Convicted killer Pamela Smart has accepted responsibility for her husband's murder for the first time - 34 years after instructing her 15-year-old lover to shoot him.
Smart, 56, who is serving life in prison for plotting with her teen student to have her husband killed in 1990, accepted full responsibility in a videotaped statement released Tuesday as part of her latest sentence reduction request.
This comes just four years after Smart doubled down on her claim that she did not mastermind her husband's death.
Smart was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy, Billy Flynn, who later fatally shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry, New Hampshire.
Flynn was freed in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Though Pamela Smart denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder and other crimes and sentenced to life without parole.
The council rejected her latest request in 2022 and Smart appealed to the state Supreme Court, which dismissed her petition last year
Smart (left), 56, who is serving life in prison for plotting with her teen student to have her husband Greg Smart (right) killed in 1990, accepted full responsibility in a videotaped statement released Tuesday as part of her latest sentence reduction request
Flynn was released from prison in Maine on parole Thursday, June 4, 2015 after serving nearly 25 years
Smart has been incarcerated for nearly 34 years. She said in the statement that she began to 'dig deeper into her own responsibility' through her experience in a writing group that 'encouraged us to go beyond and to 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, her voice quavering.
'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 asked to have an 'honest conversation' with New Hampshire´s five-member Executive Council, which approves state contracts and appointees to the courts and state agencies, and with Gov. Chris Sununu.
The council rejected her latest request in 2022 and Smart appealed to the state Supreme Court, which dismissed her petition last year.
Val Fryatt, a cousin of Gregory Smart, told The Associated Press that Smart 'danced around it' and accepted full responsibility 'without admitting the facts around what made her 'fully responsible.´'
Smart (pictured in mug shot) was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy, Billy Flynn, who later fatally shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry, New Hampshire
Pamela Smart gets sworn in before testifying in her own defense in Rockingham County Court
Pamela Smart answers questions from the defense in her murder conspiracy trial, March 1991
Fryatt noted that Smart didn´t mention her cousin´s name in the video, 'not even once.'
Messages seeking comment on the petition and statement were sent to the council members, Sununu, and the attorney general´s office.
Smart is serving time at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York. She has earned two master's degrees behind bars and has also tutored fellow inmates, been ordained as a minister and been part of an inmate liaison committee. She said she is remorseful and has been rehabilitated.
The trial was a media circus and one of America´s first high-profile cases about a sexual affair between a school staff member and a student. Joyce Maynard wrote 'To Die For' in 1992, drawing from the Smart case.
That inspired a 1995 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix. The killer, William Flynn, and three other teens cooperated with prosecutors. They served shorter sentences and have been released.
In March 2022, the infamous killer failed in her last-ditch attempt to have her life sentence reduced after apologizing for her crimes for the first time.
In March 2022, the infamous killer failed in her last-ditch attempt to have her life sentence reduced after apologizing for her crimes for the first time (Pictured: Pamela and Greg young)
Pamela Smart's bid for freedom was unanimously rejected 5-0 by an appellate panel in New Hampshire this week, 31 years after the former high school worker got underage boyfriend William Flynn to shoot and kill her spouse Gregory Smart.
'I offer no excuses for my actions and behavior,' she said in a recorded statement that was sent as a DVD to the attorney general´s office in December. 'I'm to blame.'
She continued: '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.'
In the state's response, Jeffery Strelzin, associate attorney general, wrote that Smart has told a false narrative for over 30 years and just because she's decided to change that now '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.'
