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Bleecker
Stadium
in Albany. He and four other men were randomly
placed behind five screens at one end of the stadium. At the other end
of the stadium, a police dog was given the scent of the feces-stained
clothing from the Hedderman store murders eleven months prior.
The dog crossed
the entire stadium directly to Lemuel Smith. Out
of sight of the dog, the five men were randomly
rearranged and the experiment was repeated with
the same result. It was successful a third time
as well.
On 1978-03-05, with the pressure from
the dog experiment and the bite mark match, Smith confessed to five
murders, including the murder of Dorothy Waterstreet nearly twenty years
earlier.
Insanity
defense
Along with his confessions, Smith
revealed disturbing secrets about life-long mental problems including a
claim that he suffered from multiple personality disorder. He attested
to being controlled by the spirit of his deceased brother, John Jr., who
had died from encephalitis as an infant before Lemuel was born.
One counsellor described that other
personalities besides John Jr. might exist inside Smith. They also
determined that he had suffered multiple head injuries as a child and
teenager and that he had suffered further mental abuse as a result of
overzealous religious convictions, especially from his father.
Originally, Smith's lawyers and
doctors feared he might not be fit to stand trial. When it was
determined to go ahead with the initial rape and kidnapping trials, two
doctors testified to his delusions but stopped short of saying he was
criminally insane. Smith was found guilty of rape in Saratoga County
and, on 1978-03-09 was sentenced to ten-to-twenty years in prison.
On 1978-07-21, a four-day bench trial
in Schenectady ended with Smith found guilty of kidnapping and he was
sentenced to another twenty-five years-to-life. Soon after, Lemuel Smith
unsuccessfully attempted suicide.
In Albany, Smith was indicted for the
Hedderman store double-murder. He was found guilty on 1979-02-02 and
sentenced to another fifty years-to-life.
When the bite mark evidence was
presented in the Maralie Wilson murder case, Smith was indicted for her
murder. He was also indicted for the murder of Joan Richburg after
confessing. Since there was already no chance of him ever leaving
prison, the indictments were dismissed.
Prison
murder
In 1981, Lemuel Smith was in the
maximum-security Green Haven Correctional Facility. On 1981-05-15, Green
Haven Corrections Officer Donna Payant was on duty when she received a
phone call and told her co-worker she needed to take care of a problem.
When she missed roll-call, hundreds of corrections officers combed the
entire prison grounds throughout the night and into the following
morning.
Trash dumpsters were emptied into a
truck which police escorted to a dumpsite twenty miles away. When the
garbage was spread out, officers finally found Payant's mutilated body.
It was the first time in the United
States that a female corrections officer had ever been killed inside a
prison. More than five thousand officers attended Payant's funeral and
New York governor Hugh Carey officially vowed "a swift response".
The same examiner that observed bite
marks on Maralie Wilson was coincidentally called to examine bite marks
on Payant's body. He quickly recognized the bite marks and Lemuel Smith
was charged with Payant's murder on 1981-06-01. The charge carried a
mandatory death sentence.
Big guns on
defense - to no avail
The high-profile nature of Donna
Payant's murder brought high-profile lawyers William Kunstler and C.
Vernon Mason (Mason was later a main player in the alleged Tawana
Brawley hoax). The team alleged everything from promiscuity by Payant to
guards dealing drugs inside and outside the prison. They were unable to
evade the bite mark evidence, however, and even their own expert witness
agreed that the bite marks on Payant matched those on Maralie Wilson.
The capital murder trial finally
began on 1983-01-20, more than eighteen months after Smith's arrest. The
defense impugned testimony of inmates and other corrections officers and
proposed conspiracy theories but, with no answer to the bite mark
evidence, Smith was found guilty on 1983-04-21.
Considered the only deterrant for
prisoners already serving life sentences, a New York law at the time
mandated that Smith automatically be sentenced to death. He was
sentenced on 1983-06-10. On 1984-07-02, an appeal by Smith called that
law's constitutionality into question and was successful in commuting
his death sentence to another term of life.
As punishment for the Payant murder
and due to the threat he posed even while in prison, Lemuel Smith spent
the next twenty years of his life in near-isolation, the longest such
span in the nation at the time.
References
Denis Foley.
Lemuel Smith and the Compulsion to Kill: The Forensic Story of a
Multiple Personality Serial Killer. New Lietrim House Publishing,
LLC, 2003-10-01. ISBN 0972238301
Wikipedia.org
Tooth marks of suspect key in murder of guard
By Selwyn Raab - The New York Times
August 13, 1981
A prisoner's teeth may be a vital factor in
whether he is indicted for murder in the death of a prison guard and
whether he is the first person in four years to face the death penalty
in New York State.
