Teach Me to Kill

by Stephen Sawicki

Sisti tried to hammer away at his theme that Billy was an obsessed lover, who’d killed Pam’s husband without her knowledge. But Billy hung tough.

  “Greg was in your way, right?” Sisti said.

  “Greg was in my way?” said Flynn.

  “Yeah, I mean, as long as Pam was with Greg you couldn’t have Pam, right?”

  “No,” Flynn said. “As long as I didn’t kill Greg for Pam I couldn’t be with…I could be with Pam, but she threatened to break up with me.”

  “She threatened you. So you’re telling this jury that the only reason that you killed Greg is because you loved Pam. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No,” Flynn said. “It’s because Pam told me to and I loved Pam.”

  “And you would do whatever Pam told you to do. Is that what you’re saying to this jury?”

  “Whatever Pam told me to do? Yes, I probably would back then, yes.”

  “It’s kinda like you had no brain at all?”

  “I had a brain. I just, I was in love.”

  Billy Flynn came off as a devastated, remorseful young man. Not a liar. And certainly not someone who killed for mere titillation.

  The defense surely saw it as well. Sisti soon sounded the retreat and finished his cross-examination.

  Every day that the trial continued, media coverage intensified. A crew from Entertainment Tonight showed up. And reporters were coming in from all over the country and in some cases from around the world. Virtually all of the new arrivals were forced to watch the proceedings on television in the congested waiting room.

  Other than the sheer numbers, which would burgeon to more than 100, and occasional lapses in manners, the media for the most part was restrained. Pam’s daily walks from the small conference room that served as a holding cell to the courtroom and back drew the bright lights of a dozen photographers and cameramen. Even her trips to the ladies’ room were documented.

  At one point, in the outer hallway, someone from CNN stuck a microphone in front of Smart’s face, prompting a sheriff’s deputy to shove the offender against a wall. The incident also led Judge Gray to beckon all of the journalists to a meeting in his courtroom, where he doled out a verbal spanking—just in case anyone else had ideas about causing a disruption.

  Yet the media’s worst moment occurred the day before Cecelia Pierce testified. Cecelia and her family had come to court on Thursday, March 14, but the girl was not called to the stand that day.

  After court ended, though, television crews and photographers positioned themselves outside the little room where the Eaton family had been waiting.

  In a disturbing scene, the crowd swarmed around the family, pushing and shoving, as they all moved down the stairs. Cecelia, her stepfather, and best friend Karen Crowley decided to make a break for the car. Mrs. Eaton and one of the witness advocates stopped to get their coats, then headed toward the parking lot.

  “When we got to the door, we could hear all this screaming," recalled Mrs. Eaton. “We looked out and saw all this running. I thought, Well, Christ!”

  “It looked like a football game and someone had fumbled the football. The only thing was that Cecelia was the football. The first thing that hit me was, Jesus, what is going on?

  “Cecelia and Karen were totally petrified, but they got to the point that instead of crying they were laughing. And they got to laughing hysterically ’cause they couldn’t help it.

  “They were out there running around with all of these adults chasing after them. One cameraman was going so fast backwards that he went right into a car, right up on the hood, and rolled off of it. Another cameraman dropped his microphone and stuff and just kept running, dragging it on the ground behind him while everybody just jumped over it and stepped on it. He didn’t care, they were just running.”

  Finally, the family found their car and made their way out of the parking lot. Before heading home, they pulled over to the side of the road, looked at each other in disbelief, and burst into laughter.

  When Cecelia finally did make it to the stand, she reverted to her bored, why-are-you-wasting-my-time airs, just as she had on the day that Captain Jackson yelled at her. Cecelia was scared—so much so that she was crying beforehand—but what people saw was a kid with an attitude.

  Still, she corroborated Billy’s testimony. Although Cecelia put the time of the incident in late April, she told the court about watching the movie 9 ½ Weeks with Pam and Billy. She also remembered Smart and the boy going upstairs and Billy coming back down for some ice. And lastly, she recollected accidentally catching the lovers in the act.

