Pod Insights Dark Downeast The Murder of Judith Lord (New Hampshire) About this episode Some cases linger for years not because the truth is hidden, but because the tools needed to prove it aren’t yet strong enough. Evidence waits on shelves, memories shift, and flawed forensic science can steer an investigation away from the person who seemed suspect from the start. This is one of those cases.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Kylie Low? There's something about being out in nature that makes the world feel a little quieter. But sometimes, even the most peaceful places have stories that refuse to stay hidden. That's what my friend Delia Diambra explores on Park Predators. Each week, she investigates true crime cases set against the world's most beautiful landscapes. Going beyond the headlines, Delia speaks with loved ones, digs through records, and sometimes visits the places where the stories unfolded. If you're ready to uncover the mysteries that linger beneath breathtaking scenery, listen to Park Predators every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:40 Kylie Low? Some cases linger for years, not because the truth is hidden, but because the tools needed to prove it aren't yet strong enough. Evidence waits on shelves, memories shift, and flawed forensic science can steer an investigation away from the person who seemed suspect from the start. This is one of those cases. This is a story about a young woman whose life was brutally taken and the decades that followed as investigators, family members, and forensic experts worked to overcome outdated science and finally confirm what so many had suspected all along. I'm Kylie Low, and this is the case of Judith Lord, on Dark Down East.
1:35 Speaker 01 Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us here today. I'm Attorney General John Formella, and we're here today to make an important announcement in a decades-old cold case.
1:45 Kylie Low? The room settled into a hush just before the announcement began. At the front of the packed space, the state's top officials stood shoulder to shoulder in a line of investigators whose careers spanned different eras of policing. Some had gray at their temples, while others were probably not even born yet when the case at the center of the press conference first broke. All were gathered for the same reason. After 50 years, New Hampshire authorities were finally ready to close the homicide investigation of Judith Judy Lord.
2:18 Kylie Low? Attorney General John Fromella stepped to the podium, greeted by the soft shuffle of cameras lifting into place. He thanked the crowd, then spoke plainly. "After five decades," he said, "they were here to announce the resolution of a case that had haunted a family and unsettled a community." Judy's relatives, including some of her surviving siblings, sat in the front row as officials acknowledged their loss and their patience. Her son, just a toddler when she was killed, listened in virtually. It was clear that the day belonged to Judy's family and to the many people who had refused to let her story slip from memory. The words "closure" and "truth" were used carefully, as if everyone in the room understood how fragile those promises can be.
3:03 Kylie Low? The case had traveled across generations of detectives and scientists. New techniques eventually met old evidence, and persistence had outlasted the obstacles that had once stopped the investigation cold. The wait for resolution was finally over, but what that resolution revealed was quietly devastating. The case could have been solved a lifetime ago. This story begins on an ordinary morning in the spring of 1975, when the quiet of a Concord apartment complex was broken by the sound of a crying child.
3:40 Kylie Low? It was 12:20 p.m. on May 20, 1975, and the operations manager of the Concord Gardens Apartments in Concord, New Hampshire, stood at the door of apartment 4 in Building 19, knocking for what felt like the umpteenth time. The tenant, 22-year-old Judith Judy Lord, was behind on her rent, and he had stopped by to collect it. Each knock was met with no response from the other side of the door, just the unmistakable sound of a baby crying. It carried through the apartment, thin and persistent, making it impossible to believe no one was home. But the door remained still, and no footsteps approached from within. Both the front and back doors were locked.
4:25 Kylie Low? With unease growing, the manager retrieved a spare key and let himself inside, guided less by the overdue rent and more by the child whose cries had gone on for hours. The apartment manager climbed the stairs towards the bedrooms and found the answer to why no one had come when he knocked. Judy's one-year-old son was safe in his crib in the adjoining room, but Judy herself lay lifeless in her bed, the scene revealing at once that something terribly violent had happened there. Judy was lying on her back in bed. A single unsmoked but crumpled cigarette rested on top of the bedspread. Beneath the bedding, she was nude, her face covered with a blue plastic sauna suit.
