MISSOULA – A witness in a double murder trial described the defendant in the case as “furious” and told a courtroom that they “would never forget the smell of death”.
The trial for Caressa Hardy, also identified in court documents as Glen Dibbley, began its second week on Monday with testimony from forensic experts.
Hardy is accused of murdering two people at her Frenchtown home and then attempting to dispose of the bodies in a fire pit.
When law enforcement arrived to search the scene they discovered what they believe to be the human remains of at least two people
During the sixth day of the trial, one forensics expert testified saying that the FBI search was not done properly and continued by saying that they didn’t use the proper tools or document the search well at all.
“I can’t tell you a lot about what they did because there’s not much documentation on it. Really the only documentation is a single sentence that the soil was screened,” said Forensic Anthropology Consultant Services Incorporated President Frederick Snow.
“It doesn’t say how it was removed. It doesn’t even say what kind of tools were used. It doesn’t say if it was photographed. It doesn’t say if the evidence was documented or context. There really was not much that was right frankly,” he added.
Those errors also left some evidence undiscovered until a second search, Snow testified.
“The re-screened dirt had many of the bone fragments and teeth that the FBI had missed simply because it wasn’t captured in the quarter inch screen.”
A former cellmate of Hardy’s who has cooperated with investigators also took the stand during Monday’s proceedings.
“This is the first time I have seen Hardy this angry. He was furious at Caren, saying ‘I shouldn’t have let her go.’ ‘I should have done her too.’ And by that, I understood that he meant killed,” Anton Orth testified.
He also says that Hardy talked about how he disposed of the bodies.
“That it was the most horrid stench you could ever imagine. He said that he put the bodies in the truck and drove them to the pit and that he will never forget the smell of death,” Orth stated.
He also told the court that Hardy asked him to try and send a postcard to Hardy from one of the victims — Thomas Korjack — from outside of the country.
The defense speculates that Korjack isn’t dead and is instead fleeing the country for tax evasion purposes.
Reporting by Connor McCauley for MTN News
