Susan Reinert was one of Pennsylvania’s most notorious murder cases.
Part 2
To review, Susan Reinert & her two children disappeared on June 22, 1979.
Her dead body was found four days later, on the morning of June 24th, in a hotel parking lot near Harrisburg – 97 miles from her home – stuffed inside the trunk of her orange Plymouth hatchback. Her body was nude, shackled with chains, and she’d been brutally beaten.
Her children were still missing.
Suspects
Susan Reinert was an English teacher at Upper Merion High School and Jay C. Smith had been her principal for the entire time she taught there. Remember his name.
In addition to his name, also remember the name of William Bradfield. He was head of the English department at Upper Merion, and he and Susan Reinert had been lovers for better than three years before she disappeared.
Getting back to Jay C. Smith, he graduated from Chester High School in 1946 then entered the Air Force & achieved the rank of colonel. After his discharge he taught at Upper Darby High School, earned a masters degree from Temple, and served as principal at Upper Merion for 12 years, from 1966 until 1978.
He left Upper Merion a year before Susan Reinert disappeared.
On paper, as a high school principal and former Air Force colonel, he appeared to be a fine upstanding citizen and an exemplary role model. But there were skeletons lurking in his closet.
Smith’s Daughter Disappeared.
Three years before Susan Reinert disappeared Smith’s daughter Stephanie, 24, and her husband Edward Hunsberger moved in with Smith in his home in King of Prussia. Both were known heroin addicts. They moved in with him in the hopes of making a clean start.
But in addition to his drug problems Edward Hunsberger was on probation for an armed robbery conviction three years earlier. Provisions of his probation required him to maintain contact with his probation officer and to enroll in a drug treatment program. Which he did. In fact both he and Smith’s daughter Stephanie enrolled in the same methadone clinic.
Because of their addictions neither held regular jobs. To earn money Stephanie prostituted herself.
On February 25, 1978, Edward & Stephanie paid a visit to the home of his parents, who lived in the same general area.
“We’ll be back a little later,” Edward told his parents as he and Stephanie walked out the door. But they never returned that night – nor did they return in the days that followed.
A few weeks later Hunsberger’s parents contacted Jay C. Smith trying to find out if he knew anything about the whereabouts of the missing couple. Smith told them they’d run up a significant debt with a dug dealer and fled to California to avoid retribution. In fact, he said they left with such urgency that they left all of their personal belongings behind.
But Smith sung a different tune when a female counselor from the methadone clinic called to ask about his daughter’s whereabouts. He told her that both Stephanie and Edward acquired some Placidyl (a powerful sedative that sometimes produced hypnotic effects) and some “really good pot,” and they’d gone into seclusion to detox by themselves.
While all this was going on around him Jay C. Smith ran afoul of the law himself.
On August 19, 1978 police officers arrested Jay C. Smith at the Gateway Shopping Center in Chester County after responding to a 911 call reporting suspicious activity.
Officers found Jay C. Smith in the mall parking lot parked in his Ford Granada acting in a suspicious manner. They obtained a warrant and searched his car. They found several loaded handguns, a hooded mask, and assorted burglary tools. When questioned, Smith said he carried the guns to “scare off” people who were harassing him.
Police also found a syringe filled with morphine. When asked about that, he claimed that his daughter and son-in-law, both known heroin addicts who lived with him, must’ve placed the drugs in the trunk of the Granada without his permission or knowledge.
But the cops didn’t buy it.
They obtained a warrant to search Smith’s home.
There, they found additional firearms, three pounds of marijuana, and a large quantity of prescription pills. They also found security-guard uniforms & badges. They also found a massive cache of pornography, much of it dealing with bestiality. And they also found four gallons of nitric acid and some office equipment, all of which had been reported stolen from Upper Merion High School.
They arrested him for possession of drugs with intent to deliver and for possession of stolen property. But the officers didn’t stop there.
Two unsolved armed robberies remained on the books from earlier in the year, both at Sears department stores, one at the store in St. Davids and the other at the store in the Neshaminy Mall. The robber’s M.O. was identical in both robberies. He arrived at the stores dressed as a bank security-guard and pretended to be picking up the day’s receipts.