  “When the movie was over, I had watched parts of another and I was just getting bored,” Cecelia said. “And so I was walking up the stairs and I, I yelled, you know, ‘I hope you guys are done.’ And then I went upstairs and they weren’t.”

  “What did you see?” asked Maggiotto.

  “Pam and Bill naked,” said Cecelia.

  “And where were they?”

  “On the floor.”

  “In what room?”

  “In Greg’s bedroom.”

  “And, what kind of position were they in?”

  “Pam was on top of Bill.”

  At this, a reporter in the gallery whispered, “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Cecelia was an important witness. At the same time, however, her role in the case had diminished in the last month. From the moment of Pam’s arrest through most of January, Cecelia had been expected to be the state’s star witness. But after the boys agreed to testify, she became less pivotal.

  What’s more, Billy Flynn had revealed that Cecelia knew more about the murder than she had told authorities. The state never considered it enough to charge Cecelia as one of the conspirators, but the fact that she had tried to help Billy find a weapon became a blow to her credibility.

  And Mark Sisti swarmed all over it in court.

  “On that same topic,” the attorney said, “when you had this heart-to-heart truthful conversation with the police on June 14, 1990, did you discuss with the police that you were trying to get a firearm to kill Greg Smart?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Cecelia uncomfortably.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I don’t think I did.”

  “But that—that was the, wasn’t that the day that you told Mr. Maggiotto and this jury that you were gonna tell the truth to the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t tell the truth to the police then.”

  “I told the truth as I remembered it,” Cecelia said peevishly. “It was late at night. I told everything I could remember and I did tell them. As soon as I remembered about that I told them.”

  “Well, who did you tell so that we can check it out?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  It was vintage Sisti, taking one crack in the witness’s story and using it to cast doubt on her entire testimony. The only problem was that the lawyer was only leaving the doubt dangling in the air. Sisti never clearly showed why Cecelia would lie about Pam’s involvement.

  That Friday, after Cecelia Pierce and Cindy Butt testified, the prosecution rested. Over eight days of testimony, Maggiotto and Nicolosi had called twenty-seven witnesses.

  They also entered a variety of items into evidence, ranging from the secretly recorded tapes to the lyrics of a heavy metal tune—“First Love,” by the Christian band Stryper—that Pam supposedly wrote out for Billy.

  Also displayed were a series of glossies of a smiling Pam in her two-piece bathing suit. The night before his arrest, Flynn threw away the pictures that Pam had given him. But Karen Knight, who owned the one-hour photo shop where the film was developed, testified that she just happened to have saved a number of faulty copies. (After the trial, a sign outside of the Knights’ small shop on Route 1 blared: THE REVEALING SMART PHOTOS WERE DONE RIGHT HERE!! GET CUSTOM PROCESSING NOW.)

  On Monday, it would be the defense’s turn. And as reporters left for their offices to write their stories
for the next day’s papers, one question lingered: Would Pamela Smart testify on her own behalf?

  ◆◆◆

  When Monday arrived, all indications to the uncertain public were that Pam would give her side of the story.

  Citing a source “close to the case,” correspondent Tami Plyler had an article in that morning’s Union Leader that said Smart was expected to take the stand.

  Pam confirmed it when she walked into court wearing a conservative navy blue suit, with a frilled high-collar blouse, and a black bow in her hair. If ever there was an outfit selected for courtroom testimony this was it.

  That morning, three individuals were called by the defense.

  The first was a Derry police dispatcher, who was used to help introduce into evidence the tapes of the emergency calls on the night of May 1.

  The second was Pam’s friend Sonia Simon, who said Smart behaved irrationally after the killing. “She was almost crazy, I want to say,” Sonia recalled. “She wasn’t the same.” Maggiotto, in turn, mercilessly tore into Simon, making her admit that Pam had deceived even her closest friends about the affair.

  The third witness was Pamela Ann Smart.

