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 thank you all for listening, and any chance you have to share us on social media with a friend or to rate and review is greatly appreciate it.
You can email us at the pathwent Chili at gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwin. So until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold trails and chili pass call for warm clothing. Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy