On an ordinary January morning in 2024, an old man in his late sixties answered the door of his small yellow house in Everett, Washington, wearing nothing but a pair of pajama pants. Two women stood outside, smiling, dressed in matching t-shirts and holding flyers. They told him they worked for a chewing gum company, that they were conducting research on new flavors, and that they were going door to door asking neighbors to help by tasting a few sticks and sharing their opinions. He did not suspect a thing.
In fact, he seemed pleased by the interruption and welcomed them inside. One after another, they handed him different sticks of gum. He chewed each one with enthusiasm. When he finished a flavor, one of the women held out a small dish and asked him to spit the chewed gum into it.
He did exactly that, again and again, never once stopping to think about what he was actually doing. The two friendly women were not gum company workers. They were undercover police detectives. The dish was not there to collect gum.
It was there to collect his DNA. For more than forty years, this man had been living freely in his community, going to the grocery store, chatting with neighbors, growing old in peace, all while carrying a horrifying secret. By the time he spat the last piece of gum into that dish, he had unknowingly handed over the evidence that would finally connect him to two murders from the 1980s. His name was Mitchell Gaff, and the full weight of what he had done had not yet caught up with him.
The story of how investigators trapped him began long before that gum ever touched his lips, with a murder that had gone so cold it had nearly been forgotten. On July 12, 1980, a young woman named Susan Veasey was home in Everett, Washington. She was only twenty-one, married, and the mother of two very young children, a baby boy just three months old and a daughter not yet two. Her husband was away working the night shift, leaving Susan alone with the children.
At some point during that day or night, a man got into her home. Investigators later learned that he had simply gone around the neighborhood trying random doors, checking to see which ones were unlocked. Susan’s door happened to be one of them. Once inside, the man attacked her.
He tied her up using electrical cord, then beat her, raped her, and strangled her to death. Her two small children were in the home the entire time. The attacker left them physically unharmed. Later that day, Susan’s husband came home from his shift expecting a normal evening with his wife and children.
Instead, he found his wife’s lifeless body. His baby son was found close by on the bed, untouched, too young to understand what had happened. His toddler daughter was also found safe. Police launched an investigation right away.
Detectives questioned people close to Susan, including her husband’s own brother, who became a person of interest for a time. But no matter how many leads they chased, nothing solid ever came together. There simply was not enough evidence to charge anyone. As the months passed, the case grew colder and colder until it became one more unsolved file sitting in a police archive gathering dust.
For the Veasey family, this meant living for decades without answers. Susan’s children grew up never getting the chance to know their mother, never knowing who had taken her or why. But this was only the beginning. Four years later, just four miles away from where Susan Veasey had been killed, almost the exact same nightmare would happen again.
And once again, police had no idea the two cases were connected. On June 1, 1984, firefighters in Everett got a call about a fire at an apartment. They rushed to the scene and worked to put out the flames. Once the fire was under control, they made a horrifying discovery.
A woman was dead inside. Her name was Judy Weaver. She was forty-two, a mother of two grown children, and by all accounts a lively, funny, hard-working woman who was proud of running her own restaurant. As investigators looked closer, they realized this was no accident.
Judy had been hog-tied using an extension cord, raped, and strangled before the killer set the apartment on fire, most likely trying to burn away any trace of evidence. At the time, DNA testing was not yet a common tool for solving crimes. Still, in a small stroke of luck, investigators on the scene had the foresight to collect vaginal swabs from Judy’s body a few hours after her death. It was a decision that would not pay off for another forty years, but it was a decision that would one day matter more than anyone in that room could have imagined.
Detectives at the time questioned several men connected to Judy’s life, including a boyfriend she had been seeing. That boyfriend remained the primary suspect in the case for years, right up until his own death in 1994. But suspicion is not proof, and nobody was ever charged. Here is where the story becomes even more chilling.
