On Sunday, June 10, Charewicz was erecting a fence—to enclose his Rhodesian Ridgeback dog—in his Derry backyard. It was an interminable project that had become a target of gentle humor among his fellow detectives. Charewicz had decided that this was the weekend it would be finished. Providing, of course, that nothing came up. Barry was the detective on call.
It was early afternoon when the telephone rang. Someone had strolled in the Seabrook PD with a pistol that might have been used in the Smart homicide. Charewicz had to get out to the seacoast to see if the call had any merit before calling in the rest of the bureau. The fence would have to wait.
When Barry got to Seabrook, the parade began. First, Vance and Diane Lattime laid out their story.
Charewicz called Captain Jackson and said it looked serious.
Then, a battered Ralph Welch—driven to the police station with his father by JR’s father—came in, and his statement was taken on videotape.
Welch was sobbing as he spoke to the detective. After all, he was breaking an unwritten code of loyalty, providing information that most likely would send his buddies, including the Lattimes’ son, to prison.
By the time Charewicz was through, gently coaxing Welch along, gathering as many facts as he could and trying to make sense of it all, the detective knew the case was breaking wide open.
Everyone from the Derry detective bureau was to drop what he was doing—Pelletier’s beeper went off while he and his wife were helping out at a local Special Olympics—and head east.
The attorney general’s office was contacted, too. Assistant Attorney General Diane Nicolosi as well as William Lyons, a senior assistant AG, came down from Concord.
Everyone was converging on the seacoast. A two-day offensive on the Seabrook, New Hampshire beachhead had commenced.
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Billy Flynn, Pete Randall, and JR Lattime were making their great escape to a little town south of Worcester, Massachusetts. North Grosvenordale, Connecticut was where Pete and his parents had lived for a few years before coming back to Seabrook. And it was where the boy’s grandparents and a couple of his aunts still called home.
The boys had no set plan other than that they were going to steal some motorcycles while they were in town and continue with their now several hours old life on the lam.
When they arrived in Connecticut, Randall spoke to one of his aunts, telling her that he and his friends were in a little trouble with the law over some stolen road bikes and hoped to stay until things cooled off in New Hampshire.
One of the first things the boys did was to stop at some pay phones. Flynn chose not to call anyone, but Pete and JR telephoned their mothers, collect, and assured them that they were safe. JR refused to say where he was but told Diane Lattime that he and Pete had been only joking with Ralph. JR promised to contact her again soon.
The boys were grabbing a bite to eat at a pizzeria in the nearby town of Putnam when Randall’s grandfather came in and took Pete aside. He had just spoken to Pete’s father, the old man said, and his dad was not pleased.
So Pete called his father, who was livid. His wife had been too frightened to tell him so Frank Randall was unaware of the murder. All he knew was that the car was gone, and if it was not back by 9:30 that night, he would call the Connecticut state police, report the car stolen, and have his son arrested. Pete argued for a bit, but to no avail.
So, the three teenage boys—who would later be slammed as cold-blooded thrill killers—all piled back into the car and with JR at the wheel, went obediently home to their parents.
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With the walls tumbling around her, Pamela Smart, like the boys, was scared. But her character, whatever the odds, had always been to fight rather than flee, so she sat tight in the Hampton condominium and waited for her opening.
That night, at about nine o’clock—around the time that boys were returning home—Cecelia Pierce and a friend, Robby Fields, dropped by Pam’s place after a rock concert at one of the clubs on Hampton Beach. Pam ushered the girl upstairs to the guest bedroom, where they could speak in private.
Everything was going crazy, Pam said. Talking a mile a minute and quaking nervously, she told Cecelia about the events of the last twenty-four hours, from Ralph Welch having learned about the killing onward.
If the boys had a whit of sense, Pam said, they would try to pin the killing on Raymond Fowler and Welch. After all, if those two knew so much, maybe the police would buy that they’d done it.
It was around this time that detectives Pelletier and Paul Lussier cruised by Pam’s complex in an unmarked car, just to see what kind of activity might be going on. They jotted down Robby Fields’ license plate number and looked up at Pam’s window to see what seemed to be the silhouette of a female looking down, then moved on.
Not wanting to be alone, Pam asked Cecelia if she would stay the night. So Pierce got her pocketbook from Fields’ car and she and Pam drove in the CRX to the girl’s home in Seabrook to get a change of clothes.
Cecelia was driving back on Route1A, in front of Hampton Beach, when suddenly an army of cops descended. Word had gone out to area police departments to be on the lookout for Pam’s silver Honda in relation to a homicide. The Derry cops had guessed that the boys would be driving it.
Now, the Hampton police spotted the car, and practically every available cop was speeding to the scene. Several cruisers, motorcycles, mounted police, and a paddy wagon all surrounded the CRX, bathing it and its occupants in spotlights.
Cecelia wanted to know why she was being stopped. A cop barked that they would tell her in a minute, but in the meantime neither of them was to move.
Not thinking, Pam reached down to grab her dog, who had been growling. One of the officers screamed for her to put her hands up and not move again.
