When they got back to the Seabrook Police Department, the detectives regrouped. Surette said a silent prayer that all was not lost.
His petition was answered.
Pelletier, holding a microcassette recorder next to the car scanner, had captured the entire conversation. The quality was not the greatest. A second visit to audio-enhancement expert Robert Halvorson would be necessary.
But to hell with that for now. Danny Pelletier had just saved the day.
◆◆◆
At the Seabrook PD, Cecelia dropped off the body wire equipment, said good-bye to the cops, and drove toward her great-grandmother’s house to meet her family. By now, her mother was weeping, what with Cecelia being way overdue and the relatives forecasting certain doom.
Then Cecelia pulled in. She was greeted with hugs and kisses all around.
Mrs. Eaton brushed away her tears. “See!” she yelled to her sister, who had been carrying on all afternoon. “Next time just shut up!”
Cecelia’s luggage was already packed in the van. She got in with her relatives, said her farewells, and westward they drove.
Obviously, Cecelia would not make it to her planned get-together with Smart that evening. “My personal opinion is that if Critter had gone to Pam’s condo that night, we would not have seen nor heard from Critter again,” said Mrs. Eaton. “We’d have probably found the body, but I don’t think we’d have heard from her.”
Most likely, Cecelia’s mother has watched a few too many television mysteries. It is doubtful that Pam Smart planned to kill Cecelia that night.
But then again, who can blame Mrs. Eaton? A few months earlier, who would have believed any of it?
Chapter 9
Dan Pelletier never asked for much. He came in every day and dug in on the Gregory Smart homicide. Bum leads. Lousy hours. Tons of paperwork. And just like his bosses expected, no complaints.
None of the other detectives knew Pamela Smart better than Pelletier. He talked to her on seven or eight occasions, seeing her in supposed bereavement on the night of the murder and hearing her in panic on the afternoons of the body wire conversations. And he had met most of Pam’s and Greg’s friends.
Now, Pelletier had just one favor to request of Captain Jackson. When the time came, if at all possible, he wanted to be the one to arrest her.
Jackson nodded. He would see what could be done.
It was just a matter of time.
The detectives were now so cocky that someone made a photocopy of Pam’s picture and a quote that had appeared in the Union Leader and put it up on their office bulletin board. The quote was something Pam had said to correspondent Tami Plyler a little over a week after Greg’s death: “I think about what our dreams were and those things will never happen. But I’m still alive and I still have dreams. I will try to go forward and do those things.”
At the end of the quote, one of the cops scrawled, “Wrong, guess again.” Someone else drew bars over her face. And still another detective wrote “New Hampshire State Prison” across the top.
By this time, too, the investigators among themselves took to referring to Smart as Pammy, her family’s nickname for her.
Despite the self-confidence, some work still remained. The cops were not completely happy with the sound on the body wire tapes and they were not averse to additional evidence. There was talk of using Cecelia one more time, though it was dubious that the teenager was anxious to go in wearing the body wire again. Pam, after all, had been her friend. None of this was easy for the girl.
Meanwhile, others were getting anxious.
After Cecelia failed to show up at Pam’s condo the night of July 13, Smart began calling the Eaton residence time and again. She could not find her former intern. Surely it crossed Pam’s mind that the end was near.
Bill and Judy Smart, meanwhile, were pained by knowing much of what the investigators knew and yet still having to behave as if they suspected nothing. They saw less of Pam now that she was living in Hampton, but they talked to her and hugged her when she was around.
Greg’s father would complain to Captain Jackson, half demanding to know when she would be arrested. And the captain would take the insurance salesman aside and say reassuringly, “Bill, why don’t you and Judy go away for a few days? Go out on your yacht. Go to the mountains. Just take a break. We want this thing tight and right. So just relax.”
Tight and right, tight and right. To Bill Smart, that seemed to be Jackson’s favorite phrase. But Greg’s father was sick of talk; he wanted Pamela behind bars.
