Ed Judie made calls from jail seeking passport, $500k after arrest in wife’s murder, cops say
Edward Judie Jr., a former deputy superintendent of Bibb County public schools who was jailed last week on a murder charge in the alleged poisoning death of his wife, was denied bond Thursday after a prosecutor said Judie placed calls from the county jail trying to secure his passport and “hide” some $500,000 of his dead wife’s insurance proceeds.
The revelations emerged at an emergency bond hearing for Judie in the moments after his lawyer argued that Judie was not a flight risk.
In a small courtroom at the Bibb jail, Judie stood before a camera in a hearing conducted via videoconference as his lawyer, Gregory L. Bushway, described Judie as an upstanding former public servant and ex-Army Ranger who “has served his country valiantly.”
Speaking of the murder charge against Judie, Bushway said, “Mr. Judie denies the allegations in this case.”
But moments later, county prosecutor Sandra G. Matson argued against bond being set for Judie, contending that Judie “completely is” a flight risk because of things Judie has allegedly said in “several” recorded jailhouse telephone calls since his arrest.
Matson said Judie can be heard “advising people to help him secure his passport. ... He is also talking about committing an appraisal on a house to sell it to get money and cash. And he’s also (in the calls) referencing getting the life insurance proceeds from his deceased wife’s account to someone else, to get it out of his bank account into someone else’s to hide it.”
Matson said the insurance money amounted to about $500,000.
“We clearly think his own actions in the last three or four days upon his arrest show that he clearly is a flight risk,” she said, adding that alleged phone calls from jail about Judie securing a passport were “a clear indication that he could leave the country.”
As the prosecutor spoke, the gray-haired, gray-bearded Judie, dressed in an orange jumpsuit with spectacles tucked in a breast pocket, slowly shook his head.
Judie, 66, was arrested July 1 in the Nov. 29, 2019, death of his 60-year-old wife, Joyce Fox Judie, who sheriff’s investigators now contend died as a result of a “lethal dose of cocaine.”
An arrest warrant in the case states that Ed Judie poisoned his wife “by introducing into her system cocaine” and notes that Joyce Judie was at the time “being treated for dementia.”
Joyce Judie died at the couple’s home in the Barrington Hall subdivision on Macon’s northwest side. Investigators have said in a statement that Ed Judie had “purchased cocaine (the) same night” she died.
A decade ago, Ed Judie began about a four-year stint between 2011-15 as the county school system’s deputy superintendent of student affairs during the time that since-disgraced ex-superintendent Romain Dallemand took office.
Superior Court Judge Howard Z. Simms said word of such calls “concerns me greatly.”
Simms denied bond for Ed Judie but asked Matson to send him a copy of the recorded jail calls so that he could determine whether “there are other possible interpretations” of them. If so, the judge said, he might readdress the matter of bond.
This story was originally published July 8, 2021 at 1:58 PM.