  Speaking in quiet tones, for effect, Paul Twomey conducted the direct examination. Although she appeared nervous at first, Pam settled into her role as witness.

  Pam told of her marriage to Greg, culminating in his affair the previous December; Pam said she had been devastated when she learned of it. She also spoke of her job at SAU 21 and how she became involved with the teenagers. And she recounted an off-and-on love affair with Flynn.

  Unlike Billy, who vaguely remembered the day being in mid-February, Pam definitively said she first had sex with Billy on March 24. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Billy would have been sixteen in Pam’s version—too old for the widow to be charged with felonious sexual assault—but fifteen in Billy’s account.

  That spring, Pam said, she repeatedly tried to break off the affair. Billy, however, was taking it hard, even mentioning the possibility of suicide. Finally, toward the end of the last week of April, Pam said, she ended the relationship for good.

  “Could you describe Billy’s behavior and emotions as you had this conversation at this time?” asked Twomey.

  “He was crying,” said Pam, “and then he stopped crying. He seemed mad at first but then all of the sudden he just didn’t seem mad anymore. He just asked if we could be friends.”

  As the questioning went on, Pam explained that Billy had indeed been at her condo the week that Greg was in Rhode Island. A few days before her final breakup with the teenager, she said, the boy had dinner at her place and had been downstairs in the basement by himself.

  The suggestion was obvious: Billy left the bulkhead open so that he could get into the condo and murder Greg.

  As her testimony continued, Smart corroborated almost everything the boys and Cecelia had said. She admitted to having sex with the teenager, to letting Billy use the car one evening in April (apparently the night of the first attempt on Greg’s life), to driving the boys to get JR’s grandmother’s car, and even to being with the boys on the Sunday that Ralph Welch went to the police.

  But every admission had a twist to it. Every ending suggested that she knew nothing of the murder plot.

  On and on it went, culminating in Pam’s explanation of her incriminating conversations with Cecelia Pierce.

  Hungry for information, locked out of the police investigation, and disbelieving that the arrested boys were involved in Greg’s death, Pam said she came to believe that Cecelia had knowledge of the slaying.

  “So what did you do?” asked Twomey.

  “Well, I figured that if she knew more about the murder, then she would tell me if I acted like I knew more about it,” said Pam. “And I told her, well, she had said to me that, she had asked me, did I know about the murder beforehand. And initially I had said no.

  “And then she made a statement to me that if I knew more about it, that as long as I told her that, she wouldn’t tell anyone and that we had to stick together.

  “So in my mind I thought that I would play a game with her and I would say that I knew more about the murder.”

  “Now, when you said play a game with her, what’s the game?” asked Twomey. “What’s going on? What’s the point of this?”

  “To get information,” said Pam.

  It was far-fetched, but at least Smart had a story, no small feat considering the range of the evidence. Where she lost ground, however, was in her unemotional presentation. If Billy Flynn had duped her, as Pam suggested, one would expect at least a little outrage and tears from the widow. It did not help that she remained dry eyed when recollecting the night of Greg’s death.

  Now it was Paul Maggiotto’s turn.

  That morning, the prosecutor had stunned almost everyone in the courtroom with the needless demolition of Sonia Simon. The woman was little more than a character witness for Pam, and Maggiotto, perhaps anxious to finally cross-examine someone, had reduced her to tears.

  With Simon having been only an innocent bystander, one could imagine what was in store for Pam.

  Strangely enough, there had been discussions among the prosecutors proposing that Maggiotto do practically nothing. One idea was for him to simply ask, “Are you Pamela Smart?” After she replied that she was, the prosecutor would then ask, “Is that your voice on those tapes?” Pam, of course, would say yes. And Maggiotto, in turn, would say, “Thank you very much,” and sit down.

  Instead, the prosecutor opted to question the defendant.

  Immediately, Maggiotto zeroed in on Pam’s failure, even after Billy’s arrest, to tell the police about her affair with the boy.

