Donna Payant had been working at Green Haven Correctional Facility for about two months. On May 15, 1981 she took a telephone call, told a colleague she had to deal with a problem, handed over her keys and her radio, and walked down a corridor toward the prison chaplain’s office. Hundreds of officers searched the grounds through the night. Her body was found twenty hours later in a landfill at Amenia, in the prison rubbish. She was thirty-one and had three children.
The man convicted of killing her was working in that chaplain’s office. Lemuel Warren Smith was serving two terms of twenty-five years to life for murder, with further sentences for abduction and sexual offences, and the office he had been assigned to contained a telephone and its cord, plastic bags, masking tape, a moving cart and a waste drum, with a library alongside it screened off from the rest of the prison. An inquiry after an escape at Green Haven had already found the place had become, in its own words, a free-for-all, where officers accepted gifts from prisoners.
Smith was born in Amsterdam, New York in July 1941, the youngest of four children of a religious family. His father worked nights as a porter at the General Electric plant in Schenectady. An older brother had died of encephalitis two years before he was born.
His first conviction came in January 1958, when he was sixteen, for an attack on a woman named Dorothy Waterstreet during a robbery. She survived. He served eighteen years and was released in 1976.
Within a year five people were dead. Robert Hedderman, forty-eight, and his employee Margaret Byron, fifty-nine, were shot in Hedderman’s religious goods shop in Albany. Joan Richburg, twenty-four, was found in her car at a shopping centre in Colonie. Maralie Wilson, thirty, was found in Schenectady. He was arrested on August 19, 1977.
He was convicted of the Hedderman and Byron murders on February 2, 1979 and sentenced to fifty years to life. He was indicted over Wilson after bite-mark evidence was produced, and over Richburg after he confessed to it, and both indictments were then dismissed, because there was no practical prospect of him ever leaving prison and nothing further for a trial to achieve. That is why this roster carries three convictions against five deaths.
He ran an insanity defence at the Payant trial, based on multiple personality disorder, and it failed. He was convicted of murder in the first degree and on June 10, 1983 Justice Albert Rosenblatt, later a judge of the Court of Appeals, sentenced him to death under a New York statute that made the penalty mandatory for a serving life prisoner who kills. An Albany judge called him the poster boy for capital punishment.
In 1984 the New York Court of Appeals struck the statute down in his case, holding that a mandatory death sentence was impermissible because it allowed no weighing of mitigation. He was resentenced to life. It was the last operative death penalty provision in New York, and he was the only person ever sentenced under it.
He denied the killing at the time and has never stopped. Asked what was next for him after the verdict, he said he supposed he would be executed.
Donna Payant’s son does not believe he did it. Chris Payant was twelve when his mother was killed, and has said publicly that he knows Smith is a bad man and does not think Smith killed her, and he has asked for the case to be reopened. That position is his, and no court has revisited the conviction.
Smith spent fifteen years in disciplinary segregation for the Payant murder and then remained in comparable isolation, close to forty years in all. In 2023, aged eighty-one and held at Wende Correctional Facility, he sued three retired corrections officials in federal court, arguing the isolation was cruel and unusual punishment. The case was settled with the New York Attorney General’s office in February 2024, days before a jury trial was to begin at Rochester.
He is eighty-five and still in New York state custody. The killing of Donna Payant changed how women were deployed in the state’s maximum-security prisons, and produced an inquiry into how a man with his record came to be working in that part of the building at all.