Beth Shelburne

Some new nugget to breathe life into this case.

How are you?

I'm looking for Mr. Jerry McDaniel.

Is that you?

Thank you so much.

Jerry McDaniel is retired.

in his 70s, and lives in a small, green, shake-shingle bungalow, the same house he's lived in his entire adult life.

We talk on his porch, and he remembers Hardy's murder.

Yeah, because I'm moving around, so I see everything.

McDaniel also remembers seeing Hardy argue with the group of young men inside the hotel.

I mean, did it seem like Deputy Hardy knew those people?

And about an hour and a half later, when he ended his shift and left the building, he passed by Hardy, who was standing at the hotel's back door.

But that's pretty much all he remembers.

Had police aggressively pursued this lead, they might have gotten somewhere.

But now, decades later, McDaniel can no longer recall any other specific details about the car or anything else from that night.

Whatever he saw, whoever those young men were, that potential big lead has faded, likely impossible to recover.

After reading through hundreds of pages of reports, there's a question that still sticks with me.

Why did Deputy Hardy leave the hotel atrium, where he was drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, to go out the back door to the parking lot without his radio?

According to Barry Rushakoff, the hotel desk clerk, Hardy's routine was to walk around inside the hotel when he was making his rounds.

But when he checked around the outside of the hotel, he usually drove around the property in his car.