True Crime Campfire - Episode 1: The Puppet Master and the Prince of Darkness, Part 1: Puppet Theater

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

In episode 1, we learn about the major players in this bizarre true story. There's William Sidney Bradfield, a.k.a. Bill--a handsome, charismatic teacher of English, Latin and Greek at Upper Merion High School. Adored by students and colleagues alike, Bill is a larger than life figure with larger than life stories that may or may not be true. And there's Dr. Jay C. Smith, retired Army Colonel and principal of Upper Merion High. Nicknamed The Prince of Darkness by colleagues, Dr. Smith is unlike anything this respectable community has ever seen, with his eccentric habits and unsettling eyes. He may make people uncomfortable with his perverted jokes and bizarre conversation, but no one knows (yet) about Dr. Smith's dark secret life. Then there's Susan Reinert, a kindhearted teacher and mother of two whose deadly mistake will be to put her trust in the hands of the wrong man. Join Katie and Whitney for the beginning of this epic story of love, greed, manipulation and murder.Sources available on social media.Follow us, campers! Patreon: https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. This season is the puppet master and the Prince of Darkness, the story of two very different kinds of psychopath. One was a manipulative narcissistic. who used his good looks and magnetic personality to gather a theater full of naive puppets to unwittingly help him commit a grisly triple murder for profit. The other was a pure predator, a lone wolf who thrived on mayhem and perversion, and got involved in this bizarre case for the sheer thrill of the kill. Both were brilliant and accomplished. Both were respected members of their community,

and when they formed their deadly partnership, it spelled chaos and death for the people who trusted them. The Puppet Master and the Prince of Darkness, part one, puppet theater. It was 7 p.m. on Sunday, June 24th, 1979, when two men, traveling on business to three-mile island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, saw the orange Plymouth horizon sitting in the host-in hotel parking lot. It's hatchback wide open. They didn't think much of it as they checked in at the front desk, completely forgetting to advise the employee of the car. A few hours later, at 2 a.m., an officer on patrol saw the vehicle as well. Hatchback still open. He didn't get out of his car to investigate, but when he radioed in, he found that the car belonged to one Susan

G. Reinhert of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half drive from Harrisburg. He did checked to see if the hotel had a guest by that name, they did not, but before he could look into it further, he was called away to a fatal car accident. It wasn't until 5.20 a.m., 10 hours after the car had initially been seen, that a good Samaritan calling himself Mr. Larry Brown advised the Dauphin County Dispatcher that there was a sick woman in her car in the host-in parking lot. What the officers discovered when they arrived, however, was much more horrific. The woman's body was tiny, just about five-two and a hundred pounds. She was naked, stuffed into the luggage well in a fetal position, facing the exterior of the parking lot.

The dead woman had clearly been beaten. There was bruising on her body, and worst of all, there were marks around her neck that looked like the links of a chain. This woman had been through hell. It would be almost five years before anyone knew what truly happened to poor Susan Reinhert, and as investigators would soon find out, Susan was not the only victim in this tragic yet fascinating case. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Every story has a cast of characters.

And because the major players in this bizarre little drama are more interesting than most, we'd like to start by giving you a little background on each of them. So our story takes place, for the most part, in Upper Marion Township, Pennsylvania. Upper Marion was, and probably still is, a nice area. It's upper middle class, low crime, kind of place that you use. see on Dateline with Keith Morrison saying something like, it was the kind of place where people didn't lock their doors. By the way, lock your doors. Lock your doors. Please lock your door. It takes two seconds. I don't care how safe it is.

It only takes one asshole, okay, one time. And please lock your windows. And windows. Lock everything. Lock the house down. It down. Anyway, so, but bless his heart. Keith loves to tell us that people don't lock their doors. So at least this was the case in 1979, which is when all of this happened. Specifically, most of this story takes place at and around Upper Marion High School, a well-regarded school for the children of Upper Merion's well-regarded citizens. And one of the most well-regarded citizens was a guy by the name of William Sidney Bradfield,

known to his friends and worshippers as Bill. And I got to say William Sidney Bradfield, if that's not a Harlequin Roman, novel Leading Man Name? I don't know what it is, don't you think? That is the most romance name I have ever heard. I do feel like he should be like the Duke on some English countryside. Perhaps a lower baronet of some kind. Yeah, I mean, he wouldn't quite be a Duke. No, he would definitely wouldn't, but he would love the idea of that. And, you know, if America had Dukes, he would love the idea of being a Duke. And this guy was a rock star at Upper Merion High. You know, the ultimate big fish in a small pond. He taught English, Latin, and Greek. And he was one of those

people that just drew everybody into his orbit. He was magnetic. He was very handsome, gave off sort of a manly college professor vibe, kind of a Walt Whitman attitude about him. He had big hipster beard, and I would say definitely he was ahead of his time with the beard, because we're talking 1979. Yeah. But, yeah, it was fully cultivated, as you said the other He was bringing it with the mountain man hipster Williamsburg look. Definitely. He would be very much at home on the streets of Brooklyn at the moment, like drinking artisanal beers or something like that. The worst.

He'd brew his own. He, oh, God, wouldn't he, though? He totally would, and he would never shut up about it. Not for one second. So he had the big, beautiful, fluffy hipster beard, intense blue eyes that people have sort of alternately described as hypnotic or icy or passionate. depending on his mood. He had coppery blonde hair, lots of it, big broad shoulders, and he wore tweed suits with the patches on the elbows,

you know, that kind of a vibe, like masculine but intellectual at the same time. And he was, you know, very charming, very articulate, talk circles around anybody. So basically, if you're not getting this yet, Bill Bradfield was catnip. And he attracted a lot of attention, some of it adoring. some of it eye rolling but either way people were talking about him people knew who he was he was a larger than life presence at upper marian high and bill came from a prominent wealthy waspy family in um i guess pennsylvania i can't remember off the top of my head actually if that's where he grew up or if that's just where he ended up but his dad was one of those aggressive hard charging

business boy types and he was apparently a very hard man to please and this resulted in bill having some pretty major daddy issues that haunted him for the rest of his life. So, never felt good enough for dad. And what made that worse was that his younger sister was a musical prodigy. And it seems pretty clear that this rankled the absolute shit out of bill from childhood onwards. And I can kind of get this as an older sibling myself. Like, you're an older sibling, right, Katie? Yes, I totally understand it. So you get, like, you're supposed to be the star of the family. Right, obviously. So, yeah, so it sort of sucks when your, you know, your kid brother or your kid's sister

eclipses you at anything. It just seems to kind of go outside the natural order. Like, way, way, wait, no, no, no, wait your turn. Yeah, exactly. Kid, exactly. So, for example, one year, his sister got a grand piano for Christmas. Now, I know it's a wealthy family and everything, but that ain't cheap. No, it's like, so on the cheaper end, it's, or a grand piano is $10,000.

On the high end, it's $50,000. Are you freaking kidding me right now? Not at all. No, that's insane. And this is in today's money, so, you know, I don't know what it cost back in the day. Yeah, like $1,000. I don't know. I'm bad at conversions.

It would be something like that. But that's a, I mean, that's bananas. That is just like buying your kid a car for Christmas. Yeah, and she was a kid. And she was a child. Yeah, this was childhood stuff. So one year she gets this incredibly expensive gift. And Bill decided that he wanted a grand piano, too.

Now, as far as I know, was not even interested, he wasn't even a musician. She was a musical prodigy, so although that is an obscenely expensive gift, and part of me kind of wants to smack this crap out of his parents for, you know, indulging their children so badly. But at the same time, if your kid is a musical prodigy, you know, I guess that's like an investment. So Bill decided that he wanted his, he didn't want to share his sister's grand. he wanted his own Grand Piano too. Totally reasonable.

Now, if that does not tell you a little bit about the boy's psychology, then I don't know what's going to. So he put in his request, I would like a Grand Piano too, please. Just go ahead and drop another 50K. One grand piano, please. One grand piano, please. And instead, at Bill's next birthday,

instead of a grand piano, Bill received a toy truck. Oh, my God. Whomp. Yeah. So didn't exactly get the grand. And however you slice it, I mean, even at the cheapest end of the price range that you just... And the most expensive end of the toy truck.

That's true. So cheapest end of that staggering range that you just gave me for grand pianos. And most expensive toy truck range ain't no comparison. I am imagining Bill right now as like a tiny, sickly Victorian schoolboy in like a full suit asking, Mother, can I have a grand piano? Like Oliver, right? Yes. And that sends a message to a child.

