True Crime Campfire - After School Special: The Murder of Greg Smart

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

In 1991, the small town of Derry, New Hampshire suddenly found itself the center of a media event: The trial of Pamela Smart, the pretty blond media services director at the local high school. From the outside looking in, Pam had seemed to be firmly on track for the American Dream. She and her handsome husband Greg were just about to celebrate their first anniversary, and Pam had aspirations to be a TV reporter. But behind the scenes, their marriage was crumbling—and Pam was becoming much too closely involved with one of her students at the high school. When Greg turned up murdered, it looked at first glance like a burglary gone bad…and that’s just how Pam wanted it to look. But the problem with murder conspiracies is, people tend to talk. Especially when some of those people are fifteen years old. And when the truth finally came to the surface, the little town of Derry would never be the same again.Sources:Teach Me to Kill by Stephen Sawickihttps://www.crimelibrary.org/notorious_murders/family/smart/1.html https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/pamela-smart-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-smart-marriage/ https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/show/pamela-smart-an-american-murder-mystery-investigation-discovery-atve-usFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In 1991, the small town of Derry, New Hampshire suddenly found itself the center of a media event. The trial of Pamela Smart, the pre-year-smart. pretty blonde media services director at the local high school. From the outside looking in, Pam had seemed to be firmly on track for the American dream. She and her handsome husband, Greg, were just

about to celebrate their first anniversary, and Pam had aspirations to be a TV reporter. But behind the scenes, their marriage was crumbling, and Pam was becoming much too closely involved with one of her students at the high school. When Greg turned up murdered, it looked at first glance like a burglary gone bad, and that's just how Pam wanted it to look. But the problem with murder conspiracies is people tend to talk, especially when some of those people are 15 years old. And when the truth finally came to the surface, the little town of dairy would never be the same again. This is Afterschool Special, the murder of Greg Smart. So, campers, for this one, we're in the old New England town of Derry, New Hampshire,

about 30 miles north of Boston. May 1, 1990, just after 10 p.m. on a warm spring evening, Pamela Smart parked her Honda CRX in the garage of the townhouse she shared with her husband, Greg. Pam was just getting home from a late school board meeting 25 miles away. Greg's truck was out front, but oddly the house was dark. If Greg got home before Pam did, he almost always turned on the outside lights. Pam opened the front door and went in, feeling around in the dark for the hallway light. And when she flicked it on, she screamed.

There was Greg, lying face down on the hallway carpet. A heavy brass candlestick lay next to him. Pam ran out of the house, screaming at the top of her lungs. Help! My husband! My husband! She banged on neighbors' doors until quickly a small crowd was gathering around her, desperately trying to calm her down and find out what was wrong. Pam was nearly hysterical. My husband's on the floor, she wailed. When one of the neighbors started to go in and check on Greg, Pam said, no, don't. There might still be somebody in there. The upscale condo complex where Pam and

Greg lived was not even a mile away from the town's police headquarters, so the cops and paramedics got there fast. They quickly determined that Greg Smart, a 24-year-old insurance salesman, just starting to get his life up and running with his pretty young wife, was dead. He had a terrible injury to his head, and the candlestick lying nearby made the officer's suspect a bludgeoning attack. Murder. Pamela, Greg's 22-year-old wife, was distraught. So were Greg's parents. They lived just a block away, and it hurried over when they heard Greg might be hurt, walking into an absolute nightmare, the worst night of their lives. Greg's mom fell apart, sobbing. Pam seemed glassy and distant. She and Greg had been just a week shy of

their first anniversary. Everything had seemed so perfect. Now Greg was gone and Pam's life as she knew it had just crashed down around her. What the hell happened? Pamela Wojus was born in Miami, but her family moved to Derry when Pam was 13. Even as the new kid in school, Pam didn't have any trouble making friends. She was outgoing and witty and loved being the center of attention, and she had apparently endless energy, working part-time, cheerleading for both the football and basketball teams, and still excelling academically. One of those people who just seem wired to run like twice as fast as the rest of us. She was a popular kid, and high school being high school,

it didn't hurt that she was cute, too, petite and pretty to go along with her high-energy charisma. Now, there's popular, and then there's popular. Pam was kind of a wild child in high school, had a reputation for being pretty free with her affections, if you know what I mean. I mean, shit, it's high school. If you don't turn a hose on them, stuff like that's going to happen. She got the nickname, Wham-Ban,

thank you Pam, which is just delightful, and some of the boys called her Seika after an 80s porn star to whom she had a very slight resemblance. Pam liked it. Under her yearbook photo, she wrote Seika and Reese Cup. Rees Cup was Paul Rees, her main high school boyfriend, whose other nickname was Sausage. Draw your own conclusions. From that. Pam's wild side went hand in hand with being kind of a neat freak. In her closet, her clothes were organized by matching color. She would neatly fold her dirty laundry before putting the darks and whites in separate hampers, because Lord knows you wouldn't want that precious white snake t-shirt to get wrinkled before it goes in the wash. And she probably did have a white snake t-shirt because neat,

preppy Pammy was also kind of a metalhead. It's kind of interesting, isn't it, that somebody who's so carefully organized and scheduled her life would be into metal. It's almost like Pam, had broken her personality into two distinct halves, with each one fighting to get out. Pam went back to Florida for college, getting a BA and communications from Florida State with a 3.85 GPA. While she was there, she had a once-a-week DJ gig at the college radio station hosting a show called Metal Madness. Pam was the maiden of metal, pumping out lots of head-bang-in, leather-clad tunes. It was always kind of startling for her listeners when they met her in real life. This neat, perfectly put together young woman who looked like a news anchor.

And that was what Pam was aiming for. She wanted to be a reporter on TV. I'm already jealous just of the two nicknames that she had. Like, those are already cooler than any nickname. Wham, thank you, Pam, awesome. And frigging maiden of metal. Was Wam Bam? Everybody just called me Twitney.

It wasn't fun. I feel like Wham Bam, thank you Pam, was kind of. of like a reference to sexual things, was it not? Yeah. Like, I feel, what's your point? I don't know. That was something that was a bad. Okay, that's fine.

