Donna Payant Murder: Lemuel Smith, Green Haven, and Aftermath

The Donna Payant murder took place on May 15, 1981, at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York, when a 31-year-old correction officer was lured to the prison chaplain’s office and killed by inmate Lemuel Smith about one month into her career. Payant is recognized as the first female state correctional officer in the United States killed in the line of duty. Her death exposed serious dysfunction inside Green Haven and pushed New York to overhaul how it trained the officers it sent onto cellblocks.¹

Who Donna Payant Was

Payant came from a corrections family. Her father had spent 28 years with the New York State Department of Correctional Services, and her husband, Leo, worked as a correction officer at Clinton Correctional Facility.² She was a mother of three. When she was killed, she had been on the job at Green Haven for roughly a month and had completed about three weeks of training, which reflected how thin the department’s preparation had become by that point.³

How the Killing Happened

On the afternoon of May 15, 1981, Payant received a phone call from Lemuel Smith, who was impersonating another corrections employee and directing her to the Catholic chaplain’s office. Smith worked as a maintenance clerk in the chaplain’s area, so he had access to the office and knew the internal phone system.⁴ When Payant arrived, he attacked her. She was strangled, sexually assaulted, and bitten.³

Smith wrapped her body in three garbage bags and put it in a compacting trash truck. She was reported missing that same day. Tracking dogs followed her scent through the facility to the trash collection area, and the next morning her body was found at a landfill in Amenia, New York, roughly ten to twenty-five miles from the prison.⁴³

Who Lemuel Smith Was

Smith was already one of the state’s most dangerous prisoners. He had been convicted in 1978 in Schenectady County and in 1979 in Albany County as a persistent felony offender, and he was serving consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life for kidnapping, robbery, rape, and two counts of second-degree murder.⁵ The Albany murders were of a downtown religious store owner and his secretary, and they carried a combined fifty years to life. He had killed two other young women as well. In all, Smith confessed to five murders. Payant was the fifth.⁶

The Evidence Against Him

Investigators turned to Smith early because the attack looked like his earlier crimes. Dr. Michael Baden, then a deputy chief medical examiner in New York City, performed the autopsy and documented strangulation, sexual assault, and distinctive bite marks, including mutilation of Payant’s chest and abdomen.⁴

Forensic odontologist Dr. Lowell Levine compared photographs of the bite marks on Payant with dental casts previously made of Smith’s teeth. Levine concluded to a “reasonable scientific certainty” that the person who had bitten Marilee Wilson, a 1977 murder victim in a Schenectady County case for which Smith had been indicted, also bit Payant. On May 25, 1981, a court order was issued to seize Smith’s false teeth for further comparison, and that dental evidence became the spine of the prosecution’s case.⁷

Trial, Death Sentence, and Reversal

Smith was indicted under New York Penal Law § 125.27, which at the time carried a mandatory death sentence when an inmate already serving a life term killed someone in prison. The case was tried in Dutchess County Supreme Court before Justice Albert M. Rosenblatt. William Kunstler and Mark Gombiner represented Smith. The jury deliberated for four days before convicting him of first-degree murder.⁸ On June 10, 1983, Justice Rosenblatt sentenced him to death in the electric chair, with execution initially set for the week of July 10, 1983. An automatic stay took effect when his attorneys appealed.⁹

On July 2, 1984, the New York Court of Appeals struck down the death sentence. In People v. Smith, 63 N.Y.2d 41, the court held that New York’s mandatory death penalty statute was unconstitutional because it left no room for a judge or jury to weigh mitigating or aggravating circumstances. The murder conviction stood; the sentence was vacated and the case sent back to Dutchess County for resentencing.¹⁰ In February 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the state’s appeal.¹¹ Smith was resentenced to life without parole.¹²

What the Case Exposed at Green Haven

Payant’s death did not come out of nowhere. An official investigation described Green Haven in the early 1980s as a “free-for-all” in which corruption had become routine. Guards accepted cash and gifts from inmates in exchange for favors. A “let’s make a deal” culture led staff to look past security rules, driven partly by fear of triggering the kind of uprising that had happened at Attica in 1971. Experienced officers were transferring out, and their inexperienced replacements were being sent onto the floor after training periods that had been shortened to as little as two weeks.³

After the murder, the Department of Correctional Services lengthened and formalized officer training. The department eventually established its Correctional Services Training Academy, which now requires at least eight weeks of instruction covering emergency response, security procedures, legal rights, communication, and physical fitness.³ The state also enacted N.Y. Correct. Law § 650, which created a “Unit of Condemned Persons” at Green Haven to house death-row inmates under heightened security.⁵

