Deceased/Not Found PA - Karen, 11, & Michael Reinert, 10, Ardmore, 22 June 1979 *W. Bradfield guilty*

[strawberry]

The thing that always bothered me about this case is that there was no real evidence that Smith was involved at all. Yes, he was a sociopath who almost certainly killed his daughter but his ties to Bradfield and Reinert were pretty weak. I couldn't see any reason he would comitt triple homicide for such a sleazy guy as Bradfield. I wonder if Smith was just a fall guy and Bradfield had someone else working with him we do not know about.

Could be


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[scriptgirl]

What is the story with Joanne Aitken?

 

[Onfortuneswheel]

THANK YOU! for this incredibly insightful post. I disagree with Smith being the murderer. Through my research I have had an overwhelming feeling that he was framed in all of this. But being that both him and bradfield are dead now, I guess it doesn't make much difference as far as solving the case of the the missing kids goes.

However, Your post is DIRECTLY in line with my thought process. Valley forge has always made sense to me. More specifically, Wayne's Woods. This is a section of Valley forge that is UPHILL like you said, very heavily wooded, and very undisturbed.

Now get this: This section of the park is closed off. Completely undisturbed with a fence around it and no trespassing signs. Why? Because it is a site of buried soldiers. At one corner of the woods you can see a sign that reads "Burial site of unknown soldiers." The unknown soldiers grave sites are marked by upright stones. Exactly like in the picture. It seems like its almost too easy to not be cracked at this point. A secluded part of a national park that is filled with grave sites marked by up right stones? No-brainer. I do not have knowledge on when that part of the park was officially fenced off but combining your speculations with mine, I have an OVERWHELMING urge to go investigate myself.

Lets keep this thread alive.

Did anyone ever look further into the possibility that the marker in the photograph was a side view of one of the unknown soldier grave markers near Wayne's Woods in Valley Forge National Park?

A quote from this article made me think of Valley Forge in connection to the jail cell image:

After months of hearing Bradfield talk about Smith's alleged sinister plans to kill Reinert, and others, Wambaugh said, Valaitis got spooked as he drove near Valley Forge National Historical Park during a violent thunderstorm one evening. Eventually, he wound up at Mother of Divine Providence Church, on Allendale Road, where he spilled his guts to a priest.

The stone in the image could be a side view of the same stone, 30 years of wear later.

 

[strawberry]

Did anyone ever look further into the possibility that the marker in the photograph was a side view of one of the unknown soldier grave markers near Wayne's Woods in Valley Forge National Park?

A quote from this article made me think of Valley Forge in connection to the jail cell image:



The stone in the image could be a side view of the same stone, 30 years of wear later.

Interesting...I'm familiar with the cemetery behind Washingtons Chapel but not with these. Where exactly is this marker?


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[Onfortuneswheel]

They were marked by a user on the Waymarking site: http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/...orical_Park_Historic_District_Valley_Forge_PA

 

[strawberry]

They were marked by a user on the Waymarking site: http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/...orical_Park_Historic_District_Valley_Forge_PA

Thanks! I'll have to check it out I've never ventured into the woods there


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[J. J. in Phila]

I don't know if this will help, but here is a list of all Revolutionary War Veterans' graves in the greater Philadelphia area. http://www.passar.org/graves/PCC index.html

I'm fairly sure that is a Sons of the Revolution/Sons of the American Revolution grave marker.

 

[strawberry]

I don't know if this will help, but here is a list of all Revolutionary War Veterans' graves in the greater Philadelphia area. http://www.passar.org/graves/PCC index.html

I'm fair sure that is a Sons of the Revolution/Sons of the American Revolution grave marker.

Thanks! I love this stuff


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[Onfortuneswheel]

So, I just noticed something really odd. It almost sounds crazy, but I think Bradfield was trying to send someone a message through what was engraved on his tombstone....

I was looking for more of a background on Bradfield and came across his Find a Grave profile. I saw that his gravestone has a quote attributed to Ezra Pound and wondered which poem it came from but when I searched for it nothing came up. The words on the gravestone aren't from a single poem (or even completely from Ezra Pound).

The poem on the stone is:

Thought is a labyrinth
And will fades, but the light,
the light sings eternal.
Ezra Pound

Thought is a labyrinth

This line is not a quote from Ezra Pound. It is the last sentence of Hugh Kenner's 1971 Pound biography, The Pound Era. The full paragraph is:

His mind on Carpaccio, on cats and stones, on butterflies (“gasping,” “milkweed the sustenance&#8221, on the conversation frequent visitors brought, on faces present and gone, on his own past, shrunken; slight, no more weight than he had had half-grown, long ago, in Wyncote [Pennsylvania], he shouldered the weariness of 85 years, his resource memory within memory within memory. At Wyncote, last, a summer night in 1958, St. Elizabeths freshly behind him, in bed in his old house for the last time (and aged 72), he had somehow wakened-always a brief sleeper, genius enjoys long days-and tiptoed downstairs in his pajamas, out into the dark street, and down to the Presbyterian Church, to sit on the steps looking over the moonlit lawns of great estates; sitting where a boy had sat 60 years before, his eye on trees before dawn, his mind on the poet’s destiny, which should be that of dreaming old men’s silences; the old man’s memory now in turn accessible to the still older man in Venice, to be guessed at but never experienced by any comer. “Shall two know the same in their knowing?” Thought is a labyrinth.