Out on the seacoast, Vance Lattime, usually a man of patience, was doing a slow boil. A month and a half had passed since he set off the chain reaction that resulted in the arrests of his son as well as Billy and Pete. And still they were the only ones sitting in jail. What about Fowler? And Pam?
On the morning of Wednesday, August 1, Lattime told some friends that if Smart was not arrested by Friday, he was going to find her and bring her down to the station himself.
He need not have worried.
Cecelia had been brought back to Seabrook, and that Wednesday the plan called for her to attempt one more secretly recorded telephone conversation. Then would come the arrest.
The attorney general’s people had talked about simply bringing the case against Pam to the Rockingham County Superior Court grand jury. If she was indicted, it would be the sheriff’s deputies who would arrest her.
The Derry police objected. They had worked the case hard since May 1 and felt they deserved to make the collar. Plus, the element of surprise might well lead Pam to confess or make an incriminating statement. The cops felt they should be on hand if it happened.
Indeed, Pam had a problem with keeping her mouth closed, and she might very well have said something when she felt the handcuffs on her wrists.
The only problem was that her impending arrest was one of the worst kept secrets in southern New Hampshire.
It is uncertain exactly where the leak began, though it seems likely that it soon came from more than one source. Reporters from all over the area knew that morning that the arrest was coming. One, in fact, called Paul Twomey and mentioned it. The lawyer, in turn, called Pam and told her to be prepared for the worst. Smart had received similar warnings before, so she did not know whether to believe it this time.
Nevertheless, she called Bill and Judy Smart. Since Greg’s death, Pam had called his parents often, crying about how Greg was the only thing that was good in her life and how she didn’t know what to do without him. She seldom called before noon.
Now, however, she was telling Greg’s parents that she was feeling particularly lonesome and despondent. Something in her voice and the way she was talking told the Smarts that Pam was aware of what was coming. The couple believed that Pam was feeling them out, searching for something in their voices or a remark that would confirm the news.
That morning, from her home in Seabrook, Cecelia called Pam at SAU 21 for the final recorded telephone talk. Pierce’s job was simply to say hello and say she’d heard Pam had been looking for her. Perhaps she could get Pam going once again.
Their conversation was brief and insubstantial. Probably the most interesting exchange was when Pam told Cecelia how upset she was because that morning she had accidentally run over a rabbit on the road. Cecelia was incredulous. I can’t believe that you’re upset about some rabbit, she said, but you had your husband killed and you don’t care about him. Pam sidestepped the issue.
In Derry, meanwhile, Dan Pelletier wrapped up the paperwork at Derry District Court, signing the warrant for arrest and an affidavit outlining the reasons for charging Pam.
Around one o’clock, the Derry cops met with an officer from the Hampton Police Department at the Winnacunnet High School parking lot. Dressed in their best suits and sports coats, Pelletier led Jackson and Surette toward SAU 21. Charewicz stood near the back door, in case Pam tried to slip out.
At 1:05, they entered the building. A receptionist spoke up, but
Pelletier blew right past and down the stairs to Pam’s office. Jackson and Byron trailed behind.
Pam was at her desk wearing a pale green dress with a wide black belt. She had just returned from having lunch at her condo with her young brother, Jay.
“Hi!” she said when she saw Pelletier’s familiar face.
“Hi,” he said.
“What’s up?”
“Well, Pam, I have some good news and I have some bad news. The good news is that we’ve solved the murder of your husband. The bad news is that you’re under arrest.”
“What for?” said Pam.
“First-degree murder,” Pelletier replied. “Stand up and face the wall.”
Pam’s mouth dropped and her eyes opened wide.
She did what she was told.
“Put your hands behind your back,” Pelletier said. Then he clamped the dull blue Smith and Wesson handcuffs onto her wrists.
Before escorting Pam outside to the car, he asked if she needed anything from her office. She said her purse.
The foursome climbed the steps to the front door.
