“She feels like she’s being accused and that she didn’t do anything,” said Pam. “And that, I mean, for a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old kid, I guess, you know, if you’re accused of something that you didn’t do, I mean, nobody, I mean, even me—I’m twenty-two—I don’t want to be accused of something I didn’t do.
“But for a young person, I would think that would be awful, especially if you see other people getting arrested, you know, that they are, that were around you or whatever. I mean, it’s probably, it would have to be scary I would be think…”
“Uh, huh,” said Pelletier.
“…you know, even if you’re not guilty.”
“Well,” said Pelletier, “she’s just one of probably over a hundred people we’ve talked to since—”
“Right. I’ll tell her that,” interjected Pam.
“Since May first.”
“You know, I say they’re just doing their job and, you know, just answer, just tell ‘em the truth and that’s it. You just answer the questions and whatever. And she says, ‘But I tell them the truth and they tell me they think I’m lying.’ And you know, and I, ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Cecelia, you know, and I can’t control the police. I’m very sorry that this has happened to you.’”
The next day, Pam gave an interview to Nancy West of the Union Leader, who made her pitch to Smart after trailing her car and flashing the headlights to get Pam to pull to the side of the road. The two women sat down that day in Pam’s office at SAU 21.
When West’s story appeared on June 22, it was obvious that Pam had done it again. As in the days after the murder, Smart was back to telling reporters what was going on in the police investigation, saying that the cops had questioned her about the boys’ emotional maturity. West’s page-one article even began with that revelation.
No one can say for certain why Pam kept releasing such information to the press. Some people think that Smart simply was a talker, a compulsive one, who once she got going had trouble stopping. Others contend that she was trying, both after the murder and now after the arrests, to communicate with the boys, filling them in on as much of the investigation as possible and assuring them of her allegiance.
What is certain, though, is that Pam was under intense pressure: It was obvious that she herself was a suspect. She had no one to share her fears with, save Cecelia. And rumors were spreading all over, particularly in Seabrook and in the local journalism community, that Pam had had an affair with Billy Flynn and that she’d paid the boys to kill her husband.
Now and then, the media would ask her about the scuttlebutt. “I hear the rumors, but if anybody prints any of those rumors, then, so help me, I’ll sue the pants off them,” Pam told one reporter.
The Derry News, meanwhile, quoted her as saying, “Those rumors are being spread by fifteen-year-old kids. Those rumors don’t deserve the time of day from me.”
Although the media either stayed away from or finessed the gossip when reporting it, questions were unavoidable. Pam’s and Greg’s friends all wanted to know about her relationship with the kids and how this could have happened. Pam and her father even got into a heated exchange over it. No one knew what to think.
Judy Smart, still numb and confused over the loss of her son, was emotionally twisted and turned by Pam, who would call on the phone and play on Judy’s sympathy.
Several times, Pam had said that she was afraid the police were going to arrest her. “I didn’t think she was guilty of anything,” recalled Judy, “and I’d say, ‘Pam, why are you saying such an awful thing?’ And she would say, ‘I just have an idea. I dream of it at night. I dream that they’re gonna come in and arrest me.’”
Judy, like most people, was baffled by a big question: Why would three teenagers from faraway Seabrook want Greg dead? Night after night, Judy told her husband that she was going to call Pam and straight out ask her daughter-in-law how it could have happened. But Bill Smart convinced her to refrain.
One night, when Judy was home alone, she could hold back no longer. While chatting with Pam on the telephone, Greg’s mother finally came out with it.
“I said, ‘Pam, can you tell me anything about these boys? Did you know them?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I knew them; they were in my orange juice commercial.’
“Then I got mad. I said, ‘Pam, there has to be a reason for these boys to search out Greg, your husband, go into the house, and kill him. There has to be a reason. Do you know anything about it?’ And she said, no.
“But I kept pressuring her and finally she said, ‘Well, I think the boy, Bill Flynn, had a crush on me.’
“So, the next night I called her again and we stated talking about the boys again. I said, ‘What did you have to do with them?’ And she would say, ‘Nothing, nothing; they were just students of mine.’
“I kept after her just awful. Then I got angry and I said, ‘Pam, you’ve got to tell me something. Something’s wrong here. They wouldn’t just go in and kill Greg for no reason.’ Well, now, instead of ‘I think he had a crush on me,’ Pam said, ‘I think he was in love with me.’
“That’s when it finally hit me that this girl had something to do with it.”
At least now the Smarts had a clear-cut focus for their rage. Bill now let Judy in on the police department’s suspicions of Pam. And one day, the Smarts and Bill’s brother and his wife climbed into Bill’s Jaguar and drove to the seacoast.
Even if they could not see the boys who murdered their son, the Smarts at least wanted to view the places where the tragedy had its roots. The family was curious, and they felt that the ride might help them begin to understand the incomprehensible.
First, the Smarts drove to Winnacunnet High School, and gazed at the structure. They then went across the parking lot and looked at SAU 21, where Pam worked.
Next, they drove by Pamela’s condo and decided to see where the boys lived as well. Bill Smart pulled over at a telephone booth near the Hampton police station, where they ripped a page with Flynn’s address from the phone book. Off they went.
