Philadelphia Freedom: The Murder of Judy Smith

Cold Case Murder Mysteries

True Crime

3.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2020

⏱️ 94 minutes

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Summary

On the evening of April 8, 1997, attorney Jeffrey Smith waited for his wife, Judy, to meet him at a cocktail party hosted inside the DoubleTree Hotel in Center City Philadelphia. The couple had traveled from Boston the day prior, with Jeffrey scheduled to attend a conference while Judy enjoyed some sightseeing around town. But as 6pm came and went, Jeffrey quickly realized something was wrong. Judy failed to arrive that evening, and her husband's search efforts were fruitless, so he called the police for assistance. Despite the best effort of local detectives, Judy's absence remained a mystery.

Five months, later, however, a father and son hunting in the mountains outside Asheville, NC discovered the remains of what seemed to be a middle-aged woman who was stabbed to death. Soon enough, her identity is revealed through dental work, and it's apparent the mystery woman is indeed Judy Smith. But how did she end up there, and, more importantly, who killed her?

Join host Ryan Kraus for a psychological exploration of the emotional narrative Judy Smith left in the wake of her baffling disappearance.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody welcome back to cold case murder mysteries. I'm your host Ryan Kraus
0:10.3	back at you for another installment of Murder and Madness and Mayhem, this time covering
0:15.1	the strange untimely death of Judy Smith, a 50-year-old nurse from Newton, Massachusetts.
0:22.3	On April 10, 1997, after allegedly accompanying her husband
0:27.0	Jeffrey on a business trip to Philadelphia, Judy disappeared and was subsequently designated a missing person by law enforcement until, almost inexplicably, her body was discovered five months later on September 7th 1997 partially buried within the confines of Piska National
0:48.2	Forest in Asheville, North Carolina.
0:51.6	A forensic examination in combination with Judy's autopsy revealed she was the victim of a vicious stabbing.
0:58.0	To this day, however, nobody knows who committed the crime or even what the motive might have been.
1:06.2	Beyond that, how did Judy Smith end up along hiking trails in North Carolina
1:11.4	when she actually vanished from the streets of Philadelphia.
1:15.5	Just considering that fact makes us wonder if she was ever there.
1:20.1	Now, this case has been covered elsewhere, and by numerous sources, but for the most part,
1:26.4	they've done little more than scratch the surface with analysis that doesn't get us any closer to the truth.
1:33.4	I can't tell you exactly who killed Judy Smith.
1:36.7	I don't read minds.
1:38.6	But what I can do is reconstruct a psychological narrative conducive to understanding why and also how this incident
1:46.6	transpired.
1:48.0	At the very least, that will give us a basic profile of the person who wielded the knife.
1:54.2	So Jeffrey Smith is an attorney and needs to attend a convention in Philadelphia starting on April
2:00.1	10th 1997.
2:02.4	His wife Judy is scheduled to travel with him, and substitute her husband's daytime sessions with
2:08.5	her own sightseeing around town.
	...

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