Robert Keller - Dead Men Walking Volume 3: 50 American Killers Who Were Executed for Their Crimes

They say that people tend to mellow with age but that was not the case with Lois Nadean Smith. At high school, she had been known as Mean Nadean due to her generally cantankerous attitude. And she certainly hadnt lost any of that belligerence as an adult. Nadean Smith was not the kind of person you wanted to lock horns with, as one young woman would find out to her cost.

There was a time when Cindy Baillee and Nadean Smiths son, Greg, had been close. But the relationship, like so many teenage romances, had fallen apart. Cindy and Greg had gone their separate ways, and the story might well have ended there had the rumors not begun to circulate among their circle of friends. Word on the street was that Cindy was about to squeal to the Feds about Gregs drug dealing. Not only that, but there were reports that she had put out a contract on his life. On hearing these stories, Greg did what he almost always did when things got tough. He went running to momma.

Nadean was furious when Greg told her about Cindys betrayal, furious enough to consider drastic action. Cindy would pay for this, she assured her son. Shed pay with her life. So it was that, on the morning of the July 4 holiday of 1982, Nadean and Greg drove to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where Cindy was staying in a motel. Somehow, they managed to persuade her to go for a drive with them to talk things over. However, theyd traveled only a short distance when Nadean turned on Cindy and accused her of trying to have Greg killed. Cindy, of course, denied the allegations, but her denials did her no good. Nadean grabbed her by the throat and began choking her. She then produced a knife and stabbed her in the neck, twisting the blade in the wound.

Cindy was in considerable pain but not mortally wounded, the knife having somehow missed the major veins and arteries. But her ordeal had only just begun. Next, Nadean instructed Greg to drive to her ex-husbands home in Gans, Oklahoma. There, Cindy was dragged from the car and into the house. She was told to sit in a recliner. Then Nadean fetched a pistol and began taunting her with it, firing several shots that came ever closer to hitting the terrified young woman. Eventually, one of the bullets hit Cindy and she collapsed to the floor. That seemed to amuse Nadean, sending her into fits of laughter. While Greg reloaded the pistol, she jumped several times on Cindys neck. Finally, she fired four shots into the stricken womans chest and two into her head.

Cindy Baillee was dead, but her killers would not remain at large for long. Arrested for murder, Nadean offered the ludicrous defense that she had been strung out on drugs and alcohol and had not intended to kill Cindy. That excuse was swiftly blown out of the window by the medical examiners report. Cindy had suffered nine gunshot wounds of which five would have been fatal on their own. The knife wound to the neck might also have killed the victim. It was also evident that Cindys wounds had been inflicted over a prolonged period. In other words, she had been tortured, and the crime thus fit the criteria for the death penalty.

Greg Smith would ultimately escape with his life, although hed be sentenced to spend the rest of his days behind bars. For Nadean Smith, the sentence was death. In her subsequent appeals, she made much of the fact that Gregs attorney had deliberately shifted the blame to her in order to spare his life. Greg, she said, had been the prime mover behind the whole thing. Those arguments, as well as her clemency appeal, were rejected.