(Updated Release: Solved 11/2025) Valid Concerns For Her Safety: The Unsolved Murder of Judy Lord

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
A young woman is living in a small, conquered New
Hampshire apartment with her husband.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
And their little boy.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Their marriage is rocky, and he comes and goes, often,
leaving Judy alone with their toddler. During those stretches, she
was said to have been uneasy and fearful, convinced someone
might break in. Neighbors didn't quite understand her worry until
one summer day in nineteen seventy five, Judy was found
dead inside her apartment. In the decades since, investigators have

(00:41):
looked closely at several suspects, some of whom have since
passed away. Yet, nearly fifty years later, hope remains that
modern technology might finally reveal the truth about who killed Judy.
I'm your host, Megan and each week on a Simpler
Time True Crime, I cover older unsolved cases and challenge

(01:02):
the idea that a simpler time means a safer time.
This week, I'm bringing to you the updated, now solved
murder of Judy Lord. Before we get started, I wanted

(01:33):
to tell you about a podcast collaborative I'm participating in.
The podcast is called You Should Be Here, and this
season is titled The Cases That Haunt Us. There are
so many amazing victim centered, ethical true crime podcasts participating
in this and each podcaster is donating two episodes. Every

(01:54):
penny raised from this project goes directly to a nonprofit
organization working to help victims and victims' families. So go
subscribe to you should be here and feel free to
catch up on all the previous three seasons while you
await the drop of season four. Can't wait to have
you join me over there, and now time for the episode.

(02:16):
As a fair warning, this episode is a little shorter
because there is less out there available on this case
that happened. Sometimes in the older cold cases, I cover
and whenever possible. I don't want that to limit covering
the case altogether, because Judy's case still matters and she
still has family out there who have waited half a

(02:36):
century for answers. It was around noon on Tuesday May twentieth,
nineteen seventy five, when property manager Joseph McVeigh reached Building nineteen,
Apartment four at the Conquered and Royal Gardens apartment Complex.
The subsidized housing complex had a weekly rent collection and

(02:57):
he was at the door of twenty two year old
Judy Lord Joseph knocked and waited, but nobody answered. Thinking
maybe someone just didn't hear him, he knocked again. As
he listened closely, he could hear the sound of a
child crying. Concerned, he went back to his office to

(03:18):
retrieve the spare key to the apartment. As he entered,
there was nothing noteworthy reported on the first floor, but
he could definitely hear the crying child. As he went
to the second floor, he stumbled into a gruesome scene.
There on the floor of the second story bedroom was
the body of a woman. She was nude and had

(03:40):
plastic over her head. Thankfully, in the room next door,
her seventeen month old son, Gregory Junior, was unharmed. McVeigh
rushed out of the unit and.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Called for police.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
The scene was cordoned off, but that didn't stop neighbors
from gathering and discussing what could possibly happened. Early newspaper
articles show photos of neighbors gathered on their patios watching
as the body was taken away for an autopsy. The victim, indeed,
was twenty two.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Year old Judy Lord.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Judy had moved into the two bedroom apartment with her husband,
Gregory Lord Senior, just a couple of months prior. Judy
was born in Maine to Maurice and Nellie Arnold, and
she had a huge family. She had four brothers and
nine sisters. At a point, they relocated to New Hampshire

(04:36):
and she lived in a town just south of Concord.
She attended the Pembroke Academy for high school, but ended
up dropping out before finishing. I couldn't find out how
she met her future husband, Gregory, but she was a
bit older than him, nearly three years his senior. When
he was seventeen years old, he joined the military and
he and Judy got married. He was stationed over in Germany,

(05:00):
and Judy spent some time behind in New Hampshire before
joining him there to live on base. Judy gave birth
to their child, Gregory Junior, in nineteen seventy three in Germany.
The couple then moved back to the US in nineteen
seventy five, and Judy and Gregory Senior settled into the
apartment around February or March of seventy five. Neighbors were

(05:24):
quick to pick up on the couple's marital issues. Greg
was nineteen years old at this point and Judy had
turned twenty two. Judy frequently would talk about how she
loved her husband but found him immature, and the two
argued constantly. These spats came to a head in early
May of nineteen seventy five, just a few weeks before

(05:47):
her murder, Judy and Gregory had a serious argument and
Gregory left or Judy kicked him out, we don't really
know for sure. Gregory's grandmother lived across the way in
another building in the same apartment complex, and so he
went and lived with her. In doing so, he took
most of the couple's belongings in furniture, leaving his wife

