SHALIMAR - It took the antics of murder suspect Jeffrey Hutchinson to make an otherwise tedious trial day interesting.

While expert witnesses spent hour after endless hour in Okaloosa Circuit Court explaining the "over the powder wad" and "latent ridge fingerprint," Hutchinson, facing four counts of murder, seemed to be doing what he could to aggravate his defense team.

He even had some juicy words for a corrections officer.

Allegedly.

Word that Hutchinson, on trial for the Sept. 11, 1998, murder of his girlfriend, Renee Fla-herty, and her three children, had made a "statement" to the corrections officer reached Judge G. Robert Barron at lunch Saturday.

Notification came in the form of a handwritten note, which had originally been turned over to prosecutor Bobby Elmore.

Barron informed defense attorney Stephen Cobb of the incident, but said "it is not my intention to do anything with the note except place it on the record."

Cobb requested and received a five-minute recess, which he used to chew out his client.

After the lecture, Cobb informed the court, "my client denies making any such comment."

Though he'd made it part of the court record, Barron would not allow the news media access to the note Saturday.

"It's not anything of evidence. It's just something that's not part of the trial," Barron said during an afternoon break in the proceedings. "It has no evidentiary value, it's nothing incriminating. It's just something that came up in a very unusual manner."

The document will be made public after the trial, Barron promised.

Hutchinson began the morning with intermittent crying jags. He wept as an expert in evidence gathering described where she had located bullets and body parts on the night of the gruesome murders he is accused of committing.

Laura Rousseau of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement testified to finding and tagging the shotgun believed used to kill Flaherty and her children, Geoffrey, 9, Amanda, 7, and Logan, 4. She also testified to swabbing blood and tissue from Hutchinson's hands, feet and face.

Earlier testimony indicated "there was no injury" to correspond with the blood found on Hutchinson.

The experts called Saturday provided testimony Elmore is using to tie his case together. A fingerprint expert testified "latent ridge fingerprint evidence" was found on the knob of a door that led from the Flaherty home to a garage area, where Hutchinson was found the night of the murder.

As testimony droned on, the accused carried on an animated conversation with co-counsel Kimberly Cobb, and at one point she shushed him.

A DNA expert reported finding Geoffrey Flaherty's blood on the antenna of a phone that was discovered in the garage with Hutchinson. Most of his tests, how-ever, showed inconclusive results.

The most critical evidence presented Saturday may have come from two sources. Deborah Lightfoot, an FDLE gunshot residue analyst, said she found evidence Hutchinson had fired the shotgun believed to be the murder weapon.

Michael Hill, a firearms expert with the same agency, linked shells found at the scene of the bloody shooting with the same shotgun.

It was Hill, the last witness of the day, who attempted to educate glassy-eyed jurors on the "over-the-powder wad," a material contained within a 12-gauge shotgun shell.

Following nine hours of testimony, Barron adjourned court for two days, allowing for Monday's Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday.

Elmore, who has forged a "gentleman's agreement" with the defense team and isn't speaking about the case to the media, will call at least two more witnesses before resting the prosecution's case.

As things dragged to a close Saturday, Hutchinson was the only one in the courtroom

who didn't appear worn out. He got up to go back to jail with a stack of documents under one arm.

"See you when I see you," he said to Cobb.

"That'll probably be Tuesday morning," Cobb sighed.