The path from Kent State dorms Dunbar and Engleman is well lit, with street lights lining the path and only a few trees in the clearing, but this seemingly safe path was the same one Judy Martins allegedly walked before her May 24, 1978 disappearance.
On May 26, 22-year-old Judy was officially reported missing.
Two days prior, Judy attended an end-of-the-year party with remaining students on campus — mainly only resident assistants and Reserve Officers’ Training Corps members. Somewhere in the five-minute walk back to her dorm at 2:30 a.m., she disappeared.
Dressed up in a large, red wig over her normally dark, straightened hair, wearing a beige trench coat and carrying a white shoulder bag, Judy made her way to Engleman Hall, a dorm centered on the Kent Campus. None of those items were ever seen again either.
Judy was wearing contacts when she disappeared, and her glasses were found left behind in her dorm room, along with her wallet, books and cosmetics — something her younger sister Nancy Baer said she would never do.
“It was surreal,” Nancy said. “I can remember the phone call distinctively when my mother called me and said, ‘We can’t find Judy,’ and I was like, ‘What?’ She was just a reliable person, she wasn’t somebody that would have gone off on some tangent or trip or something and not told me.”
Judy’s disappearance shocked her family because they knew her as the reliable older sister her siblings could turn to, especially as an RA for her hall, Engleman, said Judy’s younger brother Steve Martins.
“It affected our family in ways that you can’t imagine, or maybe you can. It was … it just broke my dad’s heart and my mother’s, too, and they were just so hopeful that somebody would come forward, that we would hear something,” he said.
Once the missing person’s report was filed, the decade-long search began. Kent State police conducted search parties and suspect interviews, but all were deemed unsuccessful.
In 2013, former Record-Courier staff writer Dave O’Brien started looking into the case. His first related article titled “Mystery of vanished KSU student spans 35 years” included interviews with both the current and former police chief of Kent State police.
Former editor of the Record-Courier Roger Di Paolo assigned the story to Dave, knowing the cold case would interest him.
“I came to be sort of really enmeshed with the case and very interested in finding out what happened to a missing person, essentially,” Dave said.
His second article in 2018 was more personal. Dave interviewed Judy’s siblings Nancy and Steve.
After countless discussions with Nancy, Dave said they have a collective belief that Judy is most likely dead and are uncertain if she made it back to Engleman Hall, believing it possible she may not have ever left Dunbar Hall at all that night.
As to who committed the alleged crime, Dave thinks it’s unlikely a serial killer, as some previously theorized, and more likely a person with a stronger motive.
“It probably was not a stranger, probably somebody that she either knew or who lived in Kent at the time,” he said.
Given her reliable personality and intelligence, it was unlikely Judy would take off with a stranger willingly, Dave said.
“My personal theory is that someone she knew either grabbed her or, you know, we hear a lot of times in true crime that somebody made an advance, a sexual advance or a pass at someone that was rejected, denied or refused in some way,” he said. “That led to some sort of angry confrontation, fight, that then led to violence.”
Dave keeps a manila file folder filled with the police reports, given to him by Baer and Steve, and newspaper clippings from the first few years Judy was reported missing. The folder still smells of smoke, signaling the dated evidence of an almost 50-year-old case, when police stations still allowed lit cigarettes inside.
In the years following his initial articles, Dave has appeared on podcasts discussing what possibly could have happened to Judy and explaining why certain theories are not plausible.
At the time, Judy and her boyfriend of five years had just broken up. Investigators, the Martins family and Dave have questioned if he could have been involved, but Dave thinks the facts of that night ultimately disprove this theory.
“The likelihood of him going to Kent to see her on a weekend when she had plans to go away with friends and just showing up and doing some sort of violence to her is very, very unlikely,” Dave said.
Rather, someone on campus would have had easier access and a closer proximity to Judy. At the party with ROTC students and fellow RAs, Judy was last seen at Dunbar Hall, walking out of the party with two male attendees.
All the other women had left by then, according to Nancy, but she thinks how the night actually played out may have been different than the accounts during the initial investigation.
After a possible killing, Dave suspects someone could have put her body in one of Kent’s surrounding lakes.
One theory has arisen multiple times during Dave’s discussions with people who are involved in this case, he said. The pervasive rumor suggests Judy was dropped from an aircraft into a body of water.
“I think that’s an absolutely fascinating theory, but that also means there’s more than one person involved in this case,” he said.
Only eight years prior were the May 4 Kent State Shootings, where the Ohio National Guard infamously shot and killed four students at an anti-war protest. The subsequent press that followed was unrelenting for the university, which influenced how Kent was perceived.
The next time the National Guard was at the campus was to search for Judy.
In the Akron Beacon Journal interview, Judy siblings said they believe May 4 played a role in how the investigation turned out. The university’s reputation was already damaged, and attention to this case would only bring even more negative reactions
According to her siblings, Judy was perceived as a runaway by the Kent State police, which meant a lot less attention was placed on her case.
This assumption, combined with the avoidance of bad press for the university, meant Judy had an even lesser chance of being found.
In 2000, Nancy was informed by the university police that the files pertaining to Judy’s disappearance were disposed of; however, Baer was able to obtain files from the police department in Avon Lake, the Martins’ hometown.
Two years prior to this, Baer also received copies of the files from the university police, and has since given copies of those files to O’Brien.
Around 2015, the U.S. Marshal Services’ Cleveland district, under the direction of U.S. Marshal Peter Elliot, began to investigate her disappearance. The Martins siblings shared their files with the U.S. Marshal Services, but the papers were filled with redacted sections, hiding what may have been key information.
“There were a lot of redactions and a lot of blackouts, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Steve said. “It made it that much more difficult for someone like Pete, who’s pursuing the case all these years later.”
The redacted files were packed with records of false sightings leading to failed investigations by the Kent police. A few people in Northeast Ohio reported sightings of Judy – at a yard sale, hitchhiking to Mexico and as a hooker in Cleveland. None of these turned out to be true.
With advances in technology, the use of DNA in particular, O’Brien has become hopeful that Judy's disappearance will be solved, and continues to report on her disappearance as it approaches its 50th anniversary.
“I believe this case is solvable, so that’s why I tried as much as I can with the time that I have to bring more attention to,” he said.
The Martins’ parents have since died, never having found their daughter. Nancy said their parents were forever impacted by the loss of Judy.
“It wasn’t just losing my sister,” Nancy said. “It’s like we lost our whole family that day.”
Judy was described by her siblings as someone who lit up a room, easy to talk to and extremely empathetic. In her free time, she loved to draw and was proud of her artistic accomplishments. Today, these drawings hang framed in Nancy’s son’s house.
Dreaming of being a counselor one day, she hoped to be someone everyone could lean on and trust. In an article with The Kent Stater back in the ‘70s, Judy herself wrote that she hoped to succeed in this while being an RA for girls in Engleman.
“Watching friendships evolve and seeing a floor get along are high points for me,” Judy said. “If I can lessen stress and help resolve conflicts, yet trigger positive excperiences in the dorm, I feel I’ve accomplised something.”
Nancy and Steve remain hopeful that one day they will know what happened to their sister as they continue to urge people with information to contact the U.S. Marshals at 1-866-4WANTED.
“You have to keep hope, you know, you just do … you just do,” Nancy said. “If she came back tomorrow, I can say, ‘We never stopped looking, we never gave up on you, you’re still a part of our family.’”