I don't know. That was always something that, like, people would be sad about in my high school. Not Pam. Not Pam. And I will say that, like, if you ever want to shock, like, if you, like, as long as you're not listening to, like, the shock jock DJs, if you look up, like, most radio DJs, they look nothing like you think they. well, ever. Yeah, that's true. Go to their website. This is what, this is like, I listened to 93.3, uh, alternative rock in Denver. And I looked up all of the DJs that I was like, none of you look like, like, emo superstars. You look like just dudes and like ladies. That was

weird. At the end of 1986, when she was 19 and back in New Hampshire for the holidays, Pamela hung out with some girlfriends from high school. One of them said they should go to a new New Year's party her friend Greg was throwing when his parents were out of town. This turned out to be a pretty wild party. Greg Smart had kind of a reputation as a party king. There was loud rock music, lots of booze and weed, some cocaine. Welcome to 1986, y'all. And lots of making out.

Greg was a couple years older than Pam, a carefree, friendly guy, and good looking in a kind of baby-faced way. His assembly line job kept him in good shape. and as did his love of hiking and skiing. And best of all for Pam, he had beautiful, long, curly hair and wore a black leather jacket. And at that New Year's party, he spent some time strumming on a guitar. In other words, he was pretty much pure, uncut catnip for an 80s rock chick like Pammy. Her first impression of Greg was that he reminded her of John Bon Jovi, and it didn't get any better than that. Woof, I agree

Thus far, Greg had pretty much drifted through life. He didn't get great grades, didn't want to go to college. Until he met Pam, he just wanted to do his work on the assembly line, then spend his free time partying and, you know, rocking out and stuff. I think we're genre

skipping from heavy metal here a little bit, because this sounds like the start of like 17 different Bruce Springston songs. Just 17? But seriously, it's all good. There's plenty of overlap there. Now, we're not going to try and suggest that drifting along and just rocking out is the best life choice you could make. But I think when you're 21, it's not the worst one either.

Tried at 31 and you're basically that, hey there, fellow kids, meme with Steve Schemmy. But at like 21, you're fine. And unlike your typical Springsteen hero, Greg wasn't really blue collar at all. His family was well-to-do, upper middle class, just like Pam. He was just kind of working these manual labor jobs to pay the beer tabs until he figured out what he really wanted to do. Pam and Greg hit it off big at that New Year's party, fooled around over the next couple weeks, and by the time Pam went back to school in Florida, she was a smitten kitten. Although he did keep in touch, Greg was less head over heels.

He was seeing another girl, too, and he wanted to date both her and Pam. It's either her or me, Pam told him. Yeah, boy. Okay, I'll see you later, Greg said, which is always the danger when you give an ultimatum that they'll just say, sure, okay. But when she got back to town that summer, Pam worked some kind of strange dating sex magic, and in short order, they were dating exclusively, and they became Pam and Greg, adjoined at the hit dual entity.

Are Pam and Greg coming? I ran into Pam and Greg at the mall. You know the deal. Yeah, if there were celebrities. everybody would have called them something like Peg or Graham Gammala

Pregg Pregg Pregg Oh God Of course Eventually Eventually Pam had to go back to school in Florida again

So for part of the time It was just a metaphorical Joined at the Hippidness But you put long, yearning phone calls up against the you know throbbing biological urges

of a newly minted young couple And see what happens What happened in this case was that Greg up and moved to Tallahassee and got a job as a landscaper while Pam finished school. Now, whether it was because he was dating an ambitious overachiever or because he was just starting to grow up like we do, Greg started wanting more from life than just drifting along. He wanted to start building a future, a career.

And luckily, there was one right there waiting for him. His dad was an insurance agent back in Derry and there was a salesman job waiting for him up there if he started studying for the work down in Florida. This wasn't Pam's favorite idea. There was a reason she'd come back. to Florida for school. She liked it better down there. She liked the sun and the warmth and she figured Florida would be a better place to chase her dream of a media career. But shortly after Pam

graduated in 1988, the young couple got engaged. Greg cut off his beautiful long hair and they moved back to Derry. Pam was pissed about that haircut by the way. He didn't tell her about it ahead of time. Just came home and it was like all chopped off and for a while there you'd just thought somebody died. Like Pam had a legit like five steps of grief process over Greg. heavy metal hair. Back in New Hampshire, Greg started selling insurance and turned out to have a knack for it. It's a good gig for somebody with a friendly manner and a nice smile. His first full year, he made 42 grand, which today would be around 100 grand. He was only 24. That's some pretty nice for homage. And Pam found work as a media services director for a local school district. She put

together press releases and short videos and helped kids with audiovisual stuff. Hardly Barbara Walters on 2020, but hell, she was only 21 years old and barely weeks out of college. You gotta start somewhere. Back in their hometown, with the people they'd gone to high school with, Pam and Greg partied quite a bit at their new townhouse on Misty Morning Drive, but Pam was way more into that stuff than Greg was by now. He worked hard and liked to chill out on his downtime, and though he still liked to rock it out when he was driving his Toyota truck around, got some nice speakers installed just for that. Metal music just wasn't the urgent, passionate interest that it had been for him. a couple years ago. But it was for Pam. She even named both her Shih Tzu and her Honda

CRZ Halen after Van Halen. They were her favorite band. She'd even met Eddie Van Halen once, a story she never got tired of telling. Being together as a working couple really started to reveal cracks in the relationship between Greg and Pam. He wasn't a carefree rocker anymore. He had a real grown-up job and a real grown-up haircut, and he wanted a real grown-up life. He wanted a house and kids. And Pam wasn't ready for that. There was a distance growing between them, and it's really no surprise. Other than liking the same music, they just didn't have all that much in common. A friend would later say that they had only ever really gotten along because Greg didn't give much of a shit about the shape of his day-to-day life. If Pam, the control freak, wanted to steer

the ship, well, whatever, dude. When his own life started to get more structured, and Pam wasn't the one in charge anymore, things started getting tense. So, a young, engaged couples start drifting apart and realize that maybe they're not all that well-matched after all. What happens next? Well, we've seen this movie before, right, Campers? They went right ahead and got married, because of course they did. They shook the magic eight ball and it said, do the dumbest thing you can think of. They had a big, beautiful wedding with Greg completely hammered and desperate to pee through the whole ceremony, bless his heart, because he and his best man had been neck and bottles of champagne all morning. He would be dead in less than a year. He would be dead

in less than a year. Greg Smart's murder was the first one in Derry that year. There hadn't been one the whole previous year either. This was a safe town. People were shocked and scared, and the police devoted a hell of a lot of resources to the case. Soon after arriving on the scene, they discovered the Smart's townhouse had been ransacked.

