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We’ve seen an influx of new members to the sub and one of the questions constantly being asked is “why is the knife I want still out of stock?” Longtime members, meanwhile, are more likely to ask why the same knife costs 30% more today than it did a year ago. These are good questions, but the answer is sufficiently complex that answering in a comment reply doesn’t give a full picture.
This writeup will aim to present that big picture. We’ll examine how we got here, the current state of affairs, and some predictions for the future.

https://preview.redd.it/owygjsf4tvg61.png?width=227&format=png&auto=webp&s=ea8f629779e8d1509658cbbf2841548dbe1ae458

Part I: Demand for high-end kitchen knives is increasing

It’s hard to nail down exactly why demand has increased. There are many underlying causes and yet each of them individually only goes so far. We’ll consider them in combination to understand the surge.

Online interest in knives is growing

Let’s begin close to home. Here at chefknives, we’re about to reach 100k subscribers. That’s a meteoric rise from a small following just four years ago. Here’s how that growth rate looks:

Growth in chefknives subscriber count 2015-present
For comparison, here’s that same growth trend compared to two subreddits with about the same subscriber count as of early 2018 (Delaware and Wildlife)

Subscriber growth of chefknives (blue) compared to Delaware and Wildlife (green and yellow). Source: subredditstats.com
If you look at growth rates across other kitchen knife communities you’ll see similar trends. More people than ever are talking about their favorite work cleaver, looking for an “upgrade” recommendation, or asking how to sharpen their grandpa’s vintage sabatier.
We need to be careful in recognizing that these trends play a part in overall growth in phenomena like Reddit, a revival in home cooking, and more. Yet even when compared against these background events, the surge in kitchen knives is remarkable. Reddit approximately doubled its subscribers and posts between 2018-2020. chefknives has doubled three times.

Home cooking was undergoing an early renaissance leading into 2020

It’s no longer the idyllic 1950s. As economic pressure and then cultural allowances pushed traditional gender roles into a more diverse working environment, the reality of the American kitchen became at once more egalitarian and less dedicated. Critics decried the decline of home meals as a loss of culture. More pragmatic Americans saw it as an economic reality.
Ultimately that means more of us in the kitchen out of choice. Nowadays it’s unlikely that Redditors here have (or are) a dedicated parent or spouse who stays at home and cooks all the meals. More likely is a sharing of labor in the kitchen; or, where couples take regular home tasks those chores are less likely to be gender-assigned. Furthermore, the amount of couples choosing to have children is trending downward as the age of first-time parents goes up. Fast food and other pre-fabricated meals are cheap and readily available for those who don’t feel like cooking. Working adults are therefore more likely to choose participation in home cooking than ever before.
Against this unique backdrop began a rebirth of cooking at home - Google Consumer Surveys from 2015 showed discovery search terms on the rise (“best recipes” saw 50% increases year-over-year) and online populations spending increased time researching recipes. Social media programming like Tasty, Binging with Babish, Laura in the Kitchen, and Maangchi took over our Facebook feeds and YouTube recommendations out of nowhere.

Source: Acosta research \"COVID-19: Reinventing How America Eats\"
And then, suddenly, home cooking became a necessity for us all. Restaurants closed and grocery stores faced massive supply chain issues shelving their most popular products. A population already casual fans of Bon Appetit and Beat Bobby Flay suddenly found themselves unexpectedly making fermented foods come alive and, while certainly not giving professional chefs a run for their money, then at least discovering their homemade chicken nuggets beat the hell out of Tyson’s frozen imitation.
Many of us saw 2020 turn our nascent interest into a favorite daily hobby. So, like the earlier run on toilet paper there began a run on high-end kitchen knives.

Entrenched brands are losing share in the high-end market

Until now I’ve delayed defining what high-end means. What exactly makes a high-end knife? We’re certainly not talking about $15 supermarket knives or the $30 indestructible house knife that line cooks use to chop parsley and open stubborn cans. Rather, we’re speaking of what somebody buys when they want to invest a little more. That’s the chef de commis who wants to start bringing their own knife to work or the home cook staring longingly through the glass front window of a Williams-Sonoma.
Unfortunately, once we get more specific about what a high end knife is, people tend to have wildly different standards.

I fully anticipate this will be the graphic people seize upon in the comments section, which is why I added descriptive text. That probably won't stop a few screeches about what high-end actually means but, eh, c'est la vie
I’m not going to bother saying where high-end knives begin, but for now let’s simplify to somewhere >=$100. This limits us to a handful of brands (at major retailers, at least) and comprises the vast majority of discussed lines here on the sub.
If we look at Internet search terms for high-end brands, we see people losing interest in established names that cannot prove their price to performance value. For example, let’s consider Google search rates associated with traditional German brands like “wusthof,” “henckels,” “messermeister,” etc.

source: Google Trends
All of these terms have seen a slow decline in search interest from 2007 onwards. In comparison, between 2014 and 2018 the interest in “gyuto” increased on average by 50% while more general cooking terms like “recipe” or “saucepan” have seen slow, steady increases.
Why are the traditional Solingen brands losing the interest of consumers? One theory is that knife designs are fads like clothing or trendy restaurants - a full-bolster Wüsthof and Nautica jacket may have been all the rage in the early 2000s, but interests simply change over time. If this theory is correct, the current “fad” of Japanese profiles, damascus cladding, Serbian chef knives, etc. are all temporary tastes which will give way to the next fad.
A related explanation is that the Red Queen hypothesis is at work - a theory from evolutionary biology that suggests adaptation is necessary just for survival. Indeed, many of the classic lines of these brands have changed little in the past years and certainly the main differences have been cosmetic. This explanation places blame for brand decline on the brand itself rather than consumer preferences. While unpleasant to point fingers, it’s worth exploring the other side of this coin to get a complete picture. In other words, let’s explore brands that are successfully adapting.

The high-end market is pivoting away from Europe and toward Japanese manufacturing

If consumers have a new standard in aesthetic and performance then how can existing brands stay relevant? Large household names like Zwilling, Victorinox, Wüsthof, Kai, and Messermeister have had varying success in introducing new knives in large western retailers. Focusing on the American retail space, we see that knives which successfully embrace the new consumer demand already own or else license pre-existing, non-Western manufacturing. Struggling brands, on the other hand, try to adapt Solingen practice to produce novel designs and the result ranges from “interesting interpretation” to “missed the point.”[1] [2] [3]
I won’t try to explain why Wüsthof hasn’t had luck making a competitive nakiri or why Messermeister allowed their awful “usuba” design past the concept phase. Suffice to say, the knives that western retailers are pivoting toward tend to be Japanese imports. This may be occasionally disguised by branding, but make no mistake that these are not German copies. Zwilling simply purchased a large manufacturer in Seki City; it becomes obvious when you put them side-by-side with the other Seki manufacturer sold at major American retailers.

Knife lines sold under a German and Japanese brand respectively.
Meanwhile, co-opting manufacturing (either by rebranding OEM knives or simply sourcing from the same supply chain) is not exactly a new concept. While this practice is less visible in major brands, it is prolific in the Japanese native market and within smaller retailers in the U.S. For example, take the first design from the Zwilling vs. Kai graphic above and see how it’s copied ad nauseum:

I'm not sure how many of these originate from the same knife blanks vs. different sources of steel that just happen to look very, very similar.
Okay - so what does this mean for Japanese and European manufacturers? For the Europeans, things are not looking good. Unless they somehow convince consumers that their performance to price ratio is going up (and this is a losing economic proposition at present), then major restructuring of their industry is on the horizon.
Meanwhile, the remaining question for Japanese manufacturers is twofold: (1) how do they compete against manufacturing in countries with even lower production cost bases and (2) can they scale up fast enough to deal with this demand? Keep these questions in mind as we’ll soon return to the problem with supply.

Conclusion: the global health crisis caused a run on already sparse supply

The COVID demand surge is unique because potential customers cannot be guided by in-person sales staff toward the high-margin knife they want to sell. Indeed, retail sales of the same Solingen brands listed above have actually been strong even as their internet searches have declined - which is why you continue to find them in malls. So, absent retail staff, interested consumers turned online and the growth rates at chefknives illustrate that.
Meanwhile, online communities have been building their following over years. Each community tends to have their favorite brands with some overlap, but this knowledge base tends to be built up over years and decades. That’s because trusted reviews are infrequent (we want more!) and consensus takes time to develop. As consumers turned online, they found communities recommending products already facing scarcity issues.
What do you get when combining exponential demand with a shift in consumer preferences for a relatively small market of available knives? A run on supply.

Part II: Supply cannot scale

High-end knife manufacturing is unlike low-end manufacturing

Low-end manufacturing is all about limiting cost and producing volume. Typically parts and processes must work together with high tolerance for error - imagine trying to grind a precise geometry when the heat treatment isn’t even and one portion of the knife abrades more quickly. So, there is almost always a tradeoff in performance for price and production at scale. Workers can be trained in a single task, such as soldering the tang to the blade or inspecting heat-treated batches of blade blanks. Many tasks may be automated altogether with humans only inspecting the results. When most Redditors think “mass production” they likely imagine this kind of manufacturing. Yet “mass production” doesn’t mean low-end by default.

Typical factory setting of Japanese knife manufacture. This particular factory produces both low and high-end knives
High-end knives can be similarly produced at volume, but the production process is more demanding. With higher performance requirements come lower tolerances for error and this means additional training for workers. Heat treatment must be more exacting so that grinds can fit within tighter parameters. This often requires cross-process knowledge so that the sharpener, forger, and metallurgist each understand and can identify minor discrepancies in the others’ processes. Sometimes the sharpener, forger, metallurgist, and polisher are the same person - though this is less common than marketers would like you to believe. Eventually, workers can specialize in a single aspect like polishing or forging and they become so good that others will solicit their services as part of their own process.
So in summary, high-end manufacturing requires more training. Some of that additional training is cross-disciplinary while some is highly specialized. In practice, this means working in various positions across production before settling into a specialty. All that additional training takes years, which is why apprenticeships and decades-long careers are the norm in high-end Japanese manufacturing.

There are limits on how quickly new workers can be trained

Now equipped with understanding of the training required for a high-end manufacturer, we’re ready to dive into the story of a Japanese bladesmith who we’ll call Kenji. It’s 2018 and he wants to scale up production rapidly.
First a little bit more about Kenji. He didn’t start his career in bladesmithing - in fact, despite his city being famous for metalworking and knives, everybody told him that industry was moribund back in the 2000s when he went to university. So, he worked his first years designing heavy machinery before a family emergency unexpectedly brought him into the family business. Years later, he has grown into a management role for the production where he has two full-time employees plus an apprentice. One of those employees is the father of his childhood friend. The two families’ knife businesses merged several years ago.
Now it’s 2018 and Kenji is seeing demand skyrocket. He knows that even if production doubled, he would have a hard time meeting demand. So, how can he double production as quickly as possible while maintaining approximately equal product quality?
In short, he cannot. We’ve already covered how slow training can be, but hiring experienced workers to train them can be equally taxing. That employee whose child was schoolmates with Kenji? None of his sons went into knife making because they saw it as a dead end professionally. Similarly a generation of family businesses shrunk or died out and so Kenji was a dying breed when the market suddenly became hot. Even as knifemaking becomes a viable career once again, finding apprentices is not simple. Many are mindful that consumer interest could quickly return to apathy and such a career does not pay dividends for decades.
Kenji’s story is the norm in high-end Japanese production. Even at a breakneck pace, it will take him several years to double production. If the market should falter during this time, it would be disastrous for his business’ solvency.
Historical data for "Kenji"

YEAR	EMPLOYEES	PIECES PRODUCED
2014	2	330
2015	2	310
2016	3	335
2017	3	440
2018	3	490
2019	5	570
2020	6	355

Ballpark numbers for the manufacturer Kenji manages. In mid-2018, he began subcontracting the majority of his sharpening and polishing labor and changed his product line to use more prefabricated steels. 2020 saw major business interruptions due to the COVID19 crisis.

