Things were a little different these days. As a detective, he worked nine to five. He and his wife, Robyn, had a six-month-old daughter.
And Dan Pelletier had a new assignment: He would spearhead the search for Gregory Smart’s killer.
As it turned out, Pelletier’s taking the ball had some advantages. For one thing, he was one of the better organized detectives around, and when the case file started becoming hundreds of pages long Pelletier could always pluck out any statement or report in an instant.
He had also established some rapport with the widow just hours after the killing. That was a plus, because as in any murder the odds were that Greg Smart knew his killer. That was where the investigation would have to start.
During the dinner break the night of the wake, Pelletier had met with Pam again, asking for a list of everyone who had been at the condo during the last month, so their fingerprints could be separated from any others that may have turned up. Pam was happy to oblige and gave him nine names – Tom and Heidi Parilla, Chris and Sonia Simon, Steve Payment, Yvon Pellerin, Rich LaFond, and Greg’s parents. All, except of course her in-laws were close friends of the couple.
On Saturday, the day after the funeral, Pelletier asked for more names, those of the people in Greg and Pam’s wedding a year ago and those of the pallbearers at his funeral. Again, Pam had no qualms about helping.
This time, in fact, she would offer more than what Pelletier requested. She had been in the house that day preparing to move out, and came across some things she thought the police overlooked that might help their investigation.
She gave the detective a wobbly candlestick, apparently the one that had been under Greg’s foot. She pointed out a crescent-shaped dent she said she discovered on one of the walls by the entrance; and she showed him some stains on the carpet that hadn’t been there before the murder.
Pam seemed anxious to be of assistance, but she was hurting the investigation more than helping. The problem was not her pointing out peculiarities of the crime scene, most of which the cops felt came after the state police processed the scene anyway.
The real problem was that she seemed oblivious of what had become a litany by the cops: Please do not discuss the case with the media.
Jackson began a slow boil when Pam first went to Spencer. The captain then started bubbling over after the subsequent numerous newspaper articles. He had made it as clear as he could that releasing information about the crime could hinder the investigation. He even took Pam’s father aside and pleaded with him to talk to his daughter.
Nothing seemed to register. Within a few days after the murder Pam had told reporters in exact detail about the crime scene, from the overturned drawers to the stereo speakers by the door, and that there were no witnesses. She also said that three hundred dollars worth of jewelry was stolen, and that it almost certainly was a botched burglary.
Enough was enough. The cops were fed up with hearing about how their investigation was going while they were publicly saying next to nothing. The week after Greg’s death, Jackson ordered that Pam and her family be told no more about the progress of the investigation.
Most people figured it was Pam’s way of handling her grief, but after a while it began to look as if she could not resist the attention, as if she enjoyed being in the spotlight. The local journalists picked up on it, too, and more and more reporters started leaving messages for her at the Wojas house in Windham. Virtually every request for an interview was granted.
Diane Rietman of the Nashua Telegraph was the first to talk with Pam at any length about herself and her life with Greg. Two days after the funeral, on Sunday, Pam gave Rietman a telephone interview.
The story came out the following day, May 7, the one-year wedding anniversary of the couple. “For Pamela Smart life must go on,” read the headline over the page-one story.
The article and Reitman’s notes reveal what seems to be a heroic young woman, who, strengthened by her dead husband's spirit, vows to gather the shattered pieces of her life and go on.
“We didn’t have any problems,” Pam said. “We were very happy. We just wanted to be together.”
It was Greg she was hurrying to see the night of the murder to tell that her mass media course was approved. “I had talked to Greg that day, and he was really excited about whether or not I’d be able to do this,” Pam said. “He knew how important this was to me. He wished me good luck at the meeting. While I was driving home, I was excited to get home and let him know it had been approved.”
“I’ve had a lot of family and friends who have been around me, but most of my strength has come from inside. Just knowing that if Greg was here…if this was one of our friends he would be saying this was awful but that things would work out.
“He would always say that to me when I would get upset about things: 'You don’t need to worry about everything, it will be OK, it’ll work out,’ and I know he’d be there trying to comfort me, remind me that life’s not fair and you have to take what happens. You can’t control everything.
“Knowing how short life can be – that’s scary for me. I’ll tell everybody until the day I die that from this tragedy I’ll learn to live life to the fullest. If there ever comes a time I’m at a crossroads in my life and there’s something in my heart that I want to do, I’m going to go ahead and do it. I’m not going to hesitate anymore. You never know when you won’t have a life.”
Over the next few days and on toward the summer, common strains ran through Pam’s interviews. Most obvious was her explanation that Greg had unexpectedly walked in on a burglary. Pam never wavered about that and made sure every reporter knew it.
“Greg didn’t have any enemies,” she told the Derry News. “If he did, that person’s name would be the first out of my mouth to the police.”
She told the Lawrence Eagle Tribune, “This was some jerk, some drug-addict person looking for a quick ten bucks.”
She also put forth the image of the strong widow, who with Greg as her inspiration was going to forge onward.
