Welcome back to the Path went Chili for part two of our series on the
disappearance of Judith Hiams. Robin, do you want to catch everyone up on
what we talked about in our previous episode? Well, this case started in
nineteen sixty five. It involved a twenty two year old woman named Judith Hiams
who withdrew some money from a bank and left her job for an appointment,
but then vanished without a trace, and her abandoned car was found in Atlanta,
six hundred fifty miles away, and it eventually came out that Judy was
likely magnant. She had been starting out a relationship with another man and had
made arrangements to get an abortion from an Hungarian immigrant named George Hadju, who
was unlicensed and pretty shady, so they started to think that something bad might
have happened and they covered the whole thing up. Hadju was arrested for conspiring
to perform an illegal abortion, but after he was bailed out, he jumped
bail and left the country and the case went called for twenty four years until
he captained with the Coral Gables Police Department started receiving strange phone calls from Omaha,
Nebraska, including a woman who said Judy Himes is alive and she lives
in Omaha. So that compelled the Coral Gables to reopen the case. It
was featured on Unstall Mysteries, and after the show aired, the cops received
an anonymous letter saying that Judy died on the operating table because of complications from
an abortion, so the responsible parties disposed of her body by tossing it into
Biscayne Bay. The police found the letter to be credible, but they never
did find Judy's body. And the big mystery in this case is the phone
calls. Because the case had been out of the spotlight for several decades,
he had a bunch of anonymous phone calls from Omaha, Nebraska just seemed to
jump started again. And they never figured out who made the phone calls or
why they decided to do it after all these years. And that's pretty much
the big mystery that we're going to talk about on this part of the episode.
But before we discuss why this story returned to the spotlight after twenty four
years, let's start at the beginning. Since the Unsolved Mysteries segment put most
of their focus on the mysterious phone calls. They kind of glossed over many
of the details about Judith Hime's pregnancy. Well, they mentioned that Judy was
a recent divorcee. They did not provide any information about who the father of
her unborn child might have been. But if you research the original media coverage
of Judy's disappearance from the nineteen sixties, you'll see that this was quite a
scandalous story at the time. It now seems apparent that after divorcing her husband,
Judy became involved with doctor Lucy and Gordon, and that an unplanned pregnancy
occurred. As you're probably aware, this was still several years before Rove Wade,
so abortions were illegal and if a woman wanted one, she'd have to
do so under the radar, And unfortunately this meant having to visit shady individuals
like George had You, who did not even have a legitimate license to practice
medicine in the United States and had already faced legal trouble for performing abortions before
Judy even met him. It's quite surreal to go back and read old newspaper
articles about law enforcement putting together special abortion squads during this time period to crack
down on the problem and using undercover female officers to set up elaborate staying operations.
One of the big turning points in the abortion reform movement took place one
year before Judy's disappearance, when a Connecticut woman named Jerry Santauro became pregnant after
an affair with a married man named Clyde Dixon. Six months into her pregnancy,
they both checked into a motel to form a self induced abortion, but
Santoro died of complications, and since Dixon fled the scene instead of seeking medical
attention, he was charged with manslaughter. The incident demonstrated the lengths women often
had to go to at this time without access to legal abortion. It's so
sad because I really, in my gut feel like had Judy been given options,
had she found herself in this relationship where this older man who's very successful
as a doctor, gets her pregnant, and she, I feel like,
would have likely been forced to have an abortion, or very highly encouraged by
her partner at the time to do so. He even arranges the abortion for
her, but doesn't go with her. He doesn't pay for it, So
I feel like she's pretty helpless, and yet yet I feel like she would
have had a family that would have said, listen, we love you,
right, it's okay, We're gonna be okay, you're twenty two. Give
a big life ahead of you, right. I feel like Judy died via
complications very similar to Jerry Santoro, and how sad that it would take these
kinds of cases to get people to just look around and say, I don't
have to personally agree with it. I could be absolutely horrified by the reality
of what an abortion is. But to look next to me and see women
who are going to put themselves in a position to die because they can't take
care of a baby, or they're not able to be in a situation where
they're in a safe place to take care of a baby, it breaks my
heart. It absolutely breaks my heart. I'm really reticent to talk about this
because I know that so many people listening probably are very against abortion, but
I feel like it adds something to share this story. So this was almost
twenty years ago, when I was twenty one and I was in a relationship
with somebody who was abusive. I happened to get pregnant. We were being
responsible, but clearly not responsible enough because I was twenty one and I was
stupid. I was in love and it was very unhealthy dynamic. And when
it came up that I found out I was pregnant, I knew that I
