Pamela Smart began a 'relationship' with her student. Then she convinced him to murder her husband.

Three years before OJ Simpson's murder trial was splashed across the front page of every newspaper around the globe, another murder trial had captured the public's imagination.

The trial quickly became an international sensation, with Court TV airing scenes direct from the courthouse, and local television stations opting to run the trial over the usual daytime soap operas.

It was a tale of lust, passion and murder. And its star was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed American 'school teacher' named Pamela Smart. The case inspired the 1995 film To Die For, based on a book of the same name and starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix, as well as a television series starring Helen Hunt.

Watch: Pamela Smart was convicted guilty of her husband's murder. Decades later, she still denies it. Post continues after video.

Smart, who was 23 at the time, was on trial for conspiring to murder her husband. 

Pamela Wojas first met Greggory Smart during the Christmas break in 1986, while she was home from college visiting her family in New Hampshire. Two years later, they married. But they hadn't been married for long when Smart's husband told her he'd had a one-night stand.

Pamela Smart with her husband, Greggory Smart. Image: AP.

"I thought there was something wrong with me and I wasn't good enough," she told The Washington Post in 2019.

Smart, who was the Director of Media Services at Winnacunnet High School in New Hampshire, was volunteering at the school's self-esteem program at the time and it was there that she met a student volunteer named Billy Flynn. Flynn was six years her junior but the two immediately started flirting with each other. Around Flynn's 16th birthday, they had sex. Smart later said they had sex around six times over the period of a fortnight. 

"Every day, I would say, 'I'm not going to do this anymore,'" she told New Hampshire Magazine in 2016, "and the next day I was doing it again."

On May 1, 1990, Smart came home to find her 24-year-old husband dead on the floor of their condo. He was lying in a pool of blood and the condo had been ransacked. 

While police initially put the murder down to a botched burglary, things soon took an unexpected turn. The father of one of Billy Flynn's school friends brought a .38 calibre pistol that he had found in his house to the station, believing it might have been the murder weapon. Police also received an anonymous tip that Smart's friend Cecelia Pierce may have been aware of the murder plot.

Detectives arranged for Pierce to wear a wire. Their plan worked, with Smart confiding in the student intern she would "go to the {expletive} slammer" for life if the truth came out.

Flynn and three of his friends - Patrick 'Pete' Randall, Vance 'J.R.' Lattime, Jr., and Raymond Fowler - soon confessed to the murder. Flynn said he shot Greggory Smart in the head while Randall held a knife in front of the victim's face. The four students said Smart had orchestrated the murder down to the smallest detail. They said the 23-year-old left the door unlocked for them, told them to make it look like a burglary, and offered to pay them $500 each. The boys all faced life imprisonment when they were arrested for first degree murder. They all pleaded to lesser charges in exchange for testimony against Smart.

And thus began the trial of the decade.

At the trial, Flynn testified that after they watched the film 9 ½ Weeks in Smart's condo, she took him upstairs, re-enacted the striptease scene from the film, and then they had sex while Van Halen's 'Black and Blue' played in the background. "I think he's having a problem remembering where reality began and the movie stopped," Smart testified during the trial.

According to Flynn, a few days later, Smart threatened to stop having sex with him if he didn't kill her husband. Throughout the trial, Smart had remained calm and unflinching, with the media labelling her an 'ice princess'.

Pamela Smart and Billy Flynn during the trial. Image: AP.

The jury deliberated for two and half hours before coming back with their verdict. When Smart was convicted, "gasps and sobs could be heard in the courtroom as the verdict was read out, but not from the defendant, who had become the focus of a horrified fascination that gripped most of New England this month," The Washington Post wrote at the time, "Smart sat still and unflinching, as she [had] throughout the trial."

Pamela Smart charged guilty for the murder of her husband, Greggory Smart. Image: AP.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, Smart's mother Linda Wojas addressed the courthouse after her daughter's guilty verdict was announced, asking: "What are you people going to do for entertainment next week?"

Flynn, Randall, Lattime and Fowler have since been paroled. Smart remains behind bars.

Although she's never admitted to orchestrating her husband's death, she now admits that it would never have happened if she hadn't had an "affair".

"I offer no excuses for my actions and behaviour. I'm to blame," she said when she applied for a reduced sentence appeal in December 2021.

"I regret that it took me so long to apologise to the Smart family, my own family, and everyone else. But I think that I wasn’t at a place where I was willing to own that or face that. I was young and selfish and I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of what I was doing."

Feature Image: AP/ABC News.