Notable Quotable
They say the hardest thing for a parent to do is bury a child. I will vouch for that and especially caused by a murderous conspiracy as senseless as what happened.
William Smart
The young man lying in a pool of blood on his belly in the doorway of his condo had a classic “hit”-style wound. A single shot in the left side of his head just above the ear. No mess. No fuss. Just enough to get the job done.
But further investigation would tell something different. The type of gun used was a .38 with hollow-point bullets, not the classic .22. The small bullets in a .22 have enough power to be fired through the skull, but then do a kind of crazy pinball route through the soft tissue of the brain; .38s, at four times the size, blow a bigger hole but don’t give you the internal ricochet.
Additionally, the victim, whose name was Gregory Smart, was only twenty-four years old. A clean-cut young man, he worked in an insurance company and had, in fact, just returned from a day’s work. Why would anyone murder someone like this? And on a street like Misty Morning Drive? Derry, New Hampshire, was a quiet, peaceful town, population 32,000; they hadn’t had a homicide in years.
Gregg’s wife—they had been married about a year—showed up shortly after 10:00 p.m., and she would tell police later that things looked odd. For one thing, the porch light had not been turned on, something Gregg always did so she wouldn’t trip.
Pamela Smart parked in the garage, and she knew Gregg was home because his pickup truck was parked in it. She went up the few steps of the front porch, unlocked the door, and stepped inside as she switched on the foyer light. And then she started to scream, screaming about Gregg, and neighbors heard her. One of them responded to her screams and pulled her away from the condo just in case someone was still inside it.
Gregg Smart and his wife, Pam
“My husband’s hurt! He’s on the floor!” shouted Pam. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him!” During the confusion, at some point Pam also yelled, “Why do they keep doing this?”
A number of neighbors poured out of their condos to help, including one named Art Hughes who started to search the cars, but finally Pam yelled that he was inside the house.
Hughes started to run up the steps but Pam yelled at him not to.
“Don’t go in there!” She said. “There may still be somebody in there!”
Hughes kept going and in the light of the foyer he could see what Pam had seen, the prone body of her husband.
The cops started showing up at around 11:15 and the first one in determined that Gregory Smart was dead. Immediately, yellow crime scene tape was strung around the condo to preserve the crime scene.
Soon, forty-eight-year-old Captain Loring Jackson, a heavyset man who had been on the job since 1966—though not investigating a lot of crime—arrived on the scene.
Jackson looked over the condo, and he immediately got the aroma of a staged homicide scene, as if a burglary had occurred and Gregory Smart had interrupted the burglar in the process.
But, Jackson was to say, burglars don’t ordinarily rob anyone at night—daytime is their time—and if violence occurs it doesn’t happen the neat way that resulted in Smart’s death, where he is shot once in the head. The killing is usually far more messy.
“The scene stunk to high heaven,” Capt. Jackson recalled ten years later. “Not much was making sense. No sign of forced entry? A nighttime burglary in a densely populated area? An execution-style killing?” Even if it was a burglary, the police know that burglars don’t usually go armed. Crime statistics show that burglars rarely commit homicide, and when they do kill, it is not execution-style the way Gregory Smart was murdered.
Police photo of Gregg Smart at his house, shot dead
Jackson assigned two of his best detectives to the job, Daniel Pelletier and Barry Charewicz, and as usual in the case of homicide, the first people to be considered suspects were family members.
From the outside, the Smarts would seem to be a goodlooking, loving young couple, and were doing very well. She was a teacher at Winnacunnet High School in Hampton and Gregg had his job at the insurance company.
Financially, they were doing well. They had the condo, which was nicely furnished, and each had a car. Another virtual family member was a small Shih-Tzu dog that Pam had christened “Halen” in honor of her love for the band Van Halen. She took such good care of the dog that it prompted Gregg to enthuse to his parents, who lived only a block away, that she was going to make a great mother to the children the young couple was planning to have.