I mean, I guess the message there is that, well, when you have a talent, when you learn how to do something special, then we'll get you something like this. So he got a toy truck. And that toy truck dogged him for the rest of his life. And his extremely long-suffering living girlfriend, Sue Myers, who we will learn much more about in time, said that he would bring up that toy truck on the regular. So I can just picture the scene here, lying in bed, and Bill suddenly goes all brooding and quiet, you know, like they do.

And Sue says, what's wrong, Bill? And Bill just burst into tears. And they got me a toy truck. truck. She got a grand piano and I got a toy truck. And poor Sue would have to stroke his hair and tell him she was sure he was, you know, just as smart and just as talented as his sister. And, you know, you know how it is. But I'm exhausted just thinking about that. I feel like this series will have a lot of these. But ladies, if you have to comfort him about a toy, he got in his childhood. Get out.

Yeah, that's a red flag. Men, women, everything in between. Yeah, that's true. It's not gender specific. No, not gender specific at all. Just GTFO. Yeah, this is going to be red flag theater, pretty much, with Bill. Red flags busting out all over.

So anyway, bless his heart, that toy truck, she got so sick of hearing about the goddamn toy truck after a while. And he had not let it go at age 45, guys. So, anywho, despite these terrible childhood abuses, Bill Bradfield had, you know, managed to make a name for himself at Upper Marion. He taught, as I said, English, Latin, and Greek. And he was one of those teachers who inspire movies like Dead Poets Society. He was an, oh, Captain, my Captain, standing up on the desk kind of teacher. His students absolutely adored him. And there is no doubt about that.

I mean, you can still find students of Bill Bradfield out there today. I'm sure who would say this. And he was absolutely inspiring as a teacher. And it's interesting because some of his colleagues would later say that although Bill liked to say that he was a teacher of English, Latin, and Greek, what he actually taught was English. And he had these little clubs going on the side where he tutored students in Latin and Greek. So he set this up on his own. And some of his colleagues would later say that you could fit what his two T's actually knew about Latin and Greek in a thimble.

so he might not have strictly speaking known a whole lot about Latin and Greek but this was part of his mystique and he had this thing about English literature where he just he had this theory that it was garbage and that this is my favorite one page of Homer is better than all of English literature combined oh my God and like have you read Harry Potter come on owned boom mic drop exactly although to be fair i guess harry potter didn't exist yet but if it had owned it's not not an excuse he should have read it in the future he should have read it and that's the kind of thing yet again when somebody says that to you shut it down red flag that's pretentious nonsense so anywho he he cultivated he worked pretty hard with his latin and greek

and his English literature is garbage and Homer is worth a whole lot of it he cultivated this mystique and that was a lot bigger and a lot more mysterious than his alleged proficiency at Latin and Greek Bill had a way of drawing you into his confidence

and he would take you aside and he'd make you his secret squirrel and he had this way of saying like what I can tell you is this so implying that there was this whole ocean of things that he couldn't tell you, but because he trusted you so much, he's going to tell you just this one thing. And it was catnip, because it made you feel special. Sure. And, you know, if somebody came up to me and was like, I have some hot goss, and, you know, I'm not even

supposed to tell you this, but I'm going to, I drop everything immediately. Absolutely. Everything. Especially if they add that little bit in there that you just said about how I'm not supposed to tell anyone. Oh my God. If I were in the middle of CPR, And somebody said that to me, I would be like, one, two, three, oh, hang on. No, I'm sorry, I know you can't breathe, but just, what is it? What is it? Just tell me real fast. We'll call the paramedics in a second, okay?

We just, we're, none of us is immune to that. And if you claim to be, I mean, we all like to think we are. We all, you know, like to think that we're better than that. But nobody's better than that. Nobody's better than that. And if you are better than that, you're annoying. You need to get more joy out of your life. Absolutely.

So he'd tell people all kinds of amazing stories. So one of the big ones was that when he was younger, he did some work for the government in Cuba during the revolution. The government, meaning the CIA. Now, guys, Katie, you and I, we've both been into true crime for a long time. And one thing that I would definitely call a theme that has emerged from my extremely prolific true crime consumption over the years is that if someone tells you that they work for the CIA, they are lying. No one works for the CIA. No one. No one works for the CIA.

And if they do work for the CIA, they're not going to tell you, okay? Similarly with if they say they're a spy, okay, it's not spies don't, it's not Archer, okay? A guy is not going to sidle up to you in a bar and say, I'm the world's greatest secret agent. If they do that, they tend to get in trouble because the thing is day one, page one of the manual don't tell people that you're doing espionage it kind of tends to get in the way of the efficacy of said work so if someone is telling you that they're work for the CIA that they are a spy shut it down they're after your money it's a scam yeah we all watch dr phil we know what we're talking about right we've seen enough of those catfish episodes yes

shut it down so anyway but he would tell people this he said he'd been involved in a shootout involving Castro guerrillas in Havana and he'd ended up in a military compound where he had to garot a Cuban guard to escape. Now, wouldn't you just be transfixed if somebody that you knew was telling you something like this? Oh, totally. I'd be into it immediately. Absolutely. You'd be there with the popcorn and you'd be hanging on his every word. Problem was, though, with Bill's stories is that if people started to compare notes, which of course they inevitably did, they would find that Bill's stories tended to change a little bit, depending on who he was talking to. So one friend got told that he garrotted the garden.

One was told he'd slid his throat. I mean, maybe he garrotted him so hard. It slid his throat, Whitney. I think you're being unfair. So it could have just been really sharp piano wire or something. That's true. He took from his sister's grand piano. Oh, my God.

Call back. Damn, I didn't even think about that. See, now she's weaving the threads all together. See, this is why she's basically a detective. But, I mean, you know, like, people would start to notice. And it was never anything that you could prove. So you might be able to convince yourself, you know, okay, maybe I misheard or maybe you misheard or whatever.

But some people started to realize he's full of shit. Sure. Whereas other people bought it hookline and sinker. But regardless, you were interested. You were listening. You had your popcorn. So another thing that he would do is he would tell people there was this love of his life. and her name was Maria

and he would tell some people that she had died of a brain tumor and that he had sort of nursed her in her final days. Other people got told that she died in a car accident and it was always a different story which is really very stupid. In some ways Bill is an excellent liar

and you'll see this more and more as we go through the season. In some ways he is a genius as a liar and as a manipulator and then he'll do stupid shit like this. So it's really, really, really, interesting kind of a contrast or disconnect there. Sometimes he's great at it. Other times he makes these boneheaded mistakes. I think it's just throwing stuff at the wall to see if it's fixed.

And I think he was so narcissistic that the thought of other people betraying him was unthinkable to him. That's actually a really good point. You know, you have to take the narcissism into account as well. So that's true. So whatever story he was telling, inventing, he always included some bizarre little detail to make it more believable. And this is where I feel like he's a really good liar. Sure. So for example, with the Cuba story, he said that he was wearing expensive alligator shoes, which I think is hysterical. What the hell? I'm just, I'm just imagining like some commando in like a full like commando get out and then just like some like prissy like dancing shoes, like running through the streets of Havana in the jungle of Cuba. Yes, absolutely. He, you know,

He was a dandy. What can we say? And, you know, if we had been there, I suspect, we might have had questions for him. One of us might have raised our hand in the middle of the recitation and said, excuse me, Trouble O7, why would you have been wearing, you know, $500 alligator shoes in the middle of a revolution? Maybe it's because he thought the revolution would be televised. Oh, yes, and it will be. But, yeah, I mean, we all like to think that we would have. seen right through it, right? Like, I wouldn't have been fooled. Oh, and it's just like people that say,

oh, Ted Bundy wasn't that cute. He wasn't that charming. And I'm like, well, yeah, all the footage we have of him talking was after years and years in prison. Right. After the game was, the game was up. He was done. Absolutely. And he had the prison pallor going on, which does not do anybody any favors. But that's so true. And people say, oh, he wouldn't have charmed me. Well, you know what? Maybe not, but you weren't there. And I still wouldn't want to meet Ted Bundy in a dark alley. Oh, most definitely not. And I think you have a good point that he's going to be one way when he's been in prison for 15 years and he's talking to a journalist and it's on the eve of his execution and he's already confessed and there's not as much of a need for him to sort of wear that

particular hat as the charmer. It's another thing entirely if it's a party and you're an 18-year-old sorority girl and he sidles up to you and buys you a drink. He's totally the like 27-year-old that was dating my 16-year-old friends when I was in high school. because, yeah, you can relate to an 18-year-old when you're older, but then when you have a conversation with a real person, it comes off as fake. Right. So, yeah, so we all like to think we're above it,

but, you know, at the end of the day, people like Bill Bradfield have a talent for this. And I think this was one of the strokes of genius that he would make up these little bizarre details to add verisimilitude to his lies. Because you would hear something like alligator, choose and you would just think, okay, this has to be true. That is just too weird and too specific to be made up. So, you know, at least in that regard, that's how they get you.

