Crime + investigation
Jeffrey Clark and Keith Hardin spent 16 years in prison for the Kentucky murder of Hardin's then-girlfriend, Rhonda Sue Warford.
Getty ImagesJeffrey Clark and Keith Hardin were sentenced to life in prison for the 1992 murder of Kentucky teenager Rhonda Sue Warford. Authorities characterized the crime as "satanic." Then, DNA testing cleared Clark and Hardin’s names. In 2018, the pair were exonerated, but they had already spent over two decades in prison.
“I am joyful that the truth is finally coming out, but I am upset it took so long,” Clark said after his release, according to the Courier Journal.
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One spring night in 1992, 19-year-old Warford came home and told her mother that she had been harassed by an old, “dirty-looking” man who followed her, shouting that he wanted to marry and have children with her. Later that night, Warford left home and was never seen alive again.
Three days later, her body was found in a field off a highway in a different county. She had been stabbed 11 times.
Warford was dating Hardin before her disappearance. After her body was found, her mother told police that she believed her daughter, Hardin and Clark were involved in satanism.
Investigators found a blood-soaked washcloth, satanic bible and what prosecutors claimed was a chalice for drinking the blood of sacrificed animals in Hardin’s home. Kentucky detective Mark Handy testified that Hardin told him he “got tired of looking at animals and began to want to do human sacrifices.” Handy later pled guilty to perjury and tampering with physical evidence in two other men’s cases.
A man incarcerated with Clark testified that Clark twice told him he murdered Warford. After trial, Hardin and Clark learned of a letter where this individual asked another incarcerated person to bolster his “story” about Clark’s confessions.
The court further heard testimony that a hair on Warford’s sweatpants was a "microscopic match" with Hardin’s hair. Brandon Garrett, a scholar of criminal justice outcomes, evidence, and constitutional rights at Duke University, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that it is not a scientific conclusion that a hair is a “microscopic match,” and that false hair comparisons have been involved in many wrongful convictions.
“We don’t know how likely it is that a particular set of hairs could have come from a person versus not,” Garrett says of using microscopic hair comparisons. One can exclude hair matches based on such comparison, for instance by hair color, but even two hairs from the same individual can be very different microscopically.
The FBI found, when auditing its own hair comparison work, that its analysts engaged in widespread scientific errors and misconduct, Garrett says. Today, investigators generally use this technique only as a preliminary screener.
“Law enforcement’s theory, incorrectly, was that Jeff and Keith had committed this crime together, and they were jointly tried, which is an unusual situation,” Katie McCarthy, one of Hardin’s post-exoneration attorneys, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “The sorts of fabricated evidence and the improper tactics that were used with witnesses affected them both.”
In 2009, 14 years into Clark and Hardin’s incarceration, the Kentucky Innocence Project and the national Innocence Project asked the court to test physical evidence for a DNA match in their case. Kentucky prosecutor David Michael Williams opposed it, and the defense’s request was denied in court.
However, after years of appeals, the Kentucky Supreme Court granted the request, saying it was “mystified, if not amazed, that the [prosecution] has such little interest in the possibility that DNA testing might lead to the prosecution and conviction of a guilty person.”
DNA testing found that the hair on Warford’s sweatpants did not belong to Hardin or Clark. Furthermore, the blood on the washcloth was from Hardin, not a sacrificed animal as Hardin had always maintained.
In 2016, a judge vacated Clark and Hardin’s convictions.
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Following their exonerations, Clark and Hardin sued several agencies and individuals for malicious prosecution, fabricating evidence and violating their due process rights amongst other allegations. The city of Louisville, Meade County and Handy were among the defendants.
Handy, who told the court Hardin wanted to sacrifice human beings, lied in his testimony, the pair alleged. (In 2021, Handy was sentenced to one year in prison for his role in the wrongful conviction of two other men.)
Another investigator, the pair’s lawsuits alleged, conspired with Clark’s ex-girlfriend to give a false statement that connected him to satanism and murder. Clark had reported his ex-girlfriend for sexually abusing her son, which his lawsuits said was reason for her to falsely implicate him. His ex-girlfriend was eventually convicted of sexual abuse.
The lawsuits also alleged that James Whitley, a man with a “long and violent criminal history,” had confessed to Warford’s murder before Clark and Hardin went to trial, but his confession was ignored.
Another allegation from the lawsuits was that a sheriff and coroner had conspired to change Warford's date of death to a day for which the pair did not have alibis.
Exactly 34 years after he was interrogated for eight hours with a gun pointed at him, according to Clark’s attorneys, Clark testified in court that former county sheriff Joseph Greer, deputy Clifford Wise, former county coroner William Adams and Meade County itself had framed him.
On April 29, 2026, the jury decided in his favor; Clark was awarded over $24 million. “I finally feel like I am able to wake up from a 34-year nightmare,” he said in a statement.
“In a wrongful conviction case in Kentucky, this is the largest verdict that has occurred,” Elliot Slosar, one of the attorneys who represented Clark, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “We were unable to find a larger civil rights verdict in Kentucky.”
The city of Louisville settled with Clark and Hardin for $20.5 million in 2023. Hardin settled his case against Meade County for an undisclosed amount, McCarthy says. “Mr. Hardin has lived with this wrongful conviction and over 20 years of wrongful incarceration,” she adds. “He, understandably, wanted to close that chapter of his life to the extent that he could and move on.”
Clark and Hardin had separate claims against Robert Thurman, a crime laboratory forensic analyst for the Kentucky State Police, regarding notes that were allegedly withheld at the time of their trial that indicated some microscopic dissimilarities between the hair on Warford’s sweatpants and Hardin’s hair. These dissimilarities should have caused the hair to be excluded as evidence, Slosar says.
Hardin settled his case against Thurman for an undisclosed amount. Clark’s claim against Thurman was dismissed at summary judgement.
Warford’s murder remains unsolved.
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Sanjana Bhambhani is a New York-based journalist and documentarian whose work appears on the BBC, The Rachel Maddow Show and New York Focus among other outlets. She covers a spectrum of subjects including police misconduct, the justice system, space science and women's history.
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