Teach Me to Kill

by Stephen Sawicki

  It was no different when Pam began directing Billy Flynn to murder her husband. After the boy assented, Pam took the idea and began to ride it. As with the orange juice video, she became the propelling force. But also like the OJ commercial, there was an intangible that she was unable to reign in: She was counting on a confused teenager, not a hardened killer, to bring her plans to fruition.

  Every day the plot would come up. Billy would drop by the media center and sooner or later Pam would start in about doing away with Greg.

  In many ways, it was like an abstract game, the plotting of the perfect murder, and Billy chimed right in.

  The possibilities were endless, but Pam liked the idea of making it appear as if Greg had interrupted a burglary. It was not the most creative concept. It was more like a variation on a theme. Plenty of crimes have been blamed on mysterious strangers, with none more prominent in recent years than the Boston slaying of Carol Stuart.

  Pam talked about how the boy could dress in dark clothes, park a car up by Hood Commons, and sneak back toward the condominiums. Once inside, he could lie in wait for Greg.

  “Well, it’s gonna look pretty suspicious if a kid in dark clothes gets out of a car and goes behind the plaza,” said Billy.

  “OK,” answered Pam. “Put the dark clothes in a bag and change behind the plaza. Then go down to the condo.”

  Each time they talked about it, the plot became more clear. Pam told the boy to tie his long dark hair back in a ponytail, so as to make later identification difficult. He should wear gloves, of course, to avoid leaving fingerprints. She would leave the cellar and rear doors open. Inside, the boy could tear the place end to end, take anything he wanted, and when Greg got there, kill him, preferably with a gun.

  Pam’s alibi would be beyond dispute: She would be surrounded by people at a school board meeting in Hampton.

  At first, Cecelia usually was not around when Billy and Pam began laying the groundwork for the killing. She had classes when Billy dropped by, and he had classes during the periods that she reported in for her internship. Still, Pam kept the girl up to date on the plan as well as on her faltering marriage.

  From the winter on into the spring it continued. It happened now and then that one of their classes would be canceled and both Billy and Cecelia would be at the media center with Pam. Time and again, Pam would go over the plan and new ideas with Billy as Cecelia listened in.

  Crit would come to know most of it, from the parking of the car at the plaza to Billy tying his hair back.

  As could be expected from Pam, not much would be left to chance. She even took it upon herself to see that Billy took care of her beloved Shih-Tzu, Haylen, who Pam sometimes called Hayley. In one conversation, Cecelia heard Pam telling Billy that the dog might later react strangely to him if he actually saw the boy slay Greg. With that in mind as well as the possibility that the dog would bark, Pam ordered the boy to put Haylen in the basement as soon as he got in the condo.

  Cecelia would later say that she never expected the murder to actually be carried out. The reason was Billy himself. He simply was not a violent kid. It was ludicrous. “Why do you even bother?” she would say to Pam. “Billy’s never gonna do it.”

  Still, the plotting went on. Perhaps it had become something of a perverse game that had nothing to do with reality for Billy and Cecelia. Maybe it was the thrill of flirting with danger, a dance along the edge of a precipice. Or maybe it was simply the lack of a sound-minded adult that the kids felt comfortable with, someone who could point out just how crazy it had all become.

  Whatever the case, being around Pam, even with all of the strange talk of murdering her husband, offered a form of sustenance. Pam provided it in different ways for the boy and the girl, but when it came right down to it, their needs were the same. Both Cecelia and Billy deeply wanted to feel that they were good and loved and special.

  Pam gave them that. With Billy it was through sex. With Cecelia it was letting her be an intimate friend and part of Pam’s little circle.

  It was madness, but without abhorrence the kids continually accepted the small steps that in the end pointed to a death.

  When the subject of a gun came up, for example, the teenagers named everyone they could think of who might have one. Cecelia said her father, whom she had not seen in a few years, had a shotgun. Then there was JR’s dad. And supposedly Sal Parks’ mother. And Billy’s landlord. Cecelia mentioned a friend at Papa Gino’s, a pizza chain where Crit worked as a waitress, who was said to keep a handgun in the glove compartment of her car.

