Mary Jane, then a medical assistant at a hospital, offered to perform CPR, so Scaccia set to rolling the man onto his back.
Suddenly, he saw the bloody hole on the top left side of the man’s head. He stopped. Seconds later, the paramedics confirmed Scaccia’s diagnosis: dead.
More police cruisers arrived. Scaccia’s backup, officer John Twiss, hurried in. With their sergeant guarding the door, Scaccia and Twiss took out their guns, Glock 9 mm semiautomatics, and began to search the condo, figuring that whoever did this could still be around.
They moved through the first floor. Beyond the dead man was a combined living room and dining area that took up most of the space. A small kitchen. A bathroom. A couple closets. Nice.
But someone had obviously ransacked the place. A pile of stuffing from what seemed to be a pillow was on the floor. Compact disks were strewn about. The VCR, still hooked up, was upside down on the carpet. A pair of stereo speakers and a small television were by the back door.
Upstairs, the master bedroom was a mess as well. Clothes had been tossed around. Drawers had been pulled out and left overturned. A second bedroom seemed untouched. On the bathroom sink was an empty jewelry box.
Twiss poked his head into the attic and came back down.
No signs of life anywhere.
That is, until Scaccia opened the basement door to search there. He started down and stopped suddenly when something near his feet moved.
He looked. There, in the shadows, quietly sitting behind the door, was a tan, shaggy little dog. Cowering.
◆◆◆
Outside, all was confusion. More neighbors gathered. More police cars. Yellow crime scene tape was stretched around the house.
At Pam’s request, a neighbor called Greg’s parents, Bill and Judy Smart, who lived in another condominium complex right around the corner. The panicked caller said that their son was “very, very sick” and that they should come quickly. So the Smarts threw on something over their pajamas, and with their twenty-one-year-old son, Dean, at the wheel of his Camaro speeded to Misty Morning Drive.
When they got there, they rushed to 4E, where they were met by Sergeant John Toki, his visage hardened, his body unmoving in front of the entrance. The Smarts tried to brush past, but Toki said no one without authorization could enter. No one.
“What’s going on!” shouted Bill Smart. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong with my son?”
Pam came over to join the Smarts, and Greg’s mother pelted her with questions.
“What’s wrong with him?” demanded Judy Smart. “What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know,” replied Pam.
“Where were you?”
“I was at the school,” Pam said. “There was a meeting.”
The family was frenzied. Bill Smart, a smallish, middle-aged man with a head of snow-white hair and moustache, tried to bull his way in, but Toki held him back. Judy kicked at the cop, crying and shouting.
“What the hell is wrong with him!” Dean finally pleaded. “For God’s sake, if he’s sick, someone go in and please help him!”
At this, an official from one of the response teams came down the porch stairs. “We can’t help him,” he said. “He’s already dead.”
Seconds later, the door opened and someone stepped out. Bill Smart, standing near the top of the steps, could see the candlestick and then his son–feet to head. From the base of the steps, his wife and youngest son also caught a glimpse of Greg’s body.
Judy became hysterical, and the paramedics helped her to the ambulance. As Greg’s mother was tended to, Pam seemed dumbstruck, not screaming or coming visibly unhinged in the least.
“Oh, that poor thing,” Mary Jane Woodside whispered to her husband as Pam stood there, looking very alone and forlorn, as the paramedics looked after Judy Smart. “Everybody’s giving all the attention to the parents and nobody’s even doing anything for her. She looks like she’s in shock.”
That night various neighbors went to Pam, the twenty-two-year-old looking like a waif, hugged her, and tried to provide a modicum of comfort. Pam mentioned to one that she suspected trouble when she found the front light out even though Greg’s truck was there. She puzzled another when she started talking about Greg and muttered, out of the blue, “He’s been so messed up lately.”
The family was told that Greg had suffered a head wound; almost everyone assumed the candlestick had done the job.
The police ushered Judy and Pam over to the Liessners’ to get them settled down and away from the crime scene. They sat on the couch, both obviously shattered.
Judy’s grief could not be contained; her mind and body rebelled at the thought that the second of her three sons was dead. It was all too incomprehensible. She asked the police for a paper bag as she expected to be sick.
Pam was not weeping uncontrollably but seemed unmistakably sad. “What will I do with the rest of my life?” she murmured. No one thought twice when Pam shifted her attention away from the idea of Greg to her worries about her Shih-Tzu and whether he was all right.
To some, her concern may have seemed a bit misplaced, but most wrote it off to shock. It was as if she could not face the awful truth that her husband was dead two doors over, so she focused on other things. It was as if shock was protecting her, keeping her sane.
Pam would remain that way much of that long night, even after the dog–named Haylen, also after the rock band–was finally brought to her, even after going back with Greg’s parents to their condo for a vigil.
No one doubted that Pam was upset. Brian Washburn, one of Greg’s closest friends, later recalled getting the telephone call about Greg’s death, going over to Greg’s parents’ place, and seeing Pam seated on the living room floor. “She started crying and I just kneeled down and we hugged,” he said. “And she just asked, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Why would someone do this?’”
