Pamela Smart: 'I Blame Myself' For My Husband's Death

It was one of the biggest crime stories of the early 1990s.

Gregg Smart was found dead in his New Hampshire condo on May 1, 1990. The 24-year-old insurance agent had been shot in the head.

As police investigated the crime, they began to focus on his wife, Pamela, a 22-year-old media coordinator at a nearby school. Investigators soon learned that Pamela had been having an affair with an underage student, William “Billy” Flynn.

Flynn admitted that he was the gunman, but maintained that he did it at the direction of Pamela Smart – an allegation that Smart has always denied.

After Flynn pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, he testified against his former lover.

The case quickly became international news, and even helped inspire the 1996 Nicole Kidman movie To Die For. The question at the center of the case: Was the pretty young widow responsible for her husband’s murder? A jury thought so, and she was convicted on March 22, 1991 – 25 years ago this week.

Smart is now speaking out in an exclusive jailhouse interview on Murder Made Me Famous, airing Saturday night on the Reelz Channel. (An exclusive preview of the show is below.) There were no ground rules for the interview, which was conducted by PEOPLE Senior Writer Steve Helling. No questions were off limits.

Now 48, Smart maintains her innocence, saying that she never told Flynn to kill her husband.

“I’ve been in jail for the last 25 years for something I didn’t do,” she says on the show.

But despite her declarations of innocence, Smart admits that she made some very bad choices in 1990.

For one thing, she acknowledges that her affair with Billy Flynn – who was only 15 at the time – was wrong. “I knew better, and I did it anyway,” she says. “For that, I’ve lost 26 years of my life and God knows how much more.”

“I constantly punish myself for that,” she continues. “I feel like even though I didn’t tell him to kill Gregg and even though I didn’t give him the gun, I feel like I put the bullets in there by having this relationship.”

“Does that make me responsible for his death? In my mind, yeah. A lot. Am I legally culpable? No. But do I blame myself? I do all the time. And that’s really hard to live with.”

Murder Made Me Famous combines reenactments, exclusive interviews and never-before-seen photos and video to tell the story of infamous murderers. The show’s second season premieres with the Pamela Smart special episode Saturday night at 10 p.m. ET on the Reelz Channel.