Thanks to: Christopher Dorobek, Foster’s Daily Democrat; Pendleton Beach and Diane Reitman, Nashua Telegraph; Linda Bean, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune; Bill Spencer, formerly of WMUR-Channel 9; Ric Waldman, New Hampshire Seacoast Sunday; and Tami Plyler, correspondent for the Manchester Union Leader.
Special thanks to Kevin J. Rieke, Valencia, California, for his research into the death of James William Flynn.
This book originated as a story for People magazine. Thank you for your kind words, friendship, and encouragement to: John Saar, assistant managing editor; Sue Brown, Boston correspondent; and Dirk Mathison, San Francisco bureau chief.
Thanks also to my agent, Michael Hamilburg, and my editor, Thomas J. Colgan.
Finally, my love always to my father Peter Sawicki, Leslie Graham, James Young, Keith LaBott, Beth Albert, and Mark Palmer. And, of course, Mary Alice Welch.
Author’s Note
For readability, a number of conversations in this book have been reconstructed from statements made by key participants. A variety of people and materials were tapped for this information, but author interviews and court testimony were the primary sources.
A number of other conversations, including courtroom dialogue and the secretly recorded conversations between Pamela Smart and Cecelia Pierce, are derived from television line-feed tape recordings of Smart’s trial at the Rockingham County Superior Court in Exeter, New Hampshire, in March 1991. The transcriptions are mine.
In the Smart trial, as in most court cases, the testimony of various witnesses was sometimes at odds. Weighing the different sides, I have provided those scenarios I regard as the most likely.
Raymond Fowler was the fourth teenager in the car the night that Greg Smart was killed. As of this writing, he is charged with accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, and tampering with evidence. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his trial is scheduled to begin in late 1991. A plea bargain appears to be a strong possibility.
On a lesser note, Pamela and Gregory Smart each adopted a unique spelling of their nicknames. Pamela signed hers “Pame,” which she pronounces at “Pam,” and Gregory wrote “Gregg.” To spare the reader, I have used the more traditional spellings—Pam and Greg—throughout this book.
Lastly, many innocent people, including juveniles, unwittingly were swept into the events that surrounded Gregory Smart’s murder. To protect the privacy of certain individuals, I have changed their names for this book. Jenny Charles, Sal Parks, Tommy Sells, Karen Crowley, Johnny Mylo, Louise Coleman, and Robby Fields are fictitious names.
Prologue
In southern New Hampshire there is a road that some call Death Highway.
It begins at the sea in the resort community of Hampton Beach. There it is known as Route 51. But after a few miles westward, it becomes Route 101. And if you follow that mostly two-lane roadway from end to end you will have traversed Rockingham County.
Despite the nickname, it is a pretty road, gently rising and flattening and snaking by marshes and woods and streams. In the spring, the roadside grows lush and wild; in the autumn it blazes with yellow and scarlet.
It connects two worlds, taking you away from life by the ocean, with the neon arcades and cheap souvenir shops and stifling tourist traffic, through quiet towns and by peaceful homes on into Hillsborough County and the edge of the state’s largest city, Manchester.
It is also a fearsome road, one that over the years has claimed numerous lives in the carnage of unending traffic accidents, largely from being too narrow, and thus its moniker. Most drivers follow the advice of the roadside signs and keep their headlights on both day and night – to alert oncoming traffic – like one continuous funeral procession.
So many have died, in fact, that local communities have taken to hammering in white crosses along the highway to commemorate the dead and to send a message to state officials about widening it.
At night, it is perhaps the eeriest road in America. Lighted only by the moon and your headlights, the crosses appear luminously out of the darkness and the fog as you push on for your destination.
One spring evening in 1990, four teenage boys drove that road in an old Chevrolet Impala belonging to one of their grandmothers. They lived in working-class Seabrook, on the ocean, and put a couple dozen miles of pavement behind them before they got off at the exit that led to Derry.
