Greg was now just a memory. Once he had been the life of every party, his light brown tresses dangling to his shoulders. True, he had cut his hair and gotten into the insurance business, but everyone still remembered Greg’s restless energy and his happy-go-lucky lifestyle.
These were the darkest days for the young man’s friends, many of whom, like Greg, were carefree, heavy metal aficionados. None of them could settle this in their minds. They could understand a traffic accident, maybe if Greg was driving after having had too much to drink. But this? Why would anyone want to kill Greg? They were certain that drugs had nothing to do with it.
The only answer that seemed to make sense was that maybe Greg had gotten in a little too deep during one of his forays to Atlantic City. Maybe he owed a lot of money to the wrong people. Maybe this was a professional hit.
One of the few moments that anyone could bring themselves to smile at the wake was when one of Greg’s buddies arrived having neglected to zip up his pants. He wandered around as sad faced as anyone, but with a length of his shirt hanging out of his fly.
It was that afternoon, too, that three students and a guidance counselor from Winnacunnet High School, across the way from Pam’s office in Hampton, showed up. The counselor, Barbara Kinsman, had heard about the tragedy and knowing that these students – Cecelia Pierce, Billy Flynn, and Vance Lattime, Jr., whom everyone called JR – had become friendly with Pam at school, took it upon herself to bring them to the wake to pay their respects.
They were kids, as stereotypical as could be found anywhere: Billy, who at 16, had brooding eyes and shaggy dark hair that hung down his neck; Cecelia, who was fifteen, overweight, and clingy; and Vance, seventeen, quiet, inscrutable, and bespectacled.
Pam had gotten to know the kids the previous autumn through a freshman orientation program that Kinsman ran called Project Self-Esteem. A year earlier Pam had written a newsletter story about the three-day drug- and alcohol-awareness program and thought she would like to get involved. When she did, she met Cecelia, Billy, and JR, all of them sophomores.
Pam was closest to Cecelia and Billy, having recently worked for a few months with them on a high school videotape competition. Cecelia was also Pam’s student intern in the media center. Vance, meanwhile, was one of Billy’s closest friends. He knew Pam more as an acquaintance.
And so they came to the wake, looking as awkward and out of place as anyone on such an occasion. Pam seemed genuinely surprised and pleased to see them, thanking them profusely for coming.
“Come here,” she called to a friend. “These are the kids that worked on my video. Come meet them.”
The teenagers chatted with the widow for a bit. Billy and JR each kneeled before the casket. And then, after ten or fifteen minutes, Kinsman and the kids left.
Pam stayed true to her word and never entered the viewing room while the coffin was open. It probably struck some as strange, but then again, Greg’s death must have been an awful blow. Who could blame the widow if she chose to remember Greg from happier times?
When the viewing was over, the casket was shut and Pam entered the room. “They closed it up and she walked down shaking,” remembered Pam’s best friend, Sonia Simon. “She just leaned over, put her hands on the casket and was saying a prayer. Then she kneeled down and was saying another prayer and she just like totally leaned over the casket. I thought it was going to fall over she was crying so hard. She was shaking. I swear she was going to shake the casket off the stands. And she was screaming, ‘Why?’
“She was there fifteen or twenty minutes. They had to pull her away. The guy at the funeral home was there first because he was standing right there in the room with her. He helped her up. Her parents, we all went over and hugged her and practically carried her out of the room.”
That evening, the wake went much as it had in the afternoon. Only by now, Greg’s family had begun placing items in the casket with him: a family picture of the Smarts with Greg during his long-haired days, a snapshot of his little niece, photos of relatives, a baseball hat.
Bill Smart slipped his own sapphire ring onto Greg’s pinky. Judy put an earring that she had worn at his wedding in Greg’s suitcoat pocket. A small bouquet from his niece was laid inside as well.
And in Greg’s hands, the Smarts placed a memento from one of the biggest days in his too-short life – a wedding picture of Greg and his bride.
