Jury takes 2 hours to convict in Oak Brook slaying
A DuPage County jury deliberated less than two hours Tuesday before convicting a man of first-degree murder for shooting his ex-wife to death outside an Oak Brook hotel.
Jerry Hudson, 51, faces a minimum 45 years in prison for the New Year’s Day 2010 slaying of 45-year-old Melissa Bridgewater of Bolingbrook.
Hudson had testified he was acting in self-defense when he shot Bridgewater six times in the parking lot of a Doubletree Hotel where she’d spent the holiday with her new boyfriend.
Bridgewater’s siblings were not surprised the jury didn’t buy his story.
“Ray Charles could have saw through that,” Bridgewater’s older sister, Patricia Bridgewater-Farrell, said outside of court.
Her brother Kevin called the defense “a crock.”
Hudson, of Bolingbrook, wrote of his desire to kill Bridgewater in a letter to his family days before the murder, prosecutors Mary Cronin and Mike Fisher said.
Early the morning of the killing, Fisher said, Hudson lured the victim out of the hotel in a series of phone calls “like a predator trying to coax his prey out of hiding.”
Prosecutors said Hudson rammed a rental car into Bridgewater’s vehicle as she backed out of a parking space, then ran to the driver’s side window and opened fire.
Bridgewater was shot six times, including twice in the left temple and three times in the back. Another bullet grazed her face.
Afterward, Hudson fled to Chicago, where he abandoned the rental car, threw his handgun into a canal, and went to a family member’s home. He surrendered four days later.
At trial, Hudson claimed he wanted to talk to Bridgewater because she had threatened him with a gun in a phone call and it seemed unlike her. When she reached for a “black object” inside her car, he testified, he pulled a handgun out of his coat pocket, closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.
Defense attorney John Lyke called the case an example of “imperfect self-defense” and urged jurors to find Hudson guilty of second-degree murder.
Prosecutors maintained there was a premeditated plan.
“You don’t shoot someone six times and not intend to kill,” Fisher said. “If the defendant really believed it was self-defense, he would have called the police right away.”
Bridgewater’s boyfriend, Marvin Durr of Chicago, said the jury’s verdict brought closure to the victim’s friends and family.
“I’m satisfied, very satisfied. Justice was served,” he said. “He (Hudson) tried to portray her as a bad lady, and she wasn’t that at all. She was the best.”
State’s Attorney Robert Berlin said the jury’s swift verdict left no doubt Hudson set out to kill.
“This was a coldblooded execution,” he said. “The evidence was overwhelming.”
Bridgewater, a mother of two, attended Proviso East High School in Maywood with Hudson and her family had known him for decades, her sister said.
Hudson, who returns to court next month, faces up to natural life when he is sentenced by Judge Daniel Guerin.