It was a tense scene, with the Hampton cops behaving as if they had captured a couple of the FBI’s most wanted, only to find upon checking in over the radio that they stopped the car they wanted but with the wrong people in it.
A woman officer returned to Pam’s car to say they could go. But before she could lower the volume on her walkie-talkie a dispatcher’s voice crackled with the information that the cops were seeking three male juveniles.
“Just tell her we pulled over the wrong car,” came the message.
“We pulled over the wrong car,” the officer said. “You can go.”
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The Derry police detective squad. (Left to right) Mike Raymond, Sgt. Vincent Byron, Capt. Loring Jackson, Michael Surette, Dan Pelletier, Paul Lussier, Sgt. Barry Charewicz. (Jim Paiva/ The Derry News)
The Derry cops offered Ralph Welch protective custody, drove him halfway across the state, and put him up for a couple days at a motel in Salem, New Hampshire, where he is said to have eaten heartily and run up a sizable phone bill with calls to his girlfriend.
In the meantime, investigators had talked to Danny Blake. And by eleven o’clock, Raymond Fowler and his mother were at the Seabrook police station. Detective Michael Surette, a baby-face former MP, sat across from him, with the tape recorder running. Fowler said he did not need a lawyer; he was willing to talk.
And talk he did. He told Surette that he had been in the car with Billy, Pete, and JR the night of the murder; he revealed how he and JR had waited around the parking lot at Hood Commons and how he’d eaten pizza and hit on the cute waitress; and he told of picking the boys up after the killing and of the frantic ride home to Seabrook.
Raymond, in fact, told the cops just about everything.
Except of his own involvement. He said he was just going along for the ride—the forty-five minute ride from Seabrook to Derry—and had no idea that a killing was to occur. He said he only learned about that when Pete and Billy jumped in the car and screamed that they did it.
Surette urged him to come clean, that this was his chance. But Fowler stuck to his story: He had no idea a killing was going down that night. No sir, no way.
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JR Lattime was probably wishing he had stayed in Connecticut.
All day long, Vance Lattime had been trying to do the right thing, helping the police in any way he could to get to the bottom of this. He had brought in the pistol, driven Ralph Welch to be interviewed, and turned in some of his ammunition that he thought could have been used in the crime. It was eventually determined that this was not the ammunition used in the murder.
“My biggest thing was I wanted the facts and I wanted the truth,” said the father.
But now, in his living room, he was fed up with the whole situation. Vance was a working man, not Columbo, and he had had enough.
JR was sitting solemnly on the living room couch. The boy’s mother was over near the corner, sobbing. And Vance was storming around the room, shouting at his son, hardly taking a second to grab a breath, and throwing in every few minutes, “Why won’t you answer me?!”
The boy had tried to explain, saying, essentially, that Billy was having an affair with Pam Smart, but before he could say much more, his father burst in.
“Then it’s a good thing she didn’t gang bang all of you!” he yelled. “What would you have done then? Wiped out the town of Derry?”
When his father composed himself, JR did the best he could to explain, using aliases, obvious lies, and refusals to answer to help his dad understand what had happened without telling the whole story.
As far as Vance could make out, no one ever expected the killing to actually occur, if for no other reason than that the kid who wanted Greg Smart dead was Billy Flynn.
“Did he do it?” asked Vance.
“He said he did,” said JR.
“Do you believe that he could do it?”
“Do you think he could do it?”
“I’d bet everything that I own,” said Vance. “I’d bet one million bucks that he couldn’t do it.”
“Well, I know him better than you,” said JR, “And I’d never believe he’d do it.”
“But did he do it?”
“Yes,” said JR. “He said he did.”
That night, Vance Lattime returned to the Seabrook Police Department and told the detectives that it was apparent that the kids were involved in the murder.
Before he left for home, Lattime said he told the cops that his son was willing to talk, but only to a Mike Frost whom JR had mentioned.
JR’s father was unfamiliar with him, but Frost was a Seabrook juvenile officer. He knew and had developed a rapport with all of the boys and with JR in particular.
His son never got to talk to Frost that night. Lattime said that the Derry cops rejected his offer. Some say the decision was a matter of territoriality, that with the case breaking, Derry wanted the glory to itself; others say the investigators did not want officers who were not up to speed with the case talking to key witnesses; and it did not help that Frost was out of town.
What is certain is that the connection was never made and an opportunity fell by the wayside. JR refused to come forward to any other law enforcement officials. The door would be slammed shut the next day when the Lattimes hired an attorney, who was aghast at the extent to which the family had already cooperated. And JR, at least for the time being, would be confessing to no one.
That Sunday night, Vance Lattime walked out of the Seabrook Police Department and drove home, thinking about the events of the day and what now seemed like the direction of the investigation.
Lattime remembered: “When I left that police station I didn’t make it halfway down that road when I said to myself, ‘What the hell have I done?’”
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When the boys had returned from Connecticut, JR dropped off Billy outside his home. Elaine Flynn came out and met her son. As soon as the boy saw her it was obvious that she knew. Diane Lattime had called earlier in the day, in fact, and the parents of the three boys had met.
