Where Is Pamela Smart Now? Inside Her Life 35 Years After Conspiring to Kill Her Husband

Pamela Smart was at the center of one of the most high-profile crime stories of the 1990s after her husband, Gregg Smart, was slain at the hands of a boy with whom she was in a sexual relationship.

Gregg, a 24-year-old insurance agent, was found dead in the couple’s New Hampshire condo on May 1, 1990. He had been shot in the head.

As police investigated the crime, they began to focus on his 22-year-old wife, Pamela Smart. She was a media coordinator at a nearby school, and investigators soon learned that she had been engaging in a sexual relationship with an underage student, William “Billy” Flynn.

The teenager admitted at trial that he was the gunman, but maintained that he did it at the direction of Smart — an allegation she has denied. Flynn pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and testified against Smart. She was then convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and two other crimes in 1991.

“It took me many years to see my own responsibility,” Smart told PEOPLE in a prison interview in 2014. “It was easy to blame everybody else – the judge, the jury, the media. Even though I didn’t want my husband killed and didn’t pull the trigger, my bad behavior helped load the gun.”

Smart’s case went on to inspire the 1992 book To Die For, which was later adapted into a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.

Here’s everything to know about Pamela Smart, the murder of her husband in 1990 and where she is now.

Who is Pamela Smart?

Pamela A. Smart (neé Wojas) was born in Coral Gables, Fla., on Aug. 16, 1967. She lived in Miami until her family moved to New Hampshire when she was in eighth grade, per Oxygen.

In high school, Smart was a cheerleader and an honors student. She attended Florida State University, where she studied communications and had a college radio show, according to the Crime Library.

In 1986, Smart met Gregg, and they bonded over their mutual love of metal music. The pair lived together in Florida during Smart’s senior year, moving back to New Hampshire after she graduated. They bought a condo together in Derry and were wed in 1989.

At the time of her husband’s death, Smart was employed as a media coordinator at Winnacunnet Regional High School.

How was Pamela Smart’s husband, Gregg Smart, killed?

Gregg Smart was found dead in his and Smart’s Derry condo on May 1, 1990.

Police said that Flynn, a teenager Smart was having a sexual relationship with, forced Gregg to kneel down in the apartment foyer. His friend, Patrick “Pete” Randall, restrained Gregg and held a knife to his throat, per WMUR9. Flynn then shot Gregg in the head with a hollow-point bullet.

Two other friends, Vance “J.R.” Lattime Jr. and Raymond Fowler, were also enlisted to help Flynn with Gregg’s murder.

Prior to her arrest, Smart said in a television interview that Gregg must have been shot by “some jerk, some drug addict person looking for a quick 10 bucks,” according to The New York Times.

Why did Billy Flynn kill Pamela Smart’s husband?

Flynn was a 15-year-old sophomore at the high school where Smart worked. The two met working on the drug awareness program Project Self-Esteem and began having sex. Smart was 22 at the time.

She has acknowledged that her illegal relationship with Flynn was wrong, telling PEOPLE’s Steve Helling in a 2016 jailhouse interview for Murder Made Me Famous that she was “constantly” punishing herself for it.

“I knew better, and I did it anyway,” she said.

Flynn later admitted to being the gunman. He has always claimed he shot Gregg because Smart directed him to do so, as she feared a divorce would cause her to lose everything. Smart has maintained her innocence, saying she never told Flynn to kill her husband.

“I feel like even though I didn’t tell him to kill Gregg and even though I didn’t give him the gun, I feel like I put the bullets in there by having this relationship,” Smart told Helling. “Does that make me responsible for his death? In my mind, yeah. A lot. Am I legally culpable? No. But do I blame myself? I do all the time. And that’s really hard to live with.”

Who was convicted of the murder of Gregg Smart?

Smart was arrested on Aug. 1, 1990. Flynn, Randall and Lattime all pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and testified against Smart. Fowler — who sat in a nearby car during the murder — pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and attempted burglary.

A fifth teenager, Cecelia Pierce, Smart’s intern at the high school, cooperated with the police in supplying evidence, including recorded conversations with Smart. In one, Smart reportedly said that if one of the teenage boys hadn’t bragged about the crime, “this would have been the perfect murder,” per The New York Times.

Smart has always asserted her innocence, claiming that Flynn acted in retaliation after she ended their sexual encounters to work on her marriage. She also disputed portrayals that she was a calculating woman who was after her husband’s $140,000 life insurance and wanted to avoid a messy divorce.

Flynn and Randall were sentenced to life in prison with a possibility of parole, while Smart was sentenced to life with no chance of parole for conspiracy to commit murder, being an accomplice to first-degree murder and witness tampering.

“I feel like a victim of this brutal media blitz,” Smart told The Boston Globe in 1991. “Because of all the media attention, the public’s opinion of me was one of guilt. The jurors came from the public, and to say the media didn’t at least have some kind of subliminal effect on them is the most preposterous notion I have ever heard. The fact that they were not sequestered right from the start blows me away.”

Randall and Flynn were released on lifetime parole on the same day in 2015, while Fowler was released in 2003 and Lattime in 2005.

“If I didn’t get involved with Bill Flynn, then my husband would probably still be alive, and that’s something I have to live with,” Smart told PEOPLE in 2014. “But the person who murdered him is getting out while I’m stuck in here for the rest of my life, and that just doesn’t seem fair.”

That year, Gregg’s brother Dean told PEOPLE that Smart’s conviction and sentence were just.

“We all believed that these boys would never have done this on their own,” he said. “I believe the sentence was fair.”

Where is Pamela Smart now?

Smart has been behind bars since her 1990 arrest and has tried to appeal her conviction for decades. After being incarcerated in New Hampshire, she was transferred in 1993 to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Westchester County, N.Y., per The New York Times.

Smart told The Boston Globe in 1991 that she didn’t expect to spend the rest of her life in prison. “I thought there were two options: I would be found not guilty or there would be a hung jury,” she told the outlet. “I never conceived this would become a reality.”

In prison, Smart earned a doctorate degree in ministry and three master’s degrees, became an ordained minister and has tutored her fellow inmates, according to PBS.

“Each day that’s in front of us is an opportunity to do something with our lives, wherever we are,” Smart told PEOPLE in 2014.

She has maintained that she did not know Flynn was going to kill her husband. In a 2021 appeal, however, she took responsibility for Gregg’s death and apologized to his family, saying, “I’m to blame.”

“I regret that it took me so long to apologize to the Smart family, my own family, and everyone else,” she said in a recorded statement in December 2021. “But I think that I wasn’t at a place where I was willing to own that or face that. I was young and selfish and I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of what I was doing.”

In April 2022, PEOPLE confirmed that Smart was denied the sentence reduction. A New Hampshire state council rejected her request in a 5-0 vote.

In the state’s response, Jeffery Strelzin, associate attorney general, wrote that Smart had told a false narrative for over 30 years and her apology “does not mean that she has truly changed and fully acknowledged all the crimes she committed as an accomplice and conspirator in her husband’s murder, and the perpetrator of witness tampering.”

Smart doubled down on the admission of responsibility in a June 2024 statement, per PBS.