Price increases are slowed by the business landscape

Meanwhile, the free market capitalists here on Reddit have been positively wetting themselves waiting to ask “why don’t the knife makers simply raise their prices?” The simple answer is that Japan’s economy is a free market economy in the same way choosing dinner as a family is a free market decision. Piss off your partner and you can guarantee you won’t get any dinner.
Of course price increases have been happening over time, but slowly. Many makers are still fulfilling backorders - sellers swap stories about shipments arriving for orders placed years prior. Others are under obligations to sell via wholesalers or trade brokers who behave territorially when vendors or other middlemen encroach on their network. Finally, every maker is conscious of how their prices play into the overall landscape of colleagues and competition. Did you apprentice under another bladesmith? If so, what happens if you start selling your knives for more than him? What message would that send and how would he react?
The net effect of this is a market with unusually rigid prices and inflexible scalability. These problems are not intractable, but like all market shortcomings they require time to fix. Beginning in 2020, that time suddenly became equally scarce.

Conclusion: the global health crisis slowed production of an already scarce supply

As the world left the late 2010s, Japanese manufacturing was struggling to scale its production and downstream sellers began to slowly change pricing expectations to meet the new demand surge. Both changes were gradual if not energized - scarce supply was spurring young people into rejoining an industry long thought dead in Japan. Eager young apprentices began showing up to job openings in Sanjo, Seki, and Tokyo for the first time in generations.
Then suddenly that already scarce supply lost crucial days of business production as Japan first began implementing workplace hygiene measures before entering a state of emergency from April until May. These along with other interruptions have severely hampered production capabilities during a time when the business pipeline could hardly afford it.
The run on supply that we explored at the end of Part I is different than the slow demand increases from the decade prior. Large manufacturers had time to expand operations into China and Indonesia while small manufacturers took on apprentices. OEM practices improved and producers were able to streamline their work over months and years. Everybody lagged a little behind with the promise that soon, supply would begin to scale as young apprentices became journeymen and then master smiths.
This run on supply caused a multiplier in demand as production scaled down. Manufacturers no longer lag slightly behind their orders - vendors are reporting it will take years for operations to recover and resume the same pace they had before.

Part III: What’s the future of kitchen knives?

Now we know why the knives are all gone and that the problem is unlikely to be resolved in a few extra months of production. So, what does the future hold for high-end knives? I will propose some educated guesses for what happens over the coming years.

Either Japanese manufacturing practices will scale and expand their industry or else interest will move on - potentially to China, Indonesia, and Vietnam

The Japanese market is already being eaten from both ends. At the very high end, we’re witnessing the rise of custom makers in the US and Europe whose individual pieces command price tags well into the “collectible” range for Japanese knives. Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturing is eating into the bottom range of Japan’s knife market with Indonesia and Vietnam closing in. Some of this movement is driven by Japanese companies who outsource low-end manufacturing, but it’s likely that jobs continue to move offshore en masse.
The key question is whether Japanese manufacturing can scale quickly enough to preserve their market share at the $100-500 range. The domestic Japanese market likely needs 10-20 years to scale up production. The question is whether foreign manufacturing needs this long to capture market share, even if Japan does manage to scale up eventually. The past five years have seen neighboring countries scaling up their production quality and doubling quantity every few years, so things are not looking great for the domestic Japanese market. Here is a predictive model based on the past five years of growth.
Predicted model of market share after 15 years wherein Japan doubles production while China, Indonesia, and Vietnam each double every 3-5 years.

Today’s most popular knife fads will be replaced by new ones

One thing we haven’t mentioned until now are the hangers-on of high-end knives. For example, the prolific Sakai Takayuki VG-10 damascus knives are streamlined imitators of more expensive knives like Anryu or Yu Kurosaki. They take certain aspects like the hammered (tsuchime) finish and suminagashi pattern and build the knife around them, allowing the knife to spread more quickly because of the reduced prices.
Yet there are even more extreme imitators coming out of China and Southeast Asia who move faster and are less scrupulous about marketing. They flood Facebook with ads featuring shiny damascus blades with handles so colorful it looks like an M&M mass murder. These companies move massive volume before customers grow wise and thus hasten the lifetime of the fad. For some, it’s an educational experience. For others, they’re just happy they scratched the itch.
At any rate, movement like this eventually spells the end of one consumer taste to be replaced with another. So, I predict that the current fads (VG-10 damascus, hammered finishes, serbian chef knives) will soon fade and be replaced by others. One way this prediction might come to pass is that two years from now semi-scam companies will start advertising cheap cu mai (five layer steel with a stripe of nickel) offerings instead of their current Sakai Takayuki imitations. Or maybe it will be a faux kasumi finish or etched core stainless-clad instead.

Successful manufacturers will begin to partner with small, non-Japanese makers to innovate in their designs and production

Zwilling has already done this with Bob Kramer once, so why not again? The most popular U.S. custom makers are struggling to produce at volume, so these partnerships could solve the problem from both ends. I predict we’ll soon see some version of Wüsthof releasing a line of Maumasi-designed blades or Victorinox licensing Don Nguyen’s handles.
This will, of course, come with challenges. Knife enthusiasts mostly have bitter tastes in their mouths with the memory of the Shun Ken Onion and members of the forum here have pointed out that ZKramers struggle to produce consistently good geometries. I don’t necessarily predict these partnerships will produce good high-end knives.

Conclusion

The knives are, indeed, all gone. And that’s unlikely to change for the near future. The brand you desperately want to come back into stock will continue to face shortage issues for years and may never come back at all. But that’s okay.
Instead, newcomers will soon replace the current favorites. Five years from now, the most sought-after knives will have diversified and new names will replace the old ones slowly. In the past five years, those new names have mostly been Japanese. I suspect the new ones may not be.
Until then, may the back in stock notifications be ever in your favor.

The three photos: https://imgur.com/a/vV7nclT
I had a thread on here the other day around trying to confirm if I was being lied to by my contractor. Long story short, I was. I fired the original contractor and hired a new one who did an amazing job at rescuing my floors. I'll keep the story to the end and put the tips/advice I learned from my experience first.
Some things to consider when hiring a refinishing contractor for your floors:

Always ask the contractor if the crew working are his own or if he is sub-contracting out the work to another crew. If he is having difficulty scheduling his own crew, then take it as a warning sign they might not normally work for him.
Always get the name of the products being used included in the contract. (edit: and almost as important, look up the datasheets for the products and learn about their preferred application methods, dry times, and cure times).
Always have the complete work scope included in the contract (ie: sanding, filling, staining, buffing, and especially # of coats of finish).
When sampling stain, the crew should be using named products straight from the can (like duraseal). Unless you are going super dark, avoid water-based stains. Oil-based stains like duraseal are relatively low VOC and tend to be standard. Avoid a custom stain mixture or color combo as it will prevent you from being able to reasonably match the look of the hardwood if you ever need to repair a smaller area in the future. If you go with a pre-mixed stain, then you know the type of color you need for any repair work in the future.
For a good looking finished floor, the work scope should go something like: Day 1: major sanding work + clean up + stain samples, Day 2: finish sanding work + clean up + staining + if enough time is left after a long break, maybe 1st coat of water-based poly. Day 3: Buffing + clean up + last 2 coats of water-based poly. This will differ based on size of the project, so take just as general guidance on the steps.
Except for really large jobs, stain should be wiped on by hand with rag, then almost immediately wiped off by hand with a clean rag. Finish varnish is applied with a applicator mop, but a good stain job should be done by hand.
Be wary of offers for oil-based sealers. In my region, oil-based sealers and finishes over 275 VOC are not legal. Stains like Duraseal are oil-based, but within legal limits and allowed. The sealers typically are not. I was very specific on my want to have water-based finish products only for the finish due to the fact that my pregnant wife and I were still residing at the property. Contractor #1 installed a oil-based sealer without asking me if I wanted it, then lied to me about it, which is part of the reason why I fired him. Contractor #2 was aware of that fact and my strict want for water-based finish only. Yet Contractor #2's work crew still asked me if I wanted an oil-based sealer to better protect the stain. The worker said it would protect the stain work for significantly longer and make it look really good. I asked if it was legal in California for wood floor application and the worker admitted it was not, so I told them to pass and only do the work as described in the contract for 3 coats of water-based Bona Mega finish. They accepted, but a few hours later asked me to please not mentioned their offer for the oil-based sealer to their boss (the contractor) cuz he "doesn't like when we do that sort of stuff". These workers were good guys who did fantastic work, so I didn't hold it against them. It just seems that the oil-based sealer is a bit of a standard under the table practice to make the work last longer vs. with water-based products.
Double check deposit limits in your state for licensed contractors. I've hired a number of contractors in the past, but never thought to question the varying deposits asked by them. For this project, contractor #1 asked me for a 50% deposit. Contractor #2 asked for nothing and told me it was because he could only ask for 10% max for a deposit per the state and the value was minimal, so he took the chance. I lucked out with the first contractor because he had a 50% deposit check in hand, but accidentally washed the check in his jeans and destroyed it. I put a stop order on the check for good measure the minute I fired the contractor, so no money lost, but it was pure luck he hadn't cashed it yet.
If you've got finish work (like painting walls), maybe save it for after the floor is refinished. While you may be extra careful not to damage anything if doing the work yourself, a contractor won't. Accidents will happen. And if you don't want to live with small damage or marks on walls after, you're going to have to paint it again anyways. Sometimes it's best to wait for the floors to be finished before doing finish paint work. Just cover the floors to avoid spillage when painting.

