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I'm Kristen Sevey. This is Murder, She Told. Farmington Police Chief Raymond Orr was in over his head, and he knew it. He stood on Lincoln Street with his back to the late morning sun, staring at a mountain of decomposing sawdust. The pile loomed 25 feet high and sat on a large patch of marshy earth, about 60 feet long and 40 feet across.
His officers had cordoned off the street and were now carefully stepping around the weeds and brambles that had sprung up around the pile. The sawdust had sat abandoned for 20 years, refuse from the old corson mill that had been long out of business. This morning, following the discovery of the body, it was receiving more attention than it had in decades.
The chief thought back on his 42 years in the area, and he couldn't recall anything like this ever happening in his small town. This was Farmington, a rural college town of 5,500 people. He had grown up as a child in nearby J. Maine, and then went to high school in Wilton, less than 10 miles away.
After graduating, he spent four years in far-flung places in the Air Force, but then returned to the area, working in the region's construction industry for two years. Long enough for him to figure out that he didn't want to spend a lifetime working outdoors in the harsh New England elements. So he enrolled in the University of Maine in Orono and earned his undergraduate degree.
In 1958, at the age of 29, he applied for a job as a constable with the Farmington Village Corporation, a quasi-government business whose main responsibility was to keep the town in clean drinking water. At the time, it was the closest thing that Farmington had to a police department. "I was given a badge and a gun and told to enforce the law," he told the Morning Sentinel. It would be five years before he received any formal training.
Constable Orr campaigned for a proper police department with full-time staff, resources, and training, and he got his wish in 1967 when the town government approved the creation of the Farmington Police Department. He himself became the first chief of the fledgling department.
It was just in time, too. Farmington was growing. The local school, Farmington State College, became part of the University of Maine system just one year later in 1968. The expansion that followed meant new employment opportunities beyond the timber and construction trade, or toiling at one of the nearby wool, plastic, or woodworking factories.
It also meant a growing influx of young people, which came with it its own brand of trouble: hard drinking, loud parties, and vandalism. The usual shenanigans you could expect from a college town. Missing children, however, were not the norm for Farmington. There hadn't been a murder in 40 years. As the days wore on, he began preparing himself for the worst possible outcome.
The hammer dropped on the morning of Thursday, September 23rd, 1971, 13 days after 15-year-old Judy Hand had been reported missing. The area had already been scoured. Most of the town had. But a search party led by one of the state's game wardens did a second pass over this block. Lincoln Street was a short street, just two blocks in length on the edge of downtown Farmington.
Along it were a string of university dormitories and the fraternity house for Kappa Delta Chi. The street runs eastward, and most of the buildings were along the north side of the street. A few buildings sat on the south side, but it was mostly green with wild woods, and it overlooked a sloping grade down to a little creek called Beaver Brook. These woods were a place where teenagers might go to escape the watchful eyes of the town and sneak a smoke.
A handful of unofficial paths were worn into the woods by the town's youth. It was here that the abandoned sawdust pile from the old Corson Mill quietly rotted away. One member of the search party, a young deputy sheriff, was working his way through 50 feet of pucker brush to the pile. The ground and the pile were both wet and spongy. It was described as a swampy area by the Bangor Daily News.
At 9:12 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, September 23rd, 1971, Deputy Hemingway made a terrible discovery. He noticed an indentation in the pile and felt something was amiss. He used his foot to dig. He thought that somebody might have buried an animal. But when he revealed a garment of clothing the color blue, he knew what he had. Judy had last been seen wearing a blue blouse,
As he dug into the warm, moist sawdust, he began to reveal the body of a young woman who was clearly dead. She was partially clothed, wearing just her blue blouse and a ring. Later, when asked, he said he couldn't explain why he chose that spot to dig. But it wasn't the first time he had successfully found someone. Once, he had found the body of a man who died of exposure. Another time, he had found weapons buried in chicken litter in a murder case.
