Beth Shelburne

Because Deputy Hardy was a police officer and was killed in uniform, not in his own bed wearing pajamas, Detective Richardson says he wouldn't have looked into people that knew Hardy.

Instead, Richardson repeats the theory that Hardy walked up on a drug deal that he wasn't supposed to see, and that's why he was killed.

An insider that I talked to, a retired bailiff who worked in Jefferson County when Deputy Hardy was murdered, told me that this theory about a police officer interrupting a drug deal, it's like a default explanation when detectives don't have any idea what happened.

The sheriff first mentioned this scenario hours after the murder, and the media ran with it.

The only eventual evidence to support this theory?

The always-changing statements from Yolanda Chambers.

to be in what we really thought was a revolution.

On June 11, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing.

Is this the story of a man who just got lost in the desert?

Or of a cover-up inside the nation's largest sheriff's department?

Detectives not only missed potential promising leads, they also ignored facts that could have ruled out to Forrest Johnson and Ardragus Ford as suspects.

Some of the people who were with Taforrest and Ardregas at T's place remember learning about their arrests from the media coverage the week after the murder.

We was at T's, you know, that night.

Kenyara Pickett was at T's at the same time Deputy Hardy was killed.

She was out celebrating with her sister Deidre, who had just recovered from surgery.

And DeForest gave her name to police.

But they never called or knocked on her door.

Yeah, I mean, how old were you?

So did they not check IDs at the club or did y'all have fake IDs?

They had a fake ID.