Cecelia was at her friend Robby Fields’ on the Thursday night after the boys were charged when she heard on the news that a girl might soon be arrested in the Smart homicide.
The teenager could take it no longer. Cecelia started crying hysterically, murmuring, “They’re gonna arrest me, they’re gonna arrest me.”
Her friend’s family assured her that she was being ridiculous, remembered Cecelia. “They kept saying, ‘Why would they arrest you? You didn’t have anything to do with it.’ They treated me so innocently that I just couldn’t stand it any longer.
“It’s one thing to know something and have nobody bother you about it, but it’s another thing to know something and have everyone tell you, ‘Oh, you didn’t know anything.’ It makes you feel twice as bad. It makes you feel twice as guilty.”
So Cecelia went home.
“Mom,” she said, “can I talk to you in my bedroom?”
Her mother was busy. “In a minute, Crit,” Mrs. Eaton said. “Wait a minute.”
“Mom, I want to talk to you now!”
The two went into the girl’s bedroom and sat down. Cecelia was crying. “Mom, Bill and Pam were having an affair,” she said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said her mother, as if it was the craziest thing she ever heard.
“No, they were.”
“How do you know that?” asked Mrs. Eaton.
“Well, because when I stayed there that week with Pam, Bill stayed there, too. Billy and Pam were upstairs in Pam’s bedroom and they were, well, doing it. I walked in on them, so I know.”
“Oh, great,” said Mrs. Eaton, as the magnitude of her daughter’s remarks began to dawn on her. “Do you know any more than that?”
“Yeah, Mom. A lot more.”
Around ten o’clock, Mrs. Eaton called the Derry police, who in turn reached Loring Jackson at home. When the captain and Mrs. Eaton finally made contact, Cecelia’s mother said that this was something that probably should not wait. They agreed to meet on neutral ground in Haverhill.
Mrs. Eaton, Cecelia, and an aunt of Cecelia’s who was visiting, got in the family car and headed into the night for Massachusetts. Throughout the drive, Mrs. Eaton’s imagination was running wild. She thought that someone was going to kill them before Cecelia managed to tell her story.
“We got in the car and there was a car that had come right behind us and followed us all the way,” said Mrs. Eaton. “I was petrified. I was scared to death. And Cecelia kept laughing at me.”
In Haverhill, they met with Jackson and Sergeant Byron at a Friendly’s restaurant. Cecelia’s mother and aunt sat in one booth, while the cops sat with the teenager in another. Wearing a Winnacunnet High School sweatshirt and sipping a cola, Cecelia began to fill in the details of what the detectives had already suspected, that Pam had pulled the strings that led to her husband’s death.
They drove to the Derry Police Department, with Mrs. Eaton following the cops, and in the early morning Cecelia gave a half-hour videotaped statement to Byron. When Pelletier, whom Cecelia had referred to as the “cute one” earlier in the evening, showed up to run the camera, Cecelia perked up.
Between her lack of sleep in recent days and the late hour, Cecelia was extremely tired. Still, she revealed a gold mine of information, from how she first met Pam to having heard Pam and Billy plotting the murder. She even told the cops about how Pam tried to teach her to successfully lie on a polygraph test by recasting the questions in her mind so that her answers would be true.
Around the same time, Jackson got on the telephone, awakening Bill Lyons of the attorney general’s office at home.
As a law school student at the University of Maine, Lyons had spent his summers as a special police officer in the resort community of Laconia, New Hampshire, worked his way through law school, and eventually climbed to senior assistant attorney general for the criminal division. He was just now starting to catch up on his sleep after the siege of Seabrook earlier in the week.
Jackson had been calling Lyons late at night throughout the course of the investigation and now he was back at it, apprising the prosecutor of the recent breakthrough. The captain also wanted to know about the possibilities of state approval for tape-recording some telephone conversations between the newly cooperative Cecelia and one Pamela Smart.