(06:10):
and young son in what was described as a very
sparsely furnished apartment. Gregory earned his income working at a
local hospital. Judy worked as an aide at mccurley's nursing home.
From what I could tell, Judy seemed to like her
job and spoke with her coworkers about a lot of
what was going on with her life, because they are

(06:32):
the people who piece together information for police interviews. But
according to reporting in The Conquered Monitor, she left her
job about a week before her murder so that she
would be eligible for support through aid to families with
dependent children, because she was finding it difficult to find
a babysitter for Gregory Junior, and even when she could,

(06:55):
she couldn't afford it. According to neighbors, they thought that
Gregory may have kind of moved back in about a
week or so before the murder, but then he was
back out again. Another interesting observation that they had was
that Judy had what they described as a high level
of fear of burglars. It seemed to coincide more with

(07:18):
when she was there alone with Gregory Junior and after
her husband moved out. She would ask neighbors if they
could come with her to check her apartment to ensure
it was clear with nobody inside lying in wait. The
neighbors would always agree to do this for her, but
they did find it a little odd and a little
over the top. Without any further context.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Being that this case is fifty.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
Years old, it's hard to know for sure what she
said to neighbors if she did give them context or
say what she was worried about. Was her husband violent,
had she experienced a burglary before, or had someone threaten her.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
This is something police.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
May know from conducting interviews, but we don't. Now that
we've established a bit more about Judy in her life
circumstances leading up to the murder, let's get into the
crime itself.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
In the investigation, Judy's.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
Movements on the evening prior to her murder went something
like this. There was a common area in the complex
where residents had set up a volleyball net. Judy had
been at this playing volleyball with people who lived at
conquered In Royal Gardens until about ten thirty pm on
Monday the nineteenth. It doesn't say if her son was

(08:41):
with her or if she had left him at the
apartment sleeping.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
That's unclear. What we do know is that after.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
She wrapped up the volleyball game, she sat outside on
the patio of a neighbor and they had a soda
before heading back to her apartment for the night. And
to be clear, I mean she went back to her
apartment alone. Neighbors reported hearing screams at around one thirty am,
with one saying they heard a voice that sounded like

(09:08):
Judy saying leave me alone. One neighbor thought that the
sound was coming from outside of the apartment, and one
neighbor thought it was coming from the inside. When asked
why they didn't call police or check on Judy, one
neighbor said to the Conquered Monitor, quote, in a normal neighborhood,
you'd be concerned if you heard a scream like that,

(09:29):
but up here it's nothing.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
End quote.

Speaker 1 (09:33):
I dug in to learn a bit more about the neighborhood,
and what I found out was that it was pretty
prone to drugs and crime. The town homes were built
to be subsidized low income housing, and they were built
about five years before Judy's murderer. A later article from
the early two thousands that talked about a new property
owner coming in and revamping the whole place and cracking

(09:55):
down on crime, discussed how the neighborhood had.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Been before that.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
In the years after Judy's murder, a sixteen year old
boy shot and killed fourteen year old Greg Pope. Break
ins were somewhat common, with residents saying they were going
to arm themselves or sleep with a bat under their bed.
Distribution of drugs was so blatant that it took place
right in the parking lots in broad daylight, but those

(10:20):
selling drugs also took over the resident laundry areas. On
site as a home base, and people were too scared
to go do their laundry, so they would leave the
property and go to a laundromat. The playgrounds were covered
in graffiti and poorly maintained.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
You get the picture.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Unfortunately, this is the reality of where people have to
live when they're having trouble making ends meet, particularly single
moms at a time like this. With Judy, it's still
the same now, but in the seventies, her options were
going to be limited, as well as her ability to
earn income at a time where women were still getting
more of a footing in the workplace and divorce still

(10:58):
had a lot of taboo. And of course any place
that has low income housing is filled with people who
are amazing. They make up the majority of the tenants.
It's just that with people struggling to get by, it
does breed the environment of desperation, which we know can
fuel crime. Judy's autopsy revealed that she had been strangled

(11:21):
and then suffocated. Early reports referred to it as a
plastic bag, but later on a spokesperson for the police
department named Bruce Russell would say that she had been
wearing a quote plastic type garment that the killer had
pulled over her head. Either way, that's just an awful
way to die. Police were able to collect a great

(11:44):
deal of physical evidence from the crime scene, so much
so that I'm confident in saying that if this crime
took place in twenty twenty five versus nineteen seventy five,
it would be solved almost immediately. Gregory Junior was sent
to his great grandparents' apartment where his father was staying.

