202. Looks Like You Can't Alibi Stupid - Judy Moilanen's Idiotic Murder

Just The Tip-Sters: True Crime Podcast

November 29, 1992 was the very last day of Hunting Season in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where 35 year-old Judy Moilanen, her husband Bruce and young daughter Elise were visiting Judy’s parents in the small town of Ontonagon, right on the banks of Lake Superior. Seeing it was the last day of the season to do so, Bruce, along with a larger hunting party, headed out looking for deer to hunt. Judy decided to walk the five dogs currently in the house – her four Springer spaniels and her parents’ one. Once the hunting party reassembled and got back to the house, Judy was nowhere to be found. When Judy’s parents’ dog returned without Judy and her four dogs, concern grew. As the afternoon grew late, the friends broke into small groups to go look for Judy – and her mother, Mary Ann, and a friend soon discovered the four missing dogs at the edge of the woods – and quickly thereafter, Judy’s body, shot once in what appeared to be a hunting accident. A bullet had passed right through her somewhere into the surrounding ground that law enforcement could not initially locate – but even with the missing bullet, the initial assumption was that a terrible accident had occurred. But some things about the incident seemed out of place – and while the initial consensus was that Judy was accidentally shot by a deer hunter because she was not wearing appropriately colored clothing to alert hunters of her presence, a very attentive coroner and some inquisitive, unstoppable Sheriff’s detectives saw some big inconsistencies – not the least of which was the fact that the wooded area was too close to residential houses for hunters to be present. And then forensic evidence – the most important of which was found by a civilian who became obsessed with finding the missing bulletand who eventually located it in the most unusual way – started pointing directly at Bruce Moilanen. And it was Bruce himself, with a series of some of the most boneheaded moves in the history of murder suspects, who seemed to insist upon pointing the finger at himself. He almost immediately began pursuing local women with tactics as clumsy as they were preposterous. And when he finally confessed, his reasons were both hilariously stupid – and mind-numbingly, tragically horrid. Join Melissa as she uncovers some of the lesser known facts of this often-recounted case – and marvel at the callousness and outright bumbling, unthinking arrogance that so needlessly ended a life and orphaned a little girl – all for nothing.