¿Por Qué Reaccionas Diferente A Las Mismas Palabras Que Otros?

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous True Crime series, The First 48. Each week, Carderoy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow The First 48, every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House. Alright friends, it's time for your daily True Crime rundown. Go ahead and grab your coffee, settle in because this is the case you have almost certainly heard of and there's brand new movement in it this week. 36 years ago, a 24 year old man was shot in the head inside his own home. His wife played the grieving widow until the police discovered she'd been sleeping with one of her teenage students and had talked him into killing her husband. Her name is Pamela Smart. Her trial was the first murder trial ever televised from start to finish across the country. It inspired a novel, a movie, and decades of debate. She got life without parole. The teenage boy who actually shot her husband is already free. And this week, at 58 years old, Pamela Smart was back in a New Hampshire courtroom, arguing that the evidence that convicted her was wrong and that she deserves a new trial. This is Crime House 24/7, your nonstop source for the biggest crime cases developing right now. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you haven't already, I'm Vanessa Richardson. And here's what you need to know this morning. Good morning and welcome to Crime House 24/7. Today we're headed to Concord, New Hampshire, and the reason why is because this decade's old case had a hearing this past Monday. Pamela Smart, now 58, appeared by video from the New York prison where she's spent roughly three decades. Her lawyers asked a judge to grant her a new trial for the 1990 murder of her husband, Greg Smart. Why? Well, she says the jury that convicted her was handed inaccurate, written transcripts of the secret recordings that sealed her case. Transcripts that included words which were never actually audible on the tape, at least according to her lawyers. She's also pointing to a juror who, during the trial, secretly recorded her own thoughts about the case at home. The state has asked the judge to throw the whole petition out, and the judge is expected to rule within 30 to 60 days. To understand what that fight is really about, you have to go back to the beginning. Starting in the late 1980s, Pamela Wojus was a young woman from the New Hampshire family, ambitious, and driven. She married Greg Smart, an insurance salesman in 1989. He was 24 at the time. By 1990, they were living in a condo in dairy, New Hampshire, and Pamela, then 22, had taken a job as the media services coordinator at Winnocken at High School in Hampton. In paper, they were a young, successful couple just getting started. It was that job that connected Pamela Smart with a ninth grader named William Flynn or Billy. She worked directly with students through her media rule at the school, and Flynn was one of the teenagers she taught. He was 15. She was in her 20s, married, and on staff. As for Billy Flynn, he ran with a small circle of teenage friends. All of them students at Winnocken at Patrick Randall, known as Pete, Vance Ladim Jr., known as JR, and Raymond Fowler. There was also a 16-year-old named Cecilia Pierce. She was a student intern who was close to Pamela Smart, and would later become one of the most important figures in the entire case. According to what Billy later told the jury, their relationship turned sexual in early 1990, and things escalated from there. Pamela told him her husband mistreated her, but she told him that if she divorced Greg, she would lose everything. Like the condo, the furniture, the life she'd built, and prosecutors would later argue there was a colder motive underneath it all. As Greg's widow, rather than his ex-wife, Pamela stood to collect about $140,000 in life insurance. There had already been one aborted attempt. In April 1990, according to trial testimony, Billy set out to kill Greg using Pamela's own car. But he panicked. I want to count deliberately getting lost on the way to Derry, so he turned back. The plan that finally worked came weeks later, and this time Billy wasn't alone. He recruited the help of his friends. He testified that Pamela pushed him to do it, and that she threatened to end their relationship if he refused, so he agreed to set a plan. Prosecutors said Pamela arranged the logistics. She would be at a school board meeting the night of the killing, giving herself a clean alibi. She would leave a basement bulkhead door unlocked so Billy could get inside. And on the afternoon of May 1st, 1990, she gave Billy and two of his friends a ride so they could pick up a car to use that night, a Chevrolet Impala that belonged to one of their grandmothers. That evening, four teenage boys drove to Derry. They ate pizza. They killed