TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040191/0401104.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 29

Murders They Wrote


Passion, envy and genius combine in a trio of true-life crime
dramas that seem ready-made for TV

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Linda Bean/Exeter and Deborah
Fowler/Houston


    Pity the Hollywood suits who will have to choose which of
this winter's murder cases would make the best movie of the
week. Even tabloid writers with a flair for melodrama are hard
pressed to do justice to the true stories that have unfolded
in New Hampshire, Texas and Florida -- and who knows how many
other plots are marinating, still undiscovered, in the shadows
of the heartland? A brief gazetteer:


    NEW HAMPSHIRE. In the town of Derry, Pamela Smart, a
23-year-old high school instructor with big brown eyes,
Gainsborough ringlets and a taste for heavy-metal music,
deflowered William Flynn, a 15-year-old student, after they
watched the steamy movie 9 1/2 Weeks on the VCR. She then
persuaded Flynn and two friends to do away with her husband
Greg, who was found shot in the back of the head last May.

    At Rockingham County Superior Court in Exeter, court
watchers began queuing up in the wee hours to get good seats.
The Boston Herald set up a 900 number, at 95 cents a minute,
for readers to call in verdicts. One witness, who has already
sold her story to Hollywood for $100,000, testified that Smart
told the boys to lock the dog in the cellar so it would not
have to watch the dastardly deed.

    The dog, in fact, loomed large in her calculations.
According to prosecutors, Smart decided to get rid of Greg
rather than divorce him for fear that her husband, a
24-year-old insurance salesman, would keep not only their condo
but also their pet. So, argued prosecutor Paul Maggiotto, she
"got her hooks so deep into the hormones" of Flynn that he
could not resist her influence. Last week the jury agreed, and
Judge Douglas Gray sentenced Smart to life in prison without
parole for conspiring to commit murder. All three boys pleaded
guilty to second-degree murder and face the possibility of
life imprisonment.


    TEXAS. At Alice Johnson Junior High School in Channelview,
outside Houston, two eighth-grade honor students, Shanna Harper
and Amber Heath, were vying for a spot on this fall's freshman
cheerleading squad. But Shanna didn't make it -- not least
because, on the day before the contest deadline, her mother was
arrested for trying to get someone to murder Amber's mother.

    Wanda Webb Holloway, organist at the local Baptist church,
is an irrepressible stage mother. Two years ago, when Shanna
was up for the cheerleading team, her mother tried to have
rival Amber disqualified from the competition on a
technicality. Last year Holloway inadvertently got her own
daughter disqualified when she showed up at school and handed
out promotional pencils and rulers imprinted SHANNA HARPER
CHEERLEADER.

    This year she is charged with trying a more drastic
strategy. According to the police, Holloway plotted to have
Amber's mother killed in the hope of causing the girl so much
emotional distress that she would be unable to compete. When
Holloway allegedly asked her ex-brother-in-law to help her find
a hitman, he turned informant. According to the police, she
toyed with the idea of killing both mother and daughter, but
couldn't afford the $7,500 fee. So she offered a pair of diamond
earrings to help pay for killing Mrs. Heath alone. Holloway
has pleaded not guilty, and the trial is set to start in June.
In the meantime, school principal James M. Barker still
believes in healthy competition. "After all, it's the American
way. We all want our children to achieve. There is a part of
Wanda Holloway in all of us."


    FLORIDA. The nation's second busiest death row is
accommodating an unusual new arrival: a pepper-haired,
bespectacled genius named George James Trepal, who fed rat
poison to the family next door because he considered them bad
neighbors. It seems that Trepal, a science buff and member of
Mensa, a social club for the high IQed, grew tired of his
neighbors' loud music and barking dogs. He left a death threat
on the door, and when that didn't work he slipped into the
Carr family kitchen and laced some thallium nitrite into a pack
of 16-oz. Coca-Cola Classic bottles. A few days later Peggy
Carr's hair began falling out. Her feet burned, her fingers
tingled and her stomach turned. Within a few weeks she was in
a coma; three months later she was dead. Her sons and husband
also showed symptoms but eventually recovered.

    Police were utterly baffled until Trepal began handing over
clues. No one in the small community of Alturas could conceive
of a motive, until detectives began questioning Trepal.
"Somebody wanted them to move out," he told police. "That was
the reason they were poisoned." Next he began planning for his
favorite recreation, the annual Mensa murder weekend, when the
geniuses gather to solve their perfect fantasy crime. "When a
death threat appears on the doorstep," he wrote in a booklet
for the event, "prudent people throw out all their food and
watch what they eat." An undercover agent, planted in Mensa to
befriend Trepal and learn his secrets, ultimately found the
evidence against him: a small vial in the garage containing
traces of thallium. How could a genius be so dumb?