Judy Bruce: Murdered in Her Second Act

Larry Bruce Goes Unpunished — But Only for Two Decades
(‘Soiled Plan,’ Forensic Files)

Stories about people who overcome obstacles a bit later in life offer hope to others. Such was the case with Judy Bruce, who had a severe speech impediment. It didn’t stop her from getting married or having children, but she stayed close to home and remained in the background socially.

Then, at age 34, the Ohio housewife had surgery that made her feel more comfortable going out and meeting new people.

Combined family. Unfortunately, the inspiration that husband Larry Bruce drew from Judy’s transformation was negative. With Judy able to speak more easily, she might get away from him and tell authorities about things he wanted to pretend never happened.

For this week, I looked for more details on Judy Bruce’s mysterious life. So let’s get going on the recap of “Soiled Plan” along with extra information from internet research.

Judy Ann Phillips came into the world in Bucyrus, Ohio on December 23, 1941, a daughter of Robert and Edna Phillips. She had varied siblings including one full brother named Robert Phillips, a half-brother, a stepbrother, and a stepsister, according to family obituaries. 

A set of twin sisters died at birth.

Odd sequence. Judy had a cleft palate, a common birth defect, but her parents didn’t get corrective surgery for her despite that it had long been available by the 1940s.

Somewhere along Judy’s trajectory, she met Larry Dean Bruce, a delivery driver two years her junior. He also came from Bucyrus.

Larry and Judy had a son together, LeRoy Harvey Bruce. Here’s where things get strange. Judy’s younger child, Melody Phillips, was described as Larry’s stepdaughter.

Not all bad. Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but Larry and Judy had been married for less than three years before her death, meaning that the couple had LeRoy circa 1965, and then Judy produced Melody with someone else around 1967 before getting officially hitched to Larry in the 1970s. (Not that there’s anything wrong with all that, but it’s unusual.)

The family lived on Lindaire Lane in Ontario, Ohio.

In some ways, the kids had a conventional childhood. During her Forensic Files appearance, Melody spoke of outdoorsy family fun like riding on pontoon boats on Charles Mill Lake.

Guerilla warfare. But there was also the physical abuse Larry inflicted on Judy, who was less than 5 feet tall and had a slight build.

She fought back as well as she could. According to court papers, Judy set Larry’s boat on fire and broke one of his fingers by throwing an ashtray at him. She once changed all the locks to the house, Gannett News Service reported.

Larry didn’t exactly make life at home any more peaceful by allowing Judy to find out that he accompanied Milena Davey, a former girlfriend, and Milena’s daughter on a school trip to Cedar Point, a popular amusement park in Sandusky.

A transformation. But amid all the tumult, something wonderful happened for Judy. The Ohio State Bureau of Vocational Rehabilitation in conjunction with the United Way paid for her to have surgery to repair her cleft palate in 1976.

After the operation, the United Way helped fund speech therapy for her.

“A new confident woman has emerged from the tiny, silent victim of cleft palate congenital defect,” the Mansfield News Journal wrote in a human-interest story about Judy.

Changes for the better. Judy could speak clearly and she felt more comfortable talking to people outside her family. She applied for a job for the first time in her life and ended up taking a position in housekeeping at Mansfield General Hospital. Soon, she got a driver’s license and started forming new friendships.

“I like working,” Judy told the paper. “I bought a car and the job helps pay the bills.”

But Judy only got a couple of years to enjoy her second act before the curtain came down.

Something’s not right. On the morning of November 2, 1978, Larry told the kids that Judy didn’t feel well. Melody, 11, glanced into the bedroom and saw Judy lying down with her face turned away from the door. Melody and LeRoy left for school on foot. Larry drove to work, waving to them as he cruised by.

Judy, 36, went missing that night.

Ontario Village police officer Ronald Dille searched for any strange tracks around the property but found none. No money or property was missing from the house, and Judy’s Mercury Bobcat remained in the garage. “My impression at the time was one of extreme suspicion,” police officer Denny Reid would recall at the trial.