could not bring a baby into the world. I was not in a place,
I was going to school, and I had a partner who was not
supportive, but yet it was trying to force me to have a baby,
and it was just an uncomfortable situation. I didn't tell my family because I
thought that my family would judge me, and I just didn't think it was
something that I could bring to them. So I talked to my friends and
we researched it. And because I lived in Canada, I had access to
something like that. I remember going with my boyfriend. You go for your
interview and then you I think, you come back like a week later,
and you had it done. And I, even though he was like a
horrible human, he at the very least Judy didn't have this. Judy didn't
have Lucy and come with her when she went to her abortion. She had
to go by herself, and she had to probably die on this dirty table
with had you doing? God knows what to her. It is just so
heartbreaking, and to think that I could have been in a situation like that
had I not had that access. It just this case really hits close to
home for me. Jules, Thank you so much for sharing that. I
know that took a lot to share that. I want to hug you right
this second. I think that's incredibly brave to share, and I think it's
real. It puts a face on the fact that, like, this is
not some hypothetical situations. It's it's people we love, it's sisters we love,
it's a friend that I'd go hold your hand whether I agreed with you
or not, so that I could support you. You're still here with me
right so like to support you and let you know that you are loved and
worthy and perfect and everything else. So thank you for sharing that. God,
I love you so much. I love you too. Thank you for
sharing it. It's good to know that this decision turned out to be the
right one for you, because, like you said, if you had this
baby while trapped in this abusive relationship, your life may have turned out a
whole lot differently, and you wouldn't be here with us right now. So
I'm glad that you shared that. Thanks guys. Now, I have no
idea if Judy had had any desire to have children, or if she and
Lucian Gordon were interested in pursuing a serious, long term relationship. But I
do know that Judy had just gone through a divorce at age twenty two and
became pregnant with a man whom she'd only recently started dating and was not married
too. Even if Judy genuinely wanted to have Lucian's child, this still would
have been an incredibly scandalous situation for nineteen sixty five, and there would be
a major social stigma attached to her. One of Judy's friends was interviewed during
the Unsawd Mystery segment and flat out said that having children will Unmary just wasn't
done back then. It became apparent that Judy had decided to confide about her
pregnancy with a family friend, doctor Herschel Gordon, who subsequently referred him to
George Hodju. While Lucian was not present when Judy went to have her abortion,
he was with her when she made the original arrangements with Hodju. They
may not have known any better at the time, but hearing that Hodju told
Judy it was okay for her to drive herself home after the procedure is a
major red flag. It doesn't sound like Lucian had any direct involvement in Judy's
disappearance, since she went to the appointment alone, but he chose to remain
silent for two years before agreeing to testify as a witness against Haju when he
was charged with conspiring to perform an abortion. But of course, since Haju
jumped bail, no trial ever took place. Sadly, I have no trouble
believing that something would horribly wrong during the procedure which costs Judy her life,
and that Hadju disposed of her body to cover the whole thing up. And
there's really not much else to think here. I mean, you really do
have this person who should have been there to support her and to be there
emotionally, financially, right, and he wasn't. And then all of a
sudden he does come forward and he says, okay, listen, I'm willing
to testify as a witness, probably to protect his own medical credentials. Right,
He's turning state witness against this guy who's going to be charged for actually
performing the abortion, and then, like we talked about earlier, this this
so called doctor who likely was present when Judy lost her life disappears and there's
no accountability for him. And it's hard because again, he probably shouldn't have
even been criminalized in the first place, because she would have never gone to
a doctor like this, and so, gosh, it's sad. It's just
sad. I was looking up about Lucian Gordon and I think he went on
to continue working as a dentist, so I don't think this scandal really damaged
his career and he didn't really suffer any consequences for his role in it.
Yeah, he's the most frustrating element of this because he just really seemed to
not be there to support her, and Ashley said in Part one that he
treated her like an object. And his actions in the immediate aftermath obviously of
Judy finding out, making her pay for the abortion, and then not going
with her, saying that, oh, you know, she can drive herself
back. It just is gross, and then pleading the Fifth Amendment to law
enforcement when they were asking him initially questions about the abortion or about Judy,
and like her disappearance, it's just gross, and it just be to somebody
that really didn't have that love or that care for her when he really should
have been showing up to try to do everything that he could to help authorities
find out where Judy was, but instead he chose to protect himself, protect
his dental practice, and Judy is still missing because of that, and we
still don't even know what kind of relationship they had, like for all we
know, he just wanted to have her for a fling or something like that.
