Valid Concerns For Her Safety: The Unsolved Murder of Judy Lord

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
A young woman is living in a small, conquered New
Hampshire apartment with her husband and their little boy. 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

(00:33):
summer day in nineteen seventy five, Judy was found dead
inside her apartment. In the decades since, investigators have 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,

(00:56):
Megan and each week on a Simpler Time True Crime,
I cover older unsolved cases and challenge the idea that
a simpler time means a safer time. This week, I'm
bringing to you the unsolved murder of Judy Lord. Before

(01:32):
we get started, I wanted 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 penny raised from this project

(01:55):
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. As a fair warning, this

(02:17):
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 century for answers. It was

(02:40):
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 he was at
the door of twenty two year old Judy. Lord Joseph

(03:03):
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 retrieve the spare
key to the apartment. As he entered, there was nothing
noteworthy reported on the first floor, but he could definitely

(03:26):
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 plastic over her head. Thankfully,
in the room next door, her seventeen month old son,

(03:47):
Gregory Junior, was unharmed. McVeigh rushed out of the unit
and called for police. 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

(04:08):
for an autopsy. The victim, indeed, was twenty two year
old Judy Lord. 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

(04:29):
had four brothers and nine sisters. At a point they
relocated to New Hampshire 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

(04:51):
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, 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

(05:13):
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 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

(05:34):
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 her murder, Judy and Gregory
had a serious argument and Gregory left or Judy kicked

(05:54):
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 and young son in what
was described as a very sparsely furnished apartment. Gregory earned

(06:17):
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 the people who piece together
information for police interviews. But according to reporting in The

(06:38):
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, she couldn't afford it. According
to neighbors, they thought that Gregory may have kind of

(07:01):
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 when she was there alone with
Gregory Junior and after her husband moved out. She would

(07:23):
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.
Being that this case is fifty years old, it's hard
to know for sure what she said to neighbors if

(07:45):
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. This is something
police 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

(08:07):
the crime itself. In the investigation, Judy's movements on the
evening prior to her murder went something like this. There
was a common area in the complex where residents had

(08:28):
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 with her or
if she had left him at the apartment sleeping. That's unclear.
What we do know is that after she wrapped up

(08:48):
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 Judy saying

(09:09):
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, but

(09:30):
up here it's nothing end quote. 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

(09:53):
and revamping the whole place and cracking down on crime
discussed how the neighborhood had been before that. 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

(10:15):
of drugs was so blatant that it took place right
in the parking lots in broad daylight, but those 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. You get the picture. Unfortunately, this

(10:39):
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 had a lot of taboo.

(11:01):
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 and then suffocated. Early reports referred

(11:24):
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 deal of physical evidence from the

(11:45):
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. Crime Scene technicians spent two full

(12:06):
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. Judy had fought back during the attack. Some
of the physical evidence included fingerprints on a window, bloodstains

(12:27):
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
and look for matching characteristics such as color, length, scale, pattern,

(12:51):
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 with using this technique, going to trial with it
doing the hair comparison, and then later finding out that

(13:12):
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 body hair roughly pigmented or if it was dyed,

(13:32):
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
seventy five, investigators told the press that they had three

(13:54):
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
the complex with his grandmother. All I could find was

(14:14):
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
the bodily samples, nineteen seventy five was an interesting time

(14:39):
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. They need to have
probable cause, was aligned with the constitutional right against self incrimination.
Investigators on Judy Lord's case pushed this through the court

(15:00):
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
polygraph test, which they passed. That suspect was eliminated, and
then the FBI analysis of the hair came back, and

(15:23):
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 ruled out.
In November of nineteen seventy five, the request for investigators

(15:43):
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 already had
general physical characteristics that matched their suspect. The lawyer for

(16:06):
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
with the investigators, and within hours of that ruling, John
Doe was taken to the hospital for a sample. It

(16:28):
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,
still telling you about this unsolved case, so that obviously
didn't happen. After this stir, the case went quiet. Her

(16:52):
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,
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

(17:13):
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
talked about their nine unsolved murders from the preceding twenty years.
And that's the thing. New Hampshire, for being the small

(17:34):
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, the
Connecticut River Valley murderer began his reign of terror. Within
a year of Judy's murder, an elderly woman named Madeline

(17:56):
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 unsolved cases, there was some information shared
by Bruce Russell, the former director of investigations for Conquered Police.

(18:21):
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 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

(18:43):
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

(19:05):
two thousand and five, 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,

(19:25):
previously referred to only as 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 to have belonged to an African American man.
As such, we can assume that as they were ruling

(19:48):
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
reported this incident to her coworkers, and it was their

(20:10):
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
victim of a stabbing. Interestingly enough, I couldn't find any

(20:35):
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
to conclusively tie the case to him? Have they destroyed

(20:56):
all physical evidence? Or were samples used up? With Judy
having such a 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

(21:19):
with how this behavior doesn't align with some of her
other safety behavior in 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 they had multiple suspects, but
Stanbury was the only one they named publicly. So was

(21:43):
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? Was it
a crime of passion and someone with a romantic connection
to her? Did someone see her playing volleyball maybe with

(22:05):
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 we will
ever find out why. Gregory Lord Sr. Died of cancer
in twenty nineteen. His son, Gregory Junior, was not listed

(22:30):
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

(22:50):
way they grieve does not 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 and that somebody comes forward with information
that could lead detectives in an investigative direction, either forensically
or otherwise. If you have any information on the unsolved

(23:15):
murder of Judy Lord in Conquered New Hampshire in nineteen
seventy five, please reach out to the Cold Case Unit
at eight hundred five two five five five five five
or by email at Coldcase Unit at ds dot H
dot gov. This has been another episode of a Simpler

(23:37):
Time True Crime. If you appreciate the work I'm doing,
please leave a five star review wherever you listen to
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For case suggestions, please email me at Simpler timecrimepod at

(23:58):
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but Instagram is where I'm the most active, with photos
that go along with each episode. As always, thank you
so much for listening, and tune in next Monday for
another episode.

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Valid Concerns For Her Safety: The Unsolved Murder of Judy Lord

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