i would tell you they re the nail in the coffin, if you really want the truth. i mean, they re the nail in the coffin. as he wrapped up the state s case, prosecutor maggiotto warned the jury not to be fooled by pamela smart the way billy flynn and his accomplices had been. this woman was counting on from day one that if this case ever came to court, she could put herself on the stand with her background and her intelligence and her ability to answer questions and pull one over on you, ladies and gentlemen. the prosecutors had little doubt that the always poised pamela smart was capable of doing just that. the state s case was strong, but pamela was up next. and she was about to share a very different version of events. coming up did you expect that when he was over, you would have sex with him? yes. did you have sex with him when he came over? yes. pamela smart takes the stand. i made a mistake.
if somebody condition remember pamela smart, you say the movie to die for with nicole kidman. of course i know that case. if you watch to die for, people take that and they say, okay, this whole movie is true, and this person, pamela smart, is a horrible individual. it s a very iconic movie. yes. and it helped to freeze me in the image of my worst mistake. that mistake? pamela says it was sleeping with billy flynn, not asking him to kill her husband. she denies that. pamela says the jury was infected by a press that caricatured her as an evil seductress. she says the tabloids were full of lies like those bikini photos. that they weren t shot to tempt billy flynn. they were taken for fun with a friend for a modeling contest. somehow the narrative escaped or got created that i took these pictures for bill flynn and gave them to him to seduce him.
they said pamela told them when gregg would be home. and she made arrangements to be gone. they ransacked the house. billy shot gregg. and they all fled. exactly three months after the killing, police had what they needed. they drove to pamela s workplace. she said, hello. and i said, hello. she said, what s up? and i told her, well, we have good news and we have bad news. the good news is we solved the murder of your husband. the bad news is you re under arrest for murder. stand up, turn around, and put your hands behind your back. and she s being led by the police into court, and she looks so, to me, powerless. so helpless. vulnerable. the news morphed in a nano-second from the story of a tragic widow to the story of a black widow. she was 22 and he was 16. up until then, it was a murder case.
from the day that gregg was slaughtered in his own living room, to the day they stepped into the courtroom, they could prepare for trial, together. what do you say about the motive the prosecution gives about you wanting your husband dead? life insurance? well, no, right. no one has ever infidelity. explained any kind of sufficient motive for why i would want to murder my husband when i could have just gotten divorced. my parents lived in a beautiful house right up the street. we had no children and no property or an there was nothing to lose. why would billy flynn kill gregg, kill your husband, with the help of these other teenagers? i think he felt like that was the only way he could be with me. it was very clear that, as long as i was married, i was never going to be with him. looking back, do you think there was anything you might have inadvertently said to billy flynn or done that could have provoked him into doing this? the only thing i ever said was that,
she had an intimate connection with one of them. his name was billy flynn. at first, somebody came and told me that he had he was a had a crush on me or something. and i thought it was cute, but i wasn t interested. you re the grownup here. right. i sure was. and i kept you re working for the school. i was not even thinking about him in any romantic way whatsoever. they had worked together on a school program called project self-esteem when she was helping students produce this goofy orange juice commercial as part of a competition. there s pamela on the left and that s billy. and then where does it go from there? well, i didn t think it was going anywhere because i was not interested and i didn t care. looking back, i guess i was flattered by his attention, because i felt like at that point in my life, kind of low still, after what had happened with gregg. she says gregg had had a one-night stand with a woman he met in a bar. pamela says she was feeling