“It appears that the only thing missing from the house was Mrs. Bruce and the clothes she was wearing,” investigator Scott Reinbolt would later tell Forensic Files. “Her car was still there. Her purse was still there. Her prescription drugs were still there.”

Suffocated. Later that day, a maintenance worker reported seeing a dead body in a dry creek bed at a local Girl Scouts campground. Police found a pajama-clad Judy Bruce wrapped in a blanket, which still had a sticker on it from a garage sale the Bruces once held. Larry allowed the police to search the house.

They found a little blood and urine on a blanket in the Bruces’ bedroom, but the DNA testing needed to identify it didn’t exist at that time. Police officers noticed parts of the mattress in the Bruces’ bedroom were soaked with urine.

A coroner determined that Judy had died of suffocation, which causes the bladder to empty. But there was no urine at the dumping site. Police believed someone killed her in one place and then took the body to the campground.

Another wife. Two days after Judy disappeared, her former co-worker James Isaac died in a traffic accident. In a classic Forensic Files red flag — shifting blame to somebody else (Tim Permenter, Bill Lipscomb) — Larry said that Isaac, age 22, had been having an affair with Judy and that perhaps Isaac killed her and then committed suicide via automobile.

That theory didn’t get any traction.

Judy Bruce’s murder case turned cold.

Larry went on with his life. He married Milena Davey in 1981 and moved her into the same house he once shared with Judy.

Starting around 1983, Larry spent a year in prison for the sexual battery of stepdaughter Melody Phillips (more on that in a minute). Milena divorced him in 1984.

Second look. But, back in those days before Google and the national sex offender registry, Larry managed to put some shade on his terrible crimes against Melody. He snagged another wife, a woman named Jill. At some point, Larry moved to 126 Buckeye Road in Mansfield.

He continued his existence undisturbed until 2000, when Richland County established its Unsolved Homicide Unit, funded with $25,000 from the local government and headed by Scott Reinbolt.

Investigators from the unit took a new look at Judy’s murder as their first case. They didn’t exactly find a smoking gun, but they discovered smaller things that added up to a lot.

Troubled soles. LeRoy Bruce told investigators that Larry had burned a bed sheet shortly after Judy disappeared; Larry said the dog had an accident on it. (Burning stuff, another red flag, Ken Otto.)

Former co-workers at Roadway Trucking remembered hearing Larry brag about knowing how to commit the perfect murder.

Larry’s shoes, which police had hung onto since 1978, had traces of calcium carbonate. The material is found in the limestone gravel used to pave some streets, including Walker Lake Road, situated next to the campground where Judy’s body turned up.

Special attachment. Infrared spectroscopy identified synthetic fibers from the death blanket as matching those from the trunk lining of Larry’s turquoise 1971 Cadillac.

On January 10, 2002, a Richland County grand jury indicted Larry for the murder of Judy Bruce.

Larry remained free on $100,000 bail on the condition that he wear an electronic monitoring device. The trial took place from May 14 to May 17, 2002.

Explosive information. It kicked off with the bombshell of Melody’s testimony that Larry had molested her repeatedly from ages 5 to 14. “If I wanted to go do something, he would tell me that I had to do something for him first,” she said in court.

According to the prosecution, Judy had once walked in on Larry when he was sexually abusing Melody. The couple had a horrible argument during which he took a swing at Judy but missed and hit his hand against the wall, breaking a bone in his arm.

The fact that Judy knew about the sexual abuse gave Larry a reason to silence her. She could use it in any upcoming divorce proceedings.

How the homicide happened. Some YouTube commenters criticized Judy for not reporting it to the police immediately. But the molestation started around 1972, long before the sexual abuse of children was discussed in school, at home, or in the media. And perhaps Judy herself suffered sexual abuse in her youth — she would have made an easy target — and thought of it as horrible behavior but not an actionable violation of the law.