And it's very clever. And some people, of course, knew he was full of nonsense, but regardless, this continued to build his mystique. And part of that also was that he was obsessed with the poet Ezra Pound. And if you knew Bill for five minutes, you knew he was obsessed with Ezra Pound. Now, despite having a degree in English, I actually didn't know. a ton about Ezra pound until I started researching this case. I just knew kind of the bare bones basics. Sure.

And oh, wow. So I did a little digging on Ezra. And how shall I put this? He's an interesting figure. And by interesting, I mean that he was a hot bag of shit. So, Ezra, bless him. He was an anti-Semite, lovely. A fascist supporter.

He was a supporter of fascist dictator Mussolini. even lovelier and a misogynist for the trifecta what a peach right bless his heart so um to illustrate the misogyny of which i speak is one of my favorite pound quotes woman oh woman is a consummate rage but dead or asleep she pleases take her she has two excellent seasons oh my god oh my god so wow that is awful yeah i mean i don't know about you but i'm only good when I'm dead or asleep. Dead or asleep, we please. You know, I'm on the dating

apps. And there was this, I need all of your tauts and pairs. I matched with this gentleman who had all of his favorite authors listed in his about, which is always a red flag. I don't know why I matched with him. But one of his favorites

was Ezra Pound, and I was commenting, because I always message first, and I commented, right, and I commented and I was like, hey, you know, I like this author, this author, Vana gets okay, but Ezra was like a piece of shit. And he did not appreciate that. And he was like, well, you just don't understand him. Wait, he didn't take that with perfect diploma? No, no, it's shocking. I'm shocked. And then when I was like, oh, you know, he ran a radio show for Mussolini's regime and was charged with treason, but I don't think,

he unmatched with me after that. I don't think he appreciated my comments. Well, bless his little heart. I don't know how you guys do this online dating. I'm an old married lady, and I thank my lucky stars every day. Every day. So this was Ezra Pound, and of course Pound got in

trouble, as you say, for supporting the fascists, came really close to get nailed for treason, but ended up instead in the St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C., which was a bit of goose for him, if you ask me. Yeah. I mean, he lucked out big. Oh, totally. Especially

what year was this? This was 1940s. Oh, I don't. The 40s. Yeah, in 1940s, you do not want to go to prison for treason in the 40s. Right, in the 1940s. You're coming off of World War II. Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, definitely true.

And Bill was so obsessed with Pound that he actually befriended him while he was in the asylum. How, I can't imagine. I imagine he just knocked on the door every day for several weeks with a fruit basket every day, every day, until Pound finally agreed to see this weirdo

who was showing up with gifts. and ingratiated himself while Pound was there he was writing the cantos which would of course become one of his most famous works and at one point Bill Bradfield was even plotting to spring Ezra Pound from the asylum and hide him in his attic I am not making this up I promise you this was his plan now why this didn't come to pass I don't know whether Pound was in on it I don't know I'm guessing Probably not. I'm guessing this was Bradfield's brainchild. Right. Because, like, he's, he's living good. He's got three hots and a cot. He, you know, he's not living in a fascist dictatorship anymore. You know, he gets free drugs. Because 1940s asylums were all about that, uh, that sweet, sweet, uh, just, just putting you sleep. Lord only knows what they were given them. Yeah, but it was probably the, probably the good stuff. Right. And so, yeah, some kid comes to you and says, hey, let's bring you. It's going to be like this. Shawshank Redemption. You know, I suspect he was like, yeah, I'm going to stay right where I am, thanks, and serve out my time. I love that imagery, actually. Of the Shawshank. It's like the Shawshank Redemption, except with a daughtering old fascist poet and a sociopathic narcissist. But otherwise, just exactly like the Shawshank Redemption. And then I imagine them on the lamb and it's like homeward bound, you know. Bradfield is the dog and pound is the cat.

If we get enough money on our Patreon, I need us to make this movie. Definitely. At least we're going to pitch the screenplay. So why this didn't actually happen, I can't imagine my suspicion, because he was married at the time, is that probably his wife just put her foot down. Like, you are absolutely not bringing home a treasonous poet and keeping him in our attic bill. I'm sorry, but a treasonous poet is just too big a responsibility for a boy your age, and you know I'll be the one cleaning up his messes. I'm sorry. You can cry all you want. And then he's like, toy truck. And she's like, all right, I can't anymore. Just sleep on the couch. So anyway. So anyway, eventually Pound was, you know, released anyway in sparing Bill the trouble of having to spring him. But Bill bragged forever after about being a protege of the great poet, even though my impression was that he was more of an errand boy for the great poet and probably an irritation to the great poet, as a matter of fact. This, too, added to Bill's mystique at Upper Merion High.

So what did I say earlier? Big fish in a small pond? That was most definitely Bill. And just to wrap up the Pound part of the story, it's amusing to me that Bill would tell people that he initially didn't understand Pound, but was deeply moved by it anyway. Yeah. It's very indicative of the sociopathy, in my opinion. I think so, too.

It definitely seemed, well, number one, it's hilarious. Right. I don't understand it, but I'm deeply moved. Well, it's just like every single person in all of our, you know, 100th level English classes who, yeah, who just, you know, brought in some Edgar Island Poe bullshit poem and was like, this is, this is what my life's about. Yeah. There was always that kid in poetry class who would choose the weirdest stuff that he or she could lay their hands on. And because I assume they thought it made them seem deep. yep so yeah and then there was also just as a side note there was that kid and then there was the kid that was obsessed with jack caroac that by the way was me if i'm being perfectly honest i'm gonna go on the road i bought a black beret and a rucksack and i'm ready yeah baby you would have made it about five minutes down the road and you would have been calling mom for gas money home yes but anyway that's enough about poetry class but yeah i agree i think it's

It does seem like sociopath stuff because it's all surface. You know, he liked the way it sounded. He liked the way the words fit together, but he didn't really trouble himself much that he didn't understand it. And it reminds me of the famous quote by John Douglas, who, of course, was the original profiler that founded the behavioral analysis unit at Quantico. Really interesting guy. He's the guy that the main character in the Netflix series Mind Hunter is based on.

and he's also the guy that the character of Jack Crawford in Silence of the Lambs is based on so he really is sort of the daddy of modern behavioral profiling and he has written that sociopaths know the words but not the music and I think that's such an elegant way

of putting what I mean which is that the way that psychopaths and sociopaths often move through the world is skimming along the surface so you can read a poet like Pound and just think it sounds great. And so, therefore, you weave it into your identity like Bill Bradfield is done. And I just think that's kind of fascinating.

So obviously, from that little quote that I read, You Pound, was not a big fan, let's say, of women. And I mentioned Bill's treatment of women. He was married, and in fact, he'd been married twice, although I think the second wife might have been common law, not official, but he'd been married twice. he had three children, and as our story begins, Bill is living with Sue Myers, who I mentioned before, longtime living girlfriend, and they've been together for about 15 years, and this is very indicative of how Bill treated his romantic partners, that it took Sue Myers years to find out for sure what Bill's marital status was. She really had no idea for years and years and years. Really, almost 15 years, if I remember rightly, for her to get a really.

really straight answer from him about whether he was married how many times he'd been married whether he was still in contact with his previous wives it's a yes or no question my dude it really is and it's bananas that you could live with somebody for 15 years and not know that most basic thing so bill was not great at being honest pretty much wouldn't know the truth if he fell over it and he was most definitely not good at being faithful basically bill was slamming ass all over upper Marion High, mostly with colleagues, but also with a couple of his students, which is gross, and I'm sorry, I have to tell you that. But, I mean, it was the 70s. And I can tell you, I have heard, like, my mom, you know, she and my dad were in high school in the 60s. And she told me,

and this may have just been her weird high school. I don't know for sure. But she did tell me that when she and my dad were in high school in the 60s, it was really commonplace for teachers to date students. That's so weird. That's so weird. Which is just mind-blowing to me. But I mean, maybe by 1979 it really wasn't that weird. I don't know. He did go to some pains to hide it. So I can, I assume from that that it wouldn't have been, you know, smiled upon per se. But we know definitely of one student in particular who's going to figure into the story later on. So, but mostly it was with fellow teachers. And he worked very hard to keep the very women and other people in his life separated.

