A family from Eastern Washington was murdered in cold blood 26 years ago. The man convicted for the killings now faces execution in Florida

Former Deer Park resident Jeffrey Hutchinson, a Gulf War veteran, will be put to death Thursday by the state of Florida for the 1998 killings of his girlfriend and her three children.

For the family of 32-year-old Renee Flaherty and her kids Logan, 4, Amanda, 7, and Geoffrey, 9, it’s a simple matter of justice.

“I’ve had over 24 years to think about this. And I am actually looking forward to it. For what he did to my sister and my niece and nephews – he deserves it,” Wes Elmore said of the shotgun slayings of his sister. “It was a brutal night. I won’t forget.”

Hutchinson, now 62, has been on death row for 24 years. His parents and other family members contend he is innocent despite two decades of adverse court rulings and rejected appeals. They don’t believe the forensic evidence tying Hutchinson to the crimes and say he wasn’t offered the consistent and fair court proceedings that he should have received as a death row inmate.

“The state of Florida is hell-bent on executing him,” Robert Hutchinson, his brother, said in an interview on Saturday. “And he’s never changed, his story never changed. It’s like I told his lawyer – if you put him to death, he’s still gonna be the same guy.”

Elmore believes the time has come for Hutchinson to face the consequences of murder. This week, with no doubts in his mind, he will fly to Florida with his family to attend Hutchinson’s execution at the Florida State Prison.

“He did this,” Elmore said. “The cruelty, the way he did this, for him to get a needle and be put to sleep feels not cruel enough … That day was so numbing, we wanted to believe the murders were a sick joke.”

Elmore’s sister Renee was born and raised in Washington and took a job as a mail carrier where she worked hard to make ends meet for her three children from a previous marriage.

Jeffrey Hutchinson was born in Alaska, raised in Kettle Falls and later moved to Deer Park, where he met his first wife. Hutchinson, who fought in Desert Storm and became his family’s “hero,” eventually took a job in the mid-1990s as a security guard for Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center.

Robert Hutchinson said his brother took on Flaherty’s kids like they were his own, noting how he would take them to barbecues and other outings. Nothing seemed amiss, he said.

The couple prepared to move from Deer Park to Crestview, Florida, when Jeffrey Hutchinson decided he wanted to start a motorcycle shop, his family said. As they packed up, Elmore said he hugged his only sister and her three kids goodbye.

He remembers telling Jeffrey Hutchinson: “Take care of my sister and her kids.”

He responded: “I will. I love your sister.”

A brutal crime

Nine months later, at 8:41 p.m. on Sept. 11, 1998, a frantic 911 call came into the dispatch center.

“Yes ma’am – ma’am – I just shot my family … I love my family!” a man screams into the phone. “Ma’am, I love my family!”

Deputies from the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office arrived to find Jeffrey Hutchinson lying in his garage in a daze, with the cordless phone 8 inches from his hand and still on the line with emergency responders. A 12-gauge shotgun was on the counter.

Investigators discovered Flaherty’s body on the bed in the master bedroom; Amanda, on the floor near the bed; Logan at the foot of the bed; and Geoffrey, who was found in the living room between the couch on the coffee table, shot twice. Forensic experts found gunshot residue on Jeffrey Hutchinson’s hands and human tissue on his body, court records say. He did not sustain any injuries to his head or elsewhere.

The news was a shock. The couple had seemed fine, said Jeffrey Hutchinson’s brother Dan. The two had spoken on the phone that day, and Dan overheard the couple “joking around, like they always did.”

That night, Jeffrey Hutchinson and Flaherty got into some sort of argument. He left the house to go to a bar. The bartender recalled that Jeffrey Hutchinson remarked about an argument with his girlfriend, drank some beer and abruptly left, court records say.

While Jeffrey Hutchinson was gone, Flaherty called her mother. She said she had no idea where he was, that they were separated and he had taken her keys, according to court records. Elmore said she also told a friend she wanted to get out of the relationship, and her friend told her to hang on for a few more days so they could “get her out.”

Against the advice of his attorneys, who wanted to offer an insanity defense due to his trauma and bout of random illnesses from his time in the Gulf War, Jeffrey Hutchinson insisted on a trial to inculpate the killings on two unknown masked men who he claimed came into his home and killed Flaherty and the children.

“This is what I believe: She was supporting everyone and told him she had enough. He left, stewed about it, came back and killed them. The prosecuting attorney said during the trial that he felt if he couldn’t have her, then no one could,” Elmore said. “I remember that trial so vividly. He did it without a doubt. Slam dunk.”

A jury found Jeffrey Hutchinson guilty on all counts in February of 2001. A judge sentenced him to death.

“There was something wrong with that man,” Jeffrey Hutchinson’s defense attorney told reporters at the time. “He wasn’t all there – he pops in, and pops out.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Jeffrey Hutchinson’s death warrant on March 31, despite a pending post-conviction motion in Florida’s circuit court that was still under review, court records say. His office has not responded for comment.

In the past two decades, Jeffrey Hutchinson has filed multiple appeals and petitions, arguing that certain evidence about friends involved in a robbery was overlooked and that his attorneys were incompetent because they had never represented a defendant in a capital murder case.

