I was still a couple of years on the good side of 40 when lawyers and judges in that unforgettable media circus known as the Pam Smart trial began tossing around numbers and dates so far into the future that they might as well have said “forever.”

Thirty years here, 40 years there. “What’s the difference?” I wondered.

I remember staring at this little kid on the witness stand with his peach-fuzz mustache and wavy brown mullet, speaking in a shaky – even squeaky – voice, trying to answer questions from a young, no-nonsense prosecutor named Paul Maggiotto and a pair of cocksure defense attorneys named Mark Sisti and Paul Twomey.

The kid we knew then as Billy is today a 41-year-old man named William Flynn, who just the other day reached a milestone that seemed so unreachable back when he was Billy the woebegone teen.

On Thursday, Flynn learned that his days as a prison inmate are numbered, thanks to a parole board ruling that granted his release a quarter-century after uniformed men escorted him into the New Hampshire State Prison.

Thursday, appropriately enough, was Flynn’s birthday, and assuming nothing goes awry, it will be the final one he celebrates in an environment not exactly conducive to things like birthday parties.

I’m guessing Flynn’s second-favorite day of the year – behind March 12, of course – is now June 4, the day he will officially become a free man. He will walk out of the Maine State Prison in Warren, where he’s been for a number of years – most recently as a minimum security inmate so he could take part in the work-release program.

Flynn’s good fortune is the latest, and probably the most significant, juncture in a timeline that began the night of May 1, 1990, with the violent death of Nashua insurance salesman Gregg Smart.

Seeing and listening to the Bill Flynn of today numerous times since Thursday took me back to those sometimes tedious but never boring days squeezed into my 1 square foot of camera space or my tiny allotment of wooden bench in that perpetually packed courtroom in Rockingham County Superior Court.

If ever there was a crime tailor-made for hungry, enterprising journalists, this was it. The shapely young teacher, with her long, curly hair, bright eyes and warm, seductive smile; her students, at 15 and 16 quite impressionable, perhaps struggling for approval, perhaps wandering through the fog of teen angst.

My own involvement with covering the original crime – a seemingly straightforward case of homeowner walks in on burglary, spooks the burglars, and gets shot and killed – was peripheral. But one thing I’ll always remember is seeing the first press release from Derry police and the attorney general’s office and, even though I had little familiarity with Derry beyond its main roads, recognizing the address of the crime: Misty Morning Drive.

Then it came to me: The night before, I happened to hear a Derry ambulance dispatch for Misty Morning Drive for an unconscious male, possibly with a head injury, a call so routine that I forgot about it as soon as the dispatch ended.

But by that afternoon – May 2, 1990 – things on Misty Morning Drive were anything but routine. It was a murder scene, and police had cast a wide dragnet in their manhunt for a suspect or suspects.

Not surprisingly, the idea that a young man, from all accounts a good guy on the fast track to a successful insurance career, married for just a year, with a great family and no known enemies, could be so callously rubbed out in his own home unsettled neighbors, not to mention family members, friends and the police.

The crime topped the news for several days, with journalists and TV people jockeying for interviews with the grieving widow, a petite school media coordinator who said the police didn’t want her to talk about the investigation but that she’d be willing to talk about Gregg Smart, “not only my husband, but my best friend” and her inspiration to “live life to the fullest” going forward.

As the skeptics and cynics we fourth-estaters tend to be, we occasionally floated among ourselves a “There’s something fishy here” suggestion, but I can’t recall any of us – and there were plenty of us keeping an eye on the case – ever laying out the precise scenario that would come true exactly three months after Gregg Smart’s murder.

The regional interest the murder had generated was renewed one June day when police announced they’d cracked the case, having arrested three Seabrook teenagers for killing Smart.

Nobody was all that surprised, of course; three teens from hardscrabble Seabrook try to burglarize a guy’s home and things get out of hand.

But wait: The three kids happened to attend Winnacunnet High School, where Smart’s widow, Pam, worked as a media coordinator. And she knew the kids pretty well – especially a sophomore who took her course and took an interest in after-school programs she supervised.

That can’t be a coincidence, right? Right. It’s another feather in the cap of those who like to say there are no such things as coincidences: Pam Smart the teacher, we would soon learn, seemed to have a twisted understanding of what extracurricular activities were all about.

On Aug. 1, three months to the day since she became “the grieving widow,” Pam Smart was escorted from her office at Winnacunnet wearing handcuffs moments after the arresting officer, Detective Dan Pelletier – just 28 at the time – told Smart he had both good and bad news.

Good news first: We’ve solved your husband’s murder. The bad news? You’re under arrest for first-degree murder.

To say that Smart’s trial was a media circus doesn’t do justice to the spectacle that unfolded in March 1992 in and around Rockingham County Superior Court in Brentwood.

I remember the crowds, meeting journalists whose first language wasn’t English, who’d come from – believe it or not – foreign countries for the big show. And I remember verdict day – which, by a sort of cruel twist of scheduling fate, fell on my day off.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Saturdays in The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-6443, dshalhoup
@nashuatelegraph.com or @Telegraph_DeanS.