Lemuel Smith was already serving two life sentences for murder when Donna Payant, a 31-year-old correction officer, disappeared during her shift at Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security state prison in New York, on May 15, 1981. She had been on the job about a month. Her body was found the next day at a landfill. Smith, who worked in the prison's Catholic chaplain's office, the area she had been walking toward, was charged with first-degree murder. A jury convicted him in April 1983, and in June a judge in Poughkeepsie sentenced him to death, the only penalty the law allowed for that conviction.
That sentence never came close to being carried out. In 1984 the New York Court of Appeals declared the mandatory death statute unconstitutional and vacated the sentence. Smith stayed in prison, and for decades afterward he was held in solitary confinement. He has always denied killing Payant. In 2025 her son, who spent 28 years as a prison guard himself, said publicly that he did not believe Smith did it either, and asked for the case to be reopened.
Before Green Haven, Smith's record ran back to the 1950s in Amsterdam, New York, and through Baltimore, Schenectady, Saratoga and the Albany area.
Smith grew up in Amsterdam, New York. In January 1958 he was 16 and a high school basketball star, according to a Daily Gazette history column, and he lived around the corner from a woman named Dorothy Waterstreet.
Dorothy Waterstreet was 46 and the mother of five. She was attacked at about 11 p.m. while walking home from a church meeting. Her body was found in Amsterdam on January 21, 1958. She had been beaten and stabbed. The weapon was never found.
Police focused on Smith. Officers and the district attorney questioned him again and again about where he had been that night. He told them he had come home from a date, gone out for an orange soda, and been back by about 10:45 p.m. to watch the evening news with his mother. He denied going near the scene and denied knowing anything about the killing. Police kept questioning him and put him under surveillance.
The case went before a grand jury. Smith was subpoenaed but was never called to testify, because he refused to sign a waiver of immunity. After 16 months the grand jury was discharged, in May 1959, without returning an indictment. No charge against Smith in Dorothy Waterstreet's death was reported, and he has never been convicted of it.
While that grand jury was sitting, Smith faced other charges. In December 1957 he had been indicted for burglaries at a confectionery store and a coffee shop in Amsterdam.
Free on bail in the burglary case, Smith went to stay with relatives in Baltimore. In August 1958, according to the Gazette's account, he attacked a 25-year-old woman who worked at a Baltimore dry cleaner. She was found in critical condition and survived. Smith was arrested nine blocks away and charged with assault and attempted robbery. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison, and he was released in 1968.
Months after his release, Smith was charged again. In May 1969, the Gazette reports, he was accused of taking a Schenectady woman from her home at knifepoint and assaulting her in Saratoga. He was convicted, the Gazette says of second-degree kidnapping and assault, and returned to prison. He was paroled in 1976.
On the night before Thanksgiving, Robert Hedderman and Margaret Byron were stabbed to death at a religious store. Reports disagree about where the store was: a 1983 United Press International report described Smith as serving time "for two Albany murders," while the Gazette column places the store in Schenectady. Little else was reported about the two victims beyond their names.
Smith was convicted of both killings. In its 1984 opinion in his civil rights case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit described him as serving "two twenty-five year to life sentences for second degree murder" at the time of the Green Haven killing. The Gazette column reports that the two terms were consecutive. The date of the verdict and the name of the judge were not reported.
In 1977 Smith was charged with kidnapping and assaulting an 18-year-old woman from Schenectady. By then, the Gazette reports, investigators were already looking at him for the deaths of Robert Hedderman and Margaret Byron. The woman survived.
The convictions that followed are reported in slightly different ways. A 2024 WNYT report says that in 1978 Smith was sentenced to up to life in prison after convictions in Schenectady County Court for kidnapping, robbery and rape, and, in one of its articles, murder. The Gazette says he was convicted of the Hedderman and Byron murders "along with other abductions and assaults." The same column records that two more murder charges against him were dismissed because he was already serving multiple life sentences. The reports do not name the victims in those two dismissed cases, and Smith has never been convicted of them.
By the spring of 1981 he was held at Green Haven Correctional Facility, where he was serving two consecutive life terms and a sentence for abduction, according to CBS6. He was assigned to work in the chaplain's office.
Donna Payant came from Dannemora, New York, according to the New York Correction History Society. Her husband and three children, then 12, 8 and 5, survived her, UPI reported in August 1981. She had been working at Green Haven for about a month when she was killed.
Green Haven at the time was staffed largely by new officers. In late May 1981, UPI reported that about 400 of the prison's 500 guards had less than a year on the job. About 600 of the state's guards were women, more than 400 of them working in men's prisons and close to half of those in maximum-security facilities; most were in the least experienced group, because women had begun working in men's prisons only within the previous five years.
According to court testimony described by CBS6 Albany in 2025, on May 15, 1981, Payant took a telephone call said to be for her, handed a colleague her keys and radio, and walked down a hallway toward the chaplain's office. She was never seen alive again. She was reported missing about five hours later.