Like every night since Greg’s death, no one got much sleep afterward. Sonia, who had been friends with Pam since their high school cheerleading days, took the rest of the week off from work, left her husband to fend for himself, and stayed with Pam at her parents’ house for three days. She even shared Pam’s bed with her friend.
“I remember sleeping there at night with her in her old bedroom,” Simon recalled. “I would hear her cry in her sleep. I don’t think we got more than four hours sleep in three days. She just tossed, turned, cried, had nightmares, and envisioned him on the floor. It was so weird. Being twenty-two years old, Pam was a widow.”
At Greg’s parents’ condo in Derry, meanwhile, Greg’s mother was not faring much better. Following the wake and after everyone had left the family gathering and gone to bed, Judy Smart could not sleep. The trauma of Greg’s death had caused her to be hospitalized the day before. Just that morning the psychiatrist had broken it to her that Greg had not been killed by the blow from the candlestick but had been shot.
Now it was well after midnight, and the thought came to Judy that she should go to Greg’s condo, to the last place where he had been alive. She rose from bed and padded down the stairs when her eldest son, Ricky, and his wife, who had been camped out on the couch, stopped her.
“I’m just going for a walk,” Judy insisted.
“No, you’re not,” Ricky said. “Not by yourself.”
So the three of them set off on a walk that inevitably led to 4E, Misty Morning Drive. The crime scene had been released, so they entered and went upstairs. Judy ran her fingers over a few of Greg’s possessions, stared at his pictures, and stretched out on his bed. It was a comfort.
All of a sudden, they heard a noise downstairs. They stood there, half believing that Greg’s killer had returned.
Judy reached into her pajama pocket and brandished a knife.
“Mom!” said Ricky. “Where did you get that?”
“Don’t you worry,” said his mother quietly, almost as if she had become another person. “If there’s somebody down there we’re gonna take care of them.”
The sound proved to be just an inexplicable noise in the night. Everyone breathed easier. Settling the score with Greg’s killer would have to wait.
◆◆◆
Friday afternoon was the funeral. More than 200 people filed into Saint Thomas Aquinas Church in Derry. Across the street was a crowd of reporters, photographers, and a crew from channel 9. The Derry police, meanwhile, photographed everyone coming and going, looking for anyone who might prove suspicious.
The Mass got off to a disquieting start when a huge wreath of roses, from Pam to Greg with a banner across it that read, “I Love You, Honey,” crashed facedown in front of the altar. Some remember it toppling all on its own, while others say an altar girl hit it. But everyone’s heart was breaking for the widow.
The casket was covered with a white shroud emblazoned with a gold cross. Father Thomas Bresnahan gave the blessing and proceeded.
“This gathering was not scheduled in any of our date books,” he told the mourners. “Most of us had other plans. Yet we find ourselves here despite those other plans. The fundamental question of all of us here is why. Why? Why is someone who loved life as much as Greg did, who had accomplished so much in a short period of time, being taken from us?
“Incidents such as this force us to reflect on our lives. There are always those questions as to why this had to happen. Greg’s life was cut short, but we do not mourn his destiny. We grieve what we have lost – a husband, son, brother, grandchild, or co-worker and friend.
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“Greg has no more tears, suffering or pain….His influence will live on with us. He would have been celebrating his anniversary on Monday. For Pamela it will now be a time to honor his memory.”
Few of those in attendance would remember much of the Mass, so wrapped up were they in their private grief and thoughts. But Bill Smart said he has at least one distinct memory. “Tears are coming down from my eyes, everybody’s crying,” he said. “And Pam turns to me and of course I leaned forward. I thought something was wrong. And she said to me, ‘Did you ask for a full Mass?’ I said, ‘No.' I’m not Catholic. I don’t know a full Mass from a half Mass. And she said, ‘I told him to make it short.’”
When it finally did end, Pam, at one point kept upright by her parents and older sister, Beth, appeared devastated as she carried a single rose and left the church.
