Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis, who dubbed Pam the “ice princess,” could not get enough of the story. He wrote: “Should Pam get the guillotine—as seemed to be the general consensus of the overflowing crowd huddled around the Pepsi machine in the waiting room—it may well be for her complete and utter inability to work up one, solitary tear of sorrow.
“A local TV reporter, shaking his head, offered this critique of Pam’s morning appearance on the stand: ‘I think her lawyer should have told her to stick some onion slices down her blouse. She’s gotta get those tear ducts working sometime soon, or she’s had it.’”
The newspaper outdid itself, however, establishing a 900 telephone number for readers to call in—at ninety-five cents a shot—and vote for whether they thought Pam was guilty or innocent. (Five hundred and forty three callers voted for guilty, and one hundred and one opted for innocent. The newspaper donated what money it made on the poll to charity.)
On Tuesday, Pam was on the stand again, only this time neither the prosecutor nor the defendant gained much ground. Instead, it was toe-to-toe combat.
Despite thoroughly going over the taped conversations with Pam, Maggiotto could not shake her story that she was obsessed with finding Greg’s killer and was playacting on the tapes to learn more about the murder.
“I wanted to solve it in my own mind, in my own life, first,” Smart said.
“OK,” said Maggiotto, “and then what were you gonna do? Make a citizen’s arrest?”
“No, I wasn’t,” said Pam. “At some point obviously I would have gone to the police with it.”
“So, Pam Smart, a twenty-three-year-old student-teacher was going to use her own investigation skills, do her own investigation, not tell the police what you know, talk to Cecelia Pierce, go out and talk to whoever else she knows. And then, of course, write a report and just mail it in. I mean, what were you gonna do?”
Paul Twomey objected to the question as speech making, but Judge Gray overruled.
“First of all, I’m not a teacher,” said Pam. “And second of all, yes, that was my intention, to figure it out on my own. My husband was murdered. I was not thinking rationally at the time. And unless you’ve gone through something like this, then maybe you can’t understand.”
Later, when an observer noted that the face-off between Maggiotto and Smart seemed to be a battle of the two most intelligent people in the room, one courthouse veteran made a correction. “It was the two people who thought they were the most intelligent.”
Maggiotto probably should have finished sooner. Smart’s explanation itself was unconvincing, but her ability to stay with it through all the twists and turns was remarkable.
The prosecutor was getting nowhere, and Smart was beginning to pick up momentum. “If I was guilty I would have pleaded guilty and plea-bargained with the rest of them,” she snapped at one point.
Finally, Maggiotto did conclude. Ironically, his last question resembled the cross-examination he had considered beforehand and abandoned.
“Is that your voice on the tapes of July 12 and July 13?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes, it is,” said Pam.
“I have no further questions.”
Twomey and Sisti had little else to offer. They called Greg’s friend Brian Washburn, who said Greg had told him about his affair. He also testified that around the time of the body-wire conversations, either on July10 or July 13, Pam had made remarks suggesting that she might act as if she knew more about the murder, to elicit information from Cecelia.
Few people put it beyond Pam to try to cover for herself by saying such a thing to her friends, particularly since her lawyers had warned her that summer that Cecelia might someday put on a body wire.
Nicolosi went in for the kill with Washburn. It was essentially a nonissue, but she scored her biggest points when she asked the young man about some of the deals he was considering with movie companies that were interested in buying his rights to the story.
“So it's OK to enter into a contract and make money off of the death of your best friend, right?” Nicolosi said.
Washburn sat quietly, contemplating the question and, no doubt, his lost friend.
“Everybody else is,” he finally said. “It’s not…I don’t know. No, it’s not all right.”
By mid-afternoon, all of the witnesses had been called. At 2:35 p.m. on March 19, the defense rested.
At 4:45 on Wednesday morning, the day that the closing statements were to be given, Judy Smart was awoken by a telephone call. Her heart was pounding as she went to answer it, fearing that, God forbid, someone else in the family had been hurt.