It wasn't interested in a long term relationship, so that's why he immediately
thought, we have to have this abortion. One of the most curious aspects
of this story is that Judy's rental car was found six hundred and fifty miles
away in Atlanta. I can understand the logic behind that, as I'm guessing
had you had someone drive it there because he wanted to distance Judy as far
away from him as possible. Perhaps this was done to give off the impression
that Judy took off voluntarily, or that she was abducted by someone and became
the victim of foul play. He also might have figured that abandoning the car
in another state would cause jurisdictional issues, like we mentioned in Part one,
by the time the car made it back to Coral Gables, it had been
handled by so many different agencies that it was impossible to preserve the vehicle as
a crime scene. But it is still pretty odd that the driver would leave
the vehicle in a residential neighborhood rather than somewhere remote, as a witness flat
out saw him walking away from the car, and I know traces of blood
were found in the backseat, so it is easy to assume the vehicle had
been used to dispose of Juda's body. But this aspect of the story might
be exaggerated. Looking back at the original newspaper articles, it sounds like the
actual amount of blood they found was so small that it could have been caused
by someone cutting their finger. And since it was a rental car, it's
possible the blood stain was there before Judy even drove it. Very true,
It's absolutely true. This is one of those facts that is so confusing because
we just don't know who took the car there. I don't feel like it
was Judy. I don't think Judy made it past the doctor's office, But
again, I think there were probably several people involved who needed to make sure
that this visit did not occur, and so I could see many people taking
that car and dumping it. I could also, like I set an episode
one. The problem is is it could have been abandoned ten miles from her
house, and then someone else said, oh, there's a car, there's
keys in it. I'm taking it and I'm going to dispose of it at
a faraway location, you know, like they took it on a joy ride
or something. Yeah. One mystery in this case, which has never been
resolved, is the identity of the man who drove the car to Atlanta.
He was described as being a white male in his twenties with a blonde crew
cut, So I'm pretty sure it wasn't George Hodju. So who could this
man have been. I know that when Hodju was arrested in an unrelated abortion
case one year later, he had a codependent named Jay Anderson Martin, though
it's unclear what his exact role was. However, since Martin was forty two
years old and the man Anta was described as being in his twenties, I'm
not sure it was him either. Sounds like police suspected he was an airline
passenger who used the name Smith to purchase a ticket for a flight from Atlanta
to Miami on the day of the car was dropped off. The fact that
you used to be able to pay cash to purchase an airline ticket without even
giving your full name is quite a sign of just how much things have changed
in six decades. It doesn't look like they ever figured out who this guy
was, though his rule takes on a more significance when you consider that this
case was eventually revived by an anonymous mail caller, but we'll talk about that
momentarily anyway. Once Judy's disappearance was linked to Hodju, everyone suspected that he
was responsible. Had he not skipped bail and the authorities managed to convict him
of conspiring to perform an abortion, It's possible that Hodju might have eventually confessed
that Judy died while under his care. If her body was really dumped and
biscayned Bay, then it probably would have been impossible to recover it, but
at least everyone would have known the full truth about what she happened to her
Even after Hodju disappeared. I think Judy's family and friends had come to terms
with the fact that she was dead and they were probably never going to find
her remains. I'm sure they never dreamed that her case would be revived over
two decades later by an anonymous caller who claims she was still alive somewhere,
paving the way to her story being featured on national network television. What's so
said about this is that these calls, right, you don't know where Judy
is, and so her family who desperately wants her back, right, no
matter what that looks like, could we have her body back, Could we
have our alive, you know, human back to us. We just don't
know where she is. And so that alone is so traumatic and so devastating
for her family and friends. But then to have these random calls, these
random conspiracy theories, all these things should come up years and years and decades
later, it keeps that grief and torment going. Is she alive? Like
there is a five percent chance she's alive. So the poor family is sitting
there trying to rationalize could there be any truth to these calls? Could these
letters have any truth? And it's just pure torture. I just think the
fact that her boyfriend at the time eventually comes forward and says that he helped
her get this abortion. And we also know that people have said something went
wrong there that seems most logical, but who knows? And therefore my brain
can't stop, my heart can't rest until I know if my loved one is
deceased or possibly still alive. Yeah, I have to wonder, Like Judy's
family was not interviewed on UNSAWD Mysteries, and I don't know if her parents
or many of her siblings were still alive. But I cannot imagine how weird
that must have been, because they probably accepted she's probably dead, we may
never find her body. And then this slim hope comes by all these years
later that she could still be alive, and we talked about how this was
a scandalous thing. But I think her family still would have accepted her if
she had an abortion, because she had already gone through it avorce in sixty
five, which was at age twenty two, which is very unusual back then.
