Cops used chewing gum to make murder cases stick against ‘sexual sadist’

Convicted double murderer and diagnosed sexual sadist Mitchell Gaff will likely be chewing on this for the rest of his life – in prison.

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Gaff was linked to the murder of a woman in Washington state through a “gum ruse,” in which he inadvertently provided DNA evidence to undercover detectives posing as workers conducting an investigation into gum flavoring, according to an arrest affidavit filed in Snohomish County Court.

Instead of throwing away the sticks of gum that Gaff had sampled, detectives subjected them to forensic testing that resulted in his arrest for the 1984 murder of 42-year-old Judy Weaver.

Using this DNA information, Detective Susan Logothetti of the Everett Police Department was also able to link Gaff to another long-unsolved murder, that of 21-year-old Susan Vesey in 1980, according to court records.

“After reviewing the Vesey murder file, it became apparent to Detective Logothetti that there were startling similarities between the murder of Susan Vesey and that of Judy Weaver,” court documents state.

Gaff, 68, of Everett, admitted to killing the two women in April when he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced Wednesday to a minimum term of 50 years to life in prison.

“I’m sorry, not because I was arrested, but for the consequences,” Gaff said during his sentencing. “No one did anything to deserve me coming into their life.”

Before Gaff addressed the court, relatives of the victims pleaded with the judge to give the admitted murderer the harshest sentence possible.

“For over 45 years, my family has not known who took her from us,” Vesey’s daughter, Debra Newton, said in a victim impact statement. “Delayed justice is better than no justice at all, and you can still bring some semblance of justice to me, my brother, his brothers and his other family members and friends who loved him.”

Weaver’s eldest daughter, Colleen Kayser, wrote in her statement that for 40 years she wondered who “brutally raped” and “murdered” her mother.

“My one and only wish for the monster of a defendant is that he receives the maximum number of years allowed and never sees the light of day again.” Weaver’s niece, Dawnyel Wilder Harris, wrote in her statement.

Gaff had been diagnosed as a sexual sadist and previously served 21 years in prison for breaking into a home and raping two teenage sisters in 1984, three months after Weaver’s murder, KING-TV, the NBC affiliate in Seattle, reported.

His DNA was then entered into a national database of convicted sex offender profiles, known as CODIS, after he was convicted of raping the sisters and then incarcerated at the McNeil Island facility that houses Washington state’s highest-risk sex offenders.

But Gaff had not been considered a suspect in the Weaver and Vesey murders, two cases that police initially thought were unrelated.

In fact, police questioned several other men in connection with the murder of Weaver, who was tied up, raped and strangled by her attacker who then set fire to her bedroom to cover his tracks, according to court documents.

“DNA was not yet a forensic tool available to law enforcement in 1984,” court documents state.

Four years earlier, Gaff had broken into Vesey’s home and attacked her while her two children, both under the age of two, were in another room. Like Weaver, Vesey was tied up with electrical cords before being raped and strangled, according to the newspapers.

Again, other men, such as Ken Vesey, Vesey’s husband, had been questioned. But not Gaff and the matter is not resolved.

It wasn’t until November 2023 that investigators examining the cords used to tie Weaver’s wrists got a DNA hit matching Gaff, according to the newspapers.

Needing a second DNA sample for confirmation, Logothetti carried out the “eraser ruse” in January 2024 to obtain more physical evidence from the unsuspecting Gaff.

They figured it out, and Gaff was arrested in May 2024 and charged with Weaver’s murder.

But Gaff was only charged with Vesey’s murder after Ken Vesey called Logothetti in January 2025 and told him that his brother Gerry, who had also been questioned by police, had recently died.

Logothetti, who admitted in court documents that she was unfamiliar with the Vesey case, sent the physical evidence to the state crime lab. In April 2025, she was informed that there was “strong support for the proposition” that Gaff’s DNA was on a piece of white electrical cord that was used to tie up the young mother.

Then, in March 2026, Logothetti learned the DNA matched Gaff’s, according to court documents.

Gaff told investigators he did not know Vesey or Weaver before attacking them. He also did not know his first victim, a 29-year-old Everett woman whom he attacked in November 1979, according to court documents.

That woman managed to escape after Gaff beat her and tried to bind her wrists, according to court documents. Gaff was charged with assault and burglary and sentenced to five years probation and one year work release.

In a 1994 interview with a psychologist, Gaff admitted that he intended to rape the woman and that he chose her after he spotted her mowing a lawn and “found her attractive,” according to court documents.