  Of those, the best bet seemed to be Cecelia’s co-worker. It got to the point that Billy went to Papa Gino’s and rummaged through the woman’s car, hoping to steal the gun. He never found it. Not in the parking lot at Papa Gino’s, nor later when he went through the vehicle again at her home.

  Pam, Billy, and Cecelia had a secret. But as one might expect with teenagers, it did not last long. Cecelia for the most part said little to anyone about Pam’s marital problems or what was starting to sound like an obsession with having Greg killed. But one night in the early spring, while Cecelia was on dinner break at Papa Gino’s, something in the conversation with a co-worker made her think of the discussions about killing Greg.

  Crit told Cindy Butt, who delivered pizzas, that she had a friend named Pam who had an unhappy marriage and was looking for someone to kill her husband. Butt, who was twenty years old, listened for a bit and considering everything from the fifteen-year-old source to the likelihood of the tale, decided not to take it too seriously. It was just too ridiculous.

  Billy could not keep the plot under his hat either. So he, of course, let his buddies in on it. One day in March, Pete and JR were lounging around at the Lattimes’ house, the stereo playing, when Bill told them that he wanted to kill Greg Smart.

  The boys had known of the affair, and Billy had talked about some of Pam’s marital problems. Now Billy was going on about how Greg abused Pam and how a divorce was out of the question because Pam would be left with nothing and how killing the husband was the only way to resolve it.

  Knowing Billy as they did, the boys thought little of his talk about murder. He was not exactly the most fearsome kid they knew, though he was as likely as anyone to talk big.

  Pete Randall figured he was just angry at Greg. “You’re nuts,” he told Billy. He figured that about summed it up.

  Around the same time, Billy Flynn was plotting even more murders. At least hypothetically. That winter through the end of the school year, both he and JR were enrolled in Crime and Punishment, one of the most popular classes at Winnacunnet.

  Taught by social studies teacher Leonard Barron, the course was an overall view of the American legal system, covering everything from criminal law to how the penal system works. The part of the class that most kids liked best involved mock crimes and trials. Everyone was assigned a role, be it as the criminal, the police, prosecuting attorney, and so on. Sometimes parents and others from outside of Winnacunnet took part, being called in, for instance, to testify.

  Those who volunteered to be criminals also had to suggest a crime. If approved by Barron, the lesson would then be set into motion, from acting out the offense through the trial. With due warning, certain people around the school were told to brace themselves: It was “Crime and Punishment Crime Time.”

  Billy and JR Lattime took well to the course. They had B averages through most of it. Would-be bad guys, they proposed that the two of them go on a killing spree around the school. Barron rejected their idea, but not wanting them to lose their obvious enthusiasm, he assigned them key roles in the playing out of another pair of students’ idea.

  The mock crime was simple enough. A group of animal rights activists were upset about Winnacunnet’s science department’s using fetal pigs for laboratory work. First, they sent letters expressing this concern and threatened that if the practice continued, repercussions would follow.

  Billy and JR were assigned to be hit men. Th
eir mission was to “kill” one science teacher a day, which in reality involved little more than informing the person that he was dead and putting down a paper cutout outline of a body, until use of fetal pigs stopped. Three or four corpses had turned up before Billy and JR were arrested and put on trial. The verdict came back guilty.

  ◆◆◆

  Perhaps it is true everywhere, but along the New Hampshire coastline in particular the arrival of spring is always much welcomed. The Atlantic takes on a marvelous deep blue, drawing more and more loners and couples and children to gaze out and wonder. A few miles away, the athletic fields behind Winnacunnet High School—“Home of the Warriors”—recover quickly from the ice and snow, revealing a vast expanse of green dotted with daffodils. It does not take long for two or three kids to make their way out there with gloves and a baseball. Or for the teenagers and adults inside the school to discover new energy as they head down the homestretch of the school year.