Questions the Family Has Raised

Decades later, members of Payant’s family have questioned whether Smith was the killer. Her son Chris Payant, who was twelve when his mother died and later spent 28 years working as a prison guard himself, has publicly asked for the case to be reopened. He has said he does not believe Smith killed his mother.⁸

His theory points back to the conditions inside Green Haven. He contends that his mother was being pressured by corrupt guards to help with a drug operation in the prison and was killed to keep her quiet. He also challenges the bite mark evidence, arguing that guards knew Smith had bitten earlier victims and had access to dental impressions taken from Smith a week before the killing, which he says would have made it possible to plant the marks on his mother’s body.⁸

A separate project called “Donna Payant Uncovered,” based in Saratoga Springs, has raised other alleged discrepancies: that bloodhounds first tracked Payant’s scent to the prison’s industry area rather than to the chaplain’s office, and that the first medical examiner set the time of death at about 3:00 PM while a second, later autopsy moved it to 1:00 PM. The project reports that five guards who originally said they saw Payant in prison hallways after 2:00 PM changed their statements once the earlier time of death was adopted.¹³

Albany defense attorney Paul DerOhannesian has said “there was always a question whether someone else was involved from inside the system,” but he has also pointed to the practical obstacles to reopening the case, including the passage of time, faded memories, potentially lost evidence, and the substantial evidence supporting the original conviction. As of May 2025, no formal petition to reopen had been filed.⁸

The forensic method at the center of the conviction has also lost standing. A 2009 National Academy of Sciences report found that bite mark identification lacked meaningful scientific validation, known error rates, or reliability testing.¹⁴ A 2023 review by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that forensic bite mark analysis “lacks a sufficient scientific foundation.”¹⁵ Dr. Lowell Levine, who provided the bite mark testimony at Smith’s trial, has been linked to at least two other cases in which bite mark identifications were later overturned.¹⁶ None of that establishes Smith’s innocence, and the verdict stands.

Where Lemuel Smith Is Now

Smith is incarcerated at Wende Correctional Facility in Erie County, New York, serving life without parole. Now in his early eighties, he uses a wheelchair because of a spinal condition and has deafness, seizures, high blood pressure, and prostate cancer.¹⁷

In federal court in the Western District of New York, Smith sued state officials, arguing that his nearly four decades in various forms of solitary confinement and administrative segregation amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. State officials acknowledged that he had spent September 1996 to September 2020 in administrative segregation before being moved to involuntary protective custody and then to general population. The case settled in early 2024 before a scheduled trial. Under the settlement, Smith received $5,000, his attorneys received $5,000, and the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision admitted no wrongdoing. Smith was also to be evaluated by a physical therapist for a new wheelchair. His attorneys said they were not seeking his release.¹⁸¹⁷

Payant is listed on the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision’s roster of 43 officers who have died in the line of duty, and correction officers gather at Green Haven each year on the anniversary of her death.¹⁹³

1
Officer Down Memorial Page. Corrections Officer Donna A. Payant
2
Correctional Peace Officers Foundation. Honoring Correction Officer Donna A. Payant
3
Corrections1. 1981 Murder at Green Haven Followed Prison Dysfunction
4
The New York Times. Tooth Marks of Suspect Key in Murder of Guard
5
Justia. Smith v. Coughlin, 748 F.2d 783
6
CBS 6 Albany. Revisiting Lemuel Smith’s Notorious Murders That Shocked the Capital Region
7
Casemine. People v. Smith, Supreme Court, Dutchess County
8
CBS 6 Albany. Son of Murdered Prison Guard Wants Smith Case Reopened
9
The New York Times. Convict Is Sentenced to Death for Murder of a Prison Guard
10
vLex. People v. Smith, 63 N.Y.2d 41
11
UPI. Supreme Court Lets Stand Ruling Striking New York Death Penalty Provision
12
Times Union. Capital Region Serial Killer Wants Isolation
13
Donna Payant Uncovered. Donna Payant Uncovered
14
National Center for Biotechnology Information. Bite Mark Evidence
15
NIST. NIST IR 8352 – Bitemark Analysis
16
Innocence Project. Wrongful Bite Mark Convictions and Indictments by Forensic Dentist
17
WNYT. Serial Killer Who Sued Over Solitary Confinement to Get $5,000, New Wheelchair
18
CBS 6 Albany. Settlement Reached in Capital Region Serial Killer Lawsuit
19
NY DOCCS. Line of Duty Deaths