He even convinced Sue not to tell anyone that they live together because supposedly the school might disapprove and might fire them, which was complete nonsense. I mean, that's not, Upper Marion was a very forward-thinking place. They weren't going to fire anybody for living with someone they weren't married to, especially considering who the principal was, and we're going to get into that in a minute. Katie's going to tell us about this guy, who's another of our major players. And you guys, if you think Bill Bradfield is a weirdo, hold on to your shorts because you ain't seen nothing yet. This guy is a piece of work.

So this guy would not have fired them if they had had full on naked sex in the middle of the gym during assembly. In fact, he probably would have filmed it. He would have been right there with a Super 8 camera, giving him directions. Oh, totally. This guy would not have fired them. So that was utter nonsense. And yet he managed to convince Sue of it. So they lived together for 15 years.

nobody knew except they're very very close friends so that was bonans and then when sue would catch him cheating which she inevitably would although i don't think she ever knew exactly how many people he cheated with or who it was but he would always gaslight her tell her she was being paranoid and hysterical and ridiculous like they do i know some of you people out there have been through this men and women and everybody So, yeah, and it's interesting. Bill was most definitely a womanizer in the sense that he had a lot of women in his orbit. He was involved with a lot of women. But at the same time, he would tell people that he believed in the Catholic virtue of chastity. Oh, my God. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, he would tell people, oh, I have no need of a sexual relationship. I pursue relationships of the mind. It's all intellectual with me, which he would be the type of guy to use the word safety.

be as sexual unironically. Oh, God, please don't do that. I know. I'm sorry I inflicted that upon you guys even for one second. And I don't mean to discount the fact that plenty of people do have non-sexual romantic relationships. That is absolutely a thing. It was not a thing with Bill Bradfield. Bill was lying.

And being pretentious. Yeah, he was being a little too-faced there. A little bit, yeah. And he did, you know, admit to one friend that he did an all. always succeed at this, and he was made of flesh, and sometimes he would slip. And, yeah, but he was pretty much bump and butts all over town. Now, that said, some of his ex-girlfriends have said that they never got the impression that sex was the main thing that he wanted from them.

So to that extent, it was true in that he did seem to have criteria that didn't have anything to do necessarily with hot, hot, sexy sex. For example, he tended to go after women who were vulnerable in some way. So women who were just going through a divorce or the ending of a relationship. And he, although he was very handsome, he never went after the conventionally beautiful women. So he would go after the women that were, you know, plainer, who didn't style themselves up, who probably hadn't had a lot of male attention, which I think is really interesting. It is, yeah.

And really telling about his psychology. and what he was getting out of these relationships. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But that kind of backs that up to an extent that, you know, it wasn't all about sex for him. So they would do a lot of talking and kissing and cuddling. And he had a character that he would do with some of his girlfriends. And I apologize in advance, guys.

This character was Elliot Emu. I am not making this up. Elliot, emu, because when I think sexy, I think emu. Yeah, absolutely. The emu, by far the most erotic of all the flightless birds. And I'm sorry, but like any, like, romantic partner that brings out a character? I have a bunch of questions. I just want to know the context.

I need film record of this character. I have questions and I want none of them answered. Exactly. It's like a train wreck where I'm like, I want to know what happened, but I also do not want to know what happened. Yeah, I will admit, I would kind of kill to be a fly on the wall during an Elliott emu performance. And we've tried to figure out like, what did he sound like? Like part of me wants to think maybe he was British. Yeah.

And then, yeah, what else? Like a squeaky Sesame Street character? Like, I'm picturing a Muppet, emu, which I know is not what he was doing. But I also enjoy the image of him, like, with one of those, like, puppets that you see on the sidewalk with people grifting. Oh, my God. Big fluffy wings. Yeah, yeah, totally. Or, like, a mascot costume.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I don't think he had a costume. Thank God. But, yeah, I'm sure he had a funny voice. And maybe it was just that, like, mainly. line Pennsylvania accent that I can't really do, but, you know, if anybody has any suggestions of what Elliot Emu would have sounded like, you can post them on our, on our Facebook page.

We'd be delighted to see. Please. It was, you know, it was kissing and cuddling, and it was intellectual or, as I suspect, pseudo-intellectual conversation. Not, you know, a ton of hot sexy sex. At least not like you'd expect from a man with so many girlfriends, but that did not mean that he couldn't muster up some passion. he definitely could and sometimes that passion was dark so one time he was arrested for assaulting the husband of one of his girlfriends and this guy had had the nerve to tell him to leave his wife alone I mean you know how dare and Bill had responded to this by busting through the guy's front door and beating this guy up while his poor wife who had just come out of the shower stood there in a towel and screamed her head off and

it must have been scary because Bill was a big, burly guy. He was a former wrestler, and he just left this guy in a heap. That's fucking scary. It really is. And I mean, all the guy did was say, you know, could you maybe not sleep with my wife? That was the extent of it. And Bill just went after him. And unfortunately, he weaseled out of it with a fine, which was just about $500, which isn't insignificant in 70s money, but still, that was it. And people like Bill Bradfield, this is a really bad thing because you have got to let people like this. experience consequences or all that will happen is it will just build that narcissism. I can get away with anything.

So it's really unfortunate that nobody made him serve any jail time for this. So he had a dark side to him for sure. And as I said, he tended to go after the quote unquote plain women. And one of our main sources for this podcast is the Joseph Wambaw book, Echoes in the Darkness. and Wampaw occasionally will probably get on your nerves if you ever read the book, which is quite good with his descriptions of women. So he would describe them sometimes as mousy, unattractive. No one would have ever accused blank of being beautiful, et cetera, et cetera.

So thanks for that, Joseph. Something about glass houses, throwing stones. Something about that, exactly. But he was good at this. He had a predator's instinct for zeroing in on people. who were vulnerable in some way. And he wanted people like this. He wanted people who were neurotic, insecure,

people who would be grateful for the attention and adore him and believe everything he said and put up with his bullshit. And of course, if one of them found out about any of the others, the line was always, oh, she means nothing to me. I'm not involved with her. She's pathetic.

She's just obsessed with me. I haven't encouraged it. Of course I haven't. You're the only one who means anything to me. I mean, come on. We've all heard this crap before, right? But this is what he would do And he would say, I'm just being a good friend

If I don't show her a little attention And she'll be destroyed Because he was a humanitarian, Katie He was. He should have joined the UN. He was bestowing his warm light Upon these withered flowers That's so desperately needed it Oh God, he was so gross

I hate this guy so much, you guys I hate him so much So anyway, he was really good at that And in addition to the women in his life, Bill befriended men as well. And he would always go after the young, brand new teachers. And he was 45. And he would go after these 21 and 22-year-old young teachers who had just started, had no life experience. These were the people that he gathered onto his chessboard because these were the people he knew he could manipulate.

Right. And I think that there are multiple reasons for this. One, of course, is the inferiority that he felt from never being able to please his father. At least he felt like he never could. The other thing, I think, is that when he was growing up, his father got transferred a lot for business. And so Bill actually went to 13 different schools when he was growing up. Now, I don't know if any of you guys listening were military kids or had parents who were transferred a lot. But I have known people like this, and what all of them have told me is that it teaches you to form bonds really,

quickly, but you never necessarily have time to really build deep relationships. Now, I am absolutely not suggesting that this means that if you moved around a lot as a kid, that you're some kind of narcissist or sociopath, absolutely not. Bill already had that predisposition, most likely genetically and from environmental things. I mean, his family struck me from the Wamba book anyway as being a little cold, a little chilly. So I'm sure that didn't help. Bill had had this growing in him already, but I think this contributed to it. Oh, totally. It helped him hone what was already growing inside of him because you're

completely right. I moved around a lot as a kid and I was, I'm able to form friendships really quickly and it just takes time that, you know, not a lot of people have when they're in these kinds of situations that, you know, to build deep, lasting relationships. Definitely. And I think it taught him how to be charming. Gavin De Becker, who is a former secret service agent and who wrote a wonderful book called The Gift of Fear, which I highly encourage everybody to read. It's wonderful. It teaches you how to hone your intuition and your instincts to stay safe. And one of the things that he says in that book, which this really bould me over, is that you should think of charm as a verb. Yes. So instead of thinking to yourself, oh, this guy's really charming or this woman is

really charming think this person is trying to charm me. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, charming people can be great. But it's something to be aware of is that this person is using a skill. Right. And you need to think about what their motivation might be. And so for Bill, I think it taught him how to charm how to attract people very quickly. And he was really good at this. Now, for most people, that would be a valuable life skill to make friends quickly and easily. But for somebody already headed towards sociopathy and narcissism, this meant that for Bill, people were expendable. Oh, totally. And it just made him better at drawing people into his web, which for somebody like him is dangerous.

