Teach Me to Kill

by Stephen Sawicki

  Pam saw no humor in it. She finally told Lattime to slow the hell down. That was all she needed—to have a state trooper pull him over in her car, with her in it, with an overload of passengers, one of them carrying a gun no less, on the same day that her husband was to be murdered.

  Randall, in the meantime, was nervous about other matters. He had not talked with Pam about the plan, and now he asked her to review it.

  Everything was ready, Pam said. The rear doors and the bulkhead doors to the basement were unlocked. The only glitch might come if Greg, who would be home in the afternoon, locked them. If anything, he would probably only check the rear doors.

  The bracelets, chains, rings, and earrings would be left in the jewelry box in the upstairs bathroom, she said. She had tossed a lot of stuff in the same box, even items that usually were kept elsewhere, so that they would not have to search very long. Her favorite pieces were safe—she was wearing rings that day on almost every finger—but they should find some items that would be worth some money.

  Once they got inside the condo, the boys were to be certain to put the dog in the basement and keep the place dark. “Greg’s a wimp,” said Pam. “He won’t go in the house if the light’s on.”

  Pam asked to see the gun, and Billy reached into the left inside pocket of his jean jacket and showed her.

  “Would you freak out if I used a knife?” Randall asked at one point, uncertain of how Pam would respond to the sight of blood.

  “I don’t want to know the details,” Pam replied, her voice rising. “But why don’t you just use the gun? If you stab him it’s going to get blood all over the place. And whatever you do, don’t get blood on the sofa.”

  “Don’t worry,” Billy said, trying to calm her down. “We’ll use the gun. Everything’s set.”

  Yet Pam herself had a mission that night and as JR Lattime would recall, she had not decided how to handle it.

  “How should I react when I come home and find him?” she said. “I mean, should I scream or run to the other condos for help or just run in and call the police?”

  “Just act natural,” JR replied. “Let your reactions come as they normally would if you were to find someone dead.”

  They pulled onto Lovejoy Street in Bradford and the house where Mary Chase was staying. JR went inside and got the keys to the Impala and some gas money from his grandmother.

  He and Pete climbed in the Chevy and pulled out, followed by Pam and Billy in the CRX. Both cars stopped for gas, then headed back to Seabrook, JR leaving Pam in the dust.

  It was late afternoon when the boys regrouped and rounded up everything they needed so they could leave for Derry. First, they had to go to Billy’s to pick up the duffel bag with the clothes and gloves that Pete and Billy would wear when they went into the condo.

  Then, they had to get Raymond Fowler, who had not been in on most of the planning this time but whom JR wanted to have as company while he waited for Billy and Pete to take care of business. Fowler was on Collins Street, helping Ralph Welch’s dad put a windshield in a pickup truck.

  “Ramey!” Randall yelled. “We’re going! Are you coming or not?”

  Fowler said he was and got in the car.

  Lattime stopped one more time, for gas, then pointed the Impala west for their rendezvous with Greg Smart.

  The ride was uneventful. Billy and Pete talked about the condo’s layout and again whether a knife or gun would be better. It was agreed that Pete would kill Greg with the knife and Billy would bring the gun just in case they needed it—to show, for example, if a neighbor or someone tried to apprehend them.

  The highlight of the drive, though, was when JR missed his exit off of Route 101 and Billy and Ramey ended up arguing about the correct way to go.

  Eventually the boys found their way—again Billy had been wrong with his directions—and pulled into Derry while it was still light.

  JR drove into Hood Commons, then took a reconnaissance ride around back and down toward Summerhill Condominiums. On the way, they noticed a lot of cars over near Hood Memorial Junior High School, where a sporting event was underway.

  Once they reached the complex, Billy pointed out the end unit on one of the buildings set back from the road. That was 4E, Misty Morning Drive.

  They went back to the shopping plaza parking lot. One of the first orders of business was to buy some Scotch tape, which Randall had suggested he and Billy use to cover their fingertips before going into the condo.

