OR OR - Judy Reeder, 17, Bend, 1 Feb 1962

I couldn't find anything on this case at all. As far as I know, she is not on the Charley Project-all the info I could find comes from this article from the Bend Bulletin:



1 – Judy Reeder: Reeder was last seen the evening of Feb. 1, 1962 — the night before children playing in Drake Park found the body of the 17-year-old Bend High School homecoming princess under the footbridge in

4 inches of water.

Reeder had driven her ’55 Ford sedan downtown and parked along Riverside Boulevard at about 10 p.m. She was never seen alive again.

An autopsy showed she had been struck in the head 13 times, possibly with a two-by-four , but the murder weapon was never recovered.

Evidence at the scene showed that Reeder was dragged to an area near the rock retaining wall of the pond. Investigators never determined how she ended up in the water.

Plaster casts of tennis and hard-soled shoes were taken from the mud near her body.

Those who knew her best said Reeder had been depressed in the months leading up to her death and that her grades had been on the decline.

Reeder stood 5 feet 3 inches and had long brown hair and blue eyes. Police have interviewed more than 500 witnesses in the case, including a half-dozen former boyfriends, but have no solid leads.

Hi SG - I believe there may be mention of a Judi Reeder among the articles I posted for Mary Jo Templeton's thread.

Here's some I found just now:

Man falsely confesses to Judi's murder

Fifth anniversary of the murder

Picture of the bridge where she was found

Newspaper's rebuttal of police incompetence claim

Details of wounds

Police believe killer is local

Judi's funeral

Three major suspects, not enough evidence

Donald Ben Doran, fake confession ( ? )

1979 article on local murders, including Judi

Thanks!

Bend police still diving into decades-old cold cases

[snip]

It was February 1962 when two children discovered a 17-year-old, dead in Drake Park.

Judy Lee Reeder was a popular Bend High student and homecoming princess.

Police believe someone beat Reeder, then dumped her body in the water, leaving her to drown.

[snip]

Police cannot say if either cold case is closer to being solved.

"We cant say it's going to happen this year, next year, and that really, to me, doesn't matter," Carney said. "If it's 10 years from now, if we bring closure to the family and community, that's our job."

More: http://www.ktvz.com/news/bend-polic...ases/-/413192/20199522/-/jchyecz/-/index.html

scriptgirl said:

I couldn't find anything on this case at all. As far as I know, she is not on the Charley Project-all the info I could find comes from this article from the Bend Bulletin:



1 – Judy Reeder: Reeder was last seen the evening of Feb. 1, 1962 — the night before children playing in Drake Park found the body of the 17-year-old Bend High School homecoming princess under the footbridge in

4 inches of water.

Reeder had driven her ’55 Ford sedan downtown and parked along Riverside Boulevard at about 10 p.m. She was never seen alive again.

An autopsy showed she had been struck in the head 13 times, possibly with a two-by-four , but the murder weapon was never recovered.

Evidence at the scene showed that Reeder was dragged to an area near the rock retaining wall of the pond. Investigators never determined how she ended up in the water.

Plaster casts of tennis and hard-soled shoes were taken from the mud near her body.

Those who knew her best said Reeder had been depressed in the months leading up to her death and that her grades had been on the decline.

Reeder stood 5 feet 3 inches and had long brown hair and blue eyes. Police have interviewed more than 500 witnesses in the case, including a half-dozen former boyfriends, but have no solid leads.

Click to expand...

BBM: Charley Project is strictly for missing persons.

This sounds personal, like maybe a classmate (s) with a grudge?

scriptgirl said:

This sounds personal, like maybe a classmate (s) with a grudge?

Click to expand...

1962. A girl going to a local park at 10pm. Perhaps a school night.
Sounds like she was going there to meet someone.

Tennis shoes and hard shoes imprints. Like to know the sizes of the shoes, especially the tennis shoes to see if they were a woman's size.

scriptgirl said:

Police have interviewed more than 500 witnesses in the case, including a half-dozen former boyfriends, but have no solid leads.

Click to expand...

A 17 year old in 1962 with six former boyfriends?

A 17 year old girl going to a park at 10.00pm on a Thursday night in Oregon at the beginning of February? The highest the temperature reached that day was 45F but by 10.00pm it must have been more like 26F. I agree with :+:MrTT:+:, it seems very unlikely that she was going to meet someone she didn't know. Could it have been an ex-boyfriend/current boyfriend?

I wonder if the fact that her grades had been fallling and she had been depressed in the months leading up to the murder have any relevance. It sounds as if something had been going on in her personal life, perhaps trouble with a boy or friends.

"15 deep wounds, two severe skull fractures" -- and yet, she *lived* and may have been conscious through that severe beating... Poor child.

She took mid-week, late-night trip out to what was probably a popular 'lover's lane' or local teenage meeting-point (as was the bandstand in my home town)- was she lured there? As there's multiple shoeprints linked to the crime, I think it's likely (though it could have been looky-lous too scared to come forward.. but I'm going with 'multiple assailants for now).

One report says the attack began "a short distance from the bandstand" - which suggests again, to me, that she had gone there to meet someone. It was *cold* out there (ice on the river) and late. Somebody important to her, then... or something urgent..