And this is something that with life experience comes, you know, the type of instincts to ward this kind of thing off, which is why he specifically went after such young friends is because they weren't experienced enough to call him on his shit, essentially. Oh, absolutely. That's such a good point, definitely. So one of the vulnerable people that Bill gathered onto his chess board, of course, was Sue Myers. She met him when she was a young, inexperienced graduate student. She was seven years younger than he was. And later on, after our story kind of really gets going and after she started to really see Bill for who he was, she said that she thought he had chosen her for her virginity, which just, ugh, God, that's disturbing. Disgusting. Disgusting. It really is disturbing. So that was her impression, and I suspect she was probably right. You know, for him, he thought, oh, I'm getting a unsullied blank slate here that I can write all over because that's what he wanted. He wanted somebody who had had zero experience with relationships, very little life experience, and he got that in Sue Myers, which, of course, that's a despicable way to look at sex and relationships, but that's how Bill saw the world. And so by the time our story, begins, Sue has been with Bill for 15 years, and by this point, she is in it for the long haul, for better, for worse. And at this point, there's a lot of worse. And I think, you know, she had lost a lot of her illusions about him. She knew he was a cheater. She knew he was a liar.

But she was in love with this guy. And I think she was desperate to convince him that she was as important to him as he was to her. And she wanted to have his babies. That biological clock was starting to sound the alarm because she was 38 at the point where our story starts. And in the 70s, especially, that's, you know, that biological clock alarm is going off by then. Today, that's not so much the case because people are having children later and later in life. But that was not the case in the 70s. So I think she felt like she had two choices. She knew he wasn't an ideal partner, despite the fact that she, I think, genuinely believed he was a great man with a great mind and she believed in his poetry, which is hilarious to me, because according to Wambaw's book,

he had written like four poems in the years they'd been together. So, I mean, like, they better have been damn good, is all I'm saying, to warrant all that, especially since he told her, I love this, that the dalliances that he had with other women were grist for his poetry. Oh, my God. That's not what a human being says. That's what a character in a badly written book says. Well, we talked about him being a harlequin romance novel character.

Maybe he's one of those villain harlequin romance characters. Like, he makes women cry for sport. Ooh, I love it. Yes. Which he definitely did. I mean, that's actually true. That's not an exaggeration. But yeah, I mean, when she would catch him cheating, he'd say that it was grist for his poetry.

And bless her heart, she bought that nonsense for some reason, which is amazing. Because if you do the math, again, they've been together for 15 years. We're talking four poems. And he had had like 13 affairs. That she knows of. That is a lot of gristing. That's just inefficient at that point. Yeah, not a lot of product.

A lot of... He was gristing all over town. He was just gristing up one side of Upper Marion and down the other. But I think Sue's feeling was, look, I'm 38 years old. I've never been with another man. He's the first and only guy I've ever been involved with. They're living together. Their finances are all tied up together.

she wanted to have kids and I think she just felt like I'm going to stick with the devil I know because it was too scary for her to think of leaving and I'm sure there are people listening who relate to that and I'm here to say get out GTFO she does I mean bless her heart and I know she certainly came to feel that she should have a lot sooner than she did because bless Sue's heart she is definitely going to lose her illusions entirely about old Billy B before our story is over yeah And, you know, she mostly, because of all this, tolerated the fact that he would occasionally cheat on her. She wasn't happy about it. But for one thing, she had no idea how often he was doing it.

And for another, most of the time she could buy that this was just an occasional thing that he did to kind of rev up his energy and inspire him to write or whatever. And she could usually see something attractive in the women, even though he did tend to go for the quote-unquote plainer type. She could see something. But then that all changed when he got involved with a woman named Susan Reinhert. Now, this one, above all others, bothered the hell out of Sue Myers. This one, she considered an insult because in Sue's mind, there was nothing remotely attractive about Susan Reiner. Which I think is terrible because Susan Reinhert was a really great lady by all accounts. She was, of course, as we've already learned, one of our three victims in this case.

She was a popular teacher at Upper Marion, very kind-hearted, very friendly, very warm. She had recently divorced her husband, Ken, so prime real estate for Bill to swoop in and, you know, grab her up. She had two great kids, Karen and Michael, who were 10 and 11. And Susan was sometimes described as mousy, but she wasn't really. She was plain looking and she didn't wear a lot of makeup or wear sexy clothes or whatever. But she had this kind of quiet strength about her. She was very intelligent. And so Mousie, she was not, really, not in personality at all, just maybe in looks, if you wanted to be uncharitable.

So, you know, Susan had been unhappy in her marriage, and Bill had zeroed right in on that. And one night at a party with other teachers, he had just been gollied the crap out of her and just lured her right in. And lured her, in fact, into an affair that I don't think was the cause of her breakup with her husband, but was definitely a contributing factor. by the time they divorced, she was just head over heels for Bill. Sure. But their marriage was already going downhill before Bill entered the picture. So you can't necessarily blame it on the fact that she had an affair. And she really hadn't seen herself as the type of woman to have an affair.

Her feeling was that because she had gone outside her comfort zone to do this, that if she was going to leave her marriage for this guy, he better put up or shut up. Which makes sense to me, right? Yeah, totally. I don't understand what the hang-up is. I mean, she changed her entire life, put her kids through a divorce. Right. And he can't move out of his living girlfriend's house.

Exactly. That was her attitude. Like, come on, I have upended my life for you. So put up. Now, do we think Bill is going to put up? Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Yeah, he's going to step up, right?

Yeah, right. Storms are brewing. Storms of brewing campers is all I can tell you here. And Susan was scared shitless of Sue Myers because Sue, a grown woman, had found a letter one day in Bill's classroom. It was kind of sticking out between two books. And, of course, she snooped and she read it,

as would many of us. And it turned out to be a very, very spicy letter that Susan had written to Bill. and I think that if you needed any proof that Susan was not mousy, this letter would be it. Now, I'm not going to read it to you because it's very private, and I don't think we should do that. I don't think this poor woman, who is one of the victims in our story, would want that. All I can tell you is it was spicy. Now, Whitney, I have a question here because Sue Myers and Bill Bradfield were not having sex at this point, correct?

Oh, definitely. Very rarely. Okay, definitely not. Can you imagine finding a letter from your partner who has not been putting out and finding a letter from their lover of this magnitude? Are you fucking kidding me? That is true. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah. So Sue's not getting any. Their sex life had dried up very, very badly. So tumbleweeds are rolling through the bedroom at the Myers-Bradfield abode. And now Sue goes in and finds this species. spicy, spicy letter from Susan, which was all about, you know, how the effect, the effect basically that Bill had on her. Let's just put it that way. And, you know, it wasn't mousy. There was nothing mousy about it. Let's put it that way. And she, as anybody would, freaked out. And this grown woman marched with this letter into the teacher's lounge and in front of God and everybody kicked Susan in the shins. That's an exaggeration. It is not. She can, kicked her literally in the shins and she said you better stay away from bill oh my god right in the shins so

good what kind of grown woman goes for the shins and i mean i think that this is illustrative of two things one is that sue had some deep rage bubbling up inside and you know from 15 years of putting up with bill in his damn toy truck and his infidelities and his gristing and all this kind of stuff and two it gives you a very clear picture of the kind of joint that Upper Marion High was in 1979 because any other place on earth, if you march

into the teacher's lounge and you physically assault another teacher and scream at her, you better stay away from my man. There would be some kind of disciplinary action, would they're not? Yeah, somebody would think. You would think? Or somebody would call the police,

people would be horrified. Oh no. Not at Upper Marion. Everybody's just gathered around sipping their coffee, eating their popcorn, watching it all with saucer eyes, just riveted. Oh, boy, juicy. So. Filming on their cell phones at the time, I'm sure. If they had had cell phones, they absolutely would have. So this was the kind of joint that we're talking about here at Upper Marion. And when we get in, again, to who the principal was, you guys are going to understand why. I mean, this place was just unbelievable. I'd love to work at a place like this. It seems like it would be a constant party. Yeah. So, anyway,

So Susan was scared to death of Sue, and she, like, was in this group therapy group that she went to and she confided to them about how scared she was of this woman, which is understandable. And that just kills me because here are two women who are both getting played by a lying narcissist, blow hard, pseudo intellectual. I can't even, there aren't enough adjectives to string together for what a massive twat this guy was. And we have two women who were both getting played, and what they could have done is realized that and banded together and both left him in the dust and told him where he could go and what he could shove where and just Thelma and Louise did up and left him in the dirt. That is the movie, that is the second movie we've come up with, by the way, in this podcast. We're doing Homeward Bound with Bradfield and Pound, and we're doing Thelma and Louise with Sue Squared. I'm into it. But you know, like, come on, ladies, you're both getting played.

