Bob and Delores Hutchinson expected to be retired to Oregon by now, with their four sons and a daughter grown, the house free and clear and nothing but the bliss of their golden years ahead of them.

Then, on Sept. 12, 1998, the phone rang at their home in Deer Park, Wash., and their world turned upside down.

The first call came from the ex-wife of their son, Jeffrey Hutchinson.

"We couldn't really make any sense of it," Bob Hutchinson said. "She was just hysterical."

After talking with an Okaloosa County sheriff's investigator, the grim truth began to set in.

Their son's live-in girlfriend, Renee Flaherty, and her three children, Geoffrey, 8, Amanda, 6, and Logan, 4, had been found shot to death in the home Jeffrey Hutchinson shared with them near Crestview.

That news, they said, was devastating enough.

"We thought of those children as our own grandchildren," said Delores Hutchinson, burying her face in her hands but unable to stop the tears.

What they could not believe, and still can't, was that their son was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

"Jeff is not a murderer like they say he is," his mother said. "It's impossible. He loved those children."

"The kids took up with him, and it was mutual," Bob Hutchinson added.

Jeffrey Hutchinson took care of the children when Renee was working, they said, and their relationship was especially close.

They met in 1997. Renee Flaherty was the mail carrier for Hutchinson's sister, Jennifer, and the couple had met at a social event in Deer Park, said his parents.

"We had never seen him so happy as when he was with Renee and the kids," said Delores Hutchinson. "They were always holding hands and hugging."

Renee Flaherty moved to Crestview with Hutchinson in the summer of 1998, taking a job in the Niceville Post Office, where she hoped the position would lead to further advancement.

Got their man?

Not only can Hutchinson's parents not accept that their son killed Flaherty and her children, but they question why the investigation hasn't centered on other possible suspects. While they can offer no hard evidence, they want to know why investigators haven't paid more attention to a German acquaintance of their son's, or one of Flaherty's former co-workers.

"He was the only one there," Bob Hutchinson said. "They wouldn't look for anyone else. They're so sure Jeff did it that they've used all their energies to prove that."

They also wonder if authorities spent enough time checking the movements of Flaherty's husband, Geoff Flaherty, who lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

Asked about any official interest in him, Geoff Flaherty said via e-mail to the Daily News that he spoke with prosecutors "once or twice," but the authorities' interest in him appears to have quickly waned.

"I have a hard time speaking about this because I dropped my children off to Renee (and Hutchinson) 15 days before they were killed," he wrote in the e-mail.

Retirement postponed

Bob and Delores Hutchinson have put their life on hold to help their son.

"We moved to Crestview about a month later to see Jeff, see what happened in court, talk with the lawyers and do what we could to help," Delores Hutchinson said.

Emotionally and financially, "it's been devastating to us," she said.

"We would have been retired in Oregon by now with the house free and clear," Bob Hutchinson said.

Instead of the stable financial situation they had envisioned, he said, they struggle to pay their son's $200 phone bills, his medical expenses and prescriptions.

"We're still trying to sell the house in Washington," Bob Hutchinson said. "Meanwhile, there's the utilities and insurance and taxes."

They're hanging in there.

"Sometimes, he's up and I'm down," his wife said. "Or vice-versa."

They've kept a low profile since moving to Crestview, where their son has been jailed since his arrest. "We've got good neighbors" who can see past the charges facing their son, Delores Hutchinson added.

"They help us with the computer, the paperwork, the printing. They've been fantastic."

She spends time writing letters and she sews to take her mind off the day-to-day burden of supporting their son.

He spends time on the Internet, filling in the pieces of their son's military history, searching for maps to document his movements as a forward artillery observer during the Persian Gulf War.

Hutchinson's job during the war was "helicopter insertions. We figured he was in Iraq, spotting targets for the Air Force before the ground war began."

Gulf War illness

From the beginning, it was evident that the former Army Ranger sergeant's experiences in the Persian Gulf War and his possible exposure to substances associated with Gulf War illness would figure into his defense. But to what extent still isn't precisely known.

A Washington television station doing a documentary on Gulf War illness in 1996 arranged for him to be examined by California psychiatrist Dr. William Baumzweiger, an expert in that field who has testified in congressional hearings.

Baumzweiger, now a defense consultant for Hutchinson's defense team, diagnosed Gulf War Illness a full two years before Flaherty and her children were killed.

Hutchinson suffers from neuro dysimmunity, immune suppression and autoimmunity, Baumzweiger said.

His psychiatrist said his service in the military and possible exposure to chemical and biological weapons contributed to Hutchinson's diminished mental state at the time of the killings.