Instead, it was an individual with miraculous news.
“Mrs. Smart,” said the caller, “my name’s Linda Avory. I’ve been up all night thinking about this and I’ve decided that I have to tell you this.”
“OK,” said Judy, just beginning to clear her head. “What is it?”
“I’m the one who had the affair with Greg.”
“OK,” said Judy, anticipating more.
“Yes, and I also have his baby.”
Judy could not believe it. This was the same woman who had called Diane Nicolosi at the court in the middle of JR Lattime’s cross-examination.
The woman began to explain. She lived in Milford, Connecticut, and had met Greg through his work. Several months ago, she said, she had given birth to Greg’s son.
Judy woke up her husband, who spoke to the woman as well. Bill Smart remembers a lovely, pleasant voice, but more important, she sounded sincere.
The Smarts were not easily convinced, however, and asked why Pam would ever write her a letter telling of her plans to kill Greg.
“Oh,” the woman replied without missing a beat, “it’s because Pam knew that Greg and I were having an affair.” As she went on with her elaborate explanation, it all somehow made sense.
The conversation ended with the woman promising to contact Greg’s parents again.
The past eleven months, and the trial in particular, had been trying for the Smarts. Bill had developed a stutter after Greg’s death, and both he and Judy were on medication. Mrs. Smart had even struggled to maintain her composure during jury selection. And at one point in the trial, she cut loose and yelled, “Hey, bitch!” at Pam as the defendant walked by.
Now, however, the couple was ecstatic. “Oh, my God!” Judy said joyously. ”Greg’s got a baby! Oh, my God! We’ve got a grandson! Part of him is still with us!”
Bill Smart contacted Captain Jackson, who set to work contacting authorities in Connecticut, trying to locate anyone who might know a Linda Avory who had recently had a baby.
The trial, of course, continued. That morning, Dan Pelletier and Jackson arrived at the court to hear the closing arguments.
Throughout the proceedings, the police had kept a low profile. Pelletier had testified, but Twomey and Sisti never went after him very hard, and the detective’s appearance on the witness stand had gone relatively smoothly.
Now, the two Derry cops were ushered into seats beyond the gallery, in front of the Smart family. Each of the lawyers, even from the defense, ambled over, cordially shook their hands, and made small talk.
All things considered, it was not surprising. This had not been a trial of rancor and bad blood. Sisti occasionally needed some quiet time to take off his game face after a few hours of attacking witnesses, but for the most part, all of the players had been cooperative.
During the proceedings, of course, the prosecution and defense attorneys were at war, and on a number of occasions they had barked at one another. But for the most part, they were as they should have been—civil.
It might have been different if Pam had chosen one of the out-of-state, publicity-hungry lawyers who had sought to represent her. But Sisti, Twomey, Maggiotto, and Nicolosi were all going to be back in the New Hampshire courts on other days, long after Pam Smart’s case was over.
But as Paul Twomey stepped to the rostrum for his closing arg
ument, the matter of Pam’s innocence or guilt was not settled. Some people, in fact, believed that Pam stood a chance of being acquitted.
Twomey, wearing a gray tweed jacket, had more of the air of a college professor than of an attorney defending someone charged with first-degree murder.
He began with a slap at the media, which he said had been drawn to the trial as entertainment. “It hasn’t been entertainment for Pam Smart,” Twomey said. “It hasn’t been entertainment for Greg Smart’s parents or his family. It hasn’t been entertainment for Pamela’s family.”
Next, he pointed out the uncertainties of some of the crime scene evidence—from the towel found near Greg’s head to the forensic likelihood that an object had been placed between the gun and Greg’s skull. “Something happened there,” Twomey said of the Smarts’ condo on the night of May 1,1990. “They did something else. They tortured that man in some other way that they won’t talk about. And they're liars about it. That’s the point.”
