The Gum Ruse

Susan Vesey turned twenty-one in Everett, Washington on July 11, 1980. She was bound, raped and strangled in her bedroom, and her fifteen-week-old son was found unharmed on the bed beside her. Four years later, bar manager Judy Weaver, forty-two, was strangled in her home on Rucker Avenue and the place was set on fire to destroy what was left behind.

Both cases went cold for decades. The man responsible, Mitchell Gaff, spent those years in and out of custody for other sexual assaults, was twice committed as a sexually violent predator, and was eventually living in Olympia under the legal name Sam Price. In November 2023 a lab separated a stranger’s profile from a DNA mixture on Weaver’s wrist binding and matched it in the national offender database. To confirm it, undercover officers staged a chewing gum taste test in January 2024 and picked up the piece he spat out. His DNA matched the swabs and cords kept from the Weaver scene, and further testing in 2025 tied him to Vesey.

Gaff pleaded guilty on April 16, 2026 to two counts of first degree murder, reading aloud in court his own account of how he killed both women. On May 13, 2026 a Snohomish County judge sentenced him to a minimum of fifty years and a maximum of life. He was sixty-eight.