Prison board grants parole to driver in N.H. murder

CONCORD, N.H. – Vance Lattime Jr., the getaway driver in New Hampshire’s infamous Pamela Smart murder case, was granted parole Thursday and could be freed within 30 days

Lattime, 32, will not go to a halfway house. He will be allowed to go home to his family once the three-member parole board views and approves his parole plan, but will be under strict supervision as he adjusts to life out of prison.

He has served 15 years of an 18-year-to-life sentence for accomplice to second-degree murder, and has been incarcerated at the Maine State Prison. Last May a judge reduced his sentence by three years, making him eligible for parole.

He told the three-member panel his greatest wish is to return home to Seabrook.

“Most of my family’s there and more important right now, my great-grandmother,” he said.

“You come from a very very high profile case,” parole board member Thomas Winn told Lattime during Thursday’s hearing. “You are going to have to walk straight and narrow until you prove yourself to the people outside.”

Winn said he was impressed by Lattime’s parole petition, which included supportive letters from corrections officers.

“I have never seen so many letters of recommendation,” he said. “Good luck to you.”

Then Mary Chase, Lattime’s grandmother piped up: “Is there any way we could just give him a little hug?”

In handcuffs, Lattime was led to his family, where he received hugs and kisses from his great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, sister and aunt.

A sister and aunt said they would give Lattime a place to live; he has offers to work with his mother and father.

“He’s going to have so much family support. If we had brought everybody today they would have been out the door,” said Lattime’s sister, Nicole McDonough.

Lattime was 17 in 1990 when he agreed to help a friend, William Flynn, kill Smart’s husband Gregory, supplying the gun and the getaway car. Flynn, then 16, was having an affair with Pamela Smart, a media coordinator at the boys’ high school.

“I’m just overwhelmed, the thought of him coming home,” said his mother, Diane Lattime.

William Smart, Pamela Smart’s former father-in-law, was not present, but had opposed reducing Lattime’s sentence at a hearing last spring.

Pamela Smart is serving life without parole. She was denied a pardon hearing request Wednesday.

Flynn, Lattime and another accomplice, Patrick Randall, received plea deals in exchange for testifying against her.