Jorers had been yanked open and their contents thrown around, and there was a TV and some stereo equipment piled up by the back door as if a burglar had put them there to pick up on their way out. A bunch of Pam's jewelry was missing. It was a mess, and it looked like Greg might have been the victim of that old true crime classic. A robbery gone wrong, TM. But that scenario seemed hanky to the investigators from the get-go. For one thing, there was no sign of any forced entry into the townhouse.

And for another, it just didn't make sense for the burglary to happen at this time and place. Missy Morning Drive is a busy little curved street with townhomes crammed together on both sides. An evening burglary in a place like that, when people would be home but not yet asleep, was really unlikely. Like, usually people get robbed during broad daylight when everyone's at work. Yeah, definitely. It made even less sense when the medical examiner reported that Gray Smart had not been bludgeoned with the candlestick, as they first thought. he'd been shot in the head at point-blank range with a 38-caliber slug that had ricocheted inside his skull, killing him instantly.

Burglars very rarely carry weapons when they work, and they're far more likely to run than fight if confronted by a homeowner. There was nothing in that townhouse worth that kind of trouble. And the ransacked house itself set some spidey senses tingling. Experience is one of the most valuable tools investigators have. It lets them think, I've seen a lot of the real version of this, and this ain't it. The townhouse looked like somebody's idea of a burglary rather than the real thing.

It looks staged. And a weird wrinkle came up when officers searched the basement and found a worried little shih Tzu, Pam and Greg's dog, Halen. Why would a burglar put the little guy in the basement? Detective Dan Pellateer was the lead on Greg Smart's case, and he talked to Pam several times. He thought Greg probably knew the person who'd killed him, and he wanted to get a picture of his and Pam's life, and he also needed a list of people who had been in the townhouse recently to compare against the fingerprints they found. Pam seemed eager to help, but she was also eager to talk to the media. This began because of rumors that Greg's killing may have been drug-related.

This started because the cops found a, quote, marijuana cigarette in Greg's truck. One joint. Wow. So clearly this was some kind of cartel hit, you know, not even once. Pan wanted to set the record straight. This wasn't a drug thing. It was a burglary gone bad. So she called up Bill Spencer, a local TV reporter, and set up an interview. It wasn't the interview that stuck in Spencer's mind, though, but the way Pam prepared for it. She started directing the crew, bringing up all kinds of suggestions on how to improve the piece, which is just what professionals want from their subjects, somebody to explain their job to them. Yeah.

She and Greke had frozen the top of their wedding cake, and they'd been planning to eat it on their anniversary, Pam said. Wouldn't it be a great, sad shot if Pam got it out and talked about that? Until the cameras started rolling, there wasn't much grieving widow to be seen. There was just Pam, the wannabe reporter. Wow. Spencer later said he'd never seen anything like,

get, a grieving widow trying to produce his segment for him. She did other interviews, too, and soon both the police and the local media started to figure out that she just enjoyed being in the spotlight. The media, of course, kept asking for more interviews, and Pam kept saying yes. And the police were pissed. They'd asked her not to share any explicit details of the crime and the investigation. If any suspects knew what the police were thinking or were looking at, they could take steps to cover their tracks, but Pam just kept spilling out everything she'd heard to anybody who stuck

a microphone in her face. Before long, the police just cut her off. Pam would no longer receive any updates about the investigation. Those interviews are interesting. There's very little of the usual, like, request for help or information from the public that you usually see from family members soon after a murder, but there's lots about Pam's suffering and courage and how she will bravely struggle on. She told Bill Spencer, life's not always fair, and you you have to take what happens in stride and move on and move forward. This was six days after Greg had been shot in the head. Move on and move forward.

A constant in her interviews was that Greg had been killed in a burglary gone bad. Pam never wavered from that and refused to entertain even the suggestion of any other motive. And soon she started bringing up the Greg Smart Memorial Fund. This was a fundraiser to support the very worthy cause of the media course Pam was going to be teaching next year. It would help buy lots of AV equipment. Every kid who comes through this course will share a piece of Greg, Pam said. What Pam actually did with that frozen wedding cake topper, by the way, was take it over to his parents' place and hand it over,

along with several garbage bags of Greg's stuff. Here, she said, you take this, I don't like cake anyway. Maybe because he was in the business himself, Greg had gotten excellent life insurance. Pam stood to receive $140,000. A couple of weeks after his death, Pam was shopping for Transams and Camaro's. That little Honda CRX just wasn't going to cut it anymore. And a day or two after shopping for cars, some of Pam's friends, who were worried about her, took her out for drinks.

She had a good enough time that everybody thought it was uncomfortably weird. They ended up watching a local band fronted by Pam's high school boyfriend, Paul Sausage Reese, and he got her up on stage to sing along with him. Okay, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. I know we've touched on it before, but I need a moment because what was happening in the 80s with nicknames, okay? Sausage. Sausage. Sausage.

I have questions and I want none of them fucking answered. Like, sausage. What the fuck? Well, me neither. I think, you know, I mean, it's probably kind of obvious. Ask me. The men in the 80s, you know, you've seen sleep awake. camp right with the tight shorts everywhere i mean it's you know men dressed yeah they wore tight pants

back then so a bottle of bud in one hand and the microphone in the other pam wailed along to van haelan and motley crew songs having a wail of a time until the band's drummer told rice to knock it off and get her off the stage she couldn't sing for shit he said he's worried people would think she was part of the band this is this is genuine like i my face is burning right now this is genuinely the most embarrassing thing I've ever heard. That's horrifying. I am getting secondhand embarrassment three decades in the future from this. It is, oh, I'm nauseous.

