A judgement will be on your report until it is cleared by the courts. (edit: or until it drops off due to reporting time frames)
This varies by state as well as by the judges themselves.
IF the landlord was still alive then it would usually mean paying off the judgement if you haven't already, then asking the attorney to move to vacate the judgement based on the fact that it was PIF - not guarenteed but works in some cases. You can't dispute the judgement and have it fall off since its public record and easy to prove that there is one - paid or not. Paying it doesn't make it go away either.
Since the landlord is dead, you will have to find out what happened to the property. Most landlords are set up as LLCs for their property as protection and for tax reasons. When the landlord died, a loved one may have become automatic owner of said property taking over the landlord responsibilites and thus the money is still owed. It wasn't owed to the particular person; but rather the LLC that owned/managed the property.
If there was no next of kin and the property automatically became the property of the state (if there was no will at all and no estate) then I would doubt you'll really have a venue to get it removed. You may consult an attorney in your state/county and ask them once you have full details of what happend after the landlord died to the property.
Definatly an uphill battle.