“What’s going on?” an administrator wanted to know as Pam was brought out in front of her co-workers.
“We’re arresting Pammy,” said one of the detectives, as if it should have been obvious.
“What for?”
“For murder.”
Pelletier marched her out to the unmarked cruiser. A Lawrence Eagle-Tribune reporter, Hilde Hartnett, acting on a tip, had been in the parking lot and snapped some photos of the arrest, with Pam in handcuffs and Pelletier grasping her upper left arm. (The detective, who seldom was ever named in newspaper articles about his work, had his moment in the sun dimmed a bit the next day when underneath Hartnett’s four-column page-one photo, he was identified as Loring Jackson.)
Pam looked “wild-eyed and shaken” when she got in the cruiser, Hartnett would write.
The cops, of course, were hoping Pam would say something interesting. But Pam, no doubt following her lawyer’s advice, said nothing.
Byron got behind the wheel. Pelletier climbed into the backseat next to Pam. As the car pulled away, Pelletier read her the Miranda warning.
The detectives had a tape recorder handy in case Pam became talkative, but she said little the entire ride on Route 107, which Byron preferred to route 101.
Smart’s only words, in fact, came when she asked the cops about the path they were taking: “Are we going to Derry?” she asked. The detectives told her yes. “This way?” she said.
Meanwhile, Pelletier and Byron started discussing their respective vacations and how nice it would be to get away sometime soon.
Smart had her own thoughts, which at this point were not particularly lucid: “This is crazy. Just unbelievable. You know what I mean? Like I can’t even believe this is happening. Like, I didn’t cry. It was just like shock, I guess.”
In Manchester, Terri Schnell was experiencing her own version of shock—as would all of Pam’s friends, her parents, and relatives.
Emotionally, Terri, twenty-three, was having one of the worst years she could remember. The breaking off of her engagement and the death of Greg, one of her dearest friends, had wreaked havoc on her. So much so that one day, about two weeks after the murder, Terri impulsively went and got a tattoo—a red heart about the size of a quarter on her thigh—during her lunch break.
Now, while at her job as a customer-service representative with an insurance company, Terri received a phone call from Sonia Simon with the news that Pam had been arrested. Smart was to be arraigned in Derry District Court that very afternoon.
Terri could not believe it. Schnell had been closer to Greg than she ever was to Pam. But this she could not fathom. Terri could not accept that Pam would ever have engineered Greg’s death. It wasn’t in the Pam Smart that’s he knew.
“I spent the whole summer with Pam, crying at her place in Hampton and in Windham, discussing everything,” said Schnell. “Believe me, I’m not the type of person who will let something go by. I had asked her a million questions to satisfy myself.”
Schnell got into her Toyota Tercel and drove like mad to Derry, arriving at the court building just as Smart’s arraignment was ending. As the police started to bring Pam out, Schnell, in tears, tried to hug her, and was blocked by police officers. Terri ran outside and around the building, where Smart was being brought to the car for transport to the Rockingham County Jail.
“Pam, I love you!” Schnell was shouting. “This is so wrong! I love you!”
Smart got in the backseat, put down her head, and was driven away. She sobbed quietly.
Schnell, in a suit and high heels, then broke for her car to escape all the reporters who wanted to interview her or at least get her name.
Bill Smart, meanwhile, gave reporters at the courthouse a statement. Spewing anger, he growled somewhat nonsensically, “All I’ve got to say is that if indeed she is guilty that they teach her a lessons and give her the maximum sentence that God and Lord above us will give her!”
◆◆◆
In lieu of the Almighty, Judge Douglas Gray of the Rockingham County Superior Court was assigned Pam’s case.
Gray, who stood six foot five, was intimidating not only because of his size, but because of his imperious nature. An appointee of former Governor John Sununu, he was said to have a dry, Down East sense of humor, but few saw it when he was on the bench.
More often, lawyers looked up to see Gray, then fifty-seven, scowling at anyone and everyone who might be wasting the court’s time. If anyone would be doing any intimidating in his courtroom, it was the judge himself.