(12:04):
Crime scene technicians spent two full days in the apartment
collecting evidence, taking photographs and dusting for fingerprints. They noted
that there were no signs of forced entry into the apartment,
but there were signs of a struggle.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Judy had fought back during the attack.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Some of the physical evidence included fingerprints on a window,
bloodstains on a pillow, and hair on the bedsheet. Police
sent the hair off to the FBI to be analyzed. Again,
this was going to be very limited. In the mid
nineteen seventies, they could do microscopic hair comparison. The routine
method then was to examine hairs under a comparison microscopes

(12:45):
and look for matching characteristics such as color, length, scale, pattern, tip,
and shaft damage, and by the late seventies this was
used as a strong association tool, but according to the
Innocent Project, it really had a lot of risk of
failure and a lot of people were sent to prison

(13:06):
with using this technique, going to trial with it doing
the hair comparison, and then later finding out that you know,
they had the wrong person all along. In addition to
doing the hair comparison, they could also do class level
conclusions such as saying is it a human hair versus
an animal hair, is it a pubic hair versus a

(13:27):
body hair roughly pigmented or if it was dyed, and
if it was consistent with a suspect's hair. But it
couldn't uniquely identify one person, and it was said that
in the era before DNA examiners sometimes overstated their certainty,
which is how we got these wrongful convictions. By mid

(13:50):
seventy five, investigators told the press that they had three
suspects who all lived at the complex at the time,
and that none of them would give samples that they
were requesting, which was hair, saliva and seamen. It's unclear
if Gregory Lord's senior was included in this, because remember
even though he moved out, he was still living in

(14:10):
the complex with his grandmother. All I could find was
that Gregory was interviewed in his wife's murder. He wouldn't
speak to the media on the advice of his attorney,
and that was kind of that. He retrieved more of
his belongings from the apartment when the crime scene was
cleared a few days after the murder, and that's mostly
the last we hear of him. But going back to

(14:34):
the bodily samples, nineteen seventy five was an interesting time
for this ask because recent federal court hearings had forbidden
body samples to be taken without consent from the suspect
until an indictment had been returned.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
They need to have.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Probable cause, was aligned with the constitutional right against self incrimination.
Investigators on Judy Lord's case pushed this through the court
system because they felt that this was going to be
the key to solving Judy's case. In the time it
took to do this, one of the three suspects came
forward and offered their bodily samples as well as a

(15:12):
polygraph test, which they passed.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
That suspect was.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
Eliminated, and then the FBI analysis of the hair came back,
and investigators said that their findings automatically eliminated another one
of the suspects, leaving just one A little later. We'll
find out why that is, but in real time it
wasn't known to the public why the second suspect was

(15:38):
ruled out. In November of nineteen seventy five, the request
for investigators and conquered to be able to legally obtain
bodily samples from their one suspect, referred to in court
documents as John Doe, reached the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
Investigators argued that the request was reasonable because the samples

(16:00):
already had general physical characteristics that matched their suspect. The
lawyer for the suspect argued that while that may be true,
the hair characteristic could appear the same as a lot
of people's and that as a standalone that shouldn't be enough.
In the end, the New Hampshire Supreme Court quietly sided

(16:20):
with the investigators, and within hours of that ruling, John
Doe was taken to the hospital for a sample. It
was at this time that investigators did finally confirm that
Judy Lord had been sexually assaulted. A source close to
the investigation told the papers at the time that an
arrest was imminent. But here I am fifty years later,

(16:43):
still telling you about this unsolved case, so that obviously
didn't happen. After this stir, the case went quiet. Her
case was briefly mentioned in the local paper in the
spring of seventy six to basically update that there were
no updates, and that's really how it went. For decades,

(17:03):
Judy's case would be listed amongst other crimes occurring in
the area at the time. In nineteen eighty five, there
was an article that ran that talked about thirty eight
unsolved New Hampshire murders over twenty years, and Judy's case
was highlighted in that. In August of eighty nine, there
was another article specific to Merrimock County, New Hampshire, that

(17:25):
talked about their nine unsolved murders from the preceding twenty years.
And that's the thing. New Hampshire, for being the small
state that it was, in all of its quiet New
England charm, it had a lot of unsolved murders around
the time of Judies. Some are still insolved to this day.
Just a few years after Judy's murder, took place.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
The Connecticut River Valley.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
Murderer began his reign of terror. Within a year of
Judy's murder, an elderly woman named Madeline Kraus was strangled
to death in her home in Nashua. And besides murders,
there were tons of missing persons cases, but none of
them really bore a ton of similarities to Judy's murder.
In the nineteen eighty nine article that gave updates on

