Smith was born in 1941 in Amsterdam, New York. He was convicted of attempted murder in 1958, aged sixteen, and served eight years. Released, he married and worked, and in 1976 and 1977 he killed five people: Dorothy Waterstreet; Robert Hedderman, forty-eight, and his secretary Margaret Byron, fifty-nine, in a religious goods shop in Albany; Joan Richburg, twenty-four, in a shopping mall car park; and Maralie Wilson, thirty. He was arrested on August 19, 1977 and received three life terms.
On May 15, 1981, at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, he killed Donna Payant, a thirty-one-year-old corrections officer, in the prison chaplain's office. Her body was found at a landfill in the prison rubbish. She was the first female corrections officer killed on duty in the United States.
He was convicted of that murder and sentenced to death on June 10, 1983, under a New York statute that made the killing of a prison guard by a serving prisoner capital. In 1984 the New York Court of Appeals struck the statute down in his case, People v. Smith, holding it unconstitutional to make the death penalty mandatory. The sentence became life.
The Payant killing changed how women were deployed in New York's maximum-security prisons and was the subject of an inquiry into how a prisoner with his record came to have unsupervised access to that part of the facility. He remains in custody.
The count of six in this roster is the five Albany-area killings plus Payant. Smith is also alleged to have committed further killings, none charged.