The massive multiple head trauma wounds makes me think the killer was angry/panicking and wanted to make sure she was dead.. and yet, despite hitting and hitting Judy very hard indeed, they failed to kill her. Somebody young, I think, and inexperienced. I wonder if they continued attacking Judy down to the water's edge? Perhaps they came back later to make sure she was dead... If she was left for dead and managed to stumble away, as some reports suggest, what a shock that must have been for her killers.

Head wounds bleed a *LOT*, generally speaking. If her assailant/s were young and inexperienced with killing, I would hazard to guess that they were *covered* with blood spatter, muddy-footed, probably pale and very shaken, acting very oddly indeed afterwards. Somebody would *have to* know something... I can understand the police frustration there, the appeals for people to come forward.

This is based on the little info I presently have. Digging around for more might bring up facts which change my ideas.. but that's it for now.

Oh - and despite all the beaus, Judy was a virgin when she died.

Police thought a bicycle padlock could have been the murder weapon. They also were not ruling out a female killer.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=K1FYAAAAIBAJ&sjid=evcDAAAAIBAJ&dq=judi-reeder&pg=5949,4569894

The bridge/water's edge where Judy was found (I'm supposing, somewhere around where someone is standing, by the water's edge):

A bicycle padlock is an odd choice of murder weapon. Was this something the killer brought with them with the intention of murdering Judi? If so, then it's a strange choice of weapon to bludgeon someone to death with; why not grab a hammer instead?

Or was the bicycle padlock already in the park and grabbed as a spur of the moment thing? Again, a strange murder weapon...you wouldn't think a bicycle padlock would be conveniently lying in the park near to Judi and the murderer and the murderer surely wouldn't have had time to actually remove the padlock from a bike in the park.

I know the article said the bicycle padlock might have been the murder weapon. The fifth anniversary article (linked earlier in the thread) states that a club was the murder weapon.

A club suggests premeditation. A bicycle padlock does not.

As far as interviewing POI. I wonder how many teachers they interview. Could it have been possible, probably that she was having an affair with a teacher. Maybe she told him she was pregnant and wanted to keep the baby, whether true or not, and he was married?????..........Just thinking wayyyyyyyyyyy outside the box on another possible theory. But I would bet they didn't interview any teachers as a POI.....But maybe they did.

Ausgirl said she was a virgin when she died.

Also Row vs. Wade was not for another decade, so there were only backally abortions or sending her off to an all-girls home to have her baby while the family told people that she was visiting relatives.

Re the bicycle padlock -- I'm thinking, one of things with the lock on the end of a chain? Not such an unthinkable weapon, if your goal is primarily to give somebody a severe beating. It'd be a very teenage thing to do. I've seen (many many years ago, when we had inter-hick-town 'gang' wars) people take much stranger things to a fight.

I saw the report saying 'club'. But 'bicycle lock' is such a specific item, I don't think they just pulled that out of a hat. So there's some homework for me - try to find out what the deal was with that lock.

Coulda looked something like this:

Just some further thoughts..

I honestly think there's a good chance the killer was female. The police at the time were not discounting this. Judi (I believe the correct spelling is 'Judi' not 'Judy' as it's written in several reports) was not raped, not were her clothes in disarray to suggest a sexual motive. Judi was a pretty homecoming queen, who dated but did not have sex.. she also had very few close friends, according to reports, though she had a lot of acquaintances. I can see her being the kind of girl upon whom some other females might focus some pretty intense jealousy and maybe even rage, if she dated the 'wrong' boy...

I wish we knew whether the bike lock was still in evidence -- maybe there's some trace DNA on it, even after all these years.

It'd be so great to have some people who knew Judi turn up here. I would love to know if she was indeed the focus of 'cattiness'..

I almost suggested yesterday that perhaps it was a female classmate who was jealous of Judi. Although she apparently didn't have many close friends, she was clearly popular; she was Homecoming Queen, had had at least six boyfriends and had many acquaintances, who attended her funeral. It's easy to see how female classmates could have been jealous of her.

However the method was violent and I wonder whether a female would have carried out something like that. I find it unlikely that a female would have planned such a violent crime; I find it much more likely that a female would carry out a violent crime like this in a fit of rage but that then brings me back to the issue of where the murder weapon came from and whether there would have been a convenient weapon just lying around.

Females - teenaged ones - can and do carry out planned attacks. They also can and do bring weapons with them. Perhaps they didn't even mean to -kill- Judi, just knock her about a bit, teach her a 'lesson' but things got out of hand. If the lock was indeed the murder weapon, perhaps it was on a bike ridden to the scene of the attack? Perhaps there was more than one weapon? Multiple footprints found near her body could suggest more than one attacker - maybe a case of bullying gone haywire. From my experience with teenaged girls and bullying, they do like to gang up.

Not a hard and fast theory, of course, just thinking it's very possible. I wish we had some more details to work with here.

Sue A. Fountain has written a book about growing up in Bend, and marks Judi's murder as a turning point for the community. Review by Janet Stevens, another local woman:

http://www.bendbulletin.com/news/1263733-151/fountains-book-gets-at-the-old-bend-only#

Ausgirl said:

If the lock was indeed the murder weapon, perhaps it was on a bike ridden to the scene of the attack?

Click to expand...

I didn't even think of that - it's a definite possibility.

I completely believe that a girl, or girls, could have been capable of it; Bernadette Protti and Kirsten Costas, for example, or more recently the case of Skylar Neese. I went to an all-girls high school and some of the girls could be vicious, particularly when they get together.