No evidence indicated that Greg had been tortured. Afterward, Twomey told a reporter that he had meant mental torture.
But the jury, and Greg’s mother, only heard what the attorney said. As Twomey continued speaking, Judy Smart began to cry and pumped her fists in front of her, not wanting to believe that her son had died in such a manner.
Twomey, meanwhile, set to discrediting the boys, pinning nicknames on each of them. Patrick “Pete” Randall was “the Assassin.” Vance Lattime, Jr. was “Lattime the Liar.” And William Flynn was “Billy the Kid.”
“These boys, the three of them together, have not a shred of moral decency within ’em,” he said. “And you can see that when they took the stand and testified to God to tell the truth. That has absolutely no meaning to those boys. None whatsoever.”
Twomey brought up the inconsistencies in their stories. Flynn, for example, had testified that he went with Pam to withdraw money from a bank in Hampton to purchase the bullets to kill Greg. The state could find no record of the transaction.
The boys, too, failed to agree on when the bullets had been purchased.
And how could any of them know prior to the killing how much insurance money Pam would receive? Even Metropolitan Life did not have that exact figure beforehand.
And, finally, Twomey tried to bolster Pam’s explanation of the tapes, pointing to the anguish she must have experienced in the months after her husband was killed. “Forget about everything else in the case,” Twomey said, “Just think, is there a reasonable possibility that that could cause somebody such trauma and such stress that they’d act in an irrational manner?”
Overall, it wasn’t Twomey’s greatest closing argument. Perhaps it had something to do with his ill daughter keeping him awake most of the night before, but Twomey’s summation was disorganized and filled with uncertain and mistaken references to the testimony. Maggiotto, in fact, objected on several occasions.
In all, Twomey spoke to the jury for about a half hour. “Do the right thing,” he said before returning to his seat.
Usually, Paul Maggiotto wore his wedding suit when he gave his closing statements. The false fire alarm of Monday afternoon, however, had made it necessary for him to cross examine Pam on into Tuesday. It was not exactly a crisis, but the prosecutor’s suit rotation fell out of synch and he ended up wearing the wedding suit a day earlier.
That Wednesday morning, as sort of a compromise, Maggiotto elected to wear his wedding tie. He also had his wife Amy Vorenberg, and her parents on hand for moral support.
Like Twomey, Maggiotto also had been awake most of the night. He had stayed in a small office at the courthouse, working on his summation until about 9:30. His wife, who worried about him driving on dangerous route 101 when he was tired urged him to come home to Concord. Once there, Maggiotto stayed hard at it until 4:30 in the morning. He slept less than an hour, then worked some more.
First, he wrote what he wanted to say in longhand, then jotted down key words on a separate sheet of paper. When it was time to give his closing statement, Maggiotto knew what he wanted to say, but left the specific language until the actual delivery. At least part of it would have to be a response to the defense’s remarks.
Now the prosecutor was standing before the jury. As in his Brooklyn days, once he got started with his summation, Maggiotto wasted no time before he let everyone know what he thought about the defendant. When it was time to accuse, he accused. When it was time to point, he pointed. Repeatedly. And with great vigor.
The prosecutor seemed electric. He began with an appeal to the jury’s common sense. This was not a confusing trial, he said. If the jury felt uncomfortable with any of the evidence or testimony, there was always someone to corroborate it. The only witness who challenged it was Pam Smart.
“Most of all,” Maggiotto said, “if you apply that common sense to the defendant’s preposterous testimony for the last few days, you’ll also come and realize that that was nothing more than a calculated effort, a last-ditch calculated effort for this woman to somehow try and distract you from the inescapable conclusion of what those tapes show.
“And that inescapable conclusion is that the defendant was involved and guilty of these crimes.”
Maggiotto concurred with Paul Twomey that Flynn, Randall, and Lattime were despicable human beings. The question, though, was whether they had told the truth on the witness stand.
