Teach Me to Kill

by Stephen Sawicki

  After the murder, it did not take Pamela Smart very long to reestablish her ties with Billy Flynn, her teenage coterie, and the seacoast.

  Her initial contact with the kids was at the wake. Barbara Kinsman had suggested that Billy, JR, and Cecelia come with her to the funeral home to pay their respects. None of them thought it would look good to refuse.

  Billy and JR had knelt beside Greg’s coffin and later, according to Cecelia, both commented on what a good job the mortician had done on Greg. The dead man showed hardly a trace of having taken a bullet in the skull.

  Pam was flabbergasted when the kids walked through the funeral home door, but she greeted them with great animation. Like any of the mourners, the teenagers told Pam how sorry they were and moved quietly away. “Then afterwards she came up to me and JR,” Billy Flynn recalled, “and she said, ‘I can’t believe you guys came to the wake.’ When we walked in the door, I think she said she was shitting bricks.”

  The kids stayed only ten or fifteen minutes. Pam took Cecelia aside and told her that while she was happy to see her, the situation was causing Pam great discomfort. “Tell Mrs. Kinsman that you’re ready to leave,” Pam said.

  Kinsman drove the teenagers back to her own house in Hampton Falls. The guidance counselor was going to the theater in Boston that night and had told the kids that she would not have time to drive them home. But she gave them sodas and said they could stay at her place for a bit with her father, until JR’s aunt and uncle picked them up.

  The teens were in the backyard when JR stepped inside to get something in the kitchen.

  “Billy, what happened?” Cecelia said, all but certain that the boys had killed Pam’s husband but needing to hear it firsthand.

  “Ah, Greg was an asshole,” Flynn replied. “He didn’t even care about Pam. All he cared about was his dog. He was saying, ‘Where’s my dog, where’s my dog….’” Lattime started to come back out and Billy stopped. “I don’t want to talk about it in front of JR,” Flynn said.

  About a week later, Pam was at the seacoast herself, checking in at SAU 21 and dropping by the lockers at Winnacunnet High School to assure Billy and JR that all was going according to plan.

  She told the boys, first of all, that the police were chasing leads far off track. The cops, she said, thought that Greg had either interrupted a burglary or that it had been a professional hit.

  It was also likely that she would be living nearby soon, Pam said. Her friends were encouraging her to move out of the condo in Derry, and Pam was already telling everyone that it was important for her to carry on in the wake of the tragedy. Before the month was out, she found a place in the Seabury Condominiums in Hampton, just across the athletic fields from Winnacunnet High School.

  Around the same time that the Derry police began looking in Seabrook, Pam returned to work full time. She was soon back into her routine with Billy, seeing him daily and keeping him informed of anything she had learned about the investigation before the cops cut her off, such as the lead in New Jersey.

  At one point, Pam happily told the boy that Greg had carried more insurance than she’d anticipated. In mid-May, Pam received $90,000 from a group life insurance plan that Greg had at work. She was due to get another $50,000 from a personal policy her husband had purchased.

  Billy never told Pam the details of the murder. She said she would rather not know, and Billy preferred not to tell her. Still, Pam did talk about how on the night of the killing, she simply could not bring herself to weep. Instead, she told Billy, all she could think was to repeatedly ask for her dog, Haylen.

  Pam also discussed what she knew of the murder with Cecelia: Smart described coming home and finding Greg. She spoke of the fingerprint dust ruining her furniture. And how she could not believe that Billy had so stupidly dropped a glove.

  For Cecelia’s birthday, not long after Charewicz’s visit to her and his questions about the girl to Pamela, Smart took Cecelia to the Fox Run Mall in Newington for a bit of a shopping spree. What was important now for Pam was to keep the girl as an ally.

  “Pam had everything,” said Cecelia, “and now she wanted to buy me everything. That’s what it seemed like.”

  Smart told Cecelia to pick anything she wanted and that Pam would get it for her. Underscoring their differences in upbringing and age, Pam suggested an eighty-dollar crystal item, but Cecelia preferred a pair of sneakers—her old ones had gotten ratty—and a Bart Simpson T-shirt that read “Where the hell’s the party, man?”

