A CHP captain’s colleagues watched her unravel for months, then one phone call after her husband’s death made her boss immediately suspect her

The murder trial of Thomas O’Donnell, now underway in Kentucky, is drawing back testimony from former colleagues of California Highway Patrol Captain Julie Harding, who prosecutors allege orchestrated a murder-for-hire plot against her estranged husband. As detailed by Fox News, those who worked alongside Harding described watching her behavior shift noticeably over several months leading up to the September 2022 death of her husband, Michael Harding. The trial is placing that deterioration under a microscope.

Retired Sgt. Brian Wittmer, who had worked with Julie Harding for three and a half years, took the stand to describe a change in her demeanor. He testified that she began acting erratically, appeared to be losing weight, and started sharing personal details she had previously kept private. The most significant part of his testimony involved a phone call he received after Michael Harding’s death. Harding called to tell him her husband was dead, but the call struck Wittmer as exaggerated. “When I hung up the phone, I thought she wanted me to remember this moment in time,” he told the court.

Wittmer was not the only one who found her behavior suspicious. Then-Assistant Chief Doug Lyons, who had recently become Harding’s supervisor and had never met her personally, testified that she called him and kept him on the line for 35 minutes of disjointed conversation. “It was 35 minutes of rambling, and I didn’t even know Julie. So that was the strange part. I never met her,” Lyons said. When asked whether that call led him to believe she might be a suspect in her husband’s death, he answered, “Absolutely.”

She had already withdrawn over $100,000 before her husband was lured to that house

The case against O’Donnell rests on the allegation that Julie Harding arranged to have her husband killed. Michael Harding, who ran an HVAC business, was lured to a vacant home in Burkesville, Kentucky in September 2022 under the guise of a service call. Prosecutors allege the call was a setup. While the defense has argued there is no forensic evidence linking O’Donnell to the murder weapon and no direct payment between the two, investigators have pointed to a substantial body of digital evidence.

Kentucky State Police Detective B.J. Burton testified that phone records showed an intense pattern of communication between Julie Harding and O’Donnell, with the two in contact almost every day, sometimes more than once. In total, 194 contacts were recorded between them from July to September 8, 2022, after which communication stopped entirely, 11 days before the murder. Cards from a man named “Rob,” a name O’Donnell was known to use, were also found in her office. In the days before the killing, amid a separate case in which a Wisconsin girlfriend faced a life sentence after a domestic dispute turned fatal, Julie Harding withdrew over $102,000 from joint accounts she shared with her husband.

Michael Harding was last seen on September 19, 2022, after receiving the fabricated HVAC call. His body was discovered a week later by a realtor. Investigators linked the phone number used to lure him to the same person who had contacted the property’s listing agent to gain access to the vacant home. O’Donnell was subsequently arrested at Sacramento International Airport.

Julie Harding was found dead at her home on December 10, 2022, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, shortly after O’Donnell’s arrest. O’Donnell’s defense attorney has maintained that his client bears no responsibility, pointing to the contentious divorce and suggesting Harding had reached out to multiple men for help with her personal situation. FBI Special Agent Wayne Johnson testified that he found no evidence of a direct financial transaction between the two, though the prosecution continues to build its case on phone data and the circumstances of the lure.

Harding had served with the California Highway Patrol since 1999 and had been commander of the Yuba Sutter area office since 2018. The case draws attention to how far the circumstances of a bitter divorce can escalate, a pattern seen in other recent criminal proceedings, including one in Vermont where a mother killed her two children amid an acrimonious custody dispute. At the time of her death, the CHP confirmed Julie Harding had been on leave.