Bill Baxley

His duties included delivering subpoenas and directing traffic outside the courthouse.

Lead Detective Tony Richardson and his team of investigators have no eyewitnesses to the shooting, and there's no known motive.

A fellow officer has just been shot, and they have almost no evidence to go on.

At the exact time that Deputy Bill Hardy was shot, Taforest Johnson and his friend Ardragus Ford were four miles away from the crime scene at a downtown Birmingham nightclub called T's Place, but they would soon become the focus of Tony Richardson's investigation.

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?

Just a few hours before Deputy Hardy is shot, Ardragus Ford gets into the passenger side of his 1971 black Monte Carlo.

It's an old car, and the driver's side door doesn't open.

So he slides over into the driver's seat, starts the ignition, and heads out to pick up his friend Taforest Johnson to go to a club called T's Place.

I wasn't able to interview Taforest or Ardragus for this podcast.

The Alabama Department of Corrections doesn't allow people on death row to do interviews with reporters like me.

So I was unable to talk to Taforest directly.

And Ardragus died in 2021.

I didn't get a chance to interview him before then.

I was able to speak to Ardragus' mother, Joyce Ford.

Ardragus was willing to pay for a good parking space because he was in a wheelchair.

When Ardragus was a teenager, a group of men began shooting outside an apartment building he was visiting.

He was shot trying to shield his cousin and her baby from gunfire.

And he was paralyzed.