A lot of his recent motions focus on his diagnosis of Gulf War illness from excessive exposure to sarin gas. Those effects should have precluded him from facing the death penalty, Jeffrey Hutchinson argues.

“After Jeff got back from Iraq, he stayed here for two or three months. That’s when I first saw the Gulf War stuff,” Dan Hutchinson said. “I went into the bathroom and he’s puking, throwing up blood from the chemicals, and bleeding out of his ears.”

No appeal has proven successful, however. Hutchinson filed two petitions late and is being penalized due to attorney error, his family says.

It barred a separate federal habeas review that could have made a difference, they believe.

The signed death warrant only allowed a month for Jeffrey Hutchinson to bring forth any additional death penalty issues, which he claimed was not enough time to litigate his execution, effectively denying him due process. The court denied his claim. One judge did say in a dissenting opinion that the short period of time between the death warrant and the execution date did not allow “a reasonable period for this court to conduct a full review.”

Florida’s Supreme Court also ruled in 2020 that death penalty cases no longer need a proportionality review on appeal, or a review to compare the case with other cases to ensure accurate and fair punishment.

“People on death row in Florida don’t get a fair shake,” said Jeffrey Hutchinson’s niece, Nathalie Hutchinson, who has advocated for her uncle’s release. “The process is almost invisible. … When this happened, I didn’t know how to process it. He said to me, ‘How many people on death row in Florida will never get off?’ So I have had to piece this together as an adult.”

The point, she said, is capital punishment shouldn’t be applicable in this case until every avenue is reviewed and exhausted.

“There was no DNA linking. There was blood spatter on the bottom of his feet, but it wasn’t smeared. The murder weapon was broken. And the main piece of evidence is the 911 call, but it doesn’t add up; it wasn’t his voice,” Nathalie Hutchinson said.

The family released the 911 call audio on TikTok in order to raise awareness for Jeffrey Hutchinson’s case. The man in the call has a slight Southern accent, the family said, which is contrary to Hutchinson.

Although people at trial and in interviews with investigators identified the voice on the other line as Jeffrey Hutchinson’s, he rarely, if ever, used the word, “ma’am,” his brothers said.

Jeffrey Hutchinson also told his family the reason gunshot residue was found on his person was because he had a fight with the intruders that night, not because he fired the shots.

Florida attorneys that worked on Jeffrey Hutchinson’s case did not respond for comment.

“If I thought Jeff did it, he would get what’s coming. But he didn’t do it. He’s a stand-up person that fought for this country,” Robert Hutchinson said. “If you look at the court records, he did it. But when you know more about it, nothing makes sense.”

‘Utter shock’

On Sept. 12, 1998, Elmore and his other brother got a phone call early in the morning at their home in Gig Harbor, Washington. It was a detective in Florida, calling to ask if he had found the right number.

It’s when the detective broke the news to the Elmores that their only sister and her three children were dead.

“I thought it was a sick prank and told (my brother) to hang up. But it was no prank. Then the reality set in – I was in utter shock. He’s freaking out. I am freaking out. And then we had to get a hold of my mom,” Elmore said.

“I called her, and I knew if I told her she had to go home first, she would’ve played 20 questions. So I just blurted out, ‘Renee and the kids were murdered.’ I was so incoherent, my brother had to take over.”

Elmore thinks about Jeffrey Hutchinson occasionally. But he thinks of his sister and her children often.

Flaherty was a tomboy at heart. She loved to roughhouse and “get dirty” with the boys in the neighborhood by playing football or riding bikes. But she could “be a girly girl” when she wanted to, Elmore recalled.

She was his movie buddy – the two would go to R-rated movies against their parents’ wishes – and his favorite skiing partner.

“I never asked my brothers. With Renee, I knew she would go out there and get wet, cold, fall down and have a good time,” Elmore said.

When Flaherty got older, had children and moved to Deer Park, Elmore would go and visit occasionally from his home in Western Washington. He wouldn’t see his sister all the time, but drove the five hours when he could take a vacation from work.

“One day, it was snowy and the kids came home. We lost power, and they all worried because Renee was still out, delivering the mail. She got home, but she had skidded into a ditch and slipped all over the place,” Elmore said. “But she got that mail delivered. Sleet, hail or snow, she proved she would follow through. Nothing stopped her.”

The kids, he said, “were good-spirited kids who never got the chance to live.”

Elmore recalled Flaherty getting her youngest son, Logan, dressed in the morning. By noon, he would be walking around in his underwear and boots, always on the go. Geoffrey and Amanda, the older children, were normal kids who wanted to play and have a good time. Photos of his nephews and niece that Elmore kept all this time depict the children playing at the park, jumping into a pool and opening birthday presents.

In their school photos, they are smiling ear to ear.

“The kids never called me Uncle Wes. My other family calls me Uncle Wes. For some reason, they would just call me ‘uncle.’ Even today, if I hear someone say ‘uncle,’ it catches my attention because it meant something,” Elmore said. “It sticks with me to this day.”