On May 1, 1990, Greggory Smart was brutally murdered in his own home — and months later, it was revealed that Greggory’s wife Pamela Smart had sexually manipulated one of her 15-year-old students into killing him.
Jupiter EntertainmentGreggory Smart with his wife, Pamela.
Greggory Smart was a typical middle-class American man. The insurance agent had just gotten married to Pamela Smart, the woman of his dreams, and the two shared a condo, a dog, and what appeared to be the perfect small-town life in Derry, New Hampshire.
So his neighbors were stunned when, on May 1, 1990, Pamela came home to discover that their condo had been ransacked — and that Greggory had been brutally murdered. At first, it seemed as though his death had been the result of a simple robbery gone wrong. But soon, an anonymous call to the police blew the case wide open.
As investigators discovered, Pamela Smart was not the blissful newlywed she appeared to be. In reality, she had been maintaining a secret sexual relationship with one of her 15-year-old students — and had convinced him and three of his teenage friends to kill her husband.
This is the shocking story of Greggory Smart, whose case became the first murder trial ever to be televised in full across the United States.
The Early Life Of Greggory Smart
Greggory Smart was born on Sept. 4, 1965, in Nashua, New Hampshire, where he had an idyllic American childhood. On holidays, his family would take him out boating on Lake Winnipesaukee. He played Little League baseball as a child and helped his team win the championship in 1977.
“All of a sudden, he connected with the ball and had a single, and he won the championship,” his father Bill Smart recalled in a 2010 interview with WMUR. “You talk about a father being proud, I was very proud of him.”
Growing up in the 1980s, Greggory found himself drawn into the world of heavy metal. And his passion for the genre is what initially attracted Pamela Wojas, a fellow metalhead, when the two first met at a holiday party in 1986.
Family HandoutGreggory and Pamela Smart shortly before his murder.
The pair were immediately smitten with each other, and Greggory even agreed to move to Florida to be closer to Pamela as she finished up her undergraduate degree at Florida State University.
After she graduated, Greggory and Pamela got married in 1989. They bought a condo in Derry, New Hampshire and got a dog — a Shih Tzu they named Halen after the band Van Halen — and began to build a life together.
While Greggory worked for an insurance company, Pamela worked as a media director at Winnacunnet High School in the town of Seabrook, which allowed her to dip her toes in the broadcasting world and continue to explore her love of music.
Just a few months into their marriage, however, the couple began having problems. Pamela reportedly grew tired of Greggory, who had started to shed his metalhead persona, cutting his hair short and wearing suits to work. She also claimed that Greggory confessed to her that he had had a one-night stand early in their marriage.
But despite these marital troubles, no one could have predicted what Pamela Smart was plotting in order to end their marriage once and for all.
Greggory Smart Is Killed In His Own Home
On May 1, 1990, Pamela Smart called the police to report that someone had ransacked her condo and murdered her husband.
At the scene, police found the Smarts’ home in a disastrous state and the body of Greggory Smart face-down in the hallway. An autopsy revealed that he had died from a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. He was just 24.
In the weeks following the murder, Pamela Smart made several television appearances, expressing her grief over the loss of her husband and espousing her theories that Greggory had been killed in a botched robbery attempt. She claimed that the killer was likely “some jerk, some drug addict person looking for a quick 10 bucks,” according to the New York Times.
Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesPamela Smart suggested her husband was killed in a burglary gone wrong.
Some Derry residents speculated that Greggory’s death had been a gangster killing, or the result of an unpaid debt; but even this didn’t make any sense. Derry had not had a homicide in quite some time. In fact, Greggory Smart’s was the only murder to occur there that year.
The police, meanwhile, were growing suspicious of Pamela, who seemed oddly detached in response to her husband’s death. And their suspicions were soon confirmed when they received a revealing phone call just two weeks after the murder.
New Evidence Emerges
On May 14, 1990, an anonymous female source called the Derry Police and informed Detective Daniel Pelletier that Pamela Smart had been involved in Greggory’s murder. The caller also claimed that Cecelia Pierce, Pamela’s student intern, had been the one to confide this information to her.
Meanwhile, rumors began to swirl around town that Greggory Smart had been killed with a gun belonging to the father of a boy named J.R. Lattime. Hearing this rumor, Mr. Lattime inspected his gun — and discovered that it had recently been cleaned. He turned it over to the police.
