Blind Justice

By Wayne Beyea

Drawing on his background as a police officer, the author examines true criminal cases where legal loopholes contributed to the issuance of no sentence, or lenient sentences. In the author’s opinion, these represent cases where justice was not served.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: May 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662924934

Book preview

1. An Argument in

Favor of the Death Penalty

Politicians are often heard to proclaim that the death penalty does nothing to deter crime and does not save any lives. I beg to differ with them and the true crime story you are about to read proves them wrong.

The married, young (31 years old) mother of three children would most likely still be alive and enjoying her grandchildren today if a convicted killer had received the death penalty, which was his original sentence.

Despite having a death penalty on and off the books for several years, New York State has not executed anyone since 1963. In 2004, the New York state legislature decided that the death penalty was unconstitutional. How incredible that what was constitutional from 1776 to 2004 suddenly became unconstitutional! I guess we are supposed to believe that the legal scholars during the previous 228 years did not understand, nor did they appreciate the United States Constitution.

The petite nine-year-old left school on a warm and sunny fall day. It had been a fun day at school and, as she walked and skipped along toward home, she likely reflected on the events of the day and how happy her mother would be to learn she had received an A on her math test. She was unaware that an older boy had been following her since she left school. Suddenly, and without warning, she was grabbed from behind and strong arms pulled her into bushes that bordered the sidewalk. Only one scream escaped her as her assailant’s hand clasped her by the neck and commenced choking her. Though only nine, she was a strong-willed fighter and she kicked at her assailant vigorously. One of her kicks connected with the vulnerable spot between her assailant’s legs. The pain resulting from that kick caused him to release her. Once free, she ran as fast as she could toward the safety of home, just one block away. She dashed into her home and threw herself into the waiting arms of her mother. Safely ensconced in her mother’s arms, she began to pour out the details of her harrowing experience; her little body trembling as she described the evil she had encountered.¹

Her mother called the Amsterdam (NY) police to report the assault upon her daughter. However, the only description the girl could provide of her assailant was that he was a Black boy, quite large in size. Her assailant was not apprehended. How fortunate the feisty, brave little girl was to have escaped the clutches of a Disciple of Satan, who was on the path to become a serial rapist-killer!²

Four years after the attack on the nine-year-old girl, a young woman named Dorothy Waterstreet was robbed and beaten to death in the same area of Amsterdam, New York. The police investigation quickly developed a suspect. That suspect was 16-year-old Lemuel Warren Smith. However, a lack of evidence and inability to gain a confession from the 16-year-old resulted in the robbery/murder going unsolved.³

Frustrated by their inability to charge Smith with Waterstreet’s murder, Amsterdam police followed Smith routinely, looking for any sort of criminal conduct that would permit them to arrest Smith. Desiring to escape police harassment, Lemuel Smith left Amsterdam and settled in Baltimore, Maryland. Shortly after moving to Baltimore, Smith took a 25-year-old woman prisoner and beat her unmercifully. Fortunately, a witness interrupted the beating, thereby saving the woman’s life. Smith was quickly arrested, and on April 12, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.⁴

After completion of about ten years of his sentence, Smith was paroled in May 1968 and moved back to the capital district of New York.

On May 20, 1969, Smith kidnapped and sexually assaulted a woman who managed to escape. Later the same day, he kidnapped and raped a 46-year-old friend of his mother. The woman convinced Smith to let her go. Smith was arrested for these crimes and eventually was sentenced to 4-15 years in prison.

Smith then became the beneficiary of a law passed by the liberal NYS government which made him a free man on October 5, 1976.

On November 24, 1976, only one month after Smith was released from prison, Robert Hedderman, age 48, and Hedderman’s secretary, Margaret Byron, age 59, were brutally murdered in the back of Hedderman’s religious goods store in Albany, New York. Human feces, hair, and blood evidence were found at the crime scene. Criminologists had reported that when the perpetrator of a crime defecates at the scene of his crime, he is leaving his mark, or a trophy of sorts. This evidence quickly led to Lemuel Smith as suspect in the killings; however, for unknown reasons, Smith was not immediately arrested.⁵