When asked if he was psychic, he replied, "I have a habit of finding things. I can't explain it." About 15 feet away, in another part of the sawdust pile, he found her buried clothing: shorts and a pair of black sneakers. Chief Orr had no doubt in his mind who it belonged to, even before he saw her. The search was over, but a new one was beginning. It was time to hand this over to the state police.
just as soon as he went to see the girl's mother. Lillian Hand was 42 years old in 1971 when she got the news that her daughter Judy was dead. It was a vicious blow to the entire Hand family. Lillian was married to Judy's dad, Edward Hand, and together they had 10 children in 13 years. Judy was number 4.
Raising a large family wasn't unusual for that time. It's called the baby boom for a reason. First, they had twins, Roger and Robert in 1952, and then Larry two years later. So when Judy, the first girl, came along in 1956, it was a breath of fresh air. Six more children followed. Four girls, one boy, and a fifth baby girl who died at birth. The nine kids fell into their own particular roles within the family.
Judy was the one who never caused trouble and helped to support the family. Judy's dad, Edward, had been ill for quite some time. Cancer had crept across his stomach and lungs, and he was losing a hopeless fight, painfully, day by day.
He had been out of work for some time. He could no longer work as a house painter. Lillian was grateful that her oldest boys, age 18 and 20 in 1971, still lived at home in the family's house on Middle Street. And Judy, of course, who could look after the little ones and help care for her father when Lillian went to work.
Even at 15, Judy was contributing financially to the household. Judy attended the 9th grade at Mount Blue Junior High School, just a short walk up the street from her house. In the early afternoons, when school let out, she often babysat for families around town. She worked for her mother's youngest brother, Roger Smith, and his wife, Rita. Uncle Roger and Aunt Rita had two girls, aged 2 and 3.
During the summer of 1971, Judy had even stayed with them to look after the girls and help her aunt, who was heavily pregnant with her third child. She enjoyed the extra space their house afforded her and spent the summer helping her aunt garden under the warm New England sun.
She was so bubbly and full of life, very content in her world, Aunt Rita would later recall. She was one of these people, I don't care how bad a mood you were in, one smile from her would bring you out of it. Judy was small for her age, only 4'11 by the time she was 15, and she still had some of her youthful baby fat that, with her dimples and a mop of blonde hair, made her look like an innocent cherub.
Though early reports described her eyes as blue, her mom corrected them. They were hazel. Judy Hand occupied a small corner of the world, but it was a corner that she made brighter for those around her. It was about 2:10 on Friday, September 10th, 1971, when Judy arrived home from school.
Her mother was readying herself for her shift at Forster's in the nearby town of Wilton. The manufacturing company made wooden products, including lawn games, clothespins, and ornate banisters. Lillian worked in the painting department, brushing stripes onto croquet sets in the afternoon and evenings.
That day, she was catching a ride to the factory with a friend. Since Judy would be babysitting in the afternoon for Barbara Haynes and her husband, who was part of her extended family and who lived in that direction, Lillian offered to have her friend drop her off as well, but her daughter declined. She had only just gotten back from school and wanted to savor the rare moment of relaxation before she needed to be responsible again.
Lillian said goodbye and left for her shift. She wasn't worried about Judy getting into trouble. The two-mile walk was one that her daughter knew well. Plus, it was right through the center of town, under the watchful eye of the community. Though it would take her 20 or 30 minutes, she was mature enough to get there on her own. It was a decision that Lillian would later regret.
Just before 3 p.m., Judy left her family's home on foot. It was a perfect Maine summer day, weather in the high 70s. The September sun dappled light on the pavement as she walked under the leafy canopies of trees lining Middle Street. She was walking west toward the Sandy River into the afternoon sun.
The days were getting shorter, but sunset wasn't for another four hours at 6.56 p.m. Judy wore a blue blouse and a pair of green shorts. If the evening turned chilly, her aunt could always drive her back or one of her brothers could pick her up. After-school child care was in constant demand in a town of second- and third-shift workers. Babysitting was a common way for responsible teenagers to earn some money.
As she made her way into the center of town, she greeted a girl from the neighborhood who was also on her way to babysit. Minutes later, Judy ran into another friend who walked with her into the downtown of Farmington, where Middle Street dead-ended into High Street at the American Legion Hall. The red brick building sat in the heart of the University of Maine campus. With fall term in session, the town must have felt active and vibrant.
