Teach Me to Kill

by Stephen Sawicki

  Technically a private institution, Pinkerton served as the public high school, grades nine through twelve, for students from five towns, with Derry being the largest. Pinkerton educated a variety of kids, overwhelmingly white, from the children of chief executive officers to farmers’ sons and daughters.

  More than two thousand students attended the school in any given year during the early 1980s, and Pamela Ann Wojas promptly found a place among the most popular.

  She was class president her sophomore year, for example, no small accomplishment since Derry students so heavily outnumbered the rest. Few kids from the smaller towns, particularly as underclassmen, could ever muster enough votes across the student body.

  Pam was also one of the few sophomore girls to win a spot on the basketball cheerleading squad, also a rarity at such a large school. What Pam had going for her was an enthusiasm that she could summon instantly and an ability to perform gymnastic-like moves. She would remain a fixture before the crowds as a cheerleader for both the football and basketball teams throughout her years at the school.

  What friends from high school remember most, though, were her attention-getting ploys, which could be hilarious. One time, at the annual Shrine Game between New Hampshire and Vermont high school football all-stars, Pam was nowhere to be found. Suddenly, her fellow cheerleaders saw her ride into view on the back of a mechanized camel, the mascot of another school. All the while she was laughing and screaming that she didn’t know how to stop the monster.

  Another time, while running for junior class office, Pam and the other candidates were asked random questions at an assembly to give the students a feel for their views. Most took the exercise seriously. When Pam’s turn came, she was asked where she expected to be in five years. “Probably Pinkerton,” she muttered sarcastically, and brought down the house.

  There was an unmistakable caring side to Pam. Her mother liked to talk about how she volunteered to read to elderly nuns. And a friend and neighbor from high school remembered how she came over, on her own, and spent time with her mother, who was dying of cancer.

  She also had a starkly contrasting side, a hurtful aspect to her personality that came out in her cutting remarks designed to bring people down a notch, presumably to make herself look better. “I think she was an insecure person,” said one old friend. “I don’t think she thought she was better than everybody else, but she wanted people to think that she was.”

  Or, as a college classmate would tell the Boston Globe years later: “Pam’s a real enigma. She’s a very bright, tough, and competitive woman, but there always seemed to be a real strong anger simmering inside her.”

  At Pinkerton Academy, she was also intensely possessive of the boys she liked, whether they cared for her or not. Classmates from high school smile when they recall the time that one of Pam’s crushes showed a new girl around the school. As soon as the boy left, Pam hurried over to her and said in no uncertain terms: “He’s mine! Stay away from him!”

  Beneath her senior photo in the 1985 edition of Pinkerton’s yearbook, The Critic, Pam wrote that her pursuit was “to dance the night away with David Lee Roth,” the manic leader for Van Halen. The quote itself was a reference to one of the group’s biggest hits, “Dance the Night Away.”

  Pam, often called “Wojo” by her friends, was enthralled with heavy metal – a common enough predilection for a high school student – and Van Halen was her favorite.

  Senior year, during the Pinkerton Horror Picture Show, an evening of student skits and performances, Pam and Sonia Simon, whose maiden name was Fortin, and a few friends dressed up like Van Halen – with Pam playing the starring role of David Lee Roth – and lip-synched the song “Unchained.”

  Pam and Sonia would play Van Halen tapes continually. Pam particularly liked the album Fair Warning. “It was like a ritual,” recalled Sonia. “We would learn every word on every album, know the chronological order of every song on every album, and name it when it came up.”

  Pam did more in high school, however, than listen to rock and roll. To look at the yearbook’s listing of her accomplishments, activities, and the groups with which she was involved, one would think her the All American girl: cheerleading, school government, Winter Carnival, Spanish tutor, honor roll, Students Against Drunk and Drugged Driving.