  Such was the backdrop when Pamela Smart decided that the time for her husband’s demise had come.

  Pam and Billy, of course, had talked at length about the plan. Unexpectedly one day—toward the end of March, said Flynn—she told him it should be carried out that very night.

  To Pam, all seemed to be ready. She herself had a meeting. Greg would be getting home around nine o’clock. And she had left the bulkhead and rear doors open. After the deed was done, Pam told Billy, he should call her at the media center.

  Fine, said Billy. The only problem was on his end. He was missing everything he needed to commit the crime, namely a gun and a car—ignoring that he was too young to have a driver’s license—to get to Derry.

  “Well, hurry up and get them by tonight,” Pam said.

  “I’ll try.”

  But the boy did not try. He simply let it slide, like a skipped homework assignment. Pam had talked a lot about wanting Greg dead, but she gave no indications that it was this-minute urgent. "It’s not something I wanted to do, for one thing,” Billy would later say. “And I didn’t think she’d be mad or anything if I didn’t.”

  After school that day the boy followed his usual routine: He went over to JR’s to hang out. When he finally went home, he waited for his mother to go to sleep, around ten o’clock, before he called Pam at the media center.

  “Look, I’m sorry, but I didn’t do it,” Billy told her. “I couldn’t get a gun and I couldn’t get a car.”

  “You don’t love me!” Pam exploded, giving a bizarre twist on an ageless complaint. “If you did, you would do this for me. It’s the only way we can be together, and if you loved me you’d want us to be together.”

  Until this point, Billy had only seen Pam’s sweetness and her tears. That was all that had been needed. Now he met her fury.

  Crying, he assured her that he cared about her and that he would kill Greg.

  “I know you’re never going to do this!” she said. “You don’t have any intention of doing this. And I can’t go on seeing you like this when I know we’re never going to be able to really be together. So, that’s it! It’s over between us!” Then she hung up.

  It was insanity. They were talking about snuffing out a human life, but Pam made it sound as if every woman should expect as much from a lover. What could be more simple? Love me, kill my husband.

  Billy went to bed that night, wounded and bewildered. The next day at school he kept his distance from the media center. He was certain it was over with Pam.

  Then Cecelia took him aside and said Smart wanted to talk to him.

  Billy went over. Pam apologized for getting so angry. What’s more, she told him not to worry. She had another meeting scheduled within the next month. Billy could kill Greg then.

  “That’s when I started getting serious about it,” Billy would say in court, “because I thought that if I do something like not go up or anything again, she’s gonna leave me and that’s gonna be it. So this is the time that I really started talking to JR and Pete about it.”

  ◆◆◆

  Pete Randall and JR Lattime were not going to win any most-likely-to-succeed awards at Winnacunnet High School. At the rate Pete was going, skipping school altogether on many days, he would be lucky to graduate. Randall had a sensitive side, but he also had a disrespect for authority that some people felt started with his being allowed to do whatever he wanted at home.

  “He just gave out an air of constant arrogance,” said one official who knew him. “He’s a kid you’d look at just by his facial appearance and say punk.” A number of people believed it was only going to get worse.

  As for JR, he would probably have gotten through all right. Maybe his future held a job somewhere as a mechanic or even managing a garage.

  Both of them talked about going into the armed services. JR was interested in getting a look at the mechanical guts of some of the military’s tanks and other heavy artillery, maybe in the Marines. Pete was intrigued by the Army’s elite Airborne Rangers. He wondered aloud to his friends sometimes what it would be like to kill somebody.

  When April came to South Seabrook, though, what happened to them after high school was far away. For now they were content to be teenagers, hanging out with their girlfriends and the guys, listening to the screaming guitars of their favorite heavy metal bands, ripping off a car stereo when the mood struck, drinking, and scoring an occasional hit of cocaine.

  Life had changed slightly. Ralph Welch, who had been like a brother to them, particularly to JR, was still staying at the Lattimes’ house, but he usually was out with his girlfriend. And Billy, meanwhile, was often off somewhere with Pam. Still, JR’s house remained the gathering place for them and their friends.