But appearances could be deceiving. Pam was a completely self-absorbed person and she admitted it. Born in Miami on August 16th, 1967, Pamela said of herself: “I’m definitely the typical Leo. You know, walk in, have to be the center of everything. Everywhere I go, I’m always attracting attention for some reason or another. I’m loud, very outgoing, and stuff.”
Pam Smart, nee Wojas, was the second of three children, with a sister six years older and a brother three years younger. Though close to her mother, her relationship with her father, a pilot, was not that good. She started working when she was thirteen, and she was a good organizer and a cheerleader in college.
Though they were very attracted to one another when they met in 1986, both lovers of heavy-metal music, Gregg started to become more conservative, more preoccupied with his job as an insurance salesman, and he spent more and more time with his coworkers, male and female.
Pam Smart was smart, attractive, and lively, but quite obviously beneath the surface seemed to be a profoundly disturbed personality, one riddled with insecurity. She was missing the attention that Gregg used to pay to her, and gradually their relationship started to suffer.
When they were close to being married a year, Gregg dropped a bombshell: He had had an affair with another woman.
Rather than his honest admission helping their relationship, it hurt it. Pam could not get it out of her mind, and it obviously eroded what little ego she had. Every time they had an argument now, she would dredge up his confession.
As Pam was to explain later, “I didn’t feel as important anymore. Obviously it affected my trust.” Her love—or whatever it was—for Gregg started to die, and she started to think that she wanted out of the marriage.
Nothing happened for a while, however, and the marriage dragged on, spiked by the couple arguing. A fatal blow had apparently been dealt to their marriage.
Then, something momentous happened, though no one knew it at the time. While working at Winnacunnet High, she monitored a project she called Project Self-Esteem. “The kids never got much closer to one another as a result of the project,” author Stephen Sawicki explains, “but everyone looked up to Pam. Unlike most adults, she never appeared to be patronizing them. She spoke their language and enjoyed the same music they did. Rather than lecture them or run on about her glory days at Pinkerton, Pam instead spoke of meeting Eddie Van Halen and of getting backstage passes for heavy-metal concerts.”
She met Billy Flynn, a fifteen-year-old boy who was 5'11", weighted 150 pounds, and had black hair down to his shoulders and looked, everyone said, like a young Paul McCartney. Pam, who was twenty-two, liked Billy. She thought he was a “good kid.”
Pam and Billy shared a love for heavy-metal music, and he reminded her of the long-haired Gregg that she had fallen in love with, the one who had gone conservative. As someone said, “If Pam was looking for a new lover, Billy Flynn filled the bill perfectly.”
Pam, whose goal was to be in broadcasting, also became great friends with student Cecilia Pierce, a heavyset young woman who wanted to be a journalist. Pam became more than teacher to her, but a buddy, a friend who would listen. If Pam had a complaint to air out, Cecilia was the one who would hear it.
As part of Project Self-Esteem, Billy Flynn visited Pam every day in her office, but in his head things had advanced well beyond that, starting with the first time he saw her, when he commented to a friend, “I’m in love.”
Billy Flynn was from South Seabrook and he ran with a number of tough guys, including Patrick “Pete” Randall and Vance “J.R.” Lattime Jr. “Seabrook is primarily a blue-collar town,” writes Ken Englade in Deadly Lessons, “and its residents are known to those from other areas of the state as ‘Brookies,’ a derisive term loosely translated to mean people of low class or people from the wrong side of the track. Brookies generally are regarded by other New Hampshirites with the same disdain that Bostonians reserve for the rest of the world.”
Billy Flynn’s background was tumultuous. His mother and father were constantly fighting, and his father would take out their rage on Billy. Despite two other boys being born after Billy, his father still reserved his rage for him.
Said Elaine Flynn, Billy’s mother, “If things were going my husband’s way, he was a great guy to be around. But as soon as he had to deal with any inconvenience, forget it. We used to go down into the canyons on dirt bikes and spend the day. There’s always problems with them. Well, once Billy had a problem with his bike. It was something as trivial as a spark plug. His dad told him how to fix it and it didn’t go. It was blow-up time. His father would start yelling, ‘You couldn’t have done what I said!’”
