David Hammersley has spoken out about the moment he found a murdered man while house-hunting with his family in rural Kentucky.
Hammersley, a Florida native, had relocated with his relatives to escape hurricane season and was searching for property in Burkesville when he toured a 2-acre spread on September 26, 2022. The lot featured a main house, a detached garage, and a cottage at the far end. He said’ “The Mansion Above Dale Hollow Lake” programme that the main residence appeared move-in ready. “The house was immaculate. No furnishings in it. You can eat off the floor,” he said.
The cottage told a different story. Hammersley initially thought something had died inside — perhaps a raccoon — and went to investigate with his father-in-law. What they found instead was a crime scene.
“I saw a man on the floor, his arm outstretched, obviously dead, from gunshot wounds,” Hammersley added on the CBS programme.
Police identified the victim as Michael ‘Mike’ Harding, a local man who had been missing for more than a week. An autopsy revealed he had been shot four times. Investigators also recovered a phone at the scene that would become central to cracking the case.
Lead investigator BJ Burton told the same CBS programme that the device contained damning evidence. “Once you start looking through the text messages and phone calls, it becomes very obvious early on that he was lured to the house,” Burton said.
The investigation quickly focused on Harding’s personal life. At the time of his death, he was in the middle of a divorce from his wife, Julie Harding. His daughter, Heather Cavalieri, voiced her long-standing suspicions about her stepmother in her interview.
“I feel like he was blinded by love. He truly loved her. So, I thought he found his dream girl. But to me personally, I just, I didn’t like her,” Cavalieri said.
Phone records revealed Julie Harding had exchanged nearly 200 calls with a Houston man named Thomas O’Donnell. Police discovered that the victim’s phone and O’Donnell’s smartphone had pinged in the same location just weeks before the killing, placing both devices together in Texas.
Burton detailed the geographic trail on the programme. “And the first thing you notice is… The phone is first turned on when it’s in the Houston, Texas, area,” he said. The investigator drew a direct line between the out-of-state suspect and the local victim. “I don’t think Mr. O’Donnell got out here by accident. The only connection that he had to Michael Harding was through Julie Harding.”
Burton concluded that Julie Harding had conspired with O’Donnell to eliminate her husband, motivated by fear of losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in their divorce settlement. She did not face trial — Julie Harding died by suicide shortly after her husband’s murder.
O’Donnell was convicted of murder in 2025. A judge sentenced him to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
Hammersley and his family never moved into the Burkesville property. What began as a search for refuge from Florida’s storms led them instead to a killing staged in an otherwise immaculate house, where the only sign of trouble waited in a cottage they almost did not enter.