HEAVY SPOILERS: Was Elizabeth (Judge's wife) a secret plant by the USIA?
Having recently completed the entire game and done some deep-diving into the game's lore, I've developed quite the interest surrounding Judge's former wife, Elizabeth. For some context, Elizabeth was Judge's wife and mother of their 3 kids when they lived in Chicago. Following the 2017 Chicago nightclub massacre, where Judge's entire SWAT team was massacred and he was left the only survivor with deep and crippling PTSD, Elizabeth seemingly up and left Judge, packing none of her belongings but vanishing without a trace alongside their children. While this might seem relatively straightforward at first, a married mother making the incredibly tough decision to leave her near-catatonic husband for the sake and well-being of the children, some of the details brought up posed some questions for me. For starters, according to in-game info, it was apparently Elizabeth who recommended to Judge that he move to Nevada to help find himself, and as any heavy lore nerd for this game knows, Judge's move to Nevada is what exactly led to his capture and intense brainwashing by the USIA. With this in mind, it seems pretty plausible that Elizabeth was working with the USIA to get Judge to Nevada in order to experiment on him. After all, the USIA clearly had a strong interest in Judge as far back as his time serving in the GWOT, with Evan (who is seemingly a USIA agent/informant) keeping an eye on him during that time before suddenly vanishing, only to coincidentally reappear after Judge's move to Nevada. Perhaps Elizabeth was even a plant by the USIA to marry Judge and eventually push him towards a move to Nevada (during his fragile mental state, likely making him more willing to such a drastic move) and right into the hands of Evan and the USIA. While that does connect, what I'm curious about is exactly how involved or willing she was in the manipulation of Judge. Given the fact that she up and disappeared without a trace shortly after suggesting that Judge move to Nevada, I believe that there's likely 2 theories that seem the most plausible, given the methods and tactics that the USIA has shown in the past, either they placed Judge's family in a sort of "witness protection" program (at least their equivalent), giving them new identities far away from Judge in case his conditioning failed and he came seeking them out, or that they simply had Judge's family killed shortly after in a move to fully remove any ounce of humanity and hope left within Judge in order to better groom him for his eventual experimentation in Nevada. Apologies for such a long post, I love speculating on complex lore like this and I'd you're still somehow reading this, I heavily appreciate it.