Billy was hardly a problem at school. He had complained to some staffers at Winnacunnet about excruciating headaches, the result of a skateboarding accident. Fooling around with his buddies, Billy was on the board, being pulled by a truck, when the skateboard struck something in the road. Billy was sent crashing down on the back of his head. He was briefly unconscious and lost his memory for about a day.
Besides that, he seldom called attention to himself. If anything, his problem was being too quiet. A number of adults at the school, in fact, would wonder now and then if something was bothering him, perhaps something that could be traced back to home.
Indeed, by his sophomore year, Billy’s home life was less than ideal. He was living with his mother, Elaine, and two younger brothers, Jimmy and Larry, in the basement apartment of a house near Seabrook Beach. For the most part, though, he was going his own way.
He was at a difficult age, fifteen, and did not talk much with his mother. After a while, she tended to look the other way. When Billy was around, he usually kept to himself. What he did show at home, which he did not reveal elsewhere, was his rage.
Elaine Flynn is a soft-spoken woman of around forty. At one time she might have been among the young women who take assignments from the modeling agency where Elaine does office work to supplement her income cleaning homes. She had once planned, in fact, to be a model.
It was not that Billy was violent, she said. In fact, she believed he had a lot of self-restraint. The problem, though, was that he could become incensed over the smallest difficulty, making him hard to communicate with, much less understand. “Outside of the family, people saw a kid that was polite and charming,” she said. “That was one side of Billy that he projected to people that he wanted to impress. He wanted to be liked. Inside the family is where he took out his anger. At home he could be whatever he was feeling like and most of the time he was feeling like a prick.”
Elaine laughed at her choice of words. “He has an attitude when something’s bothering him. He vibes out. You can just tell that he’s angry. It’s like a volcano waiting to erupt.”
Elaine, a widow, would ask for advice from relatives and friends about how to handle Billy’s moods, particularly when he would cause problems for her other sons. “Everybody’s solution was, ‘Beat the shit out of him,’” she said. “And I could never go for that. So most of the time I would just try to create peace, whatever it took.”
Billy Flynn’s parents had come of age in northeast Massachusetts during the turmoil of the late 1960s. Elaine graduated from high school in 1969, worked in New York for the better part of a year, and came home to save some money before trying to make it in the city as a professional model. That changed in the summer of 1970 when some friends introduced her to James William Flynn, whom everyone called Bill.
Flynn was intelligent – and intellectual, said his wife – but in keeping with the time, he was scraggly haired and heavily into recreational drugs and riding his motorcycle. He had graduated from high school a few years earlier, served some time in the army, and was planning to start college that autumn.
Then he met Elaine. When she said she was going to Southern California to visit her sister, Bill said he would come along. They drove across country in an old Dodge, found a place together, and ended up staying.
They got married a couple years later and over time would live in a variety of places around the San Gabriel Valley before moving to Canyon Country and the desert.
Flynn was an intense individual, with dark eyebrows that only added to his serious-minded persona. He broke away from his hippie image, donned a coat and tie, and like his father held positions as a car salesman – of Cadillacs at first and then Chevys. Eventually he would end up running a construction company with his brother-in-law.
The couple was only married about a year when Elaine, working as a nurse’s aide in a convalescent home, underwent a powerful Christian conversion. Overnight, she took on a whole new view of life and abandoned marijuana and swearing, which had been two of her more enjoyable pastimes.
The change did not go over well with her husband, who always liked to drink and dabbled in pot and cocaine. Before long, Elaine’s newfound religion became a constant source of discord. Major arguments ensued, and one day with Elaine six months pregnant with their first child, he ordered her to leave.
Elaine moved in with her sister, never telling her husband where she went. The night before she gave birth, the telephone rang. Bill had found her. He said he was furious that she had hidden from him. Growing more and more belligerent, he said that he was on his way over to blow her away.