"Neuro dysimmunity may cause a person to be unaware of acts that he or she may be doing" and can result in "uncontrollable unconscious fits of rage," according to an affidavit signed by Baumzweiger.

Hutchinson's condition was caused by chemical and/or biological agents he came in contact with during the Gulf War, said Baumzweiger, an expert in the field of neuro dysimmunity and Gulf War illness.

"I'm not saying he didn't do it," Baumzweiger said in an earlier interview. "If he did it, it would appear that he had no conscious control over his behavior."

But in that interview, Baumzweiger conceded that Hutchinson should be held accountable for his actions.

"I have tremendous compassion for the victims and I do not believe that anybody should be let off the hook for this," he said. "Jeff should not be let off the hook, but the government shouldn't either."

Baumzweiger said he believes about 1,800 Gulf War veterans and at least 2 million others suffer from neuro dysimmunity. And he thinks biological and chemical warfare and research in those areas are partially to blame.

In October, the Pentagon said about 30,000 Gulf War veterans were to be notified in coming weeks that they probably came in contact with low levels of sarin nerve gas after being told in 1997 that they had escaped exposure. And another 30,000 thought to have been exposed will get letters saying they probably were not exposed.

Defense lawyer Stephen Cobb earlier said that as far as he knows, the Pentagon has not notified Hutchinson of sarin or cyclosarin nerve gas exposure.

It's unknown whether Hutchinson was among those notified of exposure to nerve gas in the area of the Iraqis' Khamisiyah weapons depot in March of 1991.

U.S. forces demolished Iraqi munitions and rockets there.

Bob Hutchinson said his son was at Kamisiyah when those biological weapons were demolished. His son's discharge record shows he was assigned to a field artillery unit in the Persian Gulf and was awarded the Kuwait Liberation Medal. But his presence at Kamisiyah cannot be verified from that record.

Some of Baumzweiger's tests on Hutchinson, Cobb said earlier, show he was exposed to toxic agents. "The medical testing indicates he's been exposed to some form of toxic substance that caused physiological changes," Cobb said.

When Hutchinson came home from the war, his parents said, he was plagued by severe bouts of diarrhea and vomiting.

"He threw up blood," his mother said. "He couldn't eat before 2 in the afternoon."

Career damage

Born in Anchorage on Nov. 6, 1962, Jeffrey Hutchinson was an outdoorsman, growing up in several states and New Zealand.

His love of outdoor pursuits and sports spurred him to join the Army, which he had hoped to make a career, his parents said. He aimed for, and attained, the Rangers, the Army's toughest training program and the service's most elite branch.

But Hutchinson's post-war sickness led to accusations of malingering instead of the help he sought from military hospitals, his father said.

And personality conflicts with his superiors only added to problems with the Army, Bob Hutchinson said.

"They told him he had parasites," he said. "Once, he vomited in a doctor's office, and they threw him out."

The problems culminated in a non-judicial punishment, for which Hutchinson demanded a court-martial, his father said.

Hutchinson's discharge record shows he received a discharge under honorable conditions "in lieu of trial by court-martial."

Some of those problems appear linked to a pair of troubled marriages.

His first wife's habit of writing bad checks while he was stationed at Ft. Benning, Ga., led to problems with some of his Army superiors.

His second marriage, to a German woman while stationed in that country, foundered over her infidelity, said Hutchinson's parents and a court-appointed psychiatrist testifying in court Friday.

Motorcycle racer

Motorcycles were Hutchinson's passion, according to his parents.

"When he was in Germany (after the war) he went to Poland and placed third in his first race," Bob Hutchinson said. "After that, he began winning some races, and people were approaching him to enter more races."

He raced in the superbike category, high-powered machines with a strong following in Europe.

"He found he was good at souping them up, rebuilding the engines and transmissions," his father said. "He began to get orders from people who wanted him to build bikes for them."

One of his motorcycle buddies, a German the Hutchinsons said investigators should have checked more carefully, developed a celebrity bodyguard service in Europe and was working with Hutchinson to open a U.S.-based booking office for that business, his parents said.

Hutchinson worked in motorcycle shops in both Berlin and in Washington, they said. He also accepted contracts to rebuild stock motorcycles into racing machines while living in Crestview, sometimes shipping them back and forth to Europe.

His only previous brush with the law came in Washington when he was 19, said Hutchinson's father, while speeding on a motorcycle, riding with a friend. The friend had already been stopped by a radar officer and Hutchinson turned around to rejoin him, he said.

That citation, for eluding an officer, cost him $700.

Until Sept. 11, 1998, that was his most serious problem with the law.