By Keith Phucas, Special to The Mercury

UPPER MERION — Former Upper Merion Area High School principal Jay C. Smith, whose infamy grew when he was implicated in a sensational 1979 murder conspiracy, says he didn’t kill English teacher Susan Reinert, formerly of Phoenixville, or her two children.

In a new self-published book, Smith claims the woman’s fellow English teacher and lover, William Bradfield Jr., framed him.

In “Joseph Wambaugh and the Jay Smith Case,” Smith blames best-selling crime writer Wambaugh, whose 1987 book, “Echoes in the Darkness,” details the case, for getting him convicted. A TV movie was also made about the murders.

The former prison inmate said Wambaugh poisoned the judicial process by paying investigators and witnesses during the time the author was researching the book. In a lawsuit Smith filed in 1994, he alleged the crime writer conspired with police to withhold and fabricate evidence that incriminated Smith, just so Wambaugh could score a lucrative book deal.

Both Smith and Bradfield were convicted of killing Reinert and her 11-year-old daughter, Karen, and 10-year-old son Michael, and sentenced to prison.

Bradfield, formerly of Birdsboro, was given a life sentence; Smith was sentenced to death.

While sitting on death row in 1992, Smith’s conviction was reversed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which asked for a retrial. Beforehand the court ordered the dismissal of all charges against the former King of Prussia man based on newly discovered evidence of misconduct by Dauphin County prosecutors, according to court papers. After six years behind bars, Smith was free.

Bradfield died in 1998 while incarcerated at Graterford State Prison.

When Smith, now 80, was interviewed by The Times Herald Monday at Radisson Hotel Valley Forge in King of Prussia, he was asked how he would overcome the public’s skepticism about his innocence.

He was blunt.

“I’m not guilty of murder,” he said. “The (state) Supreme Court exonerated me.”

The decision was historic. Smith’s case is the only double jeopardy decision in a capital case in Pennsylvania history. Even if he admitted to the murders now, he cannot be retried for the crimes.

The extensive investigation and criminal trials spanned a seven-year period, from 1979 to 1986.

Reinert was discovered dead on June 25, 1979 near Harrisburg. The bodies of her two children have never been found. They were last seen in Phoenixville at their grandparents’ home.

The petite woman’s nude body, which had been beaten black and blue, was found curled up in the luggage compartment of her car in a Host Hotel parking lot. A toxicology report indicated that she had been drugged with morphine.

Suspicion promptly fell on 46-year-old Bradfield, who chaired the English Department at the high school. The bearded, charismatic teacher, who had an affinity for poet Ezra Pound and classical literature, had been romantically involved with Reinert, and she believed he would marry her.

The weekend the Ardmore woman was killed, Bradfield and three other Upper Merion high school teachers drove to Cape May, N.J. Years later, Smith’s defense attorney, William Costopoulos, argued that Reinert had been killed at the Jersey shore that weekend.

Bradfield, who was involved with at least three other women, was named beneficiary on Reinert’s insurance policies totaling $730,000, according to investigators. Even though he was a prime suspect, it took a task force of state police and FBI agents nearly four years to pin the crimes on him.

Eventually Smith, who was serving time for two Sears’ robberies and drug possession, was implicated in the murder plot.

In the 10 months prior to Reinert’s death, the rumor mill at the school had been churning nonstop following the arrest of the principal, whom many described as weird and eccentric, according to “Echoes in the Darkness.”

A dark past

On Aug. 19, 1978, a couple at Gateway Shopping Center, in Tredyffrin, saw an armed man whose face was concealed peering into a van in the parking lot.

Minutes later, the 50-year-old Smith, who earned a doctorate at Temple University, was stopped by Tredyffrin police in his car as he was exiting the shopping center, near routes 202 and 252. He had four loaded guns in the vehicle and was nearly shot by police when he picked up one of the weapons, reports state.

Police also found what looked like a homemade silencer fashioned from an oil filter, a hypodermic needle containing a tranquilizer drug and what looked like a hood, according to newspaper reports. He was arrested on firearms violations and drug possession.