  Pam was undeniably busy at Pinkerton, but in many ways it was more image than substance. She was clearly intelligent, had an excellent memory, and did well academically. Or as Pam’s father puts it: “Pam was the kind of kid who could get good grades and excel without putting in all that effort. You know the kind of kid you always hated in school? Pam would get the A with one-quarter of the effort.”

  What seemed to be lacking was a respect for the teachers and other authority figures. Truth be told, she often undermined them to draw attention to herself. Pam was always the student who would steer the classroom discussion away from whatever the teacher had planned to talk about toward whatever Pam wanted, such as something she had seen on television the night before. And if the teacher allowed it to go on, the entire class period would be wasted. “I’d be going on and on,” Pam recalled years later in an interview with the author of this book, “and next thing you know – ding! – the bell would ring. And I’d say, ‘Yes! One more day of nothingness.’”

  Although certainly an active member of student government during her years at Pinkerton, Pam did not run again after her junior year. Among other things, school officials had serious questions about Pam’s possibly rigging an election in her favor, skimming money from class funds, and drinking alcohol on school grounds. No dismissive action was ever taken – there was only partial proof -- but Pam’s mother was contacted and Pam did agree to bow out of student government if the matter was kept quiet and kept out of her student file.

  In addition to The Critic, Pinkerton also had a video yearbook, which showed Pam and her classmates in the thick of all kinds of work and play. At one point, Pam is asked on camera what song she thinks would best summarize senior year at Pinkerton: “I would have to go with ‘Unchained,’” she said, referring to the Van Halen tune. “Because that’s a song about letting loose and everything. And senior year is the time to go out of control and just go crazy, have a good time.”

  By her senior year, that good-time image was closer to the real Pam than the one seen on paper. A ribald individual around her friends, she had also developed a reputation for promiscuity, which she did little to defuse.

  A number of the boys, for instance, took to calling her Seka, after the hardcore pornographic movie star. Pam herself would include that nickname in the blurb under her photo in the yearbook. “Seka-n-Reis-Cup,” she wrote, alluding to her relationship with then-boyfriend Paul Reis, one of the captains of the football team.

  The nickname Seka grew out of the lurid stories about himself and Pam that Paul Reis regaled his buddies with over lunch. When Pam was on hand, she had no objections. “Pam would love it,” said Steve Schaffer, a friend of Pam’s from junior high and high school. “She’d laugh at it, too. She thought it was funny.”

  Reis, who went by the immodest nickname Sausage, was an all-star offensive lineman and one of the most popular kids in school. If a party was hopping, Paul Reis no doubt was there. And if girlfriend Pam was not around, so be it. “It was a serious relationship in her eyes,” said Reis. “But on nights we weren’t together, well, if something happened, it happened.”

  How much was locker room talk and how much was reality is anyone’s guess, but it was no help that some kids around school took to calling her “Wham-bam-thank-you-Pam.”

  Six years after graduation from Pinkerton, when Pam’s face would be recognized in virtually every home in New Hampshire, ex-boyfriend Reis, who became a construction worker, told a reporter from the supermarket tabloid Globe that in high school he almost married Pam because they thought she was pregnant. “She was a wild, wild girl,” Reis was quoted as saying. “We were doing everything your parents tell you not to
do.”

  They dated from September to May of their senior year, said Reis, a take-it-as-it-comes, husky guy, before he unceremoniously broke it off in the school parking lot. “I just got sick of her,” he recalled in an interview with the author of this book. “That’s terrible, but that’s how I was in high school.”

  Pam knew a lot of people in high school, including kids outside her clique, even the “druggies” and “scum,” as she put it. Her best friends were Sonia and two other girls, who together called themselves the Little Dolls, or LDs, a twist on the 1980 Tatum O’Neal, Kristy McNichol film Little Darlings. The movie revolves around a competition between the two main stars’ characters to see who can lose her virginity first.

  Pam and Sonia would see each other very seldom as adults, but in those days they were the closest of friends. They became buddies as sophomores at cheerleading tryouts. As their friendship blossomed, Pam tended to have the stronger, more opinionated personality. Sonia looked up to her and followed Pam’s lead.