time at a mall, and then, after dark, they went to the condo where Greg Smart was about to come home. He thought the house would be empty, but he was wrong. Help me take this night. Motonets. Motonets. On May 1st, 1990, 24-year-old Greg Smart came home from a business meeting. It was just after 10 o'clock at night. He opened the door and called for his dog, but it wasn't the dog that greeted him. It was Billy Flynn and Pete Randall. They jumped him and forced him down onto his knees in the entryway. Bill held a knife. Billy held a 38-calibre revolver, a gun taken from his friend Vance Latum's own father. Greg begged for his life while Billy fired a single bullet into his head, killing him. Outside, Vance and Raymond Fowler waited in the borrowed car. Before they fled, the boys did one more thing. They ransacked the condo. They pulled things apart to stage the scene, making it look like Greg had caught a burglary in the process. After that, they were gone. And for a while, the staging worked. Pamela Smart came home to find her husband dead, and she stepped straight into the role of the shattered young widow. In the weeks that followed, she gave interviews. She pleaded publicly for information about the killer. She presented herself as a grieving wife, desperate to know who had destroyed her family. To the public, she was a victim. Investigators had no reason to think otherwise. But that soon began to change. Detectives mapped the connections between the victim and the four teenagers. All of them tied to the high school where Pamela Smart worked. Once detectives learned she'd been involved with one of the boys, her public grief started to look very different. And Pamela, who'd been so visible in the press, suddenly went quiet. She stopped talking to reporters. What undid it was not eyewitnesses or fingerprints or DNA, it was teenagers who couldn't keep quiet. In the weeks after the murder, word of what the boys had done began leaking through their own circle. Vance Latum's father noticed that his revolver had been cleaned. He grew suspicious and did something unexpected. He took his own gun to the police. Ballistics tests matched it to the bullet that killed Greg Smart. Around the same time, a local teenager named Ralph Welch told Vance's parents what he'd heard. Vance, Pete Randall, Billy and Raymond Fowler had all been part of a killing. The police got an anonymous call, too. They said that a schoolteacher had been sleeping with one of the boys and that she had staged the murder. On June 11, 1990, police arrested Billy, Pete, and Vance, and Raymond Fowler would be charged soon after. The staged burglary had fallen apart in a matter of weeks. But they still had to prove Pamela's role. She hadn't been in the condo. She hadn't held the gun. The case against her rested largely on the word of four teenage boys who were themselves facing murder charges and who had every reason to shift blame. Prosecutors needed something stronger. So, they turned to the one person Pamela Smart trusted with her secrets. In 1990, Pamela Smart insisted she had nothing to do with her husband's murder. That insistence collided with a 16-year-old student intern named Cecilia Pierce. Cecilia had been close to Pamela. She knew the plot and that summer she agreed to cooperate with investigators. She wore a concealed recording device and secretly taped her conversations with Pamela on several occasions in the summer of 1990. The most important of them happened on July 13. Following those recordings, Pamela made deeply incriminating statements and coached Cecilia on what to tell police. On the recordings, Pamela can be heard talking her way around the killing. At times, she describes herself as confused and desperate. Prosecutors needed to be taken to the police. The investigators argued that desperation was just an act, though. The same manipulation she used on the boys. Her defense argued the tapes were ambiguous. And that is exactly why the recordings matter so much to what's happening now. Prosecutors built the case around them, and the jury did not just hear the audio, they were handed written transcripts to read along as the tapes were played. But let's go back to August 1st, 1990, three months after the murder. That's when Pamela Smart was arrested. Prosecutors could have pursued a capital murder charge against her, but they chose not to. Instead they charged her as an accomplice to first-degree murder, along with conspiracy and witness tampering. That last charge came directly from the recordings, from her coaching Cecilia to lie. The teenagers resolved their cases first. On January 28, 1991, Billy Flynn, Pete Randall, and Vance Laddum pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Raymond Fowler also pleaded guilty to second-degree murder as an accomplice. In exchange for their pleas and their testimony against Pamela, they avoided the