The same day that the new charges were released, Billy Flynn was certified by the Rockingham County Superior Court to stand trial as an adult. It seemed only a matter of time before JR Lattime and Pete Randall would meet a similar fate. It was more and more likely that a deal was going to be made. But the kids were sticking together. It looked like it would have to be all or none.
The attorneys for both sides, meanwhile, continued preparing for trial. On January 17 and 18, 1991, they appeared in Gray’s court for a pretrial hearing to consider a variety of motions by Pam’s lawyers. Among other requests, the defense asked for a change of venue and that the secretly recorded tapes not be allowed as evidence.
Over those two days, Twomey and Sisti, with Pam sitting quietly beside them, would question a range of witnesses, including Dan Pelletier, Cecelia Pierce, Bill Lyons, and even Bill Spencer.
There was a touch of drama when Sisti asked Cecelia about her lucrative movie contract. Anxious and near tears, the girl snapped: “If I could choose between one hundred thousand dollars and Greg being alive, I’d choose Greg being alive.”
Then, there was a bit of embarrassment, when Mark Myrdek of the state police explained to Sisti and the court why he threw away the latex glove that had turned up the day after the murder.
And finally, there was quiet laughter among the reporters in the gallery when an obviously uncomfortable Bill Spencer got on the witness stand.
Sisti tried to learn the source of Spencer’s story on the Hillsborough grand jury charges. When that failed, he asked Spencer to talk about how much coverage the case had received. “I would say it’s one of the largest murder stories we’ve covered,” the reporter replied.
But perhaps the most compelling place to be during the pretrial hearing was the public waiting room, where Pam’s family and friends were wearing and passing out little yellow ribbons. Never mind the American soldiers in the Middle East waiting to go to war with Iraq. These ribbons were for Smart, “our hostage of the state of New Hampshire.”
When it was all over, the pretrial hearings had failed to help the accused very much. Judge Gray denied virtually every motion.
Then, on January 22, 1991, the walls came down. Pete Randall agreed to cut a deal with the state. JR Lattime, who had tentatively also agreed to testify against Pam and then changed his mind, was forced to follow suit. As did Billy Flynn.
In exchange for the boys’ testimony and pleas of guilty to second-degree murder, the state promised to recommend reduced sentences. Flynn and Randall would receive forty years in prison, with twelve deferred if they remained on good behavior. Lattime would get thirty years, with twelve deferred.
Once the boys began talking, all kinds of information came forth. As a result, the Derry cops would recover the black pillowcase with Pam’s jewelry. Back in June, around the time of her son’s arrest, Patricia Randall had hidden it in a hole in the wall, behind some insulation, in Pete’s bedroom. Now, too, the Lattimes would give the police the box of ammunition that had been purchased for the killing. Diane Lattime said it had been under JR’s bed when the police searched the place.
On January 28, Flynn, Randall, and Lattime pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. However, they were caught by channel 9’s camera, at the courthouse, laughing, chewing gum, and slapping their hands, seemingly showing no regret whatsoever.
Greg Smart’s father was outraged. He had argued with Paul Maggiotto about the pela bargain and made it clear that he wanted his son’s killers to serve every day of their lives behind bars, if not worse. And now, to see their behavior, he could not restrain himself.
“What kind of people are these people?” he asked Bill Spencer on camera.” Ask yourself that. Who could do something like that and have no remorse?”
That same day, their case bolstered by statements from the boys, the Derry cops arrested Raymond Fowler in Seabrook. The charges: attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and tampering with physical evidence. (In May 1991, Fowler would also be charged with accomplice to first-degree murder.)
On January 29, 1991, Fowler was to be arraigned in Derry District Court. When the Derry cops hurriedly brought him up the walk toward the front door, a small group of photographers crowded around. Bill Spencer ran over with a microphone and futilely shouted some questions at the teenager.
As reporters and cops milled around in the hallway waiting for the arraignment, a Derry detective was heard to say sarcastically, “Did Raymond answer all of Bill’s questions?”
Raymond Fowler (Nick Thomas/ The Hampton Union)
After Fowler was formally charged and bail was set at one hundred thousand dollars, Paul Maggiotto stood in the hallway talking to a group of reporters.
It was obvious that the state’s case against Pam, already fairly strong, was now fortified. The journalists asked Maggiotto if he felt more confident. The prosecutor sidestepped the question.
“Oh, come on,” one of the reporters finally said. “You exude confidence.”
Maggiotto smiled. “If you believe that,” he said, “then the act is working.”
Chapter 12
Jury summonses were sent to 300 citizens of Rockingham County, more than for any trial in the county’s history.
Because of the boys’ plea bargaining, Judge Gray had granted the defense two additional weeks to prepare its case. So it was that on February 19, 1991, that the jury pool arrived at the County of Rockingham Administration and Justice Building in Exeter to begin the whittling-away process of voir dire.
The bulk of the original 300 prospective jurors had either moved away or died, leaving 147 people to crowd into courtroom one. By midday, the judge excused seventy-five more because they admitted to already having a notion of Pam’s guilt or innocence. Such a blanket dismissal was a leniency seldom seen in jury selection. But Gray no doubt wanted to prevent any later challenge to the jury’s integrity.