  The two spent many an afternoon after school, usually engaged in some activity revolving around food, eating Funny Bones or Italian subs or McDonald’s hamburgers, sharing secrets about boys and their plans for the future. They were so inseparable that friends took to calling them Frick and Frack, and often people thought they were sisters.

  Sonia, a brunette with a warm smile and an inclination to grow misty eyed at anything short of greeting-card sentiments, today is an accountant. She is married to Chris Simon, a truck driver who she started dating when they were both in high school.

  Sonia remembered that the Pam of her high school days only cared about three or four boys. When a relationship developed, Pam would throw everything into it. And if it failed, she would be devastated, as she was about her breakup with Paul Reis.

  “She never really was the type to dump a guy,” remembered Sonia. “She was always dumped. And she would fall hard. It would tear her apart. She really got attached to that one person. It was like a necessity in her life. And it wasn’t always easy for her to pick up and go on.”

  ◆◆◆

  Pam had never been completely happy in New Hampshire and longed to get back to her native state and the warm weather. “I’m a sun bunny,” is how she once put it. So in the summer of 1985, she spent a semester at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where her sister attended law school. Then she transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee, which had a media performance program in the communications department, that would prepare her for her dream of being a television reporter.

  Christmas vacation found Pam back in chilly New Hampshire, catching up with Sonia and the rest of her friends and stepping out to parties. It was like old times. The flame of the old friendships still burned.

  Yet change was underway. Pam had been away at college, unlike most of her high school buddies. Sonia, meanwhile, had moved in with Chris Simon, her husband to be, and was no longer always available when Pam beckoned. And a girl named Terri Schnell, who had never fit in with the cheerleaders and the popular kids in Pam’s circle of friends at Pinkerton, was now one of the gang.

  Terri had known Sonia since grade school in Derry. But for most of high school she was an outsider. She liked heavy metal and a good party as much as anyone, but she was gangly, a bit awkward, and did not have a “go team” bone in her body.

  So Terri found her friends elsewhere. One Saturday night in the summer of 1983, she and a girlfriend were in a Burger King in Londonderry, one town west of Derry. Terri had a keychain with a trinket on it that looked vaguely phallic. Another customer, a guy who looked like he was a year or two older than she, with light brown locks down to his shoulders, looked over and grinned.

  “What’s that?” he asked. “A dildo?”

  It was the kind of remark that makes a girl get her order to go, but Terri couldn’t help but smile. This kid had such a silly, infectious laugh. Next thing Terri knew, she and her girlfriend were off to a party with him -- his name, it turned out, was Greg Smart – and one of his buddies.

  Almost every weekend after that Terri could be found hanging out with Smart, who had recently graduated from high school, and his crowd from Londonderry. They became the best of friends, with Greg dubbing her Giraffe, because of her height, and Terri calling him Greggles. They would talk for hours about anything and everything. Smart was the only person that Terri ever let read her diaries. And on Sundays, Greg would come over to the Schnells’ house and Terri would make him breakfast.

  Still, they were content to keep the relationship on a just-friends basis. Smart, after all, showed no real propensity for staying with any one woman. “Greg was basically a stud,” said Schnell. “He didn’t want a girlfriend. He just wanted to have some fun.”

  Toward the spring of 1985, meanwhile, Terri found herself growing closer to Pam and Sonia. They had run into each other at a mall while getting Madonna tickets and some of their differences seemed to fade. Senior year, after all, was quickly falling away, and before long it was if Terri had always been part of the crowd.

  So it was in December of that year that Terri told everyone about a New Year’s eve party that Greg was throwing at his parents’ house in Londonderry, a place his family owned before moving to Derry.

  Greg’s bashes, inevitably thrown when his parents were out of town, were legendary among his friends as the utmost in bacchanalian delights. “Unbelievable parties,” said Tom Parilla. “Tons of people. Parties where girls would be dancing on the overhang over the doorway, with the music blaring.”