To those looking for more detail, here's a description for the three photos of my hardwood floor refinishing adventure:
Photo 1 - starting point: The old floors were full of scratches, deep wear marks, and flaking/missing varnish. The floors are original white oak from the 1940's. I'm not sure if they were ever refinished. I'd planned to refinish them myself with the help of youtube, but timing issues and my wife's persuading led me to go with a contractor. I followed the good old 3 quotes rule, though with a bit of a change due to COVID. I got most of the initial quoting details virtually via phone calls with the contractors I picked. I then chose the company I thought would be the best fit for my need and had that contractor come out for an in-person inspection and formal quote. If anything seemed off, I would move on to my next choice. The meeting with contractor #1 went well and I went with them. They were mid-priced with a large online presence with positive reviews. I figured, no way the floors can look any worse than they are now...
oh boy...
Photo 2 - The journey begins: I should have seen the warning signs right away. For sake of brevity, I'll just summarize the issues, but if people want a play by play, I will gladly share the 3 day saga. In summary, the contractor repeatedly lied about work scope done and repeatedly lied about the products that were used. He did this even when I questioned him on it at several points in the process, with him insisting that work was done when it had not been. When I finally got the chance to look at the work, it was extremely poor quality with multiple issues (stain not taking, poor sanding work, heavy damage to some of my walls, floor stain color extremely dark and nothing close to the sample done). The photo I took for this stage of the process was claimed to be almost finished work. According to the contractor, his guys just had to put 1 more coat of finish on it and they were done. Truth was, they'd only put down the stain and 1 high VOC oil-based sealer. No finish coats at all. No buffing. Nothing. The contractor's claims began to fall apart only after I got the specific product names he claimed he was using and I started showing him how the work he claimed was done couldn't possibly have been done in the timeline claimed, per the product manufacturer's own instructions. The contractor never apologized or admitted fault, but he did say he would talk with his workers and offered to fix the work to my satisfaction, to which I told him I was done using him. It boiled down to the fact that either his workers were lying to him on work done or he was knowingly lying to me about the work done. Either way, there was no way I could trust the work to be completed correctly as originally quoted. He agreed to walk away and leave it at that.
Photo 3 - Floor Refinishing Redux: After that, I scrambled to find a replacement contractor. I went to what was originally my second pick and the guy came out next day to look at the damage done. He agreed that the work was poorly done, and couldn't promise he could fix it, but that he'd be willing to try. I got a formal contract and his workers were out two days later to start the work. The process with contractor #2 vs. #1 was night and day. Contractor #2 understood the difficulties I had with the prior contractor and offered me complete transparency. He laid out a very strict timeline for workscope and insisted I come through regularly each day to check on the work being done. His guys spent 1 whole day just sanding and applying filler. They then showed me swatches of stains I could pick and applied multiple stain samples from pre-mixed duraseal quickset cans to sections of the sanded floor, so I could review them overnight and the next morning. They even left the stain cans next to the samples, so I could see what was being used. Day 2 was more sanding work plus application of the chosen stain. Then long lunch break with a ton of fans blowing air through the space followed by vacuuming/cleanup and first application of the water-based finish. I was apprehensive around that step since it seemed kind of rushed from stain coat to finish coat, but it turned out great. Day 3 was a full-scale buffing, followed by clean up, finish coat 1, long lunch, and then finish coat 2. The photo shared here is the finished product, though the floor looked similar in general quality even after just the first coat of finish.
I'm incredibly relieved that everything worked out. There was a lot of stress around it all due to a tight timeline to get the work done, but we got through it. Main downside of it is I'm going to have to completely repaint most of my freshly painted walls again due largely to the mess of the first contractor, but that is a small price to pay. Ironically, contractor #2 was the lowest bid of the 3 initial quotes I got, which was one of the reasons I didn't go with him first.
If anyone wants more specifics on anything, let me know. For now, I'm going to go enjoy my new floors.

NrdRage’s Friday DD: There’s still one meme stock that’s not dead yet. I present to you The Curious Case of Benjamin Butto....err Black Berry. ($BB)

Listen up reta.....err, I mean memelords. I know we’ve all moved on from the meme era into the weed era (and hopefully people stick around that one due to the fundamentals for a while, but if not....) and soon to be a redux of the vehicle era, but there’s one meme stonk we need to have a real, honest heart-to-heart about (and hey, it even ties into cars): Let’s talk about Blackberry ($BB)

First, let’s get some misconceptions out of the way:

Blackberry was never a short squeeze stonk, even though it ended up getting roped in with the other squeezers we were denied squozing because of Wall Street cheating. A lot of people thought it was and that’s simply not the case. Blackberry was, is, and always will be, a phoenix rising from the ashes story, nostalgia peppered with functionality. You know, kind of like how you sometimes go watch some classic porn to beat off to and don’t stop to think about the fact that the actress is now in her 60’s and probably has super saggy tiddies.
Next misconception: It’s not a Boomer mobile phone company. They don’t make phones anymore – phones that are branded with their logos are made by another company that pays licensing for the logo and some of the patents. Blackberry sold all their mobile patents months ago.
Third misconception: No matter how much we ask, they’re never changing their name back to Research in Motion so that we can talk about Rim-jobs. Sorry, just isn’t going to be a thing.
So what are they? It’s simple really: They’re now an enterprise level software security company. When you think about it, it’s not such a big pivot, given that their security encryption in their heyday was so powerful that they ended up having to set up offices in certain nations because it was impossible to crack and ran afoul of certain international laws.

Let’s take a dive into the financials before we get into the story:

At the time of this writing, BB is a 7 billion dollar company with shares trading in the $12.50 range. Even after the meme war collapse, they’re still worth double what they were when the ball dropped in New York City with absolutely nobody watching in person and everybody at home wondering why even Anderson Cooper was using an autotuner. They generate a hair over a quarter billion dollars in revenue each quarter over the last year and in 2020 had a negative EPS of about 32 cents a share as they retooled, though they trimmed that to .23 cents a share for their last quarterly earnings report. They have about a billion dollars in cash on hand and receivables, and they have about half a billion dollars in debt. It’s not a great fiscal outlook there, but it’s certainly manageable for a growth company (which is what they presently are).

Where do they make their money?

Almost half of their revenue is legacy income from selling endpoint management and secure communications licensing. A third of their revenue comes from licensing their patents. Oh, they also own Cylance, for you IT help desk monkeys.
That shit’s pretty boring, not gonna lie. Your wife’s boyfriend might find it interesting, but only because he can use it to laugh at you that you know this shit. But the rest? The rest is where things get interesting. Blackberry Radar is a fleet management solution, and the most interesting thing is....well, for that, we have to go back in time for a moment:

(Wayne’s World flashback/dream noises)….

July 29th, 2017. Las Vegas Nevada. 50,000 of the world’s most feared hackers descend upon Sin City for a weekend of debauchery, drinking, and talking about all the new and interesting ways they found to break shit or in general cause chaos - aka DefCon 25, which was NOT cancelled, contrary to what you might have been told. A young hacker from Wisconsin positively stuns everybody at a panel by revealing how it is that he found he could effectively hack almost every late model vehicle on the road that possessed connected features – from range and while the vehicles are in motion – using.....music theory. It’s an absolutely stunning revelation, something matched only by how terrifying the implications of it are. And all anybody needed was a $300 RF modulation tool. Using this, he found he could take control of every mass produced car on the market except those made by Volkswagen Group and Tesla, and those only because they had randomized frequencies they used. This guy fucked. This process was so dangerous that, for one of the only times in DefCon’s history, they didn’t publish the how-to publicly. Oh, and a team from a then relatively unknown EV company in China called $NIO won the car hacking capture the flag tournament in less dramatic fashion. If you didn't hear about any of this, it's because you were too much of a square to be there. Sucks to be you, chump. Something had to be done.

Enter Blackberry

I’ll spare you all the things that have happened since then, but what you need to know is this: Blackberry came up with a solution to defend against this and a myriad of other problems (not to mention Europoor compliance in the form of ISO 26262) not to mention autonomous security - and their security software suite (QNX) is now on almost every new car rolling off a factory line today. This software is also critical for EV’s, because it controls battery management ECU’s (that’s the shit that makes it so you don’t have to drop 10 grand on a new power plant every 2 years). Or, for those of you with IQ’s of 60: Computer make car gooder.

OK, so that’s cool. But how does this get me TENDIES, man? How much can these guys make?

They’re coy about this and won’t give hard numbers, but there are ways we can estimate what they’re pulling. But to do that, we need to go back in history again, and take a look at a stock nobody cares about

(More Wayne’s World noises)

Enter: Nuance Communications ($NUAN). You’ve probably never heard of these guys, but you and almost everybody you know has used their products at some point. They used to be best known for their Dragon Naturally Speaking software suite, which your grandparents who decided they were too old to figure out how to use a fucking keyboard bought so that they could talk to their computer and send you messages that you hated getting unless it came with a 20 dollar bill, but which they thought you cherished forever. However, at some point around 2010, IBM – whom the Nuance CEO at the time was close friends with the management of, literally just *gave* about 125 patents around voice recognition to Nuance thinking that they were worthless. Nuance took these patents and – for a brief moment – became one of the coolest techs on the planet, because their tech is what made Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Samsung’s whatever it was called and a billion other voice recognition platforms work. That is, until Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Steve Ballmer, and everybody else Nuance was dumb enough to trust to let look under the hood of their secret sauce came along and all stole the IP to made their own platforms, leaving Nuance rotting in a hole in the desert. But one of the really cool things Nuance expanded into before they went full retard was they bought a couple of companies around 2013 or so– Tweddle and some other company I can’t be bothered to look up – and got into the connected car space. At one point, Nuance’s Dragon Drive virtual assistant was in every new car made by 9 of the world’s top 10 auto makers.

OK, dude, my wife’s boyfriend is asking me to bring him a beer. Can you speed this along? What does this matter?

It matters because we can look at what $NUAN was getting in licensing for putting their virtual assistant in these vehicles, and use that data to extrapolate an estimate of what $BB is getting for their software. With just their 9 car makers at their back, they were generating over 300 million dollars a year – and that was almost a decade ago, and just for something that would tell you where to pick up your Down’s Syndrome medication. Add a premium for security, include all the auto makers, carry the one, smoke a bowl to help you concentrate, adjust for inflation.....
This is a market worth about...oh, roughly 750 million dollars a year for Blackberry on the conservative side once they actually start charging a market rate for this product. Right now, they’re adopting the same go-to strategy Microsoft has been employing with Azure, which is to basically GIVE it away in order to gain market share and penetration, and then send Fat Tony to collect once the car maker is reliant on it. Plus all the other stuff we already glossed over because it’s boring as shit. Applying the average multiple of earnings for cybersecurity firms out there, their lack of competition in the space, etc. And you come up with a market cap valuation target of....oh, roughly between 45 and 50 billion dollars once they’re firing on all cylinders. And they don’t have to worry about Google or Apple throwing 10,000 engineers at this to make a competing product, because it’s just not worth it to them, so they’re largely gonna get left alone.
Or, by using maths....a share price of somewhere in the neighborhood of $87.50. Give or take 10 bucks. Make it 15 to the downside, just to be safe.

Yeah man! Cool. So I’m in. It’s gonna go to that by like, Friday or something?

An enterprise level cybersecurity company with a sub 10 billion dollar valuation is basically unheard of in this century. But this is not a burn play where you’re gonna get 50% gains every day with no work. It’s a company that’s going to have to melt up to that. It still won’t be to that point this time next year.
BUT....that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a great story. It just means that this isn’t something you do a 0DTE YOLO on and expect to get something out of. And making an Avengers meme about it isn’t going to send it to the moon. This is something you buy and stash in a musty corner of your portfolio so you can tell your Boomer parents that you’re being responsible with your investing and you were just joking about betting your inheritance on weekly FD’s for shitty online dating sites where the women have to talk to your sorry ass first. Oh, and it’ll make the lambo you buy with the money from this safer.
Because I know it matters, here are 69 rockets so you apes understand what all this meant.
.....no, there aren't going to be any rockets. I lied.
Disclosures/Positions: I am long $BB, holding 100,000 shares @ $7.67 average and another 5000 January 2022 5c’s.

TL:DR: $87.50

All my love
-Chad Dickens

A failed application 'one-size-fits-all', 250 broken telephony reports, and the sudden realisiation that no money has been saved as IT never paid for that system in the first place.

