She Vanished In Philadelphia: Months Later, She Was Found Dead In The North Carolina Woods, Wearing Entirely New Clothes
Nearly 30 years later, the murder of a woman who ended up in another state still has law enforcement perplexed.
In April 1997, Judy Smith tagged along on her husband’s business trip in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On April 10, she told him that she would be going sightseeing while he was at his business conference.
However, she would never return. Her body was discovered months later, over 600 miles from where she was last seen.
She was found in North Carolina, wearing entirely new clothing—a hiking outfit and a backpack. She had been murdered.
Judy Smith was born on December 15, 1946, in Hyannis, Massachusetts. She put herself through college and became a home healthcare nurse.
By 1986, Judy had been divorced twice. She had two adult children from her second marriage and worked as a caregiver for a patient recovering from throat surgery.
This was how she met Jeffrey Smith, who was the son of the patient. They soon began dating and took things slowly. Finally, they married in the fall of 1996.
Jeffrey Smith was a legal representative for the Northeast Pharmaceutical Conference, which took place from April 9 to April 11, 1997.
Judy decided to come along. It was the first trip they had ever taken together. After the conference, they planned to meet up with friends in New Jersey before heading home to Massachusetts.
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On April 10, Judy told her husband that she wanted to spend the day sightseeing in Philadelphia and visiting tourist attractions.
They agreed to meet up in their hotel room around 5:30 p.m. so they could attend a cocktail party at 6 p.m. But when Jeffrey arrived at the hotel room, Judy wasn’t there. She wasn’t at the party, either.
He checked the room and the party several times throughout the night, but she never showed up. He called a cab to take him along the route of the tour buses, but didn’t see Judy anywhere. He tried to file a missing persons report with the police, but was dismissed because she hadn’t been missing for 24 hours yet.
So, Jeffrey went to the mayor of Philadelphia and the former Pennsylvania House Representative, who were at the conference, and got them to open up an investigation.
Witnesses came forward to report sightings of Judy. One woman working as a cashier at a mall claimed that Judy was trying to buy clothes for her daughter, Amy. She made a joke that her daughter never liked the clothes she bought, a detail that Amy later confirmed to be true.
Another witness claimed to have seen Judy at a Greyhound bus terminal on the day she disappeared. A local homeless man also believed that Judy had slept next to him on a bench one night. Other accounts described Judy as disoriented and confused. She appeared not to know what she was doing and made strange comments.
Police even considered the possibility that Judy was going through a mid-life crisis and wanted to leave Jeffrey to start over. But it didn’t make sense for her to leave her children behind.
Then, in September 1997, five months after her disappearance, a father and son who had been hunting in Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina found her body. Most of her skeleton was wrapped in a blue blanket and buried in a shallow grave under a tree.
Found on or near her body were $167 in cash, some clothes, a blue and black backpack, a pair of sunglasses, and a wedding ring. Authorities determined that Judy had been stabbed to death, either by a stranger or someone she knew from North Carolina.
Some have theorized that Gary Michael Hilton was responsible since he was known as “The National Forest Serial Killer.” However, no evidence was found to link him to the crime.
In 2005, Jeffrey died without ever learning who murdered his wife or how she ended up 600 miles away. Judy’s case is still open and unsolved.
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