The quote before "Thought is a labyrinth" - “Shall two know the same in their knowing?” is from a Pound poem, Canto 93 to be exact. The full block reads:

Shall two know the same in their knowing?
You who dare Persephone's threshold,
Beloved, do not fall apart in my hands.

The last line, which I bolded, is the part that I found interesting (again, this all seems rather absurd, especially as I'm typing this out). Also interesting about the last paragraph from the book is that it refers to Ezra Pound's time in Wyncote, PA, a town that is 30 minutes from Ardmore, PA, where the Reinerts' were last seen.

And will fades, but the light

I couldn't find anything that matched this but I'm going to keep looking. It just seems to defy logic that Bradfield, a self-proclaimed expert on Ezra Pound, would have a poem engraved on his tombstone that is attributed to Ezra Pound, but isn't from Pound.

the light sings eternal

This is pulled from a Pound poem, Canto 115. The complete poem (with the pertinent line bolded) being:

The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.

Wikipedia has a lengthy entry talking about the Cantos. It's analysis on Canto 115 is (emphasis added by me):

The short extract from Canto CXV is a reworking from an earlier version first published in the Belfast-based magazine Threshold in 1962 and centres around two main ideas. The first of these is the hostilities that existed amongst Pound's modernist friends and the negative impact that it had on all their works. The second is the image of the poet as a "blown husk", again a borrowing from the Noh, this time the play Kakitsubata.

Yelling at his followers who went to Cape May with him and didn't back him up in court thus leading to his eventual imprisonment?

Can anyone else found this exact poem from Ezra Pound? Do you think the convoluted poem on the stone was a mistake? That Bradfield may not have chosen it?

 

[strawberry]

So, I just noticed something really odd. It almost sounds crazy, but I think Bradfield was trying to send someone a message through what was engraved on his tombstone....

I was looking for more of a background on Bradfield and came across his Find a Grave profile. I saw that his gravestone has a quote attributed to Ezra Pound and wondered which poem it came from but when I searched for it nothing came up. The words on the gravestone aren't from a single poem (or even completely from Ezra Pound).

The poem on the stone is:

Thought is a labyrinth
And will fades, but the light,
the light sings eternal.
Ezra Pound




This line is not a quote from Ezra Pound. It is the last sentence of Hugh Kenner's 1971 Pound biography, The Pound Era. The full paragraph is:



The quote before "Thought is a labyrinth" - “Shall two know the same in their knowing?” is from a Pound poem, Canto 93 to be exact. The full block reads:



The last line, which I bolded, is the part that I found interesting (again, this all seems rather absurd, especially as I'm typing this out). Also interesting about the last paragraph from the book is that it refers to Ezra Pound's time in Wyncote, PA, a town that is 30 minutes from Ardmore, PA, where the Reinerts' were last seen.




I couldn't find anything that matched this but I'm going to keep looking. It just seems to defy logic that Bradfield, a self-proclaimed expert on Ezra Pound, would have a poem engraved on his tombstone that is attributed to Ezra Pound, but isn't from Pound.




This is pulled from a Pound poem, Canto 115. The complete poem (with the pertinent line bolded) being:



Wikipedia has a lengthy entry talking about the Cantos. It's analysis on Canto 115 is (emphasis added by me):



Yelling at his followers who went to Cape May with him and didn't back him up in court thus leading to his eventual imprisonment?

Can anyone else found this exact poem from Ezra Pound? Do you think the convoluted poem on the stone was a mistake? That Bradfield may not have chosen it?

OMG I never knew he was born in Downingtown that's where I freakin love and I've been to Hopewell church a few times. WOW


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[Onfortuneswheel]

I was flipping through Joseph Wambaugh's Echoes in Dark and my eye was caught by this:

During a small dinner party at a lawyers' club in Philadelphia just after his conviction, Bill Bradfield said, "The key to my dilemma is to be found in Ezra Pound, two cantos in particular. It's that I've loved my friends imperfectly."

Are the 2 cantos he is referring to the ones he had engraved on his tombstone?

 

[AGettler]

I hope this works. Here is a google earth image of Wyncote, Ardmore and a Presbytarian Church all on the same map and close to each other. Maybe a search of those wooded areas might be in order. Not sure how I can get an interactive Google Earth link/image on the forums.

 

[Thyme]

Just a thought. There are a number of Church Labyrinths in Pennsylvania. There is one on the third floor of the Church building of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Ardmore right across the street from the cemetery. There is an outdoor one at the Church of St. Jude and the Nativity in Lafayette Hill.

