Court audio: Murder weapon was a hunting rifle

BOISE, Idaho -- A murdered man, a 12-year-old witness, and a grandmother behind bars.

The details emerging from a 27-year-old crime paint a complicated and troubling picture.

This is a murder believed to have taken place in 1980. 

The woman who says she witnessed the crime, was 12 years old at the time.  Now, 27 years later, she's the one who tipped off police. And she says her mother is the shooter.

Judy Gough, a married, 61-year-old mother and grandmother, now stands accused of killing her former husband, Lloyd Ford.  His body and this alleged crime both apparently buried for nearly three decades.

Twenty-seven years after his death it is Gough's daughter who's coming forward with information.  As you'll hear in this audio recording from the probable cause hearing, she says she was there when it happened.

"It came to the attention of the Boise Police Department that a woman who is now about 40, had witnessed a crime, had witnessed her mother, Judy Gough, shoot her stepfather back in 1980 when the woman was only 12 years old.  She said a couple weeks prior to this incident her mother had proposed different options on how to kill Lloyd, and decided on using sleeping medication ground up and put into his ice cream with caramel topping on it and serving that."

After initially poisoning Ford, Gough's daughter told prosecutors her mother then shot the man with a deer rifle, dragged his body out of the family house and buried him in the backyard.

The same yard where human remains were recovered over the weekend.  Without the full skeleton or skull, the coroner has been unable to make a positive identification, but according to prosecutors, they already have a confession on tape -- this from a recorded conversation between Gough and her daughter.

"Judy made acknowledgements that she'd killed Lloyd Ford.  She stated that she did it because she was afraid, she was trying to protect the family, that's one of the statements that she made."

Gough also told her daughter, she would kill herself if she was ever caught.  She now sits behind bars on a $500,000 bond, awaiting her preliminary hearing later this month.

By piecing together information provided by Ford's family, prosecutors believe he was murdered in April of 1980.