Some context for you: the company in question has around 3500 staff, grouped into about 25 business units, spread across about 20 sites. There are three service desk teams, each supporting some of the business units. There are seven telephony systems across the company, five of them with call recording systems hooked in. Five of these telephony systems and four of these call recording systems are supported by head office. The final two telephony systems are supported by the team I'm on, one of which has a call recording system linked to it, which we also support.
One problem with this call recording software was that elements of the UI used Flash. The system had been around for a loooong time and undergone a few upgrades, but the last one was about 5 or 6 years prior to the events in I'm about to recall for your entertainment. Another fun fact: it only worked in Internet Explorer, not Chrome, Firefox or Edge. Our local business unit, who relied on the call recording system quite heavily, had been pushing for an upgrade for some time, but group IT kept saying no. That was until the CIO ordered a review of all systems and services used across the company, with the intention of eliminating any traces of Flash from our infrastructure. Finally, we were getting an upgrade.
It's also worth mentioning that the call recording system was originally implemented by our local business unit, back when they had their own internal IT team, before their internal IT was merged with the group IT. Even though we still spent 90% of their time supporting just them, had contracts that differed from group IT, had bonuses based on local business unit performance rather than group-wide performance, etc., we still officially reported to group IT.
Perhaps a decade after the system had been purchased, other business units decided they wanted to start recording phone calls, so group IT opted to go with the same system we used. Albeit a newer version, with fewer features licensed. Four new systems were setup, linked into four of the other phone systems across the group. These were all supported by the service desk team in head office.
Around this time, a new service delivery manager came in and wasn't happy that there were three service desk teams supporting different business units. He wanted all the teams supporting all the users across the business. He wanted duplicate systems removed or merged and maintained centrally. He wanted device and systems configurations unified across the group. He was chasing a one-size-fits-all approach to IT.
So when the decision to upgrade the systems was made, the task of coordinating it was given to the central projects team, and my team leader was assigned to the project to advise them of our requirements, risks, etc. For background, she was useless. And even more so when it came to projects. In one instance several months earlier, I had been taken off a project when it was moved to the central team and she was put on in my place. After a few months of the same issues cropping up over and over, I asked to see the issues register for the project. She didn't know what that was. It turned out she hadn't reported any of the issues we'd encountered, or reported any of the remedial works we'd been performing to the project manager over the course of the project. But whatever. I've got no involvement in the project, so don't really give it any thought.
The week of the upgrade finally comes around and the new systems are run alongside the existing ones for a week. We receive confirmation from the project manager that user acceptance testing has been a resounding success and that they're ready to deactivate the existing servers and switch over to the new ones. This switch-over happened on a Tuesday evening. On the Wendesday morning, I get in at 8am to find that all the wallboards are down.
I report this this to my team leader, who has decided to work from home as she was apparently up until 2am copying the config over from the old system. I'm a little confused by this, as surely this was done while the old and new systems were running side by side. I mean ... how do you do UAT on a system that has no config? But whatever. She says the wallboards just need logging into and pointing to the new server, which confuses me further because the wallboards are provided by our business unit's CRM, it is the CRM that links into the call recording software, and I don't have access to the CRM config. She tells me to raise it with the developers. So I do.
edit: I later discovered that projects had only tested two of the four systems; the phone systems the recording system were linked into were running two different versions, so they tested the recording software on one system for each phone system version. Our site's phone system was on the same version as another site's, and the other site was chosen for testing rather than ours.

Me: Hey [lead developer]. Have you had any reports about the wallboards not showing call stats? Lead Developer: Yeah. The call recording server is down. I'll ask [infrastructure engineer] to have a look when he's in. Me: The server isn't exactly down. It's been taken offline. The call recording system was upgraded last week and switched over last night. Here's the new server address. Lead Developer: Give me a few minutes.

A few minutes go by and I start getting phone calls from managers about call stat reports not being received. I try logging into the new call recording system and find I don't have permissions to the reporting section, so I drop a message to my team leader, who tells me to ask the head office team for access. I send them a message on Teams and log into Barracuda with my auditor credentials to see if I could find out if any reports have been sent. The last report had been emailed at 6:30pm the previous day, from the old system. None had been sent from the new one. And then I get a reply from the head office team leader.

What reporting section?

Now a little information on the reports that this system generated. Most other business units had reports generated by the BI team, but our business unit used the call recording system. Team leaders and managers had permissions in the old system to generate scheduled reports, to be sent hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. The could be run on extensions or groups that they had access to view stats on. This meant that a team leader could only generate a report for individuals in their team, or their team collectively. Meanwhile, managers could create reports for anyone in the teams they managed. Finally, the operations manager and a couple of analysts had access to create reports on any group or extension that existed within the system.
There were about 250 reports in all, some used purely to give managers visibility of what their teams were doing, others used to gauge performance for bonuses (which were awarded to some teams every other week), there were reports for which numbers were calling us the most, some targeting new employees, some targeting employees that were under review.
While the business probably didn't need all 250 reports, a few were critical to the business at an operational level, so getting them restored was a big deal. So I call the head office team leader ($HOTL).

Me: Hey $HOTL. There should be a reporting section in the phone system. The permission group is called 'Reporting Admin'. $HOTL: I've never seen that section before. And you have global admin on your system. That will give you all the admin permissions. Me: I don't think you had the reporting module on your systems. But we had it on ours. And you're right. If I have global admin, I should be able to see the module. $HOTL: What was it for? Me: It tracked call stats. It let you run reports for calls and talk time and stuff for extensions and groups. $HOTL: Why did you need that? The BI team generates call reports. Me: It's just how it always was. Our CRM linked in to the reporting module for wallboards too. $HOTL: Why does your team always have to do things differently to everyone else? Me: Because our team started using this system before everyone else? $HOTL: Well now all our systems are the same. If we don't have the reporting system, then you probably don't either. Me: So what do I tell the business now that all their reports are gone and the wallboards are broken. $HOTL: Talk to [Service Desk Manager].

FFS.
As I get off the call, the lead developer tells me the same thing.

Lead Developer: I don't think the new system has the call reporting system. Me: No. I just found out it doesn't. Lead Developer: So what now? Me: Can you replace the call stats section of the wallboard to say that it's broken and IT is looking into it? Lead Developer: How is "Group IT f**ked it all up again. Call stats will be back shortly." Me: I'm not sure about the 'shortly' bit. Lead Developer: I was feeling optimistic.

He put a clean message up with an open timescale for the fix, and I called my team leader again, who also said that I should talk to the service desk manager. So I spoke to the service desk manager, who said that all call report requests should go to the BI team and that is how it has always been. I told him that our business unit had previously run reports from the call recording system. He reiterated that requests need to go to the BI team and that no such requirement was given during the project meetings. Thanks, team leader. So I called the BI team and asked if they were able to generate call reports from our phone system. They said they could, but they'd need details of the reports needing generating.
Well this will be fun.
I hopped into vSphere and booted the old recording server up, exported a list of all the reports, and did a bulk 'run now' on all the reports. While this was happening, I got a call from a Senior Systems Engineer the central infrastructure team. I'll call him $Bro because he was pretty cool.

$Bro: Hey Escaped2theMountains. Did you just online the old call recording server? Me: Yeah, sorry about that. I need to export some config information that wasn't copied over to the new system. $Bro: Wasn't [team leader] up until 2am copying all that over? Me: She was, but she skipped all the call reports. $Bro: Why would she forget to copy over the call reports? Me: Because she forgot to tell projects our system had a call reporting module, so projects never bought the call reporting module. $Bro: How many reports were there? Me: Around 250. $Bro: Oh. Me: Our wallboards also rely on the call reporting module, so they're all down too. $Bro: Oh. Me: Yeah. $Bro: So why are you exporting the details for the reports if you can't set them up in the new system? Me: [Service Desk Manager] told me to send the details over to BI team to recreate. $Bro: You expect them to create 250 reports for you? Me: No. I expect them to buy the call reporting license. $Bro: Ah. But, next time, can you warn us before you turn a server online? Me: If I had asked, would you have said yes? $Bro: That's not the point. Me: If I had asked, would you have asked why? $Bro: Probably not. Me: So if I had asked, you wouldn't have found out how my morning is going. $Bro: Just warn me next time.

Once I had a list of all the report exported and and examples of each report generated, I saved them to the shared drive, shut the server back down, and popped upstairs to see to one of the business analysts. I bumped into the business unit's Managing Director on the way, who said she was on the way to the lead developer to ask him about the wallboards and missing reports. I told her that there was a problem with the call recording server upgrade that had taken place overnight and that she'd get an email from one of her business analysts that she will need to pass on to the BI team.

MD: Why do I need to pass it on to the BI team? Me: Group IT or Projects or whoever was responsible for the upgrade never bought the call reporting module. I've been advised by [service desk manager] that requests for call reports now need to go to the BI team. MD: And how long do you expect that to take? We need those reports now. Me: It would probably take the BI team months, if they can do it at all. But I'm counting on them not doing it at all, which is why the email requesting the reports needs to come from you. MD: How does that ... ah. You want group to buy the reporting module? Me: No. The BI team will want group to buy the reporting module. MD: Because I'm going to demand the reports be created today, which they cannot do. Me: [smiles] MD: Did [lead developer] tell you to do this? Me: No, but I would like to say I've been inspired by him. MD: [smiles]

I eventually get to the Business Analyst and we start working through the list of reports. We decide to separate them all into groups, based on how essential they are. The ones used to inform staff bonuses went into the highest priority group, which we marked as needing to be completed by midday on Thursday. That was about 27 hours away. We also threw some of the global reports (i.e. reporting on all incoming and outgoing calls) and the repeat incoming call ones into this group. The group totalled around 70 reports. We then had about 60 into a second group, that we marked for completion within a week. About 40 marked for completion within two weeks. And the remaining ~80 for completion within a month.
The business analyst writes this up into an email, attaching the .csv with the report configs to the email, and linking to a folder containing the 250 example reports that he's saved in his section of the shared drive. We call up the MD and he forwards it over to her. The MD then forwarded it over to the Head of BI, with the business analyst CC'd in. A reply comes back about 5 minutes later saying they'll need to arrange a call as such a request could take months. The MD replied to say that was unacceptable, with the CEO, CIO, Service Delivery Manager, Service Desk Manager, Head of Projects, the Project Manager involved in the project, the business analyst, and my team leader CC'd in, stressing the importance of these reports to the business. I was still sat with the business analyst, so I got to see the loooong CC field in all its glory. And, thankfully, my name didn't come up once.
Though, unfortunately, it did make it's way back to me. The Service Desk Manager found out that I'd raised the issue with my team leader and the head office team leader, and I ended up getting conferenced into a call about an hour later. Oddly enough, my team leader was absent from the call ...