harshest possible outcome. Billion Pete received sentences of roughly 28 years to life. Vance pleaded guilty to accomplice to second-degree murder with 18 years to life. Raymond Fowler, the fourth, faced a lesser sentence of 15 to 30 years. But they were all lined up to testify against Pamela Smart. Pamela Smart's trial opened in March 1991 in Rockingham County Superior Court in Exeter before Judge Douglas Gray. And it became a national event. Cameras were allowed inside the courtroom, and the proceedings were broadcast live from start to finish. In fact, it was the first murder trial in the country ever shown that way. The lead prosecutor, Paul Maggiato, built his case on the boy's testimony. Vance Cecilia Pierce's account, and above all on Pamela's own voice on the secret tapes. A trial, the boys all told versions of the same story, that Pamela wanted her husband dead and that she had used her relationship with Billy to make it happen. Billy said she told him Greg had to die and that she would leave him if he did not act. Then Pamela did something many defendants never do. She took the stand. She admitted to the affair with Billy, but she denied, flatly, that she had anything to do with planning Greg's murder. Her lawyers argued that the state had made a deal with the devil, trading reduced sentences to the actual killers, in exchange for testimony against her. They would later describe the media coverage as a tsunami that made a fair trial nearly impossible. The prosecution's closing pulled it all together. The boys Cecilia Pierce and Pamela herself captured on the secret recordings. They told jurors that Pamela had counted on her intelligence and poise to let her talk her way past them. The way she believed she'd talked her way past everyone else. The coverage was so intense that Judge Grace equestered the jury overnight before the verdict to keep the noise of the case away. The jury, seven women and five men, was not persuaded. After roughly 13 hours of deliberation on March 22, 1991, they found Pamela guilty on all three counts. Accomplished a first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and witness tampering. She was sentenced that same day to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Now here's the contrast that has fueled a lot of debate. Billy Flynn, the teenager who actually pulled the trigger, pleaded to a lesser charge. He's already served his time and was released in 2015 after about 25 years. Patrick Randall, who held the knife, was freed the same year. The hands that carried out the murder are free. The woman convicted of being the mastermind behind it is not. It's part of the reason why this case has gotten so famous. It inspired Joyce Maynard's 1992 novel to die for, which became a 1995 film starring Nicole Kidman as a coldly ambitious woman who manipulates a teenage boy into killing her husband. Decades later, an HBO documentary, captivated, re-examined how the wall-to-wall media coverage shaped the trial itself. Meanwhile, Pamela became less a person than she was a symbol, a seductive villain in a true crime tale. But for a lot of people following the case, the tapes and the boy's testimony settled the question long ago. Many feel Pamela is simply a killer who manipulated a child and got what she deserved. After her supporters, the same media frenzy that made her a household name is exactly what robbed her of a fair trial. Both readings have only hardened over 36 years, and this week's hearing is the latest round of that argument. In an era of streaming trials and true crime everywhere, it's easy to forget how new all this was in 1991. Americans had never sat and watched a murder trial unfold gavill to gavill on their televisions. In doing so, Pamela's case helped invent the modern, televised trial. The template, the O.J. Simpson case, would supercharge a few years later. Pamela spent 30 plus years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York, but her life continued inside those walls. She earned two master's degrees and was ordained as a minister, and she appealed her conviction repeatedly. But the New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld it. Her request to have her sentence reduced were denied again and again, including as recently as 2022. The state's highest court turned away another petition in 2023, and for more than three decades, she maintained she had no role in the murder. New Hampshire also lets its governor and executive council commute a sentence, so Pamela pursued that path too. She asked to have her life term reduced so that she might someday become eligible for parole. Those requests were also denied. Greg Smart's family never wavered in their belief that she did it. His brother Dean Smart wrote a book about the case and the brother he lost, and the families turned out over the years to oppose any move toward her release. To them, the