Her body was found the next day. She had been strangled.
Her death drew wide attention. She was the first woman guard to be killed in the line of duty in New York State, UPI reported, and the first state prison guard killed since the 1971 Attica uprising. About 2,500 uniformed correction officers attended her funeral. The state Correctional Services commissioner, Thomas Coughlin, said afterward that he would rather not have women in the toughest prisons but believed the federal Civil Rights Act did not allow him to bar them, and he issued an order reaffirming the rights of female officers. "A CO is a CO is a CO," he told UPI.
By early August 1981, UPI reported, Smith, whom it described as a two-time convicted killer, had been charged with first-degree murder in Payant's death. A conviction on that charge carried a mandatory sentence of death.
In early August 1981 officials took impressions of Smith's teeth, to compare with evidence from Payant's body, UPI reported. The impressions could not be used until the Appellate Division ruled on a defense claim that the procedure violated his rights to privacy and against self-incrimination. UPI described the killing as having allegedly taken place in a room next to the chaplain's office.
The same week, Payant's family prepared a civil claim against the State of New York in the Court of Claims in Albany. Their lawyer, Joseph Poissant, said his firm had begun asking anyone with information, inmates and guards included, to come forward; it asked radio stations to broadcast appeals for collect calls and placed legal notices in newspapers.
The case was tried in Dutchess County Court, and Smith was represented by the civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, according to CBS6. The prosecution's case was circumstantial. Witnesses testified that Smith and Payant were seen entering the chaplain's office on the day she disappeared. According to that testimony, the office had a telephone, a moving cart, a waste drum and a secluded library. A forensic dentist testified that a dental impression made from Smith after the murder matched Payant's wounds.
Smith's own account was that Payant had not been killed inside the prison at all. He said she had been set up by correction officers who were trying to blackmail her with compromising photographs.
The jury deliberated for four days, CBS6 reported, and on April 21, 1983, found Smith guilty of first-degree murder. Reacting to the verdict, he is reported to have said: "What's next for you, Lemuel? Gonna be executed, I guess."
On June 10, 1983, Justice Albert Rosenblatt of the State Supreme Court sentenced Smith to death in Poughkeepsie. It was the only penalty the conviction allowed. UPI reported that the sentence set his execution for the week of July 10, and that he would be the first person to die in New York's electric chair in 20 years; the last had been Eddie Lee Mays, executed in 1963. Smith was 41. He was returned to Green Haven to be held in isolation on death row, with visits limited to his immediate family. UPI noted at the time that the constitutionality of the statute was in doubt and that a long appeal was likely.
Under section 650 of the state Correction Law, a condemned prisoner had to be kept in a segregation unit. After his sentence, Smith was moved to Green Haven's Unit for Condemned Persons and stayed there about 13 months. His cell measured roughly 6 by 10 feet and had a television and a radio; he had a daily exercise yard. He could have contact visits with his lawyer, a doctor or nurse, and a priest, and non-contact visits with a psychiatrist, his family and four other clergy. He could not receive visits from lay religious advisers, friends, the press or his lawyer's staff without a court order, and he could not attend group religious services.
Smith also sued state prison officials in federal court, in a case titled Smith v. Coughlin, claiming that these conditions violated his rights under the First, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Prison officials testified that condemned prisoners posed a special danger to other inmates, were likely targets of attack, and were a greater suicide risk. The federal district court rejected nearly all of his claims, but allowed him non-contact visits with his lawyers' paralegal staff.
Smith appealed his conviction and sentence to the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court. About two months after May 7, 1984, the court declared unconstitutional the statute under which he had been sentenced. As the Second Circuit described the ruling later that year, the Court of Appeals vacated the death sentence, reduced his conviction to second-degree murder, and sent the case back to the trial court for resentencing. Smith left the condemned unit. The reports do not give the new sentence imposed on remand.
The New York Correction History Society, in its memorial to Payant, records her case as the one in which the Court of Appeals struck down the death penalty statute then in force.
On November 16, 1984, the Second Circuit decided Smith's appeal in the conditions case. Writing for a panel of Judges Oakes, Van Graafeiland and Pierce, Judge Pierce held that his transfer out of the condemned unit made his requests for court orders moot, and that his confinement there had not violated due process, the Eighth Amendment, equal protection or the First Amendment. "Smith has proven himself a particularly dangerous person by murdering a prison guard while already serving two life terms," the court wrote. It agreed with the district court that barring his lawyers' paralegals had violated his Sixth Amendment right to the effective help of counsel, but because he had shown no actual injury it sent the case back for an award of nominal damages of one dollar.
After the Payant killing, Smith was sentenced to 15 years of solitary confinement, according to a 2024 WNYT report on his later lawsuit. That term ran out in 1996, but he was repeatedly refused release into the general prison population. His lawsuit said prison staff "rubber stamped" recommendations to keep him in solitary indefinitely. In a 1998 interview, the state corrections commissioner Glenn Goord said: "Lemuel Smith will remain locked up for as long as I am Commissioner."