  Earlier, JR had reached into Billy’s duffel bag and pulled out one of the thin latex gloves. He put his hand in one of them and pressed a finger against the car window, leaving a fingerprint.

  JR and Fowler had gotten a kick out of that and started laughing and chiding Billy. “I figured with all this planning he was supposedly doing for this murder that he wanted so bad that he’d have a better set of gloves than them,” JR later said.

  The boys hardly seemed like a gang of killers. They wandered around in Ames, a department store, laughing and cutting up, before they finally bought the tape.

  Ramey was hungry, so he hit up Billy for some money and they all wandered into Papa Gino’s where Fowler ordered some pizza with extra cheese and everyone piled into the men’s room.

  Fowler sat in the restaurant, making small talk with a blonde waitress, while the others waited around for it to get dark.

  JR, Flynn, and Randall went back to the car. More somber now and tense, Billy and Pete got in back, where they methodically taped each of their fingers and Flynn loaded the gun.

  He had a handful of hollow-point bullets that a boys had talked a friend of JR’s uncle into buying under the pretense that they wanted them for target practice. One by one, Flynn dropped the bullets into the five chambers and closed the cylinder. He slipped the revolver into the front waistband of his jeans and closed his jacket to cover it.

  Darkness was beginning to fall. Billy grabbed the duffel bag. It was time.

  ◆◆◆

  No one is completely certain what happened in Pam and Greg Smart’s condominium on the night of May 1, 1990. The crime scene itself would pose as many questions as it would provide answers. All anyone has to go on is the information later given by Billy Flynn and Pete Randall, accounts which have largely gone unchallenged, but which suffer from lapses—perhaps as a result of their panicked state that night, perhaps a matter of selective recollection.

  After they left JR, Billy and Pete walked behind the plaza to a row of dumpsters. All was quiet. No people or cars were anywhere. They went behind the bins and slipped out of their street clothes and into the sweats Billy had brought. Randall wore the gray outfit and an old pair of sneakers. Billy tugged on black sweatpants, a T-shirt, a black winter coat, and the beat-up footwear that Fowler had given him. The plan was to dispose of the old clothes later.

  Flynn eased the gun into his left inside jacket pocket, then set the duffel bag, stuffed with their clothing, into a stairwell behind the plaza.

  The boys began walking down Peabody Road Annex, behind the plaza and alongside the condominiums. Then they noticed two people coming toward them, so the boys started trotting to appear as if they were out for a run.

  They jogged around the condos once and ended up on the side of Pam’s unit. As daylight faded, the boys crouched in the shadow of a garage twenty feet from the Smarts’ bulkhead doors. They watched some people on a nearby driveway saying good-bye to friends. Flynn and Randall slipped on the latex gloves and waited.

  When all was clear, they crept to the gray metal doors that led to the Smarts’ basement. All Billy had to do was pull up the handle, but for some reason they could not figure out how to open it.

  Finally, it gave way. They padded down the concrete steps, closing the doors behind them, pushed open a second door, then stepped into the dark cellar.

  Number one of their list was the dog. The boys went upstairs, but when Billy stooped to pick up Haylen, the Shih-Tzu began to bark and growl and scampered away. Flynn chased the dog
around the couch before he finally got his hands on it. The boys would later laugh that they threw the animal into the basement and heard the thump-thump-thump as it tumbled down the stairs.

  Upstairs, they ripped apart the master bedroom. Then, they went into the bathroom, which was windowless, closed the door, and flicked on the light. Randall unloaded Pam’s jewelry box into a blue, flower-patterned pillowcase he had removed from the bed. They grabbed a small portable television that was in the bathroom as well.

  Next, they stepped into the guest bedroom, but let it be.

  They started downstairs, the pillowcase holding the jewelry and a pair of sunglasses that had caught Pete’s fancy.

  In the living area, Billy opened one of the rear doors a crack in anticipation of a hurried departure. They looked around the kitchen cabinets for a flashlight, but could not find one.

  Randall busied himself with the VCR, pulling it off its shelf on the entertainment center. He could not reach the outlet to unplug it, though, so he left it upside down on the floor. Easier to move were a small pair of stereo speakers, which Pete set by the doors. He planned to bring them with him when he left.