In the days to come, when the interviews and witness statements and recollections were pieced together, the police would acknowledge this as the last definitive sighting of Judy alive, a small blonde girl dressed in summer clothes, standing on the street corner near the center of town.
Across the river and a short time later, Aunt Barbara was growing irritated. She had places to be, and every minute that ticked by was a minute closer to a tantrum. She had promised the kids that their cousin Judy was coming to play with them. She supposed all teenagers, even responsible ones like her niece, could be inconsiderate sometimes.
Judy had probably turned on a TV show or stopped to chat with friends and lost track of time. It was a mistake everyone made at some point, but she did feel a hint of concern beneath her annoyance. Her sister-in-law's oldest girl was reliable. A little before 4 p.m., Barbara called the Forster factory and asked for Lillian.
For Lily in hand, there was no hesitation. Her daughter had been trustworthy since she was a small child. If she hadn't made it to her babysitting appointment, it was time to be worried. She phoned her house and had one of her sons pick her up from the factory. They drove around Farmington and West Farmington looking for Judy. Following the path she would have taken to Barbara's house and asking for her at any building she may have stopped at along the way.
The sun had vanished under the horizon, and the Hand family was left in the growing darkness. Lillian was convinced that something had happened to her duty. At about a quarter past eight, Lillian called the Farmington PD. She would claim, later, that the police assured her that her daughter would turn up by Monday morning, just in time for classes at Mount Blue Junior High. Kids her age would skip town, blow off steam, and then come home.
Lillian recalled that the officers told her they couldn't do anything for 48 hours anyway, and she just had to wait. It was a hellish night for the Hand family. Judy was out there, possibly alone in the elements, or worse, and maybe with somebody who wished her harm. The waiting was particularly hard on her father, Edward, who was too sick to get out of bed, even though he desperately wanted to search for his daughter.
Hours passed in agony. The phone didn't ring. There was no shame-faced Judy walking through the door. Despite their initial reluctance, by Saturday morning, the family convinced the Farmington police to begin looking for the missing girl. They knocked on doors along Middle Street and the surrounding neighborhoods, asking residents if they were called seeing the girl.
Officers, firemen, and local volunteers walked the roads between High Street and West Farmington searching. At some point during the weekend, a portion of the Sandy River was dredged. The search party must have breathed a sigh of relief when nothing of consequence was pulled from its currents. Shopify's already taken the cash register online, helping millions sell billions around the world.
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On Monday morning, September 13th, there was still no sign of Judith Hand. School started at Mount Blue Junior High without her. She had been missing for three nights. Overnight lows were in the 40s. The Farmington police returned to her family's home to review the missing persons report.
While they were now taking the teenager's disappearance more seriously, Lillian had the sense that they still viewed her as a hysterical mother. She told them that she had the distinct feeling that something was very wrong, and, according to her, they were dismissive. She would later recall, "...they looked at me as if to say, What are you, nuts? No mother has that feeling."
Monday was also the day that Judy's disappearance hit the papers. The Morning Sentinel wrote, A local junior high school girl, Judith Hand, was reported missing Friday evening when she failed to report at a babysitting job in West Farmington. The piece was brief and buried on page 16 in the local Franklin County Town News, but its publication seemed to make Judy's absence more real. A teenage girl had disappeared in broad daylight in the center of town.
The following day, the Franklin Journal picked up the story, running Judy's picture beside the paper's local interest column from this corner. The author, Mickey McGuire, openly questioned the authorities' lack of action following the girl's disappearance and why it was taking so long for them to find her. On Friday the 17th, one week since Judy had vanished, the Morning Sentinel published a slim follow-up article with the header, Where Is Judy?,
They criticized the fact that police had not dispatched organized search groups from the moment she was reported missing. The unknown author praised neighbors, college students, and members of the community for jumping in to help search. The entire county, the article read, is sharing the anguish of the Hand family.
Lillian was beside herself. She kept her younger children home from school. There was no telling what they might hear, and she couldn't stand the thought of another child being out of her sight. Her older sons joined the search parties, dreading the moment they had to walk through the door with no news, or the worst news.
