MA v. Judy Church

Judy Church spent thirty-one years teaching fourth grade in Massachusetts. Then the Commonwealth accused her of murder. Prosecutors in Essex County charged the retired teacher with a single count of first-degree murder in the death of Leroy Fowler, the 55-year-old man she lived with in Salisbury, a relationship she told police went back to 2012. The State alleged that Church put ethylene glycol, the toxic compound found in antifreeze, into the Powerade that Fowler drank every day. He was hospitalized on November 11, 2022, and died two days later at a Boston hospital after the poison destroyed his kidneys. Church pleaded not guilty and was held without bail from her December 2022 arrest all the way to trial, more than three years in a cell before a juror heard a word.

The trial centered on evidence the State said turned a suspicion into a case. Investigators said they found thirteen videos on Church's phone showing Fowler in medical distress while she recorded rather than called for help, and prosecutors alleged she waited roughly thirty minutes before dialing 911. They pointed to a Powerade bottle pulled from the trash with orange residue, a de-icer container in the kitchen, and Church's own admission that she had joked about poisoning Fowler while the two watched true crime together. Family members told police about a life insurance policy and warnings Fowler had voiced before his death. But the fight underneath all of it was the toxicology. A private lab tested the samples that anchored the poisoning theory, then destroyed what remained before Church's defense could run its own tests. A judge denied the motion to suppress and let the results stand.

Justice Is A Process watched this one because it asked a hard question about a system that promises fairness. The Commonwealth built a poisoning case on lab results, then the physical material behind those results was gone before the defense could challenge it, and the court called that prejudice minimal. Church was presumed innocent, the burden sat entirely with the State, and twelve jurors were the ones who had to decide whether the proof cleared the bar. Whether the phone videos, the family accounts, and the disputed toxicology added up to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt was never ours to declare. It was theirs. The trial ended in a guilty verdict. The full coverage below follows the case from jury selection through the testimony and the rulings to that verdict.