Crime Immemorial

In 1997, in the northeastern United States, a truly bizarre murder mystery would begin to unfold whose every detail seems to suggest ever more improbable scenarios and whose outcome appears just as muddled today as it did when it first occurred.

Fifty-year-old Judy Smith was a successful home-care nurse who lived in a wealthy suburb of Boston with her third husband Jeffrey, a corporate lawyer. Judy had two adult children from a previous marriage, while Jeffrey had an older teenage daughter from his first. Judy and Jeffrey had actually met and started dating ten years prior, when Judy was hired to care for Jeffrey’s father after a cancer-related surgery, and the pair had lived together for three years before finally tying the knot in September of 1996.

On Wednesday, April 9th, the couple travelled to Boston’s Logan International Airport for a scheduled flight to Philadelphia. Jeffrey was involved in a three-day pharmaceutical conference there, and as Judy had never been to Philadelphia before, she decided to tag along and do some sightseeing on her own while Jeffrey attended workshops and sat on panels at the conference. They also planned to stop by and visit some friends in New Jersey over the weekend, after the conference had ended.

However, before Judy could board the plane, she discovered that she had forgotten her driver’s license, necessitating a ride back home to pick it up. The Smiths agreed that Jeffrey would go on and board the flight alone, as he was expected at a panel at the conference that afternoon, while Judy would take a later flight and meet up with him at the Double Tree hotel in Center City Philadelphia, where they already had reservations.

This seems to have gone as planned; Judy supposedly went home and picked up her identification, then caught a seven-thirty flight to Philadelphia, arriving at the hotel at around ten p.m. She had even brought her husband some flowers, to apologize for the trouble she’d caused.

The following morning, Jeffrey awoke much earlier than his wife and went down to take advantage of the hotel’s free breakfast. He returned to the room at around nine a.m., at which point he claimed that his wife was in the shower. He told her that the breakfast was very good and that she should go down and get some, at which point she apparently joked that perhaps she should go downstairs just as she was, naked and wet from the shower.

Jeffrey then left the room and went to attend the conference. Judy had expressed a desire to see some of the sights around the city, in particular the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. The couple arranged to meet back at the hotel room before six p.m., so they could change and go to the conference cocktail party being held at the Double Tree that evening.

After a full day of activities and sessions, Jeffrey returned to the room at around five-thirty p.m., but found that Judy wasn’t there. At first he wasn’t unduly alarmed, surmising that she had either been delayed in her sightseeing, or had become confused about their plans and had returned earlier and gone down to the cocktail party ahead of him. So thinking, he changed and headed down to the conference room where the party was being held, but he didn’t see her; he asked some of his colleagues, but they hadn’t spotted her either.

Jeffrey spent the next forty-five minutes going back and forth from the party to the couple’s room, hoping Judy would return, but when she didn’t, he began to worry. He went out and summoned a cab, telling the driver to very slowly drive the route that the local tourist bus would have taken, while he peered out the windows, searching for any sign of his wife. He also phoned his stepchildren back in Boston to ask if she had called them, and asked them to check the answering machines at the couple’s home on the off chance that she had called there and left a message. All of his efforts were in vain; Judy Smith had disappeared.

Jeffrey then proceeded to the police station at around midnight and attempted to file a missing persons report, but officers apparently informed him that he could not do so until his wife had been gone for twenty-four hours. According to him, the police seemed dismissive of his concerns, implicitly conveying to him their belief that the woman had simply taken off of her own volition. Jeffrey returned to the hotel and spoke to some of his colleagues who were attending the same conference, one of whom was the then-mayor of Philadelphia, and the other of whom was a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. They told Jeffrey they would put in a word with the Philadelphia police, and when Jeffrey returned to the station early the following morning, officers were much more receptive, and allowed him to file the report. Over the ensuing days, detectives also began interviewing witnesses at the hotel and around the area to try to determine the whereabouts of the missing woman.

