The former New Hampshire high school employee whose criminal activity became the subject of a critically acclaimed mid-90s film has been denied a reduction in the life sentence she is serving.
Years after the sensationalized story of high school employee Pamela Smart who enlisted a teenage boy and his friends to kill her husband became an international headlines, a panel has determined that the New Hampshire woman will remain behind bars.
knew about the murder plot but they didn t have enough evidence to charge her with conspiracy. but police did convince her to cooperate. when cecelia pierce came onboard and she decided to start cooperating with us, she wore a body wire and talked to pamela smart. investigators hoped pamela smart would implicate herself in gregg s murder. on the tapes she didn t come right out and say, i did it, but she did sound like someone worried about being arrested. i m afraid you re going to come in here and one day you re going to be wired by the police and i m going to be busted. on one recording pamela implies she knows plenty about the murder plot. if you tell the truth you are probably going to be arrested, and you re going to have to send me to the slammer for the rest of our entire life. she also worries about what would happen if one of the teens involved in the plot started talking to police. because he s going to turn against them. and he is going to blame me. right.
a hundred years it seemed like. i said, god forgive me. after you said, god forgive me, what happened? i pulled the trigger. viewers were like jurors rendering a verdict in real time. i feel sorry for the kids. they re so young and everything and they ruined their lives. the story of the wedding ring was devastating. don t take that wedding ring, my wife will kill me. oh, my lord. there s no soap opera to this. it s real stuff. real stuff. if the testimony from the young conspirators wasn t enough, prosecutors had pamela in her own words, courtesy of another student, pamela s intern, cecelia pierce. prosecutors believed cecelia
i m afraid you re going to come in here and one day you re going to be wired by the police and i m going to be busted. pamela told us there s a story behind those tapes. her attorney says he warned her that cecelia might be wired. but pamela talked to her anyway. the police weren t giving me any information. i was completely cut off. she says on those tapes she s acting, pretending to know more than she did in order to pump cecelia for information. all i wanted to know was did this guy kill my husband. it s like i couldn t even sleep. i had to know did he really do this? because i knew that if he killed my husband, i felt it was all my fall. whether i asked him to kill him or not, it was still my fault. because if i would have never have had this relationship, my husband would still be alive. pamela points out that a lot of what s on the tapes is hard to hear. she also argues that the tapes may have been edited and
Portsmouth Herald
HAMPTON Pamela Smart has had a lot of time to think about the murder of her husband, Gregg, and the trial that resulted in her conviction and put her behind bars with no chance for parole.
She maintains to this day she is not the cold-blooded vixen portrayed in the movie “To Die For” or the Black Widow mastermind behind her husband’s death.
“I didn’t get a fair trial,” said Smart, 53, in a recent interview from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York. “It was a media circus, and I was found guilty in the court of public opinion long before I even stepped in the courtroom.