Teacher Testifies She Did Not Ask Young Lover to Kill Spouse

A high school instructor spent her second day on the witness stand Tuesday rebutting a prosecutor’s charges that she arranged to have her teen-age lover murder her husband.

“If I was guilty, I would have plead guilty and plea-bargained like the rest of them,” Pamela Smart, 23, told prosecutor Paul Maggiotto as she wrapped up a total of five hours on the witness stand.

Not long after she stepped down, the defense rested, setting the stage for closing arguments today.

In her testimony, Smart made her first direct admission that she lied to police during their investigation of the May 1, 1990, shooting death of her 24-year-old husband, Gregory. She said she lied to avoid having to divulge her affair with William Flynn, then 16, and not because she is guilty.

Flynn and two friends face minimum prison terms of 18 to 28 years in prison in return for testifying against Smart at her murder-conspiracy trial in Rockingham County Superior Court.

Smart, media coordinator at Winnacunnet High School in Hampton, met Flynn and his confessed accomplices when they were in video projects and other programs that she ran.

Prosecutors claim she seduced Flynn, then used her emotional control over him to get him to kill her husband. They say she feared losing everything in a divorce.

The defense says the three “thrill-killers” from Seabrook murdered the insurance salesman on their own at his condominium in Derry, west of Exeter, then framed his widow to avoid life prison terms with no chance of parole.

Smart admitted lying when she told police last summer that she was encouraging her student intern, Cecelia Pierce, to tell the truth to police.

“That’s a bald-faced lie,” Maggiotto said.

“Right,” she answered.

“Your honest-to-God truth switches as we go along?” he asked later.

“Right,” Smart replied. “Then and there, it did.”

But Smart fought back when Maggiotto’s questions suggested that she intended to deceive, or lied because she is guilty.

“My husband was murdered and I was not thinking rationally at the time,” she said.