The Murderers in My Neighborhood

If you like true crime stories, I've got you covered

Chances are, you’re either really into the true crime genre or know someone who is. It’s one of the most popular podcast categories, and there are countless TV shows that reenact horrendous tales of betrayal and murder. It’s given Dateline’s Keith Morrison a lucrative career—a big step up from his previous position as a professional goblin.

For most people, watching or listening to these stories is as close as they’ll get to grisly homicides. I, however, have had a handful of them right in my backyard.

That was a figure of speech, by the way. I’m not the Barbecue Butcher of the Northeast or anything.

The outcast

When I was 15, my family relocated back to Pennsylvania after a four-year stint in Virginia. Our new house was in a normal, middle-class suburban neighborhood, not too far from where we’d lived before our move south.

It was, and is, considered a nice area. But in 1995, something shocking happened.

A couple of streets over from my parents’ house lived a family called the Fairleys. One of the Fairleys’ children was a 21-year-old named Caleb. He’d always been odd and overweight, so the bullies zeroed in on him early.

At this point in his life, he worked at the children’s clothing store that his mother owned in a nearby town. There were red flags the size of schooner sails warning that this wasn’t a good idea, but his parents ignored them.

Fairley was working alone one Sunday afternoon, when a woman, Lisa Manderach, came in with her 18-month-old daughter, Devon. They were the only ones in the store. Fairley locked the door behind them.

I’ll spare you the very gruesome details, but he killed them both. That night, after hiding their bodies, he went to a concert.

Lisa’s husband knew where she was going, and when she didn’t return, he reported her missing. Police found her car parked outside the store, while inside, they found blood stains and long, black hairs similar to hers.

Fairley was arrested within hours. He’s currently serving two consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.

The case was featured in episodes of Forensic Files and Homicide City, as well as various podcasts.

I no longer lived with my parents when this happened and didn’t know the Fairleys, but the neighborhood was shaken. Until then, the only local crime I was aware of was people rigging the cable lines to get free HBO. Those culprits were never caught. My friends and I should probably check if the statute of limitations is up on that.

The dentist

In 1999, right around the corner from my family’s house lived Dr. Thomas and Kathleen Mohn. Thomas owned a dental practice, where Kathleen was an X-ray technician. They’d been married for 20 years, and although they were estranged and both seeing other people, the couple still lived together. And you thought flossing was tough to get used to.

According to Thomas, the last time he saw Kathleen was the night of December 3, when she left to spend the weekend with her boyfriend, Robert Linder. When she never showed up, Linder called the house. Thomas then reported her missing.

Kathleen’s Ford Explorer was later found in the parking lot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken, close to where Linder lived.

Police later obtained security footage from the Pennsylvania Turnpike exit that the Explorer had taken. Only one arm of the driver’s body was visible, but the video showed a blonde woman, like Kathleen, leaning against the passenger side window. You know, the way a lifeless body might.

Linder was cleared of any involvement, while circumstantial evidence was found at the Mohn home. It was also discovered that Kathleen had recently spoken to a divorce attorney, who told her that she was entitled to sizable alimony payments, as well as 65% of her husband’s dental practice.

Kathleen had told her family that Thomas hadn’t taken that news well. On the one hand, who would, right? On the other, that’s the kind of motive that shows up with a “Right This Way!” sign hanging from its neck.

But a motive isn’t useful without a body. Although police strongly suspect that Thomas Mohn killed her, Kathleen has never been found. They report that Mohn has refused to cooperate with them.

There have been several podcasts devoted to the mystery. On a related note, this didn’t help my reticence about going to the dentist. Or Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The troubled twin

A short walk from the Mohn house was the home of the McAndrews family: Joe and Sue, and their 23-year-old twin sons, Jim and Joe Jr.

On a Saturday evening in March of 2011, a man who was renting a room from them called the police.

When they arrived, officers found Joe Jr. in the driveway with blood on his clothes. Then they found three dead bodies inside. They’d been killed with a sword.

From a CBS News report¹:

“(Police) also recount a chilling conversation in which the suspect, when asked what happened, replies ‘extermination.’ Asked who the victims were, he allegedly replied, ‘Person named brother, person named mother, person named father.’ ”

Jesus. That’s creepier than the contents of Diddy’s camera roll.

