Pamela Smart, who encouraged a teenager to kill her husband, accepts responsibility for the crime

Pamela Smart, 56, has been incarcerated since 1990

Jon Pierre Lasseigne/AP

Pamela Smart

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, accepted responsibility for his murder in a videotaped statement and published Tuesday.

The statement was made during his latest attempt to get his sentence reduced, CBS News reported.

Smart, now 56, has been appealing her conviction for decades.

In the video, Smart, who has been incarcerated since 1990 after being convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, said she began “digging deeper” into her role in her husband’s murder while she was part of a writing group.

“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 told the Associated Press. “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. »

Courtesy of HBO

Pamela Smart

“Now that I’m older and able to look back, I can see so many of the mistakes I made, and see how skewed my judgment was and how immature I was,” she said. she said, according to CBS News. “Looking back, you know, I’m such a different person than I was…back then,” she said. “I mean, 34 years is a really long time, and in that time I’ve done a lot of work on myself.”

At the end of the video statement, Smart, who is housed at the Bedford Hills Correctional Center in New York state, requested to meet or hold a video conference with New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and the executive council of New Hampshire.

Related: Pamela Smart says plastic knife offense could prevent her from getting reduced prison sentence

The Smart case was one of the most 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 learned that Pamela had been having an affair with an underage student, William “Billy” Flynn.

Flynn admitted he was the shooter, but maintained he did it at Smart’s direction — an allegation Smart denied.

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After Flynn pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, 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 center of the case: was the pretty young widow responsible for the murder of her husband? A jury thought so, and she was convicted on March 22, 1991. She has remained in prison ever since.

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