When they were questioned by lawyers for both sides, most of those who remained appeared ready and willing to help decide Pam’s fate. One woman, who was ultimately rejected, said her only concern was whether she would have enough outfits for a lengthy trial. Paul Twomey assured her that plenty of people will have worn the same clothes a few times before the trial was out. Particularly the lawyers, he said with a smile.
A gentleman who was spending his retirement raising cattle reported that things would be fine on the farm in his absence. “My wife would have to pull some more chores and we have an exchange student who would have to carry a little more of the load,” he said.
Another would-be juror, a woman, was quick to dismiss any suggestion that she had been prejudiced by the press coverage. “I don’t read newspapers since I had my house burn to the ground and the paper said it was just a fire in the bedroom,” she said.
As the lawyers for both sides probed whether Pam’s youth and attractiveness might somehow cloud a prospective juror’s ability to be objective, a number of the candidates commented on the defendant’s comeliness. “Yesterday was the first time I had seen Pamela Smart and she is beautiful,” remarked one middle-aged lady.
And when asked if it was conceivable that a good-looking woman like Pam could indeed be sexually involved with a teenager, most jurors were unperturbed. Time and again they replied: Anything is possible in this day and age.
One homemaker went even further. Plenty of older women are attracted to younger men these days, she said. “Look at Mary Tyler Moore!”
The defendant seemed not to miss a word. After six and a half months in prison, Pam could now at least make the appearance of having some control in her life.
Each day she sat at the defense table, legal pad and a manila file before her, scribbling notes to herself and her counselors, often whispering to them, and having a say about almost every potential juror.
Despite the defense’s doubts—Twomey and Sisti had filed two motions seeking to have the trial held out of the county because of the extensive publicity—a jury was chosen in one week. The only
glitch came when seven potential jurors were dismissed for talking about the case as they sat in the waiting room before being interviewed.
By the time the process had ended, the pool of would-be jurors was stretched almost to its limit. Just three people remained to be questioned when Judge Gray peered over the top of his glasses down at the lawyers and said, “We have fifteen jurors, counselors. That’s it.”
The fifteen, of course, included three alternates. Of the twelve who would actually decide Pam’s fate, seven were women and five were men. They ranged in age from a twenty-four-year-old man who had recently graduated from Harvard to a seventy-five-year-old woman with a feisty independent streak. They ranged in occupation from a software engineer to a retired bank vice president to a housewife. They were all white, with the exception of one black woman.
After the last juror had been picked, Paul Twomey stood in the hallway surrounded by reporters, and finally relaxed after the wearing, marathonlike process of asking practically the same questions to person after person. He handled each of the reporters’ queries patiently—his daily fill-in-the-blanks responses to the progress of jury selection.
When it was time to escape, Twomey gave an impersonation that reminded everyone of a scene that Americans had been seeing repeatedly on television over the past few days: He played the part of a Pentagon spokesman being coy about the United States’ recently begun ground war in Kuwait.
“And I will make no comment on the bombings or the ground fighting—until I’m sure we win,” the attorney said.
Attorney Paul Twomey (Brian K. Gonye/ The Daily News)
Monday, March 4 was set aside to view the crime scene and other key locales.
That morning, Pamela, the jury, the judge, the attorneys, and support staff all set off some thirty miles west from the courthouse to Derry to look at the condo where Greg Smart was slain as well as to see two nearby sites for an overview of the general vicinity.
Just ten months after the murder, Pam was returning to 4E, Misty Morning Drive, where her screams had once shaken her neighbors to the quick. In the cold drizzling rain, with residents curiously peeking out of their windows, two dozen reporters, photographers, and television cameramen descended on the complex.
Summerhill Condominiums looked as if it were under siege as the journalists positioned themselves on doorsteps, sidewalks, and all over the soggy lawn. An arsenal of cameras mounted on monopods and tripods trained on the doorway of Pam’s former home, their operators hoping to catch any trace of emotion that the widow might betray upon her arrival.
Judy Liessner, who had pulled Pam into her own condo and tried to comfort her back on May 1, 1990, had not seen her old neighbor since that night. Now she watched through a window and saw the stone-faced Smart, accompanied by a sheriff’s deputy, a bailiff, and her lawyers, stride by.
Past the crowd Smart went, past the feverishly clicking and whirring cameras, past the doors she had been pounding on that spring night, and up the stairs to her old unit. Unlike the evening of May 1, this time she went inside.
The new tenant had asked that the media stay out of the condo. So while Pam and the jurors were indoors, the horde passed the time musing about good restaurants and bad editors and catching up on each other. “Have you been covering this case regularly?” one reporter asked another. “Yeah,” came the reply. “As you can see, I’ve got an exclusive.”
Still, there was work to do. When the lawyers and jurors popped out of the condo onto the back porch, from where Billy Flynn and Pete Randall had made their frenzied getaway, the television crews fell over themselves scrambling to document it. And when Pam and the jurors finally left, the photographers’ shutters sounded off like so many ack-ack guns.
