UPBRINGING

• Slept in his parents’ bed with his mother while his father is at work til he was 12
• recieved no mental or physical abuse
• he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 35

Lemuel smith had a criminal history since he was a teenager. 6 weeks after being released from prison, two people were found dead. in the neighborhood Smith was living in. 7 months later another body was found. Smith was aressted during the kiddnapping of another woman. March 1978 Smith confessed to 5 murders.

Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Rape - Robbery - Mutilation
Number of victims: 6
Date of murders: 1958 / 1976 - 1977 / 1981
Date of arrest: August 19, 1977
Date of birth: July 23, 1941
Method of murder: Beating / Shooting / Strangulation
Location: Albany, New York, USA
Status: Sentenced to three life terms in prison in 1977. Sentenced to death on June 10, 1983. Conmmuted to life in prison in 1984

POST INTERVIEW
"I've done some terrible things," he later told the court, "some hideous things, things I have to face everyday in the mirror."

January 21, 1958, Dorothy Waterstreet was robbed and beaten to death near Smith's neighborhood in Amsterdam, New York. Evidence pointed towards the 16-year-old Smith

On November 24, 1976, the day before Thanksgiving, Robert Hedderman, 48, and Hedderman's secretary, Margaret Byron, 59, were found brutally murdered in the back of Hedderman's religious store in Albany.

Joan Richburg, 24, was raped, murdered and mutilated in her car at Colonie Center mall in Colonie. The pattern of brutality and more hair evidence made Smith the prime suspect in that murder as well, but he remained free pending investigation.

July 22, 1977, Maralie Wilson, 30, was found strangled and mutilated near train tracks in downtown New York. The horrendous post-mortem mutilation was worse than some investigators had ever seen in the region. Smith was known to frequent the area and witnesses recalled Wilson being accosted by a large black man. police made Smith the prime suspect in her murder.

In 1981, Lemuel Smith was in the maximum-security Green Haven Correctional Facility. On May 15, 1981, Greenhaven 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. Her fellow officer returned to work at the end of the shift to pick Donna up, when she never came out, hundreds of corrections officers combed the entire prison grounds throughout the night and into the following morning. Trash dumpsters were emptied into a garbage truck, which two senior Correction Officers escorted to a dumpsite twenty miles away. When the garbage was spread out, officers finally found Payant's mutilated body.