Not many Jaguars cruise the streets of South Seabrook, but there was Bill Smart and company slowly rolling down Upper Collins Street and then over toward Billy’s home.
When they found what they thought was Flynn’s house, the Smarts drove by staring, as if it held answers to the questions that had been pounding in their heads for weeks. Then they turned around and slowly cruised by again, speaking in hushed voices.
“Is that it?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“That’s it, that’s it.”
Months later, Bill and Judy Smart would smile about their adventure in Seabrook. “Soon as we got to the end of he road,” remembered Bill Smart, “there was an unmarked police car. They had followed us from the police station. We were a hell of a bunch of detectives.”
Derry’s real detectives, meanwhile, were probably thinking the same about themselves.
After their stunning success in Seabrook, with the arrests of the boys and Cecelia’s decision to come forward, the investigators came back down to earth.
The sound quality of the secret telephone recordings was predictably awful. Pelletier ended up spending a day in Essex, Connecticut with Robert Halvorson, an expert in audio enhancement. Halvorson, who contracts with the FBI and who sixteen years earlier had been called in to help transcribe Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes, filtered out much of the telephone line hum, improved the level of Pam’s voice, and all in all salvaged the tapes.
Meanwhile, the cops learned from Cecelia that Pam had been upset because the boys had dropped a glove while fleeing after the murder. When he heard about that, Paul Lussier, who was with the detectives as part of a training program for patrolmen, said he had found a glove on May 2, during the line search of the field behind the condos. The state police had thrown it away.
It was an embarrassing mistake for everyone. The state police had assumed that the glove came from a nearby dumpster. Indeed, there were medical offices i
n the adjacent professional building and it could have come from there,
The only problem was that a murder had just occurred, the condo appeared to have been burglarized, and other evidence had been found in the immediate vicinity. Even the rawest recruit might think that a glove was worth keeping and analyzing further. If saved, it might even have produced some fingerprints.
But that was past. Now the legwork began on getting the three teenagers certified to stand trial as adults.
The Derry cops headed back to the seacoast to interview teachers and others about the boys.
As matters stood, the kids were being held as juvenile delinquents and their cases would be under the jurisdiction of the Derry District Court. To have their cases transferred to Rockingham County Superior Court, the state would have to convince the lower court judge that this was a special matter.
At least eight criteria would have to be weighed, from the severity of the charges to the maturity of the boys. The process was not a rubber stamp, but at the same time a premeditated murder was not going to be easy for any judge to ignore.
◆◆◆
Less than two weeks after the arrest of the boys, Pamela Smart decided to look for some legal advice.
The police were not outwardly saying it, but it seemed obvious that Pam was a suspect. Linda Wojas, a legal secretary, suggested that her daughter at least talk to an attorney, if only to have one available should worse come to worst. Some lawyer friends recommended Paul Twomey and Mark Sisti.
Any regular reader of New Hampshire newspapers at one point or another most likely has come across the lawyers’ names, often in relation to a murder case or a high-profile rape.
The two men had met years earlier when they both were practicing as New Hampshire public defenders. Together, they manned their office’s newly created homicide unit and for several years worked only indigent murder cases.
Eventually, Twomey went into practice for himself. A few years later, in 1988, Sisti joined him, and their offices in Chichester and Portsmouth would provide work for as many as seven lawyers.
The pair could be hellcats in the courtroom, but they led simple personal lives. Both owned small farms, raising animals such as pigs, sheep, and chickens. Both were family oriented. Twomey was married with two small children; Sisti had three kids from his first marriage and two with his second wife.
They were also renowned in New Hampshire legal circles for their annual Fourth of July pig roast, which attracted hordes of friends and colleagues and their families. And every year the pig would be bestowed with the name of one of their favorite prosecutors.
Forty-one-year old Paul Twomey had a certain unmade-bed quality. As often as not, he would show up in court with is air sticking out and his tie askew.
Paul grew up poor in Worcester, Massachusetts. Still, he got a degree in political science from Yale, where he was something of a stranger in a strange land, and he studied law at the University of Wisconsin, before settling in the Granite State.
Twomey was the more intellectual and naturally likable of the two. Soft-spoken, sometimes to the point of a mumble, Paul had a disarming sense of humor. Once, a county attorney who was running for reelection received a Xeroxed photo of his opponent in the mail. Attached was a note from Twomey. “It said that if we could work out a deal for one of his clients, then he would agree to publicly support my opponent,” recalled the prosecutor with a laugh.
He added: “There’s an expression among trial lawyers: Never bullshit a bullshitter. You see, we’re all bullshitters. Paul understands that. He doesn’t let what happens in court get personal.”
“He’s pleasant to deal with and he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
“Now, Sisti, well, Sisti is a little more cynical.”
At least that was the image that Mark Sisti cultivated. His father was an auto mechanic who later became a mechanical engineer. Growing up, Mark’s family moved often, up and down the East Coast. But Buffalo, New York, was where he considered home.