Still, surrounded by stunned and desolate family and friends, Pam at times seemed out of sync emotionally. “I walk into the house and Pam starts crying,” remembered Tom Parilla, Greg’s best man at his wedding just a year earlier. “And I start crying. Then all of a sudden she just stops crying.”
A minute later, Pam would bewilder Parilla as she nonchalantly moved on to other topics, such as her frustration at not having her contact lens solution, which was inside 4E, Misty Morning Drive, with her dead husband.
◆◆◆
Whoever Gregory Smart had been, his problems were officially over at 11:19 When Gene Nigro, an investigator for the New Hampshire Medical Examiner’s Office, pronounced him dead. It was around that time, though, that a number of other people were just learning that they had a new problem in their own lives–finding out who had done this.
The Derry police stand guard. (Don Himsel/ Nashua Telegraph)
The Derry detectives got to the crime scene and reported to their supervisor, Captain Loring Jackson, to begin the spadework of the investigation.
Jackson, dark-haired and heavyset, wore a permanent look of having failed to get enough sleep the night before. Only now, the truth was that he had not. His Rotary Club had met first thing in the morning that day and he had been up since five. When the call came from the station he was home relaxing before turning in for the night.
When Jackson heard it was a homicide, he took a minute or two then was out the door, into his unmarked LTD Crown Victoria, sweeping the maroon beast over the back roads for Summerhill Condominiums.
Jackson, forty-eight years old, had been a cop since 1966, and had grown less and less fond of calls like this. He had been in Derry now for eighteen years and was just a couple more away from nailing down his pension.
The captain had grown up in the suburbs west of Boston, where with his buddies he raised his own brand of hell and set some still unbroken speeding records on the area’s usually tranquil streets.
After high school, Jackson kicked around for a few years, went to school with an idea of going into commercial art, but then family li
fe called. He was driving an ambulance, carting around cardiac arrests and head-on colliders, in Natick, Massachusetts, when a friend suggested he apply for a job at the local police department. Jackson had laughed. Imagine that, he said.
Twenty-four years later, after jobs as a cop in Natick and Newport, New Hampshire, he was here in Derry. The job had been hard on Jackson’s family and there had been countless apologies to his wife and four kids, now all grown.
Jackson was looking forward to a normal life, one in which he could spend more time on his artwork, painting landscapes and portraits and hand carving decorative ducks. Something with normal hours. Something where half his time did not revolve around low lifes.
Still, police work had its moments. Jackson’s world-weary look gave way to merriment when a bust he and his men were making had a touch of surprise, cops in deliverymen’s outfits, for example. Or when a good hunch paid off big time.
There was a camaraderie to police work that he liked, too. And while it was not the same now that he was a captain, Jackson liked the opportunity occasionally to be out of the office and in the field with his small band of detectives.
At 4E, Misty Morning Drive, Jackson dealt out the assignments for the evening: Dan Pelletier would videotape the interior and exterior of the condo. Michael Surette and Barry Charewicz would team up to take the stills and to jot down what they saw. Sergeant Vincent Byron, meanwhile, would conduct the initial search of the area.
Byron checked around the neighborhood for a while then moved farther out. Behind the condos was an unmown grassy hill that gradually stretched up toward the Derry Meadows Professional Park, and behind that, the shopping plaza. The field was a shortcut that kids sometimes took on the way to the stores or the nearby McDonald’s. It seemed like a possible getaway route.
Byron pulled into the professional building's parking lot, when suddenly the rays of his headlights glimmered off an object. He got out of the car and walked over. There, on a strip of mowed lawn, about one hundred yards back from the Smarts’ condo and just beyond the hill, Byron found a long carving knife jabbed into the ground. It had come, he would soon learn, from the Smarts’ kitchen. Nearby were a couple pieces of paper towel, a white plastic jewelry box, and two pieces of a cardboard jewelry box.
◆◆◆
It was around one o’clock in the morning when Cynthia White and Diane Nicolosi of the state attorney general’s office arrived at the condos.
Their job was to oversee the investigation – standard policy that dated back to when New Hampshire was vastly more rural. Having the AG’s office in control brought some uniformity to homicide probes. It also prevented the police chief of some fiefdom, who maybe had never even seen a corpse before, from claiming that this was his town, and he was going to solve this crime his way.
The population boom in southern New Hampshire, however, had changed things. Many police departments were regularly conducting investigations into practically every conceivable crime, and it was not always easy for them to subordinate themselves to one or two prosecutors, sometimes only a few years out of law school, when the most heinous of crimes occurred in their town.
No one had to like it, but they did have to do it. And for the most part, the AG’s office did let the police take care of the daily ins and outs of any given investigation, making demands only when they saw holes that needed to be filled as the trial neared.
Still, it did not go over easy when two women prosecutors, officially called assistant attorneys general, stepped out of the car that morning and said they wanted the state police, with whom they had worked before, and not the Derry police, to process the crime scene.
