Then, when it was time for lunch, a few people got some food and brought it back. They all sat around the dining room table, just feet from where Greg’s blood still stained the carpet, talking, laughing, drinking sodas and beer, and eating chicken fingers, hot dogs, hamburgers, French fries, and onion rings.
“Pam wasn’t upset,” remembered Chappell. “She wasn’t perfectly normal, but she was eating and laughing and joking. She was just having too good a time.”
Chappell was not alone in these thoughts. Some of the neighbors noticed Pam running back and forth between the condo and the cars to take stuff away, and thought it odd how happy she seemed. “I guess I expected to see her come in slowly, a little bit wary, sad,” said Mary Jane Woodside. “But she was bopping in and out of there, literally running up the front steps into the house. I said to my husband, ‘That’s weird, that’s really weird.’ I said, ‘If I had found you on the floor they would have to carry me kicking and screaming back into the house. There is no way I would go back in there.’”
One neighbor went over to wish her well. But Art Hughes, who had burst into the condo the night of Greg’s murder without a thought for his own safety, was too irritated with the widow to do the same. He had read her complaints about the neighbors in the newspaper, statements that made it sound like no one cared, that people in the complex had information about the killing but were too afraid to come forward.
“I can understand her being mad at the world,” Hughes told his wife. “But if she was going to say anything about the neighbors, she could at least acknowledge that a bunch of us came out to do whatever we could for her.”
◆◆◆
With so little to go on, the cops were fanning out in every direction that seemed reasonable.
Street sources were questioned up and down about any scuttlebutt they were hearing regarding Smart’s death.
Flyers with pictures of jewelry similar to that which was stolen, as Pam had described, were distributed to pawnshops and detectives all over. Earrings, bracelets, rings. One of the more identifiable pieces was a gold chain that Greg liked to wear on weekends. Attached to it was a little charm – the letter P – in honor of his wife.
And every new lead that dribbled in, as crazy as it might sound, stood a chance of breaking the case wide open.
Someone named Greg Smart called the cops claiming that he had recently been at odds with some very dangerous people. He was convinced that the killing in Derry was a mistake and that it was he who had been targeted to die.
One of the neighbors in the area, meanwhile, was discovered to have a criminal record for violent behavior and had to be checked out.
Then word came in that police in Fort Lee, New Jersey had arrested a gang of blacks and Hispanics on weapons and drug charges. They were from Massachusetts and were suspects in a number of other crimes, among them a killing in Haverhill, Massachusetts, not far from the New Hampshire state line. Included in the items confiscated at their arrest were hollow-point bullets, a car that had been purchased in Hudson, New Hampshire, and several handguns that could very well have been the type that killed Smart.
It was not so farfetched to think that these hoodlums could have broken into a condo and killed someone. Some of them had been in southern New Hampshire in recent months, trying to raise bail to free their leader who was in jail in Manchester. Apparently they had been posing as cops, storming into the homes of drug dealers and ripping them off.
Next, in going through Greg’s and Pam’s telephone records, the detectives found Greg had made some calls to a business – as it turned out, a gambling junket service – that supposedly had ties to local organized crime.
Around the same time, word trickled in that not long before his death Greg had been at a huge party where drugs were being sold. Some people wondered if it had any connection to a recent assault on some residents at the same house.
The cops also looked into one of Greg’s old girlfriends, whom a few years earlier he apparently had gotten pregnant but then refused to help pay for an abortion. Her father, enraged at Greg’s behavior, spouted off that he had a good mind to go shoot the kid.
Painstakingly, one by one, each lead had to be weighed and checked out. And one by one, each was scratched off. Nothing was panning out.
On the night of May 14, with all the other leads still swirling around, a call came in at the Derry Police Department. When the dispatcher answered, a woman started telling how she had information into the recent murder. High-profile cases send all kinds of crazies to their telephones with “tips.” When an investigation is going nowhere, though, even the most bizarre callers get heard.
The call was sent back to Dan Pelletier.
The woman, who at first refused to give her name, was nervous. She told Pelletier she did not want to get involved. But she had heard some things the police ought to know. Things were not as they may seem, she said, with the killing of the young man in the condo complex. And she had the name of someone who knew a lot more.
“His wife planned him to be killed,” she said of Gregory Smart, “so she could collect the insurance money. And he was killed in home and she came home and she put on a wonderful performance. The person you can talk to about it is a minor.”
Pelletier wanted to keep her talking, so he prodded her along with gentle affirmations.
“Yeah,” he said.
“She’s fifteen years old.”
“OK.”
“But she knows the whole ordeal. The whole situation of what was going on.”
“Is she a friend of this woman’s?” Pelletier asked.
“Yeah. I – I’m sorry. I – I will not reveal my name or where I’m from, but I have heard this from hearsay, but I’m damned scared silly.”
At first the caller said she thought the fifteen year old’s name was Cecelia Perkins, but soon she corrected that. It was Cecelia Pierce.
Cecelia was a friend of the wife’s, the caller said. The girl had even been at the funeral, she said. And she could be located out on the New Hampshire seacoast, in Seabrook.
Pelletier kept at her, probing for any information at all.