When people say cringe is dead, like, just think back on this. No, this is not going anywhere. I'm sorry. Cringe is alive. Just imagine Pammy up there, just tunelessly belting out Motley crew until they got the hook and like, caterwauling with the shepherd's house. Before she left, Pam gave Sausage her number and told him to come visit her. Sausage said he would, but never did.

This widow was pretty merry. Two weeks into the investigation, and police were frustrated. In a high-profile case like this, lots of leads come up, and they all have to be followed, but they all went to dead ends. And then, on May 14th, Detective Pellateer took an anonymous call. The woman on the line said she knew someone. a 15-year-old girl who knew a lot about Greg Smart's murder and had been talking about it. His wife planned him to be killed, the caller said, so she could collect the insurance money, and he was killed in home, and she came home and she put on a wonderful performance.

The 15-year-old girl was a friend of the wife. Her name was Cecilia Pierce, and she lived in Seabrook out on the coast, about 30 miles away from dairy. A few moments later, the anonymous caller hung up. Pellateer thought this might be something, because he knew the name Cecilia Piers. PAM's work for the school district was done out of Winniconet High School, and she had a student intern there by that name. In fact, one of Pam's co-workers had mentioned that Cecilia had stayed at the Smart's townhouse the week before Greg's murder. Pam hadn't included Cecilia on the list of recent visitors she'd provided to the police. Huh. They needed to have a chat with this girl.

One of the things Pam was involved in at Winnicon at High School was Project Self-Ested. which was a drug and alcohol awareness program for freshmen, and students were encouraged to join and help out. There were two 15-year-olds involved who were immediately attracted to Pam in different ways, Cecilia Pierce and Billy Flynn, both from the hard-nosed blue-collar town of Seabrook. Cecilia was a chatty, friendly kid, but insecure about her looks in her home life. She could be thin-skinned, imagining slights where none were intended. To her, high-energy, perfect put together Pam seemed incredibly glamorous, and a kind of role model that Cecilia had never had before. And she was friendly. She treated Cecilia like an equal. The two of them hit it off right

away, and when Cecilia mentioned she had some interest in being a journalist, Pam went ahead and arranged for Cecilia to be her intern. They spent a lot of time together and soon became friends. Now, I think it's clear why an insecure 15-year-old might want a charismatic older friend who took her seriously, but it's harder to enrap in the other direction. I might venture to say that it's mad-fucking weird. Why was Pam befriending a 15-year-old girl? Like, have you met a 15-year-old? You can be their mentor. You could coach them, you could teach them, but friends?

Yeah. No. Maybe she just wanted someone who was hers alone. Most of her friends were Greg's friends first. Maybe she was just flattered by someone who was so enamored of her. Pammy did love the spotlight more than anything else. Well, almost, anything else. Which brings us to the other 15-year-old kid who got to know Pam through Project Self-esteem, Billy Flynn.

Billy had had kind of a rough childhood. He was born in California, but moved to Seabrook when his mom left his overbearing dad. Shortly after that, his father died, driving drunk and plowing to the back of a gasoline tanker, which exploded. Billy was 5.11 and skinny, with the long, dark, semi-mullet hairdo. He loved heavy metal and played the guitar. He was so soft-spoken that people often thought he was talking to himself instead of to them. He ran with a kind of tough crowd in Seabrook, but he didn't seem to have many hard

edges himself. His mom would say he'd be out all day acting nice and then come home and be a prick with his family. Clearly, this kid had some stuff bottled up. The first time he saw Pam Smart, Billy nudged his buddy, JR, and whispered, I'm in love. Billy talked big about girls, but he was not only a virgin, he'd never even made out with anybody yet. He might have been attracted to Pam, but for now, that just meant he, he,

awkwardly tried to be near her. There was a national competition at this time for high school students to produce a video promoting the nutritional benefits of orange juice. The top prize, right? The top prize was a trip to Disney World. In the fall, Pam got permission to put together an entry and started assembling a crew. This would shake down to be Billy, Cecilia, and two other girls. The video took three months to make, and it was terrible.

No Disney World for you. They shot it after school and afterwards Pam would take the kids out to Wendy's or wherever to eat. Soon they'd all just go to the beach and chat. Before the video was done, Pam was letting the kids talk her into going with them to booze-free teenage dance clubs. So the lines between instructor and student were getting a little blurry there. And Pam became less of an authority figure and more of a friend, an older friend. A friend who remained very much the leader of this little pack, but a friend nevertheless. The kids adored her, and Pam liked being adored.

It's kind of pathetic, if you think about it, for more than two seconds. I don't think it's going to take me two seconds. It's just all pathetic. Yeah, zero to pathetic in point zero to. Cecilia was especially smitten, becoming possessive about Pam. When they drove somewhere to shoot scenes for the video, she insisted on sitting next to Pam, and she'd get pissy if somebody else got there before her.

Ugh, hero worship. Girls that age can fall hard for older girls they admire, older women, I guess in Pam's case, who's 22 by now. Billy Flynn wasn't quite a smitten just yet. He had a crush on Pam. He would always offer to help her carry stuff and would try his hand at clumsy teenage flirting,

but that was as far as it went. For now, anyway. While Pam was making new friends who probably still had he-man bedsheets and cabbage-patch dolls in their bedrooms, her actual grown-up marriage to Greg was hitting the skids. They both would leave early for work, and Greg, who usually met clients after their own work days were done, often didn't get back till around nine. So Pam was by herself in the townhouse a lot, which she hated, so much so that she tried to get Greg to quit his new insurance job.

But Greg was killing it as a rookie salesman. He liked a job. He was good at it, and he was making bank. So he said, hell no. They did their own things. Greg doing outdoor activities with his buddies, Pam going to classes or dance lessons. Greg started going to friends' parties by himself. If other couples visited, the men would go do one thing and the women another, like some weird throwback to posh dinners in the 20s, where afterwards the men would all stay together for port and cigars. Greg and Pam were hardly ever together anymore. And then, just before Christmas in 1989, Greg didn't

come home one night. He soon came clean to Pam that he'd gotten drunk and had. had a one-night stand that he barely remembered. Pam was, of course, devastated and humiliated and furious. But they stayed together. None of her friends would even find out about the affair until much later. This was right in the middle of the Orange Juice video, and I guess you can kind of see the appeal of goofing around with a video camera and a bunch of teenagers who thought the sun shone out of her ass.