A Dutchess County grand jury in Poughkeepsie
began hearing evidence yesterday on a charge by the state police that
the prisoner, Lemuel Smith, strangled and sexually molested a prison
guard, Donna Payant, last May at the Green Haven State Correctional
Facility.
If Mr. Smith were indicted and convicted of
first-degree murder, he would face a mandatory death penalty. State law
requires such a penalty for anyone who commits a homicide while serving
a life sentence in prison.
This provision is the only part of the
state's capital-punishment statute that has never been tested in the
courts or declared unconstitutional.
2 Provisions Thrown Out
In 1977, the Court of Appeals, the state's
highest, threw out the two other key provisions, which mandated the
death penalty for the intentional killing of a police officer or a
prison employee. But in that ruling, the court did not address the
provision applying to prisoners serving life sentences.
A major piece of evidence in the murder of
Mrs. Payant - the first female prison guard in the state to be killed on
duty - are tooth marks found on her chest. A forensic dentist, Dr.
Lowell J. Levine, of Huntington Station, L.I., said the marks matched
impressions of Mr. Smith's teeth.
''In certain cases, teeth marks can be as
good as fingerprints,'' Dr. Levine said in an interview. Mrs. Payant,
who was 31 years old and the mother of three, had been a correction
officer for one month. She disappeared last May 15 at the maximum-security
prison in Stormville, about 40 miles north of New York City. Her
mutilated body, wrapped in a plastic bag, was found the next day in a
landfill dump in Amenia, N.Y., 10 miles from the prison.
Not Guilty Plea
Entered
Mr. Smith, who is 40 years old, pleaded not
guilty at his arraignment on June 6. His chief counsel, C. Vernon Mason,
asserted that Mr. Smith, who is black, was framed because of his
criminal record and said that he might be a ''victim of racial prejudice.''
The lawyer, in an interview, also accused
the state police and the Dutchess County District Attorney's office of
ignoring evidence that he said implicated a correction officer in the
slaying.
Officers in the State Police Bureau of
Criminal Investigation said Mr. Smith became a suspect largely because
of forensic evidence and similarities between the murder of Mrs. Payant
and other crimes for which Mr. Smith had been indicted or convicted.
Mr. Smith was serving two terms of 25 years
to life for two murders in Albany in 1976. He also had been indicted for
the strangulation of two women and the rape and kidnapping of another
woman in the Albany area between 1976 and 1978.
Other Charges Dropped
After he was convicted in 1979 of the double
murder in Albany and sentenced to a minimum of 50 years in prison, the
other homicide charges were dropped.
At the Green Haven prison, Mr. Smith was a
clerk in the Roman Catholic chaplain's office. Investigators said they
believed that Mr. Smith, pretending to be a correction officer, called
Mrs. Payant on the prison telephone and asked her to go to the
chaplain's office.
After the murder, according to the
investigators, Mr. Smith placed Mrs. Payant's body in a large trash
container inside the prison, and the receptacle was later taken to the
dump.
The tooth marks on Mrs. Payant and the
manner in which she was sexually abused and bound were noticed by Dr.
Michael M. Baden, a deputy chief medical examiner in New York City, in
an autopsy review.
Evidence Called Similar
Lieut. Thomas R. Neilen of the state police
said Dr. Baden indicated that some of the evidence was similar to that
in the 1977 slaying in Schenectady of Maralie Wilson, 30 - a case in
which Dr. Baden was used as a forensic expert and Mr. Smith was indicted.
Dr. Levine, the dentist who had identified
Mr. Smith's teeth from a cast made in 1978 as the same as those that had
caused the bite marks on Miss Wilson, was called into the Payant case.
After examining photographs of the bite marks on Mrs. Payant, he said
they appeared to be the same as the marks found on Miss Wilson and
matched a cast of Mr. Smith's teeth.
Mr. Smith's lawyer, Mr. Mason, questioned
the use of photographs to compare the bite marks. But Dr. Levine, who
said he had testified as a forensic dentist in more than 200 cases,
maintained this was the usual procedure.
Mr. Mason, who is general counsel to the
National Conference of Black Lawyers, has urged that the witnesses who
he said had implicated a correction officer in the slaying be called
before the grand jury. ''Justice demands it,'' he said.