As time went by, Pam and Billy grew closer and closer to one another; there were touches, looks, subtle body language that spoke volumes, though there was no overt expression of feeling. Then one afternoon in early February, while in her office, Pam asked Billy, “Do you ever think about me when I’m not around?”
“Sure,” he admitted.
“Well, I think about you all the time,” said Pam.
Billy was thrilled, and so was Pam. He had never been in love, and now an attractive, lovely woman who he thought about all the time told him she had feelings for him. And for her part, though she was married, she couldn’t dampen the feelings she had for him.
Nothing happened sexually between the two until late March, when Gregg went out of town. Pam invited Billy Flynn and Cecilia Pierce, who she had grown close to because of their working relationship, to come over to her house.
Both Billy and Cecilia did, and the three of them watched 9½ Weeks, a movie that was very close to getting an X-rating because of sexual content.
Then, while Cecilia went outside to walk Halen, Pam Smart invited Billy to go upstairs with her.
She obviously had it all planned. Van Halen music blasting, she changed into a see-through nightgown, and then started to dance provocatively in front of Billy. One can imagine what effect this had on the hormones of a fifteen-year-old boy, and it wasn’t too long before they were on the floor having sex.
Cecilia returned and, when they hadn’t appeared for quite some time, she went upstairs and observed them having sex. She was not surprised.
The next morning Pam drove both Cecilia and Billy to school, and she didn’t seem to worry about Cecilia’s presence when she said, “Last night was great, but we can’t keep on like that.”
“Why not?” asked Billy.
“Because of Gregg. If you want to keep seeing me, you’ll have to get rid of my husband.”
More Stories of Husband Murder
Kept Him Refrigerated
Geraldine Kelly of Somerville, MA, always told her family and friends that her husband was killed by a truck in Las Vegas while trying to cross the street drunk. In a deathbed confession in 2004, Kelly admitted to one of her daughters that she had actually shot her abusive husband thirteen years before and then stuffed his body into a 3'x6' freezer. She sealed the freezer with duct tape and then had it sent to a public storage facility where it had been all those years. While a Massachusetts district attorney commented that the case was “very bizarre,” there have been several similar incidents all across the United States in the recent past. With easy access to these ubiquitous public storage facilities, murderers are finding them a convenient place to hide a body.
Pinhead
In Indiana in 1985, a forty-one-year-old woman killed her boyfriend by dropping a bowling ball on his head. Glendon Wininger claimed that Steven Detmer, thirty-seven, who owned a bowling supply company, had beaten her. Wininger dropped the fourteen-pound ball repeatedly on his noggin as Detmer lay in front of his television, killing him. A jury deliberated for ten hours before finding her guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
In the weeks that followed, Pam kept putting the pressure on Billy to get rid of her husband, who she said was a brute. She lied that he beat her and would take everything from her in a divorce: her car, her condo, even her beloved dog.
Billy agreed to do it, and made a couple of half-hearted attempts, one of which involved him getting lost on his way from Seabrook to Derry.
His missteps infuriated Pam, and she kept threatening to leave him. Terrified that she would, he promised that he would get the job done on the night of May 1, 1990.
Pam would be at a school board meeting—she worked at the Hampton School Board—so she would have an alibi. And she would leave the bulkhead doors open so Billy and a couple of friends who promised to help him could get into the condo and ransack it, so it looked like Gregg interrupted a burglary in progress.
To help him, Billy got the help of a couple of tough street kids.
Vince Lattime Jr., known as J.R., was one such. He was fifteen and wore glasses, making him look like a student. But it was Lattime who would “borrow” the .38 that the trio intended to use in the killing. He was also the person who would borrow his grandmother’s yellow 1978 Impala, which would be used as the getaway vehicle.