Still, before her limousine pulled away for the cemetery, Pam had the presence of mind to notice the television crew across the street. She rolled down her window, caught the attention of Steve Payment, one of the pallbearers, and, pointing, commanded him to go over and talk to them.
“I’d just like to say, Greg was the kindest person I ever knew,” Payment told Bill Spencer through his tears. “He was a real good friend of mine and he didn’t deserve this.”
Pam Smart (center), her parents, and sister leaving the church after the funeral service. (Don Himsel/ Nashua Telegraph)
The hearse ferried Smart’s remains to the Forest Hills Cemetery in East Derry. There, a sea of friends and relatives circled the grave as the final prayers were intoned.
When they were through, Pam turned to her in-laws. “Why don’t we each take a rose and walk up together?” she said.
One by one, they did, and after Pam had placed hers on the flower-covered coffin, she turned to Greg’s parents. There they hugged, all differences of the past few days behind them, unified in their loss.
Afterwards, the Smarts and the Wojases had separate get-togethers at their respective homes. Many of the younger people, both Greg’s and Pam’s friends, went to the house in Windham to be with the widow.
It was, as might be expected, a gloomy gathering, with many of them, just in their twenties, shell-shocked but trying to smile now and then. Not far beneath the surface there was anger as well. Most obviously it was rage at the still-unexplained loss of Greg. Pam, too, was irritated with the police investigators because no one had told her the autopsy results; she had ostensibly learned that Greg was shot while listening to her car radio. And nobody was very happy with the media crowd, who struck them as downright callous for camping out across from the church and in some cases even coming to the cemetery.
Still, one of the first things the mourners did once inside was to turn on the television. Everyone gathered around for the local news to see if there had been any break in the case. Pam found a seat right in front.
“State police are analyzing fingerprints taken from the home,” channel 9 reporter Jack Heath said, finishing his part of the story. “Sources say it’s possible that more than one suspect was involved in this killing. Officials have ruled Pamela Smart out as a suspect, and police say the couple has a clean background check.”
Chapter 2
Since girlhood, Pamela Smart has signed her name “Pame,” which she pronounces as “Pam.” The unique spelling, of course, is nonsensical, but no matter. Pam has seldom missed an opportunity to draw notice.
Pam was attractive. In it’s vagueness, that seems the perfect word to describe her appearance. She had the look that one often saw in countless young women in malls and nightclubs of the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Made up to perfection, with her hair fluffed out in front and curled down to her shoulders, sometimes frosted, Smart would hardly stand out as unique.
Little was compelling in Pam’s features. Thin-lipped with a nose that upturned slightly, she was almost nondescript. Someone would compare her skin to porcelain and another said her visage was “like a cameo.” In many ways, it was all the same. What people remembered was a mannequin-like quality.
Even Pam’s physique, baby-fat round in high school and trimmed down as she got older, was not unlike that of a department-store statue.
She was born in Miami, Florida, on August 16, 1967, a fact that Pam herself felt explained her egocentricity. “I’m definitely the typical Leo,” she would one day say. “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.”
She was the second of three children born to John and Linda Wojas. Her sister, Beth, is six years older than Pam. Her brother, John, whom the family has always called Jay, is three years younger.
The Wojases married when Linda was just eighteen and John twenty. John had a job with a printing company, and Linda was a stenographer. They struggled, but the couple scraped their way up and ultimately out of blue-collar Lowell, Massachusetts, where they’d both been born.
After a stay in Georgia while John was in the service, the Wojases moved to Miami. John had lived there during high school before he returned to Lowell and got married. He would come to work his way up from some of the lowest-level jobs around the airport to the high-prestige position of flying commercial jets for Delta Air Lines.
In the process, he and his family were elevated into an upper middle-class existence, giving the Wojas children many luxuries that the parents lacked as kids. “They had the dance lessons, the piano lessons, gymnastics; they traveled; they’ve been all over the world,” said John Wojas. “And they never had to hurt for anything.”