Only adding to the jurist’s image was his designated nickname. In the bowels of the New Hampshire State Prison in Concord, the men’s facility, Douglas Gray was known as the Hanging Judge.
In mid-August, he listened to the tapes of Pam and Cecelia so that he could better rule on the question of bail for Pam Smart.
He also listened to the defendant. “I have spent the last twelve days behind bars in state prison, incarcerated for a crime I didn’t commit,” Pam said at her bail hearing. “If this court is worried about me fleeing, I can assure you that I am going nowhere because I want to be in this courtroom to prove that I am innocent of the charges.”
At least part of Pam’s statement was true: She was going nowhere. Citing the tapes, Gray ordered her held without bond.
The next day, a Rockingham County Superior Court grand jury indicted her. The charges: accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and witness tampering.
Pam Smart after an early court appearance. (Tami Plyler)
For someone who liked attention, Pamela Smart now had plenty.
Her arrest, combined with the rough sketch of her affair with Billy as well as Cecelia’s secretly recorded conversations, was sensational stuff for both the mainstream and fringe elements of the news media.
The attraction was obvious: Pam had violated much of what society holds sacred—her marriage vows, the responsibilities she had to the teenagers involved, and, of course, the sanctity of human life.
Smart’s arrest was big news around New Hampshire and, eventually, into Boston. Had Iraq not invaded Kuwait early the next day, Pam Smart might have been a household name in Dubuque.
Nevertheless, her story was ideal for the supermarket tabloids. The Weekly World News, for instance, which has come out with such blockbusters as President Bush’s secret meeting with an alien from outer space, ran a two-page spread.
Before long, and only naturally, the tale would unfold on dramatic-news television shows. A Current Affair dubbed its story, “A Macabre Saga—Murder 101.” And Hard Copy opened with an announcer saying that students at Winnacunnet High School were getting more than an education: “Some bad grown-up games were going on, games that ended in a crime of passion.”
The case was also coming up on programs like Sally Jessy Raphael, during a segment on “Black Widow Murders,” and Geraldo, where the top
ic was “Fatal Marriages.”
Bill Spencer, who said he wanted to win some recognition to boost his career, appeared on both shows. It was ill-advised. He came off looking less than objective, which would later give Pam and the Wojas family fodder to attack his reporting.
On Geraldo Rivera’s program, in fact, Spencer even got into an embarrassing tiff with Pam’s mother, who accused the reporter of baiting Pam.
Rivera asked Spencer if perhaps Smart was getting an unfair shake from the New Hampshire media.
“The evidence is overwhelming,” said the reporter. “All these teenagers, Cecelia Pierce being the key figure. But there were many other teenagers who have spoken to the police.”
“That’s right,” fired back Linda Wojas. “They are all teenagers. My nephew, who’s fifteen, his mother still has a hard time getting him to change his underwear. Fifteen years old.”
“There are other teenagers,” Spencer said.
“What would my beautiful daughter, with her wonderful husband, that had everything to live for, both of them—very beautiful marriage, very caring people—why would my daughter look at a fifteen-year-old young man?”
For Spencer, the show was a debacle. Pam’s mother had a grating side, to be sure. And as her remarks about Billy Flynn would later show, she was obviously blindly supporting Pam. But as the wounded mother of a young woman in prison, Linda Wojas was beyond reproach.
A more crucial figure in the case, Cecelia Pierce, was also tainted by the publicity. Reporters from all over were hounding the teenager, the Eaton family, and the girl’s friends for interviews. Cecelia consented to talk to A Current Affair and Hard Copy, accepting three hundred dollars and a thousand dollars, respectively.
She also sold her rights to the story to a Hollywood film-making company, Once Upon a Time Productions, receiving two thousand dollars upfront and a promise of one hundred thousand dollars if a movie was ever made.
Teach Me to Kill Page 27