Why are you mad at each other? No, that's stupid. We all do it, regardless of gender. Absolutely. We all do it. We get mad at the one that our lover is cheating with instead of at the lover who's cheating. And it's a real damn shame. Because this story would have ended very differently if that had happened.

And man, it would have chapped his ass so bad. bad because a narcissist like Bradfield, oh, it would have eaten his lunch so bad if they'd just both dumped him. Ooh, it would have been so good. There's no Ezra Pound quote that's good enough for that

that you can comfort yourself with. Is there Billy Boy? So anyhow, that's a damn shame. So, all right, wrapping it up. When our story begins, Bill and Susan Reinhert had been involved for about a year. And of course, he was telling her he couldn't leave Sue because she would hurt herself.

She was too neurotic. He was too pathetic. Same old crap. And, of course, he was telling Sue that he wasn't involved with Susan Reiner. She was just obsessed with him. And he wasn't, you know, it had nothing to do with him. It was just a pathetic obsession of a sad woman. This is what he told everybody.

Good old country gaslighten. It's a good old gaslighten. So, yeah. And Susan, for her part, was getting really tired of his excuses of why he couldn't leave Sue and be with her. So, did I say Storms of Bruin? Oh, boy, you guys, storms are brewing. And before we get into that, there are just a couple more people I'm going to briefly

sketch out for you from Bill's sort of entourage of acolytes. The first is a guy named Vince Valetus. So he was another teacher at Upper Marion. And this guy just comes across as a doll, just sweet, early 20-something. He had never had a job outside a classroom. Pretty much went right from undergrad into teaching at Upper Marion. Bill instantly zeroed in on him because he had zero life experience. He'd never had a girlfriend.

And he was an actual real-life literal choir boy. I mean, what could be better? Right? He was very Catholic. He was a little adorable, Trekkie and horror movie buff. So a man after my own heart, and I know yours as well, Katie. Yes, absolutely. Because we're nerds from way back.

Murder nerds and also nerd nerds. and Vince just wanted everybody to be happy, you know, he was this apple-cheeked, sweet kid who looked like Clark Kent, and he was a people-pleaser, and he was absolutely in awe of Bill Bradfield, who very quickly became a father figure to him. So he was just adorable, and he was exactly the type of sweet, small-town kid that Bradfield took one look at and knew he had a live one. somebody he could get to do absolutely anything so Vince co-owned an arts and craft store with Bill and Sue Myers and as our story begins this arts and craft store has started to seriously go under it was never really solvent and it was Bill's bright idea to buy it I guess maybe he figured that all that macrame owl money would start rolling in and it would just be his ticket it out. But funnily enough, that's not what happened. And it started to go under pretty

quickly. You mean three teachers aren't business people? I guess not. And what would happen, of course, is that Bill would occasionally swoop in and bark a bunch of orders at Sue and Vince and then swoop back out again. And of course, Vince and Sue were doing all the work. And it was folding very badly. So we have financial trouble going on. And that's going to be really important to the story. So anyway, this was Vince Felatus. And then, And then the last guy that I want to talk about is a guy named Chris Poppuss. So this was Bill's other best friend, also young, also a teacher at the high school. He was a little bit older and more worldly wise than Vince, but not much. And to be honest, it did not take much to be more worldly wise than Vince at this point in their lives. And Chris owed Bill a debt of gratitude because he had initially been a student of Bill's and he had a learning disability that made it very difficult for him to read and write. And Bill had, really genuinely encouraged him and helped him. And Bill had been instrumental in Chris going to college to study philosophy, which he had taken to like gangbusters. And for the first time in his

life had something that he was good at intellectually, which had really been a source of insecurity for him because of his learning disability. So Bill was really largely responsible for Chris becoming confident in himself, finding his niche in life, finding his passion. And so Chris felt like he owed Bill and would pretty much do anything for him. And according to Bill Bradfield, that's about the best personality trait a person could have. Totally. Yeah. So when our story begins, Bill has just turned 45.

He's having some financial trouble, as I said. And he was also having a little bit of a midlife crisis. So he was telling people he hadn't accomplished everything that he had hoped to by this time in his life. and he was having this affair with Susan Reinhert and he was also involved and this was unbeknownst to Sue or Susan he was also having an affair with a student now she had just graduated so she was technically a former student

do we believe he waited until she graduated to become involved with her I don't you can decide whether you do she was either 17 or 18 I forget which but her name was Wendy and we're not going to get into her a lot in this episode but to maybe one or two close friends who he swore to secret see, of course. He confided that he wanted to marry Wendy. And why? Because that girl is going to be my ticket to heaven. Wendy was very sweet and also very religious and worship the ground he walked on. And I think he had this idea that she was a good influence on him, which is

interesting. Because it kind of shows me that he knows what a piece of shit he is. Maybe, I don't know. Or maybe maybe knew a little bit more about what he was than he would have people believe. So this is what's on. He's got Wendy. He's having this affair with Susan. He's got this arts and craft store that's floundering. And he really wanted to do something. And if you're Bill Bradfield, it has to be something spectacular. And so he told some people that what he wanted to do was buy a boat and sail around the world. Of course, as more grist for his poetry. He never tired of gristing. And he wanted to have great adventures and you can't do that plodding around the halls of Upper Merion High. To do that, you're going to need money.

And where are you going to get it? Well, we're going to find out. And that is going to set the stage for big badness to come. So that's Bill and his entourage. And I'm going to hand it over to Katie to tell you about this much-belly-hooed principle of Upper Marion High. Oh, dear God. Oh, yes.

dear lord j charles smith oh lord y'all i have been training for weeks for this conditioning calisthenics practicing the crane kick and you know if bill is a predator j smith is a tsunami he's unavoidable and caring in precise in his destruction i would say that he's possibly one of the most enigmatic characters i've ever encountered in my true crime experience and unlike bill we don't know much about Jay before he started at Upper Marion. And I would give anything to find out more about his childhood. Yeah, it's a huge gap. It's a big gap in the story that we don't know anything about his parents or his childhood at all. Right. And what we do know is that Jay was middle-aged when our story begins around mid-50s, tall, balding, had dark hair with pretty impressive

mutton chops. And this is where Wamba's delightful description. come in because he said he had a weak chin in a rubbery sensual mouth, which is disgusting. I don't know what it means. I can visualize it, though. Oh, yeah, definitely rubbery sensual mouth. Why Joseph Wambaw? Why? Well, he also described him as looking like an obscene phone call, which this is before, you know, modern times.

where everyone has a cell phone. We can just block numbers willy-nilly. But I'm assuming this is the kind of phone call you get where somebody's breathing really hard into the receiver. And much was made about people who encountered him of his eyes. And some people described them as reptilian, some amphibian. But in reality, they look just like a goat's eyes. And this is no offense to goats. Black Philip does not deserve this comparison. I'm picturing more Phil the Sater from Hercules? Yeah, we're not talking about the cute little pygmy goats in the pajamas that you see on YouTube. Like, this is a goat who's seen some shit. They're terrifying. And Jay was a military man. He was a colonel in the Army Reserve who had friends in high places. John Eisenhower,

yes, son of that president, had carpooled with him and spoke frankly incredibly highly of Jay, who also had a Ph.D. in education from Temple University. Most importantly, he was the principal of Upper Marion High School. And he is the type of guy that has the most beautiful, sparkling resume, but is completely different in real life. He was a creep and a pervert and made pretty much everyone uncomfortable to be around him. Yeah, he was good on paper, but then you would meet him. And in particular, I think if you were female, that would all start to fall apart immediately.

