Susan Reinert: The Murder, the Convictions, and the Missing Children

The murder of Susan Reinert was a 1979 Pennsylvania insurance-motive killing in which the 36-year-old Upper Merion High School English teacher was beaten, drugged, and left dead in the trunk of her car near Harrisburg, while her two young children disappeared the same weekend and were never found. Her colleague William Bradfield was convicted of the killings; the school’s principal, Jay C. Smith, was also convicted but later freed after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found prosecutors had suppressed evidence.

What Happened in June 1979

Susan Reinert lived in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, with her two children, Karen, 11, and Michael, 10. Around 9:20 p.m. on Friday, June 22, 1979, the three were last seen leaving their home in Reinert’s orange Plymouth Horizon hatchback.¹ They never came back.

At about 5:20 a.m. on Tuesday, June 25, Reinert’s body was found in the hatchback of her car in the parking lot of the Host Inn in Swatara Township, roughly 90 miles from her home.² She was nude, curled in a fetal position, beaten, and bound with chains that had bruised her body.³ A forensic pathologist later determined she had been killed by a morphine injection administered 24 to 36 hours after the initial beating, with death likely occurring on the morning of Sunday, June 24. The first autopsy had listed asphyxiation; that was corrected once lab results identified the morphine.⁴

Karen and Michael were not in the car. State and local police, joined by 18 FBI agents on a five-month nationwide search, never located them.³ They were declared legally dead in March 1987.⁵

Why She Was Killed

The motive was money. Reinert had been romantically involved with William S. Bradfield Jr., the chair of the English department at Upper Merion High School, and believed the two would marry. Before her death, she had named Bradfield the beneficiary of life insurance policies totaling roughly $730,000 and had rewritten her will to make him her sole heir, cutting out her own children.⁵ She had also handed him $25,000 to invest, money prosecutors later said he stole.⁶

Former prosecutor Richard Guida said Reinert “was worth $7,000 a pound,” and argued that the absence of the children from the crime scene pointed to the person who stood to gain from all three deaths.¹ As heirs, the children stood in the way of Bradfield collecting. Prosecutors argued they were killed for the same reason their mother was, and their bodies disposed of so thoroughly that they were never recovered.

Bradfield had spent months building cover. He arranged a weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, with a group of associates who saved ticket stubs and receipts to document his whereabouts.³ He also told those associates, in the months before the killing, that the school’s principal Jay C. Smith was a “screened hitman for the Mafia” who kept a “list of people to dispatch.” After Reinert died, he told them Smith had “apparently gone through with his threats.”⁷ Prosecutors treated the stories as fabrications designed to steer suspicion toward Smith.

The Physical Evidence Against Smith

Investigators, led by Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Jack Holtz and Sergeant Joe VanNort with FBI assistance, pulled several pieces of evidence linking Smith to the car and to the children. A blue comb inscribed “79th USARCOM” was recovered from under Reinert’s body. Smith’s former military reserve unit was the 79th USARCOM, and a bag of identical combs was later found at his home.³ A small green pin that Karen had been seen wearing on the night she vanished was later recovered from under the passenger seat of Smith’s car.¹ Red and blue fibers were pulled from Reinert’s hair, and adhesive tape residue was identified on her body.

There was also a striking coincidence of geography. On June 25, 1979, the day Reinert’s body was found in the Harrisburg-area hotel parking lot, Smith was in Harrisburg to be sentenced for an earlier conviction involving a Sears robbery and illegal firearms.⁸

Bradfield’s Convictions

Bradfield was prosecuted first for the money. On August 3, 1981, he was convicted of theft by deception for stealing the $25,000 Reinert had entrusted to him and was sentenced to up to two years in jail.⁶ While awaiting that trial, he filed a lawsuit trying to collect on Reinert’s life insurance.

The murder case followed. On October 28, 1983, after a two-week trial, a jury of nine men and three women convicted Bradfield on three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of conspiracy. They deliberated for 75 minutes.⁹ He drew three consecutive life terms. Bradfield died in prison in January 1998 without ever telling anyone where the children were.³

Why Jay Smith Went Free

Smith was tried separately. By his 1986 arrest for the Reinert killings, he was already in prison for theft by deception, receiving stolen property, and firearms offenses.³ In April 1986, a jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death. The prosecution’s theory was that Bradfield had orchestrated the plot and manipulated Reinert while Smith carried out the killings. Smith’s defense was the mirror image: that Bradfield and his associates had killed Reinert at the New Jersey shore and framed him.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed the conviction in 1987, ruling that the trial court had improperly admitted the testimony of Bradfield’s associates about what Bradfield had told them regarding Smith. Because the associates had no personal knowledge of any conspiracy between the two men, their accounts were inadmissible hearsay.⁷ The case was sent back for retrial.

Before that retrial, Smith’s lawyers discovered something the prosecution had not turned over. During the original autopsy, a state police officer named John Balshy had noticed a grainy, sand-like substance between Reinert’s toes and preserved it on adhesive “lifters.” The lifters had never been disclosed to the defense in 1986.¹⁰ If sand had been on Reinert’s feet, it fit the defense theory that she had been killed at the shore rather than anywhere connected to Smith.

On September 18, 1992, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in Commonwealth v. Smith, 532 Pa. 177. Writing for the court, Justice Flaherty held that the Commonwealth had “deliberately suppressed the existence of the two adhesive lifters” and that the misconduct violated Smith’s double jeopardy rights under the Pennsylvania Constitution.¹¹ The court noted that the state constitution reaches further than the federal double jeopardy standard, which usually requires proof that a prosecutor intended to force a mistrial; here it was enough that the misconduct “was intended to prejudice the defendant and thereby deny him a fair trial.” Retrial was barred. Smith was ordered discharged the same day.

Smith maintained his innocence for the rest of his life. The lead prosecutor in the case was later convicted on cocaine charges.¹² Smith died in Wilkes-Barre in May 2009 at age 80.

The Children Are Still Missing

Karen and Michael Reinert have never been found. Their files remain with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which has produced age-progressed images.¹³

The strongest surviving lead is a photograph developed in 1986 and recovered from Bradfield’s prison cell after his death in 1998. It shows a stone marker resembling a hooded figure, set in a wooded area strewn with fallen leaves. Investigators believe the site could be where the children were buried, but no one has ever identified the spot.²

In April 2025, the Pennsylvania State Police renewed their public appeal and offered a reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to the discovery of the children or the resolution of the case. Tips can go to PSP Harrisburg at 717-671-7500 or anonymously to 1-800-472-8477.¹⁴

1
CNN. Pennsylvania Reinert Murders
2
PennLive. Mysterious Photo May Hold Clues in 1979 Harrisburg Cold Case
3
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Smith v. Holtz Opinion
4
Crime Library. The Main Line Murders
5
The Charley Project. Karen Reinert
6
Main Line Media News. True Crime: The Reinert Murder Rocked Our Area
7
CaseMine. Commonwealth v. Smith
8
The New York Times. Jay C. Smith Dies
9
The New York Times. Teacher Convicted in Slaying
10
Justia. Smith v. Davis
11
Justia. Commonwealth v. Smith, 532 Pa. 177
12
Delaware County Daily Times. Many Unanswered Questions in Reinert Case
13
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Michael Reinert Missing Poster
14
iHeartMedia WHP 580. Reward Offered in 1979 Missing Children Case