Pamela Smart, the former high school employee serving a life sentence for recruiting a student she was having an affair with to kill her husband in 1990, accepted full responsibility for his death for the first time in another bid to reduce her sentence.
Smart, 56, who has been in prison for over 30 years, said she started to "dig deeper into my own responsibility" and was encouraged through a writing program to venture into "spaces that we didn’t want to be in."
"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 a video statement released Tuesday.
"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," she continued.
Smart was a 22-year-old New Hampshire high school media coordinator when she began an affair with the student, William Flynn. She was convicted of conspiring with him to fatally shoot her husband, Gregory Smart, 24.
Flynn testified that Smart said she needed her husband to be killed because she feared losing everything in a divorce and that she threatened to break up with him if he did not commit the murder. Flynn and three other teenagers charged in the crime cooperated with prosecutors to receive shorter sentences. They have all been released.
The murder, one of the first high-profile cases to revolve around a sexual relationship between a school employee and a student, resulted in a trial that quickly became a media circus. The case inspired the 1995 movie "To Die For," starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.
In a letter to New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, Smart acknowledged that she was "the one to blame" for Gregory Smart's "absence from this world." She asked for a conversation with him and New Hampshire’s five-member Executive Council, which approves state contracts and appointees to the courts and state agencies.
Smart has exhausted all of her judicial appeal options and has to go through the council for any changes to her sentence. The council rejected her last request, in 2022, and she appealed to the state Supreme Court, but it was dismissed last year.
Sununu’s office said Smart will be given the same opportunity to petition the council as anyone else. Councilor Joseph Kenney told The Associated Press that he would look into her petition but said it's "not on my radar screen as of yet."
Val Fryatt, Gregory Smart’s cousin, told the AP that he believes Pamela Smart's videotape statement "danced around" her actions and failed to admit the "facts around what made her ‘fully responsible.’”
