Pamela Smart Still Denies Role in Killing Husband After Two Decades in Prison

Pamela Smart, the New Hampshire school aide serving a life sentence for persuading her teenage lover to kill her teenage husband, still insists after 20 years that she had nothing to do with the murder.

Smart, 42, is serving life without parole after being convicted in 1991 of recruiting 16-year-old Billy Flynn and his friends to murder her husband a year earlier at the couple's Derry, N.H., home.

The teenagers insisted that Smart, then a 22-year-old high school media coordinator, planned the killing. Smart maintains that they lied to get a plea bargain for their parts in the crime and that the jury that convicted her was swayed by media coverage.

"I never wanted Gregg killed," Smart told WMUR News 9 on Thursday in an interview at the prison. "I never wanted him to kill Gregg. I never asked him to. I never insinuated that I wanted him to kill my husband."

"They'll be leaving prison, and right now, as it stands, I won't be," she added. "So I believe there's obvious motivation for why they said what they said."

Raymond Fowler and Vance Lattime Jr. already are out on parole. Flynn and Patrick Randall had their sentences reduced and will be eligible for release in 2015.

Smart told the TV station she wants people to realize that she's "so much more than just the one horrible thing" people have judged her by.

"I'm so much more than the worst mistake of my life," she said. "And I feel like I've been frozen in time inside that mistake to get involved with Bill, and I have never been able to get out of it."

Smart’s case was the basis for the movie "To Die For," starring Nicole Kidman in 1995.

But Smart told WMUR, that she’s not an "image" or a "character in a show."

"I'm a real human being that does feel and feels deeply sorry for what happened," she said.

Flynn was 15-years-old when his relationship with Smart began and 16 when he shot Gregg Smart above the left ear in May of 1990 with a gun Lattime stole from his father's gun collection.

Originally charged with first degree murder, as Smart was, Flynn pleaded guilty to second-degree murder after agreeing to testify against her and was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 28.

Flynn testified that Pamela manipulated him by threatening to leave him if he did not kill her husband, an accusation he repeated as he apologized to Gregg Smart’s family at a 2008 hearing for his sentence reduction request.

"She threatened to take away the only thing that was good in my life," Flynn said at the hearing. "I know none of this excuses what I did. I take full responsibility for my actions. Every day I think about what I've done to you and the people I hurt, and I'm terribly and deeply ashamed of myself for being so weak."

Pamela Smart's counselor, Dr. Eleanor Pam, says Flynn's story simply isn't true.

"Pamela wanted to end her relationship with Flynn and told him so. Pam and Gregg were trying to repair their relationship. They were looking to buy a house. In fact, they had contacted several realtors and visited many potential properties in the month before Gregg's death," she wrote on PamelaSmart.org, a website she established to introduce the public to the "real" Pamela Smart.

Dr. Pam blames outside factors for Smart's conviction.

"There were many perceived irregularities in Pam Smart's trial which resulted in her conviction and included among other things, juror misconduct, improper ex part communications, defendants who watched each other testify on television prior to giving their own testimony, and a transcript of a wire worn by a key prosecution witness which was never authenticated."

Flynn, now 35, has earned a GED, an electrician's helper license while in prison and married wife Kelly, a former executive assistant to the superintendent of schools in Wiscasset, Maine.

Smart who has earned two Master's Degrees in prison, requested a pardon hearing but was denied in 2005. She told WMUR that she plans to try to have her sentenced reduced.

Click here for more on this story from WMUR.com.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.