This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
Half a century after 22-year-old Judith “Judy” Lord was sexually assaulted and strangled to death in her Concord Gardens apartment, the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit determined her killer was her next-door neighbor, Ernest Gable.
He was the prime suspect in the case, but a faulty hair sample analysis prevented investigators from bringing formal charges against him. The case sat cold for decades.
Gable has been dead since 1987, eliminating the possibility of any arrest or prosecution. For the family, though, the case is finally closed. If Gable were still alive, he would be charged with first-degree murder.
“I don’t remember my mother,” her son, Gregory Lord Jr., wrote in a statement shared at a press conference on Monday. He was 20 months old when Lord was killed. “I was young. I always keep her memory inside my heart. She will always be with me. I’m told I look just like my mom, and I’m proud of that. I’ve been through a lot in my life, and in the dark times, I’ve always thought of my mom.”
This resolution after five decades demonstrates that no cold case is closed until the truth is uncovered, said New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella at the press conference.
“The original Concord Police Department investigators showed extraordinary diligence, only to be thwarted by flawed forensic technology of the era,” he said. “We commend the Cold Case Unit, the Concord Police Department, and all of our partners for their commitment to resolving this case and correcting a historic injustice.”
Lord was found dead by the operations manager of Concord Gardens Apartments — now called Royal Gardens — during the afternoon of May 20, 1975. Coming to collect overdue rent, he had heard Lord’s baby boy crying inside and entered the apartment after no one answered when he knocked. The operations manager discovered Lord naked on the bed, a blue plastic covering on her face.
The scene showed signs of a struggle, from a curtain ripped from the wall, its rod broken, and a lamp shade askew, to an alarm clock strewn on the floor, the time stopped at 1:47.
She had been living in her unit for only a couple of months. Lord and her husband had moved into their building in March.
“In the brief time that Judith lived at the complex before her murder, she made many friends and was reportedly very popular within the community and among her neighbors, often seen playing her guitar on the front steps while her son played on the lawn,” the Cold Case Unit’s closure memo states.
Lord was the eleventh child of fourteen. She grew up in Maine before her family relocated to New Hampshire, where she met Gregory Lord when he was home on military leave. She relocated to Germany, where she bore a son. The couple moved to Concord a year before her death.
Lord’s husband, Gregory, had physically assaulted her earlier in May 1975 and moved in with his grandmother across the road, taking all the furniture with him except for a bed and a crib. In the wake of this marital tumult, she decided to step away from her job at McKerley’s Nursing Home.
On the night of her murder, she had gone to a volleyball game at the apartment complex. Afterward, Lord and a couple of other neighbors went to the apartment that Gable shared with his wife, Linda, who hosted the gathering. Her husband was not there at the time.
The last time anyone besides Gable saw Lord was around 11:30 p.m. that evening when she left the apartment.
After Lord’s body was discovered the next day, around 12:30 p.m., some of her neighbors reported having heard screaming coming from inside her apartment in the middle of the night.
The night of the murder
Lord was afraid that Ernest Gable would hurt her, according to R. Christopher Knowles, chief of the Cold Case Unit and a senior assistant attorney general.
“She had voiced that to people even the day before her murder,” Knowles said. “She was telling people how she was afraid of him.”
Lord’s sister, among other witnesses, stated that Lord feared his repeated sexual passes at her. The closure report mentions someone who heard Gable say about Lord, “Some day I’m going to get me a piece of that white meat.”
The night of her murder, Lord asked a neighbor to walk her to her unit, which shared a wall with Gable’s apartment. She had left the door unlocked and said she felt worried for her safety. The neighbor checked inside and gave her the all-clear. Lord locked the door and returned to the gathering.
She went home for the night around 11:30. At approximately midnight, neighbors heard the sound of water running in the shower. Sometime right before 1 a.m., Gable arrived back at the apartment complex. Half an hour later, several residents woke to the sound of a woman screaming.
One neighbor reported hearing moaning and banging.
Another neighbor “positively identified the voice as Judith Lord’s and heard her yell ‘leave me alone, leave me alone’ before the sound was abruptly muffled, as if a hand had been placed over her mouth,” the report states. “The initial disturbance lasted for only a few minutes before silence returned.”
