“Imagine losing everything you love in a single day: your home, your children, your freedom. The pain drops you to your knees. But as the tears dry, you face a choice: Stay broken, or stand up and rebuild. My name is Judy Henderson. In 1982, at 32 years old, I was sent to prison for life. The crime? A murder I didn’t commit. It took 36 years for the truth to come out. I was 68 when I was finally freed and pardoned. By then, I’d spent more time behind bars than I had in the free world. This is my story.”
With the prologue to Judy’s book, written with Jimmy Soni and released in April 2025: When the Light Finds Us: From a Life Sentence to a Life Transformed, she pulls the reader into her gripping story and allows them to experience the depths of human despair as well as resilience and the transformative power of hope.
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”~ Jeremiah 29:11
She says the scripture was handwritten and taped above the mirror in her cell for years.
Judy was a 32-year-old mother-of-two and a business woman when she was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. But rather than surrender to despair, she transformed her sentence into a mission. Behind bars, she earned her GED and paralegal certification, pioneered programs connecting incarcerated mothers with their children, and became a powerful voice for women's rights and prison reform. Her advocacy work led to landmark legislation recognizing battered women's syndrome as a legal defense in Missouri.
Pardoned in 2018, Judy says her release wasn't just freedom; it was vindication. Today, she serves others through Catholic Charities and continues to advocate for criminal justice reform. Nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren have been added to her family since she was sent to prison.
“No matter your situation, there are choices,” Judy says. “With anger, you can get bitter or you an get better. A lot of people can be in dark, dark situations. There are people in their own prisons out here. But I believe you are born with everything you need to create what you want in your life. You don’t have to stay bitter. You can always turn that resentment into something better. I just thought, ‘Look at all the people I can help.’ My mother taught me to always help others.”
Before her life took what she calls an “unthinkable turn,” Judy says she was living the quintessential American dream. "My days revolved around my two children, Chip and Angel, in our modest suburban home. Our calendar was filled with dance recitals, barbecues and birthday parties: the ordinary joys of family life.”
Following her divorce, she got involved with a man she will only refer to now as her “co-defendant.” Nevertheless, at the time, he was charming and charismatic, and though now she admits there were red flags, she fell for him.
She says one day, he approached her with what seemed like a simple request. “He needed to confront a man named Harry about an unresolved financial matter.” She agreed to go.
But what he had planned was “far from a simple confrontation,” Judy writes in her book. “In a horrifying turn of events, he robbed and murdered Harry in cold blood.”
Even more horrifying, her co-defendant manipulated the narrative, framing her for his crime. And despite her clean record and evidence supporting her innocence, she was convicted of Harry’s murder, while her co-defendant walked free.
She was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In her book, Judy describes prison as a “foreign land with its own brutal language,” saying “danger lurked everywhere: shanks fashioned from toothbrushes,” and “invisible lines separating rival gangs.”
“At first, I tried to disappear,” she says. “I’d mumble apologies for the slightest bump into another inmate, my eyes glued to the floor. But it was impossible to be invisible in these crowded confines. My middle‑class background and soft‑spoken manner might as well have been targets on my back.” Worse, she says her attempts to hide screamed weakness.
So, she made the only choice she could. She learned to adapt. She says she learned to meet stares with unflinching eyes, to stand her ground and let her voice carry an edge of threat.
The prison system, she says isn’t interested “in rehabilitation, only punishment. We were systematically stripped of our names, our stories, our very humanity,” mere numbers, faceless entities “shoved along like cattle. Hope felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford.”
So, Judy focused on survival. She did what she knows best: found hope where there seemed to be none. “Even in prison’s bleakness, there were pinpricks of light. We found small ways to rebel, trading contraband, makeup or hair color. These actions may have seemed insignificant to outsiders, but they gave us precious moments of control…”
They made jokes and mimicked the guards, created silly nicknames for the prison food, crafted celebrations using crude cakes made of hoarded snacks, and sipped lukewarm tea in chipped mugs. “‘You do the time, or the time does you,’ prisoners say. I chose to do the time.”
For decades, Judy says she rebuilt herself through education, faith, therapy and service. “I devoured entire libraries, arming myself with knowledge. Faith anchored me,” she writes. “In the depths of confinement, I discovered spiritual freedom: a newfound purpose. I learned to turn raw emotion into action.”
She wrote to legislators, taught fellow inmates, became an advocate for prison reforms and protections for abused women and testified before state legislators. She even led fitness classes.
“Always, I remembered I wasn’t just an inmate; I was a mom. Prison didn’t erase my identity as a mother. It forced me to reimagine it,” she writes. “I became a voice on the phone, a lifeline of love and guidance.”
The “fragments of motherhood” kept her connected to her family and her true self, as she clung to her belief justice would prevail. “They strengthened my vow: I's speak to my children as a free woman once again, my name cleared.”
At every turn, she petitioned the state for her freedom. She crafted and recrafted clemency pleas. She spent thousands of hours with lawyers, mastering every intricacy of the legal system. Yet for 35 years, every one of those petitions failed.
“But in my 36th year of incarceration, my plea was granted. The governor himself arrived to deliver the news and apologize for the lifetime stolen from me,” she says.
“It was my faith,” she asserts. “I know God had me. Everybody who came into my life, they were there for a purpose, and He orchestrated their miracle to happen. I would think, ‘This isn’t God’s plan. He said in Jeremiah that His plans are to prosper me and not to harm me, plans to give me hope and a future.' So that gave me the strength to go on every day. In prison there is very little you can control. I controlled that, for 36 years.”
"In 1982, I was sent to prison for life. The crime? A murder I didn’t commit. It took 36 years for the truth to come out. This is my story.”
“But in my 36th year of incarceration, my plea was granted. The governor himself arrived to deliver the news and apologize for the lifetime stolen from me,” she says.
For decades, Judy rebuilt herself through education, faith, therapy and service: “I devoured entire libraries, arming myself with knowledge. Faith anchored me. In the depths of confinement, I discovered spiritual freedom: a newfound purpose."