The robber succeeded both times and made clean getaways.
As it worked out Smith matched the description of the bogus guard, as did the uniforms the officers found in the trunk of his Granada. They added armed robbery to his list of charges. Because of these arrests Upper Merion High School severed its ties with Smith.
After the disappearance of Susan Reinert, Smith’s former colleagues at Upper Merion High School nicknamed him “The Prince of Darkness” and made him a hot topic of conversation in the faculty lounge.
Rumors started floating, rumors about swinging sex parties involving several teachers, rumors about devil worshiping, and allegations that Smith was involved in the disappearance of Susan Reinert & her two children.
Some allegations had him burning the bodies in the school incinerator, while others had him chopping up the the bodies and burying the parts on the school grounds.
Two diametrically opposed rumors also started circulating. One rumor claimed that Smith killed his daughter Stephanie and her husband. But the other had Stephanie and her husband alive and well – and caring for Susan Reinert’s two children, who were still missing.
In any case, Smith had been convicted of the robbery charges and was serving time in Graterford Prison. But suspicion persisted that he murdered Susan Reinert and her children. But he was not the lone suspect.
Susan Reinert was drawn to the head of her English department William Bradfield. She was so drawn to him that she became involved in an affair with him while she was still married.
Once her divorce was final she got engaged to Bradfield. But at his insistence they kept the engagement a secret.
When rumors started circulating about an involvement between Bradfield and Susan Reinert, he publicly denied the existence of any relationship between them. Instead, he told everyone that he and Reinert were colleagues and friends, but not the least bit involved romantically.
But Susan Reinert was so infatuated with Bradfield and so certain they were on the way to a happily-ever-after future that she changed the beneficiary on her life insurance policies. Out went her brother and her two children – and in went Bradfield as the sole beneficiary. Plus she purchased an additional life insurance policy and named Bradfield – “my intended husband” – as the sole beneficiary.
Bradfield now stood to inherit $730,000 if Susan Reinert were to die – and he would get it all without one penny going to her children.
What’s puzzling is that Susan Reinert believed Bradfield. Because, get this, at the same time it was common knowledge he was living with Susan Myers another teacher at Upper Merion. But Bradfield’s romantic involvements didn’t start and end with Susan Reinert and Susan Myers. In fact, he was dating two other women at the same time, one of whom was former student Wendy Zeigler.
That said, Bradfield convinced Susan Reinert to withdraw $25,000 from her savings account so he could invest the funds for both of them. But he never made any investment with those funds. Instead, he gave the money to Wendy Zeigler to place in a safe-deposit box in her name. Which she did.
On the weekend of Susan Reinert’s disappearance, Bradfield spent the weekend with friends, male & female, on the beach in Cape May, New Jersey. It was well known that he was a member of the group of Upper Merion teachers who engaged in swinging sex parties – and this seemed to be one of those affairs.
With this in mind, was it a coincidence that upon the autopsy of Susan Reinert’s body that the medical examiner found grains of sand between her toes?
Was William Bradfield involved in Susan Reinert’s disappearance & murder?
Was Jay C. Smith involved in Susan Reinert’s disappearance & murder?
Did William Bradfield and Jay C. Smith conspire to murder Susan Reinert?
And where were 11-year-old Karen & 10-year-old Michael Reinert?
This was Part 2 of the Susan Reinert Murder Story. Parts 3 and 4 are coming next. Hopefully you’ll be with me for them as well.
Below are links to the other parts of the story.
Part 1 Victim . . . Part 3 Story . . . Part 4 Bribery
I’m America’s Best Crime Writer – Barry Bowe – & I approve this message.
My first book – Born to Be Wild – was published in 1992 and is still selling on Amazon & Kindle. it’s a true story about certain members of the Warlocks motorcycle gang.
The story took 21 years to play out with many twists & turns. It’s an amalgam of Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad – but these outlaw bikers make the Sons look like Cub Scouts.
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