Ed Fletcher III spends the Fourth in prison

The morning after Independence Day, readers of the Union-Tribune were treated to a heart-warming front-page feature and three-minute video about an influential local family’s 92nd annual reunion at their oceanfront retreat in Del Mar. “For the Fletcher family, Fourth of July is never complete without a group photo,” said the piece. “That can be a quite a chore when five generations need to get rounded up. ‘This is not easy,’ real estate agent Ron Fletcher said with a combination of good humor and exasperation as the Fletcher clan moseyed across a beach around noontime Tuesday.”

The party was composed of descendants of Col. Ed Fletcher, a county founding father who, the U-T noted, “was instrumental in the development of Rancho Santa Fe, Grossmont, Mount Helix and a host of other projects, such as the Pine Hills Lodge in Julian. His name also graces Fletcher Cove in Solana Beach and Fletcher Hills in East County. And he served in the state Senate between 1935 and 1947.”

The annual get-together, the paper recounted, “provides the family an opportunity to gather and determine which local charities will receive earnings from the Fletcher family foundation endowment.” But the darker side of the sprawling family’s doings, including the costly 1992 collapse of HomeFed Savings and two bloody murders in Borrego Springs at the opening of dove-hunting season in August 1993, was omitted from the feel-good family history.

“The man pacing with the shotgun at the Borrego Air Ranch was Ed Fletcher III,” wrote Laura McNeal in her July 1997 recounting of the tragedy and related underside of the Fletcher family legacy. “He had always been proud of his name, and with good reason. He wasn’t just a Fletcher, but Ed Fletcher. The whole name had been handed down to his father, and then to him.”

Added McNeal, “Out on the desert, where the evening temperature was still 98 degrees, his son Eric was walking off his anger at his father’s refusal to stop drinking. He was watching the mourning doves rise and fall in the night sky. He was close enough to his parents’ house that he heard not only the shots but a woman’s scream.”

Convicted in 1994 of killing family friends Walter and Carrlene Harperin during a drunken rage, Ed Fletcher III, now 88, is currently doing two consecutive sentences of life without parole at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, operated by the Department of Corrections, according to the state’s online inmate locator.