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On May 1, 1990, Pamela Smart arrived at her home and found her husband, 24-year-old Gregg Smart, dead of a gunshot wound to the head and the house ransacked. After a lengthy investigation, authorities said Pamela Smart, who worked at a high school, was having an affair with Billy Flynn, 16, and convinced him to kill her husband. They said Flynn, with the help of his friends, murdered Gregg Smart then staged the house to look like a burglary.
The story is the focus of Saturday, February 13’s episode of NBC’s Dateline. While Flynn and his friends, Vance Lattime Jr., Pete Randall and Raymond Fowler, have all since been paroled and released from prison, Pamela Smart remains incarcerated with the sentence of life without the possibility of parole, the Washington Post reported.
Smart has admitted that she was having an affair with Flynn but has continued to maintain her innocence regarding her husband’s murder and consistently denied any involvement.
Pamela & Gregg Smart Married in 1989 & Pamela Smart Admitted to Having an Affair With Flynn
Pamela and Gregg Smart married in 1989 and lived in New Hampshire, where she got a job as a media services director at various schools and Gregg worked as a life insurance salesman, the Post reported. She told the outlet in an interview that Gregg told her he’d had a one-night stand not even a year into their marriage and they began having difficulties. She said she met Billy Flynn through a school program and “started to develop feelings for him. I thought he had feelings for me, too.”
Both Flynn and Smart have testified that they slept together several times around the time of Flynn’s 16th birthday. Smart spoke to ABC News about her relationship with Flynn and said:
It was actually very difficult because I had feelings for my husband. I loved him and I also had developed feelings for Bill, and I knew that I couldn’t continue like this. It wasn’t, you know, gonna work like this forever. It was only a short relationship.
During Gregg Smart’s murder investigation, Flynn cooperated with the authorities and told them Smart frequently mentioned that her husband had to die. According to ABC News, Flynn told the authorities, “She said the way she sees it, the only alternative…is to kill him.” He said she brought up the murder plan “almost every day… She said she hated him.”
Flynn & His Friends Shot Gregg Smart at Close Range & Were All Arrested & Found Guilty
On May 1, 1990, Flynn, Pete Randall and Vance Lattime Jr., who were all 16 or 17, planned the murder with the help of another, Raymond Fowler, and Pamela Smart. According to the court’s decision recounting the events of the day of the murder:
The defendant [Pamela Smart] drove Flynn, Randall and Lattime to pick up Lattime’s grandmother’s car in Massachusetts. The defendant discussed with them the various details of the murder plan, seeking advice on how to react when she returned home and discovered her husband murdered. Lattime and Randall returned to Seabrook in Lattime’s grandmother’s car. The defendant drove Flynn back to Seabrook to meet them and then went to Winnacunnet High School to attend a meeting scheduled for that evening.
Flynn, Lattime and Randall then picked up Fowler and drove to Gregg Smart’s home, where Flynn and Randall entered the home and the other two remained in the vehicle. The court decision then stated that the two teens ransacked the home while they waited for the insurance salesman to return to the house. Flynn was holding a gun and Randall had a knife from the kitchen, documents show.
“When Gregory came home, the boys forced him to his knees,” the decision continued. “While Randall with one hand held Gregory’s head down and with the other hand held a knife in front of his face, Flynn shot him once in the head.” The four boys then fled the scene.
Flynn and Randall were both convicted of second-degree murder and each served 25 years in prison before getting paroled in 2015, ABC News reported. Lattime was convicted of being an accomplice to second-degree murder and served 15 years before he was paroled in 2005. Fowler was convicted of conspiracy to murder and attempted burglary and was paroled in 2003 after serving 12 years.
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