Pamela Smart, the woman who became infamous in the 1990s for having an affair with a 15-year-old boy who eventually murdered her husband, has finally acknowledged her responsibility for the death.
Smart, 56, accepted responsibility for her husband’s murder in a videotaped statement in an attempt to get her sentence for her role in the crime reduced, the Associated Press reported. Smart was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for her part in the murder.
In her taped statement, Smart said she had begun to “dig deeper into my own responsibility” while participating in a writing group in the prison where she is incarcerated.
“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,” she said in the video, according to the AP. “I had to acknowledge for the first time in my own mind and my own heart how responsible I was, because I had deflected blame all the time, I think, almost as if it was a coping mechanism, because the truth of being so responsible was very difficult for me.”
Smart has already exhausted her appeals for her convictions on accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and witness tampering. She’s asking for a conversation with New Hampshire’s Executive Council and Gov. Chris Sununu in the hopes of getting her sentence reduced. The council rejected her last request in 2022, which she appealed to the state Supreme Court. The highest court dismissed her petition.
Val Fryatt, a cousin to Smart’s murdered husband Gregory, told the AP that Smart accepted responsibility “without admitting the facts around what made her ‘fully responsible.’” Fryatt also noted that Smart never mentioned Gregory’s name in her statement.
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In a letter to Gov. Sununu, Smart said she is remorseful.
“I made excuses, dismissed my own involvement, and blamed everyone else but myself,” Smart wrote, adding that because she didn’t pull the trigger, she didn’t consider herself responsible, which “became comfortable in my warped logic.”
Smart was 22 years old and working as a high school media coordinator in Derry, New Hampshire, when she began having an affair with then-15-year-old sophomore Billy Flynn, who would eventually murder Smart’s 24-year-old husband. The couple was married less than a year before they started to have problems in their relationship.
On May 1, 1990, Smart came home to find her husband dead. Investigators eventually learned about the affair with Flynn, and they were both charged with her husband’s death, along with three of Flynn’s friends. Flynn and the other three have all been released after serving their sentences.