5:09 Kylie Low? Her bedroom told an unmistakable story of struggle. A mirror and lampshade had been knocked over. A green curtain appeared torn from the window. The bed had been pulled away from the wall. On the floor, an alarm clock lay where it had fallen, its hands frozen at 1:47, a silent marker of the chaos that had unfolded. And the first clue of when exactly the violence had taken place. In the bathroom, small details hinted at the moments before the attack. The toilet seat was left up. The clothes Judy was known to be wearing the night before, a pair of jeans and red underwear, were left on the bathroom floor. The New Hampshire State Police Forensic Lab processed the apartment the next day, May 21st, collecting an overwhelming amount of physical evidence.
5:55 Kylie Low? From Judy's room, technicians seized bedding, two towels from the floor, Judy's purse, and the blue plastic sauna suit. One of the towels, a purple one, was still damp, but showed hardened stain areas consistent with semen. The white towel beside it bore similar stains. Investigators theorized that because the towels were still wet, while the presumed semen stains had already dried, a sexual act likely occurred after someone, possibly Judy, showered and used the towels to dry off. As investigators continued processing the scene, they discovered five latent fingerprints on the front window of Judy's apartment.
6:36 Kylie Low? Their placement suggested someone had pushed or slid the window open from outside. Since the front and back doors were found locked, and no other signs of forced entry appeared, investigators concluded that the intruder likely entered through that window. Dr. Merritt Moon performed Judy's autopsy, beginning with a careful examination of her external injuries. He documented multiple scratch marks and abrasions on her face and neck, along with dried blood on the inside of her upper lip near the right corner of her mouth. Internally, Judy's injuries were textbook indicators of strangulation. She had hemorrhaging within the muscles and fascias of her neck, and small blood clots along the left side of her larynx.
7:18 Kylie Low? Dr. Moon also noted evidence suggesting the attacker may have held plastic material over Judy's nose and mouth with their left hand, a detail that aligned with the blue plastic sauna suit found covering her face at the scene. The physician observed what appeared to be semen within Judy's body, though did not specifically link this finding to the timing of the assault. The physician collected five hairs during the autopsy, one from her lower abdomen, a single stray hair from the palm side of her middle finger on her left hand, as well as three hairs from the bed sheet she was laying on. Other evidence collected as part of the autopsy included fingernail scrapings and vaginal fluid samples.
8:01 Kylie Low? By the time the scene work and autopsy were complete, investigators were left with a stark portrait of Judy's final moments. The violence was clear. What came next required stepping away from that bedroom and returning to the world Judy had been a part of just hours earlier to understand the routines she kept, the people she relied on, and the life she was trying to rebuild.
8:25 Kylie Low? Judy was one of 14 children, the 11th in the birth order. She was born in Maine on May 6, 1953, and grew up there before her family eventually relocated to New Hampshire during her teenage years. It was there that she met Gregory Lord. Judy started dating him in 1971 while he was home on leave from the military. Theirs was a young romance sparked in the brief windows when he returned from service. Two years later, on March 14, 1973, they got married, and Judy moved with Gregory to Germany where he was stationed. Their son was born in September of 1973, and Judy stepped into motherhood far from home.
9:07 Kylie Low? The family returned to New Hampshire in October of 1974 and settled into an apartment on Spring Street in Concord, trying to rebuild a sense of stability. A few months later, in late March of 1975, Judy and Gregory moved again, this time to the Concord Gardens Apartment Complex. Their new home was in Building 19, Apartment 4. It was a modest unit in a cluster of buildings where many of the neighbors knew one another by name. Judy made the best of it. She liked to sit on the front steps of the apartment with her guitar, strumming and singing while her son played in the grass. Other tenants would hear her voice drift across the courtyard as she made up songs on the spot, happy to provide a bit of entertainment and community for the people around her.
9:52 Kylie Low? But barely a month after moving in, the fragile calm of Judy's life shattered.
10:03 Speaker 02 Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that.
10:10 Speaker 03 Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.
10:12 Speaker 02 We don't just alert. We help stop crime before it starts. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime. SimpliSafe: Ahead of Crime in Real Time.
