Trial Ordered for Man Accused of Killing Wife, Burying Her in Yard

A La Jolla man was ordered Tuesday to stand trial on charges he murdered his wife five years ago and buried her in the back yard of their former home in Canoga Park.

Michael J. Hardy will stand trial in the death of his wife, Deborah L. Hardy, after a Los Angeles police detective testified at a preliminary hearing in Van Nuys Municipal Court that Hardy had admitted to police that his wife suffered a fatal head injury when he pushed her during an argument.

After police unearthed her body last year behind their former Sherman Way home and arrested him, Hardy told investigators that they had been arguing on Thanksgiving Day, 1985, when she grabbed a gun and fired into the floor, Detective Phil Quartararo testified.

In a tape-recorded interview, Hardy said he then pushed her and she struck her head, the detective testified.

“He said he slapped the gun away,” Quartararo testified. “He said he pushed her away and she became unconscious” after hitting her head against a wall or table.

Hardy, 46, told police his wife died hours later without regaining consciousness and he asked his son, Robert, to bury the body, the detective said.

Quartararo said that in a second interview with police, Hardy changed details of the story, saying that his wife fired the gun into the ceiling.

The Hardy family later moved from Canoga Park to La Jolla. The body was not discovered until Nov. 2, 1990, when Robert Hardy, now 25 and an inmate in a California prison, told police about the burial.

The son told investigators that his father had told him he killed Deborah Hardy by hitting her with a flashlight, Quartararo said.

In earlier testimony, Hardy’s 22-year-old daughter, Cheryl Hardy, testified that her stepmother had fired a shot into the ceiling about a week before the Thanksgiving Day argument.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh M. Goldstein told Municipal Judge Robert L. Swasey that the evidence indicated Deborah Hardy did not threaten her husband with a gun at the time she was killed.

At the conclusion of testimony, Hardy’s attorney, Randall Megee, failed to persuade Swasey to dismiss the murder charge or reduce it to manslaughter.

Hardy is an unemployed actor who was described as a mob hit man during an appearance last year on the television show “Geraldo” and in a 1977 profile in New York magazine. Los Angeles police said they have found no evidence linking him to other killings.