(18:12):
unsolved cases, there was some information shared by Bruce Russell,
the former director of investigations for Conquered Police. He said
that in their analysis of the collections from the suspect,
they matched his fingerprint to something found at the crime scene,
and that the fingerprint was found on an unlocked window

(18:33):
that was located in a way that appeared that the
person slid the window open and then used it to
gain entry. Russell said that at the time it just
wasn't enough to arrest the man because they said it
would have taken a lot more than that and it
would have been a much bigger home run had they
found the fingerprint inside the apartment. In two thousand and five,

(19:06):
Judy Lord's cousin, Bonnie cote urged police to reopen the
investigation and see if any evidence could be retested with
the advancements of DNA testing, and as a result, they
did reevaluate the evidence, and finally, in two thousand and five,
they named their prime suspect, previously referred to only as

(19:27):
John Doe. The man's name was Ernest Stanberry. He was
a neighbor of Judy Lords at the time. His fingerprint
matched the one found on the window. Ernest was also
a black man, and the hair was said.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
To have belonged to an African American man.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
As such, we can assume that as they were ruling
out those three suspects, the other two must have been
white men. According to an article in The Conquered Monitor,
investigators said that he had entered Judy's apartment approximately only
ten days before her murder at two am and told
her that he wanted to see her nude. Judy had

(20:07):
reported this incident to her coworkers, and it was their
impression that she was very afraid of him. I wonder
if Ernest is the reason why she was always asking
neighbors to clear her apartment before she'd go in. If
Ernest is Judy's killer, he can't be tried. According to investigators,
he was murdered in California in nineteen eighty seven, the

(20:30):
victim of a stabbing. Interestingly enough, I couldn't find any
record of this stabbing anywhere, and some sources even imply
that some believe Ernest Stanbury was an alias. Let's say
Ernest was the killer. I now just have more questions
than answers with DNA advancements. Why haven't they been able

(20:52):
to conclusively tie the case to him? Have they destroyed
all physical evidence or were samples used up?

Speaker 2 (21:00):
With Judy having such a.

Speaker 1 (21:01):
Fear of him, how did he make entry into her
apartment that first time ten days before? And then if
Judy was so security conscious, how was her window left unlocked?
To be clear, I am not coming from a place
of victim blaming whatsoever, Simply curiosity with how this behavior
doesn't align with some of her other safety behavior in

(21:24):
protocols she was taking, and what caused him to leave
in that prior incident after breaking into her apartment and
propositioning her. In that two thousand and five article, police shared.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
They had multiple.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
Suspects, but Stanbury was the only one they named publicly,
So was it Stanbury? Was he obsessed with her in
stalking her? Did his infatuation cause him to enter that
apartment through an unlocked window that night and this time
finish up what he intended to do ten days prior.

(21:58):
Was it a crime of passion and someone with a
romantic connection to her? Did someone see her playing volleyball
maybe with men that night, or perhaps her soda was
sitting there with a male neighbor. They never did specify
and did that make the killer jealous? The DNA may
end up revealing who it was, but I'm not sure

(22:20):
we will ever find out why. Gregory Lord Sr. Died
of cancer in twenty nineteen.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
His son, Gregory Junior.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
Was not listed in his obituary. He had remarried and
had another family, and it's unclear what happened to Judy's
son after her murder. This year marked the fifty year
anniversary of Judy's homicide, and though her family has stayed
mostly private over the years, we know she came from
a huge family and the way they grieve does not

(22:52):
mean they wish for answers any less than those who
are more public with their appeals. My hope is that
in sharing this case, there is renewed public interest in
that somebody comes forward with information that could lead detectives
in an investigative direction, either forensically or otherwise.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
And now for an update.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
When I originally recorded this episode, I ended with contact
information to report tips to the Conquered Police Department. Instead,
today I am updating the end of this episode with
a huge break in the case. On Monday November twenty fourth,
twenty twenty five, the Conquered Police Department held a press

(23:43):
conference to announce an update in the fifty year old
cold case of Judy Lord. Advanced forensics had led police
to her killer, Ernest Gable. This Earnest is the same
person you heard me refer to as Ernest dan Berry earlier.
Stanbury was an alias he went by after the murder