He hurried to the sister’s place, stormed in wild-eyed, and upon confronting his wife, reached into his pocket as if going for a gun. Elaine let loose a scream that she expected to be her final sound in this life. But when she looked Bill Flynn had taken his empty hand out of his pocket, pointed a finger at her as if it was a pistol, and smiled.
Their son, William Patrick Flynn, was born the next day, March 12, 1974. William was a popular name in the Flynn family, so that part of the process was easy. The nurse at the hospital, though, refused to allow the couple to depart until they decided on a middle name. It was near St. Patrick’s Day, so Patrick it was.
The marriage would continue to be tumultuous. Usually, Billy would be at the center of the storm, with the arguments raging over what his mother saw as overbearing treatment by the father. Perhaps because of his own strict upbringing, Bill Flynn demanded perfection from his son, something the child was unable to give.
“Bill never treated him on his level,” said Elaine. She recalled, for example, an incident that occurred when Billy was about three years old. Her husband had been washing his van and gave Billy the job of cleaning the back window. It should have been fun, but it ended in torment. The boy washed the window like any child might, with the paper towel crumpled and rubbing it in little circles that streaked the glass. “Bill would not accept that,” remembered Elaine. “So he just kept Billy there doing it over and over until it looked acceptable.”
Billy attended parochial school in the first grade, and one day he came home with a note saying the boy should work harder on his penmanship. So his father sat him down and made the six-year-old write the alphabet and the numbers one through ten. Every time he finished, however, his father said it was not good enough and commanded that he do it again. And again. And again. Nine times. Ten times. Eleven times. The lesson finally ended with the boy, and his mother, in tears.
A couple days later, Elaine picked up Billy after school and the boy started weeping. As best as she could piece it together, Elaine said, a priest had spoken to Billy’s class that day and talked about how God, like our earthly fathers, loved them so much that He would never give them more burdens than they could bear. “But Billy interpreted that to mean, ‘My earthly dad doesn’t love me because he always gives me more than I can bear,’” she said.
It was not a lack of love for Billy, but a demanding disposition that caused his father to push Billy so hard. “If things were going my husband’s way, he was a great guy to be around,” said Elaine Flynn. “But as soon as he had to deal with any inconvenience, forget it. We used to go down into the canyons on dirt bikes and spend the day. There’s always problems with them. Well, once Billy had a problem with his bike. It was something as trivial as a spark plug. His dad told him how to fix it and it didn’t go. It was blowup time. His father would start yelling, ‘You couldn’t have done what I said!’”
Billy grew up in the desert, far from the California coast, riding his dirt bike through washes and playing with the springer spaniel puppies his parents sometimes bred. He was shy even then and never had a lot of friends.
The Flynns would have two other boys, whom Elaine said the father never pushed as hard as his eldest son.
Still, the marriage was wracked with problems and finally it fell apart. Elaine said she learned that her husband had been cheating on her for years. In 1986, she decided
to leave him.
Her husband agreed to send her a thousand dollars each month, and in September of that year Elaine prepared to start her life anew. She sent Jimmy, her middle son, east to her parents on a plane. Then, driving a souped-up Dodge with mag wheels, which her husband raced now and then at one of the local tracks, she took Billy and Larry on a cross-country drive to their new home.
Billy, who was twelve at the time, never wanted to leave California. “He was just going into junior high and he didn’t want to move,” recalled Elaine. “He was an angry little guy coming back with me.”
Elaine would eventually find a place in New Hampshire, and Billy would enroll in seventh grade at Seabrook Elementary School. Unlike Pamela Wojas, who moved to Windham from Florida at around the same age, Billy never took his classmates by storm. He never possessed the outgoing personality to win over friends with his jokes or other attention-getting devices. If anything, he preferred to be in the background.
That Christmas, Billy’s father came to visit and attempted to reconcile with Elaine and the boys. Something had changed since they last saw him. Now Bill Flynn was more at peace somehow, more patient and understanding.