Service Delivery Manager: Hi Escaped2theMountains. We need to understand what is going on with the call reports and you seem to know more than anyone else in IT about it. Service Desk Manager: Yes. Apparently you've been maintaining 250 reports for your business unit. Who asked you to do that? We aren't budgeted to provide that support. Me: Hi all. I'm sorry you only found out about this requirement for the recording system now. I can confirm that the business unit had around 250 scheduled reports configured in the old recording system. But we don't really support it. Service Desk Manager: What do you mean, you don't really support it? It's an IT system. Who creates the reports? [Team leader] said she doesn't. Me: Did she not explain that the business unit create the reports themselves? Service Desk Manager: No?!? Why are they doing that? They shouldn't have admin access to the system. It's an IT system. Who authorised you to give users admin access to the recording system? Me: They didn't have admin access. They had reporting access. There were three levels of permissions for reports. Admin, creator, and viewer. Team leaders and managers had creator permissions, so they are able to create scheduled reports. And then... Service Delivery Manager: This sounds like a security risk. What is stopping a team leader from listening to their manager's calls? Me: Recording and reporting have separate permissions. And, as I was going to say... Service Desk Manager: How much time are you spending setting these permissions? CIO: Can everyone please let Escaped2theMountains say what he needs to say. And can someone get projects on this call. Me: Thank you, [CIO]. So we enter each phone extension into the system, and then put each extension into a group, and link the extension to a user. We flag each extension in each team as an agent, team leader, or manager. We then set recording and reporting permissions in each group. For example, in Team A, Team A Agents have access to their own recordings and no reporting, Team A Team Leaders have access to all Team A Agent recordings and Team A Agent and Team Leader reporting, and Team A Managers have access to all Team A recordings and reporting. So if an agent in Team A gets promoted to a Team Leader, we go into the group and flag them as a Team Leader and their access is updated automatically. This is part of our 'joiner, leaver and transfer' process, which you, [Service Desk Manager], recently signed off on when we updated it a few months ago. CIO: What about access for people that aren't in Team A. Me: We can also grant individual users permissions to recordings and reports for each group. I would show you, but that functionality isn't included in the new system, and the old system is offline. But there are very few people with access to recordings outside their own teams. Just the senior managers and directors. And the business analysts, but they only have reporting access. CIO: And you said there are also creator and viewer permissions for reports? Me: Yes. These are set at a user level. So agents have no reporting permissions, most team leaders have report viewer permissions, and some team leaders and all managers have report creator permissions. But they can only view and create reports for groups they have reporting access to. If the Team B Team Leader tries to run a report on Team A, it will show no results as they don't have access to query Team A's call stats. So even if we accidentally gave an agent user reporting permissions, all reports would be blank as they don't have any reporting permissions to each group. CIO: And you don't spend time supporting this at all. Just creating extensions, users and setting permissions. Me: If the disk space on the server fills up, the reports will fail to run, so we delete some old reports off the server. And when the SMTP relay address changed last year, the reports stopped working as well, so we had to fix that. But for individual reports? No. We don't touch them. That's all done by the business. CIO: Thank you. So, [Service Delivery Manager]. Why didn't we purchase a call reporting license for [business unit's] instance? Service Delivery Manager: The requirement was never raised with us and we had never paid for it in the past. CIO: So [business unit] was getting the module for free? Service Delivery Manager: I would presume so... Project Manager: Sorry to interrupt. The module wasn't free. [Business unit] were paying for it. Service Delivery Manager: Why were [business unit] paying for it? Project Manager: Because they had always paid for their instance. Both the core license and the reporting module license. (I found out that the PM only found this out 15 minutes before getting onto the call) [silence ...] Me: [Business unit] have had this system since at least 2004, back when they had their own IT department. The rest of the group only adopted the system 6 or 7 years ago, after their IT was absorbed into the group. I guess administration of the system moved over to IT, but the bills still went to them. But that's why we were on an older version to the rest of the group. There was a newer version out when the other systems were setup and ours was never upgraded. Service Delivery Manager: But now we pay for it. Project Manager: Yes I believe so. All four systems are under one contract. Service Delivery Manager: But we paid for four systems before. And we pay for four systems now. So that doesn't add up. Service Desk Manager: The system at Site E wasn't upgraded. It was decommissioned. [silence ...] Me: Am I still needed on this call? Shall I go and tell [business unit] that they can cancel their contract for the recording system? CIO: We will handle that. [Service Delivery Manager], can we order a reporting license for [business unit]? Service Delivery Manager: I'll contact the vendor now. CIO: Thank you. Escaped2theMountains, I think we have everything we need. Thanks for your support to the business this morning. Me: No problem. Let me know if you need anything else.

The reporting module was installed later that day and my team leader was tasked with creating the 250 reports. I didn't hear from her at all the next day, so I guess she was up all night and slept through the day. It was quite a peaceful day, actually. And the wallboards were working when I got in. Turns out the lead developer put a piece of code into wallboard thingy so the message would only appear when the reporting endpoints returned an error, otherwise it would display the call stats as intended. I loved that guy ...

When a body is found 600 miles away... Extensive two part write up on the bizarre case of Judy Smith (1997). Part 1 of 2.