The District Attorney noted that Joe Jr. had a history of mental health issues. I’d heard the same, with some specifics that I won’t share because I don’t know if they’re true.

Two grisly murder cases and another presumed homicide over the course of 16 years is high for a leafy, suburban community. It’s also not ideal for resale values. When you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting the location of a murdered human, that’s a tough sell.

But as horrifying as those incidents are, they aren’t even the most disturbing true crime stories in the area.

For that, you have to go back to the 1970s. And this one’s off-the-charts bonkers.

The principal and the English teacher

King of Prussia, PA is home to what was the largest mall on the east coast and third-largest in the country, until American Dream in the Meadowlands knocked it down a notch in 2019.

But the mall is just one of two things the town is known for.

King of Prussia is also the location of Upper Merion Area High School (UM), which I attended. This story happened well before I walked its halls, but even then, its aftershocks still reverberated.

We start with a man named Jay C. Smith. Smith was a decorated Army veteran, and held a PhD in Education. He was hired as the principal of UM in 1967.

He was also a very weird dude. In addition to education, it turned out he was into Satanism and bestiality porn. Those are three legs of a very unstable stool.

The reason we know this is that in 1978, Smith was arrested in a shopping center wearing a hood and holding two guns. The police searched him and found a syringe containing a prescription sedative in the pocket of his suit jacket. Don’t you miss the days when people dressed up for their crime sprees?

Officers later found three pounds of weed in his house, along with the aforementioned devil and donkey stuff. Awwwkward!

Even worse for Smith, though, was that they also found a security guard uniform that tied him to the armed robbery of a Sears the year before, in which he stole $53,000.

To recap, this was a high school principal who worshipped the devil, enjoyed watching people sodomize animals, and robbed a department store at gunpoint. Looks like someone really botched his chances of scoring an Educator of the Year plaque.

Smith was close friends with a UM English teacher named William Bradfield. Bradfield even gave Smith an alibi for the Sears robbery, testifying that Smith was with him in Ocean City, NJ at the time.

Susan Reinert, another UM English teacher with whom Bradfield was in a relationship, knew that wasn’t true. She was concerned that he’d perjured himself and didn’t understand why he did it.

Then, on June 22, 1979, Reinert and her two young children disappeared.

Two days later, her body was found in the trunk of her car in a motel parking lot in Harrisburg, PA. That spot was about 100 miles away from her home, but only a few miles from where Smith’s sentencing hearing was being held that same day. A hearing to which he arrived an hour late.

Reinert had a powerful sedative in her bloodstream. Tragically, her children were never found.

It probably won’t shock you to learn that this case has a financial component to it. A month before she disappeared, Reinert had named Bradfield as the sole beneficiary of her life insurance policy and her estate.

Bradfield was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to life in prison. That naturally led to death in prison, which occurred in 1998.

Smith was convicted of the murders of Reinert and her children who, by that time, had been presumed dead. He spent six years on death row before his conviction was overturned due to misconduct, both judicial (allowing hearsay evidence) and prosecutorial (withholding evidence).

Make no mistake: he was guilty as fuck, and everyone knew it. On the bright side, he finally got to meet his idol, Satan, in 2009.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to this story than I can include here—so much in fact that four books have been written about what has come to be known as The Main Line Murders.

One of them, Echoes in the Darkness, by Joseph Wambaugh, was turned into a miniseries in 1987, with Robert Loggia playing Smith, Peter Coyote as Bradfield, and Stockard Channing as Reinert.

Netflix is currently in production with its own limited series about the events. I can only hope that it’s better than the last season of House of Cards.

When I was a UM student, there were still a few teachers around who were there while all of this unfolded. I was close to one of them, who had been Bradfield’s protege; he was also portrayed in the miniseries.

He told me that Bradfield was a very charming, manipulative man, and that he had completely trusted him. What happened was devastating to him and really screwed him up for a while, as one would expect.

That’s the thing about true crime stories. They revolve around the most horrible things that people do to each other, but there’s an element of distance to them. You don’t think about what it might be like to be neighbors, let alone friends, with someone capable of that kind of atrocity. Until it happens.

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/upper-merion-man-in-jail-for-alleged-brutal-murder-of-twin-brother-and-parents/