What is generally agreed upon, though, is that when the shot was fired, it did not take long for the boys to bolt for the back door. Billy went first, with Randall grabbing the black pillowcase from the floor, and following at full tilt. They catapulted over the back porch railing and broke for the field and the shopping plaza.
Billy gripped the gun as he ran. Pete sprinted with the knife in one hand and the pillowcase in the other.
Suddenly, they saw headlights. The original plan was for Flynn and Randall to change back to their street clothes and then meet JR and Fowler in the front of the plaza. JR was then to drive back to wherever they had left the stolen stereo equipment to be picked up.
Now, however, there was JR and Fowler, cruising along behind the shopping center in the Impala, on a second trip to see if Greg had come home.
Fowler had, in fact, seen Smart’s truck, and they were going back so he could point it out to JR when he saw the dark outlines of his friends in the field and told JR to stop.
Flynn and Randall sprinted through the grass toward the car. Then Billy went down. His legs had been churning too fast for the terrain. Pete passed him and as he ran he hurled the knife into the turf at the top of the hill. He just wanted to be rid of it. Seconds later, just before he reached the car, Randall also fell, face first.
Finally, they scampered into the back seat.
“Go! Go! Go!” Pete yelled.
Lattime and Fowler all but yawned. “Why?” said Lattime. “What are you talking about? Did you do it?”
“We did it!” said Pete. “We killed him!”
“Sure, sure,” said JR, not moving the car an inch. He assumed it was all a big put-on.
“Go!” Billy screamed. Something unmistakably real and scared was in his voice. “We did it!”
JR realized it was true. He followed Pete’s instructions and drove to the dumpsters. Randall got out and grabbed the duffel bag.
Then JR pulled out onto the street to head home and noticed that the Derry police station was right around the corner from the plaza.
Lattime could not believe it. “Why didn’t you tell us the police station was right there?” he snapped at Billy.
They got on the backroads toward Seabrook, the car filled with excitement, fear, and paranoia.
A truck happened to be taking the same circuitous route as JR. When Lattime turned, the highlights behind him followed along. They worried that someone was trailing them.
“I can’t believe I killed a guy,” said Flynn. “Feel the gun. It’s still hot.”
“You almost blew my hand off!” said Randall.
They changed clothes in the back seat, throwing some out as they went, and getting rid of the rest and the duffel bag in the woods when JR stopped to urinate. It was in the car on the way home that Flynn realized something was missing. He had lost one of the gloves.
They finally found their way back near the seacoast, on Death Highway, around where Route 51 and Route 101 come together. Pam would later tell Billy that she had seen their car on the road as she was going home from Hampton and had even flicked her lights in greeting.
Randall and Flynn, though, were too shaken up by the whole affair to even know where they were. The car was filled with tension. So Lattime and Fowler thought they would take the edge off. They started singing one of the old songs they had heard on the radio while they were sitting around the Hood Commons parking lot—“Shoofly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy.”
Billy Flynn could not help but smile at the song, which among other things credits “shoofly pie and apple pan dowdy” with making “your eyes light up, your tummy say ‘Howdy.’”
Randall, however, was only irritated by the tune. He repeatedly told his friends to stop singing.
Months later, in court, much would be made of the boys’ behavior in the hour or so after the killing; JR Lattime would say that since he did not know Greg Smart, the murder wasn’t particularly bothersome. As he drove home to Seabrook, his main concern was getting away. Pete Randall would recall how Billy spoke excitedly about “the power” he felt in committing the murder, almost as if he was in awe of his own destructive capabilities. Flynn, in the meantime, would say that he remembered little of the ride home, and insisted it was dubious that he would be boasting or laughing about the crime.
The Impala rolled into Seabrook. JR parked in front of Fowler’s house. The four youths went down to Ramey’s room in the basement, emptied out the bag and poked around through what was mostly worthless costume jewelry, and listened as Pete and Billy recounted what happened inside. Fowler, JR would later say, was given the CDs.