endless appeals and petitions have amounted to a decades-long refusal to take accountability. But in June 2024, that changed. In a videotaped statement, Pamela publicly accepted full responsibility for her husband's death for the first time. After 30 plus years of denial, it was a stunning shift. Though her critics questioned whether it was genuine remorse or a strategy to finally get herself released. Her current petition does not take that statement back, but it does reframe things, because now she's also arguing that her conviction process was so flawed that the verdict itself should not stand, regardless of what she's admitted to since. Which brings us to this week. In January of 2026, Pamela's lawyers filed petitions for habeas corpus relief, a legal path that lets a prisoner challenge the constitutionality of their conviction. The core of the new argument is about those secret recordings. Her attorneys say portions of the tapes were inaudible, and that the written transcripts handed to the jury, filled in words that were never actually there. They point to research, suggesting that when jurors read a transcript while listening to muffled audio, they come to believe the written version, even if it's wrong. As one of her attorneys, Matthew Zernhelt put it in court, "No one should be serving life without parole on a conviction built on inaccurate evidence." Her lawyers raised two other points as well, that a juror had secretly taprecorded her own impressions of the case during the trial, and that the whole proceeding was, in their words, a trial by media in the purest form. They argue the coverage turned Pamela into a caricature, rather than a defendant, and that faulty jury instructions and an improperly imposed mandatory sentence tainted the outcome. That juror detail is one of the stranger threads in the petition. According to Pamela's team, one juror was trying to obey the judge's order not to talk about the case, so instead she recorded her own private thoughts about the evidence onto tapes at her home in her bathroom. Pamela's lawyers also attack the judge's instructions to the jury. They say the jury was wrongly told it had defined that Pamela planned the murder in advance, but they were never clearly told to base its decision only on the evidence heard in the courtroom. On the sentence, they argue the judge was simply wrong. He treated life without parole as automatic for an accomplice, but New Hampshire law didn't actually require that punishment for the charge she faced. On Monday, July 20, 2026, those arguments came before Judge James Kennedy in Marama County Superior Court. Pamela watched by video from prison, taking notes, the state pushed back hard, and assisted attorney general told the court that none of Pamela's claims hold up. Most of them, he said, were already raised and rejected on appeal years ago, and she's now trying to use the habeas corpus as a substitute for an appeal she's already lost. He compared the transcript dispute to reading a transcribed voicemail and then hearing the real thing. You can still judge it for yourself. Judge Kennedy took the matter under advisement. He's expected to rule in the coming weeks on whether Pamela smarts bid for a new trial can move forward, or whether the case is finally closed for good. Strip away the tapes and the transcripts and the decades of appeals, and the heart of this case doesn't change. Greg Smart was 24 years old. He came home from work on an ordinary spring night, called for his dog. and was forced to his knees and shot in his own doorway, all by teenagers his wife had recruited. He never got old. The boy who shot him has been free for a decade, and the woman a jury said sent him to do it, is now 58, waiting in prison to learn whether any of this changes a thing. We'll keep watching for Judge Kennedy's ruling and bring it to you when it lands. We're Crime House 24/7. This story involves an adult's sexual abuse of a minor. If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual abuse, the free confidential rain hotline is available at 1-800-656-4673. You've been listening to Crime House 24/7, bringing you breaking crime news. I'm Vanessa Richardson. We'll be back tomorrow morning with more developing stories. Stay safe and thanks for listening. The moment a body is found, the clock starts ticking. 48 hours before the trail goes cold. From A&E and Crime House, this is the official podcast from the famous True Crime series, The First 48. I'm Carter Roy. Every Thursday, I revisit a landmark homicide investigation in depth with long-form storytelling built for your ears. Listen to and follow The First 48 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or Wherever You Listen to Podcasts. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow The First 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or Wherever You Listen to Podcasts.