Doesn't make it a good idea, but you can kind of see it. Not long after, in February, Pam quite deliberately started to change things. She gave Billy a role of film and asked if he'd get it developed for her. He said, sure. Later on, the two of them drove to the Photoshop. Yes, kids, that is a thing that once existed, and picked up the prints. Right there in her Honda, beside Billy, Pam opened him up and started laughing, like the pictures were just something goofy and fun. Pam and one of her girlfriends had taken turns taking pictures of each other, in bikinis, on a bed, mimicking the kind of poses you might see in Playboy. She and her friend had taken the picks

for a modeling portfolio, she told Billy, but she didn't really like how they turned out. she was just going to throw them away unless Billy wanted to keep him. Billy did, of course, want to keep them. So just to hammer this home, a 22-year-old married woman gives her 15-year-old student, whom she knows has a crush on her sexy pictures of herself essentially in her underwear. This was obviously creepily seductive, and it's about a month after Greg had put the cherry on top of the increasingly shitty Sunday of their marriage by owning up to an affair.

So it seems pretty clear Pam was setting out to pay Greg back for cheating on her. But why set her sights on Billy? If she just wanted to screw around, old Wham-Bam Thank You Pam, knew how to get that done without, you know, committing statutory rape. But she chose a kind of messed up 15-year-old, who was already most of the way wrapped around her little finger. What was she thinking? I mean, you said it yourself.

She was a control freak. A 15-year-old virgin who's obsessed with you is much easier to control than your adult husband with his own ideas about what he wants his life to look like. Predators are usually pretty one-dimensional like that. And then there's this next thing. Yeah. A couple of days after giving Billy her thirst-trap pictures

and maybe frustrated that she hadn't heard anything from the kid, Pam called Cecilia into her office and told her, I think I'm in love with Bill. Cecilia just grinned. This was ridiculous. Pam's got to be joking. I'm serious, Pam said. And she had Cecilia,

go send Billy to her, and apparently nervous and embarrassed, asked him, Do you ever think about me when I'm not around? Sure, Billy said. Well, I think about you all the time. Billy was over the moon. He couldn't believe his teacher crush was actually into him. Pam told him she didn't know what to do with these feelings. I mean, she was married, so it was difficult.

But hey, every problem has a solution, right? And just a little while after Pam confessed her feelings to Pam asked him if he knew anyone she could hire to kill her husband. All along, she'd been telling Billy and Cecilia what an abusive monster Greg was, how he hit her, how one time during an argument he made her get out of the car and walk home in the freezing cold snow. To these kids who had never met him, Greg was an ogre. So Pam, always high energy and efficient, had quickly gone from A, here are some pictures of me in my underwear, through B,

I think I might be in love with you to see, do you know anyone who can kill my husband? And I don't think Pam was dumb enough to think that 15-year-old Billy Flynn had a rolodex of hired killers.

She was just opening up the subject, maybe hoping Billy would jump in and offer to take care of Greg himself. Every part of their relationship was like this, with Pam dangling some bait that a more assertive person might have taken on their own initiative. And Billy, because he was a teenage kid, just getting awkward and not picking up on it. Like, when Pam told him she had feelings for him, he didn't make a move on her or anything.

He just walked to his next class with a big smile on his face. Every time, Pan had to push him to take the next step, because, you know, he was a child. With his hitman business, Billy figured Paul. Pam was just blowing off steam, that she wasn't serious, but Pam kept pushing. She couldn't just divorce Greg. Greg wouldn't give her up. He'd hound her and stop her from seeing anybody else. How he was supposed to do this, Pam never made clear, and it was obviously bullshit. If anything, by this time, Greg's main reaction to a divorce would have been relief. Of course, Billy didn't know that. All he knew about Greg came from Pam, who painted him as an

abusive monster. And Greg would get everything in a divorce, the cars, the furniture, even the dog. Pam wouldn't have enough money to move to the coast and be close to Billy. Again, this didn't have much in common with actual reality, but I guess one of the advantages of hooking up with unsophisticated co-conspirators is that they don't know enough to call you on your bullshit. Billy told Pam he didn't know any killers for hire and hoped she'd let you. the whole thing drop. Pam started tightening her grip on him. One day, she was over at Billy,

supposedly working on the Orange Juice video. Billy's mom and brothers were home, but Billy locked his door and the two of them stretched out on his bed listening to Motley Crew. Yeah, folks, don't let your teenage kid take a teacher into their bedroom and lock the door. There is no good scenario here. Uh, yeah, what the hell? Pam, always having to push Billy. Billy to the next step said, well, are you going to kiss me? And they made out on his bed. Ugh. God, this bitch is the worst. She really truly is. Now, if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that a 15-year-old kid in this situation is going to be super, super discreet about it. Yeah, yeah, right. Billy told his friends he was involved with Pam pretty much immediately.

They thought he was full of shit until they saw her kiss him goodbye after dropping him off at one of their houses. Jesus Christ. These buddies of his went to the same school, where Pam worked. Even if things went no further than this one makeout session, she was already skating on thin ice. But Pam didn't seem to care. Talking about Pam with his friends, Billy was as crude as you might expect for a teenage boy bragging to his buds. But the truth was, he was falling for her fast. and hard. There wasn't much in his life that was bright and warm, and this at least looked like

that and felt like that. Poor kid, man. Pam planned her next move carefully. Greg was going away on a ski trip in the middle of February. Pam would have Billy come over. They would watch a tape of nine and a half weeks together to get them in the mood, and then they would go to bed. She even bought new lingerie just so she could recreate the sexy dance Kim Basinger. does in the movie. Oh, God, I hate her so bad. And, oh, Cecilia would be there, too. Apparently so that if anybody found out Billy had spent the night, it wouldn't look so bad.

