For the first time in 34 years, teacher Pamela Smart admits that her teenage lover killed her husband

Pamela Smart, who is serving a life sentence for plotting with her teenage student to have her husband killed in 1990, accepted full responsibility for his death for the first time in a videotaped statement released Tuesday in as part of his latest request for a sentence reduction.

Smart, 56, was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy who later fatally shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry, New Hampshire. The shooter was released in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Although Pamela Smart denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of complicity to first-degree murder and other crimes and sentenced to life without parole.

Smart has been incarcerated for almost 34 years. She said in the release that she began “deepening our own accountability” through her experience in a writing group that “encouraged us to move beyond and into spaces we didn't want to be in.”

“For me it was really difficult, because going into these places, into these spaces, I found myself responsible for something that I desperately didn't want to be responsible for, the murder of my husband,” she said. -she declared, her voice trembling. “I had to recognize for the first time in my mind and in my heart how responsible I was, because I had always deflected blame, I think, almost as if it was a mechanism coping, because the truth of being so responsible has been very difficult for me. »

She asked to have an “honest conversation” with the five-member New Hampshire Executive Council, which approves state contracts and appointments to state courts and agencies, as well as the governor Chris Sununu. The board denied his final request in 2022, and Smart appealed to the state Supreme Court, which denied his request last year.

Val Fryatt, a cousin of Gregory Smart, told the Associated Press that Smart “danced around” and accepted full responsibility “without admitting the facts about what made her 'fully responsible.'

Fryatt noted that Smart did not mention his cousin's name in the video, “not even once.”

Messages seeking comments on the petition and statement were sent to council members, Sununu and the attorney general's office.

Smart is serving time at the Bedford Hills Correctional Center in Westchester County, New York. She earned two master's degrees behind bars and also mentored fellow inmates, was ordained as a minister and served on an inmate liaison committee. She said she was remorseful and had been rehabilitated.

The trial was a media circus and one of the first high-profile cases in the United States involving a sexual affair between a school staff member and a student. Joyce Maynard wrote “To Die For” in 1992, inspired by the Smart affair. This inspired a 1995 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix. The killer, William Flynn, and three other teenagers cooperated with prosecutors. They served shorter sentences and were released.