The Story They Didn't Know: A Memoir

Everyone knows the story of the Main Line Murders. Almost nobody knows the family who helped solve it - and paid for it for seventeen years. In June 1979, teacher Susan Reinert was found murdered, and her two children, Karen and Michael, vanished. Their bodies were never found. The case became one of the most infamous in Pennsylvania history, ending with high school principal Jay C. Smith - the "Prince of Darkness" - convicted and sentenced to death. The state's key witness was my father. Raymond Martray was a disgraced former police officer serving time for perjury after the Connellsville police scandal - the one Johnny Carson joked about on The Tonight Show. In prison, he befriended Smith. And when Smith started talking, my father made a choice that changed our lives forever: he wore a wire. State police investigators set up in our basement. Taped phone calls captured Smith's confession. When threats came, my sister and I were rushed to a guarded hotel while our father testified under protection. Smith went to death row - and then his conviction was overturned because prosecutors had hidden evidence. In 1992, he walked free. My family spent the next seventeen years, until his death in 2009, looking over our shoulders. I was five years old when it started. This is what it cost the family inside the case: the prison visits, the whispers, the "jailbird's daughter" years - and a father the headlines never got right. Readers of Joseph Wambaugh's Echoes in the Darkness know the investigation. This is the story they didn't know. The Story They Didn't Know is a true-crime memoir about loyalty, stigma, and the price of telling the truth - and a daughter's tribute to a flawed man who, when it mattered most, did the right thing.