“I don’t know what my husband went through during those months,” Elaine said, “but for those ten days, he was Mr. Perfect Dad. I don’t think he ever yelled at anyone once. I heard him tell Billy he loved him and I saw him with his arms around him. I think it was the first time that Billy ever felt, wow, maybe my dad does care about me.”
Except for the formality of the divorce, the marriage was over. But by the time her husband headed back to California, Elaine and he had talked out many of their differences. They even discussed sending the boys west to stay with him for the summer.
That was never to be.
It was just after one in the morning on Wednesday, January 21, 1987. Bill Flynn had been out drinking all night. When it was time to go home, he refused all offers from his brother-in-law to stay at his house and drove off into the dark in his ’85 Mercury Cougar.
Not much later, Flynn was pushing eighty miles per hour on the Antelope Valley Freeway, one exit from home, when a car pulled in front of his. He veered to avoid a collision and smashed into the back of a gasoline tanker carrying nearly nine thousand gallons of fuel.
At that instant the night seemed to become day. The rear tanker and Flynn’s car roared into flames.
A couple passersby and two sheriff’s deputies tried to save Flynn as the fire ripped through his car. To no avail. When it was over, only Bill Flynn’s teeth would reveal his identity.
“The hardest thing I ever had to do was to tell those three boys that their dad was dead,” said Elaine Flynn. “I shut the TV off and I told them. I remember that Billy was standing up and started to cry. Then he broke away from me and shut his door and wouldn’t let me in.”
For a long time, Billy Flynn let no one in. He and his mother went to California to retrieve his father’s remains for burial in northern Massachusetts. When he returned to New Hampshire, Billy stayed by himself, scribbling in his room and fiddling with his Sears computer. He just wanted to be alone.
Chapter 5
It had long been coming. Like the nearly imperceptible chill in the summer that speaks of autumn, something in the very air of Gregory and Pamela Smart’s marriage was changing.
Greg and Pam were the same. It was true that they had full-time jobs now, careers. They wore their hair differently than they once did. They spoke of buying a house. They had, as people like to say, started to mature. As individuals, though, they were no different than they had been. Their personalities and attitudes and values had undergone no major overhauls.
Yet theirs was a relationship held by the most fragile of ties. Having so little in common, outside of similar social-class upbringings and their regard for heavy metal, Pam and Greg slowly began to pull away from one another.
Their jobs did not help. Every morning, Pam headed east toward the seacoast. Greg worked in the other direction, in Nashua. Most of his appointments were at night, so often Greg was not home before nine o’clock. And Pam, never one to like being by herself, was bothered by it. So much so that Greg complained to a friend, Yvon Pellerin, that Pam wanted him to quit the insurance business. Smart was happy in his job and was earning a good wage, though, and he refused.
Their free time, meanwhile, was seldom spent together by themselves. Greg could often be found with friends, playing cards or golfing or roaring his four-wheeler, an off-road recreational vehicle, down the trails by the power lines in Londonderry or along the old railroad bed in Windham.
Pam was never taken by such outdoor activities and leaned instead toward dance lessons or classes, such as in public relations, to further her career. She also liked to follow the news closely, reading five or six newspapers a day.
The common ground they did have was eroding. Dinners with Greg’s parents were fewer. Greg would go to parties without his wife. They would even take separate vacations, with Greg and some friends going skiing in Canada and Pam taking a cruise to Mexico with her parents.
If other couples came to visit, often the women would do one activity and the men something else. Some of Greg’s friends who needed a break from their girlfriends or spouses especially liked going to see the Smarts. But for the ones who hoped to get together as couples it became maddening.
“It ended up that they were never together,” said Tom Parilla’s wife, Heidi.
Other changes were more damaging. Pam told people that Greg used to tease her about having an affair and, in a nonjoking way, he once told his friend Dave Bosse that if either of them was likely to cheat on the other it would be Pam.
But a week or so before Christmas 1989, Pam would later testify, Greg failed to come home one night. When he showed up a little after six the next morning, he told her he had been drinking and stayed at a male friend’s place.
