She was burned alive by the man she loved. Then Judy Malinowski testified at her own murder trial
Speaking from her hospital bed – missing hair, skin, ears and fingers after suffering burns to more than 90 per cent of her body – Judy Malinowski raises a deformed right hand and stares down a video camera. The word “frail” doesn’t even come close to describing the appearance of the young mother. It’s hard to believe she is even alive.
Judy’s voice is steely, belying an unfathomable strength and determination from a body on the verge of giving up. The arson victim is talking through the live feed to her lawyer and then to the attorney representing Michael Slager, the boyfriend who’d tried to kill her.
Within months of giving the deposition, Judy would be dead. Those videotaped conversations would prompt a historic development within the Ohio court system – allowing a murder victim to testify at their own trial.
That’s exactly what Judy did, as she personally addressed the judge and jurors from the grave. Slager was sentenced to life without parole.
The tragic case is chronicled in The Fire That Took Her, a documentary that opened on 21 October for a limited theatrical release before it becomes available to stream next year.
Judy not only made history with her posthumous testimony. Her story and advocacy also helped push through a state law that adds up to six years to sentences for offenders who attack and disfigure victims with accelerants such as gasoline.
Legislators unanimously passed Judy’s Law and it was signed by the governor, Judy’s two daughters at his side, the same week as her funeral.
“This woman contributed to American legal precedent,” director Patricia Gillespie, who first read about the story in a newspaper piece that didn’t even make the front page, tells The Independent. “It’s a wild story. Everybody should know about this woman.”
Judy grew up in suburban Ohio, where she doted on her sister and brother and enjoyed a happy childhood, even winning beauty pageants and being crowned homecoming queen. Her idyllic life was thrown into chaos, however, when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer as a young adult; she beat it once but was told in 2006 that the cancer had returned.
Doctors performed a full hysterectomy on Judy, but she became addicted to opiates during recovery at a time when the drug epidemic was exploding across the United States. When Judy’s insurance ran out and she could no longer access prescriptions, she turned to the streets for heroin. Judy herself says this in the documentary, which utilises video footage filmed by family and detectives.
Relatives helped care for Judy’s two young daughters as she worked thorugh her addiction and tried to get back on her feet; she seemed to be making great progress until she began dating Michael Slager.
The documentary says that Slager contacted Judy on social media, and the pair became inseparable from their first date onwards. Unbeknownst to her family, neck-tattooed Slager had a lengthy record with offenses ranging from theft and stalking to child endangerment and domestic assault.
During her relationship with Slager, Judy fell back into addiction. He would buy her drugs, according to the film, despite not using them himself. It created a toxic cycle leaving her controlled by and dependent upon him. The pair fought often; it was one of those fights, while Judy was on her way back to rehab in 2015, that would ultimately turn deadly.
During the altercation by a gas station on 2 August of that year, Judy threw a soda at Slager; he responded by dousing her with gasoline. Surveillance footage from an ATM across the street shows Slager head back to his black truck, only to return in half a minute with a lighter.
Seconds later, Judy’s entire body was engulfed in flames as Slager looked on.
Against all odds, Judy survived for 23 months after her attack, underwent more than 50 surgeries and coded at least seven times
A frantic 911 caller alerted authorities. Slager began attempting to pass off the attack as an accident. Judy was whisked to the hospital, where she was not expected to survive.
“In the burn world, we have an equation for mortality, which is based on the patient’s age, and percent burn,” Stacy Best, one of Judy’s nurses, says in The Fire That Took Her. “And in Judy’s case, she was 31 at the time of the burn, I believe, and approximately 80-plus percent burned. So that made her like 110 percent mortality.”
As Judy fought for her life, detectives were investigating what had really happened outside that gas station. It was the ATM surveillance footage – in addition to eyewitness statements – that almost immediately tore to shreds Slager’s account.
“It looked like a movie scene,” Lead Detective Chad Cohagen says in the film, adding that the footage was “clearly showing that they were arguing, and then Michael dumped gas over her. So we knew right away that Michael’s story … he had lied to us. For me, that scene has played out in dreams more times than I can count.”
Mother-of-two Judy Malinowski was just 31 when her then-boyfriend, Michael Slager, set her alight in 2015; she died two years later from her severe injuries
Michael Slager pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison after Judy died from injuries incurred when he set her on fire in August 2015.