According to a desk clerk at the Double Tree, Judy had approached him on the late morning of April 10th and asked him where would be the best place to catch the PHLASH bus, which made stops at all the significant tourist sites around the city. This jibed with Judy’s reported plans to spend the day sightseeing. A PHLASH driver also claimed he had picked Judy up at the intersection of Front and South Streets early in the afternoon, and further said he had dropped her off near the Double Tree later in the day. Another conference attendee also allegedly spotted her in the hotel lobby, though he admitted he didn’t know Judy Smith very well.

Other witnesses also reported seeing Judy going into and coming out of the Philadelphia Greyhound bus terminal, where she may have gone to use the restroom. Her family later speculated that Judy might have been in that area because it was very close to Chinatown, and Judy often sought out Chinese or Thai restaurants when out travelling. Notably, though, no one working in the establishments in Chinatown ever came forward claiming to have seen her that day.

There were a few weirder sightings of her as well, though these may have been cases of mistaken identity. For example, staff members at the Society Hill Hotel claimed that a woman who closely resembled Judy had stayed there from April 13th to the 15th, checking in under the name H.K. Rich/Collins. Employees remembered this woman specifically because she had been behaving very strangely, reportedly speaking in tongues, masturbating in front of a hotel window, and referring to someone called “the emperor” who was going to wire her money so that she could stay at the hotel longer.

In addition, a handful of individuals reported a similar looking woman who appeared disoriented, walking around the intersection of Locust and Broad Streets at around three p.m. on the afternoon of April 10th. This same woman was apparently spotted near Penn’s Landing on the same day, acting in a bizarre fashion. Further, a homeless man in the vicinity, when shown a photograph of Judy, told police that she had slept on a bench next to him on the night of April 14th.

However, it should be noted that there was a homeless woman, well known in the area, who looked so much like Judy Smith that even her own son had mistaken her for his mother when he spotted her from across the street. This raised the possibility that many of the sightings of Judy on the day of her disappearance, particularly the ones where she was reportedly disoriented, might have actually been sightings of the homeless woman, although the homeless man who asserted that he’d seen her sleeping on the bench was insistent that the woman he saw was not the homeless woman, who he had seen before, but was in fact Judy Smith. If this was the case, the prospect arose that Judy had suffered some type of mental breakdown, a stroke, or perhaps had hit her head and lost her memory.

Over the next few days, there were a handful of other accounts from farther afield. A retail clerk at a Macy’s department store in Deptford, New Jersey, for instance, stated that she had seen Judy there shopping for dresses. The clerk maintained that she had spoken to this woman, who had told her she was buying a dress for her daughter and lamenting that her daughter never liked anything that she bought for her. This unknown woman had not appeared distressed, though the clerk further claimed that the woman had attempted to get another younger woman, presumably the daughter, to leave the store with her. While it was possible that Judy could have travelled to Deptford from Philadelphia in a very short time by taking the New Jersey Transit Bus Route 400, there was no way of knowing if this woman was actually Judy Smith or simply a woman who resembled her.

Likewise, a woman who looked like Judy was spotted in Easton, Pennsylvania—more than fifty miles from Philadelphia—shortly after the disappearance, and another witness reported seeing her sitting in front of a grocery store in Philadelphia at around six a.m. a few days after Judy went missing. None of these eyewitness accounts could be corroborated as actually being sightings of Judy Smith.

Jeffrey Smith spent the next several months searching for his wife, hiring three private investigators and printing thousands of flyers, which he faxed to police departments and hospitals all around the country. Despite his efforts, it would be September of 1997 before she was found, and her discovery would only deepen the mystery of what had transpired in Philadelphia on that fateful April afternoon.

On the afternoon of September 7th, 1997, a father and son who were deer hunting out of season in the Pisgah National Forest near Asheville, North Carolina stumbled across a set of human bones not far from the Stoney Creek picnic area. The body had been buried in a shallow grave, and appeared to have been scattered by animals. Punctures and slashes in the bra, as well as cut marks on the bones, suggested the victim had been stabbed to death.