  It was early in the month when Billy Flynn began to ask JR and Pete if they would help him kill Greg Smart. There was much to be gained if they did, he said. They could keep anything they could take from the condo, Flynn said, because insurance would cover it.

  What’s more, Pam would move to Hampton after Greg was dead. They could have another place to hang out, and Pam would let them use the Trans-Am she was planning to buy as well as Greg’s pickup truck, the Honda CRX, and Greg’s four-wheeler.

  Billy even told JR at one point that he could have anything he himself owned. The boys told him no.

  Yet one day, Ralph Welch’s cousin, Raymond Fowler, was over when Billy was making his pitch. Fowler, a high-school dropout, was the stereotypical Seabrooker. He was a tough kid, inarticulate, and considered less than brilliant by most people who knew him. “He’s slow,” said one individual who had dealt with him. “Very slow.”

  Flynn had asked him about finding a gun. Ramey, as the kids called Fowler, replied that he thought there was one somewhere around his house. His late father had been a Seabrook cop and had owned a .357 Magnum handgun.

  Although he was from the neighborhood, eighteen-year-old Ramey did not usually hang out with Billy, Pete, and JR. He had just gotten out of the Rockingham County Jail in January after doing four months on charges of receiving stolen property and conspiracy to receive stolen property. Besides that, he had a long laundry list of minor run-ins with the law, mostly motor vehicle offenses.

  Fowler, Billy would later testify, took an interest in the proposition. It would be an easy break-in since Pam was in on it, and Ramey could take anything he wanted—the stereo system, television, video-cassette recorder, jewelry—anything at all. It was also understood that Pam would pay him a thousand dollars, Fowler later told a friend, according to court records.

  Fowler was in, but he said he wanted to take care of the actual burglary and the murder by himself. Since Billy was romantically involved with Pam, he would be the first person the cops looked into. All he wanted Flynn to do, Ramey said, was lead him to the condo in Derry and be a lookout.

  Given Fowler’s criminal history of theft and other small-time capers, with virtually no propensity for violence, it is probable that Ramey was more interested in the burglary than the murder. (One court affidavit says that Fowler
told Lattime at one point that “he would not kill Smart, but he did not care of Flynn did it, he just wanted the stereo.”) Although it is impossible to be certain, Fowler might well have been thinking only of rounding up the goods and ignoring the matter of Greg altogether.

  Still, he and Flynn began searching for a weapon, digging around in the Fowler attic and cellar for the old man’s Ruger pistol. Nothing. As it turned out, the gun was in safekeeping with an uncle.

  With no firearm, they would eventually go to Plan B. Fowler’s brother had a knife collection. Ramey would bring one of them, Billy testified, and when the time came planned to simply slit Greg’s throat.

  One of the last items on their checklist was a car to make the cross-country haul to Derry. They asked around, but finally Billy told Pam that he and Ramey would accept her offer to use her Honda CRX. For obvious reasons, it had not been their top choice.

  Pam said she would leave it behind the SAU 21 building, the keys in the ignition, and they could take it while she was in her meeting.

  One the day Gregory Smart was marked to die, most likely around the middle of April, one of JR’s friends from school, Johnny Mylo, was driving to the Newington Mall to get tickets for a Motley Crue concert that was coming up in Rhode Island. Billy, Ramey, Pete, JR, and Fowler’s cousin Danny Blake, all piled into Mylo’s car. It was a madcap trip, with a lot of them packed together, cracking jokes, and laughing when Pete took someone up on their dare and dropped his pants, mooning a woman in another car.

  The sky was just darkening when they got back. Ramey told Mylo to drop him and Billy off at SAU 21. Pete and JR knew better, but for Mylo’s and Blake’s benefit, Fowler said that he and Flynn were helping Pam with a school project.

  When Flynn and Fowler got out of the car behind the building, Billy could hear voices from upstairs. It sounded as if Pam’s meeting was underway.