The goings-on at Upper Merion High School in 
the late '70s were just not what one would expect from an academically superior school catering to the scions of the upper middle class. The principal was acting dangerously weird and eventually was arrested on robbery charges, and the English teacher, a bearded, charismatic hunk who was so fascinating to female teachers that he was called a "Svengali," was leading a cult-like following of teachers, both male and female.
Out of this smoldering mix would come murder and mystery, the implications of which linger to this day. On Tuesday, the strange high-school principal, Jay C. Smith, who spent six years on death row in the killing of an Upper Merion teacher and, probably, her two children before being freed on a technicality, died of heart disease at the age of 80.
Smith never ceased trying to persuade the world that he had nothing to do with the murders of Susan Reinert, 37 - whose chained, naked and battered body was found in her car in a motel parking lot near Harrisburg on June 25, 1979 - or her two children.
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