Lyons, who knew the case inside out, said sure. He figured that could be arranged.
When the cops spoke to Cecelia about trying to have Smart incriminate herself over the telephone, the teenager insisted it would never work. Pam was already convinced that her telephones at home and at SAU 21 were being monitored. Smart had even mentioned to the girl that she wondered whether her condo was bugged.
All the same, the detectives figured it was worth a shot.
It was Tuesday afternoon, June 19, when Jackson and Pelletier showed up at the Eatons’ apartment ready to conduct what in legalese is known as “a one-party consent telephone tap.”
Despite the serious nature of their mission, the detectives carried some uninspiring equipment, namely two inexpensive Panasonic microcassette recorders and a cheap tapping device that was attached to the outside of the telephone receiver with a suction cup. They also brought along an earplug that hooked up to the recorder, so one of the detectives could monitor the call.
The Derry PD’s budget was tight, but was it so sparse that they could not afford something better than a dime store taping device? To use such equipment in a major homicide investigation—in which detectives might only get one chance—carried the potential for disaster. Nine times out of ten, no doubt, such hardware would suffice. The danger is that Murphy’s Law will eventually kick in.
And on June 19 kick in it did.
The plan was for Cecelia to call Pam at work. The girl was to tell her that the Derry police were on their way over to the Eatons’ place with more questions and that she was tired of lying. She was to try to get Pam talking freely.
But first they had to be able to hear Smart.
The problem started with the telephone itself. The Eatons had a Princess phone with a thick plastic housing which was difficult to record through. The family rummaged around and came up with one of their old telephones, which was not much better.
Then, the detectives noticed a strong hum on the line. So Jackson called the Seabrook police to see if they had a phone that might work better. With time ticking toward the end of Pam’s workday, Jackson left for the Seabrook police station and returned with a phone, hooked it up, and found that the noise was still there.
Finally, they decided to go ahead and make the call—line disturbance and all. They would try to have the excess noise filtered out later.
At five minutes before three, Cecelia, her mother, Jackson, and Pelletier huddled around the kitchen table. Cecelia manned the phone. Pelletier listened in. And both detectives scribbled messages on a sheet of notepaper, comments and questions for the girl to raise with Smart.
From the first few seconds Pam was on the phone, though, she obviously was worried about a phone tap.
PIERCE: Hi. What are you doing?
SMART: Ordering all of the stuff for next year.
PIERCE: Oh? Listen. The Derry Police Department called me from the car phone. They’re on their way here now to question me again.
SMART: Why?
PIERCE: They said they had more questions for me. Can you hear me?
SMART: Yeah.
PIERCE; I don’t know what to do.
SMART: Answer the questions.
PIERCE: What if they ask me again about you and Bill having an affair? Do you still want me to deny it?
SMART: Well, we weren’t.
PIERCE: What?
SMART: We weren’t.
PIERCE: What?
SMART: We weren’t.
PIERCE: No?
Cecelia poked around, looking for a soft spot, but Pam was not about to discuss her affair with Billy Flynn, the murder, or make any overt remarks suggesting that Cecelia should
lie.
Instead, Pam looked for other ways to insulate the girl from the investigators.
First, Smart said that if the cops started pressuring Cecelia as Jackson had earlier, she should refuse to answer any more questions unless her mother was present.
Then, in the unlikely event that the investigators wanted Cecelia to take a lie detector test, Pam told the girl that she should refuse until she hired a lawyer, who in turn would recommend against taking one. “They’re gonna try to do everything they can to make you tell the truth,” Smart said.
Jackson and Pelletier, meanwhile, were jotting notes such as, “I don’t know what to say when I’m under oath” and “You should have just divorced him” and sliding the paper over to Cecelia. One by one, the teenager dropped bits of fresh bait. Pam, however, was not biting.
PIERCE: This whole thing is so stupid. I wish you guys could have just got divorced instead, you know.
