by Jess McCuan . photos by Matt Rose

Meet four of Asheville’s most powerful women. Female judges now outnumber males in Buncombe County’s district courts, a shift that started in 2005. The four current female district judges, pictured here, have remarkable stories to tell. At 38, Judge Julie Kepple is the youngest sitting judge in the county. Judge Rebecca Knight, once a P.E. teacher, was Buncombe’s first woman district judge, along with Shirley Brown, when they were elected in 1990. VERVE takes a closer look at women on the bench.

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Name: Andrea Dray

Age: 53

Year appointed District Court Judge: 2011

You might be surprised to know: She was born in Greece, adopted by Americans and recently reunited with her biological family.

Judge Dray likes to use the phrase “ridiculously colorful” to describe her early childhood story. “Some Greek peasants threw me down a well,” she says. No joke. And while it might sound a bit like a movie script, there is a happy ending: Dray was adopted by a family in upstate New York and recently reunited with her biological family in Greece. At her citizenship ceremony at age 5, Dray says the judge told a group of recent immigrants, “There are no kings in this country. The only way to rule here is to serve.” Her adopted father took the message to heart and repeated it to her often. At age 9, she says, she announced that she would go into law. She later got degrees at Syracuse University and the University of Bridgeport. Afterwards, she and her husband, an attorney, moved to Asheville, where she’s been practicing family law since 1994. She’s only been a district judge since February, but every day, she’s struck by the weight of making decisions that permanently affect people’s futures. “The gravitas of [judgeship] is amazing,” she says. “We impact on a daily basis the fabric of people’s everyday lives: their cars, houses, money, family and liberty. It doesn’t get any more personal than that.”

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Name: Patricia Kauffman Young

Age: 45

Year elected District Court Judge: 2002

You might be surprised to know: She has an associates degree in fashion merchandising from Endicott College in Massachusetts.

Judge Young started her law career as a paralegal at an upstate New York firm, Dempsey & Dempsey, and quickly recognized she was as capable as any of the office attorneys at preparing a case for court. So the East Aurora, New York, native headed to Lansing, Michigan, for law school. Shortly after, she moved to Asheville sight-unseen after landing a job with a criminal law practice in Haywood County. Since then, she’s practiced criminal law at area firms and spent five years in the Buncombe County Public Defender’s Office. She’s also served on regional commissions to address substance abuse and mental health issues. Does she mind leaving behind her fashionista dreams to don the black robe? Not at all. (The fashion-biz interest was short-lived anyway.) “The whole concept behind the robe is that—when people see us wearing it—we’re a blank slate. In the courtroom, we have to be someone they can relate to. We’re here to render justice. If we came in looking different, it would take away from the nature of the business.”

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Name: Julie M. Kepple

Age: 38

Year elected District Court Judge: 2010

You might be surprised to know: She regularly runs marathons, including, in 2009 and 2010, the Blue Ridge Relay (a 211-mile run) with five other women.

Most days of the week, Judge Kepple weighs in on tragic situations in family court—custody battles and cases of abuse and dysfunction that get hashed out over the course of weeks or months. Having come from a broken home herself, you might argue that she has a deeper empathy than most for such situations. The Asheville native grew up with an alcoholic, abusive father. At a young age, Kepple called 911 as her mother was being choked in her front yard. After high school at Mount Pisgah Academy in Candler and degrees from University of Tennessee and University of Memphis, she married her high school sweetheart, Rich Kepple. They now have three children, ages 5, 7 and 10. As a judge, Kepple thinks of herself as a good listener, but no one would call her shy. Particularly when it comes to her views about female justices. “Some people are concerned about women on the bench. But if they need a white man’s perspective, they can look to case law,” she says. “It’s my perspective, not my gender, that makes me the judge that I am.”

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Name: Rebecca Knight

Age: 55

Year elected District Court Judge: 1990

You might be surprised to know: She’s married to Judge Marvin Pope and was once a P.E. teacher and coach.

She learned a sense of right and wrong—and a strict sense of duty—early on from her father, an Air Force officer. You might have called Judge Knight a bit of a tomboy, growing up with three brothers and learning to ride horses and play outside. She says she wouldn’t have been at all disappointed in a career as a gym teacher and coach in Charlotte, where she spent five years teaching. But when her family moved to the tiny town of Buies Creek, North Carolina, 45 minutes from Raleigh, there were no teaching jobs. Her husband, Marvin Pope, was in law school there at Campbell University, and she signed up for law school as well. A few years in, she says, she realized she could make more of a difference in kids’ lives as a judge than she might have as a teacher. She took a job as an assistant county attorney representing social services in child abuse and neglect cases, then moved on to various aspects of family law, spending time on both prosecution and defense teams in child abuse trials. “I wanted to see it from all sides,” she says. “I think I’ve got a tremendous passion to get it right.”