That was the crux of her talk with Bill Spencer when he came out to the Wojas’ house on Pam’s wedding anniversary.
Spencer was a few years older than Pam, but the two seemed to get along well. One thing they had in common was their interest in television journalism. Right out of college, Pam had applied for a reporter opening at WMUR, but the more-traveled Spencer had gotten the job.
Chatting with the reporter on camera, Pam sat on the couch wearing a blue dress and silver hoop earrings and stroked the dog, Haylen. Spencer himself remembered being on the verge of tears at the utter sadness of the story, but when he looked over at the widow he saw none of the same emotions.
“She’s a public relations person, that’s her job at the school,” Spencer recalled thinking. “She studied media in college, and I thought, It’s so bizarre but she’s going to PR her husband’s murder, she’s going to manage the media on her husband’s murder. I thought this was a way of her dealing with her incredible grief.”
Pam glanced over at Spencer, then down at her pet, the camera trained on her expressionless features. “Well, today’s a hard day because one year ago today we were married right about this, you know, at this time. And I remember on that day the feelings that I had and how different, in contrast, the feelings are that I have today.
“You know, I woke up with a bright outlook on the day a year ago, you know, facing one of the happiest days of my life. And the beginning of our future together. And today I have to wake up and realize that there is no future for us. There’s a future for me, but not for us.
“Sometimes I ask myself, I can’t figure out where the strength is coming from, but it seems like it’s coming from inside maybe. Maybe it’s part of Greg or whatever that’s helping me go on with everything, you know, and I feel like if this happened at any point in Greg’s life it wouldn’t be fair, and it wouldn’t make sense then. It’s just an awful tragedy and now, you know, there’s no better time in his
life for this to happen.
“And that’s one of the things that I think is keeping me going, that if Greg was here right now he would be saying that things that, like, life’s not always fair and you have to take what happens in stride and move on and move forward.”
It seemed to be the stereotypical grieving-widow story. The tragedy was evident. Her words sounded right. But did they?
There’s no better time in his life for this to happen?
You have to take what happens in stride?
In stride?
Spencer paid no mind. After all, this was someone who had suffered a great loss.
“You know, it’s awful to just think about what happened in there,” Pam said, talking about the murder. “You know, the only comfort I have is that, you know, it just seems to have been a situation where Greg didn’t know what was happening. And he just never knew, you know, and it was really quick.”
“Do you have any idea why somebody would pick your house of all houses?” Spencer asked.
“No.”
“I’m sure you asked yourself that, and that probably didn’t make sense either….”
“The only thing I could think of is it’s close to the field and it’s an end unit and there was nobody home.”
Pam begged off on any more questions about the police investigation. The cops were frustrated with her and she knew it. She also had other concerns. “I know the police are working their hardest on this case and everything, but right now I’m concentrating more on my loss than on the investigation, because if they caught the person tomorrow he’ll never be back. Greg will never be here again.”
Two other points came through in almost every interview. One was the Greg Smart Memorial Fund, which was in truth a fund-raiser for her own course. “Every kid who comes through this course will share a piece of Greg,” she told the Derry News.
The other was her incredulity that her neighbors heard nothing that night. Surely someone knew more and was not talking, she said. “I know a gunshot isn’t a common sound in Derry, New Hampshire,” Pam complained, “but I’d at least look out the window.”
“I’m hoping there’s someone who is afraid to come in and I would hope that their conscience would get to them in the end.”
Through it all, the young widow found a way to smile. “I kept the top layer of my wedding cake and put it in the freezer,” she told Tami Plyler of the Manchester Union Leader. “Greg has complained about it since I put it there. Right before this happened, he said, ‘I can’t wait until our anniversary so we can get rid of this cake.’”
Pam conjured an image of a benevolent Greg watching her with approval from heaven now that she finally removed the year-old piece of cake.
“I can laugh,” she said, “because I know Greg’s looking down and saying, ‘I’m glad you got that out of the freezer.’”
What few people knew at the time was what Pam did with that cake. Without much sentiment, she brought it over to Greg’s parents and gave it to them, one of the numerous reminders and possessions of her dead husband, most of which had been placed in plastic garbage bags, that Pam would drop off.
“Here,” she said in what Greg Smart’s father later remembered as an irksome condescending tone. “You take this. I don’t like cake anyway.”
As she promised in her interviews, Pam was getting on with her life. As she told Spencer, Pam and Greg had no future but Pam had one.
First, however, the past had to be properly laid to rest.
Pam selected Greg’s tombstone, a three-foot-high slab of New Hampshire granite. On one side it bore his name and the years of his birth and death. On the other was an engraved rose laid across a heart. Along the bottom it read: “A life that touches the hearts of others lives on forever.” Pam had come up with that phrase after seeing a similar sentiment on a sympathy card she had received.
“I didn’t want something like ‘He lived, he loved, he died,’” Pam said. “I wanted something that made you, for a second, feel warm inside. It was for people to realize he’s still alive in us.”