Like, you'd look at his resume and be like, Oh, heck yeah, we're going to bring this guy in for an interview. Oh, my God, look at his eyes. And if you guys think we're exaggerating, because I would have. And I remember when I was reading the book, I thought, oh, please, how bad can his eyes be? Because you do hear a lot of exaggerated talk in true crime about people's dead eyes or whatever. I'm telling you, we're going to post a picture or two of this dude. And I've seen some stuff, okay, in like 20 years of true crime obsession.

I got chills from this picture and there's a video of him talking somewhere too where you can really, like he looks at the camera at one point and you're just like, yeah, so we'll post all of that for you and you will see we are not exaggerating. No, thank you. He was, I mean, as I kind of inferenced, he was a disgusting lecher

and he always made really gross comments to teachers regardless of their gender. He told one male teacher who came to him with a concern about a school policy just saying, you don't need this job anyway, do you? You live on a farm. You should raise dogs. And why campers? Should he raise dogs? Well, of course, as a surrogate sex partner for women who are unsatisfied with their mates. Oh, my God. Holy shit. Oh, my. Okay. Okay, so just for a second, indulge me. Imagine that you go to your employer, your boss, and you say, so what are we going to do about X, Y,

and he says, hey, you don't need this job anyway. Go raise dogs so that they, oh my God, I can't even finish that sentence. No, that's disgusting. And one weekend, a teacher through a party for all the faculty and a female teacher who had been taking belly dancing classes got a little into her cups and started demonstrating her skills. Oh my. She went and got changed for this. She had a boombox. She was writhing all over the place. And then Mr. J. Smith, I'm sorry, Dr. J. Smith. Oh, right. Doctor. Sightled. He earned that doctorate.

Yes, you have to be, give him this honorific. He wiggled on up behind a couple of the other female teachers who were watching and said, What does one do when a portion of one's anatomy gets hard? I'll pause and let our campers puke if they need to. Oh, my God. So gross. And I can only imagine that they could feel like his breath on the back of their necks as he said this to them. Mm-mm. No.

Blach. Thank you. And apparently he had a really, like, malefluous voice, like a made-for-radio voice, which somehow makes this even creepier when you picture all of those disgusting comments in this really silky voice. I can't. Not great. Yeah, my impression is probably not true to life.

I'm sorry, everyone. I think I think that was fairly, fairly malefluous. His faculty and his long-suffering secretary, a woman named Ida McEuchy, had to deal with stuff like, you know, walking in on him sitting in his office and tidy white, he's with his feet up on the desk. Weird chemical smells wafting under his office door, throwing his own trash away in the campus dumpster. and the weirdest disappearing from the office and appearing around campus. Now, Whitney, in your estimation, is this guy on drugs? I think he has to be. I can't imagine what else the chemical smell wafting under the door would possibly be.

I don't know what kind, but my guess is he was probably like huffing something in there or smoking something. I don't know what, but yeah, it's got to be. And also, I mean, just if we want to talk about smell for a second, because we've also got him sitting in his underwear. And it was nothing else, right? Like literally in his tidy whitties with his feet up on the desk. So I can only assume that at this point, Ida, his secretary, is like buying Glade plug-ins in bulk to deal with the smell of drugs and sweaty balls, just wefting from underneath the man's door. And, you know, speaking of Ida, she was quite a character. And she was actually the only person who ever tried to get the bizarre new principle in line. And she fucking hated him. She said that she would have been scared of him if she didn't hate him so much. But, you know, because she hated him, she was able to give him hell early and often. And at one point, after a bad performance review, Ida confronted him and demanded a written explanation, which is a pro move, absolutely. And

And Jay provided said explanation, which was that Ida kept a candy dish on her desk, which Jay said was encouraging teachers to loiter around the principal's office and attracted bugs and vermin. Bugs and vermin. I love this vermin. Like, bugs you could maybe see if you just had like a big open thing of M&Ms. But was he insinuating that there were like raccoons perched on her desk or something? My theory is he meant the teachers. That was the vermin. I can totally see that.

Ida was pissed. Of course. She made her displeasure known. And Jay, to his credit, weirdly enough, spent the next few years apologizing at every single opportunity. And he, this is important to mention, he never apologized to a single other soul. No. No one.

And after that, he would get her little gifts. Like, at one point, she mentioned that she loved. stuffed cabbage, and she arrived home one day to a vat of it on her porch, which is very curious, in my opinion, because it's one thing to bring your secretary lunch on a special occasion, but to deliver extreme amounts of cabbage to her house unannounced is so weird and smelly. Yeah, nobody wants that. Nobody wants to come home to like a waste basket size vat of really anything, but especially not stuffed cabbage, because you could probably smell it halfway down the street.

It's just weird, Jay. That's so weird. And I think this is going back to our homeboy, John Douglas, talking about knowing the words and not the music, because it is normal to bring your secretary her favorite food for lunch. Yes. It is not normal to somehow obtain a vat of said favorite food. bring it to her house, which is fucking terrifying. It's almost a little hostile,

if you ask me. There's an undercurrent of hostility to that. Like, oh, you like stuffed cabbage, do you? Well, here! I would not eat one micron of anything that that freak brought me if you paid me $1 million. And I'm

sure that entire VAT went in the trash. Because I guarantee you Ida was not touching that. Because God only knows what he put in it, what he did in it, did to it. I wouldn't put anything past him, telling his teachers to raise dogs as sexual surrogates. Oh, God. He's no. No. No, no, no. And Ida seemed to have his number down pretty well, so I'm sure that went straight in the trash. And, you know, Ida was a good person. And Susan,

being a single mom, would often have to leave her kids in custody of Ida while she finished up after school. And Jay, magnanimously would whine, I don't like teachers bringing their damn kids around school. We're not here to babysit. I don't know why I turned British at the end of that impression. But, you know, his secretary, who, like everyone, adored the Reinerk kids, who were very polite and sweet, said, you'd have to like those kids. And he responded, I don't like any kids. Yes. Take it in, folks, an educator that hated kids. Yeah, why he chose to be a school principal, I can't really imagine but yeah I kind of have this theory that because he obviously as we're about to learn he had a very loosey-goosey approach to being a principal so he wasn't actively torturing the kids or anything like

that he was very hands off as we'll find out but I kind of have this feeling that there was something about being around something that he despised all the time that he found invigorating and I could be dead wrong about this but I almost wonder if he just kind of enjoy like stoking the rage garden like you know or stoking the rage flames and just oh yeah for the big boom it's like on Facebook when you see an article and you let you're like I know if I click the the comments I'm going to be fucking angry but you do it anyway to get that rage out of you sure absolutely but there's certainly a guidance counselor somewhere that wasn't paying attention on the day jay took his aptitude testing you know Smith wasn't like other

principals. He was a cool principal. He didn't try to keep order and wouldn't do much of anything to discipline the kids. And bore Ida, having enough of the chaos of the school, finally confronted him and said, there are kids smoking dope in the halls. Are you going to do anything? And at that, he laughed and said, what do you want me to do? Kill them? Which is the most fucking extreme joke he could have made. I maintain he would have enjoyed that. Oh, absolutely. You would have enjoyed killing the children. But yeah, definitely a weird joke to make.

And another teacher who came to him for help dealing with the kids were who were drag racing in the parking lot and blasting music on boomboxes. He told her he had no time for overreacting menopausal women, my dear. Isn't that just charming, bless his heart? Oh, God bless him, I guess. You know, and he had these open mic announcements on the school's PA system, which by my estimation was just an opportunity for him to rehearse his stand-up type five. Yeah, he loved to hear himself talk. There's no doubt about that.

He and Bradfield have that in common for sure. And sometimes the announcements would take up the entire class period, which I'm sure the kids loved. And for example, he would say something like, this is your principal speaking. There is a new regulation for gym clothes. You may wear yellow bottoms and blue tops, or you may wear blue bottoms and yellow tops. I trust that this will please authoritarians and the faculty and not displease libertarians. But I have one caveat. In the winter, it shall be the duty of each and every student to be encased in warm underwear.