Yet they still like accepted her. They didn't disown her for that,
so I think they still would have supported her even if they found out she
was pregnant and had aborted a child. These calls are so weird though,
Like, just keep going back to nineteen sixty five, and how the hell
do these people get this information about this obcure cold case. It is so
confusing unless there was a direct tie. But we know that the family has
no tide in Nebraska, unless Judy had some tide in Nebraska that we're unaware
of. Yeah, as far as I know, they couldn't find any.
Okay, So this new series of events all started when Coral Gables Police Captain
Chuck Shearer received a phone call from someone claiming to be Steve Brown, who
said he had received new information about Judith Hime's disappearance. Now, given the
Brown was a radio show host in Omaha, and this call took place just
two days after Sheer returned from a lecture at a police acad to me in
Nebraska, you'd assume that there was a connection. But the problem is that
Sera's lecture did not actually take place in Omaha, but at an academy in
Grand Island, a city which is one hundred and fifty miles away. And
I'm just trying to figure out, like a side a logical explanation for how
these events might have played out. Let's just say that Sheer went to the
lecture and someone living in Nebraska had knowledge of the Judith Hiams case and just
happened to find out a Quarrel Gables police captain had been there. Sara did
say he handed out a few business cards during his trip, so perhaps one
of these cards wound up in the hands if someone with information they wanted to
share, I can understand them feeling compelled to phone Shearer, But what I
cannot understand is their decision to impersonate an Omaha radio host whom Sheer had never
even met before. If the caller was worried about incriminating himself and wanted to
remain anonymous, that would be one thing, But pretending to be someone who
was a fairly recognizable personality in the Omaha High area and providing a Sheer with
that person's work and home phone numbers is another. I find it interesting how
Sheer told the caller he had to get back to him after researching the case,
which is why he provided these two numbers for Sheer to call. But
what would a caller have said if Sheer immediately pressed him for information. Would
he have actually shared anything pertinent about Judith Hiams. Again, I just don't
see what the purpose would be for impersonating Steve Brown, who didn't know anything
about the case. Since the caller provided sheer with Brown's unlisted home number,
which only a limited amount of people would have known, he probably had some
sort of personal connection to Brown. On their surface, the most logical explanation
is that someone was playing an elaborate prank to cause confusion. But the biggest
issue with that theory is that what would possess them to reference the Judith Hiams
case. How would someone in Omaha even have found out about it to begin
with? It just seems like the most inexplicably random starting point for a practical
joke. It really does. I mean the fact that they picked this radio
host who has no connection. They even reached out to him and he's like,
I don't know, I do not know what's happening. People do not
have my personal number because I'm a public figure. It does just raise this
question again as like what did you gain from this? What information is coming
from this? Like I get you want the case back in the public eye,
but is this creating this course that distracts people from the actual details of
what could have happened to her. I'm just thinking, I feel like a
peal to phone in a tip about an unsolved coal case. I'm just going
to phone them and impersonate Howard Stern because that makes total sense. It's exactly
right. I would believe you. It's so weird though, like it.
I mean, in today's world, when you got access to all of this
information, it would make sense that you could come up with information on pretty
much any cold case. Like Robin said, you know, you can go
to the Charlie Project. Whatever nameless is not nameless, but like the Charlie
Project, and you would be able to find all of these different active cold
cases. And back then in nineteen sixty five, unless you actually had physical
files, how would you ever find that information? I mean, aside from
maybe a missing poster. And of course they're probably not going to be circulating
missing posters because they pretty much accepted she's probably dead and the case is essentially
closed. So I don't know why one would be circulated all the way in
Nebraska for a case that happened in Florida. Of course, the confusion was
compounded two days later when Captain Sheer received the anonymous call from the woman who
said Judy Hymes is alive and she lives in Omaha. Since the chances of
two completely unrelated people deciding to phone up the police about an obscure, twenty
four year old cold case are pretty much non existent, it's a given that
both the male and female callers were in on this together, but who knows
what their motives might have been. If these calls took place today, it
would probably be easy to trace them, or at least determine where they originated
from. Back in nineteen ninety, they didn't have the technology for that.