With a crisis at hand, Elaine Flynn asked her son if he needed a lawyer, then told him he should go upstairs to talk to their landlord and family friend, Kenny Knight. She and her son had been too far apart the past few years to expect anything to change now. Elaine figured Billy might explain to a man what had happened.
But first, fearing that the police might search her residence, Elaine told Billy to get rid of anything and everything that “looked bad,” or in other words, that tied the boy to Pam Smart.
Billy rummaged through his room with a brown paper bag and loaded it with Pam’s love letters, the bikini photographs, the medallion that read “Bill and Pame Forever,” and dozens of passes that Pam had issued him to get out of study hall. He gave it to his mother to throw away.
Then he went upstairs. That night, Kenny Knight contacted Boston lawyer James Merberg, who had represented Knight in some past misadventures. Merberg, who had once worked with famed criminal defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, had himself handled a variety of high-profile cases over the years, including a good number of homicides. Merberg in fact once represented punk rocker Sid Vicious, who was accused of killing a girlfriend and who died of a drug overdose before going to trial.
Merberg’s advice, according to Elaine Flynn’s later court testimony, was that she “take Billy out of town somewhere until he saw what was going to happen.”
That night, fearing that someone might follow her, Elaine drove Kenny Knight’s car rather than her own and took Billy to her brother’s place in Haverhill, where the boy stayed until Monday, when Elaine picked him up to return to Seabrook.
All the way home, the mother and son said nothing about the situation at hand.
“I didn’t know how to deal with this,” Elaine Flynn said later in court, “and I suppose I didn’t want to deal with it at the time. I didn’t want to know.”
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The investigators worked through the night. Pelletier, Surette, and Fowler drove along South Main Street in Seabrook, searching in vain for the duffel bag that Fowler said his friends had discarded the night of the murder. Other witnesses were interviewed. When a lull came, some of the detective stretched out for an hour or two on mats in the Seabrook PD’s workout room.
Then, not long before sunrise, a harbinger of doom for Flynn, Randall, and JR arrived at the station in the unlikely form of a young woman named Ellen Carter. She was a clerk for the Derry police and she had come to type the warrants for arrest that the AG’s people were beginning to draft.
On the morning of Monday, June 11, the Derry cops went to Winnacunnet High School and interviewed the girlfriends of Pete and JR. A little later, at the Seabrook Police Department, they met with Sal Parks.
Pete Randall was the only one of the three boys who’d gone to school that day. He stayed for a while, got into an argument with Ralph Welch’s girlfriend over the events of the previous day, and then, when he saw the Derry cops were there, called his mother to have him dismissed.
Randall spent a few hours with his mom and JR, driving around in preparation for his driver’s test. The boy would pass his exam and receive his driver’s license that day.
Detective Paul Lussier, meanwhile, had delivered Vance Lattime’s .38-caliber revolver to the New Hampshire state police forensic laboratory in Concord. Firearms examiner Roger Klose microscopically compared the bullet that had been removed from Greg Smart’s skull to one that he had fired from Lattime’s gun. They had a match.
By late afternoon, Captain Jackson had decided that it was time to try Cecelia Pierce again. Around four o’clock, the girl’s mother received a telephone call from Dan Pelletier asking her to bring Cecelia to the Seabrook Police Department.
Mrs. Eaton, who was thirty-five, said she would bring her daughter over, but first she had to track her down. The last she had heard, Crit was with Pam. The teenager had a driver’s education class that evening and had told her mother that it would be easier to go from Pam’s place rather than have her mother drive her over.
When Mrs. Eaton called Pam, though, she was told that Cecelia had already left.
“Well,” said
Mrs. Eaton, “the detectives just called here and they want to ask her some questions.”
“They did?” said Pam, obviously agitated. “What did they want?”
“I don’t know. They just wanted to know if I could bring her over to the Seabrook police station.”
“Look, why don’t you just let me take her over there?” said Pam. “I can go and find her. I’ll take her over.”
“Pam, I’ll find her and I can take her over,” said Mrs. Eaton. “I want to know what’s going on here.”
Sure enough, the mother would locate her daughter at a friend’s house just down the road. Before leaving to get Cecelia, though, Mrs. Eaton called Pam back.
“Pam, I found her and I’m going to bring her to the police station now,” she said.
“Don’t take her over until I get there!” said Pam, almost screaming now, her voice filled with panic. “Let me go with you so we can all go together.”
“I’m a victim here! I have a right to know everything that the police know and they’re not telling me anything! I’m getting tired of being treated this way and I want to know what’s going on!”
By this time, Mrs. Eaton was holding the phone away from her ear because of the volume of Pam’s voice.”
“If you want to meet us there, fine,” said Mrs. Eaton. “I’m driving over now.”
Mrs. Eaton and her husband got in their car, picked up Cecelia, and drove in rush hour traffic about two miles to the Seabrook police station. Pam had three times as far to travel from her apartment in Hampton.
Yet when the Eatons’ car pulled into the parking lot, Pam had already arrived. Immediately, she buttonholed Cecelia as they walked toward the door, the girl’s mother lagging behind.
Teach Me to Kill Page 21