HVAC impostor sentenced for plotting with highway patrol lover to murder her husband

A man from California who conspired with his police officer girlfriend to murder her husband in a multi-state killing scheme is now going to jail.

On Monday, 64-year-old Thomas O'Donnell was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of 53-year-old Michael Harding, an Army and Navy veteran, in Cumberland County, Kentucky. O'Donnell was found guilty of murder by a jury in the state last week.

During the murder, O'Donnell was involved in an affair with Julie Vernnan Harding, a California State Patrol Trooper at the time. 

According to prosecutors, Julie Harding withdrew more than $220,000 from her estranged husband's accounts in the months leading up to the killing.

O'Donnell and his partner devised a plan where he posed as an HVAC technician to get close enough to take Michael Harding's life. 

The veteran was last spotted alive on September 20, 2022, and was later discovered shot multiple times.

However, the sinister pair did not get their fairy tale ending.

As Law&Crime previously reported, months later Julie Harding was discovered dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound outside her former residence, approximately 25 miles away in Tennessee, with a short, cryptic letter left beside her body.

After Michael Harding vanished, Clay County Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy Rick Lisi stated in an interview with AM radio station WUCT that there were no immediate signs of foul play.

A captured image of his black truck placed him in the Bowling Green area of Kentucky on the day he disappeared. Friends were quick to notice his absence.

However, six days later, Harding was discovered deceased with several gunshot injuries inside a Cumberland County, Kentucky, house.

The house wasn't his, and it stood empty otherwise.

A significant development occurred on December 8, 2022, when O'Donnell was detained and accused of Harding's murder. 

A Napa native, O'Donnell, was arrested at the Sacramento International Airport just before boarding a flight to Tennessee.

On that same day, Julie Harding, 49, was arrested too, but for reasons unrelated to her husband's death. Authorities in Tennessee charged her with stalking and burglary. 

In early October 2022, she was caught on a Ring camera in Murfreesboro whispering to her deceased husband's dog, Charlie, before leashing him and taking him away.

NBC affiliate KCRA later reported that Netflix accounts at the house where the dog was taken had been breached, user profiles were altered, and other accounts on the device were erased.

The dog was living with the woman who was romantically involved with Michael Harding at the time he died. 

According to KCRA, there was a disagreement over the timing and location for handing over the dog.

Two days post-arrest, Julie Harding apparently ended her own life. Her body was discovered in the yard, near the driveway, of the Celina, Tennessee, residence she and her husband bought two years earlier. 

As per statement from Clay County Sheriff Brian Boone and as reported by Sacramento-based CBS affiliate KPIX, a postal worker and "another man" first found her. She succumbed to a single gunshot wound, the sheriff stated.