Was Pam’s teenage lover a liar? “I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, if Bill Flynn was a liar, that was one of the greatest performances you’ve ever seen in modern times,” Maggiotto said.
And if the boys were liars, he added, don’t you think they would have done a better job of it? Wouldn’t the boys have laid it on even thicker?
Then the prosecutor focused on Pam. This was not a murder for insurance money or furniture, he said. “But think about what a divorced would have done to this woman, who I submit to you was very, very concerned with her image and very, very concerned with her professional reputation…
“If she got a divorce, the affair is gonna come out. It’s going to ruin her reputation professionally. She’s gonna lose her job.”
As he neared the end of his remarks, Maggiotto brought out huge placards bearing enlargements of Pam’s conversation with Cecelia. Key remarks were highlighted in yellow. Later, Maggiotto would call it poetic justice, since Sisti had used the same tactic in getting the hung jury for Anthony Barnaby the previous summer.
Maggiotto went over a few of them. Then the prosecutor made sure he pointed out Pam’s comment that a jury would believe her with her “professional reputation” and “a course that I teach” over JR any day.
“This woman has counted on from day one that if this case ever came to court, she could put herself on the stand with her background, with her intelligence, with her ability to answer questions, and pull one over on you, ladies and gentlemen,” Maggiotto said.
“And I submit to you based on the evidence you’ve heard today, don’t let her do it.”
Much of what Maggiotto had to say was standard prosecutorial fare, but he articulated it so well and with such vigor that people were talking about it for days afterward.
The summations completed, Judge Gray charged the jury. That afternoon they began deliberations.
◆◆◆
Linda Avory contacted the Smarts again after they got home from court. She said she was in Derry now, visiting friends. Fearful that Smart might somehow get off on the charges, she refused to come forward until Pam was convicted. In the meantime, though, she had dropped a letter and a photo of the baby, whom she had named Gregory, into the mail for the family.
On Thursday, deliberations continued throughout the day. Reporters, running out of people to interview, began interviewing each other for stories about the extensive media coverage. They had begun, in the words of the Boston Herald’s Peter Gelzinis, to eat their own flesh.
The day ended without a verdict. But with the media coverage intensifying, Judge Gray decided to f
inally grant one of Twomey’s and Sisti’s motions to sequester the jury, something that had not been done in the state since 1984.
In Derry, meanwhile, the police had put a tap on the Smarts’ telephone in an effort to trace the call if Linda Avory contacted the family again.
That night, when the Smarts returned home, they found the letter Avory had mailed, along with a picture of the baby.
Despite Captain Jackson’s previous insistence that they leave it sealed, so as not to destroy possible fingerprints, the Smarts could not resist.
Bill and Judy and some of Greg’s friends used a pair of tweezers to open the envelope and read the letter. They also marveled over the beautiful child in the photo. The boy was five months old. And Bill Smart happily noted that he looked just like Greg.
◆◆◆
The next day, March 22, at 12:55 P.M., a bailiff stepped into the hallway outside of courtroom one and announced, “OK, we have a verdict.” The jury had been out for only thirteen hours.
The courtroom quickly filled. The Smarts, their relatives, and friends took up the entire row on the left. The Wojases settled into their seats on the right.
Then Pam, wearing a purple and black plaid jacket and black skirt, entered and sat down. Sisti was at her left and Twomey at her right.
The jury filed in. None looked at Pam. Then Judge Gray entered.
“Will the defendant please rise and face the jury,” said Raymond Taylor, the clerk of the court.
Pam and her lawyers stood. Smart pressed her hands against the table in front of her.
“Madam forelady, will you please stand,” Taylor said. “Has the jury reached a verdict on each of the three offenses charged?”
“Yes, we have,” said the forelady.
One by one, Taylor asked for the verdict on each of the charges.
Conspiracy to commit murder?
Teach Me to Kill Page 33