Pam returned to the condo the day after the funeral. She was joined by her parents, the Smarts, and a claims adjuster from Metropolitan Life. Greg’s father was using the pull of twenty-five years with the company to speed the processing of Pam’s claim for property damage – some of the furniture had been ruined by fingerprint dust – and the missing jewelry.
Pam in the meantime did the laundry and made some calls to cancel services, time and again stepping carelessly on top of the towel that covered the bloodstain from Greg’s head wound. Granted, it was impossible to get into the main living area without passing it, but the Smarts, who could hardly stand to look in the direction of the stain, simply could not understand Pam’s lack of revulsion. “She flitted around there like a busy bee,” Judy Smart would later recall.
Like the Smarts, Pam had much weighing on her mind. Her husband was dead, her life was in upheaval, and almost every day she was in contact with the police, coming to the station when beckoned and answering their many questions about herself and Greg and their friends. She also provided names, hair samples, and telephone bills.
She took some time off from work, and lived with her parents in Windham. Friends visited often, many times staying over and sleeping in Pam’s bed with her so she would not have to be alone.
Pam’s relationship with her mother and father, however, had long been tense, and even now the strain could be felt. Pam told friends that she felt smothered at home and decided early on that she would get back on her own as soon as she could.
Yet Pam’s desire to get on with her life went beyond finding a new place. In the month after Greg’s death, she would shop around at car dealerships, looking to trade in her practical Honda CRX and use some of the $140,000 in insurance money that was due her to buy a car with a little more muscle – an eight cylinder Trans-Am, for example, or a Camaro.
She also hit a number of area nightspots. All of the couple’s friends were concerned about her, and they thought it was a positive step when less than three weeks after Greg’s death Pam went with some of them to the Hanover House to have a drink or two and listen to the local top-forty band Joker.
Pam’s high school boyfriend Paul Reis was lead singer. A construction worker by day, Reis tugged on the spandex at night and put on a fair imitation of the acrobatic David Lee Roth. Like Van Halen’s former singer, Reis too liked to leap around in front of an audience, perform splits, and make his way into the crowd and sing right in the faces of all the pretty girls.
It was good for Pam to get out, but no one quite expected her to have such a good time. She happily showed off her photo with Eddie Van Halen to some of the band members. And then she got caught up in the music and the entreaties of Reis, stood up and started belting out several rock and roll tunes with her ex-boyfriend.
“It was weird,” said Reis. “She was footloose and fancy free.”
Joseph O’Leary, the band’s drummer, recalled Pam holding a bottle of Budweiser in one hand and the wireless microphone in the other as she joined Reis in singing the Van Halen standard “Dance the Night Away” and Motley Crue’s “Wild Side,” among others.
“The reason I remember it is because she couldn’t sing for shit,” said O’Leary.
Yet that night stuck in O’Leary’s mind for another reason as well. He had heard that this woman’s husband had been murdered less than a month ago and he had no idea what to make of this behavior.
Maybe it was nothing, but O’Leary thought it might be a good idea to document the moment, just in case this widow ever became of interest to the police. The drummer called to a friend who had been taking pictures of the band and asked her to snap a few of the young woman with the singer, which she did.
The other members of the band finally convinced Reis to get back to singing by himself. “We were trying to tell Paul to knock it off,” remembered O’Leary, “because she really didn’t sound that good, and new people were coming into
the club. We didn’t want them to think that she was the singer.”
Before Pam left, she gave her former boyfriend her phone number and urged him to come out to Hampton and see her new condo. Reis told her he would, but said later he never followed up on it.
There were other nights out as well. Terri Schnell, who frequented the local clubs, remembered being at T.R.’s Tavern in Londonderry with Pam two weeks after Greg’s murder. Schnell said that when Pam met people that night one of the first things out of her mouth was the matter-of-fact remark that her husband had recently been murdered.
Terri went clubbing with Pam several times after Greg’s death. “She got pissed one time when a guy she was dancing with went and danced with someone else,” Schnell remembered. “When she asked the guy why, the guy said it was because Pam had a fat ass. Then she started crying.”
Around the middle of the month, a group of Pam’s friends, her mother, and her sister, Beth – about a dozen people in all – joined her at the condo in Derry one Saturday to help her start moving. Pam was going to a similar sized condo in Hampton near work, and she wanted to get her lighter belongings out of the way before the movers took the heavy stuff.
The condo on Misty Morning Drive was a low-level disaster area. The couches were black with fingerprint dust. The couple’s belongings were strewn around. And there at the edge of the dining area was the ever-present bloodstain from Greg’s skull, covered by a towel but unsettling all the same.
Everyone went to work, boxing things and helping clean the place. Then, upstairs in the bedroom, Pam held court, handing out items she no longer wanted. To the Parillas she gave a humidifier. To the daughter of an old friend from junior high a cheerleading doll. But the main door prizes were her dead husband’s belongings.
Some friends had wondered why they were invited in the first place. Nothing very heavy needed to be moved. They got the feeling that this everything-must-go giveaway was the real reason they were there. “She was just giving away everything that was his,” remembered Ted Chappell, a friend of Greg’s since boyhood.
Teach Me to Kill Page 9