When the skeleton was examined, it was found to belong to a white woman between forty and fifty-five years old, with extensive dental work and a severely arthritic knee. The coroner estimated that the woman had been dead for perhaps a year, maybe as long as two years.

A North Carolina doctor, who read about the finding of the body in the newspaper, remembered a faxed flyer he had received a few months before, concerning a fifty-year-old Boston woman named Judy Smith, who had gone missing from Philadelphia while on a trip there with her husband. The doctor contacted the authorities, who were soon able to obtain Judy Smith’s dental records. It was a match; the dead woman was Judy Smith.

The discovery of the remains opened up a whole host of mystifying questions. How had Judy Smith ended up dead on a somewhat remote hiking trail nearly six-hundred miles from where she had last been seen alive? Stranger still, why was her body found dressed in clothing more appropriate for cold-weather hiking—jeans, long underwear, and hiking boots—rather than the clothing Judy Smith had last been seen in, which had been more appropriate for sightseeing in spring in Philadelphia? And why were there various items found alongside the body—such as a pair of expensive Bolle sunglasses and a blue vinyl backpack containing winter clothing—which appeared new and reportedly did not belong to Judy?

North Carolina police were quickly able to establish a few facts. Firstly, robbery had not been the motive for the slaying; though no wallet or identification was found with the remains, the backpack contained eighty dollars in cash, and a shirt buried nearby contained a further eighty-seven dollars in the front pocket. Judy was also still wearing her wedding ring. Oddly, though, Judy’s trademark bright red backpack—which she had been wearing in Philadelphia and always carried when she travelled—was never found.

Secondly, several people in the Asheville area claimed to have seen a woman resembling Judy Smith in April of 1997, and all of them reported that she did not appear to be under duress or suffering from any type of mental impairment. A retail clerk at a Christmas store, for example, said the woman had shopped there and had seemed very friendly, saying that she was from Boston, that her husband was a lawyer, and that he was attending a conference in Philadelphia. She also allegedly told the clerk that she had decided to come to Asheville, though she didn’t give a specific reason.

The proprietor of an Asheville deli also came forward and said that this same woman had spent thirty dollars there, buying a toy truck and several sandwiches. And a woman who worked at the popular Biltmore Estate tourist attraction informed police that a woman resembling Judy had driven to a nearby campground in a gray sedan and asked if she could park the car there and sleep in it overnight. The vehicle, the witness said, had been full of boxes and bags. After the employee had told the woman that she couldn’t sleep in her car there, the woman had driven off. None of the witnesses remembered this woman being accompanied by anyone else, though a few of them did report that she had been wearing the distinctive red backpack.

If the witness sightings were actually of Judy Smith, this would seem to imply that she had travelled to North Carolina on her own for some reason known only to her, without informing her husband, her children, her friends, or her coworkers where she was going. Curiously, Judy had never expressed a desire to visit North Carolina before, at least as far as anyone who knew her could recall, and the only other time she had even been to the state was a few years prior, when she had stayed there for a week while her husband was getting treatment at a weight loss clinic in Raleigh-Durham, about two-hundred-fifty miles away from where her body would eventually turn up.

According to Jeffrey, his wife had taken two-hundred dollars in cash with her on her supposed sightseeing tour of Philadelphia on April 10th, though she had left another five-hundred dollars in cash back at the hotel room. She had a credit card, but apparently it had not been used at any time after her disappearance, whether to rent a car or take a bus or train to North Carolina. She might have had some amount of cash and a credit card that Jeffrey was unaware of, however.

At this stage, police were looking into two distinct lines of inquiry. On the one hand, since most of Judy’s movements after arriving in Philadelphia were attested to by her husband Jeffrey, there were some investigators who favored the idea that Judy had never come to Philadelphia at all, but that Jeffrey had either killed his wife prior to leaving for the conference, or hired someone to kill her after he had already left.