SMART: You wish that what?
PIERCE: That you guys just got divorced instead. It would have been so easy.
SMART: Well, anyways…all right, uh, I’ll just talk to you later I guess….
PIERCE: Is Patty there or something?
SMART: No, but I don’t know whether my phone is tapped, you know.
Cecelia said that she would call back after the cops left, to fill her in on how the interview went. Then they hung up. The conversation had lasted less than seven and a half minutes. Cecelia had been correct: Pam said little that was useful.
Pelletier had monitored the entire conversation, but Jackson had only heard Cecelia’s end. The captain rewound the tape so he could listen.
Then, the phone rang. Caught with the first recorder unready, the detectives hurriedly connected the listening device to the backup recorder. Pam was calling back.
For whatever reason, Smart now felt more free to talk. It was not the stuff that wraps up a murder investigation, but it was obvious that Pam both overtly and subtly was trying to manipulate Cecelia into maintaining her silence.
Smart began by telling Cecelia how sorry she was that the girl was being inconvenienced, especially by the reporters calling at home. All Cecelia had to do, Smart said, was say “no comment” and they would leave her alone.
It was an ideal segue into what certainly was the true reason behind the call. The police, if Cecelia stuck to her story, would also back off.
SMART: They’ll just leave you alone too. You know what I mean? They’re just doing part of their job and that’s just, you know if…I don’t now what the guys are saying. I doubt, you know, according to Mrs. Flynn, like that no one is confessing, and that they're all sitting around saying they didn’t do it.
So, I mean, I’m sure that the police are saying JR and Bill said that you did it. You know what I mean? Or whatever, you know, and trying to get everybody to confess. But that has nothing to do with you. You’re not on trial. You know what I mean?
PIERCE: Yeah.
SMART: They’re on trial, and that’s it. And so you just, you know, answer the questions and that’s it. They’re gonna try and get you to talk and to confess and you know they’re gonna say, “We know you know” and all that, you know, try and make you nervous. But all you have to do is just maintain the same story.
They went on for a bit about the television report Cecelia had seen that said a girl was soon to be arrested. The teenager said it was frightening, but Pam reassured her. The police had arrested Billy, Pete, and JR almost immediately after learning of their role in the murder, Smart said, and now days had passed since Cecelia had heard the impending arrest story.
PIERCE: Well, obviously Bill and them must—must not be saying anything or we would have been arrested already.
SMART: We, well, I don’t know what they're saying.
PIERCE: Yeah.
SMART: That’s the thing. If they're saying that we knew, then the police can’t bust us because we’re saying that we didn’t know, and that’s it. You know what I mean?
PIERCE: Yeah.
SMART: You can’t have proof of somebody, of someone knowing.
PIERCE: That’s right.
SMART: And that’s it, you know.
PIERCE: It’s all in our minds.
SMART: But what’s gonna happen is people start changing stories and getting nervous….
PIERCE: I know. I’ve heard every possible rumor there is.
SMART: Right. So have I. So that’s it. I mean, that’s ridiculous. Why would I, why would a twenty-two-year-old woman like me be having an affair with a sixteen-year-old high school student? That’s just ridiculous and people will not believe that.
Finally, they said good-bye. Lasting six minutes and twenty-five seconds, the second call, like the first, hinted of Pam’s role in the murder but was far from incriminating.
What it showed, however, was why Pam had been so fiercely interested earlier in the week about what evidence the police had on the boys. Physical evidence could be deadly, but Pam knew that the police could not make much of a case against her based on hearsay and accusations by teenagers who were facing first-degree murder charges.
Proof was going to be necessary, Pam said. Proof that she was in on the murder. Proof that she was having an affair.
She was, of course, correct.
Just before four o’clock, Cecelia called Pam at her condo to try one last time. Now she told Pam that the cops had left. The only new subject raised was the love letter that Jenny Charles had found in Flynn’s denim jacket months earlier. Apparently, Cecelia said, the cops had learned of it.
