Who was the suspect in Dr. Judith Calder's murder? Details explored ahead of Buried in the Backyard on Oxygen

In August 2001, the University of Nevada's humanities professor Dr. Judith Calder was staying at the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas.

Having a commute of about 60 miles between the University campus and her house, she'd often stay at nearby hotels after a long day at work, and August 17, 2001, was another of those days.

Shockingly, Calder disappeared the next day and was last been seen getting in her car and driving off, according to the hotel's CCTV footage. While the car was quickly found by the police in their initial investigation, Calder was nowhere to be seen.

It was only ten days after her disappearance that some antelope hunters discovered her body in the sands of the Jackpot deserts in Nevada, almost 500 miles from the hotel.

Judith Calder (Image via YouTube)

The post-mortem report of her body revealed that she was stabbed in the heart multiple times and was dead since the day she disappeared.

After a series of twisted and complex interrogations with family and coworkers, it was finally found that Ricky Barge, an associate of the Calder family, was responsible for the killing.

However, it was later brought to light that Barge was, in reality, a homeless man in Texas whose identity was being used by a man named Mohamed Kamaludeen, a convicted robber and murderer. The criminal was finally caught by the police almost six years after the murder of Calder and was sentenced to life in prison by the jury during the legal proceedings.

Oxygen's Buried in the Backyard will revisit the shocking 2001 murder case of Judith Calder in their upcoming episode, titled A Vanishing Professor. The synopsis of the episode, as per Rotten Tomatoes, reads:

"A weekend getaway at a Reno resort becomes the center of a mystery when a respected college professor disappears; police learn that the answers may lie buried beneath desert sands hundreds of miles away."

The upcoming episode airs on the platform on Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 7 pm ET.

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Judith Calder murder case: Mohamed Kamaludeen had previously been convicted of murder and robbery

Mohamed Kamaludeen during the trial (Image via YouTube)

During the Judith Calder murder case investigation, a coworker of Mohamed Kamaludeen, who at the time was known as Ricky Barge, confessed that he witnessed him stabbing Calder and placing her in a plastic lined box.

He said that Judith had loaned a sum of $150,000 to Barge, an amount Barge was unable to pay back to her. So. he planned to lure her to his warehouse with the pretext of paying her back only to stab her to death.

While Barge was nowhere to be found after the confession, the police launched an invetigation into his personal and criminal history. The search led them to discover that Ricky Barge was Mohamed Kamaludeen, a criminal who had been using this false alias to go undetected by authorities.

Kamaludeen used the money Judith Calder loaned him for gambling in several casinos in Las Vegas, where he'd racked up thousands of dollars in debts. However, what was even more shocking is that the police also discovered that Kamaludeen had committed a gruesome murder in 1993 while he was living in Canada and had an active arrest warrant in the country.

When Kamaludeen was finally caught, all his crimes were brought up during the legal proceedings, and the jury eventually convicted him of first-degree murder count. He was sentenced to life in a state prison in Ely, Nevada.

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Watch Buried in the Backyard on Saturday, July 15, 2023, at 7 pm ET, exclusively on Oxygen.