Washington 1984 Cold Case Solved — Detectives Posed as Gum Salesmen to Catch a Double Murderer

Washington 1984 Cold Case Solved — Detectives Posed as Gum Salesmen to Catch a Double Murderer

Our story begins not with the solution, but with the decades of silence and pain that came before it. It starts in Everett, Washington, a city that became the unwilling backdrop for two vicious crimes that stumped investigators for a generation. The first life stolen was that of Susan Veasey. On the night of July 11th, 1980, her 21st birthday, Susan was inside her apartment on Casino Way when a stranger forced his way in.

The next morning, her husband Richard turned home from working the night shift and found her bound, beaten, and strangled. What made the scene almost incomprehensible was who else was in the home. Her two young children, an infant son just 15 weeks old and a toddler daughter, were found completely unharmed. The killer had stepped around them and left them alive.

 The man responsible was Mitchell Gaff. He was 22 years old. He later told a court that he had been roaming the building testing random doors when he found Susan’s unlocked. He hid inside, waited for her, and then attacked. Her son Joshua, who grew up without ever knowing his mother, would later tell that same court that the killer didn’t just take her life, he stole a mother’s unconditional love from an entire family.

The investigation launched immediately, but with forensic science still in its infancy, the leads dried up and the case went cold. Four years later, in the early hours of June 2nd, 1984, the nightmare returned to Everett. The victim this time was 42-year-old Judy Weaver, a bar manager at the Bell Ness Cafe, who had been on shift since 6:00 in the morning.

As she made her way home that night, Gaff was watching. He had spotted her returning and followed. She was found in her home on Rucker Avenue after firefighters responded to a blaze, and it quickly became clear the fire was no accident. It was a crude attempt to cover up another brutal murder. Like Susan Veasey, Judy had been bound and strangled.

 Gaff had also removed the batteries from her smoke alarm before setting the bedspread on fire, making sure the evidence burned before anyone arrived. Her brother, Leon Gregory, would later speak of the four decades of pain his family endured, noting that their parents and siblings had gone to their graves without ever knowing who took Judy’s life.

At the time, the two cases were seen as unrelated tragedies. With no clear suspects and no forensic tools powerful enough to connect the dots, both investigations stalled. For Susan Veasey’s family, it would be 46 years of waiting. For Judy Weavers, 42. The killer, it seemed, had gotten away with it. Decades passed.

 The world changed, and so did the science of solving crimes. Tucked away in evidence lockers, biological samples from the Veasey and Weaver crime scenes, once of limited use, were now potential treasure troves of information. Cold case units across the country were realizing that their best assets were often carefully preserved items from old, forgotten cases.

The Everett Police Department was no different. In 2020, detectives decided to take a fresh look at the Judy Weaver murder. It was a long shot. The evidence was over 35 years old, and biological material degrades over time. Plus, crime scene samples are rarely clean. They are often complex mixtures containing DNA from the victim, the perpetrator, and trace amounts from others who were innocently at the scene.

Back in the 1980s, technology couldn’t reliably separate these messy mixtures. A sample with DNA from more than one person was often useless. This was the challenge facing the new team. They knew a killer’s genetic fingerprint was likely hidden in the evidence from Judy’s case, but it was tangled up in a complex, degraded biological mess.

To the naked eye, it was a dead end, but to a modern forensic scientist, it was a puzzle waiting for the right key. They sent the preserved samples to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, hoping that 40 years of scientific advancement could finally give Judy Weaver a voice. What they didn’t know yet was how much darker the full picture would eventually become.

Because Gaff wasn’t just a man who had committed two murders and managed to stay off the radar. During his later civil commitment hearings, where juries twice found him to be a sexually violent predator, he made a series of admissions that stunned the courtroom. At the height of his offending, Gaff told investigators he had been attempting to attack as many as 30 women a day.

Not 30 over a lifetime. 30 in a single day. A predator operating at a scale that was almost impossible to comprehend, hidden in plain sight in the same city where he had already killed twice. He had also served 21 years in a state prison followed by civil commitment at the McNeil Island facility, Washington’s most secure housing for high-risk sex offenders, all for a brutal home invasion attack on two teenage sisters that he carried out just 3 months after murdering Judy Weaver.