  Alcohol would flow. Cocaine and pot would be passed around. And Greg, baby faced and long haired, would go to work seducing the ladies.

  Stories, some perhaps apocryphal, abound of Greg’s sexual encounters. He and some of his friends would hold contests to see who could sleep with the most women. Ted Chappell, a drummer in a local heavy metal band who goes by the nickname Terror, told of one party at the Smart house when Greg scored with three women in the course of a night, none knowing about the others. Terri Schnell recollected an evening when it was four. And another pal laughed about the time that he and Greg had sex with a pair of cousins in a Cadillac. The friend said he still hears echoes of Greg in the backseat with his date, his high, patently silly laugh bursting forth as he exchanged merry glances with his buddy in the front.

  Heaven only knew what a party at Greg Smart’s would bring; but Pam, Terri, Sonia, and a few others from the Pinkerton crowd were looking forward to finding out as they made their way through the snow and up the driveway to greet 1986.

  Unlike most of the high school parties they attended, Pam and her friends were now on new turf. Most of the thirty to forty people there that night were from Londonderry. And although adolescent rivalries had largely been laid to rest, everyone was aware that Londonderry High School had long been Pinkerton Academy’s archenemy.

  Nonetheless, it was an affair that lived up to Greg Smart’s standards. Boone’s Farm and beer were in good supply. Cocaine was circulating. Motley Crue and Van Halen were roaring from the stereo speakers. And Greg, as always, was the party’s lifeblood, jumping around the place in a black party hat.

  Terri had introduced Pam and Greg at a party a little earlier that month, but this was the first time they hit it off. What caught Pam’s eye was his hair. Greg reminded her of the rock star Jon Bon Jovi.

  What’s more, he had a lot of the characteristics of Paul Reis. Greg was less burly and had never been a high school sports hero. But they were both renowned wild men, the egotistical hub of their respective circles of friends, and proud of their exploits with the opposite sex.

  Smart made his requisite move on Pam that night, along with those on several other young women, but he was less than enthusiastic about Pam becoming a permanent fixture. They went out, sledding and to the movies, over the next couple weeks, and then Pam returned to college, head over heels for Greg.

  Smart, however, could take her or leave her and had no plans for changing his li
festyle. They exchanged letters and calls. And Pam did use her father’s airline connections to come home for free to see Greg around Valentine’s Day and over spring break. But Smart, who at this time was working in construction, was busy with another woman as well.

  “There was this person that he had been dating,” Pam said years later, “and he said basically that he didn’t want to break up with her and he didn’t want to break up with me. He wanted to go out with both of us. So I said, ‘Well. It’s either her or me.’ And he said, ‘OK, I’ll see you later.’ And I was saying to myself, ‘That wasn’t such a good plan.’”

  That summer, though, their relationship took a turn. In June, Pam and Greg and some of Greg’s buddies went to Vermont for a few days, to celebrate one of his friends’ eighteenth birthday, and to take advantage of the state’s drinking-age laws. Something sparked between Pam and Greg, and for the rest of the summer they were together.

  Pam was totally infatuated. But Linda Wojas was less enthused. When Pam’s mother first laid eyes on Greg she too noticed his hair. And while the daughter thought it was gorgeous, Linda had a different perception. “When I first met him I had my reservations,” allowed Linda. “This kid walked in my door and he had long hair and I didn’t like it. He looked like a girl. He almost looked pretty.”

  The mother had hoped the relationship would pass, but for the first time in his life Greg Smart was enamored. By the time Pam headed back to Tallahassee for her sophomore year, he was headlong into his most serious relationship. The phone bills, for instance, started climbing into the hundreds of dollars. Pam would send him little gifts, T-shirts, and other forget-me-nots. She started flying home more often. And that fall, Greg and a friend even traveled down to Florida to see Pam and to check out the lay of the land.