And there they went to the part of town where a young man, Gregory Smart, lived. They had never even met him. Yet two of the youths crept into his home and waited. When Smart returned from work, they killed him.
Eleven months later, through most of the blustery month of March 1991, an unusually large number of people got to know the road those boys had traveled. Numerous journalists, attorneys, and the just-plain curious all made their way onto at least a strip of it.
For not far from that road in the town of Exeter, a trial was taking place. A jury had been selected to decide the fate of one Pamela Ann Smart, the victim’s twenty-three-year-old wife.
Millions of words had been churned out about the case. The trial would include everything reporters could have hoped for – love and hate, sex, violence, even the skullduggery of secretly recorded conversations.
Certainly there were legal points to be won and lost, testimony to be weighed, issues to be analyzed. But at the core of it all, the trial was about control. The crux of the matter was whether Pam Smart, driven by demons of her own, used love and lust to convince a sixteen-year-old named Billy Flynn, and in turn his friends, to commit a brutal crime.
Actually, the central question laid before those seven women and five men was not complicated at all: Did Pamela Smart point the boys down that road to murder her husband?
Chapter 1
Derry, New Hampshire is a bedroom community. Every weekday morning by seven o’clock, hundreds of the town's residents are in their cars, swarming down Interstate 93 for Boston and the high-tech firms on that city’s outskirts. Or they are off for nearby Nashua. Or Manchester. Or the gritty cities of Lawrence and Haverhill in Massachusetts’ Merrimack Valley. Or the seacoast.
Most of those who live in Derry are employed somewhere else, but no one minds very much. After all, work was usually not the main reason they came to southern New Hampshire. They came to get away. And except for the sacrifice of time and the test of their patience during their daily commutes, escape they did.
More often than not, they came from Massachusetts. Both white and blue collar, they left behind excessive taxes, a real estate market that was bursting through the roof, and the fear born of drugs and crime. More than anything, they simply came to get some quiet and to enjoy the fresh air and open space of New Hampshire.
Derry, like the other towns near the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border, had a lot to offer within its thirty-five-square-mile boundary: decent schools, a sense of security, and store clerks who smiled. It was Main Street come to life. And nothing exemplified it better than the pride that the citizenry exhibited in 1961 when native son Alan Shepard became the first American to be rocketed into outer space. After that, Derry started calling itself Spacetown, U.S.A.
So it was that when the newcomers started pouring into Derry they kept pouring in. In 1960, a few years before the interstate opened nearby, fewer than seven thousand people called Derry home. Over the next thirty years – the eighties being the busiest period – that number would quadruple.
With the new faces came apartment complexes and condominiums and a new feel to the town. Hood Commons, a shopping center, opened over on Crystal Avenue. And Broadway, the strip that constituted downtown Derry, lost its prominence as the heart of town.
Much of Derry remained rural, but the small-town flavor, like the family farms that once were prevalent, was virtually gone. Many of the newcomers lacked a true stake in Derry, gone as they were from early morning until after nightfall. They came home after work, shut their doors, and did not open them again until the nex
t day’s push down the interstate started all over.
As the population grew so did the crime rate. It only made sense that the days of unlocked doors were past. “We get a lot of people who moved up here seeking the geographical solution to their problems,” explained one Derry policeman. “But they just brought them with them.”
Break-ins were not unusual. Drug busts. Child abuse. An assault here and there. Perhaps a biker gang every now and then that needed to be put back in place. But all in all the lid was on. At least folks in Derry were not killing each other as they were in all the bigger cities.
As they were, for instance, in Boston. Who was not glad these days to be leaving Beantown for New Hampshire when the workday was over? Every morning the Boston newspapers were blaring about street gang wars and innocent bystanders who ended up either in the hospital or the morgue. Every new story updated the city’s worst-ever homicide rate.
Then, in January 1990, came the revelations about Charles Stuart, who grabbed national headlines when he apparently murdered his pregnant wife in a tough Boston neighborhood and blamed it on a black man. All this before he jumped off a bridge to his death.
At least the residents of Derry did not have to contend with that sort of madness.