10:28 Speaker 04 Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.
10:34 Kylie Low? Every small town has a local legend. The house no one drives past after dark, or the woods that hold secrets. Every October, I like to add something a little more spooky to my playlist: stories that blur the line between what's imagined and what might be waiting in the dark. Full Body Chills returns with more strange coincidences, unsettling confessions, and stories where danger may be closer than it seems. Listen to Full Body Chills all October long, wherever you get your podcasts.
11:12 Kylie Low? On May 4th, 1975, Concord Police responded to Judy and Gregory's apartment to find Judy outside with visible injuries. She spoke to officers through swollen, black eyes and dried blood around her mouth, a painful lump rising on the back of her head. She told them that her husband had assaulted her after an argument. Gregory, who was 19 years old at the time, was arrested the following day on a simple assault warrant. He pleaded guilty and was fined $100. But this wasn't the first time Judy said she faced violence at Gregory's hands. She'd told family and friends about alleged domestic violence assault while they were living in Germany, but she never went to the police about those earlier incidents.
11:57 Kylie Low? After Gregory's conviction, their relationship and Judy's trust were too fractured to repair, so Gregory moved out of their shared apartment to his grandmother's apartment in the same complex, Building 20, Unit 1, just 200 feet away. He reportedly took the furniture with him when he left. Judy and their son remained behind with only a bed and a crib. That separation left Judy in a difficult spot. Stephen Pearlstein reports for the Concord Monitor that she had been working at McCurley's nursing home, but without reliable childcare, she could no longer keep her job. She quit and planned to apply for aid to families with dependent children, hoping the support would allow her to "provide for her son" while she figured out how to start over.
12:41 Kylie Low? Despite their estrangement, Judy still relied on Gregory for some things, and she was with him the day before her murder. Around 4:00 PM on the afternoon of May 19th, Judy picked up her son from her friend's house. The friend had been babysitting while Judy went with Gregory to the bank together so she could cash her final paycheck. Later that evening, Judy played volleyball out behind the apartment building with two other residents, including Linda Gable and another neighbor named Jeff. After the game, Judy and the neighbors went to Linda's apartment, immediately next door to Judy's unit, for coffee. Judy wanted to grab a few sodas from the fridge at her place, but she was nervous to go inside alone because she realized she left the back door unlocked, so she asked Jeff
13:26 Kylie Low? to check the place out for her first. After he gave her the all-clear, Judy picked up the soda, locked the back door, and went back to Linda's apartment to continue socializing with everyone. By 11:30 PM, Judy was ready to call it a night. She went back to her apartment, but just a few minutes later popped back into Linda's place to borrow a pair of shoes, before she was back home for good. Linda told police during an interview that sometime around midnight, she heard the shower running on the other side of the shared wall of her apartment with Judy's unit next door. Investigators spoke to other neighbors, who reported waking up to the sound of a woman screaming around 1:30 in the morning on May 20.
14:08 Kylie Low? One neighbor said she knew the voice was Judy's, and she could even hear Judy repeating, "Leave me alone," before the sound quieted. Another neighbor, a guy named Larry, said that the wall in his apartment bedroom shared a wall with Judy's apartment, and after the screaming stopped, he heard what he described as "the bed hitting against the wall," and he just assumed there was some sort of sexual activity going on.
14:34 Kylie Low? According to some of those neighbors who spoke with the news reporters at the time, it wasn't all that concerning or out of the ordinary to hear screaming around the Concord Gardens apartment community. That's why no one called the police. Once investigators understood the sounds and movements inside the apartment that night, their attention shifted to the person whose relationship with Judy had recently fractured in plain view. The first person they needed to rule in or out was her estranged husband, Gregory Lord. Given the recent history between them, Gregory became the first and most obvious suspect in Judy's murder. Just a month earlier, he had pleaded guilty to simple assault.