  A few days later, Pam had Cecelia stay with her at her parents’ home in Windham and then spend a day at a nearby amusement park, Canobie Lake Park. And there, less than a month after Greg’s death, Pam and Cecelia would have their picture taken, happily smiling into the camera.

  Pam was making little secret of her friendships with the teenagers. Even old friends who knew Greg, like Terri Schnell, Sonia Simon, and Tracy Collins, were aware of Pam’s spending time with the teens after Greg’s death. To them, it seemed that Pam was simply trying to help kids who were less fortunate. None of them knew about her affair with Billy.

  “I could see that they were close,” remembered Sonia Simon, “but I thought it was because she was dealing with them with this awareness program. I thought that maybe she felt a need to be there for them, like they looked up to her.”

  On a number of occasions, in fact, these friends would even join Pam on outings with Billy and JR or Cecelia. Terri Schnell wondered at one point if the school didn’t mind Smart spending so much time with the students, but then let it go.

  Toward the end of May, Pam had made up her mind to rid herself of Greg’s truck. She would simply let it be repossessed. But first she wanted the stereo removed. And to save money, she accepted Billy’s offer to do it for free.

  By now, Pam seemed less concerned about who saw her with the kids, almost in defiance of common sense. The degree to which she was socializing with high schoolers in itself was inappropriate, not to mention somewhat strange. But then there was the fact that she seemed to have shed her widow’s weeds rather quickly, especially considering that no one still seemed to know the reasons behind Greg’s death.

  At the end of May, Pam drove the pickup to JR’s house, where amid a crowd of kids—Billy, JR, Pete, Ralph, and their girlfriends—JR removed the stereo system. He took an instant shine to Greg’s dark gray Kenwood speakers and came out and asked if he could have them.

  Pam said no, but JR pressed on, saying he was willing to have two hundred and fifty dollars dropped from his expected five-hundred-dollar payoff for the killing. Still Pam refused, claiming that it would be too difficult to explain to her friends why she gave the expensive speakers to some kid she knew at Winnacunnet. Anyway, the speakers were going to go in the new car she wanted to buy with her insurance windfall.

  That day, Pam drove Billy, Pete, JR, and his girlfriend to Dreher-Holloway, the Exeter, New Hampshire auto dealership where JR’s mother worked, to look at cars, one of numerous trips that Pam would make to price Trans-Ams and Camaros.

  They were waiting in the showroom for a salesman to help when Pam noticed a barrel of lollipops that the dealership keeps for customers. With Pete Randall standing nearby, she turned to Billy and ordered, “Go get me a lollipop.”

  Flynn was not sure whether Pam was putting on a bossy show in front of Randall or if she truly wanted the candy, but it still came down to the same thing—she was trying to embarrass him in front of Pete. So Billy ignored her.

  “Fine, be that way,” Pam said, not seeming too concerned.

  When they were through looking at cars, Pam drove the kids back to Lattime’s, then went with Billy to park down at a secluded spot at a nearby marsh. Before Billy knew it, Pam started in on him about his refusal to get her the lollipop.

  “You don’t love me,” she said. “If you did, you would have gotten that for me.”

  “Well, to me it looked like you were just trying to be sarcastic,” Billy answered.

  They argue
d about it for a while, with Billy finally displaying a modicum of self-respect and not backing down. Pam, furious, drove him back to JR’s. Billy started down the driveway when she beeped her car horn, signaling for him to return.

  “So I went back up there,” Flynn recalled, “and she said, ‘I was this close to going, taking back my first and last month’s rent at the condo and just not move down here anymore and that would be it between us,’ like that. And she asked me if that’s what I wanted. And I said no. And I apologized for not getting her a lollipop.”

  Not long after that, in the beginning of June, Pam did settle into her rented Hampton condominium, beautifully adorned with furniture from her place in Derry. She also had new pieces to replace those damaged by fingerprint dust, which of course had been covered by Metropolitan Life. And true to her word, Pam would have Billy drop by to see her, as well as Pete and JR now and then, and many of her old friends like Terri Schnell and Tracy Collins.

