Julie Harding died before she could be tried, but prosecutors said her relationship with Thomas O’Donnell led to Michael Harding’s killing.
BURKESVILLE, Ky. — The man prosecutors said helped a California Highway Patrol captain kill her estranged husband was sentenced to life in prison after jurors accepted a murder case built around divorce, cash and a fake repair call.
Thomas O’Donnell, 64, was convicted May 1 and sentenced May 4 in the death of Michael Harding, 53, whose body was found in a vacant Cumberland County house in September 2022. The person prosecutors described as O’Donnell’s partner in the plot, Julie Harding, never sat at the defense table with him. She died two days after O’Donnell’s arrest, leaving the trial to focus on what jurors could learn from her records, her calls and her ties to him.
Julie Harding had spent more than two decades with the California Highway Patrol. She began work there in 1999 and later became a commander. By 2022, her marriage to Michael Harding had broken apart. He had moved to Celina, Tennessee, where the couple had bought a home with plans to retire, while she remained connected to California. Prosecutors said the separation turned into a deadly conspiracy after she began an affair with O’Donnell, a Napa man who later traveled across the country and posed as part of a service request. The state said her law enforcement background did not stop the plot, but made her alleged role more alarming.
The money trail was central to the way prosecutors described Julie Harding’s role. After filing for divorce in May 2022, she made three large withdrawals from shared accounts, according to court filings. The amounts were $102,000, $73,000 and $47,700. Prosecutors said the withdrawals, which totaled more than $220,000, were used to hire O’Donnell. Defense attorneys said the claim stretched beyond the proof and told jurors there was no record showing a payment from Julie Harding to O’Donnell for murder. Prosecutors answered that the withdrawals, calls and travel records showed a coordinated plan whose purpose became clear only after Michael Harding was found dead.
Michael Harding’s work as an HVAC technician gave the alleged plot its opening. Prosecutors said O’Donnell used a prepaid phone to draw him to a vacant house on Glasgow Road in Burkesville on Sept. 19, 2022. Harding thought he was responding to a service call. FBI Special Agent Elizabeth Wheeler testified that Harding texted the prepaid phone at 4:10 p.m. that he was “35 minutes out.” The exchange that followed was brief and ordinary. The person on the other end replied, “No worries,” then “Yes,” then “Perfect.” Prosecutors said the quiet tone of the messages mattered because the service call looked normal until Harding entered the empty house and was shot.
Harding’s body was found Sept. 26, when a real estate agent arrived with prospective renters. Authorities said he had multiple gunshot wounds. The vacant house was not his, and investigators later said the property had been reached through deception. Prosecutors alleged O’Donnell got access by posing as someone with a reason to enter the home, then used the same planned setting to isolate Harding. Earlier in the investigation, friends and family had been trying to understand why Harding disappeared. A black pickup tied to him had been seen in the Bowling Green area, but the vacant house in Burkesville became the center of the case once his body was discovered.
Phone records linked Julie Harding and O’Donnell before the killing. Prosecutors said the two exchanged 194 calls in the three months before Michael Harding was killed. Investigators also said O’Donnell’s personal phone and the prepaid phone used to contact Harding moved in the same areas. Those records showed trips to Celina, Tennessee, where Michael Harding lived. Two days before the killing, O’Donnell’s phone was found in the same area as Julie Harding’s phone near her Sacramento home, according to testimony. On the day of the killing, prosecutors said Julie Harding’s phone stayed in Sacramento, while O’Donnell’s phone and the prepaid phone were near the Kentucky house.
The defense treated those records as weaker than prosecutors claimed. O’Donnell’s attorneys argued that phone data cannot prove who was holding a device at a given moment. They also said the state had not produced direct evidence of a payment, had not shown an eyewitness to the shooting and had not proven that O’Donnell was the killer beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors said the defense was asking jurors to ignore the full pattern. The same man tied to Julie Harding, they said, was tied to the prepaid phone, the travel route, the hotel Wi-Fi and the property where Michael Harding died.
Julie Harding’s final days added another layer to the case but did not replace the murder evidence. On Dec. 8, 2022, O’Donnell was arrested at Sacramento International Airport as he prepared to board a flight to Tennessee. That same day, Julie Harding was arrested in Tennessee on stalking and burglary charges tied to Michael Harding’s girlfriend. Authorities had said a Ring camera showed her in October whispering to Harding’s dog, Charlie, placing a leash around the dog’s neck and taking him from a Murfreesboro home. On Dec. 10, Julie Harding was found dead at a home in Celina from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Because Julie Harding died, prosecutors could not present a murder case against her to a jury. Instead, her alleged actions became evidence in O’Donnell’s trial. The court filings said she and O’Donnell were part of a conspiracy and that the killing was committed for money. The jury heard about the divorce, the cash and the calls, then considered the final service-call texts. Prosecutor Jesse Stockton told jurors that the evidence pointed to O’Donnell as the killer. “There’s no evidence someone else killed him,” Stockton said during closing arguments. He called O’Donnell an “amateur hitman from California.”
The verdict gave Michael Harding’s family the legal finding they had waited for since 2022. His daughter, Heather Cavalieri, said the family was in shock but happy after the conviction. The case left a painful record of two lives ending and a third life sentence imposed after a trial that could not include one alleged conspirator. It also left no public trial testimony from Julie Harding, whose death meant jurors never heard her answer the allegations that she used her lover and her money to target her estranged husband.
O’Donnell’s life sentence now stands as the final judgment from the trial court. Any appeal would proceed without Julie Harding, whose alleged role remains part of the record but not the subject of a verdict against her.
Author note: Last updated May 25, 2026.