For nearly half a century, the city of Everett, Washington, held two unsolved murders that refused to fade. The first victim was Susan Veasey, a 21-year-old mother killed on the night of her birthday, July 11th, 1980. A stranger had forced his way into her apartment on Casino Way, bound her, beaten her, and strangled her. When her husband returned from his night shift the next morning, he found her body.
The scene was made almost incomprehensible by what the killer had left behind: Susan’s two children, an infant son just 15 weeks old and a toddler daughter, were found completely unharmed. The killer had moved around them and left them alive. The man responsible was Mitchell Gaff, then 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 attacked. Her son Joshua, who grew up without ever knowing his mother, would later say that the killer had not only taken her life but had stolen a mother’s unconditional love from an entire family. At the time, however, forensic science was still in its infancy. Leads dried up, and the case went cold.
Four years later, in the early hours of June 2nd, 1984, the nightmare returned. The victim was 42-year-old Judy Weaver, a bar manager at the Bell Ness Cafe who had been on shift since six in the morning. As she made her way home that night, Gaff saw her and followed. Firefighters responding to a blaze at her home on Rucker Avenue found her body, 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 removed the batteries from her smoke alarm before setting the bedspread on fire, ensuring the evidence would burn before anyone arrived. Her brother Leon Gregory would later speak of the four decades of pain his family carried, 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 them, both investigations stalled. For Susan Veasey’s family, the wait would last 46 years. For Judy Weaver’s, 42.
The killer, it seemed, had gotten away with it. Decades passed, and the science of solving crimes changed dramatically. Evidence once considered useless was now a potential treasure trove. Biological samples from both crime scenes, carefully preserved in evidence lockers, held information that the technology of the 1980s could not extract.
Crime scene samples are rarely clean; they are complex mixtures containing DNA from the victim, the perpetrator, and trace amounts from others innocently at the scene. Back then, a sample with DNA from more than one person was often useless. In 2020, Everett Police 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.
They sent the preserved samples to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, hoping that four decades of scientific advancement could finally give Judy Weaver a voice. What no one knew yet was how much darker the full picture would become. Mitchell Gaff was not simply a man who had committed two murders and stayed off the radar. During later civil commitment hearings, where juries twice found him to be a sexually violent predator, he made 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. He was a predator operating at an almost incomprehensible scale, hidden in plain sight in the same city where he had already killed twice. He had served 21 years in state prison, followed by civil commitment at the McNeil Island facility, Washington’s most secure housing for high-risk sex offenders.
That sentence stemmed from a brutal home invasion attack on two teenage sisters carried out just three months after he murdered Judy Weaver. That conviction, unknowingly, became the thread that would eventually unravel everything. His DNA from that case was already sitting in the national database, waiting. The breakthrough came not from a microscope but from an algorithm.
The evidence from Judy Weaver’s murder contained what is known as a complex DNA mixture—like trying to read a sentence that has been shredded and mixed with pieces of several other sentences. Putting it back together by hand was nearly impossible. But a probabilistic genotyping software called STRMix could. Instead of an analyst making a subjective call on a mixed sample, STRMix used powerful statistical models to assess millions of possible genetic combinations and calculate the probability that a specific person’s DNA was present.
It could read those shredded, jumbled sentences where older methods completely failed. In 2023, using STRMix, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab developed a male DNA profile from a ligature used to bind Judy Weaver’s wrists. It was a ghost profile, a genetic signature that had been there all along, invisible to the technology of its time. The analyst who processed the sample, forensic scientist Knowlton, 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, which contains profiles from convicted offenders and crime scenes across the country.
In November 2023, they got a hit. The DNA from the 1984 murder of Judy Weaver matched Mitchell Gaff, whose profile was 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 now a 68-year-old man living quietly in Olympia, Washington, where he had 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 a connection no one had expected. Detective Susan Logothetti had taken over cold case homicide investigations in 2022 and had never heard of Susan Veasey before the CODIS match came back. But shortly after, 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.
When Logothetti called him back and heard 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 is not always enough to secure a conviction on its own, especially with decades-old evidence.
Prosecutors needed a fresh DNA sample directly from Mitchell Gaff—a direct, contemporary, one-to-one match that would be irrefutable in court. This put the detectives in a difficult position. If they obtained a warrant for his DNA, Gaff would immediately know he was the prime suspect in a double homicide, giving him a chance to flee or trigger legal delays that could derail the case. They needed his DNA without him ever knowing they were taking it.
The normal solution is 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 were not going to work.
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 answered the door in his pajama pants, completely unsuspecting. He was friendly, even enthusiastic, and invited them inside. Three detectives sat across from a man they believed had murdered two women decades earlier, pretending to care about flavor profiles. The entire weight of more than 40 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.
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 gum was rushed to the lab. The results were definitive. The DNA extracted from Gaff’s saliva matched the ligature profile and 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. 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. 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. His statement began: “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. The 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, 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 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: “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.