Now, I'm not quite sure of the logic there. Like, sure, there was an underage boy there, but don't worry, there was an underage girl, too. Like, what? That's worse, not better. What are you doing? By this time, Cecilia was Pam's loyal confidant. She knew all about Billy. She'd heard Pam's diatribes against Greg.

She'd even heard Pam's plans to have Greg killed. She didn't take him seriously, and even if she had, I don't think you can overstate the hold that Pam had over Cecilia. It was so strong that Cecilia's mom had complained more than once about Pam taking her place. The evening went just as Pam had planned. They watched the movie, which has to be up there as one of the more uncomfortable to watch with the third wheel present. Then went up to Pam and Greg's bed,

and had sex twice. In the intermission, Billy came downstairs to get some ice to continue the nine and a half weeks reenactment. Oh, so gross. In the morning, Pam drove Cecilia and Billy back to Seabrook.

She dropped off Cecilia, then drove back down to the beach with Billy. There, she sadly told him that they probably couldn't be together after this. Greg wasn't going away. It just couldn't work. Heartbroken, Billy started sobbing. He desperately wanted this, wanted Pam.

Pam told him there was only one way that could happen. Greg would have to die. Billy would have to do it. Again, he figured Pam wasn't serious, but he wasn't about to risk losing her. He said, yes. Over the next few weeks, Pam and her 15-year-old boyfriend slash victim, Target, Tool,

had a lot of sex. And Pam, ever the organizer, said about planning how Greg would die. She settled early on on the idea of making it seem like Greg had interrupted a burglary. Day after day in her office at school, she and Billy workshoped and refined the plan. Cecilia was sometimes there too, and she would sometimes join in. It really seemed like an abstract game to her, just talk. Billy, who was coming to know Pam a lot better, was finding it increasingly hard to pretend she wasn't serious.

But he went along. Since they'd started having sex, he'd become totally devoted to Pam. and he hated Greg, the man he'd never met and only knew through Pam's stories. And Pam was a hell of a storyteller. She wanted to be a reporter, remember. The plan settled into a pretty simple shape. Pam would leave the cellar and rear doors unlocked. Billy, wearing gloves, would sneak in before Greg got home

and tear the place up as if it had been robbed, then lie in wait. When Greg got home, he would kill him. Pam wanted him to do it with the gun. and Billy was to make sure Pam's little Shih Tzu dog, Halen, was put safely down in the basement before Greg got there. She didn't want the dog to see Billy killed Greg. She didn't want Halen traumatized, and she didn't want him to hate Billy either. So, one thing 15-year-olds are not good at is keeping their damn mouth shut. On break at the pizza place where she worked, Cecilia was chatting to one of the delivery women when the subject of unhappy relationships came up.

Cecilia told her she had a friend named Pam who was looking for somebody to kill her. husband. The delivery driver looked at the source, a kind of blabber-mouth mess of a 15-year-old girl, and, as people usually do in this situation, decided it was bullshit. Billy was even more loose-lipped. He'd already told his friends J.R. and Pete about how serious he and Pam were getting. J.R. and Pete had seen the two of them kissing, so they believed him, but they found the situation more ridiculous than impressive. They teased him by singing the Van Halen song Hot for Teacher, but using humping the teacher instead. Oh, my God.

And now, Billy told them he wanted to kill Greg Smart. They didn't believe him. They were tough kids, and Billy, I mean, he could talk big, but he was definitely the sensitive plant of the three of them. The idea of him killing somebody was just laughable. Yeah, yeah, Billy, you're going to kill Pam's husband. Sure, man, good luck with that. It was just kind of a joke.

At first. But Pam wouldn't let up on the hitman talk. She brought it up constantly. For Billy, it became as much a part of their time together as the sex. And then, toward the end of March, Pam said, out of the blue, You have to do it tonight. She had a meeting at the school board that would provide her with an airtight alibi. She'd leave the basement in the rear door unlocked.

Once Billy had killed Greg, he was to call Pam at her office and let her know what was done. Everything was ready. Except Billy didn't have. have either a gun or a car to get him to dairy. Well, hurry up and get them by tonight, Pam told him. Okay, Pam, I, a 15-year-old boy, will track down a car and a fucking gun in a matter of hours. So ridiculous. Billy told her he'd try, but he didn't.

He just hung out with his buddy, JR, and then went home and called Pam at about 10 p.m. Look, I'm sorry. I didn't do it, Billy said. I couldn't get a gun and I couldn't get a car. You don't love me, Pam yelled at him. This was the first time Billy had seen Pam's angry side. She really tore into him, saying if he loved her, he'd have already done the things that meant they could be together. Billy started crying. Pam didn't care. She just kept on rolling. You don't have any intention of doing this, and I can't go on seeing you like this when I know we're Never really going to be together. So that's it.

It's over between us. And with that, she hung up the phone. And this clumsy, manipulative bullshit worked like a charm because Billy was a kid. He was in love with her, and she was dumping him. That's a real sharp pain. Billy was devastated. The next day at school, though, Pam was all sweetness.

She said she was sorry for getting so angry. She was just so desperate to get away from Greg, so she and Billy could be together. But it was okay that Billy hadn't been able to get a gun and a car on short notice. She had another school board meeting next month, and Billy could kill Greg then. She was playing this kid like a fiddle, and she got just the result she wanted. Billy was now taking the idea of killing Greg 100% seriously, because it was clear to him now that if he didn't, Pam would leave him. Again, a grown man might have looked at the choice in front of Billy and thought,

What the crazy bitch, dump me? Good riddance. But he was 15 and in love for the first time and totally enthralled with Pam. The thought of her leaving him hurt like nothing else. The next month, Pam's school board meeting rolled around again, and Billy had a near-do-well buddy drive him in Pam's car to the strip mall behind the smarts townhouse. This buddy, like everybody else, thought there was no way in hell. that Billy Flynn was going to kill someone. But he figured he might get to nab some decent valuables

during the simulated burglary part of the plan. Billy still hadn't got hold of gun. Pam really wanted Greg shot, not stabbed, because it would make less of a mess on her nice white furniture. But... Yeah. But he'd just have to stab him, furniture or no. Despite his determination to follow through this time, though,

Billy got cold feet. He knew the way to the smart house well enough, but he gave his friend bad directions, and they ended up getting lost. By the time they got to Misty Morning Drive, it was nearly 10 o'clock, and Greg's Toyota truck has already parked outside, so they couldn't go in and wait to ambush him when he came home.

