During the following summer, while under continuing pressure from Amsterdam police, Smith relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, where he kidnapped a 25-year-old woman and beat her nearly to death.
Smith was paroled from prison in October 1976 after having served a little more than four years incarceration after having pleaded guilty to first-degree attempted rape.
The pattern of brutality and more hair evidence made Smith the prime suspect in that murder as well, but he remained free pending investigation.
With the three murder investigations stalled, on July 22, 1977, Maralie Wilson, 30, was found strangled and mutilated near train tracks in downtown Schenectady, New York.
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.
Along with his confessions, Smith revealed disturbing secrets about lifelong mental problems, including a claim that he suffered from multiple personality disorder.
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 March 9, 1978, he was sentenced to ten to twenty years in prison.
On July 21, 1978, a four-day bench trial in Schenectady ended with Smith being found guilty of kidnapping, and he was sentenced to another twenty-five years to life.
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.
Trash dumpsters were emptied into a garbage truck, which two senior correction officers escorted to a dumpsite twenty miles away.
More than 5,000 officers attended Payant's funeral and New York governor Hugh Carey officially vowed "a swift response".
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 April 21, 1983.
On July 2, 1984, however, 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, Smith spent the next twenty years of his life in near-isolation, the longest such span in the nation at the time.