Even though Judy Weaver’s murder happened just four miles from where Susan Veasey had been killed only four years earlier, and even though both women had been tied up with cord, raped, and strangled in almost identical fashion, investigators never connected the two cases. Two separate detectives worked two separate murders, never realizing they were hunting the very same man. Both cases went cold. Both families were left to grieve without answers.
And the man responsible carried on with his life as if nothing had happened. For years, both murders sat untouched, boxed away in police storage. But science does not stand still, and eventually the tools available to investigators changed the game completely. In 2020, law enforcement decided to revisit Judy Weaver’s murder using modern DNA technology, a tool that simply did not exist back in 1984.
A forensic scientist began working the file using new software that could examine tiny, complicated mixtures of DNA and separate out different people’s genetic material, even from very small or degraded samples. One of the cords used to tie up Judy’s body held a mixture of DNA. Some of it belonged to Judy herself. Some of it belonged to her boyfriend.
But buried in that mixture was a small amount of DNA from an unknown third person. Using the new software, scientists were able to subtract out Judy’s and her boyfriend’s DNA, isolating the profile of this mystery contributor. In November 2023, that unknown profile was entered into a national criminal database that stores the DNA of convicted offenders across the country. And it matched.
The hit came back for a man named Mitchell Gaff, a convicted rapist whose DNA had been logged years earlier after he was found guilty of a separate violent crime. This was a massive breakthrough. But detectives needed more than a database hit. They needed a fresh, direct sample of Gaff’s DNA to confirm the match beyond doubt and to make sure it would hold up in court.
Normally, in cases like this, detectives try to secretly collect something a suspect has thrown away, like a cigarette butt or a drink cup. Police quietly began watching Gaff’s house. But he barely left home, aside from the occasional trip to a nearby grocery store. There was hardly any opportunity to grab something he had discarded.
Detectives even considered trailing Gaff around town, hoping he might toss aside a cigarette butt or leave behind a half-finished drink somewhere in public. But Gaff rarely left his house at all, making that approach nearly impossible. That was when one clever detective came up with an idea that sounded almost too simple to work. What if they invented a reason for Gaff to voluntarily hand over his own saliva?
And that was exactly how the gum ruse was born. In January 2024, a female detective and two colleagues dressed the part, put on branded t-shirts, printed flyers, and knocked on Gaff’s door pretending to represent a chewing gum company. It worked exactly as planned. Gaff invited them in and happily sampled several different gum flavors, spitting each one into the small dish the detectives held out.
That gum was carefully collected and sent straight to a crime lab. When the results came back, they were damning. The DNA extracted from that chewed gum was consistent with DNA found on Judy Weaver’s body decades earlier, including samples from her vaginal swabs and from the cords used to bind her neck and wrists. In May 2024, Mitchell Gaff was arrested and charged with Judy Weaver’s murder.
After more than forty years, one of the two murders finally had a suspect in custody. But the story was far from over. There was still Susan Veasey’s murder sitting cold and unsolved just four miles away, and nobody yet realized the two cases were linked. That changed in January 2025.
A phone call came in to the detective working Judy Weaver’s case. It was from Susan Veasey’s husband. He wanted to let the police know that his brother, who had once been questioned as a suspect in his wife’s murder, had recently passed away. He also expressed frustration, wanting to know why, after all these years and after Gaff’s arrest for a similar crime nearby, nobody had reopened his wife’s case.
As he described the details of his wife’s murder over the phone, the detective on the other end felt a chill of recognition. The method used to tie Susan up, the way she had been attacked, it all sounded eerily similar to what had happened to Judy Weaver. Acting quickly, the detective pulled old evidence from the Veasey crime scene and sent it off to the state crime lab for updated testing. In April 2025, results came back showing strong support that Gaff’s DNA was present on a white cord used to bind Susan’s body.
Then, in March 2026, a second piece of cord from the scene was tested and confirmed to be the same match. On March 13, 2026, nearly forty-six years after her murder, Mitchell Gaff was formally charged with the killing of Susan Veasey. Two murders, two separate decades, two families who had waited a lifetime for answers. And now, finally, one single name connected them both.