No dice. The killing was off. When they picked up Pam from the school and told her, Billy was relieved at first. She didn't seem too mad, but that only lasted until they were alone together. You knew the way, she said. You got lost on purpose. And repeating the refrain of a thousand abusive fuckwits before her,

she wailed, If you loved me, you would do this because you want to be with me. Billy promised he would do what she wanted. Pam told him there was one more board meeting that year on May 1st. If you don't do it then, that's it, she said. for attempt number three Billy wanted to get his best friends Pete and JR involved and they agreed for a thousand dollars each

Pam balked at that and haggled them down to 500 paid in $50 installments over five months in case the police had questions about large withdrawals from her bank account around the time of Greg's death $500 to kill a guy J.R. would end up cutting that in half as long as he got to take the nice speakers from Greg's truck these were not nice kids

J.R. had access to his grandma's car whenever he wanted, but they still needed a gun. J.R. would supply that too. His dad had a 38 caliber revolver stashed in one of his dresser drawers. Greg was out of town the week before the murder, and Pam had Cecilia get permission from her mom to stay with Pam at the townhouse. She knew how much Cecilia enjoyed playing the grown-up roomy, and Pam wanted to make sure her hold over the girl didn't slip. Cecilia knew everything, even if she really didn't think Billy would go through with it. But Billy, Pete, and J.R. were going through with it this time. J.R. would drive and stay in the car. Billy and Pete would go in, put little Halen in the basement, then trash the place and wait for Greg. They'd jump him as soon as he got in the door,

subdue him, then Pete would slit his throat. Pam might have wanted a gunshot, but the boys figured that would be too loud. And Pete, the most physical of the boys, had from time to time wondered out loud what it would be like to kill someone. Billy would carry the revolver in his pants as a backup. At school on May 1st, beside Billy's locker, Pam told him she had left the basement and rear doors unlocked. She'd put the jewelry the boys were to steal into one box. She'd put the good stuff elsewhere, though, and was wearing rings on pretty much all her fingers. That night, Billy and Pete waited in the darkness inside the Smarts Townhouse. Billy picked up a candlestick from the dining table, thinking he'd hit Greg with it. Then he changed his mind and

dropped it. They waited some more. Greg's silver truck pulled up outside. Jesus Pete, he's here, he's here, Billy yelped. They heard Greg's footsteps in the jangle of keys as he opened the door. He stepped in and turned on the light. Haley, Greg called out. That was one of his names for the dog. The boys jumped him, beating on him while Greg tried to protect his face. Pete grabbed Greg's hair and slammed his head into the wall, then shoved him down onto his knees. Pete was behind him, Greg's hair in one hand and a knife from the kitchen in the other. Don't hurt me, dude, Greg said. What do you want? Pete told him to shut up. Where's my dog? Greg said. What did you do with my dog? That breaks my heart that he said that.

That he wanted to protect a dog. Your dog's okay, Pete said, then told Greg to hand over his wedding band. I can't give it to you, Greg said. My wife would kill him. me. That would stick in Billy Flynn's mind later, how Greg was worried about how Pam would feel if he handed over his ring. And now it was time. But Pete discovered that he didn't have it in him after all to slit someone's throat. He looked at Billy. Billy half moved his hand toward the inside pocket of his jacket where the gun was. Pete nodded. Billy took out the gun and cocked the hammer. He held the weapon a couple of inches from Greg Smart's head.

said. It was one of those moments that seemed both fleeting and endless all at once. Billy said, God forgive me, and pulled the trigger. After Greg was dead, the boys fled in a panic, leaving the TV and speakers by the rear door. Pete grabbed a pillowcase he'd stuffed with Pam's cheap costume jewelry, but that was it. It was always going to fall apart. No one involved could keep their mouths shut, but it would take a while and Pam, after the police shut her out of the investigation, remained convinced they were going down the wrong paths of burglary gone wrong or a professional hit. Within a couple of weeks, she was back to work and seeing Billy every day at school and

spending a lot of her free time with him. She even took the boys with her when she went shopping for transams. At the dealer, where JR's mom happened to work, there was a jar of lollipops on the counter for customers. Pam ordered Billy to get her one, figuring she was enjoying embarrassing him in front of Pete, Billy ignored her. She shrugged. No big deal. But after she dropped the other boys off, Pam lit into him. You don't love me. If you did, you would have gotten that lollipop for me. And then she threatened to dump him until Billy caved and apologized for not getting her the damn lollipop. Wow. You killed somebody for this, dummy. Are you happy? I know, right.

June 9th, a friend of the boys, Ralph Welch, overheard Pete and J.R. talking about the killing and made them tell him the whole story. They did, apparently figuring he would be as unbothered by the murder as they were, but they were wrong. Ralph blew up. He was furious and disgusted. He couldn't believe his friends had done this. Finally, somebody with a damn conscience. Ralph and Pete got into a fight while J.R. burst into tears, and then Ralph stormed into the house and told J.R.'s dad his gun had been used to kill someone. Hell yes, Ralph. Damn. Good for him. I know, right? This never happens in cases like this.

I was, like, we needed a hero, and Ralph was our hero. Yeah. Ralph, man, who about it? Hell yeah. The dad checked his revolver in the dresser drawer and noticed it had been cleaned, which was not the case when he had last put it in there. the next day he and his wife took the gun to the police station and said they thought it might have been used in a murderer. The detective sergeant there listened carefully. She didn't know of one recent murder involving a 38 caliber gun over in Derry. Have you heard the name smart?

She asked. They had, or at least J.R.'s mom had. That was the name of the woman who had come shopping for transams with the boys. The walls were tumbling down. The boys knew it. Pete took his dad's car and all three of them zipped down to his grandparents' place in Connecticut. They planned to steal some motorcycles there and fly on south on down on the highway, which is a teenager's idea of a getaway if there ever was one. Like I couldn't stop myself from laughing. We're going to just escape on some motorcycles. They'll never catch us.