  “I thought if the police knew that I had an affair with Bill then they would automatically conclude that I was involved in the murder,” Pam testified.

  “So rather than get what you thought was the wrong person off—you can get him out of trouble—and go and tell the police about the affair, you thought it was more important to keep quiet and keep the affair quiet, right?” asked Maggiotto.

  “Yes.”

  “So this was a conscious decision on your part not to tell the police about the affair.”

  “Right. And also the police never asked me.”

  “O-o-o-oh,” they didn’t ask you,” said Maggiotto sarcastically. “O-o-o-h, if they would have asked you, you would have told them, right?”

  “I can’t speculate on that. I don’t know.”

  (Although it was overlooked at the time, Pam was being doubly disingenuous on this point; the day after the murder, Derry Police Captain Loring Jackson asked her point blank if either Greg or she had been having an extramarital affair, and she said no.)

  Maggiotto would return to the point again and again. Despite all that was happening, from the murder of her husband to the police investigation to the arrest of the boys, Pam never came forward with information about her affair to the police, even when she said she was suspicious that Billy was involved.

  Next, Maggiotto asked Pam to talk about her relationship with Flynn. Pam’s version was that it was a tumultuous, on-again, off-again affair.

  “All right,” said Maggiotto, “do you want this jury to understand that Bill Flynn decided to kill your husband because you broke up with him?”

  “I want this jury to understand the truth,” Pam replied.

  “Is that what you’re claiming the truth is?”

  “I don’t know why Bill Flynn killed Greg. I can just come in here and give my testimony.”

  “So even as you sit here today, you still have no idea why he may have done this. Is that it?”

  “I didn’t say I had no idea, but I don’t know specifically.”

  “Well, I’m asking you. What do you think? Why do you think he did this?”

  “Probably because he thought we could be together.”

  Pam had certainly covered all of her bases. She had given Billy Flynn a motive. Now all she had to do was ex
plain her own actions, in particular her taped conversation with Cecelia Pierce.

  Smart claimed that it was shortly after the boys were arrested that she began her so-called “game” to garner information from Cecelia.

  As such, the comments Pam made in the secretly recorded conversations were continuations of this supposed attempt to learn more. Meanwhile, her efforts to stop Cecelia from going to the police were attempts to protect herself from being unjustly accused. By playing this game with Pierce, Pam said, she now found herself in danger of being convicted.

  Maggiotto was unimpressed. First, he said, Pam was hiding her affair with the accused killer of her husband. On top of that, she now had a girl who mistakenly thought Pam was involved in the murder and was threatening to go to the authorities.

  “So obviously you ran right down to the police and straightened it out, right?” Maggiotto asked.

  “No,” said Smart. “It’s pretty confusing, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it sure is,” said Maggiotto. “It’s very confusing and you didn’t do a damn thing to try and straighten it out, did you?”

  With that, Gray called the afternoon recess. A fire alarm—false, it turned out—sounded during the break, and court was canceled for the rest of the day.

  That day, televisions in homes and businesses all over New Hampshire had been tuned to the trial. Bill Spencer’s employer, WMUR in Manchester, had originally planned to broadcast only portions of the proceedings live. But the interest had been so strong that most of the trial was aired. Some of the Boston television reporters, in fact, were mockingly calling WMUR “New Hampshire’s Smart Station—All Smart, All the Time.”

  WMUR officials were smiling as well—at the skyrocketing ratings. General Hospital was boring compared to the real-life drama playing out in Rockingham County Superior Court. Pam’s testimony, in fact, produced ratings higher than the station had seen in its thirty-seven-year history. At one point as many as 130,000 people watched Pam on the witness stand.

  By now, Pam’s trial received play all over the country. Reporters were flying in from everywhere. But no media outlet ran with the story any harder than the spunky Boston Herald, which gave it five pages of coverage after Pam’s first day of testimony. “Cold as ice,” screamed the page one headline. “Smart shows no emotion in denying murder plot.”