Hello everyone, for the last few months I have been creating long form write-ups on a variety of unsolved cases. If you are interested in other lengthy write ups you can find them on my profile- https://www.reddit.com/useQuirky-Moto.
Months ago, I was asked to cover the inexplicable case of Judy Smith, a woman who went missing from Philadelphia or perhaps Massachusetts, only for her body to be found in North Carolina months later. The case was famously covered on the show Unsolved Mysteries, and it is strange enough to warrant a long, hard look at the case and a comprehensive timeline. I hope you are able to learn something new about this semi well-known case.
Background
Judy Smith was born Judith Eldridge in Massachusetts in 1946. Right out of high school Judy married for the first time. Her husband and she had been married very shortly when in an attemot to avoid the draft, he fled to Sweden. Judy went in search of her young husband but soon returned to the states empty handed and filed for divorce. Years later, Judy married Charles Bradford a man who worked in the racehorse industry. They had two children together, Craig and Amy, but unfortunately the marriage did not last and soon Judy found herself jobless and raising two children by herself. Rather than fret, Judy got a job and enrolled in nursing school. Judy was known to study in all of her free time and soon became a successful home health care nurse. In 1986 at age 40, Judy was caring for a man who was recovering from throat surgery when she met her patient’s son, a well to do lawyer named Jeffrey Smith. Jeffrey said he was impressed by how Judy cared for his father and asked her on a date. Judy and Jeff had several things in common, both had been divorced single parents who raised children alone, and Jeffrey worked in healthcare as well, except he was a lawyer. The couple both enjoyed going to plays and Celtics basketball games. After seven years together, Jeff and Judy moved in together and three years later the couple married in Nov., 1996.
According to friends and family, Judy was a rather assertive and independent person. She was no stranger to travelling alone. Judy had been to Europe on her own a few times, and when her children were pre-teens, she took them to Europe for a backpacking adventure. Judy also independently traveled to Thailand where she went hiking and visited friends. While Judy wasn’t the epitome of fitness, she was an active person who enjoyed walking, hiking, and sightseeing. She was also known to be a go-getter who once helped an AIDS patient who was having a medical crisis on a plane. So, while Judy was kindhearted and considerate, she wasn’t thought to be naive and was able to take care of herself in a variety of different situations.
The disappearance
Five months into her new marriage on April 9th 1997, Jeffrey prepared to attend a conference in Philadelphia that was taking place from Wednesday April 9th-Friday April 11th at the Double Tree hotel in downtown Philadelphia. Judy decided to accompany her husband to Philadelphia and planned to do some sightseeing in the area. Afterwards, the Smiths were going to New Jersey to spend the weekend with some friends before flying back home.
On April 9th in the morning, Judy accompanied her husband to Logan International Airport to fly to Philadelphia, but discovered at the gate that she could not board as she did not have her photo ID. Judy encouraged Jeffrey to take the 1:30 pm flight and assured him that she would take a flight later that day and meet him in Philadelphia. According to relatives, the Smiths took public transport to the airport and Judy apparently took the bus back home and retrieved her ID. Jeffrey flew to the conference while Judy returned home and booked a flight for later that day. Judy boarded a 7:30 pm flight and arrived at the hotel in Philadelphia at approximately 9:30 pm.
Once at the hotel, the couple purchased some snacks and went to bed. The next morning Jeffrey awoke and ate breakfast at the complimentary buffet downstairs while his wife was still asleep. When he returned to the room Judy was in the shower. The two talked about several things, and Judy explained that she planned on taking the PHLASH bus in order to see the famous sights such as the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. The Smiths planned on meeting up at the hotel in the evening to attend the conference’s 6 pm cocktail party together. With that squared away, Jeffrey attended the conference. Sometime in between 9 and 10 am a hotel concierge recalled seeing a woman matching Judy’s description ask how to get to the PHLASH bus stop. The woman was in her 50s, with shortish hair, wearing a dark colored coat, blue jeans, and white tennis shoes, carrying a bright red backpack. (Picture of the Judy wearing the backpack here).
At approximately 5:30 pm Jeffrey who was done with the day’s sessions returned to the hotel room expecting to find Judy waiting for him. Judy wasn’t there, so Jeffrey attended the cocktail hour in the hopes his wife was already visiting at the party, but she wasn’t there either. For the next 45 minutes, Jeffrey floated between the room and the party hoping to find Judy. At approximately 6:15 pm Jeffrey told the concierges that his wife had not returned from sightseeing and the hotel staff began calling local hospitals. At 6:30 pm, Jeffrey hopped in a taxi and instructed the driver to take the PHLASH bus route slowly so he could look for his wife. In one interview Jeffrey recalled that he made the driver go so slow it angered those stuck behind him. After a few hours without any sign of Judy, Smith called the police to report his wife missing. Shockingly, the PPD told Jeffrey that he couldn’t file a report until it had been twenty-four hours since the last final sighting of Judy. After lodging some complaints with some high-ranking officials within the city, a missing person’s report was taken for Judy Smith on the morning of April 11th, 1997 (Lewis, 1997).
Jeffrey called his step children and asked them to check the house in case Judy had gone home, and he also asked that they would check the answering machine, but there were no messages of note and the house was empty.
A check of the hotel room showed that Judy had left with her signature red backpack, her wallet, the jewelry she normally wore including a diamond engagement band and a simple silver wedding ring, and the clothes on her back. Jeffrey estimated that she had approximately $200 dollars with her at the time.
According to later interviews with Philadelphia investigators, Judy, or someone with her name did in fact buy a USair ticket on the 7:30 pm flight into Philadelphia. Her ticket was used to make the flight and her seat was occupied on the flight into Philadelphia (Justiceforjudy.org). At the time of the Smiths’ trip, regulations that required photo identification to board a plane had only been in effect for 18 months and Judy had flown only one other time during that time frame. Additionally, police have a luggage tag from Judy’s suitcase that showed that she took the 7:30 pm flight, and that her bag did not travel to Philadelphia with Jeffrey earlier in the day (AP, Oct 4th, 1997).
Sightings
As news of Judy’s disappearance spread, many people called the police station to report various sightings of Judy.
One PHLASH driver remembered picking up Judy in the early afternoon at Front and South streets, a stop near the Double Tree.
There was also a reported sighting of Judy entering the Greyhound bus station at 11th and Filbert sometime in the early afternoon. This station is a common place for tourists to use the bathroom and is only a 10-minute walk to the DoubleTree hotel. One report claims Judy was seen entering and then exiting the station but most reports mention only entering the station. This area was close to Philadelphia’s Chinatown and Jeffrey speculated that Judy may have gone to Chinatown for lunch as she loved both Chinese and Thai food, but no restaurant owners remembered seeing Judy that day.
There was yet another sighting of a woman who looked like Judy at around 3 pm near the hotel; witnesses claimed this woman seemed disoriented.
A number of sightings were reported over the next few days in the waterfront area of the city called Penn’s Landing. A variety of people claimed to have seen Judy. Some witnesses said she seemed confused or dazed. Judy’s two children, her son in law Jay, and Jeffrey looked into these sightings and discovered that there was a homeless woman in the area who looked strikingly similar to Judy and it is believed that many witnesses saw this woman rather than Judy Smith. This local resident looked so similar to Judy that at one point Judy’s son Craig crossed the street thinking he had discovered his mother, only for it to be the other woman. Police officers and volunteers stopped this woman a number of times as well.
One transient in the area, a man named David, was insistent that he saw Judy, not the other woman, on the night of April 10th in the Penn’s landing area, either resting or sleeping on the bench. He was insistent it was Judy, and not the other woman as he knew the other woman from the neighborhood. Judy’s son believes this story is credible as David was coherent and very willing to be interviewed, even though there was nothing to be gained from his testimony and he was simply happy to help the family. He also identifed Judy from a collection of photos, something many other witnesses were unable to do.
On April 11th an employee at a Macy’s department store in Deptford, New Jersey believed that she interacted with Judy Smith in the morning on that day. She described the clothes Judy wore, right down to the old red backpack. This shopper told the employee, that she was buying some dresses for her daughter but laughed because her daughter often disliked the pieces that she purchased for her. Judy’s family confirmed that this was acurate and affirmed that Judy sometimes shopped at Macy’s. The customer appeared to be slightly disoriented as she asked a young woman in the store to leave with her, thinking that the other customer was her daughter or a someone else she knew. One report says that Judy asked another customer in the store about menopause, a very odd subject to talk about, especially with someone you don’t know in a department store.
This mall complex was in Deptford, New Jersey, a bus ride away from Philadelphia, across the Delaware River. According to newspaper reports, NJ Transit Buses had routes which traveled from downtown Philly to Deptford hourly, and the stop was very close to the mall the sighting took place at, meaning it was possible for Judy to have boarded the bus and ended up in Deptford quite easily. Unfortunately, the Macy’s didn’t have security footage which showed this customer and the woman paid for her purchases in cash.
After a second story ran in the newspaper on April 14th, a variety of other witnesses came forward with stories. The most famous report came from a Society Hill hotel employee who explained that a woman who matched Judy’s description stayed in the hotel from April 13th-15th. The woman appeared to have psychiatric problems and did a variety of strange things during her stay such as touch herself very noticeably in front of the window (it’s unknown if this was in her room or in the lobby), speak in tongues, and finally claimed that “the emperor” would help her pay for her stay at the hotel. This wacky guest was remembered by several employees including the hotel manager, a woman named Abby Gainer, who alerted the police. The strange guest told the employees that she wanted to stay at the hotel for another night but didn’t have the funds to do so. She later said she would get the money via a Western Union wire transfer from “the emperor” (Altman, 1997).
The nearby Best Western Hotel had a similar situation with a similar woman. Concierge Tyrone Taylor remembered that on the 15th, a woman matching this description entered the hotel to use the telephone in the late afternoon. The woman was speaking loudly and said that “the emperor of China” was going to pay for her stay as she did not have the cash to pay for a night at the hotel. Taylor reported that the woman was well dressed and did not appear to be a transient. Both hotel employees reported that the woman was a heavyset blonde in her 50s, wearing heavy dark makeup, eye glasses with tape on the side, and nicer clothes. Gainer reported the woman was sporting an expensive looking scarf with camels and roses on it. The woman, who signed in as "H. K. Rich/Collins," did not have any luggage with her and was wearing very different clothes than Judy was last seen in. When Taylor called the police to report his sighting, he gave the strange guest a call (she must have left a telephone number) and told her she could have a free night at the hotel. She arrived at the Best Western but police decided that the woman was not Judy Smith (Altman, 1997). The hotel sightings were nothing more than a red herring. Over the next few months various sightings were reported but none seemed to pan out. Many of the sightings were believed to be other people who looked like Judy. After all history has shown that false eyewitness sightings are incredibly common in cases of missing persons.
Philadelphia PD’s investigation
Philadelphia PD launched an inquiry into the disappearance of Judy Smith on April 11th, 1997. Jeffrey tried to report Judy as missing in the late evening hours of April 10th, but the police told him to wait 24 hours. Smith, however, was a well-connected man and after a few complaints to both a Pennsylvania state representative and the mayor (both men were attorneys and knew Jeffrey from previous work functions), Jeffrey was able to file a report in the early morning hours of the 11th. The Smith family made and hung flyers in the area. Judy’s children joined the search and followed up on sightings around the tourist areas of Philly. Police interviewed Jeffrey, Judy’s children, and others in order to retrace Judy’s last steps. Judy left behind her passport at her home in Massachusetts meaning she could not have easily left the county. The Smith’s two landline records were checked but nothing out of the ordinary was found.
After interviews and searches of the area, Philadelphia PD announced that they believed Judy had never made it to Pennsylvania at all and speculated that Judy went missing from the Boston area. This speculation was based on a couple of things.
First, investigators did not believe Jeffrey’s story that Judy couldn’t catch the flight due to a lack of photo ID. Police thought that this story was odd and did not believe a seasoned traveler like Judy would forget her license at home before heading to the airport.
Later investigation showed that someone named Judith Smith took a 7:30pm flight into Philadelphia and flight manifest showed that the ticket was used to make the flight that evening, however, the entire incident is still odd to many amateur sleuths and professional investigators.
Another detective thought it was odd that while Judy had clothes and belongings in the hotel room, she didn’t have any cosmetics with her. Further, detectives noticed that there were few soiled items of clothing in the room meaning that if Judy was in Philadelphia on the 10th, she wore the same jeans and coat that she was wearing the night before. Judy’s children reported that this wasn’t uncommon for their mother as she wasn’t a frilly person. They also said that their mother only wore makeup on occasion and not while traveling so these things didn’t seem out of the ordinary to them. (Personally, I have also wondered if Judy did have some makeup, but it was in her backpack at time. I know plenty of women who don’t wear much makeup, but if you looked in their purse or bag you might find some lip stick or powder.)
Investigators went on to say that no one but Jeffrey could place Judy in Philadelphia during this time frame. This announcement resulted in several eyewitnesses who claimed that they had seen Judy at the hotel. One receptionist from the hotel claimed that on April 9th in between 9-10 pm, she saw Judy arrive at the hotel and greet her husband in the lobby. She said that Jeffrey gave Judy flowers and the two appeared to be apologizing to each other. (Jeffrey said this was the case except Judy gave him the flowers). One concierge remembered a woman in her 50s with a coat and old red backpack ask him how to get to the PHLASH bus stop at around 10 am on April 10th. He knew it was after 9 am because that is when his shift started. Finally, a conference goer named Carmen Catazone, who was sitting in the lobby also recalled the flower incident from the night before. The woman did not know Jeffrey personally, but recognized him from the conference. Jeffrey was a moderator for a variety of sessions and was very overweight so he was easily recognizable. These witness’ accounts seem to line up with Jeffrey’s story. As far as I can tell the flower story had not been released to the press at this point.
Finally, Philadelphia PD divulged that Jeffrey wasn’t fully cooperative, as he wouldn’t submit to a polygraph. Jeffrey denies this and said that as a lawyer he knew that polygraphs are fallible. Further, he claims that he was willing to take a lie detector if it was given by an outside agency such as the FBI, but Philadelphia police declined this scenario. These are the four reasons investigators used in order to prop up their theory that Judy wasn’t in Philadelphia at all. Despite witness sightings, this theory is a popular on online to this day.
Aftermath and Discovery
After several weeks Jeffrey returned to the Boston area and tried to resume his normal life. He drastically cut back his hours at the office reporting that he could not focus on his work. Smith attempted to keep his wife’s case in the spotlight doing interviews whenever he could and eventually landing a spot on the show Unsolved Mysteries. On the show, one friend of the couple called the marriage “tenuous” but modern articles on the case mention that the police could find no one who reported concerns like these about the couples’ relationship. In independent interviews Judy’s adult children denied witnessing any warning signs in their mother’s new marriage. Eventually, Jeffrey hired three private investigators to look for Judy. The PIs faxed over 9,000 missing posters to police departments and hospitals all over the country hoping that someone would recognize Judy.
Five months after her disappearance in September 1997, a man and his son were hunting in the Pisgah National Forest near Candler, North Carolina, a short drive from the city of Asheville. On a steep incline one-quarter mile from a picnic area, which itself was a mile from hike from the nearest parking area, the duo found what appeared to be a human bone. They alerted the police who responded to the scene. Over an area approximately 300 feet in diameter, investigators found most of a human skeleton which had been wrapped in a blue blanket and buried in a very shallow grave. Scavenging animals had dug up the skeleton and a few bones had been carried away. The skeleton was determined to be female. The woman was dressed in thermal underwear under her jeans, hiking boots, socks, a t-shirt, a bra and a jacket. Nearby in two different holes, a blue vinyl backpack and a men’s shirt had been buried. The backpack contained some winter clothing and 80 dollars. The shirt contained a pair of $110 Bolle brand sunglasses, as well an additional $87. A paperback mystery novel was also found nearby. She carried no ID. The slope where the body was discovered was near some hiking trails, but the hill itself was steep and at an elevation of 4,000 feet, the search was difficult. The incline was so severe that one investigator crushed his sciatic nerve attempting to search the area, an injury which required major surgery.
Early coverage of the body’s discovery in the Asheville Citizen Times, initially reported that the police found a body belonging to a woman who they believed to be in her 20s dressed in hiking clothes (Ball, 1997). Several days later, the medical examiner assessed the bones and concluded that the skeleton was that of white woman in her 40s or 50s, who was about 5’3” tall with shortish light brown hair. There were cut marks in the woman’s bra and t-shirt which indicated that she had been stabbed in the chest area, however, no cause of death could be determined. Some reports mention that there was trauma to the woman’s ribs. The decedent also had a severely arthritic right knee (some reports say it was her left knee), extensive fillings and dental work in her molars, and some animal hair on her shirt, which may have been horse hair. The woman did not seem to be a transient due to her nice clothes and dental work. The death was ruled a homicide as the woman had been wrapped in a blanket post mortem and buried. The ME determined that the body had been there for 1-2 years prior. For several weeks the skeleton remained nameless in the ME’s office.
On September 9th, a small blurb about the unidentified body ran in an Asheville, North Carolina paper. 65 miles away in Franklin, NC, an ER physician named Parker Davis was looking at missing poster which had been faxed to the hospital he worked at when he noticed that the woman on the poster had a severely arthritic knee. He remembered the story of the skeleton from the paper who had a similar knee problem. On a whim he called the police who were able to get a copy of Judy’s missing poster. After a preliminary check, the ME contacted Jeffrey in order to obtain a copy of Judy’s dental records. The records were a match, and by the end of September 1997, Judy had her name back. Friends and family were also able to identify Judy’s diamond engagement band with a pear-shaped stone and wedding ring which had been found on or near the body. Some early reports say that the woman had no jewelry and that Judy’s wedding ring was missing, but later reports say that it was found near the body. The area of the burial was searched on at least three occasions so it is possible the rings were not found until later. Missing was Judy’s wallet, red backpack, and some jewelry that she typically wore (it’s unclear what jewelry this is referring to). The coat she was last seen wearing was nowhere to be found and the clothes she was dressed in, as well as those in the backpack were unable to be identified by family or friends. The shirt buried nearby was a men’s shirt and was believed to belong to the killer, not Judy. Furthermore, the sunglasses did not appear to be Judy’s as Judy’s kids said she wasn’t the type to spend over $100 on sunglasses. The sunglasses are an athletic style and to me look like men’s or unisex sport sunglasses.
Buncombe County Investigation
Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department took over the case from the PPD after Judy’s identification. Once it was determined that Judy was the woman in the woods, several residents in and around Asheville reported that they had seen Judy or had interacted with her in the April shortly after she was last seen in Philadelphia. For example, one woman thought Judy had stayed at her hotel from April 10th-12th, one woman who worked at a souvenir shop near the Biltmore house (a tourist attraction near Asheville) thought that she spoke to Judy who said she was from Boston and that her husband was a lawyer. Another woman who worked in a store recalled that Judy with her red backpack. She claims that Judy bought a toy truck and approximately $30 worth of sandwiches. There were two other sightings of a person resembling Judy in the area in a gray sedan. One person claimed to have seen Judy near the Pisgah National Forest in a gray sedan chock full of stuff. This witness said that the woman was looking for a place to camp. Another person saw a woman in a gray sedan in the same area. All sightings occurred in the week or so after Judy was last seen in Philadelphia. Of course, it goes without saying that, eyewitness testimony can be unreliable and the human mind is susceptible to suggestion.
North Carolina investigators traveled to Philadelphia to retrace Judy’s steps. They have said that they don’t believe that PPD did a poor job but simply wanted to cover their bases. Two detectives flew to Philadelphia and determined that Judy probably been there at least briefly before traveling to the Pisgah National Forest. They reported that there was no indication that Judy had been abducted or otherwise forced to travel south. It appeared she at least started the journey of her own volition. In all the sightings of Judy in North Carolina, she was alone.
Buncombe county deputies were able to rule out Jeffrey as a suspect rather quickly, although they concede that anything is possible and Jeffrey could be involved however unlikely it seems. Jeffrey was ruled out based on his size and health. Jeffrey was a morbidly obese man who investigators noted began huffing and puffing when walking quickly or climbing stairs. Because of this they did not believe Jeffrey could have disposed of his wife’s body especially in such an inaccessible area of the forest. Furthermore, they could find no evidence that Jeffrey rented a car in Philadelphia adding to the logistical problems with Jeffrey being a suspect. On top of his lack of car, Jeffrey had less than 12 hours to dispose of Judy’s body as he was seen in the lobby of the hotel at 9:30 pm, and then was moderating a session of the conference at 9:30 am. Driving to the Pisgah National Forest from Philadelphia takes approximately nine hours one way meaning he did not have time to kill and dispose of his wife. One podcast on the case mentions that police could find no large withdrawals of money from the Smith’s accounts which could have indicated the hiring of a hit man or a paid accomplice. (I could find no other corroboration of this claim so take this with a grain of salt.) Jeffrey also kept his wife’s case in the spotlight and suffered many hardships in the wake of his wife’s disappearance. Besides the one woman who was interviewed on Unsolved Mysteries, no other friends or family reported that there were issues in marriage that they were aware of.
Philadelphia police also struggled with Jeffrey’s size as carrying and disposing of a dead body is quite taxing and it is doubtful that Jeffrey could have done this on his own. However, they say that Jeffrey is still as suspect as he could have killed his wife in Boston or had an accomplice.
With the most obvious suspect cleared, investigators moved on to other lines of inquiry. They searched the surrounding areas hoping to find people who had seen Judy which is how the discovery of the woman in the gray car was made. Police also searched a nearby horse farm as Judy was known to like horses and had what could have been horse hair on her body, but nothing definitive was found.
Other information

