Cops used chewing gum to match murder suspect’s DNA in cold casesnewsline24

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

Gaff was tied to the cold-case murders of two women in Washington state by a “gum ruse,” in which he inadvertently provided DNA evidence to undercover detectives posing as workers conducting a gum flavor survey, according to an arrest affidavit filed in Snohomish County Court.

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

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

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

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

“I am sorry, not because I was caught, but the consequences,” Gaff said at his sentencing. “No one did anything to deserve me coming into their lives.”

Before Gaff addressed the court, relatives of the victims implored the judge to hit the admitted killer with the harshest sentence possible.

“For over 45 years, my family has grappled with not knowing who had taken her from us,” Vesey’s daughter, Debra Newton, said in a victim impact statement. “Late justice is better than no justice at all, and you can still give some semblance of justice to me, my brother, her brothers and her other family and friends who loved her.”

Weaver’s oldest 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 be given the most amount of years allowed and that he never sees daylight again,” Weaver’s niece, Dawnyel Wilder Harris, wrote in her statement.

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

His DNA was later entered into a national database of convicted sex offender profiles known as CODIS after he was convicted of raping the sisters and later confined 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 hog-tied, raped and strangled by her attacker, who then set a fire in her bedroom to cover his tracks, court papers state.

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

Four years earlier, Gaff had barged into the home of Vesey and assaulted her while both her children, both under the age of 2, were in another room. Just as with Weaver, Vesey was bound with electrical cords before she was raped and strangled, the papers state.

Again, other men, like Vesey’s husband, Ken Vesey, had been questioned — but not Gaff — and the case went unsolved.

It wasn’t until November 2023 that investigators examining the cords used to bind Weaver’s wrists got a DNA hit that matched with Gaff, the papers state.

Needing a second DNA sample for confirmation, Logothetti set up the “gum ruse” in January 2024 to get more physical evidence from the unsuspecting Gaff.

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

But Gaff wasn’t charged with killing Vesey until after Ken Vesey called Logothetti in January 2025 and told her that his brother Gerry, who had also been questioned by police, had recently died.

Logothetti, who admitted in the court papers that she was not familiar 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 has been used to bind the young mom.

Then, in March 2026, Logothetti was told the DNA was a match with Gaff, the court papers state.

Gaff told investigators he did not know Vesey or Weaver before he attacked them. Nor did he know his first victim, a 29-year-old Everett woman he attacked in November 1979, the court papers state.

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

In a 1994 interview with a psychologist, Gaff admitted he intended to rape the woman and that he picked her after spotting her mowing a lawn and “found her attractive,” the court papers state.