Pamela Smart, 56, has been incarcerated since 1990
Jon Pierre Lasseigne/AP
Pamela Slim
Pamela Smart, a former high school employee serving a life sentence for recruiting a teenage boy with whom she had a sexual relationship to kill her husband, took responsibility for his murder in a videotaped statement released Tuesday .
The statement came during her latest attempt to get her sentence reduced, CBS News reported.
Smart, now 56, has been fighting her conviction for decades.
In the video, Smart, who has been imprisoned since 1990 after being convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, said she began to “dig deeper” into her role in her husband’s murder while in a writing group.
“For me, that was very difficult because when I went to those places, in those spaces, I found myself responsible for something that I absolutely did not want to be responsible for: the murder of my husband,” she told the Associated Press . “I had to acknowledge for the first time in my mind and my own heart how responsible I was, because I had been deflecting blame all the time, I think, almost as if it was a coping mechanism, because I found the truth of being so responsible very difficult.”
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Pamela Slim
“Now that I’m older and can look back on things, I can see so many mistakes that I made, and see how skewed my judgment was and how immature I was,” she told CBS News. You know, I’m such a different person than I was then…,” she said. “I mean, 34 years is a long time, and in that time I’ve worked on myself a lot.”
At the end of the video statement, Smart, who is housed at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in upstate New York, asked to hold a video conference with New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and the New Hampshire Executive Council.
Related: Pamela Smart claims plastic knife violation could keep her from getting jail sentence reduced
Smart’s case was one of the high-profile crime stories of the early 1990s.
Gregg Smart was found dead in his New Hampshire apartment on May 1, 1990. The 24-year-old insurance agent had been shot in the head.
As police investigated the crime, they began to focus on his wife, Pamela, a 22-year-old media coordinator at a nearby school. Investigators soon discovered that Pamela was having an affair with an underage student, William “Billy” Flynn.
Flynn admitted he was the shooter, but claimed he did it at Smart’s direction — a claim Smart denied.
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After Flynn pleaded guilty to manslaughter, he testified against Smart.
The case quickly became international news and even helped inspire the 1996 Nicole Kidman film To die for. The question at the heart of the case: was the beautiful young widow responsible for her husband’s murder? A jury thought so, and on March 22, 1991, she was convicted. She has remained in prison since then.
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