Bill Baxley

So you heard some voices and it sounded like they were arguing?

It was male voices?

He remembers turning to the co-worker he was sharing a room with.

Directly beneath his window, Cummings sees a four-door car.

It's dark copper or light brown with a vinyl top parked facing the hotel's back double doors.

He sees a tall person get into the driver's side of the car, close the door, and slowly pull away with the headlights off.

So Barry makes that initial 911 call, hangs up, and decides to investigate.

Barry sees Deputy Hardy's radio on a table in the hotel's atrium, and right next to it

his cigarette still burning in an ashtray.

Meanwhile, back on the fourth floor, Marshal Kelly Cummings hangs up the phone with Barry and goes back to the window.

Cummings spots a body on the ground and realizes someone has been badly hurt.

It's right around this time Barry makes the same terrible discovery.

332, do we have any information?

After he makes the second 911 call, Barry walks down the hallway to the back parking lot.

More than a dozen officers from four different agencies arrive at the hotel.

One of them is Detective Tony Richardson, who says he'd known Deputy Hardy since he first started working for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office in 1978.

Big afro.

Big afro.

Deputy Hardy often wore his traditional, broad-brimmed, tan, Smokey the Bear-style sheriff's hat.

It was later entered as evidence from the crime scene, with a bullet hole through the brim.