Fortunately, none of the Hand family was on the team that finally found Judy, nearly two weeks after her disappearance, in the sawdust pile off the end of Lincoln Street. They didn't have to see their sister's badly decomposed remains peeking from the decaying woodchips. It was a testament to the long hours and thorough work of the authorities that the search party had even revisited Lincoln Street.
Judy's body was so well hidden that it might have sat there for years unnoticed. Her body was only a quarter mile from where she was last seen on High Street. A little past noon, the authorities removed Judy from the scene. A waiting ambulance took her to Thayer Hospital in Waterville, about 45 minutes to the east, where her autopsy would take place.
Almost immediately, it was clear that the investigation was beyond the meager resources of the Farmington PD. Since the 1960s, homicides in Maine have been handled by the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit and prosecuted by the AG. The team assigned to Judy's case consisted of seven men, led by Detective Sergeant Gerald Boutilier, who was a veteran officer of 14 years, having joined the state police in 1957.
He and his men would receive support from their colleagues in Farmington and the Franklin County Sheriff's Office. The Maine State Attorney General's Office appointed Assistant AG Richard Cohen as the media liaison for the investigation. The day after Judy's body was discovered, he told the press that the deputy chief medical examiner who had conducted the autopsy said that no cause of death could be determined, nor could he assess whether she had been sexually assaulted.
Her body had simply been in the sawdust and the elements for too long. There were two heavy rains in the last two weeks that she was missing. Sheriff Dennis Pike would later recall in 2014, the sawdust was wet. That generates heat, speeding decomposition. One of the reporters asked Cohen if Judy's case shared any similarities with the unsolved Olenchuk murder.
Just over a year prior, 13-year-old Mary Olenchuk had gone missing while riding her bike near her family's Agunkwit summer home. Two weeks later, her decomposed body was found under a pile of hay in a barn in Kennebunk, another vacation hotspot. Mary had been strangled with a length of rope that was still around her neck when she was discovered.
The case received a lot of coverage, not only because violent crimes against children were rare in the seaside town, but because her father was a brigadier general in the army. There was only ever one lead, a tip that she might have been picked up by a younger, dark-haired man in a maroon-colored car.
The memory of Mary Olenchuk would have weighed heavily on Detective Sergeant Boutelier, as he was also the lead investigator on her case. The two crimes shared some remarkable similarities. Judy, who looked young for 15, would have appeared roughly the same age as Mary. Both disappeared in broad daylight after leaving their homes on foot. Both were found buried in relatively obscure locations under decomposing material.
Judy under sawdust, Mary under hay. The murders occurred over 100 miles apart. Could they be the work of the same predator? To Lillian, it was hard to believe. Outside of the family, her daughter was almost painfully shy. Very unlikely to talk to strangers, let alone accept a ride with someone she didn't know.
Both killings predated DNA technology, and the state of the girl's remains left little physical evidence. In Judy's case, the authorities' most valuable resources were the memories of those who saw her last.
They canvassed the area, interviewed her friends and family, and visited the stores she may have passed that day. Judy would have made her way down Middle Street straight through the heart of downtown and the university campus. The two girls that Judy had met up with earlier on the walk confirmed that she had made it at least as far as the Legion Hall at the corner of Middle and High Street. From there, her steps became less clear.
One unnamed witness claimed that they saw her around 3 p.m. near the Ingalls School at 144 High Street. This was not along the most direct route to her aunt's home, but it wasn't a big diversion either, only about 200 feet from her route. It had been reported by the mainstay police that she had one errand to run before heading to her aunt's. She had to pick up some money she was owed for babysitting from another client, who has never been identified.
That could explain the reason she was spotted off the most direct route to her aunts.
No one recalled seeing the teenager on the bridge that crossed the Sandy River, which separated Farmington from West Farmington. On a busy September afternoon, surely someone would have remembered passing a young blonde girl hugging the sidewalk of the bridge. It seemed to the investigation that Judy had not walked much further than the area near High and Middle Streets where she was last seen.
So how did Judy vanish from the center of town on a busy Friday afternoon in the early fall? One way would have been in a car. But Lillian found it unlikely Judy would have gotten in a car with someone she didn't know. But what if it were someone she did know? Perhaps he didn't even mean to kill her. Perhaps in the midst of assaulting Judy, her attacker smothered her. Or in a panic that they might be overheard, strangled her.