That conviction was, unknowingly, the thread that would eventually unravel everything. His DNA from that case was already sitting in a national database waiting. The breakthrough came not from a microscope, but from an algorithm. The evidence from Judy Weaver’s murder contained what’s known as a complex DNA mixture.

Think of it like trying to read a sentence that’s been shredded and mixed with pieces of several other sentences. Putting it back together by hand is nearly impossible. This is where a revolutionary software called STRMix came in. STR Mix is a probabilistic genotyping software. Instead of an analyst making a subjective call on a mixed sample, STR Mix uses powerful statistical models to assess millions of possible genetic combinations and calculate the probability that a specific person’s DNA is present. It doesn’t magically create

a clean profile, but it interprets messy data with such power that it can often pull out a usable profile where older methods completely failed. It could finally read those shredded jumbled sentences from the crime scene. In 2023, using STR Mix, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab successfully developed a male DNA profile from a ligature used to bind Judy Weaver’s wrists.

This was the ghost profile. A genetic signature that had been there all along, invisible to the technology of its time, patiently waiting. The analyst who processed the sample, forensic scientist Knowlton, later admitted she wasn’t expecting much. “I wasn’t expecting anything to come from this, being the ’80s,” she said.

“I was expecting this to be some unknown profile from an EMT responder or something like that.” She was wrong. With a viable profile in hand, investigators uploaded it to CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database. The system contains profiles from convicted offenders and crime scenes across the country, governed by federal and state law.

In November 2023, they got a hit. The DNA from the 1984 murder of Judy Weaver matched [clears throat] a man named Mitchell Gaff in the system due to his 1985 conviction for raping two teenage sisters. His name had never appeared in either the Weaver or Veasey investigations. He was a 68-year-old man living quietly in Olympia, Washington, who who legally changed his name to Sam Price.

A doctor who evaluated him had labeled him a sexual sadist, and Washington state had formally designated him a sexually violent predator in both 1994 and 2000. Then came the connection no one had expected. Detective Susan Logothetti, who had taken over cold case homicide investigations in 2022, had never heard of Susan Veasey before Judy Weaver’s DNA hit came back.

 But shortly after the CODIS match, Veasey’s husband, Ken, left a voicemail with the department calling to let them know that his brother, once a suspect in his wife’s murder, had recently died. Logothetti called him back. As Ken described the details of Susan’s murder, she felt a chill she couldn’t shake. “The only thing I could think about was Judy Weaver,” she later said.

“The similarities weren’t just striking, they were a blueprint. Same city, same method, same signature.” They tested Gaff’s newly identified profile against the Veasey evidence. It was a match. The same man had killed both women. A CODIS hit is a powerful lead, but it’s not always enough to secure a conviction on its own, especially with decades-old evidence.

To build an airtight case, prosecutors needed a fresh DNA sample directly from Mitchell Gaff, a direct contemporary one-to-one match that would be irrefutable in court and impossible to challenge as degraded or contaminated. This put the detectives in a difficult position. If they tried to get a warrant for his DNA, Gaff would immediately know he was the prime suspect in a double homicide.

That could give him a chance to flee or trigger legal delays that could derail the whole case. They needed his DNA without him ever knowing they were taking it. The normal solution in situations like this is straightforward surveillance, waiting for a suspect to discard a coffee cup, a cigarette butt, anything containing DNA.

 But, Gaff barely left his home. Weeks of observation turned up almost nothing. Traditional methods weren’t going to work. They needed something else entirely. That’s when an investigator came up with an idea that a colleague later admitted sounded kind of crazy. They would stage an elaborate undercover sting posing as market researchers for a brand new chewing gum company.

 In January 2024, three undercover detectives, including Detective Logothetti, approached Gaff’s home wearing branded t-shirts and carrying promotional flyers for a fictional gum company. They launched into their pitch, a simple flavor preference survey, the kind of thing any ordinary consumer might be asked to participate in.