The family lived in a ranch-style home in Miami’s Pinecrest-Palmetto section, a dozen miles away from the racially combustible center of town. Despite the comfortable surroundings of their own neighborhood, the Wojas children attended the integrated public schools, learned their share of Spanish, and by all accounts got along fine.
Even as a youngster, Pam was an organizer, a leader, and the focal point of whatever was going on. “She even organized all those black kids and had a big dance routine at the end of the year one year,” John Wojas recalled. “Fifth grade students! She had ’em all up there dancing.”
By 1980, when Pam was still in junior high, Miami’s crime rate was burgeoning and the Wojases thought it would be better to raise their kids elsewhere. Said John: “When they started burning the place down, when they had the riots in Miami, I says, ‘I’m getting my family the hell out of here. I don’t need this aggravation.’”
The family had often spent its summers in New Hampshire, and with Beth already in college, they decided to make the move north to a seemingly more wholesome place. They settled on Windham, a tony community of eight thousand people, just south of Derry. Their house was located in a section of town known as “the Estates.” Yet the Wojas’ eight-room ranch, on less than an acre, valued at about $150,000 in the early ‘90s was hardly palatial. If anything, it was convenient, being close to Interstate 93 and an easy drive for John to Boston’s Logan Airport.
In the summer or on weekends the family would escape to Lake Winnisquam in central New Hampshire, where since 1976 they had owned a Cape Cod style house on what is known as Mohawk Island. In the ‘90s it would sell for about $240,000.
It was a comfortable life, the kind that so many American aspire to. But not everything was picture perfect.
Pam’s parents had been together for more than thirty years. Her mother was the more active in Pam’s young life, and friends from high school almost unanimously recall the friendliness they received from Linda Wojas when they visited or slept over.
Pam’s father, though, was away at work much of the time, and when he was home Pam and he were often at odds. As an adult, Pam would astound friends and acquaintances with her open criticism and hostility toward her father. “She didn’t really have a close relationship with her dad,” allowed Sonia Simon. “But then again he really wasn’t home much. I think she thought he was kind of cheap.”
Other friends got a similar impression. When Pam was in college she and some pals were driving to Walt Disney World and realized that Pam’s tires were obviously not up to the lengthy trip. She called her father long distance, collect, for advice on buying new ones, but he refused to accept the charges.
For himself, John Wojas said he always believed that his children should learn the lessons of hard work. As a result, Pam held jobs since she was thirteen, be it at a bakery or a Dairy Queen. “I always insisted that my children work,” said John. “They’ve always worked, whether they were baggage boys, waitresses, all that kind of stuff, because I had to work for everything I have today. I always felt that’s part of their education.”
Adds Linda Wojas: “All our kids have been overachievers. That’s what we instilled. You work hard and then you reap your harvest.
“We grew up with nothing. Both my husband and I are from big families. You didn’t have a quarter to go to Girl Scouts. You didn’t even ask. You didn’t even have pets because you had all you could do to feed your family. That’s how everybody was in our neighborhood. But at least we were both in homes and not tenements.”
Pam learned that lesson well and she was never one to idle away the hours. Yet those who knew her as a teenager say that Pam seemed to lack a childishness at home. Her room, they say, was usually immaculate, decorated primly, and lacking the usual fare of rock and roll and movie-star posters. And her clothes, they say, would be color-coordinated in her closet.
Pam, however, was never demure. Unlike many children who are uprooted and left to find a place in a new school, for example, Pam used her sense of humor to adapt at Windham Center School, where she attended eighth grade, and at Pinkerton Academy, her high school.
Pinkerton is in Derry, about a mile from Summerhill Condominiums, where Greg and Pam Smart would live as newlyweds. One hundred and seventy-five years old, Pinkerton possessed a bucolic New England splendor, the centerpiece its red brick tower building. A young Robert Frost was once employed there as an English teacher.
Teach Me to Kill Page 5
