibers. Without knowing much about hair and fiber evidence, Costopoulos looked as well versed as the FBI expert in this, the most subjective of the forensic sciences.
When he got back to the council table he whispered to Jay Smith, “How’d I do, teach?”
To which Jay Smith answered dryly, “You get a B-plus in science.”
The defense put on its own hair and fiber experts who had far more impressive scientific credentials than the FBI witness, the substance of their testimony being that the hair could be Susan Reinert’s or any other brunette’s. And that the fiber was red polyester but no more could be said.
It seemed certain that hair and fiber testimony was not going to convict or acquit Jay Smith.
The days passed slowly as the parade of a hundred witnesses repeated testimony that they’d given in other courtrooms over the years.
There was a marked difference in the style of opposing counsel. Costopoulos was never argumentative and seldom objected. He could be indignant with witnesses, even scornful, but not toward Guida. He always looked at Guida’s multiple objections with a faint smile as though he was trying to be more than reasonable with the prosecutor.
Rick Guida was constantly drinking water and dying for a cigarette and rolling his eyes in disgust at what he perceived as the indecisiveness of the judge, who obviously hated Guida’s many objections.
Judge William Lipsitt was sixty-nine years old and during the course of the trial marveled that Bill Bradfield had had four women going at one time while he himself didn’t even have one until he got married at the age of fifty-five. Judge Lipsitt wore oversized black frame glasses. His slicked-down hair looked suspiciously black. He walked as though he were on the deck of a rolling ship, listing from side to side. The judge was quaint and gentle, and Rick Guida was annoying him.
The prosecutor constantly asked to come to the sidebar where he and Bill Costopoulos could argue out of the jury’s earshot. Guida was so uncertain about the strength of his case that he had a tendency to overtry it.
The way Judge Garb had handled such requests for sidebar discussion was simple. He’d say no
Judge Lipsitt would say something like, “Uh … oh … well … naturally I try to avoid the sidebar.”
But he couldn’t say no. He’d look as though he’d like to say, “Oh, fudge!”
When Guida would object, he’d often say, “Yes, I guess it calls for a conclusion, but, oh, I’ll overrule the objection.”
The odd thing was that a great deal got admitted into the record from both sides, yet the trial moved swiftly. Even with Rick Guida doing more eye rolling than Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest.
To a jury who wondered what the Bill Bradfield alibi testimony was all about, Rick Guida once more used the clever device of reenacting the testimony at Jay Smith’s trial, with the prosecutor of that trial portraying Bill Bradfield while reading from the official transcript.
And he brought in the Sears employees again to identify Jay Smith as the bogus Brink’s courier. Suddenly, the jury was getting the idea that this fellow William Bradfield had told a very big lie for Jay Smith. For some reason.
When the day arrived, Bill Costopoulos, as promised, did a good job of trying to discredit the testimony of Jay Smith’s prison buddy Raymond Martray. Martray admitted under cross-examination that he did not tell in earlier interviews that Jay Smith had said he’d killed Susan Reinert.
There were a lot of people in the courtroom including most of the reporters who doubted him when he said now that Jay Smith had blurted, “I killed that fucking bitch.”
And yet, three women on the jury jerked their heads in the direction of Jay Smith when Martray said those words. It appeared that at least those three did believe Raymond Martray.