Murders They Wrote

By NANCY GIBBS

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?

With reporting by Linda Bean/Exeter and Deborah Fowler/Houston