Then there was the matter of what to do with her body. If her attacker was local, then they would have known about the sawdust pile that had been abandoned for years. Perhaps they took her body there under the cover of darkness later that Friday night. But that would be a risky choice, to move her body from the trunk of a vehicle parked on a downtown street and then walk a few hundred feet into the woods. It's possible the assault took place there,
But how did Judy get down to the saw pile in the first place? Maybe the killer was a boy, a classmate that Judy trusted, and he lured her to the sawdust pile under the guise of having something cool to show her. Maybe a litter of kittens. She went willingly, and then things took a dark turn.
He smoothed the surface of her shallow makeshift grave and walked away. It was just a matter of waiting for nature to dispose of his problem and for the missing posters to tatter with age and fall from the telephone pole.
Detective Sergeant Boutilier and his team had one thing working in their favor. If the person who murdered Judy Hand was a local or even one of the students attending the university, they would feel the pressure. The whole of Farmington was outraged by the violence perpetrated against them. That, coupled with the imposing presence of the state homicide squad, the killer must have been feeling the probing eyes of everyone upon him.
On Monday, September 27th, four days after Judy's body had been discovered, the police questioned a man whose name has never been publicly disclosed. His narrative of the afternoon that Judy disappeared had some discrepancies, they thought, but ultimately, they had no reason to detain him. He agreed to take a polygraph two days later and was determined to be offering truthful answers.
While polygraphs weren't admissible in court by the 70s, they were, and still are, considered a useful investigative tool for interviewing suspects. A second suspect, also unnamed, was questioned by authorities in Augusta.
That person also agreed to take a polygraph. The results of this test were deemed inconclusive, but the police didn't feel that there was enough direct evidence connecting the suspect to Judy's death. So the authorities turned to an unusual resource to help them early in the investigation.
Kathleen Blaisdell, who went by the name Kaimora, was a professional psychic living in Rangeley, Maine. A lecturer and self-proclaimed healer, Kaimora conducted hundreds of de-hauntings in the U.S. during her career. She also occasionally assisted police departments throughout Maine until her passing in 2003. It's unclear who first reached out to Kaimora in the Judy Hand case.
In a 1997 interview, the psychic recalled that she told the investigators that Judy was definitely abducted and was held a day or two before she was killed. She added, "I was able to describe the house where the killer lived. It was somebody in the community. I could see this person, but then it was up to the police to prove it." We have no information about how much of an impact Kaimora's assistants had on the case.
Judy's family said goodbye to her in a private Baptist service on Sunday, September 25th, at the Adams Funeral Home on Court Street in Farmington. After the service, the family members moved on to Fairview Cemetery, a tidy green rectangle located a mile southeast of the town center. It's situated on High Street, the same street where she was last seen.
In the years that followed, when he helped park cars at the fairground each autumn, right across High Street from the cemetery, Roger Hand could see his sister's final resting place. It may have been a comfort to him, or a grim reminder of his family's loss, or perhaps a little bit of both.
The residents of Farmington were left without an outlet for their anger about what happened to Judy. Their sense of helplessness grew as each day ticked by without an arrest.
On the day of her funeral, the Morning Sentinel announced that members of the public had created a fund to offer the community of Farmington and the area an opportunity to express sympathy for Judy's tragic death. Readers were directed to leave contributions at First National Bank, or Mickey's Variety Store. Businesses, banks, churches, and schools were invited to contribute. Within four days, the fund had reached $3,000.
On the 1st of October, Mickey McGuire wrote a piece for the Franklin Journal titled, A Response to the Judy Hand Fund, in which he called on God-loving folks to donate. Two weeks later, the journal published a second call to action, urging readers to help the fund reach $5,000. It met the mark by 8 a.m. the following morning and climbed to about $5,600, or roughly $42,000 today.
Most of the money went to help Judy's parents, while a small portion was added for a reward fund for any information about her murder. Lillian and Edward used the money to cover the cost of Judy's funeral, and with the remainder, they repaired their well and purchased a new refrigerator. It was a great help.