“I’m not positive, but from what I’ve heard the wife had planned it,” the woman said. “She wanted the insurance money. From what I understand she’s already gone out and bought a brand new Trans-Am with the insurance money.”
“OK,” Pelletier said. “And do you know how long she was planning on doing this?”
“Not exactly. The last four or five weeks.”
The detective was walking a tightrope. He wanted to cull as much as he could, yet not scare her off.
“I – I’m just trying to be helpful,” the woman said. “I don’t want to be involved.”
“I understand, but I’m just…you got to understand, this is probably the last time I’ll talk to you, so I’ve got to get as much information as I can right now.”
“Yeah,” she replied. “Well, if I hear other things I will get back in touch with you again.”
“OK,” Pelletier said. “yeah, just for – “
“There’s just been a gentleman killed,” the caller interjected. “There’s been a murder committed here and I don’t like the idea of that.”
A minute later she was gone. What she had left, however, was a tip that rang some bells.
Cecelia Pierce. The girl’s name had come up before. In a routine interview just a few days after the murder, one of Pam’s co-workers had mentioned that one of the students at Winnacunnet High School, Cecelia, had spent the week before Greg’s murder at Pam’s condo.
Pam, too, had brought up the girl’s name. The widow had failed to mention Cecelia when Pelletier initially asked for names of anyone who had been in the condo the month before the murder. But she did pass the name along about a week later, when the detective asked if Pam had any friends that were not Greg’s as well.
Pam could think of just two, and though they were not related, both were named Pierce. Ann Pierce was Pam’s col
lege roommate. Cecelia Pierce was her student intern at work, a girl she had met through the drug- and alcohol-awareness program.
Now Pelletier figured that maybe investigators should get to know Cecelia Pierce a bit better.
Chapter 4
The late cartoonist Al Capp once said that Seabrook was where he “found the men to be the most ferocious and the women the most beautiful.”
He also said, tongue in cheek, that Seabrook, where he and his wife often enjoyed the beach, was the model for Dogpatch, the comic-strip community of hillbillies where Capp’s “Li’l Abner” took place.
A cartoonish figure in his own right, Capp was a raconteur who never let the truth ruin a good yarn, whether it involved his place of birth or the inspiration for his famous comic strip. “Li’l Abner” sprang from the cartoonist’s travels through the South as a young man. His wife, daughter, lawyer, and a publisher of his cartoons in book form all insist that Capp was joshing about Seabrook.
Yet on the New Hampshire seacoast that story persists as fact. For Al Capp was not the only one who scorned reality for the sake of an anecdote. In the minds of many, even some of its own residents, Seabrook has always been Dogpatch: a place that embodied a clannish, backwoods mentality and lifestyle, a chunk of Appalachia transplanted to New Hampshire, an hour from Boston.
It sits seven-thousand people strong, beside the ocean, the first New Hampshire town off Interstate 95 north. From the exit, it is just a short drive in one direction to Seabrook Greyhound Park, the dog track, and in the other, Seabrook Station, the infamous nuclear power plant.
The town’s main drags – Route 1 and, by the Atlantic Ocean, 1A – are a seedy hodgepodge of tattoo parlors, fireworks stores, and fast food joints. Big Al’s Gun Shop here, Leather and Lace adult books and videos there.
First appearances notwithstanding, the town’s coffers are far from bare. Tax dollars from the nuclear plant have brought healthy five- to six-million-dollar budgets and have allowed Seabrook to build facilities – a police station and a community center to name two – that are envied around the state.
North and south of Seabrook are popular recreational areas, Hampton Beach and Massachusetts’ Salisbury Beach. “We’re basically the town in between, the point in transit,” said one citizen. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, as a result, the traffic in Seabrook can be ungodly and the number and behavior of visitors, often teenagers, hellish.
Summertime only adds to what is already a day-to-day struggle for a good number of Seabrook’s residents, many of whom make their living from the sea on fishing boats, clamming, and catching lobsters. Others work at the nuclear plant or in factories in the surrounding communities. A handful hold professional positions. And many do not work at all. Seabrook’s unemployment rate, and the number of its young people that fail to finish high school, is high.
The most impoverished, rough-and-tumble part of town is South Seabrook, a four-square-mile section that has long been a world unto itself. Hard by the Massachusetts border, South Seabrook is marked by blight, the front and back yards of many houses and mobile homes decorated with rusted out cars and parts. Barking dogs tethered by chains are ubiquitous.
Outsiders regard this part of Seabrook as Dogpatch. This is where the natives proudly call themselves “Bubbas” or “Bubs.” Outsiders derisively refer to them as “Seabrookers” or simply “Brookers.” It is a neighborhood where even the local police tread carefully, never quite sure when their cruisers might be stoned or egged.
Here, generations of the same families have lived. Unwed daughters raising their babies at home are not uncommon. And while the traditional family does not thrive, a wariness of strangers makes for a thick code of loyalty among family and neighbors alike.
That isolationism is exacerbated by a dialect seldom heard elsewhere in the vicinity.
When New Hampshire Seacoast Sunday, a weekly newspaper, published a critical article about the town, residents were up in arms. One sent a lengthy letter to the editor and closed with a couple of paragraphs written in the native tongue.