From site to site they went—the white unmarked Crown Victoria that ferried Pam, the judge’s BMW, the jury bus, and a caravan of media vehicles, which included everything from reporters’ personal autos to logo-bearing company cars, half of them with all kinds of strange antennae.
Traveling at a speed of ten miles per hour, the motorcade wound from the condo to the Derry Meadows Professional Park to the Hood Memorial Junior High School. And at each stop, everyone would run around and take pictures of the serious-faced widow and her entourage while the Derry cops ordered everyone to back off.
After lunch they massed again, this time at the seacoast in the parking lot of Winnacunnet High School for a look at Pam’s former workplace. Again, all eyes and cameras were on Smart. Perhaps appropriately, all things considered, she looked concerned, almost afraid, as she briskly walked around back into the SAU 21 building. Leaving, she glared at the reporters.
As the jury bus finally began to pull away, a police officer let the journalists know that it was time to leave. “OK, folks,” he said. “That’s a wrap.”
◆◆◆
Despite their comments to reporters, Twomey and Sisti did not have a wonderful case to defend and it did not take a Clarence Darrow to figure it out.
Before the trial, of course, few people knew what evidence was coming. But any lawyer who was aware—as Twomey and Sisti obviously were—would have blanched.
It would be a long shot, at best, to counter it all. Not only was Pam’s own voice on tape implicating herself time and again, but also there was a wide range of witnesses, many the product of the kids’ talking to friends about the murder and its planning, who could be called at any time. The strongest, of course, were the three boys. But others could do damage as well: Cecelia Pierce, Ralph Welch, Cindy Butt, for starters.
Given any single scenario, Twomey and Sisti probably had a chance. Most likely, they could have found a way to having Loring Jackson and Dan Pelletier tugging on their collars on the witness stand. Or they could have raised enough doubts about the teenage boys who were angling to someday get out of prison. Possibly, they could even have convinced twelve people that what they heard Pam saying on tape was not what she meant.
But all of it in one case? Why would everyone be trying to frame the widow? And what single story could possibly explain so many damning statements, facts, and actions that were coming from all sides?
The unpredictable nature of a jury makes an acquittal possible in any trial. But no matter what Twomey and Sisti said, that did not seem to be something the defense could realistically expect.
A hung jury, however, was more reasonable. If Twomey and Sisti could pull that off, it was a safe bet that the counselors would be clinking champagne glasses and toasting everyone from Paul Maggiotto on down to the courtroom bailiff who placidly rolled his tie up and down his chest throughout the proceedings.
To get a hung jury, the defense did not need a knockout. The lawyers just needed to counterpunch and cast some doubt on the state’s case. In other words, cover up when the left and right hooks came raining down and hang in there. Boxer Muhammad Ali had a name for it—the rope-a-dope.
If the defense lawyers were still standing when the final bell rang, maybe, just maybe, they could pull it off.
◆◆◆
Tuesday, March 5 dawned gray and chilly in Exeter. With the roads still slick in places from the rain the day before, would-be spectators began wheeling into the courthouse parking lot around seven, a half hour before the doors even opened, two and a half hours before Pamela took center stage in the most publicized trial New Hampshire had ever seen.
Finally it was about to begin. All of the pretrial maneuvering was over. The opposing sides in the State of New Hampshire v. Pamela Smart 90S-130, 1371, and 1372 were finally facing one another in trial.
By 9:15 the second-floor hallway and waiting room outside courtroom one was jammed with 200 people—reporters, relations and friends of Pam’s and Greg’s, the curious, as well as the rueful others who simply had business there that day.
In the mid-sixties, when the courthouse was built, its designers could never have imagined any trial attracting the media barrage of this one. By now, the twenty-five-year-old structure had become too small for even much of th
e court’s regular business.
But with the Pamela Smart case attracting overflow crowds and a few onlookers who appeared to be unstable, it also became obvious that it was not the most secure building. “I think there is a hostage-taking situation waiting to happen,” a local attorney complained to a reporter from the Hampton Union. “And as one of the potential hostages, I object.”
That morning, red-jacketed bailiffs ran metal detectors across everyone entering Judge Gray’s courtroom. Before court one day, a bomb-sniffer German shepherd would be called in as well, prompting Paul Twomey to jest, “There’s Haylen! Our first witness!”
Officially, the room could only seat eighty, but nearly 100 people crammed in for the opening arguments. Throughout the trial, a handful of family members of various court officials would, as a courtesy, be seated closer to the action, along the wall opposite the jury and in front of the gallery. On day one, Judge Gray’s wife and her guests were among those with the equivalent of box seats.
The gallery itself consisted of only eight pewlike rows, four on either side with a pale green carpeted aisle separating them. This was the nightmarish antithesis of the Smart-Wojas nuptials of May 1989. The first row on the left was reserved for the Smart family and friends. Across from them, on the right, were the Wojases and Pam’s supporters.
The thirty-five reporters and photographers settled into the three rows behind Pam’s family. The three rows behind the Smarts went to the general public. So many people wanted to attend the trial that after day one, numbers would be given out each morning. Only the first thirty people, many of whom were arriving in the wee hours of the morning, had a courtroom seat for the day.
Teach Me to Kill Page 30