  JR, meanwhile, through Billy, kept up the pressure for Greg’s speakers. Pam had yet to pay the boys for the murder and Lattime wanted the equipment more than the cash. Again JR made the offer to have the payment for his part in the slaying lowered by half in exchange for the Kenwoods. He was hoping to get a job soon, he told Billy. All Pam had to tell her friends, he said, was that JR was buying them.

  Pam’s resistance began to waver. But before giving in, she made sure her tracks were covered. One day, Pam took Tracy Collins on a special trip to price similar speakers, thereby making it clear that the sale to JR was imminent.

  Finally, Pam and Billy drove over to JR’s house in the CRX and gave him the speakers. JR brought them into his room, where he had his own unique sound system—a car stereo hooked up to a car battery connected to a battery charger plugged into an electrical outlet. Now Lattime added the finishing touch: a dead man’s truck speakers. Something in it seemed ideal for JR, the mechanically minded lover of Edgar Allan Poe.

  ◆◆◆

  With investigators saying next to nothing for the record, reporters were finding little to tell about the death of Greg Smart. On June 6, around midday, WMUR’s Bill Spencer and a cameraman came to Hampton for a prearranged interview with Pam, their third meeting.

  On the phone, Spencer had convinced her to grant the interview by saying that it was important to keep the murder in the news. It would maintain pressure on the police, he said, and might lead to potential witnesses to come forward.

  Upon entering the two-story condo, Spencer said, he was surprised to see no reminders of Pam’s husband. “I just found it funny that she had this gorgeous place and there’s not one picture of Greg,” said the newsman. “Usually when you go into somebody’s house who’s just lost a loved one, they might even have a tribute up, like flowers or candles. Here, there was nothing.”

  On the news that evening, WMUR’s report began with Pam, dressed in a pink pullover and jeans, talking about the aftermath of her husband’s killing.

  “It’s just frustrating because there’s so many unanswered questions,” she said. “And there’s so much speculation.”

  Spencer then intoned, in voiceover: “More than a month after her newlywed husband, Gregory, was gunned down just inside the front door of his Derry condominium, Pamela Smart is frustrated. Police have yet to make an arrest in connection with the killing.”

  Pam continued: “I’ve been told just that they are interviewing people and that it’s a process of elimination. They do have to explore all kinds of different avenues. They have had some leads. A lot of them have turned up to be, turned out to be dead ends.”

  Spencer then said: “Along with the frustration, Pamela has also felt fear. After all, the killer is still out there. She worries it could happen to someone else.”

  “Am I afraid that somebody else might go through something like this at the hands of the same person?” said Pam. “Yes, I do. I do think about that sometimes. I would never wish anything like this upon anyone.”

  Spencer closed his report on an ominous note: “And as far as the Derry police investigation goes, Pamela says the detectives in this department have made her husband’s murder case their number-one priority.

  “She says though they’ve been sensitive, they have not let anyone off the list of potential suspects. That includes friends of Greg Smart’s, people he worked with, even Pamela herself.”

  ◆◆◆

  Diane and Vance Lattime had seen a spark of something in their son’s friend Ralph Welch.

  The boy had lived with his family in what was little more than a shack, a place with automobile parts strewn around out front, a house or two away from the Lattimes, on the opposite side of Upper Collins Street.

  The Welch family was poor, with a gaggle of kids and even some of their children’s children living under the roof of the same little dwelling. Ralph’s father picked up what work was available, sometimes fishing, sometimes working in the junk business. His mother was a factory hand.

  As he grew up, Ralph started to spend more and more time over at the Lattimes’ house. There was, of course, his friend JR. Also, Vance and Diane had hot running water and Ralph liked to use their shower. He was also attracted to the sense of family that was evident at the Lattimes’.

  Like most people who met Ralph, Diane and Vance saw a likable kid. Welch, rawboned, with a face that is best described as a mug—the kind that would fit in among the Bowery Boys—was rough around the edges, to be sure. At the same time, he could be friendly and respectful. Ralph had potential, perhaps not to set the world on fire, but certainly to go beyond the physical blight of his upbringing.

