In March of 2021, two officers knocked on Amy Kusaywa’s door. “I expected the conversation to be about — maybe, that they were putting the investigation away,” she told Dateline.
Amy’s mother, 45-year-old Judith Geurin, had disappeared on February 20, 1991, and for nearly three decades, Amy battled with the idea that her mother might never be found.
“Every traceable thing with my mother ends in that winter of 1991. Her driver’s license just, you know, expired — was never renewed. She never filed taxes again,” Amy said. “She just vanished.”
Amy was 20 when her mother went missing. She was 50 when the detectives came to her house to tell her the news. “They told me that they had found her remains,” she said. “I was really in shock.”
Life before
The Geurins were a close-knit family, according to Amy.
Amy was the second born — and the only girl — of Judith and Joseph Geurin’s five children. “We were always with one or both of my parents,” she said. Judith was a stay-at-home mom, and the family spent most of their time together in their Cohoes, New York home.
In 1988, Joseph Geurin suffered a fatal heart attack. “He had been having some health issues,” Amy explained. “But his final, you know, heart attack was a shock and we didn’t expect him to pass.”
Judith took the loss hard. “She couldn’t really handle it,” Amy remembered. “That’s when everything started to change for our family.”
Amy describes her mother as “lost” in the aftermath of her husband’s death. Judith began to drink excessively and started to spend less time with her children, which was unusual. “She just gradually started to stay away from the house at all hours,” Amy said. “The day-to-day, you know, running of the household fell to me.”
The years that followed were a complicated time for the Geurin family — especially Judith. “I think she was, you know, in the midst of grief and despair,” Amy said. “And she made some bad decisions that ended up, unfortunately, having a permanent outcome.”
In late 1989, Judith — who was in her early 40s — met 27-year-old Curtis Pucci. The two began dating. “None of us [trusted him]. We made it difficult for their relationship,” Amy said. “We weren’t very pleasant when he was around — on the few times that she would bring him around.”
In 1990, a few months after the started dating, Judith and Pucci moved about 200 miles away to Sodus Point, New York — leaving Amy and her siblings in a new house Judith bought for them near their old Cohoes home in Troy, New York. Amy’s youngest sibling was 12 at the time.
“I do struggle with the fact that she left us,” Amy told Dateline. “I don’t believe she intended it to be permanently. I think she would have come to her senses if she was given the opportunity.”
The last time Amy saw her mother was in late 1990, when she and her siblings drove to Sodus Point. “We found her, but she didn’t really want to have anything to do with us,” Amy recalled. “And we drove right back that same night.” They continued to speak frequently by phone.
Amy described a call from her mother in December of 1990. “She realized the mistakes that she had made, that she was embarrassed by her behavior,” Amy said. “But I just reassured her that she could come home and we could just start again.” Amy hung up believing it was Judith’s intention to do just that.
“That was the last time I ever spoke with my mother,” Amy said.
The disappearance of Judith Geurin
Dateline spoke with Sergeant Caley Gaziano of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, who is the current lead investigator on Judith’s case. He said in 1991 there was an outstanding warrant on Judith Geurin for issuing a bad check earlier that year, so on February 20, the department made contact with her at her residence in Sodus Point regarding the warrant.
After not hearing from her mother since that last call in December of 1990, Amy grew concerned. “It had to be in March of ‘91 — March and April — when I started making phone calls [to the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office] to try to get them to do a home visit,” she said.
Sergeant Gaziano confirmed that, following Amy’s request, officers went to Judith and Pucci’s home in Sodus Point to check on her mother. Judith was not there, so they spoke with Curtis Pucci who told them Judith had fled to Florida to evade a warrant. “The information that [Pucci] had provided the officers at that time was accurate in regards to the warrant,” Sgt. Gaziano said. “The reasoning he provided saying that she fled the state to get out of a warrant did make sense at the time.”
Amy says she never believed her mother fled Sodus Point. “We had a relationship the whole time she was out there,” she said. “There was no reason for her not to speak [to us] and, you know, to move to Florida without telling us.”
According to Amy, for the next 15 years or so, her mother’s case was not investigated. “I reached out to anybody that I could reach out throughout the years and nobody really, you know, took me seriously,” she said. Sergeant Gaziano confirmed the case was not investigated, as it was assumed Judith had, indeed, left the state to escape that warrant. “For many years, there wasn’t anything I could do,” Amy remembered.
In the early 2000s, Amy asked her husband, who was with the Albany County Sheriff’s Department, to informally reach out to the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office regarding her mother.
In 2006, after speaking with Amy’s husband, the sheriff’s office opened a missing persons case for Judith Geurin.
The investigation
The original investigator in Judith’s missing persons case “did significant work into looking into credit history, housing history, phone history — any sort of record of Judith’s whereabouts,” Sgt. Gaziano told Dateline. “There’s no record showing that she ever resided in another state,” he added.
