Lemuel Smith & the Compulsion to Kill: The Forensic Story of a Multiple Personality Serial Killer

Lemuel Smith and The Compulsion To Kill: The Forensic Story of a Multiple Personality Serial Killer by Denis Foley is a true crime shocker about one of New York’s most notorious serial killers. Rapist, thief, and killer Lemuel Smith brutally murdered five people from 1958 to 1977. Judge John Clyne imposed two consecutive life sentences and labeled him "the poster boy for capital punishment." In 1981, while serving those sentences in Green Haven Correctional Facility, he murdered prison guard Donna Payant.

Anthropologist Denis Foley’s riveting narrative reads like a novel but is one of the most detailed and well documented accounts ever published on the workings of the mind of a violent, multiple personality serial killer. Forensic psychology exposed in Smith a pathological view of women, religion, and his place in society. That pathology played itself out through the actions of Lemuel’s imagined brother "John," the monster that dwelled within his mind and, according to Smith, committed the rapes and murders.

Denis Foley is the Administrator/Coordinator of the Albany County STOP-DWI Program. He is on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology of Union College, Schenectady, New York, and a former National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Criminal Justice, Rockefeller College, The University at Albany. Relationship to item: Distributor