15:16 Kylie Low? With that incident still fresh in the memory of law enforcement, investigators naturally turned their attention to him. But almost immediately, complications emerged. Gregory had what appeared to be a solid alibi. He told police that on the day of the murder, he had gone fishing with his brother and returned to his grandmother's apartment where he was living at around 10:00 PM. He insisted he never left after that. His grandmother backed him up, telling investigators he had been home all night. Still, the proximity raised questions. Gregory's grandmother's apartment was only about 200 feet away from Judy's unit. Even without knowing every detail of the layout, to me, it is entirely possible Gregory
15:59 Kylie Low? could have slipped out unnoticed, crossed the short distance, and returned without drawing attention. Now Gregory did tell police that he went to Judy's apartment the next morning, planning to pick her up, but she didn't answer the door. He said he then left to go to court and pay a fine. But it was what Gregory said during an interview on the day of the murder that truly unsettled investigators. When asked whether he had been inside Judy's apartment recently, Gregory blurted out, quote, "What do you think? I strangled her and then [BLEEP] her while she was getting stiff? Do you think I'm some sort of [BLEEP] pervert?" End quote. No one had mentioned strangulation.
16:41 Kylie Low? In fact, no one outside of law enforcement knew how Judy had died, not even her family had been told yet. For Gregory to reference both strangulation and sexual assault unprompted was, to investigators, alarming and difficult to dismiss. A statement from a neighbor seemed to point in Gregory's direction as well. A man named Larry told police that during the early morning hours of May 20th, he heard Judy screaming through the shared wall and could even make out words. According to Larry, Judy yelled, "What are you doing here, Greg?" And, "No, Greg, no." Yet Larry's wife, who was in the same room with him, told investigators she heard screaming, but no names at all, only Judy's voice.
17:26 Kylie Low? Gregory underwent a physical examination so investigators could compare any injuries or physical characteristics to the wounds found on Judy's body. Notably, Gregory's fingernails were bitten extremely short, not extending past the tips of his fingers. His hands did not appear capable of leaving the long scratch marks found on Judy's face and neck. He also submitted to two polygraph tests. The first, conducted the day the murder was discovered, was inconclusive due to his emotional state. The second, administered two months later on July 30th, showed no deception. The lead investigator stated at the time that Gregory passed conclusively and that
18:08 Kylie Low? there was no reason to believe he was lying about what he did or did not know regarding the murder of his son's mother. Despite Gregory's disturbing choice of words during his interview, the evidence against him did not hold. He had a corroborated alibi. He reportedly passed the second polygraph. His hands did not resemble those that could have caused Judy's injuries. Now investigators didn't entirely eliminate him, but the focus on Gregory faded as attention shifted to others who lived just as close to Judy and who raised a different set of concerns. Judy's neighbor, Larry, had been one of the first people to offer a version of what he heard the night Judy was attacked.
18:53 Kylie Low? He told police he heard Judy yelling Gregory's name through the shared wall during the struggle, a claim that immediately sharpened suspicion toward her estranged husband. But Larry wasn't the most trustworthy of witnesses. When questioned under oath, Larry denied having any sort of sexual relationship with Judy. That denial didn't hold up for long. Judy's best friend and others had already told police that Larry, who was married, had in fact been having an affair with her. His dishonesty raised some eyebrows and even placed him on the list of potential suspects, but he didn't stay a serious suspect for long. He and his wife were both in their bedroom at the time of the attack, placing them together
19:37 Kylie Low? while the violence unfolded on the other side of the wall. None of the physical evidence collected in those early days pointed to him either, and investigators eventually ruled him out. But Larry's statements continued to shift over the years. In a later interview, he backed away from his original claim that Judy cried out Gregory's name. Instead, he said he might have actually heard someone else's voice that night, another tenant at the Concord Gardens Apartments, a man named Ernest Theodore Gable. And Ernest was already at the center of the investigation.
20:17 Speaker 02 Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that.
20:24 Speaker 03 Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.
20:26 Speaker 02 We don't just alert, we help stop crime before it starts. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime. SimpliSafe, ahead of crime, in real time.
20:42 Speaker 04 Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.