Patrick Randall was the other kid. He was short and muscular, and though his mother looked on him as a good kid, he got in the most trouble with the law, compiling a history as a truant at Winnacunnet High School. Though no one could provide any direct statement, there was a rumor that his goal was to become a hit man.
As they drove to the murder scene, Flynn, Lattime, and Randall picked up friend Ray Fowler. They waited until dark, then drove to Derry. Lattime and Fowler stayed in the getaway car while Randall and Flynn went to do the actual murder.
Pam had discussed a variety of issues with them, including not to harm the dog, not to put any light on or Gregg would be scared away, and to use a gun instead of a knife; a knife would be too messy and could stain the white couch. They also discussed how she should react when she found Gregg’s body.
As planned, the duo got into the house through the bulkhead door, and after a short time were able to capture the dog and literally throw him down the stairs in the basement.
Then they went around the house taking various items, making it seem as much as possible that a burglary had occurred.
Then they waited for Gregg.
When he didn’t show, they started to panic a little, but finally the lights of Gregg’s Toyota pickup truck appeared, and they waited in the darkness for him as he came through the front door.
Gregg called out the name of the dog, Halen, and then Randall pounced, pulling his head back by the hair and holding a knife to his throat. Randall told him to give up his ring, but Gregg ironically said, “I couldn’t. My wife would kill me.”
And then Billy Flynn, the gun barrel inches from Gregg’s head, cried out: “God forgive me!”…and pulled the trigger.
***
Homicide detectives will tell you that they can often tell when people are guilty, though not always so. With murder, people can express grief in different ways. Some will weep and wail while others will crack jokes.
So it was with Pam Smart. Detective Daniel Pelletier, a young cop investigating the case, said that Pam was particularly obvious.
“From day one,” he said, “she wasn’t acting the grieving widow.”
“She insisted on an immediate interview,” Pelletier said. He and his partner, Barry Charewicz took her to the PD (police department) to interview her. Pelletier recalled some of her comments. “She said, ‘This looks like a botched burglary. The first thing I saw was the speakers off the stand.’ I remember looking at Barry, thinking the first thing she saw was the speakers? What about her husband on the floor?”
Pam also referred to walking over to “the body” rather than her husband.
But if she were in shock, she didn’t seem so. Pelletier said she seemed in total control, and did not seem to care about her husband at all. One incident really brought this home.
The bloodstains from her husband were still on the carpet when she returned to the condo to get something, and instead of stepping over the stains, as if they were sacred, she walked right through them, a total lack of respect. Finally, her mother covered the bloodstains with a towel but that didn’t stop her. She walked right on the towel, not going around it like most people would have.
The detectives noticed. It was strange behavior for a widow whose husband had been murdered.
A couple of weeks into June, a female called the police and told them that one Cecilia Pierce knew all about everything, that Pam Smart was going to kill her husband—or have him killed.
And then they got a call from J.R.’s father, Vince Lattime, who said that he found his .38 perfectly clean, and that plus conversation that a house guest had heard indicated that it might have been the weapon used in the murder of Gregg Smart.
The cops collected the gun and started looking deeper into the case, and after a fairly short while it looked like Pam had arranged for her husband’s death.
But they needed more than that. They had to get Pam Smart talking about the killing in her own words.
They had a candidate to wear a wire: Cecilia Pierce. They knew she had been aware of the plan to kill Gregg and could be tried and jailed. They offered her a deal to wear a wire, and on June 19 and July 12 and 13, she got Pam Smart to make some incriminating statements about the murder.
In August, Pam Smart was arrested for the murder of her husband Gregg. When the trial occurred, Smart testified on her own behalf, and was as cool as a cucumber in denying that she had anything to do with the murder.
This letter was received May 10, 2006, in response to the project “Justice in New Hampshire.” The project was a fifteen-year retrospective of the Pam Smart case and was published April 20, 2006, in the Equinox college newspaper.