This call prompted investigators to explore the possibility that Judy really was alive and living
in Omaha after all these years, or that perhaps the female caller was even
Judy herself. They given all the evidence that Judy went to have an abortion
and never returned, it seems very doubtful that she was still alive. I
know. They briefly explored the possibility that even if Judy survived the abortion,
she might have felt the stigma was so large that she decided to cut off
all contact with her family and friends and start a new life somewhere. But
it seemed very doubtful that Judy would remain in hiding that long, particularly once
abortion was legalized, not to mention that she left behind twenty five thousand dollars
in a bank account that was never touched. So, in spite of what
the caller said, I seriously doubt that Judy was alive and living in Omaha
in nineteen ninety But we still have to ask why Omaha. On the off
chance that the caller was a tipster who legitimately believed that she might have seen
Judy Hyams in Omaha, why didn't she say anything else besides repeating the same
sentence? And again, if this was nothing more than a prank, what
compelled them to select that particular case? Was there any significance to the fact
that a Coral Gables police captain had been in Nebraska days earlier. I know
this is nothing more than a coincidence, but here's an interesting piece of trivia
I thought was worth mentioning. At the time these calls took place, the
police chief in Omaha was James Skinner, who resigned in nineteen ninety seven and
instantly became police chief in another city. And take a wild guess, wear
Coral Gables I don't think that is any bearing on this case, but it's
still pretty crazy. It's absolutely crazy. I don't think it probably has any
bearing on this but it's fascinating to make those links at all. I am
so stuck on this idea that in nineteen sixty five she had twenty five thousand
dollars from her divorce settlement, and that, like you said, abortion became
legalized very shortly after her disappear parents, And so why would she stay away
from her family. Her family never said that there was an issue. They
never said that they had gotten onto her, that they had judged her,
that they had made her feel lesser than. And it's very sad to think
that, you know, it would be normal for her to get up and
start her life somewhere else. I just don't think that could have happened.
I think she was trying to get herself out of a situation that she didn't
need to be in or want to be in, and she was learning that
this man does not care about her and it's not going to be there for
her. And yet she's successful. She's twenty two, she's working at the
hospital, she's building a life for herself. This decision as heavy and as
hard as that would be for someone to make, should not have ended her
life, should not have changed her life in this kind of fashion, And
I don't think it would have put her in hiding. I definitely do not.
If she was going to run away and start a new life, she
would have taken out twenty five thousand dollars, not three hundred dollars. Now.
The third call Captain Shira received from an anonymous FBI informant, I think
that one was legitimate and had no connection to the previous two calls. Remember
those calls prompted Sheer to reopen the investigation, and an article about Judy's disappearance
soon ran in the papers which mentioned George had You? So the informant could
have easily read about the case. So I had You's name and felt compelled
to phone in a tip. As you recall, the caller claimed that he'd
recently spent several weeks with had You in Hungary and provided a phone number,
Even though they couldn't find had You. Interpool confirmed that the phone number was
linked to someone with that name, So I believe the caller was telling the
truth. Investigators found it very unlikely that had you himself was behind any of
the phone calls, and I definitely agree with that, as I'm sure Had
You had a very distinct Hungarian accent which would have stuck out if he was
one of the callers. To this day, Had You has never been found,
and if he's still alive somewhere, he would be in his nineties by
now. That's wild. Yeah, he was never going to be held account
or be able to tell his side of the story. I mean he ran
because of the laws and the regulations at that time. He was also operating
without a license, and who knows if he really was an established doctor in
his home country of Hungary. So he had to leave. He had to
remove himself from the situation. But it's sad because had they been able to
say, you know, did you see her? What happened? Or you
know, can we help you get out of this, it's we might have
had more information. He might have confessed to hurting her, you know what
I mean. But there's zero way. We don't have a way to reach
him. He's not alive anymore. I doubt he's in his nineties, and
it's just a missing piece of the puzzle. And I think it's sad is
that, for all we know, he could have gone back to practicing illegal
abortions after he returned to Hungary, meaning that other young woman such as Judy
could have found themselves in the same situation and wound up maybe dying of complications
on the table and no one ever found out about it. So it's almost
the same as like letting a murderer get away, because you have a guy
who is a very unstable doctor who has the potential to harm people, but
because the statute of limitations have expired for his previous crimes, he was never