20:55 Kylie Low? If Gregory Lord was the obvious first suspect, 24-year-old Ernest Theodore Gable quickly emerged as the far more troubling one. Judy was afraid of Ernest. She had been for weeks. About 10 days before she was killed in the early hours of May 10, 1975, Judy woke around 2:00 a.m. to the sound of someone at her door. When she opened it, Ernest was standing there, asking if she wanted to party with him. I can only imagine what Judy's first thought was at the invitation. She was a single mother of a toddler, woken up in the middle of the night. Judy declined, closed the door, and went straight back to bed. Later that same day, Judy told her older sister
21:39 Kylie Low? that she was afraid to stay alone at the apartment, not only because of her abusive husband nearby, but because of their neighbor. She told her sister that the neighbor had made inappropriate comments about wanting to see her naked. Judy's coworkers had heard similar concerns. She told them a neighbor was making her uncomfortable, hanging around her windows and doors in ways that felt intrusive and unsettling. And Judy wasn't the only one talking about Ernest's attention towards her. Ernest himself had made comments to a friend about wanting to "make it" with the woman next door, which the friend took to mean Judy. Now Ernest was Linda's husband. Linda, who Judy had played volleyball with on the night of the murder.
22:23 Kylie Low? Judy even hung out inside Linda and Ernest's apartment after the volleyball game, but Ernest wasn't home at the time. A coworker had dropped him off outside the apartment complex between 12:45 and 12:50 a.m. Ernest first spoke to police on the day the murder was discovered. He walked investigators through his movements the night before, a shift at the Hazel Green Restaurant in Concord until about 8:20 p.m., some time in the lounge downstairs, then a visit to an apartment above the restaurant before returning to the lounge until last call at 12:30 a.m. His coworker confirmed that they left together around 12:35 a.m. Once he was dropped off, Ernest had roughly a 40-minute window
23:06 Kylie Low? that aligned almost perfectly with the estimated time of the murder. Ernest told police that as he stood at his front door, he heard someone scream. But he also saw some cats fighting and had been drinking, so he didn't make anything of the sounds. Ernest said he went inside, went upstairs, and was drifting off to sleep when he heard footsteps running up the stairs in Judy's apartment next door, and then a thud, as if someone had fallen. He said he fell asleep soon after. That was the story Ernest told, but the physical evidence told another.
23:42 Kylie Low? The FBI forensic laboratory determined that the five hairs removed from Judy's body and bed sheet were from someone of African-American descent. Ernest was African-American. And the five latent fingerprints found on Judy's front window, the likely point of entry? Those matched Ernest's fingerprints. Ernest claimed there was an innocent explanation for this. He first told police he had once entered Judy's apartment through the back window when she locked herself out. But when investigators pressed him, the story shifted. He then said that he and their neighbor Larry had once leaned on the windowsill to talk to women inside. He had nothing to offer about how his prints ended up on the glass itself.
24:24 Kylie Low? During this questioning, Ernest grew visibly nervous. He scratched at his ear and stomach so hard that he drew blood. And then he stopped cooperating with the investigation altogether. After that, Ernest's hands and nails drew special attention. During a physical inspection under a search warrant, investigators noted that his nails were "slightly longer than normal, long enough to have caused the scratches found on Judy's neck." As investigators dug deeper, Ernest's past came into view. He had a pattern of criminal behavior and violence that aligned disturbingly with what had happened to Judy.
25:04 Kylie Low? Ernest had prior arrests for breaking and entering in 1969 and again in 1971. The year before Judy's murder, he was arrested for providing false information relating to a firearm and for being a felon in possession of a dangerous weapon. Witness statements provided an even more chilling scope of Ernest's behavior. More than one former girlfriend told police that Ernest strangled them during sex, describing his preference for what an attorney general's report called, quote, "simulated rape," end quote. During the still-active investigation into Judy's murder in September of 1975, Ernest became the focus of another case involving an alleged sexual assault on a minor.
