BEDFORD HILLS, N.Y. — Even after 20 years, the New Hampshire school aide convicted of persuading her teenage lover to kill her husband insists she had nothing to do with plotting the death.
Pamela Smart, 42, is serving life without parole after being convicted in 1991 of recruiting her teenager lover and his friends to murder her husband a year earlier. Smart was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator and Bill Flynn was 15 when he shot Gregg Smart to death at the couple’s Derry, N.H., home.
“I’m so much more than the worst mistake of my life,” Smart told WMUR-TV in an interview at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York. “And I feel like I’ve been frozen in time inside that mistake to get involved with Bill, and I have never been able to get out of it.”
Smart admits to the affair, but not to masterminding the murder.
“I never wanted Gregg killed,” she said. “I never wanted him to kill Gregg. I never asked him to. I never insinuated that I wanted him to kill my husband.”
Smart insists the teens lied to get plea bargains and that media coverage swayed the jury. Flynn and Patrick Randall won sentence reductions and are eligible for release in 2015. Raymond Fowler and Vance Lattime already have been paroled.
The case was the basis for the movie “To Die For,” starring Nicole Kidman in 1995. Smart said she is not a “movie caricature.”
“I’m not this image, this character in a show,” she said. “I’m a real human being that does feel and feels deeply sorry for what happened.”
Information from: WMUR-TV, wmur.com
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