On December 23, 1976, Joan Richburg, age 24, was enjoying a day of shopping at Colonie Center Mall, a large and popular shopping center located in the Albany suburb of Colonie. While placing her purchases in her vehicle that was parked in the sprawling mall parking lot, she was grabbed from behind and forcibly pushed into her car. Her assailant’s strong hand gripped her neck and stifled her ability to scream for help. After being forced into the backseat of her vehicle, she was raped, murdered, and mutilated. When police investigated the brutal, sadistic murder, the pattern of brutality and hair evidence identified Smith as the prime suspect, but once again, incredibly, and for unknown reasons, he remained free, pending investigation.⁶

On January 10, 1977, a large Black man tried to lure a 22-year-old woman out of a gift shop in Albany, New York. When she resisted, the man took the woman’s 60-year-old grandmother hostage and threatened to kill her. The women’s screams attracted attention. When help arrived, the man knocked the grandmother unconscious, threw her down and deliberately stepped on her hand, breaking it. The perpetrator escaped and the crime went unsolved. Years later, the younger woman victim saw a picture of Lemuel Smith in the newspaper and identified him as her attacker.⁷

Incredulously and for unknown reasons, despite evidence linking Lemuel Smith to these crimes and three murders, Smith was not arrested, and the crimes went unsolved.

On July 22, 1977, the body of Maralie Wilson, age 30, was found near railroad tracks in downtown Schenectady, New York. Investigation revealed Wilson had been strangled and her body mutilated. A hardened veteran police investigator who investigated Wilson’s murder, described the crime scene as an absolutely horrible scene of brutality. It was decided that the perpetrator got some sort of morbid satisfaction out of raping and brutalizing women. Police soon learned that Lemuel Smith was known to frequent the area and they found witnesses who recalled Wilson being accosted by a large Black man. Smith quickly became the prime suspect in Wilson’s murder.⁸

Note: DNA testing and analysis did not become a crime investigation tool until 1986. DNA was discovered by Professor Jefferies in England and used to solve two crimes, one a rape and the other a murder. DNA was introduced in the U. S. and first became admissible as evidence in 1988. Since that time, DNA has become one of the most valuable means of identifying criminal perpetrators and convicting them.

On August 19, 1977, Marianne Maggio, age 18, who worked in the same area as Maralie Wilson, was kidnapped and raped by Lemuel Smith. After sexually assaulting Maggio, he forced her to drive towards Albany. Maggio drove recklessly, trying to attract attention of the police and succeeded. Police stopped the car and arrested Smith without incident. Following Smith’s arrest, a police investigator looking at photographs of Maralie Wilson noticed a bite mark on Wilson’s nose. This finding led to Wilson’s body being exhumed for examination of the bite mark. Dr. Lowell Levine, DDS, renowned for his work in the identification of bite marks, obtained a bite impression of Lemuel Smith, and it was compared to the bite mark on Wilson’s nose. The bite was positively matched to Lemuel Smith.⁹

While waiting for analysis of the bite mark, Lemuel Smith was picked up by police and taken to Bleecker Stadium in Albany. He and four other men were randomly placed behind a fine screen 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 murders which had occurred eleven months earlier. The dog crossed the entire stadium and went directly to Lemuel Smith. The dog was then returned to the opposite end of the stadium and the five men rearranged in different positions behind the screen. The dog again smelled the feces-stained clothing and then went directly to Lemuel Smith at the other end of the stadium.¹⁰

On March 5, 1978, confronted with a multitude of evidence against him, Smith confessed to five murders, including the murder of Dorothy Waterstreet, which had gone unsolved for 20 years.

Lemuel W. Smith¹¹

Smith was assigned counsel and after his lawyers analyzed the multitude of evidence against their client, they decided that using insanity as a defense was their best defense option. They portrayed Smith as suffering from lifelong mental illness, including the claim that their client suffered from multiple personality disorder. Smith claimed he was controlled by the spirit of his deceased brother John, Jr., who had died from encephalitis as an infant before Lemuel was born. The defense team introduced evidence of head injuries Smith had suffered and mental abuse from his father concerning overzealous religious beliefs. At his trial, doctors testified as to Smith’s mental state, but would not attest that he was criminally insane. Smith was found guilty of rape in Saratoga County and was sentenced on March 9, 1978, to serve 10–20 years in prison.¹²

Following conviction in Saratoga County, Smith was put on trial in Schenectady County, and convicted of kidnapping. On this conviction, he was sentenced to serve 25 years to life in prison.¹³