25:48 Kylie Low? A former roommate said that when the victim refused Ernest's advances, he strangled her and even described a specific plan to kill her using a plastic bag. The evidence stacked up against Ernest. From his violent past, to his disturbing statements about Judy, and the fear she expressed to her friends and family in the weeks leading up to the murder, he seemed a very likely suspect. And hello, those prints on the glass of Judy's front window matched Ernest. It was a strong case against him already, but something would have made it much stronger: physical, biological evidence.
26:28 Kylie Low? According to a New Hampshire Supreme Court document, because the hairs found on Judy's body were determined to be from a person of African-American descent, all of the residents matching that description at the apartment complex were asked to give samples of their hair, saliva, and blood for comparison. Ernest was the only one who refused. So prosecutors took a different approach, seeking a search warrant that would compel him to provide samples. In the mid-1970s, this was a unique strategy with some legal ambiguity. Contemporary Supreme Court decisions set the precedent that no one could be forced to give any body samples unless investigators could prove there was sufficient probable cause
27:10 Kylie Low? to arrest that person without having the biological samples first. With that, Ernest challenged the search warrant for his hair, blood, and saliva samples on the grounds that there was not enough probable cause for police to obtain them. They took the case all the way to the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The case was filed as the State of New Hampshire versus John Doe at the time, with records sealed from public view. But based on information contained in the now publicly available 1975 decision, it's clear that the case is referring to Ernest Gabel and the murder of Judy Lord. In December of 1975, the state's highest court ruled in favor of investigators,
27:54 Kylie Low? finding that there was probable cause to arrest and therefore probable cause to obtain the biological samples. Ernest had to provide those biological samples the very same day. But what could have and should have closed the case right then and there ended up throwing the entire investigation off course for half a century. In December of 1975, the FBI forensic laboratory analyzed Ernest's hair samples against the hairs recovered from the crime scene and from Judy's body. Using the then-standard microscopic hair comparison technique, FBI examiners concluded that the hairs were, quote, "microscopically different",
28:37 Kylie Low? and that the hairs found on Judy did not originate from Ernest Gabel, end quote.
28:44 Kylie Low? It was a devastating blow to the investigation. Prosecutors had been preparing to take Ernest off the streets, believing they had the right person for this violent crime. But in 1975, an FBI exclusion carried enormous weight. With the mismatched hairs, the case against him suddenly looked unstable, the kind of weakness a defense attorney could exploit in front of a jury. So Ernest walked free, and Judy's case went cold.
29:13 Kylie Low? After Judy's murder, Ernest began using an alias, Ernie Stanberry. His questionable and often criminal behavior didn't slow down. In October of 1975, he was arrested for possession of a controlled drug. In November of 1976, Ernest resurfaced at the Massachusetts home of his estranged wife, Linda. He asked to take their two daughters to dinner, and Linda refused. Ernest then returned with a police officer, who knew nothing about Ernest's history, but encouraged Linda to let the girls go. Ernest took his daughters and disappeared. A warrant was issued for kidnapping, but it seems he was never arrested on that charge.
29:56 Kylie Low? Linda didn't see her daughters again for 14 years. At some point, I want to learn a lot more about this case, but holy cow. And then, get this, on October 29, 1977, Ernest was arrested for murder in Illinois. But the charges were dismissed just one day short of a month later. When the New Hampshire Attorney General's office later tried to obtain records related to the arrest or the dismissal, they found nothing. His criminal activity continued into the next decade. Ernest was convicted of armed robbery in March of 1978, and he served time in an Illinois prison before apparently relocating to Los Angeles. There, throughout the mid-1980s,
30:41 Kylie Low? he was arrested multiple times for robbery, burglary, theft, forgery, and for use of or being under the influence of a controlled substance. Four decades after the FBI's exclusion, the case languished. Ernest moved on with his life of crime under a new name, while Judy's murder remained frozen in place, sealed behind the authority of the FBI forensic lab and 1970s standards of practice. Investigators retired, memories faded, and the box of evidence gathered in the first frantic days of the investigation was pushed further and further back on the shelves, waiting for a moment when science might finally catch up to the truth.
31:31 Speaker 02 Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that.
31:37 Speaker 03 Stop, this is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.