  With a black-handled carving knife from the kitchen butcher block, Randall then sliced open a black pillow from the couch and emptied the stuffing on the floor. The flowered pillowcase was too conspicuous, so he unloaded the jewelry and sunglasses, as well as some compact disks, into the black pillowcase. He tossed the flowered one aside.

  ◆◆◆

  At the plaza, Lattime and Fowler were killing time. They window-shopped, then wandered down where some new stores were under construction and surveyed the workmanship. They went back to Ames, where JR got some motor oil and poured it into his grandmother’s car. They checked out the cars in the parking lot to see if any had radios worth ripping off. They sat around listening to golden oldies on the Impala’s AM radio, belting out their favorites as loud as they could. They talked about whether or not they should take the wheelchair that JR’s grandmother kept in the trunk and push each other around the parking lot. They sliced up plastic bottles with a razor blade.

  And at one point, they drove around the condo to see if Greg had returned. His truck wasn’t there, so they went back to the plaza.

  Around eight o’clock, meanwhile, Sergeant Vincent Byron of the Derry Police Department’s detective bureau had been out with his wife and two kids, and as he was driving home decided to take a brief detour.

  After work some days, Byron, then thirty-seven, liked to take a golf club or two and go to the athletic field at Hood Junior High and smack balls. He saved the money that a driving range would charge, and usually no one was around to bother him. Byron told his wife that he wanted to see if the field was available.

  The sergeant, who is built like a linebacker, turned into the Hood Commons parking lot, quite possibly passing JR and Fowler, taking a shortcut to the junior high. Byron drove up to the school, which overlooks Summerhill Condominiums. Billy and Pete were just a couple hundred yards away, in the Smarts’ condo. But all the sergeant saw was the field filled with baseball players, apparently a softball game in progress. “Not a good night for golf,” he said, and headed home.

  Less than an hour later, close to nine, Greg Smart’s friend Dave Bosse, whom Smart had met back when he was working construction, was also at Hood Commons, picking up a baseball magazine at a bookstore. Since he was in the neighborhood, Bosse figured he might as well drop in to see Smart. He drove past the condo, but like JR and Fowler, didn’t see Greg’s pickup. Bosse decided to just go home.

  ◆◆◆

  Billy Flynn was also keeping an eye out for the Toyota pickup, sitting on the kitchen counter and peering out the blinds. Pete was in the living room, trying to figure out how he could remove the stereo system.

  As the seconds ticked away, the boys talked, trying to decide how best to subdue Smart. Billy said maybe they should use Pam’s plan of Flynn’s hiding in the closet and then pouncing on Greg when he went to hang up his jacket.

  At one point, Billy grabbed a towel from the upstairs bathroom. The plan was to cover Greg’s head with it when they ambushed him at the door and then yank him in. But then for some reason they changed their mind and Flynn tossed the blue towel on the carpet.

  Billy then took one of the heavy brass candlesticks from the dining room table and said maybe he should hit Greg over the head with it.

  A second later, though, he had another idea. What if they unscrewed the lightbulb in the foyer, so Greg would be unable to turn it on? Billy set the candlestick on the floor and went over to the door to look. But that idea also went by the wayside. If they ever got caught, he said, it would look like a premeditated killing, not a burglary gone wrong. He never picked up the candlestick again, Billy said.

  Finally, they agreed on a plan. Randall, who was burlier, would hide behind the entranceway door. Billy would stand at the base of the stairs that led to the second floor. When Greg came in, Pete would pounce on him and Billy would turn off the lights and shut the door.

  They waited. Flynn continued looking out from the kitchen. Randall, nervous about fingerprints, had wrapped and then rewrapped the knife handle in paper towels from the kitchen, discarding the used ones on the carpet. He sat at the dining room table anticipating cutting Greg’s throat.

  Suddenly, the Toyota pickup appeared outside. Greg pulled into his parking place.

  “Jesus, Pete, he’s here!” Billy said. “He’s here!”

