Ex-Army Ranger gets death in shotgun slayings of 3 children
SHALIMAR -- An Army veteran diagnosed as suffering from Gulf War illness was sentenced to death Tuesday for killing three children with a shotgun. He got life for murdering their mother, his live-in girlfriend.
Jeffrey Hutchinson showed no emotion as Circuit Judge G. Robert Barron pronounced sentence, but afterward made a brief statement proclaiming his innocence.
"I did not kill Renee and the kids and I believe I was framed," he said.
Hutchinson, 38, a former Army Ranger who became a self-employed body guard, claimed earlier that two men in ski masks broke in and killed postal worker Renee Flaherty, 32, and her children, Geoffrey, 9, Amanda, 7, and Logan, 4.
The only penalties possible for Hutchinson were death or life in prison without parole for the Sept. 11, 1998 murders in a Crestview-area home where he lived with the victims.
Barron rejected defense arguments that Hutchinson was mentally ill and suffered from alcohol intoxication that made him unable to recognize the criminality of his actions.
The judge agreed with two prosecution psychologists who had disputed a defense psychiatrist's findings of alcohol intoxication and that Hutchinson suffered from a bipolar disorder characterized by manic depression, mood swings and delusions.
Barron noted that the psychologists had testified in hundreds of homicide cases while Dr. Vincent Dillon, the defense psychiatrist, was handling his first such case.
He said he gave minimal weight to the Gulf War illness diagnosis because no correlation between that and the murders had been established.
Barron found only one aggravating factor that would have supported a death sentence in the mother's murder, that the crime was committed in conjunction with the other three slayings. He said it was outweighed by mitigating factors such as Hutchinson's lack of a criminal record and his military service.
The judge found the children's ages were additional aggravating factors supporting the death sentence in their slayings. He found another factor supporting a death sentence in the case of 9-year-old Geoffrey -- saying his slaying was especially heinous, atrocious and cruel because he was first shot in the chest and was still alive when finished off with a shot to the head.
The family had moved with Hutchinson to the Florida Panhandle nine months earlier from the Spokane, Wash., area after Flaherty was estranged from her husband, Geoff Flaherty, of Anchorage, Alaska.
Okaloosa County sheriff's deputies rushed to the house after a man called 911 and told a dispatcher "I just shot my family." They found Hutchinson splattered with blood and lying in a daze on the garage floor with a telephone, the line still open to 911, inches from his head.
Hutchinson rejected his lawyers' advice to offer an insanity defense, but they persuaded him to neither testify at trial nor offer a statement at a sentencing hearing last week. He also agreed to waive a jury recommendation on sentencing, leaving it entirely to the judge. The 12-member jury took only 2 hours, 20 minutes to convict him on Jan. 18.
Two years before the murders, Dr. William Baumzweiger of Tarzana, Calif., had diagnosed Hutchinson as suffering from Persian Gulf War illness, including neurological damage.
Baumzweiger also examined him after the murders and submitted a written report that concluded Hutchinson apparently "did not knowingly commit the killings."