What Happened To Pamela Smart After Her Husband's Murder (And Where Is She Now)?
On March 22, 1991, as the world watched on television, a New Hampshire jury convicted Pamela Smart on first-degree murder charges for orchestrating the murder of her husband, Gregg Smart, by her teenage lover and his friends. Pamela Smart didn't show any emotion when she heard the verdict nor when a judge sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to The Boston Globe.
The case had been an international sensation full of salacious details of how Smart, a 22-year-old school media services administrator, had been having an affair with a 16-year-old named Billy Flynn when she convinced him to murder her husband in 1990 so she wouldn't lose anything in a divorce, per the Associated Press. The murder inspired the 1995 film "To Die For" which starred Nicole Kidman.
Since 1993, Smart has been serving her prison sentence in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. This maximum-security women's prison is located in Westchester County, north of New York City, per the New York State Department of Corrections.
Decades of denial
Billy Flynn, who along with Patrick Randall, broke into the Smarts condo in Derry, New Hampshire on May 1, 1990, admitted shooting Gregg Smart, a 24-year-old insurance salesperson, in the head while Randall held a knife to the victim's throat, per The Boston Globe. Two other friends waited outside in a getaway car, per WMUR. Flynn received a second-degree murder conviction and was the star witness against Pamela Smart at her trial. Randall also testified and received a lesser sentence. Prosecutors said Pamela Smart masterminded and helped cover up the murder. She continued to deny her involvement in her husband's killing for decades, according to People.
Then in 2022, she finally admitted her role in the murder to the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office. "I offer no excuses for my actions and behavior," she said in a recorded statement (via People). "I'm to blame. I regret that it took me so long to apologize to the Smart family, my own family, and everyone else. 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."
Life in prison
A judge originally sentenced Pamela Smart to serve her sentence at the New Hampshire State Prison for Women, but in 1993, officials moved her to New York because of "security reasons," per The Boston Globe and The New York Times. Her living conditions in prison are spartan, spending much of her time in a 7 by 10-foot cell containing a bed and a toilet, according to WMUR. "It kind of looks like it does on TV usually, except for we don't have bars," she told the television station. "We have doors."
While in prison, Smart earned two graduate degrees in legal studies and literature and became a tutor and minister, per the Courthouse News Service and The New York Times. The New Hampshire Supreme Court denied her latest bid for freedom after 32 years in prison in March 2023. This came after New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu dismissed her petition for clemency. The state paroled Billy Flynn in 2015.