Prosecutors made a case that Larry wanted Judy dead either to cover up the sex crimes or so that he could marry Milena Davey without the hassle of dividing up money and property in a divorce.

Investigators believed that, during the night, Larry killed Judy on their bed, causing urine to soak into the mattress. After the kids left for school, Larry quickly loaded Judy’s body into the trunk of his Cadillac. As he drove past his children, he made sure to wave goodbye as an alibi. He left Judy’s body in his parked car during his entire workday, then drove to the campground to dispose of it.

Curiously still. The prosecution took 40 minutes to lay out its case. Bob Castor and James J. Mayer portrayed Larry as a gambler, wife-beater, adulterer, and child molester.

The defense only filled up 90 seconds with its refutation, Gannett News Service reported. “Is this Unsolved Mysteries or unsolved homicides?” defense lawyer Steve Cockley said. “It’s built on a house of cards. Pull one card out of the bottom and it all falls down.”

LeRoy testified that the day of his mother’s disappearance, she lay motionless in bed when he entered the bedroom to ask his father to sign a school permission slip. Larry told him not to bother his mother because she was sick, but LeRoy had a second look and noticed she had boots on. LeRoy also said he heard the sounds of choking and medicine bottles being knocked over coming from his parents’ bedroom the night before Judy disappeared. But he thought his mother was simply getting up to find some medicine. Investigators alleged that what LeRoy heard were the sounds of Judy being asphyxiated and that Larry placed her in bed with her face away from the door to make it look as though she were just sleeping.

Two witnesses reported seeing a car similar to Larry’s in the vicinity of the campground on the night of the murder, according to court papers.

Brutal attack. Milena Davey served as a witness for the prosecution. Frank Myers, Judy’s uncle, testified that Larry had once said that Judy was hard to kill.

The trial got theatrical at times.

“In the summer of 1978, he grabbed this little woman with force and violence and pitched her down the basement stairs,” Mayer said while recounting instances of Larry’s violence.

Not noisy enough? Mayer called out the Cedar Point trip as the tipping point, when Judy decided to get out of the marriage.

“That man right there has escaped justice for 23½ years, but he is guilty,” Castor said. 

The defense team, consisting of James TyRee as well as Cockley, countered that, if someone tried to kill Judy in her bedroom, LeRoy would have heard louder noises because Judy had the gumption to fight back. TyRee also said that there shouldn’t have even been a trial — evidence was too old or had been lost and too many of the witnesses, including one of Judy’s brothers and her mother (then known as Edna Myers Leadingham), had died.

The defense presented no witnesses.

Capital punishment not happening. When the jury announced its guilty verdict, Larry’s mother, Annabelle Bruce, broke the silence in the courtroom by starting to sob. Outside, Jill Bruce and Larry’s brothers, Roger and Kenny, consoled Annabelle.

Melody later told Forensic Files that it had been hard for her to admit to herself that the sexual abuse really happened, but she was glad to see justice done.

Larry didn’t qualify for the death penalty because it wasn’t part of Ohio law when he murdered Judy. Instead, he got a sentence of 15 years to life.

In 2003, a three-judge panel rejected an appeal from Larry.

Inglorious end. Two years later, Forensic Files made a stir in the Mansfield area when it produced “Soiled Plan,” the episode about the case. The News Journal reported that Randy Bruce said he would be watching the show despite that he believed in his brother’s innocence. “I’ll probably even record it because [Larry] wants to see it, too,” Randy told the paper. “We go out and see him every two weeks.” 

Larry Bruce died at the age of 76 on April 23, 2020, while serving his sentence at Marion Correctional Institution. Newspapers didn’t give a cause of death, but the News Journal reported that it was unrelated to Covid.

Sadly, it looks as though Judy and Larry’s son has passed away as well. A 2022 obituary for Randy Bruce mentions the death of his nephew, LeRoy Bruce.

Melody Phillips, the only surviving member of the immediate family, has kept a low profile over the years.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

---

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube