Ex cop staged a car crash to cover up wife’s murder
Jamie Baldwin’s history in law enforcement made him the perfect killer…
Judy suffered a head injury
The festive season had got Judy Orr Baldwin feeling all nostalgic – in early December 2016, she posted a picture of herself with her husband James ‘Jamie’ Baldwin, reminiscing about their first Christmas together five years earlier.
I love you more than you could imagine, she wrote. I love you more, Jamie had replied.
In 2011, Judy,
53, had become a widow after losing her first husband Todd in a motorcycle accident.
They’d been married 20 years, with two sons, Chris and Josh, and Judy was heartbroken.
She belonged to the Caroline Thunder Christian Motorcycle Club, and that’s where she met Jamie, a former police officer for the York Police Department in South Carolina.
He was also a dispatcher for the Chester County Sheriff’s Office.
It was Judy’s second chance at love.
They’d married eight months after they’d met, lived in Chester, South Carolina, with Judy’s son Chris a few doors away.
Five years in, she was still posting on social media about how happy they were, but those close to Judy questioned whether everything was OK at home.
Judy’s sons noticed her walking on eggshells around her husband.
Judy confided in a friend that he was getting a bit too close to a woman at the motorcycle club.
But to the outside world, she seemed happy.
Until tragedy struck.
On 14 December, Jamie made a 911 call from a rural road near his home to report that he and his wife had been in a car accident.
‘I need help…my wife… she’s bleeding,’ he cried.
The dispatcher asked whether Judy was trapped in the vehicle.
‘No ma’am, it threw her out,’ he told her.
As emergency services rushed to the scene, Jamie was told to try CPR, and he said he already had with no avail.
When the ambulance arrived, it was clear that Judy had been badly injured – she was unresponsive and had a head wound.
It was a 24cm skull fracture, and when Judy arrived at hospital, it would prove fatal.
When Jamie explained what had happened, Judy’s death seemed more heartbreaking.
Jamie said they had been at home and Judy was hanging Christmas decorations.
At 4ft 11in, he said she was using a ladder to reach the upper part of the tree. Jamie described going to the garage, and when he returned, Judy was on the floor bleeding from a head wound. He assumed the ladder had toppled, sending Judy to fall and hit her head on the mantlepiece on the way down. He said he’d tried to clean up his wife’s injury as there was a lot of blood, blood but realising how serious it was, he’d helped her into his Jeep and drove her towards the Piedmont Medical Center.
On the way, Jamie said a car had come into their lane and forced their Jeep down into an embankment under a bridge.
Judy had somehow been thrown out of the vehicle. Her loved ones were heartbroken and confused by her death.
Judy hated being up a ladder, so it was an extremely unusual action.
Judy spoke to her sons every day – so why hadn’t she called Chris who was a few houses away to say what was going on?
When they saw where their mum had fallen, they were shocked by the amount of blood there was.
Why hadn’t Jamie called 911 from the house?
There was also a closer hospital than the one that Jamie was heading to – just two minutes away.
The police department didn’t consider it to be a suspicious death, so the house wasn’t processed as though it was a crime scene.
The ladder would eventually go missing, and not enough
evidence was taken.
Some blood was high up in the room – it was thought the ladder might have been staged.
There was a data recorder in Jamie’s Jeep which said that he had been in control of the vehicle before it crashed.
There was also a clear tyre mark at the scene that wasn’t conclusive to a car losing control like Jamie had described.
The coroner wasn’t convinced that Judy’s head injury was consistent with a car crash, tried to get an outside agency to look into her death.
With Jamie’s police background, he had the capacity to cover up a crime with an accident.
Had he done something terrible to Judy?
But Jamie insisted that their marriage was going well.
‘It was about as perfect as it gets,’ he told officers.
Just months after Judy’s death, Jamie moved in with Teri King, a woman he knew from the motorcycle club.
Judy’s sons recalled that she had been at the hospital the night their mum had died – he’d called her and not them.
Jamie insisted it was a purely platonic relationship and he was renting a room off Teri because he couldn’t afford to keep his house. But despite them both saying there was nothing sexual between them, Judy’s friends remembered that she had been suspicious about their relationship.
Jamie posted pictures on social media of himself and his motorcycles – but didn’t linger on the tragedy that had befallen his wife.
I’m hanging in there, he replied to a comment in September 2017.
Eventually, a campaign by the coroner and Judy’s family saw the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) take over the investigation.
They reviewed the case and came up with a new theory about what had happened.
They believed that Jamie had beaten his wife at home, then faked the car crash afterwards to try and cover it up.
With his experience working for the police, he would have known the right things to do.
When a SLED crime scene specialist analysed the crime scene again, they found that blood was all the way up the wall and high up, which suggested that something swung upwards. Jamie was interviewed by SLED and went over his story again, recalling the night his wife had died and how he’d found her by the fireplace on the floor.
‘Her head was bleeding… bleedin there was blood all over,’ he said.
Jamie said his wife was conscious and talking on the way to the hospital.
‘The last words she said to me was ‘I love you’,’ he told them.
Some medical experts insisted there was no way that Judy could have been talking with a head injury as severe as hers.
In August 2018, Jamie was arrested and charged with murder.
He was free on bond for an unrelated case in which he was accused of burning down a woman’s mobile home and collecting insurance money in 2017.
At the trial in
2019, three years after Judy’s death, the prosecution maintained that Jamie had attacked Judy at their home, and when he realised it didn’t look realistic enough to say she’d fallen off the ladder, he staged the accident.
And for an experienced police dispatcher, he’d made some rather suspicious decisions that night.
‘He didn’t call 911,’ the prosecutor told the court.
‘He didn’t call her son, who lives right across the street, didn’t call any one from her family to tell them he was taking their mum to the hospital, or that there was blood everywhere.’
Jamie’s defence said that Judy had fallen off the ladder while decorating the Christmas tree.
They said Jamie had been knocked unconscious during the crash, and somehow Judy had ended up outside, having been thrown from the Jeep.
Both sides had medical experts testifying both arguments that Judy’s head injuries could have been from the crash – and that Judy’s head injuries couldn’t have been caused by the crash.
What was agreed on was that the effort to collect evidence at the crime scene was woeful and many details were overlooked – the investigation was not conducted in the way that it should have been.
When it came to a motive, the prosecution said that Jamie had ‘lost control of his life and his ability to do the things that he wanted to do.’
They talked about his relationship with Teri King.
Had Judy confronted him about a possible affair?
The prosecutor said text messages proved that Jamie and Teri were more than just friends.
They were texting one another back and forth forth. Boy, you make me happy, I miss you you, one of the messages read. In November 2019, the jury deliberated for just over two hours and Jamie, now 60, was found guilty of his wife’s murder. He was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole. Judy’s loved ones had worked tirelessly to get justice for her, her and finally, her killer was behind bars. Nothing that happened to Judy that fateful night was an accident.
It was all part of a deadly plan.
There was blood high up on the wall