“My mom sent me the Equinox (story) a few days ago. I feel compelled to write all of you and let you know that it was very refreshing to read what I feel was accurate and fair reporting. It amazes me that students were able to get all the facts together, when the so-called ‘professional’ journalists wreaked havoc on the truth. I want you to know that I both appreciated and commend your thorough reporting. I hope that as you establish media careers in the future, you will always remember that it takes courage to want the truth, no matter how contrary to popular opinion it may be. Again, thank you for treating me like a human being and not a monster. Good luck to all of you in your future endeavors.
Respectfully, Pamela Smart”
The prosecution had some heavy evidence, including the testimony of Lattime, Flynn, and Randall, who made a deal for pleading guilty and lesser time if they testified against her.
They did, and the jury came back with a verdict of guilty. Still, the jury said that the boys’ testimony would not have been enough to convict her. The key was the tapes. Without them, Pam Smart would not have been convicted. Indeed, Smart realized that when, it was said, she tried to arrange for the murder of Cecilia Pierce.
Billy Flynn
Smart’s attorneys appealed the guilty verdict on fifty different issues, but so far have been unsuccessful.
The Tapes
Below is a transcript of the tapes made by Cecilia Pierce of conversations she had with Pam Smart on July 12 and 13, 1990.
July 12, 1990, taped conversation
SMART: You didn’t have anything to do with anything, and even if they have, a phone, ah like one phone, phone conversation or something…
PIERCE: Yeah.
SMART: …with me and Bill, then I’d have to admit that yes I was having an affair with Bill; I am never going to admit it the fact that I asked that I told him that I hired them cuz I never paid them money, I never hired them.
SMART: You have to remember through this whole thing that he did…they’re fucking old enough, you’re old enough to make your own decisions…They did this all, I did not force anybody to do anything, they made their own decisions.
PIERCE: Seeing what happened, wouldn’t you just have divorced Gregg?
SMART: Well, I don’t know, you know. Nothing was going wrong until they fucking told Ralph [Welch].
PIERCE: No shit!
SMART: It’s their stupid-ass faults…that they told Ralph, you know.
PIERCE: I can’t even believe they told him. Now they’re in jail and like every time I hear Motley Crew I think of Bill.
SMART: Yeah, So do I. Tell me about it…That’s the thing. I never fucking paid ’em. Somebody told me I gave J.R. a stereo and stuff…You know, if they get certified as juveniles, then nobody will ever know anything, and they’ll all be out in a year, you know, when they turn 18…but I’m just like, what the hell, I’ve already got the best friggin’ lawyers anywhere.
PIERCE: You do?
SMART: Yeah. But they’re fucking wicked expensive, but what could I do?
PIERCE: Obviously you can afford it.
SMART: No goddamn fucking way. Didn’t I need them? But right now they don’t have to do anything unless I’m arrested, and if I get arrested, then they have to do shit…So they can’t convict me ’cause of fucking J.R.’s sixteen-year-old word in the slammer facing the rest of his life.
PIERCE: Well, first of all, you didn’t offer to pay him, right?
SMART: No.
PIERCE: So he’s not gonna say that you offered to pay him. He’s going to say that you knew about it before it happened, which is the truth.
SMART: Right. Well, so then I’ll have to say, “No, I didn’t” and then they’re either gonna believe me or they are gonna believe J.R. sixteen-years-old in the slammer. And then who [will they believe]? Me, with a professional reputation, and of course that I teach. You know, that’s the thing. They are going to believe me.
PIERCE: All right. Well, I’ll call you.
Pam then invited Cecilia over. “You’d better be there,” Pam said jokingly, “or I’ll come after you with my Rambo knife.” If Pam knew she was being recorded that might not have been an idle threat.
July 13, 1990, taped conversation
PIERCE: Well, that time, if he hadn’t have forgotten directions he could have killed Gregg then…
SMART: I know…
PIERCE: …if Raymond [Fowler] hadn’t run his fucking mouth off this would have been the perfect murder…
SMART: …Right.
PIERCE: …because they set everything up…to look like a burglary just like you said…
SMART: No shit…so it’s not my fault. If fucking Raymond…
PIERCE: Had not run his mouth off everything was set up perfect.
