Donna Payant had been a correction officer at Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Dutchess County, New York, for about two months when, on May 15, 1981, she took a telephone call, told a co-worker she needed to take care of a problem, and walked off down a corridor. When her shift ended and she did not come out, hundreds of officers searched the grounds through the night and into the morning. The prison's dumpsters had been emptied into a garbage truck, and two senior officers followed it to a dump about twenty miles away. When the garbage was spread out, they found her mutilated body. She was thirty-one and had three children. It was the first time in the United States that a female corrections officer had been killed inside a prison, and more than five thousand officers came to her funeral.
The man convicted of killing her was Lemuel Warren Smith, who was already serving life for murder and was working in the prison chaplain's office, the area she had been walking toward. The medical examiner called in to look at the bite marks on her body was the one who had matched bite marks on another murdered woman to Smith four years earlier, and he recognized them. Smith was charged on June 6, 1981.
He was born on July 23, 1941, in Amsterdam, New York, into a very religious household; examiners later concluded that his father's zeal had been abusive and that he had suffered several head injuries as a boy. An older brother, John Jr., had died of encephalitis as an infant before he was born. On January 21, 1958, a woman named Dorothy Waterstreet was robbed and beaten to death near his neighborhood. The evidence pointed to Smith, who was sixteen, but the case collapsed when the district attorney pushed too hard for a confession, and he was never arrested for it.
Under pressure from the Amsterdam police, he moved to Baltimore the next summer, where he kidnapped a twenty-five-year-old woman and beat her nearly to death. A witness interrupted him, and she lived. On April 12, 1959, he was sentenced to twenty years for assault with intent to murder. Paroled in May 1968, he came back to the Albany area, and on May 20, 1969, he kidnapped and sexually assaulted a woman who got away with the help of a couple named Anthony and Kathleen Scipione, then later that day kidnapped and raped a forty-six-year-old friend of his mother's, who talked him into letting her go. He pleaded guilty to first degree attempted rape and served a little over four years.
He was paroled again in October 1976. On November 24, the day before Thanksgiving, Robert Hedderman, forty-eight, and his secretary, Margaret Byron, fifty-nine, were found murdered in the back of Hedderman's religious goods store in Albany. Smith was working nearby, and hair and blood evidence made him a suspect. On December 23, Joan Richburg, twenty-four, was raped, murdered and mutilated in her car at the Colonie Center mall. On January 10, 1977, a big man tried to lure a young woman out of a gift shop in Albany, took her sixty-year-old grandmother hostage when she resisted, and stamped on the older woman's hand, breaking it; years later the grandmother saw Smith's picture in the paper and identified him. On July 22, 1977, Maralie Wilson, thirty, was found strangled and mutilated near the railroad tracks in downtown Schenectady.
He was caught on August 19, 1977, after he kidnapped and raped an eighteen-year-old woman, Marianne Maggio, who worked in the same part of Schenectady as Wilson, and forced her to drive toward Albany. Police stopped the car. A state police lieutenant, Don Pinto, then noticed a mark on Wilson's nose in the photographs that looked like a bite; her body was exhumed and the mark matched Smith's teeth. In late October the police took Smith to Bleecker Stadium in Albany, stood him behind one of five screens with four other men, and gave a dog the scent of feces-stained clothing from the Hedderman store. The dog crossed the stadium straight to him, three times, with the men rearranged between tries.
On March 5, 1978, facing the bite-mark evidence, he confessed to five murders, among them Dorothy Waterstreet's, in an effort to persuade prosecutors that he was insane. The confession was to be kept secret, though the police could follow up its leads. He described lifelong mental illness, including multiple personalities, and said he was controlled by the spirit of his dead brother. Two doctors testified to his delusions but would not call him legally insane. He was convicted of rape in Saratoga County and sentenced on March 9, 1978, to ten to twenty years; of kidnapping in Schenectady that July, receiving twenty-five years to life; and of the Hedderman and Byron murders in Albany on February 2, 1979, receiving fifty years to life. He was indicted for the murders of Wilson and Richburg, and those indictments were dismissed, because he was never going to leave prison.
Payant's killing brought in William Kunstler and C. Vernon Mason for the defense. They accused guards of dealing drugs and attacked Payant's own character, and they could not get past the bite marks; their own expert agreed that those on Payant matched those on Wilson. The trial began on January 20, 1983, and Smith was convicted of murder on April 21. New York law at the time made death mandatory for a prisoner serving life who killed again, as the only deterrent left for such men, and he was sentenced to death on June 10, 1983. On July 2, 1984, the New York Court of Appeals held that mandatory statute unconstitutional in his case, and his sentence became another term of life.
He has admitted his guilt in every case but hers. He says she was set up by guards who were trying to blackmail her with compromising photographs into joining a drug ring inside the prison, and at trial he told the jury that she had been going to expose corruption in the corrections department and was killed to keep her quiet. Her son, Chris Payant, who was twelve when she died, said in 2025 that he wanted the case reopened: "I know he's a bad guy but I don't think Lemuel Smith did it." No court has reexamined the conviction.
For the Payant murder, and because of the danger he posed even inside, Smith spent the next twenty years in near-isolation, the longest such span in the country at the time, and he has remained under isolation conditions since, held in recent years at Wende Correctional Facility. In 2023, at eighty-one, he sued three retired corrections officials in federal court, arguing that the isolation was cruel and unusual; the case was settled with the state attorney general's office in February 2024, shortly before a jury trial was due to begin in Rochester.