Arnold Smith is a magna cum laude (1963) graduate and an honor graduate of UT Medical School (1967). He did a surgical internship at UT and then did a residency in neurosurgery and special diagnostics at the Mayo Clinic. He did other residencies at the University of Mississippi and the University of Kentucky. He served as medical director of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Mississippi Baptist Medical Center in Jackson from 1974 to 1991. He then moved to Greenwood, Mississippi, and opened the North Central Mississippi Regional Cancer Center.
In April 2012 he was jailed on counts of conspiracy to commit murder and felony murder. Smith was accused of hiring Keaira Byrd to kill Lee Abraham, the attorney who had represented Smith’s ex-wife, Sara McAdory Smith in divorce proceedings in the late 1990s. When the alleged hit man broke into Abraham’s office, he was himself shot dead and his supposed accomplice was wounded.
Following his arrest, Smith was sent to the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield for a psychiatric evaluation. In 2014, Smith was ruled mentally incompetent and was ordered to return to the state mental hospital for two years. A protracted lawsuit filed by Abraham against Smith was settled out of court in 2019.