Judy Markey

Judy Markey was a Chicago radio host, newspaper columnist and novelist best known as one half of WGN Radio's "Kathy and Judy Show," the midday program she hosted with Kathy O'Malley from 1989 to 2009 and again on weekends from 2013 to 2017. The show built a devoted following of listeners who called themselves "The Girlfriends," and it was known for candid, funny conversation about sex, marriage, parenting and everyday life, including a recurring feature called "Sex Thursday." The program twice won the Gracie Award for Best Major Market Talk Show, and for two decades it was among the most listened to midday shows in Chicago.

Before she became a radio personality, Markey had already built a career in Chicago media. For roughly fifteen years she wrote a thrice weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times, and she also contributed to The New York Times and national magazines such as Cosmopolitan. She wrote two novels, "The Daddy Clock" and "Just Trust Me." Colleagues who worked alongside her at the Sun-Times remembered her writing as sharp and quick witted, qualities that carried directly into her radio career.

Markey's personal life included time spent living abroad in Rome, Paris and Amsterdam with her first husband, Tom Markey, before the couple settled in Wilmette, Illinois, where she raised her two children while continuing to write. In 2002 she married Tom Collinger, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University's Medill School. Between them the couple had two children and two stepchildren, and the family later divided time between the Chicago area and a second home in Tucson, Arizona.

Judy Markey died on September 11, 2026, at the age of 82. According to reports from WGN Radio and the Chicago Sun-Times, she had spent recent years dealing with declining health tied to a degenerative neurological disorder, and she chose to end her life through a medically assisted death in Switzerland, a country where such assistance has long been permitted under strict conditions. WGN Radio announced her death to listeners on the morning of September 11, and her longtime broadcast partner Kathy O'Malley, along with former colleagues at WGN and the Sun-Times, offered public tributes describing her wit, warmth and her outspoken support for the right to choose a medically assisted death.

Her death drew attention in part because news of it reached the public the day before a new medical aid in dying law took effect in Illinois, a coincidence noted by several Chicago journalists who had known her. Markey is remembered chiefly for the two decades she spent as one of Chicago radio's most familiar and candid voices, someone who made an entire city's listeners feel like they had a girlfriend on the airwaves.