Those who supported this theory pointed out that whenever a woman was murdered, there was an eighty-five to ninety percent chance of her having been killed by her spouse, boyfriend, or other male acquaintance. There was also the reported refusal of Jeffrey Smith to take a polygraph test. Though Jeffrey claimed that he would take a test if it was administered by the FBI, apparently this condition was not met, and when he was asked to take one later on, he declined due to his fear that his heart medication would interfere with the results.

Police had also made note of the fact that when they searched the couple’s Philadelphia hotel room, there were no female toiletries or cosmetics in the room and no dirty clothes. Judy’s luggage was still there with some of her clothing in it, but apparently none of it had been worn. Jeffrey claimed that Judy had simply redressed in the clothes she had travelled in before going on her excursion, and her children informed police that Judy never wore much makeup, and what little she did wear would have been in the red backpack she reportedly took with her.

Working against the hypothesis that Jeffrey was the killer was the fact that he was morbidly obese, and would not have been able to hike the quarter-mile up the steep hiking trail where Judy’s body was ultimately found. Not only that, but his movements were accounted for by numerous other colleagues at the conference, as well as hotel employees. Further, Jeffrey spent a great deal of his own money hiring private investigators and printing and faxing flyers for months after his wife’s disappearance, and though one of Judy’s friends told police that the Smiths’ marriage was “tenuous,” everyone else familiar with the couple didn’t see any problems at all between Judy and Jeffrey that would have suggested he had a motive for killing her.

Lastly, Judy was apparently seen alive by her children on the evening before the couple had left on their trip, and nothing had seemed amiss. Her ticket on the seven-thirty flight to Philadelphia on April 9th had been used, the plane had held the correct number of passengers, and some of the other people on the plane remembered seeing Judy—or someone who closely resembled her—on the later flight; not to mention the desk clerk, the conference attendee, and the PHLASH bus driver in the city who claimed to see Judy on April 10th, going about her business according to her stated plans while in Philadelphia.

Jeffrey Smith died in 2005, and though he was still considered a person of interest in the murder of his wife, he was never charged in any capacity, and while his involvement is certainly possible, it seems somewhat unlikely.

The other line of inquiry pursued by detectives was that Judy was murdered by a stranger, or someone she had made plans to meet up with. Though she could have potentially been abducted from Philadelphia while out sightseeing and subsequently been taken to North Carolina before she was murdered, this seemed implausible in light of the several sightings of her in Asheville, where she appeared to be alone, untroubled, and in her right mind.

This left police with the theory that Judy had gone to North Carolina on her own, perhaps on a whim, where she then came across a stranger who had murdered her. Alternately, she may have preplanned the whole escapade in order to meet up with someone secretly, who later killed her. It did appear, from the clothing Judy was found wearing, that she had planned the hiking trip; she also had a blanket with her, other articles of warm clothing, and some sources reported that she also had a flashlight and a paperback book. It further did not look as though her body had been dragged to the site where it was found, indicating that she had gone there voluntarily.

For a time, detectives considered the possibility that Judy had run into serial killer Gary Michael Hilton, who in 2007 murdered an elderly couple in Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina, and was later convicted of killing and beheading two other hikers in Florida and Georgia. Though the murder of Judy Smith predated Hilton’s other known crimes by a decade, the area and modus operandi was similar enough that his involvement could not be ruled out. As of 2022, Hilton remains on Florida’s death row, and has not confessed to killing Judy Smith.

The bizarre homicide case was featured on the Unsolved Mysteries television program in 2001, and a large reward is still on offer for information leading to a conviction, but as of this writing, police are still spinning their wheels in the investigation, and the questions concerning why Judy Smith suddenly took off for North Carolina and who exactly ended up killing her remain unanswered.