A house hunter viewing a vacant property in Burkesville, Kentucky, discovered the body of a man who had been missing for more than a week, leading investigators to a suspected murder plot involving his estranged wife.
David Hammersley and his family had travelled from Florida while fleeing hurricanes and were touring homes on 26 September 2022. At a two-acre rural property, they inspected a main house, detached garage and cottage.
Hammersley said the main house was in immaculate condition and empty of furniture. He was also interested in a Dodge truck parked inside the garage.
But when he and his father-in-law approached the cottage at the far end of the land, they noticed a powerful smell. “It had to be something like a dead raccoon, in my opinion,” Hammersley said.
They went inside and found Michael “Mike” Harding lying on the floor. Hammersley said the man was “obviously dead, from gunshot wounds”.
Authorities identified Harding as a California transplant who had been living across the state border in Tennessee. An autopsy found that he had been shot four times – twice in the head and twice in the torso.
Investigation into the Kentucky house murder
Kentucky State Police investigator BJ Burton examined Harding’s phone, which was found at the scene. Messages and calls suggested that Harding had been lured to the property.
Investigators learned that a realtor called James Fraser had contacted Harding, who worked as an HVAC technician, asking him to carry out a repair. But the number used to reach him was linked to a prepaid mobile phone.
“It was pretty evident early on that this is a burner phone,” Burton said.
Police also discovered that Harding was involved in a contentious divorce from Julie Harding, a captain with the California Highway Patrol. The couple were living separately, with Harding in Tennessee and Julie in California.
Friends and relatives told investigators that Harding feared his estranged wife. Police found that Julie Harding had exchanged about 194 calls in the months before his death with Thomas O’Donnell, a former car salesman living in Napa, California.
The prepaid phone used to contact Harding and O’Donnell’s phone had also been located together several weeks before the killing. Burton said the prepaid phone was first activated in the Houston area and that O’Donnell’s connection to Harding was through Julie Harding.
O’Donnell was arrested for Harding’s murder on 8 December 2022, two months after the body was found. Two days later, Julie Harding was found dead at the Tennessee home where Mike Harding had been living. An investigator determined that she had died by suicide.
Burton believed Julie Harding had conspired with O’Donnell to kill her estranged husband because she feared losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the divorce. O’Donnell pleaded not guilty, but a Kentucky jury later found him guilty and he was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