It was well in 1990, after all, and Derry’s homicide body count was holding fast at zero. And with the coming of the lovely New Hampshire spring, no one was expecting any changes anytime soon.
Tuesday, May 1 arrived with some clouds and drizzle. By afternoon, though, the sun had broken through and the temperatures pushed up into the high sixties. It was pleasant enough for a round of golf at the public Hoodkroft Country Club, a minute from downtown Derry. Or a bicycle ride along the town’s gently graded back roads. Or a nice jog.
For the Derry police it had been business as usual all day. The DWI traffic accident of mid-afternoon faded into the juvenile shoplifter around dinnertime, which in turn faded into a routine arrest of a twenty-one year old wanted on some bench warrants. A false alarm sounded. A car accident. A handful of traffic stops with warnings issued rather than summonses.
About a mile from the police department, down and behind Hood Commons, the residents of Summerhill Condominiums were settling in for the night. Those who lived in the clusters of beige town houses, built on what was once the sprawling Hood dairy farm, were often educated young professionals, many with one or two kids.
Despite the closeness of the dwellings, most neighbors were not on a first-name basis. Friendships tended to be forged when couples had children the same age. For the rest, it was hello-hello at the garage, then off to work.
Clouds hid the stars. As ten o’clock passed, the residents had put their children to bed and were now finally sitting down themselves to catch up on their spouse’s day or simply to click off their minds in front of the television.
It was around 10:10 when the silver 1987 Honda CRX wheeled into the complex and the cul-de-sac idyllically named Misty Morning Drive. HALEN read the green on white New Hampshire vanity plate – a tribute to the heavy metal rock and roll band Van Halen. Underneath, as on all plates around the state, was the motto “Live Free or Die.”
The car rolled into the garage. Pam Smart stepped out and made her way along the walk, past her husband Greg’s 1989 Toyota pickup that was parked out front, to the end unit that the couple rented.
Oddly, the front light was off. Pam climbed the few wooden steps to the porch and opened the storm door. She inserted her key into the front door, pushed it open, flicked on the light, and took a single step inside.
Her scream that next instant was wordless and shrill and resonant enough to be heard in most of the surrounding units. Neighbors stiffened. A birthday party halted in the middle of “Happy Birthday.” A number of parents immediately bolted for their own children’s rooms, fearing it was their kids.
“Help! My husband! My husband!” Pam shrieked as she hurried to the adjacent unit. She rang the doorbell and began banging on the door. Her screams were chilling. “My husband’s hurt! He’s on the floor! I don’t know what’s wrong with him!”
In Unit 4D, Kimberly Mercer, who worked as a contracts administrator, and her fiancé, Paul Dacier, a lawyer, had been upstairs in their bedroom chatting. Kim’s nine-year-old daughter from her first marriage had just gone to bed. Then they heard Pam’s screams and the pounding on the door.
“Oh my God, Paul, she needs help!” said Kim. “Something’s wrong!”
They ran downstairs. Kim started for the door, but Dacier told her no. Not knowing what awful scene was unfolding outside, just that this hysterical woman seemed to be trying to come through the door, Dacier leaned against it to keep it shut and told Kim to call 911.
Mercer did so. “I need a policeman at 4D, Misty Morning Drive!” she shouted into the phone.
“OK. What’s going on there, ma’am?” asked the Derry police dispatcher, Sergeant Vernon Thomas.
“4D, Misty Morning Drive!”
“Where are you, ma’am?”
“Summerhill Condominiums!”
“Where are you? What number?”
“4D! As in David!”
“OK, calm down. Can you tell me what’s going on there? Do you know?”
“There’s a woman screaming outside!”
“OK. We’ll send someone over.”
“Please! It’s an emergency!”
Pam, meanwhile, gave up on 4D and broke for the next unit down, 4C. Again she started banging and screaming. Judy and Chris Liessner were just about to go to bed when they heard the commotion.