brought to justice. Is he a doctor or did he just like say,
I was a doctor in my home country, and like how would they ever
have checked records back then? Like he could have been a barber for all
we know. I mean, it's not the first time we've come across a
shady doctor where we've questioned their credentials. Can you think of who I'm thinking
of, Robin follow me a molock? Yes, Yes, the guy had
three gunshot wounds to his chest and he was like, oh, that's a
self inflicted gunwound. A whole bunch of ones, like they smoked thirty marijuana
cigarettes and passed on on the railroad tracks. And the guy who lost his
head found a cap dated and he said, the dog gate all, sir,
and the dog ate it. Yeah, he was from Egypt, so
I'm willing to bet maybe he just came to America, said he was a
doctor of no credentials and they gave him the job. He's like, all
learn as I go. No big deal anyway. This series of events led
to the case being featured on Unsolved Mysteries, followed by the anonymous letter being
sent to the Coral Gables PD which detail how Judy died of complications from her
abortion. The police found the letter to be credible, and I concur with
that. Unlike the initial phone calls, this letter came in after the case
had been broadcast on national television, so it not surprised me if someone watched
the episode and felt the need to clear the conscience. Of course, it
seems doubtful that Hadju was the writer, but if the outline scenario from the
letter is true, there were probably other people present when Judy died, such
as a nurse, and we know that at least one mail played a role
in the cover up by driving Judy's car to Atlanta. So the obvious question
is could the writer of the letter been one of the people who made the
phone calls? While there is one woman who might be a potential candidate to
be the infamous, Judy Hymes is alive and she lives in Omaha Collar On
her last episode, we mentioned that in May of nineteen sixty six, Hadju
Jay Anderson Martin and a twenty year old nurse named Donna doo and Rale arrested
for the roles in another abortion case. I have no idea what actually happened
to Donna Dowan or if she served in EGIL time, but since this occurred
only eight months after Judy went missing, I think there's a good chance that
Duan was hot Ju's nurse when Judy came in for her abortion. For sure,
I think that's absolutely possible. It's sad to me when you think about
these people who knew her like that. You know, she used that fake
name to get her pregnancy test done, and the woman who did it,
she said I knew her, And she's watching as this poor girl is struggling
to try to get a pregnancy test to see if she's pregnant, and they're
watching this girl they went to nursing school with struggle, and everyone's just looking
the other way and saying, like, I hope she gets the help she
needs, but I hope she survives that. At the same time, even
if Donnaduan wasn't the caller, she might be the best candidate to have written
the anonymous letter, since it sounds like the writer had first hand knowledge of
the event. But if Duan was the caller, why would she be stating
that Judy was still alive. She may have been trying to throw investigators off
the track, but it's possible that seeing Judy's story on national TV was her
breaking point and finally compelled her to send in a letter with the complete truth.
However, if Donna Dewan was the female caller, then who was the
male caller who impersonated Steve Brown? Was the male caller directly involved in what
happened to Judy? Or could Duena put someone else she knew up to making
the call because she hadn't yet worked up the courage to phone anybody about the
case on her own. I suppose the one thing I just can't get a
handle on is if either or both of these callers did have knowledge about what
transpired what suddenly compelled them to come forward twenty four years after the fact.
Well, in September nineteen eighty nine, the Miami Herald published an extensive article
titled Abortion Before Choice, which talked about the history of abortion in Florida before
Roe v. Wade and a brief reference to Judith Hyam's disappearance, citing it
is a possible example of an illegal abortion gone horribly wrong. Since this article
was published six months before the phone calls, could someone have read it and
seen Judy's name and felt a desire to come clean. I think it's very
possible. I think it's possible they saw her name and wanted to quote,
come clean or tell something that someone had told them. Remember, a lot
of time had passed, so people change relationships, people get safe in relationships,
and information can come out. That's the one thing that's good in a
cold case. Right time is your enemy and eventually becomes your friend. So
it is possible that that happened. It's possible that now that it's legal and
things have happened right that someone felt more confident. But it's also very possible
that someone saw that same newspaper or found this case on a Reddit thread,
or saw the Unsolved Mysteries case or whatever and decided that they're going to make
these phone calls. I don't know again, why Steve Brown was chosen.
I don't know why Donna Douan wouldn't just come forward and says it's me,
like, this is information that you need to know, right And if Judy
was really alive, surely you would be fighting to get more information to her
family, to get more information to authorities who could help bring this to rest.
Because we're talking about just saying someone's alive. That's a good thing.
