Ep 29: She Was 22, Newly Married, and Supervising the Teenager She Sent to Kill Her Husband | Pamela Smart

A 22-year-old newlywed. A brand new house. A husband who adored her. On the surface, Pamela Smart had everything. But eight months into her marriage, she began an affair with a 15-year-old student named Billy Flynn — a boy she supervised as part of her job at the school district. And somewhere along the way, the affair became something else entirely. Billy didn't just fall in love with Pamela. He killed for her. On May 1, 1990, Gregg Smart came home to his townhouse in Derry, New Hampshire, and was shot once in the back of the head by three teenage boys who had been waiting inside. He was 24 years old. He and Pamela had been married for less than a year. What followed was one of the first murder trials to be televised live in the United States — a case so sensational, so stranger-than-fiction, that it inspired a Gus Van Sant film, a Joyce Carol Oates novel, and decades of debate about who, exactly, was the mastermind. Because Pamela Smart has maintained her innocence ever since. And the boys who pulled the trigger, who traded plea deals for testimony against her, walked free years ago. Pamela is still in prison. She will be there for the rest of her life. The question that never quite goes away: did a teenage boy murder a man because a woman told him to? Or did a teenage boy murder a man and then blame the woman he loved to save himself? This week on You're Killing Me, Shawnee covers the murder of Gregg Smart — the New Hampshire newlywed whose death became a media spectacle, a courtroom circus, and one of the most contested convictions in true crime history. She looks at the affair, the manipulation, the teenage boys at the centre of it, the trial that gripped a nation, and the question that Pamela Smart's case has never stopped asking: what does it actually mean to be guilty? **Topics:** Gregg Smart murder | Pamela Smart | Billy Flynn | Derry New Hampshire murder | true crime New Hampshire | murder for hire | teen killers | manipulation and murder | televised murder trial | wrongful conviction true crime | To Die For true crime | 1990 murder case | true crime podcast Australia | You're Killing Me podcast | YKM *New episodes every Monday. Follow so you never miss one.*