Philadelphia investigators looked at the Smith’s phone records and determined that there was no unusual activity on either of their phone lines that would indicate that either of the Smiths were having affairs. Neither Jeffrey or Judy had cell phones. If Judy was having an affair at the time, none of her friends could provide any insight or speculate as to who it was. There was a computer in the house which was searched, but it is unknown if the computer was connected to the internet.
When Judy went missing Jeffrey believed that she had approximately $200 on her person. About $500 dollars in cash was found among Judy’s things in the hotel room. Judy also disappeared with her ID, her credit card, and her phone card. To this day, there has been no activity on either card.
Judy’s description varies from source to source. Some sources report that she was “heavy set” or “top heavy”. Others say she was 130 or 140 lbs., which is more average size for a 5’2” woman. In some pictures Judy looks to be of a larger build, but in some photos, she appears smaller. Whether these weights were a misprint or Judy was someone whose weight fluctuated regularly is unclear. It is not a very important detail but it is a discrepancy I wanted to point out.
Judy had been to North Carolina only once and had no connection to the area. She had once been to Raleigh to visit Jeffrey who was at a weight loss clinic. Jeffrey said that he loved the area and thought about moving, but the couple never returned to the state. Family also said that Judy had once traveled to Tennessee or another nearby state with a former patient but that had been years earlier.
Judy Smith is also the name of a famous "Crisis Manager." This Judy Smith was the inspiration for the hit show "Scandal" with actress Kerry Washington. This woman is not the same Judy Smith who went missing in 1997.

Suspects
Gary Michael Hilton, sometimes called the national park killer, is a suspect in Judy's disappearance. In 2008 Hilton was arrested for a murder in a national forest and was later linked to three other murders, all of which took place between 2005 and 2008. Hilton, who was in his 50s and 60s at the time, killed hikers in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina and he is considered a suspect in many other murders in surrounding states such as Arkansas, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Hilton, who loved the outdoors, would often stalk hiking trails, camp sites, and other areas known for outdoor recreation to find victims to terrorize. His crimes were tended to be opportunistic and his motive most often was monetary. Hilton held down a series of jobs from 1997 to 2007 but did not work full time. He was also a drifter who moved from place to place. Hilton usually assaulted and robbed his victims of their wallets, atm cards, cash, and valuables. His victims were male and female, young and old. He seemed to prefer victims who were isolated and alone did not try to find a specific type of person otherwise. One thing that is interesting about Hilton as an offender is that it appears that he did not commit any violent crimes before he was 58 or 59 years old. Hilton has a very long rap sheet but most of his crimes were relatively minor such as possession of marijuana, carrying a pistol without a license, soliciting false donations for charity, carrying a police baton, and DUI. Once arrested several violent incidents that Hilton had been a part of came to light but he had never been convicted of them in the past. Most people agree someone with does not start a life of violent crime in their 60s. Many believe the Gary Michael Hilton has more victims then are currently known.
John and Irene Bryant, an eclectic couple in their 80s, were hiking in the Pisgah National Forest in 2007 when they were attacked by Hilton. Hilton killed Irene, and then kidnapped her husband in order to use their ATM cards and withdraw money before killing John as well. Irene's body was left only miles from where Judy's body was found 10 years earlier. This is one of the most convincing pieces of evidence that Hilton may have been involved in Judy's murder as well. However, it is important to note that Judy was not robbed and Hilton did not bury any of his known victims. Judy's murder also took place 10 years before any Hilton's other murders. Some blogs or more unofficial sources on the case mentioned that Hilton was believed to be in Georgia at the time of Judy's disappearance, but this isn't known for sure. If you are interested in learning more about the crimes of Gary Michael Hilton this reddit post is a really good place to start. This post did a good job of putting it all in one place so thank you u/lisagreenhouse.
Another offender who was in the Asheville area at the time of Judy's disappearance was a young man named Lewis Kyle Wilson. In the early 2000s Wilson was arrested after assaulting and robbing a sex worker he had brought home to his property. There's not a lot of information on Wilson online, but he was living in Asheville and would have been 19 at the time of Judy's disappearance. I cannot find any evidence that Wilson actually killed anyone but he does have a history of violence towards women and was in the area at the time so he is sometimes mentioned online as a possible suspect. One sex worker Wilson was known to frequent was the victim of an unsolved homicide that happened in 2006; Wilson is the prime suspect in that crime.
In 2016, only a couple of miles from Judy's burial site in the Pisgah National Forest, a lone hiker in her 60s was attacked, raped, and left tied to a tree. Thankfully, the woman was found alive and taken to the hospital. Some have wondered if this crime was connected to the Judy Smith homicide but there is no hard evidence of this and the rapist remains unknown.
Theories
Amnesia is one possible explanation for Judy’s disappearance. The family believes that Judy was injured or otherwise suffered a bout of dissociative amnesia which caused her to become confused or forget her identity. This is supported by the sightings of a confused or disoriented Judy in Philadelphia. The family believes this explains why Judy traveled to the Pisgah National Forest apparently of her own free will.
One theory is that Judy and Jeffrey had an argument that spurred an angry Judy to leave the area, whether she left from Boston or Philadelphia. After she left the area and traveled south to North Carolina, she met with foul play.
In a similar vein, some believed Judy willingly traveled to North Carolina to meet up with someone, perhaps a friend or a secret boyfriend. The ID incident at the airport was simply a cover so Judy could converse with this person who she wanted to meet. Once in North Carolina she met with foul play perhaps at the hand of the person she went to meet.
One theory Jeffrey explored was that Judy was suffering from mental illness and had a psychotic break. Being a lawyer, Jeffrey was able with some legal maneuvering to obtain all of Judy’s medical records from her adult life, including a physical she had had only months before hand. There was no indication that Judy had ever had any mental health concerns. Neither she or her doctors ever mentioned anything that would have pointed to any mental health problems, even minor ones such as anxiety. According to Jeffrey, Judy’s newest physical reported that Judy was in good mental and physical health (Lewis, 1997 and Trace Evidence Podcast).
Other sleuths have speculated that Judy traveled to North Carolina because she was questioning her sexuality. Asheville at the time was known for having an LGBT community. This theory is pushed forward by one interview on the Unsolved Mysteries segment as Judy’s friend says, “If you are looking for a mystery man, there wasn’t one.” Some have said that this implied that Judy had met a mystery woman, not a man. However, this theory is full of holes. No friends or family ever had any indication that Judy was questioning her sexuality. Judy had been married to men on three occasions and had other boyfriends as well. This explanation fails to explain why this realization would cause Judy to unexpectedly travel hundreds of miles and cease contact with her children. It also fails to explain who killed Judy.
Others have speculated that Judy was tricked into going to North Carolina. Perhaps she met someone while sightseeing who offered her a ride and that person abducted her or drove her to North Carolina for some reason.
Personally, I have always wondered if Judy was suffering from early onset dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. This would be a similar theory to the psychotic break theory; however, I believe this explains why Judy was described as both disoriented and acting normal in different sightings. I am by no means an expert, but if I understand correctly, patients with these conditions can get very confused and agitated but can also have times of acting completely lucid. I think this theory can explain why Judy forgot her license at home before flying, and can also explain her disappearance. I think it is possible Judy got on the wrong bus and ended up first at the Deptford mall and then eventually North Carolina, simply getting more and more lost each day. Of course, this hypothesis does not solve Judy’s murder, it simply gives an explanation for her travels.
A final theory that is prevalent online is the idea that the doe found in Pisgah National Forest was not Judy at all and was instead misidentified. While this is always possible and something I have entertained from time to time, Judy was matched via dental records, her arthritic knee, and her distinct engagement ring with a pear-shaped stone. If the doe was not Judy, then the mystery becomes even stranger, and now includes the identity and murder of yet another woman. While the odds of a similarly aged woman, with a bad knee, similar dental work, and a plain silver wedding band accompanied with a fancy diamond engagement ring, who was not Judy being murdered in the forest is possible, I believe that it is not very likely. Proponents of this theory point to the ME’s report that the doe had been in the forest for over a year, while Judy had been missing only five months at the time of her discovery.
TO BE CONTINUED...
Full list of sources are in part two- https://unsolved.com/gallery/judy-smith/
link to part 2 https://www.reddit.com/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/kky2l2/when_a_body_is_found_600_miles_away_extensive_two/

Why Invest in HITI?

/r/RedDeadOnline Simple Questions & FAQ Thread.

/RedDeadOnline Simple Questions & FAQ Thread.

If your question isn't answered below, leave a comment and a community member will try to help!
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PC / Next-Gen / Stand-alone Questions

Q) If I buy on Rockstar Launcher, can I play with friends on Steam?

Yes, you can play with friends on PC regardless of what store they bought it from. Even Steam GTA, uses Rockstar to launch the game.

Q) Can we transfer our characters from PS4 and Xbox One to PC?

No, you cannot transfer characters to a different platform, e.g Xbox to PC. The game is cross-gen however, so if you play PS4 you can continue on PS5.

Q) If I buy a next-gen console, can I play with friends on old-gen consoles?

Yes! The game is backwards compatible on console, so you can play with friends on PS4/PS5 or XB1/XBX

Q) If I already own Red Dead Redemption 2, do I need to buy Red Dead Online again when it goes standalone?

No! Red Dead Online is still part of the RDR2 game.

Red Dead Online: General Questions

Q) What are the currencies in Red Dead Online?

Cash, the main currency in RDO that is earned through almost every activity.
Gold Bars, the premium currency in RDO that can be purchased using real money. You earn a small amount of gold for completing activities online.
Role Tokens, earned by levelling up in each role, used to unlock abilities & items for the five current roles.

Q) What is the Outlaw pass?

The Outlaw Pass is an in-game purchase using the premium Gold currency that allows you to earn items/rewards as you level up.
Outlaw Pass are only available for a limited time and once they finish, you can't access them again.

Q) What are Daily Challenges?