You're not gonna get in trouble for that. Why would you hide any more
information from the family and the authorities. And what's interesting is we had all
these references to Nebraska and Omaha on these calls to Captain Sheer, but I
don't know if the calls actually originated from Omaha, Like, for all we
know, maybe they were calling from Florida and just making that up because I
don't think they had the technology to trace the calls back then. And I
don't know how likely it is that someone from Nebraska would have seen this Miami
Herald article which published in September of ninety nine, and learned about Juda's case.
But if someone in Florida just happened to see it, then maybe they
just made up this story and decided to pick up Omaha or mentioned Nebraska because
they knew Captain Shear had just been there and thought it might register. However,
it's also possible that the whole thing was orchestrated not by someone who had
direct involvement in Judy's disappearance, but by someone close to her. But by
someone close to her who was motivated to get the investigation reopened after seeing her
name in the papers, and since there was an all new team of investigators
working for the Coral Gables PD at this point, they wanted to do something
unique in order to plant the seeds about this case with them. Perhaps they
somehow found out that Captain Sheer was traveling to Nebraska for a lecture and decided
to come up with a very odd way to capture his attention by somehow tying
Judy's case to Omaha. Because even though Sheer hadn't heard of the case before,
the strange nature of the phone calls definitely got him intrigued enough to reopen
the investigation. If the caller's intention was to bring a forgotten cold case back
into the spotlight, then they certainly succeeded. But once again I have to
reiterate what an ass backwards way to do things. Even if someone did read
about Judy's case in the newspapers, what would compel them to impersonate a radio
host from over sixteen hundred miles away. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever
know the answers anyway. The mystery of the phone calls is such a jigsaw
puzzle that I'm afraid the victim in this story sometimes gets overlooked. Sadly,
I am about ninety nine percent certain that Judith Heimes died because of an abortion
gone wrong, and if the story had taken place a decade later, I'm
sure the circumstances of how she attempted to handle the situation would have been a
lot different. If she did wind up in bis Game Bay, they'll probably
never be able to recover her body, and since the police officially closed the
investigation following the anonymous letter, there really isn't much more they can do,
and less Judy was flat out murdered than the statute of limitations for whatever crimes
took place have long expired. But whatever the motive was for the phone calls,
at the very least they did rescue Judy's case from obscurity and gave her
story a bit more closure than it otherwise would of receipt. All that being
said, if you happen to know any information about the disappearance of Judith Hiames
which could provide more concrete answers about what actually happened to her, please contact
the appropriate authorities. But don't say Judy Hymes is alive and living in Omaha,
because that will just confuse everything. So Jules, actually, any final
thoughts on this case? You know, I have to really quick ask,
do you guys think because she was someone who was going for an abortion,
she was pregnant, and she was not married in nineteen sixty five, she
was divorced in nineteen sixty five, do you think there was a like she's
a lesser victim and that she wasn't give any initial attention because people didn't think
she was worthy of it. That is possible. I mean I looked through
the newspaper archives in her case did get a decent amount of coverage back in
the nineteen sixties, and they did seem to take it seriously that the State
Attorney's office looked into the investigation. They did try to bring in like Lucian
Gordon and George Hadju for questioning, but it just seems that after hawd you
fled the country, they didn't seem to have a vested interest in trying to
find him or doing anything else. So I guess it is possible that they
figured, well, we've done everything we can, but the abortion doctor is
gone. Nothing else we can do, and that's why she was forgotten about
for twenty four years. This case is really sad. I mean every case
we cover is I spoke about my own personal experience, and when Robin sent
this to me and I had to go through it, it was really heartbreaking
for me because I saw the parallels in my own life. You know,
I was dating someone who was a complete asshole at the time too, and
he was involved in a different capacity. But I very well could have seen
my situations spyraling into something that happened to Judith. And she had her whole
life ahead of her, and it sounded like her family was really supportive,
and I do not believe for a second that she ran away to start some
new life because of the stigma attached to abortion. It just doesn't sound like
that's the way that her family was. And even if she had done that,
the fact that she wouldn't have surfaced all of those years later, or
somewhere along the line, her resolve would have weakened, and she thought,
well, maybe my family won't be mad now. Just to believe that she
would be in Nebraska so many years later, the biggest conundrum to be is
who are these people in Nebraska? How do they have this information? And
I think Robin had brought up are I think one of us had brought up
that it had been written about in that article briefly referenced about abortion prior to
rov Wade and how it was a potential illegal abortion gone wrong. Yes,
somebody could have read that, but I also don't think that. It was
also pre internet at that time, so it wasn't like you're reading newspapers online,
so you'd think it would more be a It would more likely be a
local person who would read that, So somebody in Nebraska. It's just all
very confusing, But I do believe that the most likely confusion is that poor
Judith died in darkness on this dirty table of Haju, and he escaped without
having to pay for what he did. And all the while we've got Lucy
and Gordon, who was just really disappointing as a human being in the way
that he handled himself before and after Judith's disappearance. It is so sad to
me because again, when you have a missing person in nineteen sixty five,
right, we didn't even have the technology to try to network and link link
ideas and look at where she might be. Her family has no idea where
she is and what happened to her. And those are the cases for me
that I could not bear as a mother, as a sister, as a
friend to go, what if something's happening to her bad? What if she
is alive? Is that worse in certain ways? You know, if she's
alive, why would she not love me enough to call me? And then
also of my brain would go, there's no way she's alive. She's deceased.