Of the three tape-recorded conversations that day, the final one, about fifteen minutes long, was the least audible. Months later, it would be ruled inadmissible in court.
Not that it much mattered. When Jackson and Pelletier left for Derry at the end of the day, it was obvious that they were going to have to do better.
And sound quality was not their biggest problem. Content was.
◆◆◆
In the days that followed the arrests of Billy, Pete, and JR, Pamela Smart walked on the high wire.
She was trying to maintain her image as the grieving widow. The act, however, could not be pushed too far. It would be unwise, for example, if Pam publicly lashed out at the boys, as might be expected from the wife of the dead man. The mere suggestion that she had abandoned them could set off a confession or a series of confessions that could land her in a cell.
At the same time, Smart wanted to defuse the crisis. She wanted to let the boys know that she had not forsaken them. Furthermore, she wanted to get the heat off their backs. After all, mere teenagers could not be expected to forever remain “stand-up guys,” the Mafia’s term for those who remain silent until death.
As a result, people started noticing some peculiar behavior from Pam. For one, she was telling friends and others that she wished she could visit the boys, saying that since she knew these kids she felt bad over their being in jail. Some people were bewildered: She wants to visit her husband’s murderers?
Later, Smart would anonymously main Elaine Flynn a cassette tape of heavy metal songs that Billy had put together for Pam. (One of those tunes, reportedly, was Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.”) Pamela included a note on a sheet of lined yellow paper. “Please give this to Bill,” it read. “When he listens to it, I want him to know that his true friends think of him all the time.”
But one of Pam’s more brazen acts was when Dan Pelletier and Barry Charewicz came to interview her at her parents’ home the day after the telephone taps.
The detectives had come, tape recorder in hand, ostensibly to ask about the boys. Since Pam knew the kids, they said, perhaps she could help the detectives as they gathered information for the upcoming hearings to get the kids certified as adults.
A better bet was that this was a shake-up interview in which the cops came to get a firsthand look at Smart’s reaction to the mounting pressure.
Pam did not let them down. Desperate, Smart tried to turn the tide of
the entire investigation.
First, she spoke of the boys, trying to convince the detectives that they had arrested the wrong people. It was undoubtedly a hard product to sell, since Pam really knew very little about what the cops knew.
“As far as I’m concerned, I’m just gonna tell the truth, no matter what, OK?” said Pam.
“Yeah,” said Pelletier.
“And the truth is that I don’t think these kids did this. That is really my truth. That’s my honest, my God’s honest truth.”
Next, she would steer the conversation toward Cecelia, who was the only other person outside of the boys with firsthand knowledge of the day-to-day planning of the murder.
“The only concern I really have honestly is I don’t know if I agree with how Cecelia, poor Cecelia, is being treated in all this,” she said. “I really don’t know that I agree with that. I mean, Cecelia I highly doubt has anything to do with anything about this. She’s not even friends with those guys as far, with the exception of knowing them in school. I mean, she never went out on the weekends or…”
“Yeah,” said Pelletier.
“…anything like that. And I mean, this is way too hardcore for someone like her to be involved with, I think. And she keeps feeling like she, like she’s being, you know…I haven’t talked to her a lot, but I’ve talked to her a couple times and she’s, you know, being accused of all these things that she doesn’t know, and now her parents are like, well, maybe you shouldn’t talk to Pam, you know, until this is over, and all that. And I kinda, you know, I kinda resent that because, I mean, she’s my intern.”
It was almost as if Pam could not stop herself from talking. She was trying to manipulate the detectives’ thinking in the case, but what she really was doing was revealing how scared she was herself.
Wary that her remarks on the telephone the day before may have been monitored, Pam began echoing those comments, trying to cast them in the light of her supposed innocence. At the same time, she tried to convince the cops to back off from Cecelia.
Teach Me to Kill Page 23
