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What Does Pamela Smart Say Today About The Infamous Murder Of Her Husband?
Pamela Smart, whose sensational case would later inspire the movie "To Die For," continues to insist she never orchestrated her husband Gregg's murder decades after her conviction.
It was a case that captivated a nation and inspired the popular movie “To Die For.”
Pamela Smart, a 22-year-old bombshell with dreams of one day succeeding in broadcasting, convinced her high school boyfriend and some of his friends to murder her 24-year-old husband, Gregg Smart, just days before the couple’s one-year anniversary.
Gregg’s New Hampshire murder would lead to a sensational trial — complete with claims of sex, lies, and manipulation — and ended in Pamela’s conviction for murder as the mastermind behind the cold-blooded killing.
But just what does Pamela, who remains behind bars serving a life sentence without parole, say about the murder today?
While Pamela does admit to the affair with one-time high school student Billy Flynn, she continues to insist in an interview from behind bars for “Dateline: Secrets Uncovered,” airing Wednesdays at 8/7c on Oxygen, that she never instructed the teen to kill her husband.
“No one has ever explained any kind of sufficient motive for why I would want to murder my husband when I could have just gotten divorced,” she said. “My parents lived in a beautiful house right up the street. We had no children and no property or any — there was nothing to lose.”
Smart believes that Flynn—who was just 16 years old at the time of the shocking murder — took matters into his own hands after she cut off the relationship with him.
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“I think he felt like that was the only way he could be with me,” she said. “It was very clear that as long as I was married, I was never going to be with him.”
Pamela and Gregg’s relationship initially appeared to be an epic romance. Pamela, a sophomore at Florida State University, met Gregg, a fellow rock fan with long hair much like Bon Jovi, while home from college break in New Hampshire.
The pair hit it off and Gregg moved with her to Tallahassee as she finished school.
“We used to go to the beach … or travel. We went to concerts a lot. I was working as a disc jockey at the time,” Pamela recalled.
By the time she graduated, the couple was engaged. They moved back home to New Hampshire, where they got married. Gregg cut his long hair and started working with his dad selling insurance while Pamela got a media job with a local school district, employed at Winnacunnet High School.
It was there she crossed paths with Flynn.
“At first, somebody came and told me that he was, uh, had a crush on me or something. I thought it was cute but I wasn’t interested,” she told “Dateline: Secrets Uncovered." “I was not even thinking about him in any romantic way whatsoever.”
But Pamela admitted that the relationship eventually turned romantic. According to her account, she had been looking for affirmation after her husband, Gregg, allegedly had a one-night stand with another woman.
“I knew it was wrong,” she said of Flynn. “I felt like I didn’t want to be attracted to him, but I still felt like I was.”
She said the affair lasted a few months before she ultimately broke it off so she could work things out with Gregg.
But Flynn had a different version of events in court. He testified on his 17th birthday that Smart seduced him with a “strip tease” and they “made love” for the first time while Gregg was away. The next morning, he said, she began to talk about her desire to get rid of her husband.
“She started crying and that got me upset,” he said on the stand. “She was saying that the only way that we’re going to able to be together is if, um, you know, if we killed Gregg. ‘If you love me, you’d do this because you’d want to be with me.’”
For the next two months, Flynn said he and some friends plotted along with Pamela on how they’d carry out the murder.
Flynn and his friend Patrick Randall broke into the home on May 1, 1990 and confronted Gregg in what they hoped would look like a robbery gone wrong.
Randall testified he held a butcher knife to Gregg’s throat as the 24-year-old begged the teens “not to hurt him.”
An emotional Flynn said that he held a gun to Gregg’s head for what felt like “a hundred years” before he shot Gregg.
“I said ‘God, forgive me,’” Flynn recalled through tears. “I pulled the trigger.”
During the sensational trial, Pamela also took the stand to deny the teen’s claims that she had orchestrated the murder — claiming Flynn had acted on his own after she cut off their relationship — but her cold and unemotional demeanor earned her comparisons in the media to an “ice queen.”
“I think I was in shock completely by it. I was overwhelmed by the media attention,” Pamela told “Dateline: Secrets Uncovered” of her behavior during the high-profile trial. “I was raised my whole life not to be a crybaby, not to be, you know, overly dramatic or anything like that and of course when I was by myself later on at night I would be crying, when I would be watching the coverage or whatever.”
Prosecutors also played recordings of conversations Pamela had with teen Cecelia Pierce after Flynn, Randall, and two other teens connected to the murder plot were arrested.
“If you tell the f---ing truth you are probably going to get arrested and you’re gonna have to send me to the [expletive] slammer for the rest of our entire life,” Pamela said in one conversation with Pierce, played in court.
Today, Pamela insists she had been trying to pump Pierce for information about who killed her husband and has suggested that the tapes may have been edited.
“All I wanted to know was, did this guy kill my husband? It’s like I couldn’t even sleep,” she said. “I had to know, did he really do this? Because I knew if he killed my husband, I felt like it was all my fault, whether I asked him to kill him or not, it was all my fault because if I would have never had this relationship, my husband would still be alive.”
A jury didn’t believe her version of events and Pamela Smart was convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder in 1991 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Even after her conviction, the public’s fascination with the case didn’t end. In 1995, the murder served as the inspiration behind the popular movie “To Die For,” starring Nicole Kidman.
Pamela said the fictionalized movie has helped to “freeze me in the image of my worst mistake,” referring to the affair with Flynn.
“If you watch ‘To Die For’ people take that and they say, ‘Ok, this whole movie is true and this person, Pamela Smart, is a horrible individual,’” she said, claiming the movie does not accurately portray her story.
Today, Pamela remains behind bars, where she has earned a Master’s in law, another Master’s in English literature, and is also working toward a doctorate in biblical studies. She regularly serves as an inmate advocate and practices “praise dancing” in church.
“It makes me feel free,” she told "Dateline" correspondent Andrea Canning of her dancing. “It’s one of the times here that I do feel free.”
Pamela filed a petition with the New Hampshire governor in 2018 to reduce her sentence to allow for the possibility of parole, but the request was denied, in part, because she refused to accept responsibility for orchestrating her husband’s death.
She was denied a sentencing reduction hearing again in 2022, according to The Associated Press.
“I’m supposed to admit to something I didn’t do just to get out of prison? I don’t get it,” Pamela told “Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.”
Flynn and the three other students convicted in connection with the crime have already been released for their roles in the killing.
To learn more about this case and others like it, watch "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered," airing Wednesdays at 8/7c on Oxygen.