But even more powerful was the message that it sent. The community stood with the Hand family, enveloping them with their love and support in a great time of need. I'm sending my brother money directly to his bank account in India because he's apparently too busy practicing his karaoke to go pick up cash. Thankfully, I can still send money his way. Direct to my bank account.
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Some families put floodlights in their backyards, and many parents refused to let their children walk around after dark or wait alone at a school bus stop. At the junior high school that Judy had attended, teachers stopped issuing detentions that would keep students late. One Mount Blue High School teacher told the press that they had given rides to several students who stayed after school, as their parents didn't want them walking alone under any circumstance.
One mother said, The murder has affected our family and friends to a great extent. Before it happened, we thought by living in a town like Farmington we were immune to that sort of thing. Now, we know we're not.
For Halloween, one month after Judy's death, several organizations collaborated to offer alternatives to traditional trick-or-treating for the town's youngest children. The Farmington Businessmen's Association held a Halloween-themed window-painting contest with prizes, urging parents to accompany their kids to participating stores.
The local Lions and Rotary Clubs, along with Mount Blue Junior High students, held a party at the community center for little kids through second grade. Other clubs, the high school and the university students, held other Halloween parties for the rest of the town's younger kids. It was a dark time, but the community adapted and looked out for one another, particularly the children.
In February, Judith's father, Edward Hand, passed away. After battling cancer and living through the death of his daughter, he was finally at rest. In early March, Chief Orr published a six-month update on Judy's case, which he presented with his annual report to the town council.
He wrote, I feel at this time I should remind the people of Farmington of the tragedy of the hand girl and ask again for any information or help that anyone can give. There is still a $5,000 reward being offered. I'd like to inform people that this tragedy has not been forgotten by police. He also stated that the Farmington and state police were still dedicating every spare moment to following up on leads and speaking to witnesses.
But with that said, the trail was growing cold. Going forward, only one full-time investigator from the state police would continue to work the case. The others had been reassigned. Judy's death would be the only murder in town during Chief Orr's time on the force, and it haunted him that the killer was never brought to justice.
In 1978, for an article commemorating his 20th anniversary on the force, he noted that, little short of confession is likely to solve this case at this late date. Judy's siblings grew up and started families of their own.
Lillian remained in Farmington, surrounded by her friends and family. Every fall, when the college kids returned to campus and the leaves began to change from green to red, the family was reminded that Judy's case remained unsolved, and her killer had never faced justice for taking her away from them.
By the fall of 1988, Judy's case was cold and was only occasionally reviewed. But in late September of that year, Farmington police officer Dennis Pike was watching the news and saw a segment about a man being jailed in Connecticut, who is being questioned in connection with the death of Mary Olenchuk, the girl murdered in Kennebunk the year before Judy died.
The program brought up the old question of whether the two girls had been killed by the same person. There was also a fleeting mention that at least two people had confessed to Judy's murder over the past 17 years, both of which turned out to be false. Seeing the segment reignited a spark in Officer Pike, and he brought the case up for review by the Farmington PD and the state police.
In October of 88, Stephen McCausland, public information officer for the state police, shared that there was new evidence in Judy's case and that the investigation was reopened. Farmington Police Sergeant Nolan Wilcox, now the lead officer, refused to confirm whether the evidence was based on the arrest of the man in Connecticut, but said that they would be following up on new leads and conducting interviews based on the information they now had.
Three state police detectives traveled to Farmington to work on the case. Meanwhile, the Morning Sentinel published a retrospective and reached out to Lillian for comment. Judy's mother told a reporter that it was deeply painful to remember that period of time, but it would be worth it if the renewed interest produced results.
It's been hard, she said. You wonder if the killer is right near you. But Judy had been put to rest. And to dig her up again like this, it's hard for all of us. Lillian was still angry about the Farmington PD's slow response to her initial report when Judy went missing. If they had gone out that night while the trail was still fresh, they might have found her alive. Or if not alive, they might have found the person who killed her.
G4 had now retired from the force, but was serving as chairman of Farmington's Board of Selectmen. He defended the department's actions, saying, 48 hours is the usual procedure. You write it down and you put it out over the radio, but you don't mount a search, because they generally show up. This is the one that didn't.