In his book, Smith states his house was robbed of money and jewelry Aug. 19, and he suspected his daughter Stephanie and her husband, Eddie Hunsberger, both of whom were heroin addicts; and he was out looking for them. He claims the couple used Placidyl, the drug Smith had in the syringe that night, to help them kick their heroin habit.

Smith’s wife Steffie, who worked at a dry cleaning store at Gateway Shopping Center, told her husband she had seen her daughter buying drugs out of a van in the parking lot, according to “Joseph Wambaugh and the Jay Smith Case.”

When police searched Smith’s brick house on West Valley Forge Road, near PennDOT’s current District 6 headquarters, they discovered stolen property from the high school that included office machines, paintings and bottles of nitric acid.

Another basement find was a bogus security badge, which later tied the principal to the $34,000 theft at Sears in St. David's, in Radnor Township, where he posed as a armored car driver coming to make a cash pickup. Wambaugh’s book claims the thief signed the name “Carl S. Williams” at the store when he got the money, the same name police found on identification in Smith’s home.

Smith was tried and found guilty of the Sears robberies and eventually sentenced to three-and-a-half to five years in prison for the St. David’s Sears heist and an attempted robbery at Neshaminy Mall’s Sears. For the firearms and drug violations, he was sentenced to two to five years, according to Smith’s book.

As to the Sears thefts, Smith maintains he is “totally innocent.”

“It means (the authorities) had it wrong, and they don’t want to admit it,” he said.

The junkman’s find

In 1992, antique dealer Mark Hughes was hired to clean out state police Det. Jack Holtz’s attic. Holtz had investigated the Reinert murders along with lead state police investigator Joe Van Nort.

In the attic, Hughes found a box containing a duplicate blue comb used to implicate Smith, investigative notes contradicting prosecution testimony, adhesive “lifters” containing grains of sand and quartz taken from Reinert’s toes, and a letter from Wambaugh offering Van Nort $50,000 for information about the case.

“What people didn’t know is that Joseph Wambaugh met secretly with investigators,” Smith said.

The former Upper Merion resident charges that the author tainted the case by paying the state police detectives and even witnesses.

Though Holtz had received money from Wambaugh, according to the Associated Press, in 1993 he was cleared of any wrongdoing in the case.

During his trial, Smith’s defense had not been given the lifters a police officer used to remove the sand from Reinert’s toes. While appealing the murder conviction, Smith’s lawyer argued that the sand particles stuck to the adhesive suggested the victim had gone to Cape May and been murdered there.

Another key piece of evidence used against the former principal was a green Philadelphia Museum of Art pin identified as Karen Reinert’s and allegedly found in Smith’s car. But state Supreme Court Justice John P. Flaherty, who called the prosecution’s case “despicable,” accused them of making this up.

“I got a list of items from Dr. Smith’s car. That pin, they lied to the jury, saying it was found in Smith’s car,” Flaherty said in court. “Nothing was ever told to me that the pin was actually found in Susan Reinert’s car.”

“It’s in Chapter 26 (of my book); I was never in the victim’s car,” Smith said last Monday night.

He said Reinert and her children went to Cape May the weekend she was killed to meet with Bradfield and an attorney to settle legal matters prior to a planned trip to England. She stayed at Stockholm Motor Inn.

“That’s where she was killed,” he said. Bradfield had been to Cape May many times. “He buried the two children in the sand,” Smith alleged.

In 1987, Karen and Michael Reinert were officially declared dead. In 1993, Smith filed suit claiming prosecutors violated his civil rights. Five years later, a federal jury rejected the lawsuit.

He appealed, but in 2000, a federal appeals court upheld the earlier decision. He sued Wambaugh as well, to no avail.

Though the appeals court agreed that the prosecution’s withholding of evidence was unethical conduct, the court found “nothing untrustworthy about Smith’s conviction for murder,” according to court papers.