They got back in the car. JR dropped off Pete, who had the bag, at his parents’ place. When Pete walked in, his mother, Patricia Randall, asked what was with the bag. It was from a break-in, said the boy. When he mother started to become angry, Pete told her not to worry, that it hadn’t been his idea.
JR went next to Billy’s, where Flynn emptied the gun, took the remaining bullets for disposal and handed the weapon over to Lattime and Fowler.
JR drove Ramey home and asked if he could clean the revolver tomorrow while the boys were at school. JR wanted to return it to his father’s drawer in good shape. Then Lattime went home himself, left the murder weapon in the camper for Ramey, and went to bed.
The next morning, JR, Pete, and Billy went to school, thinking that it would seem less suspicious if their lives proceeded as normal. Randall had been up late after the killing because he and Fowler had gotten together after everyone was dropped off; they walked down to Hampton Beach to try to trade some of the stolen gold chains for cocaine. Pete’s connection had not been around, though, and now the boys were planning to make an after-school trip to Haverhill to see what their contacts there would pay for the jewelry.
It was about quarter after seven that morning, at their lockers, that Billy and JR saw Sal Parks. Billy’s friend lived in North Hampton. Parks’ father, ironically, had been a Derry cop before he and Sal’s mother divorced. For the last month, Flynn had been telling Parks about the plot, even going so far as to bring a bullet to school and tell Sal it was the kind that would end Greg’s life. Moreover, Billy would sketch maps of the condo and its environs for Sal and JR in biology class.
The day of the murder, Billy had told Parks that Greg was going to die that night. As always, Sal had listened, but he also knew Billy. He doubted it would ever happen.
“Well, did you do it?” Sal asked Flynn the morning of May 2.
“Yeah, I did it,” Billy said nervously, but he revealed little more.
Cecelia, in the meantime, was also aware that the murder was to have gone down. Pam, she would say, had told her the morning of May 1. Cecelia and a friend had also dropped by the media center and said hello to Pam just before Smart went into the evening meeting.
Yet as classes got underway at Winnacunnet that Wednesday, Pierce had no idea what had happened. During second period, however, guidance counselor Barbara Kinsman poked her head into Crit’s class and asked to see Cecelia and Karen Crowley. It was an emergency.
Kinsman, fifty-four years old and a guidance counselor for nearly two decades, had been sent as a member of the school’s crisis assistance committee to gather some of the students who had gotten close to Pam through Project Self-Esteem and the orange juice video project.
“What’s going on?” Cecelia asked when they got in the hall. “What’s happened?”
“Cecelia, I’ll tell you in just a minute. We have to get Bill and Vance first.”
Down the corridor they walked until they got to the biology classroom. Kinsman went in.
“Bill, Vance,” she said quietly, “can I speak to you for a moment?”
Kinsman led the students to the group-counseling room in the guidance area.
“There’s been an accident,” Kinsman finally said. “Mrs. Smart’s husband was killed last night.”
“My God, no!” said Cecelia, only partly acting.
JR and Billy, in the meantime,
were behaving so shocked that Cecelia thought they were giving themselves away.
“Do they have any clues?” Billy asked. “Do they know who did it?”
Kinsman did not know much, Cecelia remembered, just that Greg Smart apparently had been struck over the head.
They talked for a while about what they could do for Pam, such as get a sympathy card, and Kinsman told them that they could come to see her anytime if this tragedy was upsetting them.
That day at lunch, Billy Flynn bought Sal Parks a meal with the five dollars he said he took from Greg’s wallet. Before the day was out, he would reveal to Sal almost everything that had happened in the condo. And Parks, stunned that it had happened at all, decided it was best to say nothing to anyone—for fear that he himself was in trouble as much as to protect Billy.
After school that day, JR went to the camper, where he found the revolver had been cleaned. He slipped it back into the holster in his dad’s room.