Analyzing forensic evidence
The physical evidence collected at the crime scene ultimately led to identifying Gable, 24 at the time, as the killer. Beyond the signs of disarray, two towels were found to have dried seminal fluid stains. The towels, at the foot of the bed, were still damp from Lord’s shower, indicating the fluid had come onto the towels afterwards.
Five hairs were discovered on Lord’s body and on the bed. The hairs were determined to have come from an individual of African American descent, aligning with Gable’s racial identity.
Lord’s bedroom window had five of Gable’s fingerprints on the outside, “consistent with pushing it open to gain entry,” according to the report.
The autopsy mentioned scratches on Lord’s face. Gable’s fingernails, “slightly longer than normal” as observed by investigators, fit the bill. Her husband, the other primary suspect, had nails that were bitten too short to leave such scratches.
Gregory Lord had an alibi that placed him at home with his grandmother the night his wife was killed. Ernest Gable, however, told the police a story that revealed stark inconsistencies.
Further evidence pointing to Gable indicated the semen came from a Type B or Type AB secretor. Gable fit the bill as Type B.
According to Knowles, the collection of DNA at a crime scene in the 1970s was cutting-edge, as DNA forensics did not become more commonplace until the 1980s.
Investigators had difficulty getting Gable to provide voluntary hair and blood samples to compare with those at the scene, leading to a landmark New Hampshire Supreme Court Case, State v. John Doe (who was Ernest Gable), resulting in the precedent of law enforcement being able to obtain DNA samples with a search warrant.
“Something that investigators do routinely every day in investigations, collect a sample, was made possible as part of the legacy of Judith Lord,” Knowles said.
Investigators had been prepared to arrest and charge Gable with killing Lord, but then Gable’s samples were sent to the FBI, whose findings threw a curveball at the whole investigation — according to a microscopic hair comparison, the hairs at the scene “did not originate” from Gable, per the report, which stated incorrectly that they were “microscopically different.”
With no other leads to pursue, the case went cold.
Closing the case
State investigator Todd Flanagan reopened the murder of Judith Lord in 2003. Modern DNA testing confirmed that the semen on both towels found in the bedroom was a “statistical match” to Gable’s DNA: 1 in 6.5 million within the population of African Americans.
In the decades since Lord’s murder, microscopic hair analysis has been found to provide flawed analysis. It involved a physical comparison of hair under a microscope.
“It usually involves the identification of the erroneous identification of an individual, but in this case, it involves the erroneous exclusion of the murderer,” Knowles said.
Scientific advances and the discrediting of this method of forensic investigation ultimately led to confirming what investigators 50 years ago had suspected to be true.
“In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in the FBI’s microscopic hair comparison unit had provided flawed testimony or reports that overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95% of the cases reviewed,” the closure report states. “The review included the work of Agent Mike Scholberg, the very examiner who analyzed the hairs in the Judith Lord case.”
The Cold Case Unit has identified Gable as the killer “based on the overwhelming evidence gathered,” as stated in a Monday press release.
He had a background of sexual violence, with multiple women detailing how he’d tried to strangle or kill them in other ways during non-consensual sexual acts. Gable also had a broad criminal history and was a known figure to the Concord Police Department at the time of Lord’s murder. He had previously been arrested for breaking and entering, possession of a dangerous weapon, and possession of drugs.
After killing Lord, he kidnapped his two daughters in Fall River, Massachusetts. Gable eventually moved to Illinois and California. He served time in Joliet, Illinois for armed robbery. He was killed at age 36, stabbed in the chest during a street argument in Los Angeles in 1987.
“If Ernest Gable was alive today, we’d be able to prosecute him,” Knowles said.
Even in cases where criminal proceedings aren’t possible, the Cold Case Unit strives to solve these crimes.
“It’s lived with the family and to give them closure, it’s what we strive to do, to tell them what happened,” Knowles said. “Closure, to family, to community, it’s the first step in the healing process.”
Joanne Buck, Lord’s sister, remembers her as a lover of music, recalling how Lord would play her guitar anywhere and everywhere she could.
“We lost someone that can never be replaced,” Buck shared in a written statement on Monday.