31:40 Speaker 02 We don't just alert, we help stop crime before it starts. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime. SimpliSafe, ahead of crime, in real time.
31:56 Speaker 04 Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.
32:09 Kylie Low? In 1977, an article headlined "Bag of Bones: Abandoned Love Seat" by Deborah DePaster describes the Concord Police Department's evidence room. It had become something of a catch-all for not only material from major crimes, but also abandoned items collected around town. Evidence from Judy's case was stored among early 1900s skeletal remains in a garbage bag, and bicycles, a single tire from a tractor-trailer truck found rolling down the street, an apparently abandoned outboard motor, an antique clock, and more. Judy's box sat quietly in the mix, waiting for the day when modern science could make
32:51 Kylie Low? more of what had been collected and finally tell the complete story of her murder. There had been plenty of physical evidence to work with in the case, at least by today's standards. But forensic science of 1975 wasn't capable of answering the questions the case demanded. In a February 1976 report, the vaginal fluid sample collected during the autopsy had gelled and could not be examined. The FBI forensic laboratory had been able to determine the possible race of the attacker based on the hairs, but ultimately concluded those hairs did not match the prime suspect based on microscopic difference. But some investigators were unwilling to let this case go untouched any longer. In 2003,
33:35 Kylie Low? Concord Police Detective Todd Flanagan reopened Judy's case, spurred by a motion filed in Merrimack County Superior Court for transcripts from the original investigation that brought renewed attention to it. Detective Flanagan reviewed the entire file, page by page, and decided to resubmit the physical evidence for forensic testing using contemporary techniques and technology. That cold case review and new analysis revealed something remarkable. The DNA from the semen and sperm on both towels at the scene showed a 1 in 6.5 million match to Ernest Gable's DNA. To be clear,
34:18 Kylie Low? this means there had been a DNA match in this case after it was reopened in 2003. But that didn't close the case. It begs the one-word question: Why? Well, because the DNA match wasn't enough to move the case forward, not while the FBI's 1975 conclusion that the hairs did not belong to Ernest remained a brick wall the case kept crashing into. The trouble with this case, the immovable roadblock that kept investigators from arresting Ernest in 1975, was the FBI's reliance on microscopic hair comparison, a technique now widely considered junk science.
35:02 Kylie Low? What had once carried enormous weight in courtrooms across the country has since been largely discredited as a reliable method for identifying a specific perpetrator. The shift in scientific understanding became unavoidable in 2015, when the US Department of Justice and the FBI publicly acknowledged that microscopic hair comparison had overstated matches in favor of the prosecution in more than 95% of reviewed cases. While the technique still has limited usefulness for determining species like human or animal hair, or broad characteristics such as texture or potential racial origin, it cannot be trusted to accurately include or exclude a specific individual.
35:45 Kylie Low? It is simply too unreliable for that purpose. It was within this evolved scientific landscape that contemporary investigators revisited Judy Lord's murder. They re-interviewed some of the investigators who had worked the case in 1975. Those seasoned detectives expressed what they had held on to for decades. They had always believed Ernest Gable was the culprit. He was, to them, the only true suspect. And they carried frustration and sorrow over the fact that they had not been able to arrest him despite the overwhelming weight of the evidence. By 2025, with microscopic hair analysis firmly discarded as flawed science,
36:29 Kylie Low? the Attorney General's Office compiled decades of work: the original investigation, the 2003 cold case review, the DNA findings, and the re-interviewed testimony. Taken together, these findings allowed the state to officially and definitively conclude that Ernest Gable killed Judy Lord. The AG's office announced the closure during a press conference in November 2025. The closure of the case was not the result of a single dramatic breakthrough. As described in the Attorney General's 2025 closure report, it was instead the culmination of the evidence that had always existed, evidence that pointed squarely to Ernest, coupled with the scientific understanding developed slowly over years
37:14 Kylie Low? that microscopic hair analysis could not be trusted to exonerate him. The DNA match identified in 2003 had placed Ernest's semen at the scene of Judy's brutal murder, and nothing uncovered since had pointed to anyone else. Had Ernest still been alive, the AG's office would have pursued first-degree murder charges for knowingly causing Judy's death during the commission of aggravated felonious sexual assault, and for purposely causing her death by strangulation. But a trial will never come. Ernest Gable himself was murdered in Los Angeles on February 1, 1987, at 36 years old. He was stabbed once in the chest during an argument,