Before heading to Haverhill to sell the stolen items, the boys decided to run two of the stolen chains and two bracelets through a mixture of bleach and water to test if they were truly gold. A black film rose to the surface. What had looked like the only pieces of jewelry of any value were in reality gold-plated. Junk.
Pete Randall tossed the chains and bracelets off a bridge and into Seabrook’s Blackwater River. Oddly, however, he would keep the black pillowcase and its worthless, yet incriminating, collection of costume jewelry.
Cecelia, meanwhile, went through her day as she always did, but as the hours passed, she kept thinking about Billy and the boys and Pam’s husband. She could not believe it. They had done it. They had actually done it.
At Papa Gino’s after school, Cecelia was finding it hard to keep her mind on waitressing. Cindy Butt came into the backroom to see why she was so upset.
Her friend Pam’s husband had been killed the night before during a break-in, Pierce said. It was just so sad.
Cindy suggested that Cecelia come with her on a pizza delivery when Crit had her break. They could talk more then. Cecelia agreed and later that night she got in Butt’s car to join her.
“Didn’t you tell me about a friend that was planning on having her husband killed?” Cindy asked, thinking back to their conversation during dinner a month or so earlier.
“Oh, shit,” said Cecelia. “I had forgotten that I told you that.”
They talked about it for a while, and when they were through. Cindy Butt thought it was best to not get involved. If Cecelia was telling her, Cindy figured, she probably told other people as well and they would go to the police.
So Butt kept quiet. About two weeks later, though, she had a couple of friends from work, who also happened to live in the same Seabrook apartment complex, by her place for drinks. Cindy told her co-workers that Cecelia knew a woman from Derry who had her husband killed for the insurance money.
Louise Coleman, thirty-nine years old, pregnant and single, who worked as a waitress at Papa Gino’s, was shocked by what she was hearing. Someone, she thought, had to tell the police.
“I left Cindy’s apartment,” Coleman remembered. “I walked across the yard. I went into my apartment, and I made the phone call.”
Coleman did not get all of the facts correct. She told the police that Cecelia attended Greg’s funeral, when the girl in fact only attended the wake. She said Pam had purchased a new car, when in fact she was still looking for one.
But Coleman knew one thing damn straight: “Someone was killed and that bothered me,” she said. “To hear what I had heard, I figured any little bit was gonna help ‘em, because at that point the police didn’t know much of anything.
“Like I told ’em, I says, it’s hearsay; if it helps, it helps; if it don’t, it don’t. But I feel like I did my civic duty.”
Chapter 6
For Dan Pelletier, there was no escaping the Gregory Smart homicide. The investigation was entering its third week, and the detective seemed unable to wrangle a full day off to spend with his wife and new baby daughter.
Pelletier might wake up believing that he need not go in, but inevitably the call would come, and it was back to the Derry Police Department. Robyn Pelletier would roll her eyes in disbelief.
Most of the time, the work was drudgery—leads that went nowhere, interviews that illuminated little, background checks of Pam and Greg that mostly painted a picture of a trouble-free young couple.
Pelletier’s only solace was that he had company. Every available investigator—five detectives and a patrolman who was on a training program in the bureau—was thrown on the case. Only one, who at the time was working undercover drug cases with a regional task force, was kept off.
Generally, investigators seek to break a murder case in the first day and a half. After that, the odds that anyone will be apprehended begin to diminish. Killers can flee the state, even the country. Evidence can be destroyed. Witnesses move on, and the memories of those who remain begin to fade.
Time was marching on. What’s more, all the detectives had other cases in limbo, which could not be left there forever. Pelletier himself had to carve out time to work a few rape cases that had been on his desk when Greg Smart was shot.
At the Summerhill Condominiums, meanwhile, residents began receiving sales calls from security-system installation companies. Some of the neighbors put new locks on their doors. Others placed Louisville Sluggers in strategic locations around their homes. And, a number called the Derry police with concerns about their safety and questions about what was being done to solve this crime.