Long before Gaff was ever linked to Judy Weaver or Susan Veasey, he already had a criminal record. And mental health experts who evaluated him over the years came to a chilling conclusion. Multiple professionals diagnosed him as a sexual sadist, meaning he found pleasure specifically in causing pain and fear in his victims. His very first known attack happened in November 1979, the day before Thanksgiving.
A twenty-nine-year-old woman was putting her lawn mower away in the tool shed behind her home in Everett. Out of nowhere, a young Mitchell Gaff, only twenty-one at the time, appeared holding what looked exactly like a handgun. It later turned out to be an air gun, but in that moment, the woman had no way of knowing that. Gaff ordered her to get on her knees and told her not to turn around.
At first, she believed it might be a joke. She turned to look at him, thinking maybe it was a friend playing a prank, since she worked in law enforcement herself at the time and was used to that kind of humor among colleagues. Instead, Gaff struck her across the head with the gun. He continued beating her, punching her head, and slamming it against the concrete floor and the wall of the shed.
At some point during the attack, Gaff set the gun down so he could tie up her wrists. This was the moment that saved her life. She remembered her father always teaching her to fight back no matter what. Summoning everything she had, she threw her body weight against Gaff, catching him off guard and sending him stumbling into the wall.
They both scrambled back to their feet, but now she was trapped with nowhere to run. That is when Gaff pulled out a hunting knife from his boot. She held her hand up instinctively to defend herself and began trying to reason with him, but he slashed her open palm with the blade, telling her he was going to kill her. Believing she was about to die, she fought with everything left in her, shoving Gaff, striking him, and clawing at his neck.
In that split second of chaos, she managed to break free and ran screaming into a nearby alley, where neighbors found her and called the police. Gaff fled the scene and quickly changed his clothes, but he was arrested soon afterward. A jury found him guilty of assault with a deadly weapon and burglary. And despite everything he had done to her, the judge sentenced Gaff to just thirty days in jail, and even that sentence allowed him work release, meaning he was free to leave every day.
After that, he was placed on five years of probation. It was a punishment so light it would go on to haunt his survivor for the rest of her life, especially once she learned what he would go on to do next. Because Mitchell Gaff was still on probation for that very attack when he murdered Susan Veasey in July 1980. And he was still on probation, walking free in his community, when in August 1984, just months before Judy Weaver’s murder, he committed one of the most horrifying attacks of his entire criminal history.
On the night of August 28, 1984, Gaff crept into a home in Everett where a mother and her two teenage daughters, aged fourteen and sixteen, were sleeping. Their mother was asleep downstairs in the basement, completely unaware of what was unfolding upstairs. Once inside, Gaff turned his attention to the two young sisters. For the next two and a half hours, he subjected them to an ordeal almost impossible to put into words.
He hog-tied both girls using electrical cord. He cut their clothing off with a knife. He violated them repeatedly. He beat them.
He choked them. He even used an electrical cord to shock one of them. At one point, while Gaff was choking the older sister with the cord, the younger girl managed to break free. She escaped the house and ran for help, likely saving both of their lives.
Gaff fled into the night once again, but this time he did not get away so easily. He was eventually caught and pleaded guilty to two counts of rape along with burglary. This time the punishment was far more serious. A judge sentenced him to eleven and a half years in prison.
In hearings that followed, Gaff made an admission that reveals just how dangerous he truly was during this period of his life. He confessed that in the early 1980s, he had attempted to attack as many as thirty women and girls in a single day, and that he had raped at least eight of them. One prosecutor who dealt with his case said publicly that in nearly two decades of work, he had never encountered anyone more dangerous to the community than Mitchell Gaff. It was this 1984 conviction for raping the two sisters that placed Gaff’s DNA into the national criminal database in the first place.
