Jay C. Smith reemerges to tell his own story

Nov 17, 2008 (The Philadelphia Inquirer - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- SHLD | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Some real-life figures walk straight into the history books. Sixteen years after he was freed from death row, Jay C. Smith has tried to write his way out of a true-crime best-seller.

Smith, 80, is the former Upper Merion High School principal whose Jekyll-and-Hyde downfall became the stuff of suburban legend.

A lifelong educator and Army Reserve colonel, he was caught in 1978 with drugs, illegal guns and pornography. He was convicted in a string of Sears robberies, and then found guilty of killing Upper Merion teacher Susan Reinert and her children.

Smith is free because the state Supreme Court in 1992 dismissed his murder conviction and forbade a retrial, ruling that state police had concealed evidence.

Some have compared Smith to O.J. Simpson, believing Smith was a killer lucky to be walking free. So he vanished into obscurity in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Until now.

Last week, Smith reappeared in King of Prussia to hawk a 439-page self-published book aimed at salvaging his reputation.

"You should never talk about Smith again unless you read this book," Smith said.

In Joseph Wambaugh and the Jay Smith Case, Smith asserts that he was framed for the murders by a band of collaborators:

Another Upper Merion teacher, William Bradfield, who was having a relationship with Reinert and who was a named beneficiary of her life insurance. Bradfield, also convicted of the murders, died of a heart attack in Graterford prison in 1998.

The state police investigators and the case's prosecutor, who the Supreme Court said concealed evidence that could have led to Smith's acquittal.

Wambaugh, the California crime writer, who came to Pennsylvania and paid police to slip him information on the strange case's investigation, promising more money if a "suitable book" emerged.

Wambaugh, who wrote one of the three books about the saga, still believes in Smith's guilt and claimed recently that Smith would be "a number-one draft pick" in hell when he dies.

In Smith's telling, Bradfield killed the Reinerts and framed Smith, who was already facing charges in 1978 for having guns and other illegal items in his car and home.

"This was a big bit of publicity, the principal being arrested and having guns in his car, you know what I mean?" Smith said. "And so I was disgraced, and I think he thought I would be an easy mark."

The "rogue cops," Smith claims, manipulated evidence against him because of Wambaugh's $50,000 promise. Getting that sum required the mercurial principal to be convicted as the murderer, Smith claims.

He sued Wambaugh, but the case was thrown out in the 1990s.

Now comes his book, which has a chapter labeling Wambaugh "The Man Who Corrupted Harrisburg." Without Wambaugh, Smith says, he never would have been sent to death row.

Reached by phone, Wambaugh said he had not heard of Smith's book. When told the title, he laughed.

"I have a feeling that it won't make him rich," he said.

Wambaugh said he had been told that Smith had a post-prison bout with cancer and so he prepared an epitaph: "I do not celebrate the death of any man, but Satan does. A number-one draft pick has finally arrived."

Echoes in the Darkness, Wambaugh's book about the Reinert case that fingers Smith and Bradfield, was a best-seller and became a TV miniseries in 1987. Wambaugh was asked whether any of the hidden-evidence disclosures that got Smith off death row had changed his mind.

"Are you joking?" Wambaugh said. "No. Everybody knows who did it."

In the authorities' version, Bradfield plotted the murders for months, then enlisted Smith as an accomplice.

Bradfield's alibi was that he was in Cape May with other teachers on the weekend in June 1979 when Reinert was killed. Her body was found stuffed in the trunk of her car in a hotel parking lot near Harrisburg that Monday morning. That same day, Smith was due in court in Harrisburg for sentencing on his guns-and-drugs case. He showed up late.

Authorities found a promotional comb from Smith's Army Reserve unit under Reinert's abused corpse. Smith's car allegedly contained an Art Museum pin that Reinert's daughter had been wearing. Her children, Karen, 11, and Michael, 10, were never found. Bradfield was convicted in 1983. Smith was convicted in 1986.

He was freed from prison in September 1992, after a man hired to clean out a state policeman's house found documents showing that evidence had been hidden from Smith's lawyer, including sand between Reinert's toes that an expert matched to the Jersey Shore. The state Supreme Court decision cited "egregious" prosecutorial misconduct and forbade a retrial on double-jeopardy grounds.

Smith said he could confess to the murders today -- even write a book about how he did it -- and "they couldn't do anything" to him. But even with little to lose, he maintains his innocence.

"I didn't do it," Smith said.

The book he wrote claims he did little wrong: The Sears robberies were mistaken-identity convictions. The marijuana in his house was his drug-addicted daughter's, and he didn't know about it. He did not know Reinert outside school and had no reason to kill her.

He concedes to illegally transporting his guns, for which he had permits. And he says that when he was arrested he was prowling a shopping-center lot in Devon, looking into vans in a search for his daughter, who had disappeared.

The self-published book, Smith says, was written without an editor or cowriter. Its numerous rambling digressions are intermingled with sexual observations and minutiae of Smith's life.

The man pictured on the cover -- Mark A. Hughes, who found the evidence that freed Smith -- did not know about the book until a reporter called him.

"Why the hell is my picture on the front page of a book? That's not good," said Hughes, who now owns a bowhunting store in Wellsville, Pa. "Jay Smith never contacted me to thank me, if what I did helped him in life."

The book leans heavily upon long quotations from court records and Smith's experiences in prisons.

"His anger toward the system continues to this day, through his book," said William C. Costopoulos, the defense attorney who won Smith's final appeal.

Smith, who is retired and remarried, says he walks five miles a day and speaks regularly for Witness to Innocence, an anti-death-penalty group. For several years after prison, he worked as a state-certified nursing home administrator near Wilkes-Barre, benefiting from a common last name that obscured his infamy. (The law, he said, has since been changed to bar convicted felons from obtaining such a state license.)

"The people there did not know it," he said. "I didn't go around saying, 'I'm from death row. Hire me.' "

Contact staff writer Derrick Nunnally at 610-313-8212 or dnunnally@phillynews.com.

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