Every day at 6am UTC, you are given a new list of 7 daily challenges as well as 15 role daily challenges. They can range from hunting specific animals or finding certain herbs, to completing PVP/Freeroam events.
Initially, you earn 0.1 Gold per completed challenge plus a bonus if you complete all 7 regular challenges.
After completing at least 1 challenge per day for 7 days, you then earn a little more gold per challenge each week before your daily challenge streak resets after 28 days.
Your daily challenge streak will then reset, and you start the process again.
In addition to this, there are also 3 daily challenges for each role available and you can do a max of 9 role daily challenges. Daily challenges for roles will also differ depending on your rank within each role.

Q) What are Free-roam events (role/normal)

Every 45 minutes, you'll receive an invite to a free-roam event. Free-roam events can be activities such as fishing, horse racing, archery competitions, or PVP. You earn XP + cash for completing.
There are also role specific events that happen every 90 minutes, you need to be ranked up and enrolled in each role before you'll see invites for these activities.
You can see the schedule for free-roam & role events here

Q) What are ability cards?

Abilities in Red Dead Online are assigned to a character through Ability Cards. These are divided into two different types. Dead Eye cards that grant abilities only active during Dead Eye, while Passive cards add abilities that are always active, no matter what you do. Passive abilities are further divided into several different categories.
In Red Dead Online, it's not possible to assign all of the available abilities to the character, as there are only 4 slots available. One slot is used for a single Dead Eye card, while the remaining three slots are used for Passive abilities. ^{^{^{^Source.}}}

Q) What are the playing styles online?

Defensive: Players in Defensive mode will be indicated by a shield icon, will take reduced damage from enemy players, cannot be lassoed, melee attacked, executed or targeted with auto-aim. Defensive players will also be excluded from being targeted in PvP-related missions such as Player Assassination. Those who attack Defensive players receive hefty penalties via the Hostility system, while players who initiate conflict while in Defensive mode will be instantly pulled out of Defensive mode and also receive similar Hostility penalties.
Offensive: The Offensive playing style is set as the default and is how most players traditionally interact in Free Roam – free to engage in hostile contact with other players if you are prepared to accept the potential consequences.

Red Dead Online: Other Questions

Q) How do I dual wield?

At rank 25, you can buy an off-hand holster which allows you to equip a second handgun.

Q) How do I change appearance

Press Left on the D Pad (Keyboard TBC) to bring the Online menu up > Scroll down to Online Options > Scroll down to Change Appearance

Q) How do I setup camp

Press Left on the D Pad (Keyboard TBC) to bring the Online menu up > Scroll down to camp options > Choose location for camp
Camps can be used to access wardrobes, collect items you've ordered via the catalog, craft & cook and fast travel if upgraded.
A small camp is suitable for 1-4 posse members and costs $1 per in game day. A large camp is suitable for 1-7 posse members and costs $2 per in game day.

Q) Where is the gun locker?

You unlock it through the trader role, then purchase it at Wilderness Outfitters in camp, and then it appears at your specific tent in camp.

Q) How do I buy a dog?

At your camp, head to Cripps and access Wilderness Outfitters, from there you can select the dog option.

Q) What can dogs be used for?

Looking cool at your camp and warning you of camp raids when you unlock the perk. Not really much else. (They're not companions like Dogmeat from Fallout 4)

Q) I saw an item, but can't find it on PC or Xbox One.

Some items are exclusive to PS4, so you may see things promoted by Rockstar that aren't yet available on your platform or it may be from an old Outlaw Pass.

Q) What is the best Horse

This post should help.

Q) What are the best Weapons

Captain Balrick's arsenal should help you decide

Q) What is the best ability card loadout

This post in the /RedDeadOnline mega-guide should help.

Q) What is the best way to make money/gold

This post should help.

Q) Where are the treasure maps located?

You can find them all here.

Red Dead Online: Roles

Q) Can I have more than 1 role active?

Yes! You can play in all roles concurrently.

Bounty Hunter Role

Q) What is the Bounty Hunter role?

Get started as a Bounty Hunter when you meet the Legendary Bounty Hunter in Rhodes and purchase the Bounty Hunter License. The standard cost is 15 Gold Bars.
Licensed Bounty Hunters can pick up work by visiting bounty boards located near law offices, post offices and train stations across the states. There is no shortage of criminals to be dealt with and the targets range in difficulty, from lone low-level petty thieves to notorious outlaws with armed protection details and a watchful eye. Taking on an armed gang or bringing multiple targets to justice is made easier with the help of a Posse, who will all earn a cut of the final bounty. And keep in mind, bringing in targets alive will yield a greater reward.
Reaching Bounty Hunter Rank 12 will open up the opportunity to take down other players with high bounties of $20 or more. Bounty Hunters will be notified through an invite about the opportunity to hunt down the wanted player when they’re nearby in a structured pursuit. The wanted player must escape (or surrender) within the allotted time and if captured, they’ll also have opportunities to escape and flee. If the Bounty Hunter brings the target in alive, they’ll receive an award while the criminal serves time.

Q) What are legendary bounties?

Legendary bounties are high-tier bounties, they usually involve a mini-story/cut scene. They're also much tougher than a regular bounty.
There are 10 legendary bounties that can be access as part of the Bounty Hunter role and 3 that can be accessed (when they've all released) by purchasing the Prestigious Bounty Hunter upgrade.

Trader Role

Q) What is the Trader role?

our trusted camp companion, Cripps, has long dreamed of starting a trading outpost and you’re going to help him make it happen - by becoming a partner in the fledgling Cripps Trading Company. Combining Cripps’ lifetime of working with animal materials and your skills at hunting and frontier security, you’ll have the perfect ingredients to develop a thriving business.
Once you agree to help Cripps, you can start turning your camp into a business by sourcing items for Cripps to convert into sellable goods. An investment of 15 Gold Bars to purchase a Butcher’s Table will get your business up and running.
Once you’re operational, you’ll provide Cripps with Materials through hunting animals – pristine pelts and carcasses will provide better yields. You’ll also take on Resupply Missions to acquire additional necessities through less than savory tactics. Once supplied, Cripps will begin turning the materials into sellable goods, which can then be sent out on low-risk local deliveries for payment or across greater distances for a premium.
Improve your hunting yields with a Hunting Wagon for larger hauls or upgrade your Delivery Wagons for larger sales. As business flourishes and your presence becomes known in the market, your competition may grow jealous of your success, so keep an eye out for raids on your camp. As your trade grows, you might consider purchasing a camp dog from Wilderness Outfitters. Not only are dogs great camp companions for all players, but a Trader of sufficient rank can teach their dog to warn of incoming attacks.

Q) Can I skip the medium wagon?

No, you need to buy the medium wagon, then the large wagon.

Q) What can I sell to Cripps?

You can sell carcasses & small animals (e.g squirrels). Along with some animal parts, e.g feathers.
Cripps does not accept meat, fish or skinned carcasses.

Q) How long does it take Cripps to make goods after resupplying?

Cripps requires materials and supplies to produce goods. You give him materials by donating carcasses and pelts. He uses two units of materials to produce one good. You either buy supplies or obtain them through resupply missions. Either way, that gives enough supplies to produce 25 goods. As long as both materials and supplies are available, Cripps produces 1 good every 2 minutes (1 in-game hour).

Collector Role

Q) What is the Collector role?

Seek out the mysterious travelling saleswoman Madam Nazar to acquire the Collector’s Bag and get started on the path of the Collector. It will cost 15 Gold Bars for access to collecting and selling rare items.
With Madam Nazar’s help, you will be able to explore the world finding valuable treasures, whether they’re discarded Tarot cards in abandoned camps, buried treasures unearthed with your trusty shovel, hidden family heirlooms and more.
Collect individual pieces and sell them off directly to Madam Nazar or collect entire sets for even more valuable sales. As you progress, you’ll unlock enhanced searching skills; more useful tools like a metal detector; benefits like increased carrying capacities; the ability for your horse to directly pluck and pass herbs to you while mounted, and more.

Q) Where is Madam Nazar?

Madam Nazar can be located by completing a map/collection for her. Her location is posted daily on /RedDeadDailies - She changes location at 6am UTC time each day.
You can also find her using https://madamnazar.io/

Q) Who is Madam Nazar?

Madam Nazar is the Collector role vendor, you can obtain maps, cosmetics & other items such as the shovel from her.

Q) Why is Madam Nazar?

...

Q) Where do you buy a shovel?

From Madam Nazar, it costs $350. If you need help finding her, check /RedDeadDailies

Q) Where do you buy a metal detector?

From Madam Nazar, it unlocks at level 5 and costs $700. If you need help finding her, check /RedDeadDailies

Q) Can you sell collector items individually or does it need to be a full set?

Yes, however you get far less money than you would if you sold a full collection

Q) Can you only have one collector map active?

Yes, if you try to open a second map, it may auto-close and almost looks like a bug, however, you should only try and activate one at any given time.

Moonshiner Role:

Q) I already met Maggie but I didn't buy a shack, now I can't find how to buy the shack?

In the options menu (left on the D-pad, or L on PC), select "Camp & Properties" → "Moonshine Shack" → "Shack Location".

Will be expanded upon soon...

Naturalist Role

Will be updated soon...

Useful Red Dead Online Resources

/RedDeadDailies - A subreddit dedicated to sharing daily challenge information
/RedDeadCollector - The best place to ask for support with any locations for collector items.
Collector map.
/RedDeadOnline mega-guide.
Free-roam event schedule
Red Dead Online Discord

This thread will be posted at 6am UTC every Monday. We'll aim to update & add any additional questions in time for the new thread being posted each week.

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If you applied for a duplicate driver’s license or commercial driver’s license, you will be given a temporary license valid for 60 days. If you applied for an ID card, you will be given a receipt as proof of application. You should receive your new DL or ID card in the mail within three to four weeks. If you have not received your DL and/or If you need the certificate sooner, you can use the priority service for £35. It’ll be sent the next working day if you order by 4pm. Extra copies are the same price. Get help ordering a Did you know that you can replace, or change your address or emergency contacts on your DL, CDL, ID or motorcycle license without going into a driver license office? You may also be able to renew your DL, CDL or ID online. You can also obtain your driver record, check you driving status and pay reinstatements. You may also conduct a DL or ID transaction by telephone or by mail. They’ll send you a form so you can give them a new photo. You can make sure the photo on your licence is updated by using the photo driving licence renewal service . What to do if you find your Browse: Driving and transport. Driving licences. Vehicle tax, MOT and insurance. Driving tests and learning to drive or ride. Number plates, vehicle registration and log books There could be a few reasons why you are unable to order a new license plate online. The plate type may not be permitted to be replaced online. Most plate types can be replaced online, however some plate types are ineligible. An indicator is on the vehicle account that stops plate orders. If you did not find the information you need, enter a descriptive word or phrase in the Search field Renew Your Driver's License and Other Motor Vehicle Services. Learn how to get or renew your driver's license, register your car, or access other motor vehicle services. Or, find out about Real ID, including what it's used for and how to get a Real ID-compliant driver's license or identification card. Alabama Alaska In order to get one you'll need your drivers license number and some documentation. We list all the documentation needed, and let you know how and where to get it done. If your state offers replacements online, we'll let you know. And for many states, we even list the fees for a replacement license. You might be asked to take part in research by email, but you can opt out. Your licence should arrive within one week if you apply online. It may take longer if DVLA need to make additional checks Please request a duplicate driver's license or ID card online with the new online option here or by MVA Self-Serve Kiosk. These transactions will no longer be handled over the counter and the duplicate driver’s license or ID card will be mailed to the address on record at the MVA. Lost Maryland License or Permit. You must obtain a duplicate driver’s license or permit online. The license or

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