A former New Hampshire high school teacher whom a judge sentenced to life in prison for a 1990 plot to kill her husband has admitted her role in the murder for the first time, WBZ reported Tuesday.
Pamela Smart, 56, was put away for life after a 15-year-old student she had an affair with when she taught in Derry shot and killed her husband, Gregory Smart, according to WBZ.
William Flynn served 25 years for the murder and was freed in 2015, while Smart, who was 22 years old at the time and denied knowledge of the plot, was convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole, WBZ reported. (RELATED: Arizona Wife Who Plead Guilty To Attempting To Poison Husband With Bleach In Coffee Sentenced)
Pamela Smart accepts responsibility in husband’s 1990 murder for first time https://t.co/ZxcJYj09CZ
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) June 12, 2024
In a videotaped statement released Tuesday, Smart pleaded with New Hampshire officials to reduce her sentence, according to the outlet.
Smart said that in the past she didn’t take responsibility for the crime “because the truth of being so responsible was very difficult,” WBZ reported.
In her statement, Smart requested to meet Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and the governor’s advisory committee, the New Hampshire Executive Council, according to WBZ.
Smart, who has been behind bars for 34 years despite numerous attempts to appeal her sentence, told WBZ in a 2019 interview that she would never admit her guilt in the murder plot.
She said in Tuesday’s statement, however, that her experience in a writing group encouraged her to “dig deeper into her own responsibility,” WBZ reported.
“For me that was really hard, because going into those places, in those spaces is where I found myself responsible for something I desperately didn’t want to be responsible for, my husband’s murder,” Smart said in a reportedly quivering voice.
Smart said that her time in prison had changed her, according to WBZ.
“Now that I am older and able to look back on things, I can see so many errors that I made, and see how skewed my judgement was, and how immature I was,” she said.
Smart, whose trial sparked a media frenzy at the time and dramatic book and film reenactments, has earned two master’s degrees and been ordained as a minister while sitting in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York.