In November, the Maine State Police Captain told the media that while the case was still being worked on, the new evidence had not proven fruitful. That said, the police were reviewing the original case files and had identified lingering questions from early in the investigation that weren't properly answered and interviews that weren't as thorough as they could have been. They continued working on the case.
But by the spring of 1989, the investigation had once again slowed to a stop. In 1997, Maine State Police Detective Mark Lopez told a reporter, "I think at this point to solve the case would be almost short of a miracle, an act of conscience or something as sensational as a deathbed confession. How do we know the killer is even alive? We might be looking for a ghost."
In 2001, there were some articles that surfaced that mentioned Judy in connection to a couple of nefarious characters, a father and son duo that had done some bad things. Raymond Trimmer, the father, and Raymond Parsons, the son, were both arrested for the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Massachusetts in 1972.
The son was convicted for it and served a long sentence at Bridgewater State Hospital. He was still incarcerated in 2001 when he implicated his father in some unsolved crimes in New York.
Authorities took his statement seriously and started investigating the father for the crimes. This inspired a multi-state task force to take a closer look at the father's movement over the years to see if he could be connected to any other unsolved cases. One of those cases was Judith Hand. The son was 15 years old when Judy was killed in 1971. The father was 38. It seems that they were both free at the time.
While it is possible that one or both of them could have been involved, there is nothing to connect them to the case that I'm aware of. There are no reports that they were in Farmington at that time, nor did they seem to have any connections to Farmington. The son didn't implicate him in Judy's case specifically, and more importantly, the other crimes were in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York, not Maine.
Other than these guys being serial offenders, nothing else appears to connect them to Judy. When Lillian Hand passed away in 2013, she was pre-deceased by three of her children. Victoria, the baby who died at birth, Roger, one of the twins, who had lost his battle to diabetes six years prior, and Judy. Her third son, Larry, told the local paper that he believed his mother learned in death what she could never find out in life.
Now, she's up there with her. She said then that she would know. And I think she does now." There have been multiple articles and TV segments over the years that have turned over Judy's case, inspected it seems, and tried to find some piece of evidence that was missed or a witness who was never interviewed. Without DNA and with memories waning and relatives passing on, her murder may remain a mystery.
From time to time, a member of the state police, the Franklin County Sheriff's Department, or the Farmington PD will express their remorse at never having solved the case, never bringing peace to the family.
Judith Hand is fading. Her childhood predated the digital age, and the only public photo of her is the cherubic yearbook photo that has circulated among law enforcement agencies and the media for decades. I would absolutely love to see more photos of her. The articles all refer to her shyness and her reliability even as a young child.
But that tells us nothing about her dreams, her quirks, the things that made her laugh and annoyed her, all the parts that make up a person. Those reside only in the memories of her loved ones. We tried to reach her many surviving siblings, but were unable to. To the Hand family, if you're listening, I'm still interested to speak with you and learn more about Judy. But for now, I'll leave you with some comments made on a Facebook post about the case.
From a classmate: "I went to Mt. Blue with her. Judy was the most friendliest person you could ever meet. Such a sweet girl." From a friend: "Judy was the kindest person I knew. Even though it's been 40+ years, she touched us all." From her future sister-in-law: "I hadn't known Judy long, but she made me feel like I belonged with Roger. I miss her too. Farmington Fair is always a reminder."
and from her sister, Patricia. Thank you, everyone, for caring about my sister. If you have any information about the murder of Judith Hand, I encourage you to call the Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit South at 207-624-7076, extension 9.
Thank you so much for listening. A detailed list of sources and photos from this episode and more can be found at MurderSheTold.com. If you want to support the show, there's a link in the show notes with options. You can find Murder She Told on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
Thank you to Morgan Hamilton for her writing, Byron Willis for his research and writing support, and to Samantha Coulthart, Amanda Connolly, and Sam Wood for their research support. If you have a case suggestion or a correction or you just want to say hi, you can email me at hellowhatmurdershetold.com. My hope is that I've kept the memories of your loved ones alive. I'm Kristen Sevey. Thank you for listening.