‘This is all going to be over on the 19th:’ Police records reveal new details about MD judge’s killer

At 5:03 p.m. on Oct. 19, 2023, Pedro Argote opened an email and learned that he had lost custody of his four children after being unmasked as a controlling, abusive father at a court hearing earlier that day.

By 6:11 p.m., Argote was gassing up his 2009 Mercedes SUV at a Sheetz in Frederick, where he’d been living in an apartment since April.

He drove 30 miles northwest toward Hagerstown, where he stopped in a Lowes parking lot and sat in his car for 15 minutes. Then he shut off his phone.

Surveillance cameras picked up the trail next, showing Argote’s SUV driving toward a tidy neighborhood just a few miles from the Maryland-Pennsylvania border.

At 7:54 p.m., a neighbor’s Ring camera caught the SUV passing by Washington County Circuit Court Judge Andrew Wilkinson’s home.

The SUV stopped in the street as a person stepped out of the home’s garage and unlocked the silver pickup truck in the driveway. As the person opened the truck’s passenger-side door, the SUV’s brake lights turned off. The driver had put it in park.

Then the Ring camera cut out, unable to sense any more movement in the early fall dusk.

Police would later fill in what happened next: Argote approached Wilkinson in the driveway and fired three shots, hitting the judge twice, before fleeing in his SUV.

RELATED: 1 year after the murder of a Washington County circuit judge, what’s changed?

Wilkinson’s wife and neighbors who heard the gunshots immediately rushed outside and called 911. But Argote was gone and Wilkinson died less than an hour later at a nearby hospital.

The brazen shooting of a Maryland judge in his own driveway stunned the state and shook the core of a legal system intended to supplant violence as a means of resolving disputes. It spurred urgent meetings about judicial security and the passage of legislation to keep judges’ home addresses off the internet.

Now, more than 100 pages of police files released in response to a public records request from The Daily Record shed new light on the terrifying shooting, providing a fuller picture of Argote’s actions after his family finally escaped his grasp.

Argote died by suicide days after the murder, his body found in a wooded area near the West Virginia border after an intensive weeklong search by law enforcement.

Police and court records show there were signs that Argote posed a danger, at least to his family, before the shooting.

When officers sought out Argote’s wife in the hours after Wilkinson’s death, she became hysterical.

“I knew he was going to do something,” she said, according to the police reports. Their divorce had become increasingly fraught in the past few months, and she was convinced Argote’s mental state had been deteriorating.

He was estranged from many of his family members. At the divorce hearing that ended just hours before Wilkinson’s shooting, Argote’s adult daughter testified that her father beat her with a belt and other objects and installed cameras throughout the house so that he could monitor her every move.

“The reason I worked up the courage to testify was so that my siblings wouldn’t have to go through the mental torment that I currently have,” said the woman, who testified that she left home at 18 and had not spoken with her father since.

Argote’s wife, the mother of his four younger children, said the abuse and isolation intensified when Argote found out she planned to leave him.

Wilkinson immediately granted Argote’s wife a divorce and sole custody of their children, who were 12, 11, 5 and 3 years old at the time.

“The manner in which Mr. Argote has isolated these children and mom over the past two years, I think that has gone on throughout the marriage, and it’s shocking,” Wilkinson said. “I think he is abusive in multiple ways.”

Argote was not in court that day. He claimed to have a headache.

Maryland judge killed: Everything you need to know

His wife turned to her lawyer with a warning: They should not take Argote’s absence lightly. She believed “he would do something crazy,” according to the police records.

She would later tell police that she was “convinced Pedro was going to kill her, but would not attempt it while she was in the presence of her children.”

Instead, Argote went after the judge who ruled against him. Investigators later discovered that Argote’s search history on his home computer included inquiries about Wilkinson, the lead detective on the case told The Daily Record in an email.

“Exactly what information those searches returned, I do not know,” said Kevin Klappert, a detective with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. “But at the time, I and others searched the judge’s name on Google and it didn’t take long to find his address with publicly available information.”

Argote’s wife also told police that her husband had an interest in guns and an anti-government attitude, according to the investigative records.

He closely followed news stories about bombings and people trying to get into the White House, she said. He spent a lot of time at a gun range practicing shooting, sometimes bringing home targets with human outlines and showing them to his wife. The bullet holes were always in the center of the target, she told police.

Argote had also attended the Montgomery County Police Department’s Citizen Academy years earlier, his wife recalled. He came home from those classes and discussed cases he’d learned about there, she said, noting what he perceived to be mistakes the police had made in their investigations.

In an email, an MCPD spokesperson confirmed Argote attended the Citizen Academy 10 years ago after passing a background investigation.

“During the Citizen’s Academy, only highly publicized cases are discussed with participants,” Capt. Stacey A. Flynn said. “The department encourages anyone suffering from domestic violence to seek assistance via the Family Justice Center and those experiencing mental health crisis to contact the Montgomery County Crisis Center.

“Judge Wilkinson was an exemplary public servant who will continue to be missed. Our deepest MCPD condolences are offered to his wife Stephanie and his children,” Flynn said.

During a search of Argote’s residence, police found a training certificate issued by the Citizen Academy, according to the police records. Investigators also found an article on “abusive litigation” with handwritten notes, a blue notebook containing a timeline of his divorce case, a purple notebook detailing his interactions with his children and his grievances against his wife, and a red notebook that contained notes and witness preparation materials for upcoming court dates.

“Nothing in the above-recorded documents showed a direct link to Judge Wilkinson’s homicide,” a police lieutenant wrote. “However, the records did demonstrate Argote’s mounting frustration with the judge, his ex-wife’s attorney, the children’s assigned attorney, and the legal system in general.”

A search of Argote’s mailbox at a UPS store in Hagerstown turned up a letter from the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network advising that Argote’s membership would expire later in 2023, along with notices indicating that his small digital advertising business was flailing.

Argote’s wife also told police that he owned a Glock handgun and an AR-style rifle, but said he sold the rifle before Wilkinson’s shooting. Evidence recovered at the scene of the shooting and at the site where Argote’s body was found confirmed he used the Glock in the murder.

Argote carried the handgun with him at all times, his wife told police, “even if it was illegal” to do so. Argote was a registered gun owner, but was briefly ordered to surrender his two firearms in June 2022, when his wife received a temporary protective order against him.

The order was rescinded 10 days later, after Argote and his wife agreed on a “nesting arrangement” where he would live on the first floor of the family’s home and she would live upstairs with the children. He later moved out of the home entirely.

Argote’s wife said her husband never threatened her with a gun, but described their relationship as “20 years of domestic violence” during an interview with police after the shooting.

Argote’s behavior also became increasingly concerning in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 19 hearing, his wife told police.

Just days before the hearing, when Argote picked up the children as part of the couple’s court-ordered custody arrangement, he walked up to the front door of the house instead of waiting in the car like he was supposed to, frightening his wife.

Two weeks before that, he delivered a chilling message as he dropped off the SUV at his wife’s house: “This is all going to be over on the nineteenth.”

Argote may have meant that he expected to win the custody battle.

But that’s not what happened. On Oct. 19, after skipping that day’s court hearing, Argote lost the divorce case and custody of his children after years of abuse and controlling behavior finally came to light.

He opened the email informing him of the decision at 5:03 p.m.