Pam went to work that day angry and certain that he was lying. At home that afternoon she demanded the truth. “You wouldn’t like the truth,” Greg replied. She continued to press, until finally Greg admitted that he had spent the evening with another woman. He had been drinking and one thing led to another. He hardly even remembered the whole matter, he said.
Pam was, as she would later tell a jury, devastated. When Greg tried to discuss it with her, she refused to listen. For a day she would not even talk to him.
The marriage was on shaky grounds, yet few, if anyone, outside of the couple seemed to have noticed. No one moved out. There were no massive public disagreements. Life went on for Greg and Pam, though the issue of the husband’s infidelity was no doubt always simmering near the surface.
A few days before Christmas, they even accompanied his parents to a holiday party at a relative’s home in Nashua. Greg had been drinking heavily at the gathering and was acting silly on the ride home with his parents. Pam, who these days drank only in moderation if at all, was irritated by Greg’s behavior at the party and afterward.
A bit later that night, Pam showed up at the Smarts’ condo obviously upset, having trekked over in the snow, wearing only her nightclothes and slippers.
Pam, according to Bill and Judy Smart, blurted out that Greg had slapped her in the face, had her bent over a railing upstairs, and tried to strangle her.
After several attempts, Bill Smart finally got into Greg’s condo and confronted his son. “He had come out of the bathroom,” the father remembered. “And I said, ‘Did you hit Pam? What the hell are you doing?’ You know, like a father would. He said, ‘I haven’t even touched her. She’s a pain in the ass. I just told her to get the hell out of here.’ So I said, ‘OK, go to bed.’ He jumped into bed. I turned the light off and proceeded out the door. The next day I went up and down on him for three hours, telling him, ‘You cannot drink hard liquor if indeed you did that last night and you don’t even remember it.’ I said, ‘You’ve got a problem,’ so on and so on.”
Pam would later say that Greg had accidentally slappe
d her, that he would never intentionally hit her.
Whatever happened that night, however, it was not enough to cause an immediate breakup. Pam said they had smoothed over their differences, though Greg would later complain that his wife would never let him forget his breach of their eight-month-old marriage vows. And if Greg in fact did intentionally strike her, that too was not something Pam would easily set aside.
All the same, they stayed together, and virtually none of their closest friends thought the couple had any serious problems. Then again, few ever learned of the affair or Greg’s having hit Pam until many months later.
Out on the seacoast, Pam had another life. She and her teenage friends eased into an existence that no doubt pleased Pam. Unlike home, this was her unchallenged domain.
In less than six months, Smart had become a central figure in the lives of Cecelia and Billy, two very different teens, each of whom was missing a piece or two in their emotional makeup and desperately longed for positive attention.
By February, the unfinished orange juice commercial was a constant presence, a project that continually drew them together. Now Pam’s student aide Cecelia was at the media center for two periods each day. And Billy, never short of reasons to visit Pam, was also there daily, usually by himself but now and then with JR Lattime in tow.
Pam, in fact, encouraged Billy. She issued him passes to get him out of his free-study periods. When Billy dropped by they would talk, or he would help put labels on mailings or they would go to lunch.
One day, Pam brought in some undeveloped film and gave it to Billy. The teenager had told her that Ken and Karen Knight, his mother’s landlords and upstairs neighbors, owned a one-hour photo shop in Seabrook. Billy said he could get Pam a discount and would see that the Knights got the film.
Later, Pam and Billy drove over to the store on Route 1 to pick up the finished prints. In the CRX, Pam opened the package and laughed. Inside were photos of her and Tracy Collins posing in two piece bathing suits on a bed. (Pam, heavily made up, wore a black and white bikini.) The two women had taken pictures of each other – for a modeling portfolio, Pam would later say – in a variety of poses, mimicking the kind found in men’s magazines.
Teach Me to Kill Page 12