For years Smith spent nearly 24 hours a day in a cell about 13 feet by 10 feet, without access to vocational, cultural or educational programs. His lawyers said his only infractions in that time were minor ones, for contraband and for disobeying an order. By 2024 he used a wheelchair, had a spinal condition that limited his movement, and took medication to guard against heart attack, high blood pressure and prostate cancer, WNYT reported.
He filed several appeals over the Payant verdict, CBS6 reported, accusing Kunstler of poor representation. The verdict stood.
In federal court in Rochester, Smith, then 82 according to his lawyers, sued several commissioners and staff of the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. He was held at Wende Correctional Facility in Erie County. He argued that his indefinite solitary confinement violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, calling it a disproportionate punishment that "offends society's sense of decency," and asked to be placed in the general population and for punitive damages. A jury trial was set to begin in late February 2024.
It never began. The parties reached a settlement shortly before the trial date, according to a federal court entry reported by WNYT on February 26, 2024. His lawyers, Tracy Burnett and Jonathan Jeremias, said they had "achieved Lemuel's goal of being removed from restrictive custody." The settlement papers, filed on March 20, 2024, provided that Smith would drop all his claims, that the department admitted no wrongdoing, that he and his lawyers would each receive $5,000, and that a physical therapist would examine him and he would get a new wheelchair. WNYT reported him still at Wende that month.
On May 5, 2025, CBS6 Albany reported that Payant's son, who was 12 when she was killed and later worked 28 years as a prison guard, wanted the case reopened. He believed that a drug trade inside Green Haven, which later led to the arrest and conviction of correction officers, lay behind her death. He said he and his family felt that she had been forced or asked to become a drug runner or some kind of intermediary. "I know he's a bad guy but I don't think Lemuel Smith did it." He argued that guards could have used dental impressions of Smith, which he said had been made about a week before the murder, to create the marks on her body.
The station noted that an investigation in the 1980s, after an escape from Green Haven, had found the prison a "free for all," with guards accepting gifts from inmates in exchange for freedom, as the station put it. The Albany defense lawyer Paul DerOhannesian told CBS6 there had always been a question of whether someone inside the system was involved, but that there was "substantial evidence" Smith committed the crime, and that the passage of time raised problems of lost evidence and faded memories that any prosecutor would weigh. No court was reported to have reopened the conviction.
The Waterstreet killing: police in Amsterdam focused on Smith in 1958, but a grand jury sat for 16 months and returned no indictment. He has never been charged with it.
The two dismissed murder charges: the Gazette records that two murder charges against Smith were dismissed because he was already serving life. They were never tried, and the victims were not named in the reports.
The Payant conviction: Smith denies it. His account, that she was set up by officers blackmailing her, and her son's view that the prison's drug trade lay behind her death, are claims; no court has accepted them. The prosecution's case was circumstantial, with dental testimony at its center. The verdict stood on appeal, CBS6 reports; the Court of Appeals vacated the death sentence and, as the Second Circuit described it, reduced the conviction to second-degree murder.
December 1957: Indicted in Amsterdam on burglary charges.
January 21, 1958: Dorothy Waterstreet found dead in Amsterdam; Smith, 16, questioned.
August 1958: Attacks a woman in Baltimore; later convicted and sentenced to 20 years.
May 1959: Amsterdam grand jury discharged without an indictment in the Waterstreet case.
1968: Released from prison.
May 1969: Accused of a kidnapping and assault in Schenectady and Saratoga; convicted.
1976: Paroled.
Night before Thanksgiving (year not reported): Robert Hedderman and Margaret Byron stabbed to death at a religious store.
1977: Charged in Schenectady with kidnapping and assaulting an 18-year-old woman.
1978: Convictions in Schenectady County Court, sentence of up to life (WNYT). Convicted of the Hedderman and Byron murders, two terms of 25 years to life (date not reported). Two further murder charges dismissed.
May 15, 1981: Correction officer Donna Payant disappears at Green Haven; found the next day.
By August 1981: Charged with first-degree murder; dental impressions taken; family prepares a claim against the state.
April 21, 1983: Convicted of first-degree murder.
June 10, 1983: Sentenced to death by Justice Albert Rosenblatt; moved to the Unit for Condemned Persons.
1984, about two months after a May 7 argument: New York Court of Appeals declares the mandatory death statute unconstitutional and vacates the sentence.
November 16, 1984: Second Circuit decides his conditions case; one dollar in nominal damages.
1996: His 15-year solitary term expires; he remains in solitary.
February 2024: Federal suit over solitary confinement settled before trial.
March 20, 2024: Settlement terms filed; he is at Wende Correctional Facility.
May 5, 2025: Payant's son asks for the case to be reopened.