Edit: Scratch that...these labyrinths are too modern...would need to find an older one.

 

[JerseyGirl]

Karen and Michael Reinert — Karen, then 11, and Michael, then 10, were last seen on June 22, 1979 when they left their home in Ardmore, Montgomery County with their mother Susan. Three days later Susan Reinert's body was found in the trunk of her own car in the parking lot of the Host Inn in Swatara Township outside Harrisburg. There was no sign of the children.

Susan Reinert was a teacher in Montgomery County and a fellow teacher, William Bradfield, with whom she was romantically involved was later convicted of her murder and died in prison. A principal was also charged with participating in the crime but his conviction was overturned. He died in 2009.

Karen and Michael were legally declared dead in 1987. Authorities believe the Reinerts were killed for insurance money. The children's father died in 2002.

http://www.mcall.com/news/police/mc-missing-childrens-day-lehigh-valley-20170525-story.html

 

[Ozoner]

I hope these children's bodies are found some day, but I'm not optimistic. If Smith was involved, the bodies may well have been destroyed.

 

[wendybtn]

So, I just noticed something really odd. It almost sounds crazy, but I think Bradfield was trying to send someone a message through what was engraved on his tombstone....

I was looking for more of a background on Bradfield and came across his Find a Grave profile. I saw that his gravestone has a quote attributed to Ezra Pound and wondered which poem it came from but when I searched for it nothing came up. The words on the gravestone aren't from a single poem (or even completely from Ezra Pound).

The poem on the stone is:

Thought is a labyrinth
And will fades, but the light,
the light sings eternal.
Ezra Pound




This line is not a quote from Ezra Pound. It is the last sentence of Hugh Kenner's 1971 Pound biography, The Pound Era. The full paragraph is:



The quote before "Thought is a labyrinth" - “Shall two know the same in their knowing?” is from a Pound poem, Canto 93 to be exact. The full block reads:



The last line, which I bolded, is the part that I found interesting (again, this all seems rather absurd, especially as I'm typing this out). Also interesting about the last paragraph from the book is that it refers to Ezra Pound's time in Wyncote, PA, a town that is 30 minutes from Ardmore, PA, where the Reinerts' were last seen.




I couldn't find anything that matched this but I'm going to keep looking. It just seems to defy logic that Bradfield, a self-proclaimed expert on Ezra Pound, would have a poem engraved on his tombstone that is attributed to Ezra Pound, but isn't from Pound.




This is pulled from a Pound poem, Canto 115. The complete poem (with the pertinent line bolded) being:



Wikipedia has a lengthy entry talking about the Cantos. It's analysis on Canto 115 is (emphasis added by me):



Yelling at his followers who went to Cape May with him and didn't back him up in court thus leading to his eventual imprisonment?

Can anyone else found this exact poem from Ezra Pound? Do you think the convoluted poem on the stone was a mistake? That Bradfield may not have chosen it?

Bill Bradford was a psychopath and a control freak. He had that veneer of respectability, but everything about him was an inch deep. He likely thought it was a quote from Pound.

 

[wendybtn]

Karen and Michael Reinert — Karen, then 11, and Michael, then 10, were last seen on June 22, 1979 when they left their home in Ardmore, Montgomery County with their mother Susan. Three days later Susan Reinert's body was found in the trunk of her own car in the parking lot of the Host Inn in Swatara Township outside Harrisburg. There was no sign of the children.

Susan Reinert was a teacher in Montgomery County and a fellow teacher, William Bradfield, with whom she was romantically involved was later convicted of her murder and died in prison. A principal was also charged with participating in the crime but his conviction was overturned. He died in 2009.

Karen and Michael were legally declared dead in 1987. Authorities believe the Reinerts were killed for insurance money. The children's father died in 2002.

http://www.mcall.com/news/police/mc-missing-childrens-day-lehigh-valley-20170525-story.html

Susan Smith had to be found for Bradfield to collect insurance monies. The kids were just an afterthought that Jay Smith did not need found, in case of forensic evidence. I firmly believe hey both were involved. Otherwise, why did Bradfield testify as an alibi witness for Smith on the Sears robbery at the last minute?

 

[J. J. in Phila]

Bill Bradford was a psychopath and a control freak. He had that veneer of respectability, but everything about him was an inch deep. He likely thought it was a quote from Pound.

If Bradfield was an expert on Pound, he'd have the original text. Either he's pointing to something or he didn't do the engraving.

 

[AGettler]

I watched "Echoes in the Darkness" (on youtube, runs about 4 hours and has very few commercials) over the weekend. When batsh*~ bradley and *#itbird smith are sentenced, the judge orders them to pay the cost of the prosecution. This is great. Is this no longer done as I am not aware of it?

 

[wendybtn]

I think it is done but how much money will they get from two inmates?