Thickly built and balding, Sisti, thirty-five, seemed to relish his role as an abrasive rebel. Until recently, he wore his hair in a short ponytail, a look that while in style was more common among his clients than his colleagues.
Sisti was the team’s attack dog, snorting and sneering at the state’s witnesses. Almost invariably, he would rage through proceedings against his clients as if everything were a sham. The charges, the trial, the evidence – all of it was “garbage.”
“Frankly, what amazes me,” said one prosecutor, “is that Sisti gets away with it. He conveys the same attitude across the board, with the judges, his clients, witnesses, everyone. I think he actually intimidates some judges.”
Yet Sisti was more than bluster. What a lot of people failed to recognize, to their later dismay, was how hard he labored. He had worked his way through Canisius College in Buffalo, where he studied pre-nineteenth century literature, and later, Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire. But Sisti’s side jobs did not involve checking books in and out of the college library or baby-sitting freshmen in the dormitories; he was a mechanic at a gas station, an aide in a state mental hospital, and an ironworker.
And so it was in his career. Mark Sisti wasn’t Muhammad Ali; he was Smokin’ Joe Frazier. He was not going to beat you with fancy talk or intellectual arguments. But when he came to work, he came prepared and was ready to pound away.
On this day in June, however, with Pamela Smart seated before him, Paul Twomey decided that his job was to keep his new client from ever having to call upon their courtroom skills.
Pam had explained that she was a victim and that the Derry police were telling her nothing about the investigation of her husband’s death. She mentioned that she and Cecelia had been pulled over near Hampton Beach. She did not know what to think.
Twomey had a pretty good guess what was going on. It did not take long to make a phone call to Bill Lyons of the attorney general’s office and to follow up with a letter. Twomey told Lyons that Pam Smart was now represented by counsel. All contact with her from now on should be through him.
Pam, in the meantime, told Bill and Judy Smart that she hired the attorneys in case she decided to sue some of the local newspapers for libel. A number of them, but particularly the Derry News, were hinting in print that she might be involved in her husband’s death, and she was not going to stand for it.
Indeed, Pam had mentioned the possibility of a libel suit that day when she spoke with Twomey.
The truth of the matter, though, was that neither of the lawyers took on many civil cases of any kind.
And when Pam wrote a five-thousand-dollar check dated June 26 to Twomey and Sisti, she was not retaining the state’s foremost experts on media law. She was hiring some pretty fair homicide defense attorneys.
◆◆◆
June was coming to a close and Cecelia Pierce—thanks in large part to Pamela Smart, who had let the girl practice driving in her Honda CRX—earned her driver’s license.
The following Saturday, a friend of Cecelia’s was to come to the apartment and they were going to go to Hampton Beach. Before her friend arrived, however, Cecelia was asleep and had a nightmare.
“ I had a dream that there was somebody in a brick building in the window shooting at all my friends,” said Cecelia. “And I was in front of my friends running back and forth with my arms waving, saying ‘No! Not them! Not them!’ And I kept getting shot over and over again. But I wasn’t dying.
“And I just knew that the person in the window was Pam. But she never showed her face.
“And then I woke up. I had the chills. I was sweaty. I was scared.
“So anyway, we went to the beach and I was telling my friend about it as we were walking along. We walked the whole beach, down to the end by all the clubs. And as we got in front of the Peacock Lounge, I saw a license on the ground. I decided not to pick it up.
“And then I decided, well, I don’t know. I just paid thirty dollars for my license tw
o days ago; it’s only gonna cost me twenty-five cents to mail this person his or her license; I might as well pick it up and save them some money; you know, do something good.
“So I went back. And as I was bending down to pick it up, I freaked. It was Pam’s license. I found Pam’s license on Hampton Beach in front of the Peacock Lounge.
“So, anyway, I picked it up, stuffed it in my bag, and when we got to my friend’s house I called my mother. I’m like, ‘Mom, you’re not gonna believe this.’ And naturally she didn’t believe me.
“Then I went to work and I hadn’t seen Pam in a while. This was after school was out. And that night Pam shows up and she’s telling me, ‘Yeah, I was gonna go clubbing tonight, but I lost my ID.’
“Then it dawned on me. So I said, ‘Wait a minute’ and I came out and gave it to her. I said, ‘Here, I found this on the beach.’ And she’s like, ‘No way.’ I said, ‘Don’t ask why me, but, yeah, I found it all right.’”
Chapter 8
As the summer progressed, it was obvious that something extraordinary would have to happen for the Derry police to build a solid case against Pam. Twomey and Sisti, who some of the Derry cops knew from past singeings on the witness stand, were not going to make it any easier.
In July, the lawyers had been in the news when a jury failed to reach a verdict in the case of Anthony Barnaby, a Canadian Indian who had confessed, and later recanted, to taking part in a double murder. It was Barnaby’s third mistrial, which was as good as an acquittal. The state dropped the charges shortly afterward.
For his dramatic closing argument, Sisti had enlarged Barnaby’s confession on placards and highlighted parts of it to show the jury that his client’s supposed confession was nonsense. The hung jury was an ego blow to the state as well as to Paul Maggiotto, the young prosecutor who handled the case.
Teach Me to Kill Page 24