Soon after, the police arrested three teens: 16-year-old Billy Flynn, 17-year-old Patrick Randall, and 18-year-old J.R. Lattime. Later, they arrested another alleged accomplice, 19-year-old Raymond Fowler.
It didn’t take long for the boys to reveal the whole shocking story of how Pamela Smart had seduced Flynn and manipulated him into killing her husband.
Pamela Smart’s Shocking Crimes Come To Light
Pamela Smart and Billy Flynn met in 1989 at Winnacunnet High School, when Pamela was 22 and Flynn was just 15. The teen had long hair and a passion for heavy metal music — much like Greggory when Pamela first met him.
In February 1990, Pamela asked Flynn if he ever thought about her sexually. Weeks later, she invited him to watch the sexually explicit film 9 1/2 Weeks. Afterward, she and the underage boy had sex for the first time.
Before long, Pamela began persuading Flynn to murder her husband. She claimed that Greggory was abusive, and that she couldn’t divorce him because she would lose everything, including her precious dog.
When Pamela threatened to end their sexual relationship if Flynn didn’t kill Greggory, the teen finally agreed. He soon began conspiring with three of his teenage friends to carry out the grisly crime.
Jim Mahoney/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty ImagesBilly Flynn, the student Pamela Smart manipulated into killing her husband.
On May 1, 1990, Oxygen reports, the teens ambushed Greggory in the Smarts’ New Hampshire home. As Patrick Randall held a knife to Greggory’s throat, Flynn forced Greggory to his knees, said “God forgive me,” and pulled the trigger, fatally shooting him in the back of the head.
The boys also ransacked the home to make it look like it had been robbed.
With the evidence stacked against Pamela Smart, police apprehended her in the Winnacunnet High School parking lot on Aug. 1, 1990.
“Well, Pam,” Detective Pelletier said, according to author Richard Holmes in his 2009 book The Road to Derry: A Brief History. “I have some good news and I have some bad news. The good news is that we’ve solved the murder of your husband. The bad news is you’re under arrest.”
The First Fully Televised Murder Trial In U.S. History
The death of Greggory Smart put the small town of Derry, New Hampshire on the map when the subsequent court case became the first murder trial to be televised in full across the U.S.
The country watched in astonishment as Billy Flynn and his accomplices took the stand, detailing how Pamela Smart had manipulated them into committing the murder.
The prosecution argued that Pamela Smart had been seeking an easy way out of a marriage she no longer wanted. They also claimed she had hoped to collect on a $140,000 life insurance policy in the wake of Greggory’s death.
During the investigation, Pamela’s student intern, Cecilia Pierce, had agreed to wear a hidden recording device in conversations with her supervisor. The resulting audio tapes, which the prosecution played for the jury, appeared to show Pamela acknowledging her role in the crime.
“You’d be better off just lying to the police,” Pamela told Pierce, according to the New York Times. “We’d go to the slammer for the rest of our lives.”
She also boasted that “this would have been the perfect murder” had her teenage accomplices not bragged about the crimes to their friends.
The Aftermath Of Greggory Smart’s Murder
Bettmann/Getty ImagesPamela Smart was sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to kill Greggory Smart.
On March 22, 1991, a jury found Pamela Smart guilty of being an accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and witness tampering. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. She is currently serving her time at a maximum security prison in New York.
Billy Flynn was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 28 years to life in prison. He was paroled in 2015. Randall was paroled the same year, and Lattime and Fowler were paroled in 2005.
The Smarts’ case had been something of a media sensation in the early 1990s. In the years since, it has inspired multiple books and TV adaptations, as well as the 1995 film To Die For, starring Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon, and Joaquin Phoenix.
As for Greggory Smart’s family, they are still struggling to pick up the pieces following his horrific murder. In 2011, Greggory’s brother, Dean Smart, published a memoir about the tragedy titled Skylights and Screen Doors.
“I wanted the book to be a memorial to Gregg more than anything else so that maybe in the future, people won’t talk about [Pamela] Smart,” Dean told WMUR. “Maybe they’ll talk about Gregg Smart.”
After reading about the murder of Greggory Smart, dive into the story of Dalia Dippolito and how she attempted to hire a hitman to kill her husband. Then, read about how Jordan Graham murdered her husband because she was terrified of having sex with him.