Gaff, who answered the door in his pajama pants, was completely unsuspecting. He was friendly, even enthusiastic, and invited them inside. The tension in that room must have been almost unbearable. Three detectives sitting across from a man they believed had murdered two women decades earlier, pretending to care about flavor profiles.

 The entire weight of 40-plus years of pain for two families rested on maintaining that performance. The critical moment arrived when it was time for Gaff to try a new flavor. A detective held out a small ceramic ramekin and asked him to spit out the piece he was already chewing so he could try the next one. Logothetti later described what came next.

I remember watching him spit the first piece of gum into the ramekin and seeing the saliva, and it was very hard for me to contain my excitement. He had taken the bait. Without any idea what he had just handed over, Mitchell Gaff had delivered the final piece of evidence they needed. The detectives thanked him for his time, wrapped up their survey, and walked out the door with a piece of gum saturated with his DNA.

 The piece of gum was rushed to the lab. The results were definitive and overwhelming. The DNA extracted from Gaff’s saliva wasn’t just a match to the ligature profile. It matched biological evidence recovered from Judy Weaver’s body directly from three separate pieces of her clothing and from the restraints used in her murder.

 Five independent points of connection from a single piece of chewed gum. There was no innocent explanation for any of it. Investigators then confirmed the match to the evidence from Susan Veasey’s 1980 murder as well. The same genetic signature linking a 68-year-old man in Olympia to two separate crime scenes spanning four years and four decades.

With this evidence locked in, the case moved with swift certainty. In May 2024, police arrested Mitchell Gaff. The man who had lived freely for decades hiding his past behind a changed name and a quiet routine was finally in handcuffs. For the investigators who had worked the case, the moment was surreal. For the families, it was the answer to a question they had lived with for their entire adult lives.

With the DNA evidence against him insurmountable, Mitchell Gaff’s time was up. On April 16th, 2026, he pleaded guilty in open court to two counts of first-degree murder with premeditated intent. In his own words read aloud before the judge, Gaff admitted to everything. He described going out on the night of Judy Weaver’s murder with a chilling purpose.

 His own statement beginning, “I, Sam Price, formerly known as Mitchell Gaff, was out looking to rape women or burglarize them.” He confirmed both women were total strangers. He described arriving at their homes with no weapons, then using knives taken from their own kitchens. He described it all without hesitation as if recounting something that had simply happened to him rather than something he had chosen to do.

His victims’ families finally had the chance to face him. Judy Weaver’s daughter, Kathy Myers, delivered a statement that cut through the silence of the courtroom. “Mr. Gaff carried on with his life,” she wrote, “never caring about the tragedy and hurt he caused an entire family. My wish is that he never gets to just carry on with his life again.

” Susan Veasey’s son, Joshua, the infant who had been found unharmed beside his murdered mother, spoke of growing up with a void that never closed. Before sentencing, Gaff offered an apology, blaming his actions on drugs and alcohol. The judge was unmoved. Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Adair N.

 Okuloco tied the sentence directly to the decades those families had spent in the dark, stating, “The family of Susan Veasey have had to wait 46 years for the answer to the question, who killed Susan Veasey?” “The family of Ms. Weaver has waited 42 years to receive an answer to the same question.” “The appropriate sentence, at a minimum, is the number of years that the families had to wait.

” Mitchell Gaff was sentenced to a minimum of 50 years and a maximum of life in prison. At 68 years old, it is a sentence that ensures he will spend every remaining day behind bars. The resolution of these cases is a story of relentless police work, a forensic science revolution, and two families who never stopped deserving answers.

 But most of all, it is the story of a wild undercover sting, a fake gum company that served up a piece of bubble gum and with it a cold dish of justice, more than four decades in the making. Stories like this show that even when decades pass, the pursuit of justice never truly ends. If you found this story of determined detective work and extraordinary forensic breakthroughs compelling, subscribe for more in-depth true crime investigations, and let us Let me in the comments, what do you think about the ingenious gum ruse used to crack this case?