  Before long, Welch was spending most of his time at the Lattime house, so Diane worked out a deal. She told Ralph he could live with them if he returned to high school, from which he had dropped out.

  Ralph agreed and in the process found himself with a second family. Vance and Diane treated him like a son. He had a place at the dinner table. And for the first time in his life, Ralph enjoyed a traditional family Christmas, becoming an integral part of the Lattimes’ annual hunt for what became known as the “elusive perfect Christmas tree.”

  For Ralph, it had not been a bad trade, considering that all that was expected of him was to go back to Winnacunnet, which he basically liked anyway.

  Welch, of course, had his moments. In school one time he raised a few eyebrows when after an argument with his girlfriend he heaved a desk across the room. He had also come along on a number of car radio rip-offs with Pete, JR, and Billy, and had, in fact, plotted a storage warehouse break-in that proved rather fruitful.

  Ralph Welch was a realist. Maybe it was because he knew true poverty, but Welch tended to view the world in terms of the concrete. He wasn’t a kid who complained about his lot in life. Nor was he a dreamer like Billy. Ralph, for example, thought that running a junkyard might not be a bad future.

  Welch knew Billy was involved with Pam Smart. Flynn had told him as much, but Ralph had also seen the good-bye kisses at the top of JR’s driveway. And once, a week or so before Greg Smart was killed, he had seen Billy coming out of the Lattimes’ house joking around and saying, “We’re gonna go do Greg.” He even heard that Pam Smart’s husband had been murdered, but dismissed any possibility that Billy or his friends were involved.

  That is, Welch would later testify, until the afternoon of Saturday, June 9.

  Ralph was working on his car in the Lattimes’ driveway when Danny Blake, a cousin of both Raymond Fowler and Ralph, wheeled up on his bicycle. “Man, if I was Bill Flynn, I’d punch Raymond’s face in,” said Blake.

  “How come?” asked Ralph.

  “Raymond’s been going around shooting his mouth off about killing that guy.”

  Danny Blake was a Seabrook hang-around, a swarthy twenty-year old high school dropout who ran with an older crowd but who spent a fair share of time in and out of the Lattimes’ place, mainly to visit Ralph.

  As far back as April, Blake had heard Raymond Fowler rambling on about t
his supposed murder for hire for Bill Flynn’s girlfriend. About a week after the failed attempt, Blake said Ramey had said something about a plan to murder someone, but Danny had written it off to Raymond’s tendency to try to make himself sound like a tough guy.

  Then, in early May, Fowler had spoken to Blake about how Billy, Pete, JR, and he had driven to Derry and actually murdered Pam’s husband. Blake said he again thought Raymond was lying.

  “Raymond’s the type who will tell you stories,” said Blake. “He tells stories that aren’t true. He’ll tell you one thing and do the opposite. He exaggerates.”

  Again, Blake ignored him.

  Yet toward the end of the month, Blake heard a news report that mentioned the murder of Greg Smart. Around Memorial Day, he asked Fowler about it again. Raymond repeated the story, saying that Billy and Pete had gone inside and killed Smart.

  Blake, not wanting to get involved in a police investigation, said he elected to keep the information to himself.

  By June, Fowler had left town, perhaps to put some distance between himself and the boys should the heat eventually come down, moving in with relatives just over the Maine border. In the meantime, though, he had already talked to a number of people about the murder. Word was leaking out.

  Now, the story reached Ralph Welch. Somehow, Ralph thought, Blake’s words had a ring of truth to them, but the only way to know for certain was to ask his buddies.

  So that evening, after JR’s parents and the baby, Ryan, had gone to sleep, Ralph came home to find JR and Pete in the bedroom. It was close to 11:30 and the two had just returned from being at the movies with Pam Smart and Billy.

  Welch went in and asked the boys about what Blake had said. Was it true? Were they involved in the murder? Pete and JR were incredulous. They would never have something to do with anything like that, they said. No way.

  Ralph said OK, that was all he wanted to hear, and stepped out, closing the door behind him. He walked away, then crept back and listened at the door.