Murder Plot Verdict Shocked Teacher

A high school teacher convicted of conspiring with a student to murder her husband and sentenced to life in prison concedes she acted oddly after the murder, but “then nobody gave me the 22-year-old widow’s handbook.”

In an interview from a cellblock in the New Hampshire State Prison for Women, Pamela Smart, 23, also said she doubted she would be convicted.

“I thought there were two options: I would be found not guilty or there would be a hung jury,” said the former media director for the Winnacunnet School District in Hampton, N.H. “I never conceived this would become a reality.”

Smart told the Boston Globe that her March 22 conviction, following a 14-day trial, has shaken her faith in the criminal justice system and caused her to contemplate suicide.

Among those she is angry with: Judge Douglas Gray, who presided at her trial; the jury; people profiting from the trial and those in the media who dubbed her “the ice princess” because of her stoic behavior during the trial.

Prosecutors charged Smart with manipulating her former lover, William Flynn, then a 15-year-old sophomore at the high school, into killing her 24-year-old husband, Gregory, last May 1, a week before their first wedding anniversary.