The residents’ fears were not allayed when Derry Police Chief Edward Garone and New Hampshire Attorney General John Arnold issued a press release that seemed to say that the investigation was at a standstill. The statement asked anyone with information to please come forward. And it refused to rule out the possibility that Smart had indeed interrupted a burglary.
Otherwise, neither the cops nor the AG’s office was commenting to the press, a silence that was worrisome in itself.
In contrast, the widow continued to tell journalists, friends, and family that her husband had surely surprised robbers; she was certain of it.
With no surefire answers, the Derry detectives were all but forced to keep Pamela on their list of possible suspects.
Pam and her family had already been closed out from learning more about the case because Pam had revealed too much to the media. Linda Wojas would call the detectives on her daughters’ behalf, asking for details on the investigation, but came away politely rebuffed.
Now, after the call from Louise Coleman, the Derry cops decided to take a closer look at Pam. Their first stop was Seabrook.
Talking to Cecelia Pierce became a priority. The anonymous phone call, of course, was one reason. But Cecelia had stayed with Pam the week before Greg’s murder, which was interesting in itself. After all, how often do students get that close to teachers and other school officials?
On Monday, May 21, Detective Barry Charewicz, who was lean with close cropped hair, sat down with the teenager at her parents’ rented condo in Seabrook. He came to get fingerprints, which the police were collecting from everyone who was said to have been in the condo prior to Greg’s murder. He also had a few questions.
Cecelia, three days shy of her sixteenth birthday, talked about her friendship with Pam and admitted that she had stayed at the Smarts’ condo while Greg was out of town. She insisted, however, that she knew nothing about the murder, and anyone who said she did was a liar. Charewicz got Cecelia’s prints and returned to Derry.
Before long, however, he was back at the seacoast. With Pelletier having finally taken a vacation, Charewicz picked up the slack, dropping in at Winnacunnet High School and the Seabrook Police Department, seeking anything he could learn about Cecelia Pierce.
Around the same time, Charewicz questioned Pam about Cecelia and her close friend Karen Crowley. Pam maintained that it was incomprehensible for the girls, who Pam regarded as good kids,
to have somehow taken part in Greg’s murder. Anyway, she said, Cecelia still lacked a driver’s license.
Captain Jackson, in the meantime, felt that he needed someone relatively close to Pam to read her moods and keep investigators informed about her activities. His best bet was Greg’s father.
By now, Bill Smart was beginning to have a doubt or two about Pam having been his son’s loving wife. Her behavior the day after the funeral, when she had casually strolled over the towel covering the bloodstain at 4E, Misty Morning Drive, had appalled Bill. He had also been disturbed when Pam brought over Greg’s belongings in plastic garbage bags. Still, Smart and his wife talked to their daughter-in-law regularly.
One day, as it became obvious that Pam needed closer scrutiny, the captain contacted Bill Smart and laid his cards on the table. “Look, I need your help,” Jackson said. “I’m going to take a chance here. Are you willing to help me and keep your mouth shut about it? Even to your wife?”
Bill agreed and Jackson broke the news to him that Pam was the main suspect. What the police needed, he told Greg’s father, was someone to monitor Pam’s behavior and moods, someone to report back what she was saying and asking family members. In short, Jackson wanted to know what Pam’s concerns were about the investigation and when she would be most vulnerable.
“I more or less had to act like an agent of the state,” said Bill Smart.
But it was now June and the investigation was at a crawl. Most of the leads had fizzled out. And now the strongest one—Pam’s relationship with Cecelia—was murky at best.
Toward the end of the first full week of the month, Jackson met with Sergeant Byron to discuss the logistics of a round-the-clock, perhaps week-long, surveillance on Pam in the near future.
They were interested in her schedule, where she went, who she spent time with, even if it was just to eliminate her as a suspect, which by now seemed increasingly unlikely.
Teach Me to Kill Page 18