The very same database that would, decades later, connect him to Judy Weaver’s murder. After his conviction, Gaff served time behind bars and went through an intensive sex offender treatment program. But when his release date arrived in 1994, officials refused to let him walk free. Instead, under a newer state law targeting violent repeat offenders, he was kept confined indefinitely at a special facility for the state’s most dangerous sex offenders.
A jury agreed he remained a threat to the public. In the year 2000, Gaff tried again to gain his freedom, claiming years of therapy had changed him and that he now felt deep remorse for what he had done. Once again, a jury disagreed, ruling that he remained a violent sexual predator, and he stayed locked away for several more years. It was not until 2006, more than twenty years after his original sentencing, that Gaff finally won some level of freedom, moving into a supervised halfway house with an electronic tracking device.
For the following decade, he moved back and forth between partial freedom and full confinement due to repeated violations of his release conditions. Eventually, Gaff settled into a quiet life under a new identity, registered as a high-level sex offender, going about his days peacefully, completely unaware that science was slowly closing in on him. By the time detectives finally connected Mitchell Gaff to both Susan Veasey and Judy Weaver, he was scheduled to stand trial in September. But instead, Gaff chose to plead guilty.
On April 16, 2026, standing in a Snohomish County courtroom, Mitchell Gaff pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. In chilling detail, he described exactly how he had killed both women, admitting that he had gone door-to-door on the night he found Susan Veasey’s home unlocked, and admitting that he wrapped cords around Judy Weaver’s neck and lit her bedspread on fire in an attempt to hide his crime. He stated plainly that he had not known either woman before he attacked them. For prosecutors, the guilty plea meant certainty.
Rather than risk an unpredictable jury trial, they secured a guaranteed conviction and gave both families closure without the emotional toll of a lengthy trial. On May 13, 2026, Gaff returned to court for sentencing. The courtroom was packed with survivors and family members of his victims, many of them in tears as they spoke about how his crimes had shattered their lives forever. Susan Veasey’s son, who had been an infant in the very room where his mother was murdered, told the court that this crime marked the very beginning of his life, and that what Gaff stole from him and his sister was not simply their mother’s life, but her unconditional love, the kind of love that shapes a person before they even understand what is happening to them.
Susan’s daughter told the court that her mother’s death changed the direction of her entire family for generations to come, and that she had missed her mother at every major milestone of her life ever since. Judy Weaver’s family shared similar heartbreak. Her surviving brother wept as he remembered looking out for his baby sister. Her daughter described her mother as a vibrant, funny woman who was proud of the restaurant she once owned, and said that Gaff had simply carried on with his life for decades, never caring about the pain and devastation he had caused an entire family.
Even the survivor of Gaff’s very first attack back in 1979 stood before the court, describing how to this day, nearly fifty years later, she still cannot keep the television or radio on when she is home alone, because she needs to be able to hear every single sound around her just in case. She admitted that for decades she had avoided attending Gaff’s court hearings in person, choosing instead to watch remotely because she refused to let him ever see her cry. But for this final hearing, after everything her community had endured, she said she felt she finally had to show up in person and face him one last time. The prosecutor asked the judge to hand down the harshest possible sentence, describing Gaff as a kind of random, predatory danger who could strike anyone whose window or door happened to be left unlocked at the wrong moment.
When Gaff finally addressed the court himself, he said he had no excuse or defense for what he had done, and that nothing he could say or do would ever make up for it. Witnesses in the courtroom noted that he showed almost no emotion throughout the hearing, only appearing to react once he heard his final sentence. The judge sentenced Mitchell Gaff to a minimum of fifty years up to life in prison. Given his age, it is almost certain that he will spend the rest of his life behind bars and die there.
For over forty years, the man responsible for two horrific murders lived among ordinary people. He shopped at local grocery stores. He was someone’s quiet, unremarkable neighbor. And although the families of his victims lived for decades without knowing whether the person who had taken their loved ones was still out there, still walking free, still capable of hurting someone else, in the end the one thing Mitchell Gaff could not escape was science.
A piece of gum, chewed willingly into a detective’s dish, was all it took to finally end his freedom.