Smith had also been indicted in Albany County for the double murders in the Hedderman store. At the conclusion of trial in Albany County court, Smith was found guilty on February 2, 1979, and a life in prison sentence was added to his first life sentence.¹⁴

As for the murder of Maralie Wilson and the other murders Smith had confessed to and was indicted for, those crimes never proceeded to trial. Prosecutors felt that as Smith had already been sentenced to serve two life sentences in prison, it would be a waste of money to prosecute him again with the only possible sentence being another life sentence tacked onto his other life sentences.¹⁵

Note: In a perverse sense of justice, in 1963, New York—the first state to utilize the electric chair as a means of execution and which had recorded 1,608 executions—decided to cease using capital punishment as a sentence in capital crimes. Eddie Mays would be the last person electrocuted at Sing Sing prison in 1963. New York’s justice system suddenly decided that the appeals process for defendants given death sentences was too costly and lengthy a process. Although capital punishment remained a viable sentence for capital crimes, no executions occurred in New York State after 1963. In 1995, a new death penalty statute, which provided for execution by lethal injection, was signed into law by Governor George Pataki. However, in 2004, the state’s highest court ruled in People v. LaValle that the state’s death penalty statute violated the state Constitution; thereby creating a moratorium on capital punishment.¹⁶

From the author’s perspective:

How the state’s highest court came to this conclusion is a mystery and a conundrum, as, by their decision, apparently 1,608 people had been wrongly put to death prior to the esteemed legal minds sitting on the state’s highest court in 2004, who decided that all their predecessors were bumbling fools.

Following the ruling by the court, New York’s governor, David Patterson, by executive order, disestablished death row in New York’s prison system.¹⁷

In 1979, serial rapist/murderer Lemuel Smith began serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in New York’s prison system. Smith was now out of sight, out of mind, and society no longer had anything to fear from him. However, all the brilliant legal minds, smug in their belief that justice had been served, would soon be proven to be fools.¹⁸

Note: A major argument constantly heard opposing capital punishment is that the convicted facing the death penalty will be able to file appeal after appeal, resulting in a very lengthy and costly process. The truth is those convicted and given a life sentence without parole are still able to file appeal after appeal. As time passes and appeals are ongoing, the victims die, or, if alive, no longer desire to participate in prosecution because they grow tired of being harassed by the legal team of the same animal who violated them. The police investigators who investigated the crimes have retired or may have died. The prosecution in the county where the defendant was convicted has changed and the new District Attorney is reluctant to spend the money and resources required to keep the convicted life-serving defendant in jail—unless the convicted criminal’s crimes were of a high-profile nature and release from prison would result in public outcry. In some cases, the evidence and testimony that convicted the defendant are no longer available. A sentence of life without parole satisfies a large segment of society, opposed to the death penalty and convinced that justice has been served. However, in some cases, justice is hardly served because the killer/rapist, etc. wins appeal and is released from prison, or continues a life of crime while in prison.

At a young age, Donna Collins aspired to follow in the footsteps of her father and become a New York State Correction Officer. She greatly admired her dad and thought he looked quite handsome in his corrections officer uniform. She also enjoyed hearing her father relate details of many unusual experiences while supervising men in an environment of forced confinement. As a young woman, Donna fell in love with a young, handsome corrections officer, and they soon married. Three children resulted from their marriage.¹⁹

Marriage and children did not deter Donna from trying to achieve her dream of becoming a corrections officer. In 1980, Donna passed the examination and requirements to achieve her dream and entered the New York State Correction Officer Training Academy. Upon graduation, she was assigned duty at the Greenhaven Correctional Facility, located near Fishkill, New York. Her specific assigned duties involved escorting prisoners from a cell block to the dining hall and, when they were finished eating, to escort them back to their cells. At the close of her work shift, after only a month into her corrections officer career, Donna was missing. A search of the prison by her coworkers failed to locate her and foul play was suspected. The prison was locked down (all prisoners required to remain in their cells) and the warden called the state police to request an investigation.²⁰

Another search of Dannemora Prison by police and corrections officers, aided by a state police bloodhound, failed to locate Donna Payant. State Police investigators commenced investigation to identify exactly where every prisoner in the Payant-supervised cellblock was throughout the day. They soon learned that lifer Lemuel Smith was working in the prison chaplain’s office and had very little supervision