Murder in Woodstock

Motherhood

According to a statement Jon Baker later read in court, Judy had an insatiable appetite for sports. She loved being outdoors, soaking up the sun, riding her bike, running, or just working around the house. "Judy was a champion body builder," Jon told the court, "long distance cyclist, runner, wonderful cook, avid gardener, and enthusiastically jumped in to designing and building with her own hands ..."

Jon and Judy had purchased their Woodstock property when it was, according to Jon, "a shell of a home ..." Judy had never worked on a house before. But, like "most everything else she took on," Jon said, she soon grabbed a hammer and started banging sheet rock against the walls "as well as any contractor." All of it, insisted Jon, brought out an energetic shade of Judy's lovable character: in whatever she did Judy gave one hundred percent and wasn't afraid to take on new responsibilities. "I can't tell you," Jon added that day in court, "the number of times she would stand in the middle of our unfinished house and say, 'I love our home.'"

Woodstock Middle School

Beyond being a sounding board for students as a social worker and caring deeply about every kid she worked with at Woodstock Middle School, Judy was an exceptional mother to Jon's children, he said. "It would be a mistake," he wrote to the court, "not to mention what a great mother Judy was ... always there for the children and [she] never missed an academic, musical, or athletic event—and there were many over the years."

One aspect of Judy's life that State Police did not yet know as they began searching for her was that Judy had recently been involved with the State's Attorney's Office in Danielson, working with state's attorney Patricia Froehlich in particular. There was a problem at the school, a sexual abuse case involving a child. Judy was a witness. She was helping the State's Attorney's Office build its case. "I remember that discussion over the dinner table," Jon told the court, "...and how furious Judy was at what had happened to the child." What truly inflamed Judy was that within it all, "this child," Jon added, "was somehow being blamed for what happened to her." For Judy, this was "bureaucracy" at work: she had "no tolerance for abuse," less so when it was seemingly allowed to continue under the umbra of a system that failed to protect the children.