But then Pete talked to his dad on the phone and his dad yelled at him for taking the car. Pete obediently drove. all three of them back to Seabrook. So much for the great escape. Oh, Pete. For Pete's sake. On June 10th, Ralph Welch told the police what J.R. and Pete had told him. That was plenty enough for arrest warrants for the boys. The next day, their moms brought them in and they were arrested. That same day, the investigators took another run at Cecilia Pierce. They'd interviewed her a couple weeks after the kids.

killing, after that anonymous tip, but she had denied any knowledge about the murder. Now they went after her harder. They knew she was lying. She could be in big trouble. Cecila resisted for a couple days, but finally she broke and told them everything. It was partly out of fear, partly out of conscience, and partly out of seeing Pam in a whole new light. After the boys were arrested, Pam's only concern had been how they might implicate her. She said she loved Billy, but she hadn't expressed an ounce of actual worry about him in jail. Cecilia wondered, were Pam's feeling for her just as fake? In jail, the boys kept their mouths shut right up until the state decided to try them as adults.

At that point, with plea deals dangling, they all started talking. And their stories matched Cecilia's. The police knew Pam was at the center of the whole thing. They had enough to arrest her, but they weren't sure they had enough for a conviction. Yeah, the word of four teenagers, three of whom were admitted murderers, is a pretty shaky peg to hang a trial on.

What they needed was to have Pam incriminate herself, and they thought they knew how they could hook that up. After Cecilia had finally spilled what she knew, the officers had built a nice rapport with her, especially Detective Pellateer, who she called the cute one. They wanted to record her conversations with Pam. Cecilia agreed.

They tried full. phone calls first, but Pam quite accurately suspected her phone might be tapped and dropped nothing incriminating. So the police got together with Cecilia and her mom and asked if she'd wear a wire. They agreed, and on July 12th, she went to school and down to Pam's office to chat like they always did. They talked about the case, of course. Initially, there were clear hints of Pam's involvement, but not yet enough to grab her. Like Cecilia said the attorney general wanted to talk to her and she was sick of lying, and Pam said, well, you know, I'm just telling you that if you tell the truth, you're going to be an accessory to murder.

Pam knew Cecilia was a weak link and pressed her hard. I think I've been a very good friend to you, and that's the thing. Even if you send me to the fucking slammer or you don't, or if anybody sends me, it's going to be you, and that's the big thing, and that's what it comes down to. But what good is it going to do if you send me to the fucking slammer? And later, there was this,

which is super creepy when you remember the whole business started with Pam seducing a child. You have to remember through this whole thing. 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.

And then came the passage that had the police high-fiving each other in the surveillance van. If you tell the fucking truth, you're probably going to be arrested. And even if you're not arrested, you're going to have to go and you're going to have to send Bill. You're going to have to send Pete. You're going to have to send J.R. And you're going to have to send me to the fucking slammer for the rest of our entire life. Ain't she a peach, y'all? Little Pammy.

It took a little while to clean up the audio tape and make sure they had all their ducks in a row, but this was more than enough. On August 1st, 1990, Pamela Smart was arrested for the murder of her husband Greg. The trial was a media circus, predictably, and made history as the first trial in the U.S. to be televised live. But it wasn't really a close-run thing. The boys took plea deals to testify. The theory Pam's defense, forward was that she had broken up with Billy shortly before the killing, and he, Furious, had

killed Greg on his own accord and conspired with his friends to pin it on her, because he's a criminal mastermind at 15, right? She knew nothing of their plan to kill Greg. But if they were broken up, why was Billy shopping for transams with her a couple weeks after the murder? And how did JR end up with the nice speakers from Greg's truck? The answers, of course, are that Pam and Billy hadn't broken up and that the speakers were part of J.R.'s payment for the killing. And as for Pam not knowing anything about the murder, complete and utter horseshit as the recordings from Cecilia prove beyond any doubt. Those recordings are what really sunk Pam, and they're also what seeing her continued protestations of innocence. They only make sense if she's guilty up to her neck.

At trial, she tried to put forward some kind of cockamamie theory that she knew Cecilia was working with the police and was just playing along to get information out of the girl so she could like solve the crime herself or something. I mean, it's utterly ludicrous, and I hope that anybody who believes her has someone in their lives to check whether they put their pants on the right way around every morning. Because bless your heart. Bless your heart. That's ridiculous. Billy and Pete were both sentenced to life in prison for second-degree murder with eligibility for parole after 40 years, with a potential 12-year deferment for good behavior. A judge later knocked three years off the parole eligibility, and both of them were released in 2015, 25 years. years after they murdered Greg Smart. J.R. also got life, but as an accomplice to second

degree murder, his parole eligibility was 10 years shorter, and he got the same three-year reduction as the other boys, leaving prison in 2005. Pam was convicted of accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and witness tampering. She was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole, and she's been trying to get out ever since, given the occasionally interviewed a 20-20 or Dateline still swearing up and down that she didn't do it. Oh, yeah.

A lot of the reporting on this case takes the position that Pam had Greg killed so she could be with Billy. But I think that gets it backwards. I mean, just look at the timeline. The first time she brought up killing Greg was right after she started seducing Billy.

It was sexy pictures, I think I love you, help me kill my husband. Bam, bam, bam. Yeah, exactly. The morning after they first had sex, Pam told Billy they could never be together again unless he agreed to kill Greg. She wanted Greg dead first. Billy, a useful and easily manipulated tool, came later. If not him, it would have been some other sucker.

And look, Billy Flynn did a vile thing. We get that. Just because Pam victimized him sexually doesn't make that okay. But he was the only one of the bunch who seemed to show any genuine remorse at the trial. He didn't try to blame it on anybody else. He did something he regretted, and he served his time. Pam, on the other hand, is still playing games. So that was a wild one, right, campers?

You know we'll have another one for you next week, but for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Katie, great name. Linifer, Marissa, Amy, Jessica, Marine, and Jen. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out.

Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin while supplies last at 10, virtual events with Whitney and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. And for great TCC merch, visit the true crime campfire store at spreadshirt.com.