In 1979 the body of Susan Reinert was found stuffed into the wheel well of a Plymouth Horizon that had been abandoned at the parking lot of a Harrisburg, Pa., motel. She was a recently divorced schoolteacher. Her children Karen, 11, and Michael, 10, had vanished, most likely on the day their mother was killed. They have never been found, and are presumed dead. A seven-year investigation eventually led to the arrests and convictions of two men, former colleagues of Reinert's at the Upper Merion High School outside Philadelphia.
Given the public taste for upscale homicide, the case became known as the Main Line murders. This is not as elegant as it sounds. Echoes in the Darkness and Engaged to Murder have nothing to do with Grace Kelly's relatives or rowing on the Schuylkill, although some of the characters in the story had a fortune in fantasy lives. So it is no surprise that Joseph Wambaugh, the former Los Angeles cop who writes well about the police (The Blue Knights, The Onion Field), attempts to establish a gothic mood. He associates the feeling with eastern Pennsylvania's brooding Germanic influences and forbidding estate architecture. His competition, Philadelphia Inquirer Reporter Loretta Schwartz-Nobel, prefers the interior decoration of the not-so-new journalism. She has had the doubtful advantage of interviewing the imprisoned criminals in the case, and likes to titillate readers with her reactions: "That night, after falling into a troubled sleep, I had my first dream about William Bradfield. He had escaped from prison and had come directly to my house. I was alone. When I opened the door and saw him, I was surprised, but greeted him as a friend. He put his arms around me. 'I've waited a long time for this,' he said, and then he lifted his hands to my throat."
Bradfield was an Upper Merion English teacher and is now serving three life sentences for conspiracy in the Reinert murders. The actual killings were done by Jay Smith, the school principal, who was sentenced to death and awaits execution. How Smith ever got to be an administrator of impressionable youth remains one of those mysteries of American public education. He fixed people with a cold, goatish stare and liked to shock. His opening remark to a teacher who had recently lost her husband: "As a young widow, perhaps you could tell me how you handle your sex life." When police searched Smith's house they found pornographic material, including books with titles like Her Four-Legged Lover. He claimed to be exploring the use of animals as sexual surrogates and writing a book tentatively called How to Prevent Homosexuality in Your Children. His basement contained items of even more interest to the law: 580 grams of marijuana, illegal pills, stolen office equipment, four gallons of nitric acid, gun silencers made from automobile oil filters and Brink's security-guard uniforms used in a robbery of a Sears store. Smith was in prison for that caper when he was charged with the Reinert deaths.