(24:05):
of Judy. As it turns out that hair analysis that
excluded him, while it did so when it shouldn't have.
Oftentimes I discuss how some of these older techniques that
haven't scientifically held up over time, how they have landed
innocent people in jail. In this case, it wrongfully excluded
the prime suspect. Now that the case was wrapping up

(24:29):
and the suspect was identified, police were able to release
more information to the public, and they did so via
that news conference as well as reporting in the Conquered Monitor.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
We learned that it's.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
True Judy had gone to play volleyball with friends that
night in the complex. But also remember how I said
that she hung out and had drinks with a couple
of her neighbors while the person hosting that get together
in the drinks that was actually Ernest's wife, Linda, gathering
with a couple of other neighbors that was in Ernest
in Linda's apartment, but Ernest wasn't there at the time when.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Judy was found.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
The curtain rod had been broken and ripped out of
the wall, and the clock as well, with the time
stuck at one forty seven am, which is just a
short time after. Neighbors reported hearing screams and muffled cries
saying things like get away from me and leave me alone.
According to reporting the Conquered Monitor, Cold case investigator R.

(25:32):
Christopher Knowles told the paper that even just the day
prior to her murder, Judy Lord had told friends and
those closest to her that she was afraid of Ernest
and afraid that he would hurt her. When Judy had
gotten home that night, she did indeed have another neighbor
do a walk through of the home and check on
it for her. Like I had told you about earlier

(25:53):
in this episode. What I did not know was that
part of her worry was that she had accidentally left
her door unlocked, and she was concerned that Ernest was
in her apartment hiding. This neighbor gave the all clear,
But it's hard to say for certain that Ernest wasn't
in their hiding and someplace where the neighbor just didn't look,

(26:13):
you know. You imagine they might have looked in all
the rooms, behind the shower curtain in the closet, but
I mean, for all we know, he could have been
hiding somewhere like under her bed, or possibly he went
into the unit unlocked things like windows for later. And
because we don't know the thoroughness of the walkthrough of
the friend, it doesn't really close that all out. But

(26:33):
in the end, you'll remember that Ernest's fingerprints were found
on her window, so it's likely that he wasn't in
there when she got home, and that he came back
through that window later. I've already been through the faulty
hair analysis earlier in this episode, but the other forensic
evidence they had with semen found on towels. By the way,

(26:54):
the evidence collection at the time in nineteen seventy five
was considered cutting edge in what they did, decided to preserve,
and how they stored it, and modern DNA testing was
able to link Ernest to Judy's case in a way
that was statistically highly probable. Conquered Police stated that if

(27:14):
Ernest were alive today, he would absolutely be brought up
on first degree murder charges no hesitation, so they have
a pretty strong case to close. The Conquered Monitor also
gave a bit more reporting on Ernest Gable's violent life
of crime. He had a history of sexual violence where
multiple women had reported his attacks on them where he

(27:37):
choked and strangled them. Women had accused him of rape.
He had previously been arrested for breaking and entering, assault
and drug charges. After the murder of Judy, Ernest kidnapped
his two daughters in Fall River, Massachusetts, and then he
bounced all over the country, including doing a stint for

(27:58):
armed robbery in Illinois. His transient lifestyle makes you wonder
if there are any other murders and crimes out there
connected to him, where investigators have just yet to discover
that connection. And it's said that even with his long
criminal history, he was out free to rob Judy of
her life and her care free spirit. In the weeks

(28:21):
leading up to her death, Ernest stalked Judy relentlessly and
she spent her final weeks living in absolute terror and fear.
Ernest would meet his end in an argument where he
ended up being stabbed in the chest in Los Angeles
at thirty six years old. Judy's son, Gregory Lord, was

(28:44):
able to watch the press conference of his mother's case
being solved, and he released the following statement, I don't
remember my mother I was young. I always keep her
memory inside my heart. She will always be with me.
I'm told I look just like my mom, and I'm
proud of that. I've been through a lot in my life,

(29:06):
and in the dark times, I've always thought of my mom.
This has been another episode of a simpler time true crime.
The Cold Case Unit released some additional photos to the
Conquered Monitor and I'll have those on the Instagram, so
go check it out. This outcome is what I can

(29:27):
only hope for in all of the cases I feature,
and I hope seeing a case solved after fifty long
years gives hope to anybody who needs it today. Thank
you so much for listening, and join me for another
case on Monday.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
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(Updated Release: Solved 11/2025) Valid Concerns For Her Safety: The Unsolved Murder of Judy Lord

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