  “Calm down,” Randall said, standing. “Let’s go.”

  In the excitement of the moment, they ended up in each other’s place. Billy stood behind the door and Pete got on the landing by the stairs.

  Billy could hear Greg’s footsteps outside as he climbed the steps, then the jangle of his keys, and the metallic click of the door unlocking.

  The door opened.

  Greg took a step inside and flicked on the light.

  “Hayley!” Smart called, to the dog.

  No response.

  For seconds, they all stood there—Greg, Billy, and Pete—suspended on the cusp of the most critical moment of each of their lives.

  Then Flynn leaped out. He grabbed Smart by the shoulders of his coat. Stunned, Greg hollered and tried to retreat.

  Randall bounded down and shoved Smart completely into the foyer, then turned to shut the door and extinguish the lights. The doormat, though, was caught in the door and he had to kick it free. When Pete looked again, Billy had Smart over by the stairwell wall, the boy flailing away while Greg tried to cover his face to block the blows.

  Randall rushed over and in one violent motion seized Greg by the hair and slammed the back of his head against the wall.

  “Get down on your knees!” Randall said, lurching before him with the knife in his right hand and Greg’s hair tangled in his left.

  Smart dropped to his knees, his back toward the stairwell wall, his hands in his lap. Flynn stood to his left.

  “Don’t hurt me, dude,” Smart said, almost in a whimper. “What do you want, dude?”

  “Just shut up!” Randall said, waving the blade before his face. “Shut up!”

  “Where the dog? What did you do with my dog?”

  “Your dog’s OK,” Randall fired back. “No one hurt your dog.”

  Randall guessed that Smart was wearing a chain around his neck. He demanded that Greg hand it over, but Smart denied he was wearing one.

  Then Pete told him to remove the ring on his left hand. It turned out to be his wedding band.

  “I can’t give it to you,” Smart said. “My wife would kill me.”

  Pete decided to let it go. The boys turned instead to his wallet. Greg took out the billfold, monogrammed G.W.S., and Billy rooted through it, removing his money, most likely only five dollars.

  The moment had arrived to kill him, but as Randall would later say, Greg’s remarks about his wedding band and his pleadings to spare his life were playing on Pete’s mind. It was not as easy to stab some
one face-to-face as it was to boast about it.

  Randall could not slit Smart’s throat. Pete looked over at Billy, who motioned with his right hand toward where the revolver sat in his inside jacket pocket. The movement was a question.

  Pete, still grasping Greg by the hair, nodded yes.

  Flynn removed the gun while Randall and Smart traded words, but Billy wasn’t comprehending any of it.

  He cocked the hammer of the dual-action pistol. Now the trigger was far less resistant to pull.

  The boy stood there—“A hundred years, it seemed like,” Flynn later said—the gun two or three inches from the top of Greg’s skull.

  “God forgive me,” Billy said.

  He squeezed. There was a loud report and a flash.

  At that instant, Randall let go of Smart’s hair.

  Mysteriously, Greg’s head came to rest partly on the discarded blue towel. Perhaps it was a coincidence. Or, perhaps one of the boys, worried about Pam’s admonishments about causing a mess, placed it there, consciously or unconsciously. Neither of the boys says he remembers.

  Also strange, though more likely a coincidence, was that Greg’s foot came to rest on the candlestick.

  Greg’s right ring finger would show an abrasion, as if his ring was pried off of him. And the ring from that hand would end up beneath his body, along with his keys and his wallet. Yet neither of the boys would recall seeing it, much less forcibly removing it.

  Most baffling would be the forensic evidence. Bullet fragments under the scalp and a lack of gunpowder in and around the wound strongly suggest that Smart was indeed shot at close range, as Billy and Pete would say, but that an object was placed between the gun barrel and Greg’s head.

  Was something used to muffle the sound of the gun? Was Smart’s head covered, perhaps with a towel, so that he didn’t know what was coming? Was he somehow tortured? No physical signs of such an object remained at the scene. And the boys say that nothing, absolutely nothing, was in front of the gun.