“I went downstairs and I saw this young girl outside, banging on the door, and I really didn’t even know who she was,” recalled Judy, who is in her mid-twenties and who works as a software engineer. “She just was carrying on and crying, so I opened the door and pulled her in because she was looking behind her like someone was following her. I pulled her in and I shut the door behind her.”
“Dial 911!” Pam said. “My husband’s on the floor! I don’t know what’s wrong!”
Judy rushed to call the police while her husband tended to Pam.
“What is going on there?” asked dispatcher Thomas when the call came through.
“There’s someone passed out,” said Judy. “I don’t know. A girl is hysterical in here. She just ran over. Her husband is passed out in 4E.”
“OK, we’ve got units on the way. Do you know why he’s passed out in there, ma’am? Do you have any…”
“Help is on the way!” Judy shouted to Pam. “Do you know why he’s passed out?” She turned back to the phone. “No, we don’t know.”
Not much of what happened that night would ever become completely clear to Judy. For one, she could not figure out why Pam kept refusing Chris Liessner’s offers to go and help her husband. More nonsensical, even a year later, were the words Pam had uttered shortly after she came into their foyer. “Why do they keep doing this?”
In the bedlam of the moment it little mattered what she was talking about. By now, a half-dozen neighbors were out on their stoops to see what was happening. Art Hughes, a station manager for an air delivery service in Manchester, had been watching thirtysomething when he heard Pam’s screams.
He rushed over from his building off to the left, ran between the structures, and looked for the woman he had heard. He saw no one. He went to the front of Pam’s building where he heard Pam’s shrieks once again, only this time she was coming out of 4C onto the stoop.
Art felt certain her husband had been beating her.
“What’s wrong?” Hughes yelled, “What’s the problem?”
“My husband’s on the floor!”
“What’s wrong with him?” Hughes shouted back. “Where is he?”
Pam pointed toward her unit and Hughes, in his bedtime T-shirt and sweatpants, frantically ran in front of unit 4E, looking madly into parked cars and all over the parking lot and lawn.
“Where the fuck is he?” he shouted in despair.
“Inside!”
Pam yelled from the Liessners' stoop. “He’s inside!”
Hughes bolted up the steps and went to open the storm door when he heard Pam again.
“Don’t go in there!” she said. “There may still be somebody in there!”
At this, Hughes’ wife also started yelling. “Arty! Don’t go in! Be careful!”
Hughes crouched slightly, pulled back the storm door, and pushed open the front door. He didn’t realize that another neighbor, Harvey Woodside, was right behind.
The foyer light was on but the rest of the place was in darkness. As the door opened, the first thing they saw, ten feet away, was the brass candlestick, the light playing off it. Then a shod foot. The door fully opened, and the two men surged forward–over the floor mat depicting two cartoon ducks and past a maroon portfolio left carelessly near the entrance–and beheld the facedown body of a man.
The pair froze and stared. The man was dressed in gray pans and a gray sports coat. Looking like a discarded, broken toy, most of his body was on the blue wall-to-wall carpet in the dining area. His legs were splayed, his right arm contorted. Resting on his left cheek, his exposed skin had taken on a nauseating blotchy purple-grayish cast. And a small amount of blood stained the carpet beneath his nose.
Only the man’s feet and ankles were on the tiled floor of the foyer. His left foot was twisted against the stairwell wall and pressed against the fallen candlestick. His right foot lay flat, pointing toward them.
Hughes and Woodside instinctively backed off. This was beyond anything they could do to help.
Outside, Derry patrolman Gerald Scaccia, twenty-seven years old and a four-year veteran, pulled into the complex with his cruiser lights flashing and his siren screaming. He glanced over and saw Pam on her knees on the stoop in front of the Liessners’ unit, sobbing and moaning. Woodside’s wife, Mary Jane, directed him to unit 4E.
The patrolman hurried in, Mary Jane in tow, and felt the fallen man’s wrist for a pulse. Nothing. Yet his own heart was pounding so hard that Scaccia was picking up his own pulse, making him uncertain of the man’s condition.
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