And I don't even have the ability to go visit a grave site.
I can't go love on Judy and talk to her and she's safe, right,
And then her body is safe. And so all those things, to
me make these missing person cases so devastating, and Judy's seems so avoidable.
It sounds like Judy had so much going for her. All she needed was
someone to say, Oh, you're with someone who's not taking care of you,
you're with someone who's dangerous, You're with somebody who's not going to support
you. Judy didn't have many options, and Judy felt like, I'm just
going to ask people I trust. Remember, she reached out to doctors that
she trusted to help her, and we never heard from Judy again. So
it is devastating. I'm just heartbroken by it, and I wish, I
wish, I wish we could get some answers, even from our doctor and
hungry quote unquote doctor in hungry. I wish there had been a way to
get information from him, to say what really happened? Right, we can't
extradite you, we're not extraditing you, but what happened to her? And
sadly, I don't think we're ever going to know. Yeah, like I
said in our previous episode, that this case is the mystery involved in this
case, it's not the destination, it's the journey because the mystery itself is
pretty straightforward. It's more of a tragedy rather than a baffling cold case,
because it just seems obvious that Judy died on the operating table during the abortion
and the responsible parties covered it up. And like I just said, if
she had gotten pregnant just a couple of years later after ROVERSUS way, then
she wouldn't have had to take these measures, could have gotten the legal abortion,
and she never would have become a missing person and gone on living her
life, which is why this is just so sad. But of course,
the reason that this case became so memorable and was featured on US All Mysteries
is because of the strange phone calls, and I am inclined to believe that
whoever did them might have been someone who had knowledge about this case and just
had some sort of conscience. They wanted to reveal the truth about what happened
to Judy. They wanted the police to reopen the investigation. I mean,
I still don't know why they would use these methods by impersonating a radio host
in the ASCA, but whatever their intention was, it did work, because
if this hadn't happened, the case would have been forgotten about forever. It
never would have been on national television on Unsolved Mysteries, and we wouldn't be
talking about it on podcast today. So I consider this pretty much like a
solved unsolved mystery where I'm convinced I know what happened, but it's still It
is never complete when you don't have the victims remains and you don't know the
full truth about what happened. But I am glad that these phone calls took
place because at least Judith Hime's story could be remembered all these years later and
can also function as a cautionary tale about all the bad things that can happen
when abortion is not made available to women in her position. So I am
hoping that her family will receive justice someday. Robin, do you want to
tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon? Yes, The
Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and we offer these
standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers
and signed thank you cards to anyone who's signs up with us on Patreon if
you join our five dollar tier Tier two. We also offer monthly bonus episodes
in which I talk about cases which are not featured on The Trail Went Cold's
original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon and if you join our highest tier,
Tier three, the ten dollar Tier. One of the features we offer
is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsaw Mysteries, where you can
download an audio file and then root up the original Unsaw Mysteries episode on Amazon
Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background,
where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases featured in this episode.
And incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to download a commentary track
in which I make more smartass remarks about juwel kaylor than be sure to join
Tier three. So I want to let you know a little bit about the
Jewels and Ashley. Patreon, so there's early ad free episodes of The Path
Went Chili Got Our Path Went Chili minis, which are always over an hour,
so they're not very many, but they're just too short to turn into
a series, and we're really enjoying doing those, so we hope you'll check
out those patreons will link them in the show notes. So I want to
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You can email us at the pathwent Chili at gmail dot com. You can
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to bundle up because cold trails and chili pass call for warm clothing. Music
by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy