Hardy Found Guilty of Murder and Solicitation for Murder

------UPDATE-----

Thursday, May 16 5:30 p.m.

After several hours of deliberation, a jury in Missoula has found Glen Dibley, also known as Caressa Hardy guilty of four felonies.

Missoula County Attorney Kirsten Pabst provides details.

“The jury found Glen Dibley, aka Caressa Hardy guilty of all four counts that he was charged with,” said Pabst. “They were two counts of deliberate homicide and two counts of solicitation to commit deliberate homicide. Mr. Hardy killed two of his roommates back in 2013. No one had reported them missing or dead until Karen Hardy (the state’s chief witness) one of the eyewitnesses who was at the scene of the homicides with her infant at the time came forward three years later. She walked into a police department in the middle of the night in eastern Montana and said ‘I have a story to tell’.”

Pabst said at that point the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office took over the investigation.

“The Missoula County Sheriff’s Department with Detective Jared Cochrane launched a massive years-long investigation that culminated in the arrest of Caressa Hardy back in 2017,” she said. “For the last two weeks we’ve been in trial producing a whole loot of witnesses and evidence for the jury to digest and tonight they came back with their verdict and we’re very pleased with that.”

Pabst said that presiding Judge James Wheelis will order a pre-sentence investigation. Pabst has maintained that her office will ask for four terms of life in prison with no possibility of parole.

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Did Caressa Hardy, also known as Glen Dibley, shoot two men to death in 2013, and then attempt to dispose of their bodies by burning them to bones and cinders?

Or did the two men, Thomas Korjack and Robert Orozco simply disappear overseas for their own reasons?

Did Hardy attempt to hire jail inmates to kill Karen Hardy, the state's key witness?

Those were the questions put to the jury in Missoula District Court before Judge James Wheelis with closing arguments on Thursday in Courtroom number three.

Hardy’s attorney Britt Cotter raised questions about the testimony of the state’s chief witness Karen Hardy, who said that Caressa Hardy/Glen Dibley shot both men and then burned their bodies.

“Can you trust what Karen is saying?” asked Cotter. “We know that she’s lied to police before, she has used various aliases, accused CJ (Hardy’s nickname) of stealing her name, even though he changed his name to Caressa, Karen has never gone by Caressa. She accused CJ of following her in Sidney (Montana) and we know that’s not true. She claimed that Mr. Korjack was the owner of the Pond Road property and we know that’s not true. She’s made various allegations, not knowing anything about Mr. Korjack’s finances, CJ’s finances, or any agreement that may have existed between them.”

Cotter then appealed to the jury for fairness for his client.

“You’ve got some very big decisions to make,” he said. “Please treat CJ as one of your most important affairs, give him the benefit of the doubt, apply that presumption of innocence, hold the state to that very high burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and please find him not guilty on all counts.”

Offering closing arguments for the state, Brian Lowney went directly to the point of the prosecution.

“The defendant spent three and a half years destroying evidence, and then he comes into court and criticizes the state for not recovering any evidence, that’s rich,” stated Lowney. “One of the things Mr. Cotter just said was that none of the walls in the room tested positive for DNA. That’s because the defendant gutted the room and painted over everything. ‘How could the state not recover any evidence of my crime that I tried to cover up? What’s wrong with the state’?”

Lowney addressed the allegation that Hardy burned the victims’ bodies.

“Mr. Cotter criticized the state’s recovery of the human remains, but he ignored the fact that they are human remains, right,” he asked. “He said they couldn’t do carbon dating on them or can’t DNA test them. That’s because the defendant burned these people in an attempt to destroy this evidence. Now, whet he’s saying about Thomas Korjack and Robert Orozco is that Korjack ran away, not because he was under investigation, but because he might have been at some point? So, he ‘anticipatorially’ ran off without 700 grand?”

Lowney asked the jury to judge the character of the defendant.

“Obfuscate, distract, tear down other people, and maybe that will add up to you not paying attention to what he actually did, which was to kill two people that he was upset with in desperation, and when he got caught, try to kill the one person that knew what he did,” he said. “The evidence shows that he is guilty of all these offenses, so we ask that you find him guilty.”

Hardy has been in the Missoula County Jail for nearly two years on $2 million bond on two counts of deliberate homicide, as well as two counts of solicitation for murder for allegedly attempting to employ other prisoners in the jail to kill the state’s chief witness, Karen Hardy.