Poulsbo Man Sentenced to 11 Years After Pleading Guilty in Bremerton Girlfriend's Killing

A Poulsbo man with a documented history of fatal drunk driving was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison this month for killing his girlfriend inside her Bremerton home, then fleeing behind the wheel into a ten-vehicle pileup on Highway 3. Stephen Terry Harvey, 51, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and driving under the influence in Kitsap County Superior Court and was sentenced Aug. 10 to 136 months, according to court records reviewed by Kitsap Sun. He was also ordered to pay more than $3,000 in restitution for the vehicles he struck.

The case began Feb. 5, 2024, when Washington State Patrol pulled Harvey from a rolled pickup truck after he struck at least nine vehicles along northbound Highway 3 near Poulsbo. The next day, Bremerton police found 45-year-old Andrea Gaudette dead inside her home in the 5000 block of 5th Street, after a coworker reported her missing. Harvey, her boyfriend, was ultimately charged with second-degree murder with a domestic violence enhancement, a charge prosecutors agreed to reduce as part of the plea that closed the case two and a half years later, according to Kitsap Daily News.

How a Highway 3 Rampage Led Investigators to a Body on 5th Street

Washington State Patrol troopers were still sorting out the wreckage on Highway 3 near State Route 303 when they arrested Harvey shortly after 7 a.m. on Feb. 5, 2024. According to a trooper's report cited by Kitsap Daily News, Harvey drove a white Toyota Tundra into at least nine vehicles in the northbound lanes, several of which were pushed off the roadway, before the truck rolled. He fled on foot, tried to climb into the bed of a passing pickup, was reported to 911 by that driver, then tried to commandeer a second vehicle before he was caught. Troopers wrote that Harvey was "manic," his eyes bloodshot and watery, and that he denied using drugs but refused field sobriety testing. He was taken to St. Michael Medical Center in Silverdale for evaluation, then booked into the Kitsap County Jail.

At his Feb. 6 arraignment, Harvey pleaded not guilty to felony DUI and four related misdemeanors, three hit-and-run counts and a reckless driving count, and bail was set at $750,000. That same day, the case took a second turn. A coworker who had not heard from Andrea Gaudette filed a missing-person report, and Bremerton police went to her home in the 5000 block of 5th Street for a welfare check. Officers found the 45-year-old dead inside. A Feb. 7 Bremerton Police Department news release confirmed Harvey was "known to the victim," and prosecutors moved to add a second-degree murder charge with a domestic violence enhancement on top of the DUI and hit-and-run counts already filed from that morning's crash spree.

Security Footage Captured the Final Minutes Before Gaudette's Death

Court documents laid out what investigators said a search warrant recovered from the victim's own home security system. The footage allegedly showed Harvey arriving at Gaudette's house around 6:30 a.m., roughly 30 minutes before Washington State Patrol arrested him on Highway 3, and the two arguing inside. According to the probable cause statement cited by Kitsap Daily News, the video shows Harvey shouting at Gaudette to call 911 while she told him to leave, then shows him overpowering her in what court documents describe as a "violent pushing" before the recording captures her screaming. Gaudette does not appear on camera again. The footage then shows Harvey leaving the house at roughly 6:50 a.m., minutes before he struck the first of nine vehicles on Highway 3.

Investigators said no one else entered the home between Harvey's departure and the following evening, when police arrived for the welfare check, a gap prosecutors would later cite as evidence against any theory that someone else was responsible. Court records also noted that friends and coworkers described Harvey and Gaudette's relationship as "contentious" and "volatile," and that it had been "progressively failing," though the documents specified there were no previously documented domestic violence incidents between the two. Harvey did have a separate history of violence-related charges tied to resisting law enforcement, according to the same records.

Investigators have said they believe Harvey's driving on Highway 3 that morning was an attempt to flee the scene rather than an unrelated DUI incident, a conclusion that shaped how prosecutors built the case from its first hours.

A Second Woman Killed by the Same Driver on a Similar Morning

Harvey's arrest for Gaudette's death was not Kitsap County's first encounter with his driving record. In January 2008, Harvey crossed the center line on Clear Creek Road near Port Orchard and struck an oncoming vehicle, killing 34-year-old mother Jessica Torres. Investigators found a bottle of whiskey in his car, and toxicology results showed his blood-alcohol level was over the legal limit. He was convicted of vehicular homicide and, in 2009, sentenced to 41 months in prison, the longest term Washington law allowed for that charge at the time.

By 2022, Harvey was back in court. Washington State Patrol arrested him again after he allegedly followed a female driver on Highway 3; an open container of vodka was found in his vehicle, and he was released from the Kitsap County Jail on $75,000 bail while that felony DUI case awaited a March trial date. He was still out on that bail, sixteen years after the Torres killing, when he allegedly killed Gaudette and then triggered the Highway 3 pileup.

Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Daniel Peet addressed that pattern directly during Harvey's initial court appearance after the 2024 arrest. "The history here is particularly concerning," Peet told the court, according to Kitsap Sun's reporting on the hearing. "We have a vehicular homicide in 2008 where he's already taken the life of someone through this very same act but yet can't seem to stop the behavior." The remark framed what became the case's central tension: whether a man with one homicide conviction, one pending felony DUI charge and a documented pattern of dangerous driving should have still been free on bail at all by the time Gaudette died.

Harvey's Daughter Asked the Court for Treatment, Not Just a Sentence

At Harvey's Feb. 6, 2024 arraignment on the DUI and hit-and-run charges, before the murder charge was added, his daughter addressed Kitsap County Superior Court Judge Cadine Ferguson-Brown directly. Family members had repeatedly sought help for her father, she said, and the traditional levers of the justice system had not worked. "What has happened here has not worked," she told the judge, according to Kitsap Sun. "As his daughter, I have a three-year-old who loves him, and when is good, he is good, but when he is not, he's paranoid, he's scared, he's worried. I do not believe that these are acts to harm others on purpose."

Her testimony described a man cycling through manic episodes and mental health crises rather than a calculated repeat offender, a portrait state troopers echoed hours earlier when they described Harvey as manic, sweating and swinging between rage and tears during his arrest. Whether that framing shaped how prosecutors ultimately resolved the case is not spelled out in the public record, but the eventual outcome, a manslaughter plea rather than a murder trial, alongside a 136-month sentence more than three times what the 2008 vehicular homicide conviction carried, suggests the court weighed both the pattern of harm and the mitigating account of Harvey's mental state.

No public statement from Gaudette's family appears in the court filings or news coverage reviewed for this story, a gap that leaves the case one-sided in the public record: Harvey's history, his daughter's testimony and the prosecution's evidence are documented in detail, while the woman he was convicted of killing is remembered in court paperwork mostly as the person he could not stop hurting.

How a Murder Charge Became a Manslaughter Plea

Nearly two and a half years passed between Gaudette's death and Harvey's guilty plea. Court records reviewed by Kitsap Sun show Harvey pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and DUI in Kitsap County Superior Court in July 2026, a resolution that replaced the second-degree murder charge with a domestic violence enhancement that prosecutors had originally filed in February 2024. Washington law defines first-degree manslaughter as recklessly causing a death, a lower legal threshold than the intent element required for a murder conviction, and it typically carries a shorter standard sentencing range than second-degree murder.

Plea agreements of this kind are common in cases where prosecutors weigh the certainty of a conviction against the risk, delay and cost of a trial, and where the evidence points more clearly toward recklessness than a planned attack. In Harvey's case, the surveillance footage described in charging documents showed a physical altercation and a push, not a weapon or a stated intent to kill, a distinction that plausibly factored into how the charge was ultimately negotiated down over more than two years of pretrial proceedings.

A Kitsap County Superior Court judge sentenced Harvey on Aug. 10, 2026, to 136 months in state prison, more than 11 years, and ordered him to pay upwards of $3,000 in restitution for the vehicles damaged in the Highway 3 crashes. That sentence is more than triple the 41 months Harvey received for killing Jessica Torres in 2008, reflecting both the manslaughter conviction itself and what the court record describes as an escalating pattern of alcohol-related harm spanning nearly two decades.

What the Case Means for Kitsap County's Repeat-DUI Gap

Harvey's case sits inside a pattern Washington court watchers have flagged for years: felony DUI defendants who remain free on bail for months or years while their cases move through a backlogged court system, sometimes committing new offenses in the interim. Harvey was free on $75,000 bail for a 2022 DUI charge when he allegedly killed Gaudette in 2024, and that 2022 case was itself filed fourteen years after his 2008 vehicular homicide conviction. Across those sixteen years between the Torres killing and Gaudette's death, Harvey was arrested, convicted, sentenced, released and arrested again, twice, without a documented intervention that removed his access to a vehicle for good.

For Kitsap County residents who share Highway 3's commuter corridor between Poulsbo and Bremerton every morning, the practical takeaway is less about one man's sentence and more about how little visibility drivers have into who shares the road with a pending felony DUI case. Washington's court records are technically public, searchable case by case through the county clerk's office, but there is no simple, real-time way for a driver to know whether the vehicle beside them belongs to someone out on bail for a second or third alcohol-related offense.

Court records do not indicate whether Kitsap County prosecutors sought stricter bail or ignition interlock conditions after Harvey's 2022 arrest, and no public statement from the prosecutor's office addresses whether the office's bail practices for repeat DUI defendants have changed since Gaudette's death. That remains an open question the case has raised but not answered, and one likely to resurface the next time a Kitsap County defendant with a prior alcohol-related homicide conviction is arrested for driving drunk again.