Cold Case Files Revisited: Over 27 years later, the serach for Brady Hutchins' killer remains a law enforcement priority

Brandy Dawn Hutchins

In the fall of 1988 a fourteen-year-old girl named Brandy Dawn Hutchins asked her father for a ride to a birthday party in Coal Hill. Jerry Hutchins dropped her at the end of a long driveway off County Road 6 and watched her walk up the gravel.

She carried a purse and a note that read meet me at the old house. No party took place that night.

Two days later hunters found her purse near an abandoned house on the same road. They searched the crawl space beneath it and discovered her body. She had been shot once at close range in the forehead just above the right eye with a twenty-two caliber pistol.

The house where she died stood empty and known as a spot where local teenagers gathered. Inside and outside it someone had scrawled pentagrams "666", ,"REDRUM" and references es to the Ku Klux Klan. Those markings had been there before the killing.

Investigators dismissed any ritual connection. A pregnancy test turned up in her purse, but the autopsy showed she was not pregnant. She had placed the test there herself, hoping it would keep her boyfriend committed.

Within weeks the abandoned house burned to the ground. The boyfriend and his family left the state. The case file sat with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and the Arkansas State Police under number seventy dash three sixty four dash eighty eight. Thirty seven years later it remains open.

Brandy lived in a trailer park with her father and his brothers after her parents separated. She had spent time in group homes for troubled youth. People who knew her described her as sweet, generous, and quick to talk to anyone.

She formed attachments fast. In early September she met a new friend at the county carnival and began spending nearly every day at the friend’s house. There she developed a crush on the friend’s older brother.

She told people they were a couple and wrote his name across her tennis shoes. Evidence later showed a sexual relationship. She planned to tell him she was pregnant the weekend she disappeared. The note and the false test pointed to a meeting arranged at the isolated house. No one else has ever been named publicly as a suspect.

If you have any information about the murder of Brandy Dawn Hutchins, no matter how small it may seem, please come forward. Contact the Arkansas State Police Company E at (870) 741-2136.

You may also reach the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office at (479) 754-7810 or their dedicated Crime Tips hotline at (479) 705-8477. Anonymous tips are welcome and can help bring long overdue answers to this case.

Every detail matters.