A little after 10:00 pm on the evening of May 1, 1990, Pamela Smart returned home from work to find her husband, twenty-four-year-old Gregg Smart, lying dead just beyond the front door of their condominium, a single bullet hole in his head. Detectives from the small town of Derry, NH arrived to find what appeared to be the scene of a robbery; though, very little looked to have been stolen and to investigators the scene felt staged. Two days later, Derry Police Captain Loring Jackson announced that Gregg Smart’s death wasn’t a random attacked, he’d been murdered by someone who knew him. The murder of Gregg Smart, and the trial that followed, shocked the population of New Hampshire, where it remains perhaps the most notorious criminal trial in the state’s history. As the first criminal trial to be televised from beginning to end, the case of Pamela Smart and her teenage lover captivated a national audience, leading to television and feature films, several nonfiction books, and countless television specials in the decades that followed.

Special thank you to the brilliant David White for research assistance

References

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—. 1990. "Widow charged as accomplice." Concord Monitor, August 2: 14.

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1991. NH v. Smart: Opening Statements. Directed by Court TV. Performed by Court TV.

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Englade, Ken. 1991. Deadly Lessons. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.

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Hernandez, Monica. 2023. Accomplice in Smart murder asks for sentence reduction. January 10. Accessed May 1, 2023. https://www.wmur.com/article/smart-murder-vance-lattime-sentence-reduction/42449265.

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Kilgannon, Corey. 2023. "Smart, who plotted with a teen lover to kill her husband, loses a parole bid." New York Times, March 30.

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Sawicki, Stephen. 1991. Teach Me to Kill: The Shocking True Story of the Pamela Smart Murder Case. New York, NY: Avon Books.

Schweitzer, Sarah. 2015. "5 years later, shooter to go free: William Flynn was 16 when he was lured into murder by Pamela Smart." Boston Globe, March 13: A1.

State of New Hampshire v. Pamela Smart. 1993. 622 A.2d 1197 (Supreme Court of New Hampshire, February 26).

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West, Nancy. 2016. Breaking Silence: Cecelia Pierce Speaks. October 12. Accessed April 24, 2023. https://www.nhmagazine.com/breaking-silence-cecelia-pierce-speaks/.

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https://www.bostonherald.com/2015/03/09/brother-of-pamela-smarts-victim-killer-did-his-time/

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