Ike, even our “clipped dialect and homespun idioms” are a bone of contention with you. My answer is: I think it’s bout time we start mouthing off in a mucker way, caus for ye-ars the carpetbaggers and cliff dwellers have tried to throw us out cross; it can’t be done, boy. Berta, people like you try to stave us up with your written word, but it ain’t gona work.
We ain’t gonna be no bodies’ larky. I can face a looking glass any day and be proud of my heritage. Berch, as far as our dialect and homespun idioms go we should never lose it, or try to disguise it. We should talk it to our children and grandchildren, caus it ott be taught um.
Sneers one newcomer: “If you can understand what they’re saying, you’ve been here too long.”
South Seabrook fought change when the rush was on from Massachusetts to southern New Hampshire, often literally. The Seabrook cops spent many a night pulling apart upwardly mobile transplants and the Bubs when turf battles erupted in places like the pool hall.
To this day, many of the residents resist impingement by the outside. At the same time, the outside has not always been kind to those from Seabrook.
Nowhere has it been more evident over the years than at regional Winnacunnet High School in Hampton, where nine hundred kids, both working-class and wealthy, from five towns are poured together for grades nine through twelve.
The dyed-in-the-wool Seabrook kids have always stood apart, particularly from their classmates raised in affluent communities like North Hampton and Hampton Falls. A standing joke is that there are no minorities at Winnacunnet High School, except, of course, the Brookers.
The differences are as subtle as the Seabrook kids tending to keep their coats on all day in the winter instead of putting them in their lockers. They tend to wear a lot of leather. T-shirts. Blue jeans. The dialect and lack of concern about education in many Seabrook families only draws the line more sharply.
Whether the kids are ostracized or whether they shut themselves off is open to debate. But if a child is from Seabrook, no matter whether he is a native or not, he stands a good chance of being regarded as a ‘Brooker. And while some of the kids find friendship in the larger community of the high school, many others remain outsiders, left to seek security with those from their own community.
As such, class differences play out even where the students have lunch. For years, the Seabrook kids have tended to eat in the lower part of Winnacunnet’s two-level cafeteria, a section known as “The Pit.” The kids from the other communities sit above.
A number of the teachers and school officials, though, have a warm spot for the kids from Seabrook. Unlike many of their classmates, they lack certain pretensions. A lot of the students from Seabrook tend to show real appreciation when someone takes the extra time to care about them.
And even the troublemakers among them often have an ethical code unlike the rest of the students. “As a disciplinarian I never had much trouble with the Seabrook kids,” recalled one former Winnacunnet official. “Usually when I called them in they’d say, ‘Yeah, I did it.’ It was the Hampton kids who gave me some phony story or tried to talk me out of punishing them.”
Still, not many Seabrook kids have grand dreams for when they leave Winnacunnet High School, which is often long before graduation day.
“I hated to think what their future would hold for them,” said the former school administrator.
◆◆◆
The hangout was Vance and Diane Lattime’s house on Upper Collins Street in the heart of South Seabrook. Their mobile home sits down a dirt driveway, off the road, with woods out back, an ideal place for the Lattimes’ seventeen year-old son JR and his buddies. It was not expansive, but it was property enough for a few junk cars that the kids worked on and space to roughhouse or blast fireworks without driving too many neighbors crazy.
What made it perfect, though, was that Vance and Diane liked having the kids around. If their son was home, the parents fi
gured, he wasn’t off someplace else getting into trouble.
And, anyway, with the Lattimes it was always the more the merrier. Their place was never empty: Diane’s mother was over regularly. Their daughter, who was unmarried, had a baby and they were planning to adopt him. And they had taken in one of JR’s friends, Ralph Welch, who lived in the neighborhood and whose parents’ place was overcrowded and in need of repair.
The elder Lattime was a laborer at the nuclear plant, and his wife was a warranty administrator for a car dealership. They had moved from Salisbury to escape the Massachusetts tax bite ten years earlier, and picked Seabrook because Diane’s mother lived there. The couple, in fact, had planned to move the family to wooded northern New Hampshire in the summer of 1989.
But JR, who would enter his sophomore year at Winnacunnet that fall, convinced them to stay until he graduated. He didn’t want to leave his friends.
Indeed, he and his pals had forged strong bonds over the years. Ever since they were little, JR, Ralph Welch, and Patrick Randall, known as “Pete,” might as well have been brothers. Randall’s family had moved to Connecticut for a while, but for the most part they grew up together in Seabrook – brawny, tough talking, street smart.
They were joined by Billy Flynn, who had come to town three years earlier and who lived with his mother and two younger brothers near Seabrook Beach, a few miles away. Billy was from Southern California. His parents were splitting up, and his mom had packed up the kids and headed east, settling in New Hampshire, not far from the little Massachusetts town where she grew up. It was not long after the move, however, that Billy’s father died out in California.
In less than a year, Billy Flynn’s world had been turned inside out, and the boy, who had already been quiet, turned deep within himself. It was JR and Pete who helped pull him out, taking him into their circle of friends.
Teach Me to Kill Page 10
