Inset: Michael Harding (Clay County Sheriff). Left: Thomas O’Donnell (Cumberland County Sheriff). Right: Julie Harding (California Highway Patrol).
A California man who worked with his police officer girlfriend to kill her husband in a murder plot spanning multiple states is headed to prison.
Thomas O’Donnell, 64, was sentenced to life in prison on Monday for the slaying of 53-year-old Michael Harding, an Army and Navy veteran, in Cumberland County, Kentucky. A Bluegrass State jury last week convicted O’Donnell of murder.
At the time of the murder, O’Donnell was in an extramarital affair with then-California State Patrol Trooper Julie Vernnan Harding. Prosecutors said Julie Harding, in the months preceding the slaying, drained more than $220,000 from her estranged husband’s bank accounts.
O’Donnell and his lover then hatched a scheme where he would act as an HVAC contractor so he could get close enough to kill Michael Harding. The veteran, who was last seen alive on Sept. 20, 2022, was later found riddled with bullets.
But there would be no storybook ending for the demented couple.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Julie Harding was found dead months later from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in front of her one-time home, some 25 miles away in Tennessee, with a terse, cryptic, and rueful letter left by her corpse.
At the time of Michael Harding’s disappearance, Clay County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Rick Lisi said in an interview with AM radio station WUCT that no foul play was suspected.
A timestamped image of his black pickup truck placed him in the Bowling Green area of Kentucky on the day he vanished. Friends immediately reported his absence.
Six days later, however, Harding was found dead with multiple gunshot wounds inside a Cumberland County, Kentucky, residence.
The house was not his, and it was otherwise empty.
An apparent break in the case came on Dec. 8, 2022, when O’Donnell was arrested and charged with Harding’s murder. O’Donnell, who hails from Napa, was apprehended at the Sacramento International Airport just as he was about to board a flight to Tennessee.
That same day, Julie Harding, 49, was also arrested, but not in connection with her husband’s death. Police in Tennessee had charged her with stalking and burglary. In early October 2022, she was seen on a Ring camera from a home in Murfreesboro whispering to her deceased husband’s dog, Charlie, before putting a leash around his neck and walking away with him.
Local NBC affiliate KCRA later reported that Netflix accounts had been hacked into at the house where the dog was stolen, profile pictures were changed, and various other accounts on the device were deleted.
The dog had been staying with the woman who had been dating Michael Harding at the time of his death. According to KCRA, there had been a dispute about when and where she would surrender the dog.
Two days after her arrest, Julie Harding apparently died by suicide. Her body was found in the front yard, near the driveway, of the Celina, Tennessee, home she and her husband purchased two years prior. According to comments from Clay County Sheriff Brian Boone and reported by Sacramento-based CBS affiliate KPIX, a letter carrier and “another man” were the first to find her. She died from a single gunshot wound, the sheriff said.
Like O’Donnell, Julie Harding has a California connection: She was the Yuba-Sutter commander and captain of the California Highway Patrol, where she worked since 1999, at the time of her death. She assumed her leadership role in 2018. The agency has told various media outlets that she was on leave when she died.
At the time of his disappearance, Michael Harding was going to be a groomsman in his friend Preston Cleary’s upcoming wedding. On the day he went missing, he was on his way to pick up his tuxedo, but stopped to make a service call for the heating and air-conditioning business he owned. He never made it to the tuxedo shop.
“Mike was a good man,” Cleary told KCRA at the time. “He didn’t deserve what happened to him. He was [an] ‘integrity-through-the-roof’ guy. He couldn’t tell a lie. He would always do everyone right.”
He told the TV station that he was shocked to learn his friend was the victim of a crime like this, but that he also had a bad feeling as soon as he learned Michael Harding had gone missing.
“Deep down, I knew we weren’t going to find Mike alive,” Cleary said.
The deaths of the couple, less than four months apart, sent shockwaves across three states that have resulted in investigations by numerous local, county, and federal law enforcement agencies. O’Donnell was arrested with the FBI’s help.
Cleary always believed Julie Harding had hired a hit man to kill her husband.
“I believe it was months of planning,” Cleary recently told WBKO. “He was in fear for you know his life as well, because his doors was chained up, they were propped up. So like you were trying to keep someone out. And I think he knew what she was capable of.”
Cleary said the Hardings were experiencing a variety of marriage troubles and that Michael had asked Julie Harding for a divorce.
According to Cleary, Julie Harding had left behind a note that read: “Mike, I guess you win.”
Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report