Jackson and his men grumbled. But then again, no one had to like it.
To get the process going, detectives Pelletier and Charewicz were sent to the Smarts’ condo to ask Pam to sign the standard papers allowing investigators to search her home and Greg’s truck.
They found her in the living room, with a doleful expression and her head in her hands, amid the many mourners. With her mother, Pam joined the detectives in the relative quiet of the kitchen, where they chatted briefly.
Pelletier showed Pam the consent-search forms and explained that she had the right to not sign them. Linda Wojas, who worked as a legal secretary, told her daughter that these would save the police from having to obtain search warrants.
As far as Pam was concerned this was not a matter that required much thought. Of course she would sign.
“I’ll do anything I can to help,” she said.
Pamela Smart was indeed willing to be of assistance. So much so that it bothered her that Pelletier and Charewicz had only come by to get the consent forms signed and then were leaving. She told some friends and her mother that she didn’t understand why they did not want to ask her any questions. They, in turn, relayed to the cops that she was anxious to talk.
◆◆◆
By 2:30 a.m., the New Hampshire State Police Major Crimes Unit began the arduous task of combing through the apartment, taking more photographs, jotting down everything they saw, gathering evidence, and dusting for fingerprints.
The Derry police, meanwhile, could start some interviews. So Pelletier and Charewicz went back to the home of Greg Smart’s parents. Pam came downstairs to meet them with a few of her friends, who in turn drove her to the Derry Police Department to be interviewed in a quieter setting.
Leaving her friends, Pam went into the interview room and gave the detectives her statement, verbally then in writing.
She worked as media center director for School Administration Unit 21, the body that manages a number of school districts on the New Hampshire seacoast, Pam explained. Her building was across the parking lot from Winnacunnet High School in Hampton. That evening she had been at a school board meeting because several of the issues being voted on related to her job.
Her husband, who had flexible hours at Metropolitan Life Insurance in Nashua and who worked mornings and at night, had left at 9 A.M. that day. And although she herself usually worked from eight to four, Pam said she had gone in a few hours later, leaving at quarter to ten, because of the night meeting.
When that meeting was over, she drove the forty-five-minute trip back to Derry and discovered Greg sprawled on the floor.
She remembered seeing her husband, a brass candlestick, and what she mistakenly thought was a blue pillow against his head. Having watched television shows like Rescue 911, she decided against touching the body and instead began screaming for help.
She wondered aloud why none of the neighbors reported hearing Haylen barking as the dog most certainly would have if strangers had entered the house.
As for the condo itself, it was possible, she told the detectives, that Greg may have returned to a darkened house that night as the couple did not usually leave a light on. She and Greg may also have accidentally left the French doors unlocked after having a cookout on the back deck just a couple days earlier, she said.
If the couple was careless in making sure the place was locked, they certainly were the opposite when it came to cleaning. The condo had been immaculate when she left it Tuesday morning, Pam said, having just been thoroughly vacuumed and dusted that weekend.
Pelletier asked most of the questions that night. Barry Charewicz had been exhausted and kept nodding off. When the hour-long interview was over, Pelletier was bothered. He could not quite place it but something about the widow irked him. She had only known her husband was dead for a few hours, yet she was calmer than he would expect. Pam never lost her composure, never fell apart, never cried. Pelletier thought she seemed anxious more than sad. Throughout the interview she had seemed on edge, her eyes shifting nervously all around the room.
At the time he dismissed it. Everyone suffers loss in his own way, he told himself.
◆◆◆
When the sun came up on May 2, it was only the skies that began to clear. Now, reporters and photographers and the Manchester television people were arriving, wanting to k
now all about a crime that made less than complete sense to the investigators themselves.
That morning, state police colonel Mark Myrdek led a half-dozen policemen in a line search of the area where the knife and jewelry boxes had turned up. They were looking for anything that might somehow tie in, anything at all.
But nothing of any worth cropped up among the discarded soda cans and candy wrappers. The cops only stopped the line twice for Myrdek to inspect possible evidence. One item was a cigarette. Myrdek ruled it unimportant and disposed of it.
The other was a latex glove. It was slightly dirty and wet from the gentle rain of the early morning. Myrdek looked over at a nearby garbage bin, considered the medical offices located at the professional park, and figured the glove had blown over from there.
Trash, he said.
◆◆◆
For everyone–Pam and the police–May first and second seemed like one long day, with sleep coming in snatches, if at all.
For Jackson, countless details needed to be tended to, as after any homicide. He sent his detectives home at 3:30 for a few hours sleep and stayed on himself to work with the state police.
For Pamela, widowhood brought duties as well, from making arrangements with the funeral home to selecting a casket to deciding what clothes her husband would wear.
Jackson was at the crime scene late that morning when two cars with Pam, her family, and friends pulled in. They had come to get some personal items, but Jackson said no one would be allowed inside until late in the afternoon.
As might be expected, Pam was curious about how the investigation was going and whether the police had any ideas about what had happened to Greg.
Teach Me to Kill Page 3
