Welcome back to Kern Affairs, our show about the stories of love gone fatally wrong that are in the news right this very minute.

These shorter contemporary stories come out every Friday

while our extensive full-length episodes

come out on Wednesday.

Once again, our main focus will be on the Karen Reed trial in Massachusetts.

Before that, however, we have a very surprising update from the Pamela Smart Case.

One of our earliest episodes and one of the more famous New England cases that we've ever covered.

Pamela Smart, who has been serving a life sentence for orchestrating the murder of her husband has publicly

accepted responsibility for the crime in a recent videotaped statement.

If you're surprised, so am I. Smart, who was convicted in 1991 for recruiting a teenage student, William

Billy Flynn, with whom she had preyed upon and was having an illegal affair to kill her husband made this statement during

her latest attempt to have her sentence reduced.

She has been appealing her conviction for years.

Per the AP, Pamela Smart reflected on her actions saying,

for me, that was really hard,

because going into those places, in those spaces,

is where I find myself responsible for something I desperately didn't want to be

responsible for, my husband's murder. I had to acknowledge for the first time in my own mind

and my own heart how responsible I was, because I had deflected blame all the time.

I think almost as if it was a coping mechanism because the truth of being so responsible

was very difficult for me.

Smart, now 56, has been in prison since 1990.

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