SMART: No shit…
PIERCE: But what I was saying is if I’m I mean obviously I knew about it beforehand and if I get up there and lie and if then they find out about it after, I’m gonna get in trouble.
SMART: Well if you didn’t know about it beforehand and you say you knew about it beforehand, you’re gonna be in trouble.
PIERCE: Umhum.
SMART: So you are better off just lying…
SMART: …All I know is that, uh, pretty soon J.R. is probably going to roll. He was supposedly only in the car, and pretty soon he is gonna be like fuck Pete and Bill, I’m not going to jail for the rest of my goddamn fucking life, so he is going to turn against them and he is gonna blame me.
PIERCE: Right.
SMART: …that’s when I’m going to be in trouble. That’s when I am going to get arrested but I can probably get out of it because they are not going to have any proof, ya know. But that’s when I am gonna be arrested cuz J.R.—I never said the words like J.R., I will pay you to kill Gregg. I never said anything. J.R. never talked to me about the murder or anything, ya know…They can’t convict me cuz of fucking J.R. sixteen-year-old’s word in the slammer facing the rest of his life.
PIERCE: …Well first of all you didn’t offer to pay him right?
SMART: No.
PIERCE: So he’s not gonna say you offered to pay him, he’s going to say you knew about it before it happened, which is the truth.
SMART: Right—well so then I’ll have to say no I didn’t and then they’re gonna believe me or they are gonna believe J.R. sixteen years old in the slammer. And then who me with a professional reputation and a course that I teach, that’s the thing.
It Will Cool You Permanently
Malicious antifreeze poisonings are rare but they do happen. The scenario usually involves a financially desperate spouse looking to cash in on her insignificant other’s insurance policy. It is a cruel way to kill someone, as the victim suffers considerable physical distress before succumbing. Antifreeze contains three primary chemical agents: ethylene glycol, methanol, and propylene glycol. Ethylene glycol is a colorless, odorless, sweet-tasting liquid and is highly toxic. As little as four ounces can kill the average man if ingested at one time, but when it is added to the victim’s fluids over time (i.e., soft drinks, sports drinks, etc.), its insidious effects damage the brain, lungs, liver, and kidneys—and eventually causes death.
Two recent cases bear this out. In 2008, thirty-four-year-old James Keown was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after he was found guilty of spiking his wife Julie’s Gatorade during the summer of 2004. Judge Sandra Hamlin said that, because of the way that Keown methodically poisoned his wife over a period of weeks, she felt that she was “truly in the presence of an evil person.”
While Keown’s defense team argued that his wife had committed suicide by drinking ethylene glycol because she was depressed about having kidney disease, the prosecution revealed that after police seized Keown’s laptop, they found he had done extensive research on buying and making poisons. He was also seriously in debt and stood to get $250,000 from her insurance policy.
In another bizarre case, forty-one-year-old Stacy Castor of Syracuse, NY, received a sentence of over fifty years after being convicted of poisoning her husband with antifreeze, forging his will, and then trying to kill her daughter with a mix of vodka and sleeping pills so she could frame her as the murderer.
The kicker in this story is that it was believed that Castor’s first husband, Michael, died of a heart attack at age thirty-eight, but when his body was exhumed, it was ruled a death by homicide. He had died from—of course—ethylene glycol. The prosecution stated that Castor had killed her husbands to inherit their estates.
Judge Joseph Fahey told Castor “In my thirty-four years in the criminal justice system as a lawyer and a judge, I have seen serial killers, contract killers, killers of every variety and stripe, but I have to say, Mrs. Castor, you are in a class all by yourself.”
Q. How long is the average jail sentence for wives who kill their husbands?
A. Six years.
Q. How long is the average jail sentence for husbands who kill their wives?
A. Seventeen years.
Q. What is the most common motive for a wife to kill her husband?
A. Abuse.
Q. What is the most common motive for a husband to kill his wife?
A. Jealousy.