With no evidence of Judith Geurin being alive after 1991, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office quickly focused on Judith’s boyfriend, Curtis Pucci. According to Sgt. Gaziano, the agency publicly named Pucci as the main suspect in Judith’s disappearance in March of 2007.
Amy Kusaywa says that after her father died, her mother was the beneficiary of a sizeable life insurance payout. Amy believes Pucci was taking advantage of her mother to gain access to her money and property — including the trailer she owned in the Margaretta Road Trailer Park in Sodus Point where she and Pucci lived.
Through interviews conducted over the years with Curtis Pucci’s friends and ex-girlfriends, the sheriff’s office learned Pucci “does mention to one of his friends that Judith had come into a lot of money. He mentions that he wants Judith to sign over the trailer to him.” Sgt. Gaziano said. Shortly after Judith was last seen in February of 1991, “[Pucci] begins to sell off a lot of the belongings saying that Judith left them behind,” the sergeant noted. “And this might be jewelry he tried to sell off, a washing machine — belongings like that.”
Sometime around 2007, Wayne County Sheriff’s Office detectives attempted to interview Curtis Pucci regarding Judith’s disappearance. At the time, Pucci was serving time in state prison for an assault charge. “He will not talk to them. He lawyers up immediately,” Sgt. Gaziano said. “So that was kind of a dead end in hopes to get something from him.”
During their investigation, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office learned that Pucci was a “violent person” over the course of his relationship with Judith. “Judith would come in with marks on her arms, or bruises — and she would always play it off,” Gaziano said witnessed reported. “Witnesses had said that Curtis was violent and aggressive towards her, whether it would be physically or verbally.”
Sergeant Gaziano says Pucci had been arrested following a “domestic” dispute with Judith in the early ‘90s. He would not share any further details of the incident or the outcome.
Dateline attempted to get in touch with Curtis Pucci multiple times but did not hear back. His public defender declined the opportunity to comment on his behalf.
Over the course of their investigation, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office learned that Pucci had made mention of an ex-girlfriend to people he knew. “Speaking with friends and exes of Curtis, a couple of them had made mention that had told them that he had buried his ex-girlfriend,” Sgt. Gaziano said. “And actually, one of his friends -- he had said that [Curtis] buried in the bluffs.”
The bluffs are the Chimney Bluffs, a popular area in Wayne County about a 10 to 15-minute drive from Pucci and Judith’s residence in Sodus Point. Some witnesses reported having run into Pucci there. “He makes odd comments to people as they’re fishing in front of the bluffs. One gives us information that he says, ‘If bones could talk…’” Sgt. Gaziano said. “Things along these lines, like, pointing in the direction that he possibly could have done something.”
On October 8, 2020, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office received a phone call.
“Remains were located in Chimney Bluffs, right across the street from Chimney Bluffs State Park entrance on Garner Road in the town of Huron by some hunters in a little patch of woods,” Sgt. Gaziano told Dateline.
October 8, 2020 was Amy’s 50th birthday. When she later learned that had been the day her mother was found, she described it as “some kind of karmic gift.”
The next day, October 9, the remains “were identified through x-rays to be Judith’s,” Sgt. Gaziano said.
No longer missing
The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office internally re-classified Judith’s disappearance as a homicide “shortly after they found her remains,” Sgt. Gaziano revealed.
In December 2020, they returned to Judith and Pucci’s former residence in Sodus Point. “It was decided that a search warrant would be conducted of the residence,” he told Dateline. “Additional forensic evidence was actually located inside the trailer after all these years.”
Sergeant Gaziano would not to share the details of what they found. “We are still awaiting some forensic evidence to come back from the lab in hopes that that pushes us into a direction,” he said. The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office also executed warrants on Curtis Pucci’s vehicle and cell phones.
In May of 2024 the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office publicly announced they were investigating Judith’s death as a homicide. “It was validating, since I knew it was a homicide all these years,” daughter Amy said.
Sergeant Gaziano chose not to share Judith’s cause of death. He did tell Dateline his office believes Judith was killed in February of 1991.
Curtis Pucci has not been arrested or charged in connection to either Judith Geurin’s disappearance or her death. “This continues to be a working cold case investigation,” Gaziano said. “Our hope is that as we continue to speak with people, investigate leads, examine evidence, one day we could close this investigation and provide Judith’s family with the closure that they deserve.”
Although it took nearly 30 years for her mother to be found, Amy Kusaywa is grateful that she has been. “I have deep empathy for anybody that has a missing person in their life,” she said. “Very few people get the type of — if you want to call it ‘closure’ — but very few people get the, you know, get their loved one’s remains. And I’m thankful that we got hers.”
That said, “I definitely still want justice,” Amy told Dateline. “I want a prosecution.”
Anyone with information that might help solve Judith Geurin’s case is asked to contact the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office at 315-946-9711. You can also contact Sergeant Gaziano directly at 315-946-5748 or at cgaziano@co.wayne.ny.us.
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