Oh, my God. Which, of course, the kids, as you said, I'm sure loved because it was chaos, and it meant they didn't have to do any word. and which I'm sure the teachers absolutely despised. But encased in warm underwear. So speaking of underwear, wasn't there a story about one of the janet? Now we already have him sitting at his desk with his feet up in his little tidy whitties. Wasn't there a story where one of the janitors was there late at night one night

and said he used to see him there at all hours of the night all the time? So he just treated it as like his home. He was throwing his trash away. He was just hanging out in his underwear. And one night, this janitor was mopping the floor in the hall and saw Smith walk out of his office and down the hall to the bathroom, which would not have been a big deal except that the man was in his flippin underwear again and nothing else. I'm imagining the scene from risky business. Yeah. Except it's way grosser with Jay.

Except he's a horrible old lecher, bestiality enthusiast. Other than that, just exactly like risky business. Jay and Bill actually locked horns quite a bit due to Billy Boy's position as the teacher's rep. Yeah. And, you know, as a hilarious display of Galaxy Brain masculinity, Jay would break out obscure or bizarre words to humble those that challenged him, especially Bradfield, though, who hated when he did this. Smith would say something like, I find a reasoning a bit paraphrastic, which would send Billy scurring off to look up what the fuck that meant,

which is indirect, by the way. You're welcome, Wendy. Yeah, it kind of means like you're taking the long way around to get to your point, which is probably something that Bill Bradfield did on the regular because he loved to hear himself talk so very much. Yeah, it was probably a bit of a truth bomb. And he eventually started doing, which I hate to say,

is something that I personally find the most fucking funny thing he ever did. He started doing this thing where he'd make up words for Bill because he got bored with the real ones. He told Ida, those pseudo-intellectuals need the exercise that I provide, which is the most terrifying thing he could have possibly said. Yeah, like one of the words that he made up was rims for gold, which I was really quite creative, rims for gold. And I love that he figured Bill out as a pseudo-intellectual so quickly because when our story begins, he'd actually only been principal for a pretty short time. And so he twigged Bradfield immediately for the blowhard sort of fake that he was. And this is why he would mess with him like this.

And I have to say, J. Smith is a repulsive human being through and through. but I almost like him a little bit just in that moment when he's making up fake words for Bradfield. Yeah, no, that's one of those like, you know, gun to my head. I'd be like, oh, but I kind of like Jay better. Yeah, God. If I had to pick one of them. Yeah, if somebody put a gun to your head and said,

choose now which one is slightly less loathsome of these two utterly loathsome human beings. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And, I mean, that's just damn funny. You can't argue with that. making up fake words to score off a pseudo-intellectual blowhard like Bradfield. And, you know, he, I mean, I've kind of mentioned some of the weird stuff he said, but that doesn't even scratch the surface.

I mean, this next section is something I like to call Jay Smith's greatest hits. He once asked a prospective teacher what kind of birth control she used. And she was a young widow. And he goes, how do you handle your sex life? And she responded with discreetly. Oh, my God. Which, bram-b-b-b-b-b-m-mik, like, that's fucking awesome. To poor Vince Volitis, he said, young man, just remember one thing.

English literature is nothing more than fucking and sucking. Oh, my God. Again, this is your boss or your perspective, because I think he said this at his interview, right? Yeah, this is his interview. And Vince said, thank you. Good to know. Yeah. my lord so where is the fucking and sucking in huckleberry fin it's in the subtext

whitney you have to look deep deep in the subtext for it yeah what um what about little women where's the fucking and sucking in that is that also in the subtext i think there might be a porn remake of oh you know there is unfortunately rule 34 full effect but yeah i mean i don't necessarily think that that's a view that you could support if challenged no no you're talking to a couple of English majors here. That's absolutely not the case. Fucking and sucking. So while his faculty did enjoy the freedoms that came with him being so loosey-goosey,

they did have some choice nicknames for their boss. And in particular, after Jay was investigating a busted boiler, he emerged from a dark room cloaked in copious amounts of steam, looking straight out of a Bram Stoker novel. And Vince Velitis, the horror fan he was, ascribed him the apt nickname, Prince of Darkness. Yeah, and he always wore a black suit. So I imagine the effect was pretty intense of him emerging from a dark room, swirling, you know, steam swirling around him in his black suit. Prince of darkness indeed. Absolutely. Unfortunately, Jay was not alone in the world. He was married to a woman named Stephanie who Wamba generously described as Dolly Parton from the back and a hooked nose hag from Macbeth from the front. Dude, Wambaw, are you kidding me, man?

What hell? Killing me, Smalls. Oh, my God. And, well, you know, I was going to, this is terrible, but Stephanie, Jay's wife was actually really sick as, you know, throughout the entire story, she had cancer. And so she had passed away by the time the book came out. But she's certainly not the only woman that Wambaw describes in extremely unflattering terms. And you have to wonder as he's writing this thing, like, you know people are going to read this

right? Does that not bother you in any way? No. I guess he felt it was just hard-nosed journalism. He was telling the truth. And I found that generally true crime authors do the opposite where they like very generously describe people and I like look up pictures and I think they're going to be like Angelina Frickin' Jolie.

Yeah, it's true. And they're just like normal people and I'm like, oh, I mean they're fine. Yeah, no, that's true. That's true. Because we do tend to kind of lionize the dead. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, Stephanie was very sweet and friendly. And In fact, she put her husband through college when he got his Ph.D. She, I mean, she worked her

ass off. She worked at a dry cleaner. And she was a total gossip and would give customers, coworkers, pass her by by, a blow by blow of her husband's indiscretions. And boy, were there some indiscretions, folks. He had, you know, a couple affairs. And she once found some love letters in his secret basement apartment, which she showed to poor Ida, who was dismayed to find that they were all about Dobermans and Collies. Oh my God, what is his thing with dogs? I genuinely apologize that we even have to tell you that. But I felt, we felt, that it was necessary to capture how absolutely disgusting this human being was.

Yeah, and how no one seemed to even bat an eye. His wife thought it was fucking funny. Well, I got the impression she was really jealous of the affairs. But yeah, like the bestiality thing, I don't think she had an approach. appreciation for just how disgusting that was. Yeah, I think she was, she was laugh. Like, if you don't laugh, you cry. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, she would, she would giggle over. And I'm also sorry, campers for what I'm about to tell you. He called his mistress, uh, love woman, which is bad enough. But in turn, she called him and brace yourselves. Lovecock. Oh, please no. Lovecock. What a beautiful story

It really should be like a sweeping rock ballad About the two of them and their love affair The Ballad of Love Woman and Lovecock And yeah I mean bless her heart Stephanie If you came into that dry cleaner You were going to get the full story Every time I found another letter

You want me to read it to you Please know Ida would say, please no, because she had to work with the man. But everybody else, I assume, was there every Thursday on cue with the popcorn and ready to listen. But if I had been there, I would have totally been into it and wanted to hear all the disgusting details because I'm an odd person. But I would definitely have told her to filter out the dog stuff because that's horrifying. Yeah, and maybe like notify the ASPCA. Most definitely.

And thank God they did not own a dog. Thank God. I made sure of that. Yeah. And, you know, Whitney mentioned this. but she did develop cancer in her stomach, intestines, and lymph nodes. And sadly, spends most of the story in hospice care because it was growing so quickly. Bless her heart.

So, this concludes the puppet show. These are our major players, and there are going to be some other people who are going to pop up as the story goes along. But this is sort of the stage that you need to have set before you can fully participate in the story, which we'll start with next time. But, you know, of course, in the beginning, we, learned about poor Susan and her fate being found in her car. And so Ken Reiner was her ex-husband. He was brought in to identify his ex-wife's body. And of course, he's going to be the investigator's prime suspect initially, as any spouse or ex-spouse would be. So they were watching him pretty

carefully as they interviewed him and as he identified her body. And he really still clearly cared deeply for Susan. She was the mother of his children, and he hadn't been the one that wanted the divorce. He was really upset about it, in fact. So when he made the positive ID of her body, he was obviously very saddened and confused. So one detective showed, I guess, a little bit of compassion for him, took him to a diner for the initial interview, got him coffee, and Ken was just completely in shock. So for about two hours, he did his level best to calmly answer the questions that the police put to him and then when the shock kind of started

to wear off a little bit, almost as an afterthought, Ken said so where are my kids, are they at the neighbors? And the investigator's stomach dropped. And he said, what kids? So we'll leave it there for today,

campers. We've told you who one of our three victims will be. We've told you about the major players in the case. Next time, we'll get into the story itself, and let me tell you. It's probably by far the most bizarre story you've never heard. Until then, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. You can follow us on Twitter at TC Campfire, Instagram at True Crime Campfire, and be sure to like our Facebook page. If you want to support the show and get

access to extras, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. Thank you. Thank you.