A young mother is strangled \u0026 suffocated to death On a spring evening in 1975, Judy Lord, a 22-year-old Caucasian female, enjoyed a volleyball game with others in a common area of the Royal Gardens apartment complex in Concord, New Hampshire. At about 10:30 p.m. on May 19th, she left the game and, after having a soda with a neighbor, returned to the apartment she shared with her seventeen-month-old son, Gregory.
Sometime in the early morning hours, neighbors reportedly heard a scream from the vicinity of her apartment, but no one alerted the police.
The following day, May 20, an employee of the apartment complex went to Judy's apartment around 12:30 p.m. to collect the weekly rent. When no one answered his knocks, he grew concerned as he could hear a child crying inside. Using a spare key to enter, he made a gruesome discovery. Judy Lord was found dead in a second-floor bedroom. An autopsy would later reveal she had been raped, strangled, and suffocated. Her young son was found unharmed in the apartment.
Investigators spent more than two days meticulously processing the apartment for evidence, and over the years, they conducted numerous interviews with friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. The investigation revealed no signs of a forced entry into the apartment. Police looked into several individuals, including Judy's ex-husband and a few other potential suspects. One individual, a neighbor named Earnest Stanberry, emerged as a prime suspect. Judy had previously told co-workers she was afraid of Stanberry and reported an incident where he had entered her apartment weeks before her death. Investigators found his fingerprints on her window, and hairs similar to his were discovered on the bedsheets.
Despite the physical evidence and the identification of a prime suspect, no arrests have ever been made in Judy Lord's murder. The case grew colder when Earnest Stanberry was reportedly stabbed and killed in California in 1987. For decades, the homicide has remained one of Concord's most haunting unsolved cases, leaving a family without justice and a community with lingering questions about what happened in the Royal Gardens apartment on that tragic night.