37:56 Kylie Low? possibly over money, and later died at the hospital. A suspect was arrested for his killing. The state's conclusion finally resolved the central question of who killed Judy Lord. Yet in doing so, it revived many of the other questions that had lingered in the shadows for decades. With Ernest identified and the case officially closed, investigators and Judy's family could finally confront the remaining loose ends, including the roles and suspicions once cast on others whose lives intersected with Judy's in those final days. The 2025 closure report from the New Hampshire Attorney General's office makes it clear that, early on, investigators believed Judy's estranged husband,
38:38 Kylie Low? Gregory Lord, was the prime suspect. Despite his alibi, and despite the condition of his hands immediately after the murder, the history of documented violence he inflicted on Judy, combined with his disturbing statements during an early interview, and his apparent knowledge of how she died, kept him under the shadow of suspicion for years. But once microscopic hair comparison was exposed as unreliable, and after DNA conclusively identified Ernest Gable as the person who left semen at the scene during the window of Judy's fatal assault, the foundation of the case against Gregory collapsed. What had once seemed like powerful circumstantial evidence no longer held up. As it turns out, Gregory's early knowledge of Judy's injuries
39:21 Kylie Low? did not come from committing the murder at all, but from seeing the aftermath firsthand. Contemporary investigators discovered that before the crime scene was fully secured, but while officers were already on site, Gregory sprinted into the apartment and up to Judy's bedroom. It was almost certainly then that he saw her body, the plastic suit covering her head, the marks on her neck, and the state of the room. From that, he could have easily formed an accurate picture of what had been done to her. In fact, in Gregory's own statement, he said he saw police at the apartment, went over, let himself inside an unguarded door, and found Judy lying in bed. Officers asked him to leave shortly after.
40:05 Kylie Low? Now with modern testing, we know the truth. With the loose ends untangled, the case stands in its full clarity at last. But at the center of it all is not the science, not the suspects, nor the years of delay, but Judy Lord herself. Judy was kind, gentle, and expressive, someone who carried her guitar with her the way others might carry a purse, always ready to play music, always ready to lift the mood of whatever room or front stoop where she happened to be. She loved her son deeply and spoke often about the kind of mother she hoped to be, imagining a future with him that was stolen far too soon.
40:47 Kylie Low? Judy's sister Joanne still feels the weight of the loss even after 50 years. For her, the grief has never dulled into something simple or manageable. It remains anger at Judy's stolen future, sorrow for the milestones she never reached, and gratitude for the pieces of Judy that live on in family stories and memories. Judy was and remains irreplaceable in her family. Judy's son Gregory Jr. never had the chance to know his mother, yet her absence shaped him just as profoundly as her presence shaped others. He grew up hearing that he looked like his mom, a resemblance he carries with pride.
41:28 Kylie Low? In his darker moments, he says, he would think of her and draw strength from the idea of who she was and from the belief that she would have wanted him to keep going. For him, closure isn't about letting go, it's an acknowledgement that the truth matters, that persistence matters, and that remembering her is a way of giving her back a measure of the dignity she was denied. Judy was a daughter, a sister, a mother, a friend. She was not defined by the violence that ended her life, but by the love she created in it. Honoring her memory is what carried her family through half a century of uncertainty and what ultimately kept her story from fading, ensuring that Judy Lord will not be forgotten.
42:18 Kylie Low? Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Dark Down East. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Low and this is Dark Down East.
42:49 Kylie Low? Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and AudioChuck. I think Chuck would approve.
43:01 Speaker 05 If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly.
43:15 Speaker 06 They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him, violent. Backhanded him. Pow!
43:27 Speaker 07 Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Previous The Murder of John E. Volungis Jr. (Massachusetts) Next The Murder of Mary Monsell (Connecticut) Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated