Cops Tricked Him Into Giving Up His DNA. It Ended a 46-Year Manhunt

A man spits his gum into a plastic dish during a fake flavor survey. He has no idea he just handed police the DNA that will connect him to two murders he wished would stay buried. Police had been chasing him for over four decades without ever knowing his name. Two women killed four years apart. Two families left with nothing but questions.

 and one man walking free the entire time, hiding in plain sight under a name that wasn’t even his own. This is how a piece of chewed gum ended a 46-year manhunt that no one even knew was happening. To understand how it all started, we need to go back to July 1980 to a quiet home in Everett, Washington. Susan Vzy was 21 years old, married, and a mother of two, a daughter just two years old, a son only a few months old, still small enough to be carried in one arm.

 She lived in a modest home on Casino Road. Her husband, Ken, worked night shifts, and on July 11th, he was at work. That night was also Susan’s 21st birthday. There’s no record of anything unusual about how she spent it. No party, no late night out. Just Susan and her two small children at home waiting for Ken to come back in the morning.

He never got the chance to wish her a happy birthday in person again. When Ken walked through the door after his shift, he found Susan in their bedroom. She had been beaten. She had been bound. She had been strangled. In another part of the house, their two children were exactly where they’d been left, physically untouched, too young to understand what had happened just a few feet away from them while they slept.

Police arrived to a scene that offered very little to work with. There was no clear sign of forced entry that investigators could point to with confidence. Susan wasn’t a woman with enemies, as far as anyone could tell. She wasn’t involved in anything that might explain why someone would want to hurt her. She was simply a young mother killed in her own home the morning after her 21st birthday.

Detectives started with the people closest to Susan. Ken’s brother had crossed paths with the family in ways that drew some suspicion, and he was questioned at length. Investigators pulled at every thread they had. They waited for something, anything, to come loose. Nothing did. Whoever walked into that house hurt Susan and walked back out again simply vanished into the rest of his life.

No confession, no witness, no answer for a husband left to raise two children alone or for two children who would grow up knowing their mother only through photographs and other people’s memories. Somewhere in that same city, the person responsible was still out there. He was not finished. Four years passed.

Susan’s case went quiet. Not forgotten by the people who loved her. Just no longer active. No longer moving forward. A file in a cabinet waiting for something that hadn’t arrived yet. Then in June of 1984, it happened again. Judith Weaver went by Judy. She was 42 years old and she managed a bar called the Bell Nest Cafe in Everett.

On the 1st of June, she started work around 6:00 in the morning. By 9:30 that night, she had been on her feet most of the day, and she’d had enough to drink that she knew driving home wasn’t a good idea. She asked the bartender to call her a cab. 20 minutes passed. The cab never showed, so Judy decided to walk.

 It wasn’t far to her apartment on Rucker Avenue, and she’d made the walk plenty of times before. Along the way, she stopped at a Dairy Queen for ice cream. A witness there later told police she seemed to be with a young man. At the time, nobody thought much of it. It was the last time anyone would see her alive. Later that night, someone entered Judy’s apartment.

She was attacked, bound, and killed. Before leaving, whoever did this removed the batteries from her smoke alarm and set fire to her bedroom, an attempt to erase whatever evidence he might have left behind. Sometime after midnight, a man walking along Rucker Avenue noticed smoke pouring from the building. He pounded on Judy’s door.

 Nobody answered. When firefighters arrived, they tried to push through the smoke and had to fall back. On their second attempt, they found the fire contained mostly to one room. Inside that room, they found Judy. DNA testing barely existed as a usable tool for police work in 1984. But somebody working Judy’s case that night made a decision that would matter enormously decades later.

They called the crime lab and asked about preserving evidence in case science ever caught up to what they couldn’t yet prove. Vaginal swabs were collected within hours of her death. For now, though, all police had was a body, a fire meant to erase the truth, and no idea who was responsible. Whoever had done this had gotten away the same way he had four years earlier on the other side of the same city.

And nobody investigating either case knew the two murders were connected at all. The investigation into Judy’s death focused heavily on her boyfriend at the time. According to people who reviewed the file years later, it grew thick with theories that led nowhere. Talk of money laundering, talk of drug connections.

None of it produced an arrest. Judy’s boyfriend remained the person investigators kept circling back to until he died in 1994, still carrying suspicion that may never have belonged to him. For 14 years, investigators were looking in a direction that led nowhere. The man who actually killed Judy Weaver wasn’t a suspect. He wasn’t a person of interest.

His name hadn’t crossed a single detective’s desk in connection with her death. But he had crossed paths with police before. Just not for this. In November of 1979, a 29-year-old woman named Jacqueline O’Brien was in her garage in North Everett putting away her lawn mower. She worked as a Washington State Patrol officer.

A man approached her from behind, told her to get down on her knees, and threatened her with what she believed at the time was a gun. Instead of complying, she turned to face him. He struck her across the head. When he tried to bind her wrists, something in her refused to let this happen quietly. She thought of her father who had always told her to fight back and she threw her body weight into the man hard enough to send him into the wall.

He recovered fast. He pulled a hunting knife from his boot. Jacqueline held up her hands and started to apologize and he cut her palm with the blade. Still, she kept fighting. She clawed at him, pushed him back, and broke free, running for a nearby alley where neighbors found her and called the police. He was caught, but not held for long.

 He was sentenced to probation and a short period of work release for assault and burglary. At the time, nobody connected this attack to anything else because there was nothing yet to connect it to. It looked like an isolated, violent crime, and the man responsible went on with his life.

 5 years later, in August of 1984, just months after Judy Weaver’s murder, that same man broke into a home in Everett and assaulted two teenage sisters. This time, he was caught, charged, and convicted. He was sent to prison. As part of that conviction, his DNA was entered into a national database, a routine step that meant nothing to anyone at the time.

Nobody investigating Susan V’s murder knew this man existed. Nobody investigating Judy Weaver’s murder knew about him either. A predator had just been fingerprinted, photographed, and permanently logged into a government database. And still two unsolved murders sat untouched in filing cabinets across town with no thread connecting any of it to him.

 While in custody, he was evaluated repeatedly by psychologists. More than one expert who examined him used the same clinical word to describe him. Sadist. In 1994 and again in 2000, separate juries designated him a sexually violent predator, a legal status used in Washington for people the state believes are highly likely to reaffend.

Under that designation, he was held well beyond the length of his original sentence. Eventually, he was released. He left his old name behind and began using a new one. He settled in Olympia, about an hour south of Everett, and lived there quietly for decades, working, keeping to himself, staying under the radar.

Susan V’s family and Judy Weaver’s family were still waiting for someone, anyone, to tell them who had taken their loved ones from them. He was not waiting for anything. He was simply living his life. one town over from where two families were still searching for answers he alone possessed. Susan’s children grew up without her.

Raised by a father who never stopped wondering who had done this and why. Judy’s children carried the same unanswered question into their own adult lives. Investigators who had once worked these cases retired moved on to other assignments or passed away themselves. The files sat in storage untouched for years.

But in 2020, something changed. Everett’s cold case unit began taking another look at Judy Weaver’s murder. DNA science had moved far beyond anything available. In 1984, new software could now do something that would have sounded impossible to the detectives who first worked her case. It could take a DNA sample containing genetic material from more than one person, some of it in a tiny amount from an unknown contributor, buried under much larger amounts from known people, and mathematically separated out. That

was exactly the type of sample investigators had preserved from one of the cords used to bind Judy’s wrists. It carried Judy’s own DNA. It carried DNA from her boyfriend, the man who had absorbed decades of suspicion, and it carried a much smaller trace of DNA from someone else entirely, someone whose presence made no obvious sense at all.

 A forensic scientist used the new software to subtract out what was already known, isolating that third unidentified profile piece by piece. In November of 2023, that profile was finally run through the National DNA database, the same database that had quietly held one man’s genetic information since 1985, waiting unnoticed for almost 40 years.

It came back with a match. The name attached to that profile was Mitchell Gaff, the same man who had attacked Jacqueline O’Brien in her garage back in 1979. The same man convicted of assaulting two teenage sisters in 1984. For the first time in four decades, his name was connected on paper to Judy Weaver’s murder.

It wasn’t proof yet, not enough to bring before a jury. A DNA match from an old, degraded, mixed sample gave investigators a name and a direction, but not a case they could take to court. They needed a second sample, one collected fresh, one that would hold up without question. And Gaff had no idea any of this was happening or that his name had just resurfaced after almost 40 years of silence.

Detectives began quietly watching him. He rarely left his home except for occasional trips to a nearby grocery store. The usual approach, waiting for a suspect to discard something in public, a cigarette butt, a used cup, was proving difficult with a man who left almost no trace of himself outside his own front door.

 That’s when one of the officers proposed an idea that the lead detective later admitted sounded at first a little far-fetched. They would pose as representatives of a gum company conducting a survey on people’s flavor preferences. It required nothing unusual from Gaff at all. Just something people do every single day without thinking twice.

Chew a piece of gum and throw it away. In January of 2024, three undercover detectives arrived at Gaff’s home dressed casually, holding flyers for their invented gum company. Gaff answered the door in pajama pants. He was friendly. He seemed genuinely interested in trying different flavors, and he invited the group inside.

He sampled stick after stick, engaged and unhurried, with no reason in the world to suspect anything unusual was happening. When it came time to try a new flavor, one of the detectives held out a small dish and asked him to spit out what he’d already been chewing so he could move on to the next sample. He did exactly that without hesitation, without a flicker of concern, into a small ceramic dish.

The detective watching him do it later admitted it took everything she had not to let her excitement show. That gum went straight to the crime lab. The DNA extracted from it matched the unidentified profile recovered from Judy Weaver’s liatures. It matched DNA on her clothing and on evidence recovered from her body decades earlier.

After 40 years, Judy Weaver’s killer finally had a name attached to evidence that could stand up in court. In May of 2024, Mitchell Gaff was arrested and charged with the murder of Judy Weaver. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment days later. For Judy’s family, this was the moment they had waited four decades for.

 a name, an arrest, the beginning of something that finally resembled justice, however delayed. But Susan V’s case was still sitting exactly where it had been for 44 years. Cold, unconnected. Nobody yet had any reason to believe the man responsible for Judy’s death had anything to do with Susan’s murder at all. Justice was finally moving forward for one family.

The other family had no idea that anything had changed. In January of 2025, the detective handling Judy’s case, a woman named Susan Logetti, received a phone call. It was Ken Vi, Susan’s husband, the same man who had found her body decades earlier. He wasn’t calling with a new lead. He was calling to let the department know that his brother, a man once questioned in connection with Susan’s murder, had recently died.

Loggoetti had never heard of Susan V’s case before that call. She asked Ken to describe what had happened to his wife. As he spoke, the details started to sound familiar. the binding, the nature of the assault, the complete absence of any clear sign of how the attacker had gotten in or out. The only thing she could think about while he talked was Judy Weaver.

Could two murders, four years and one city apart, really have been committed by the same person? There was only one way to find out for certain. Items from Susan V’s original crime scene were pulled out of storage and sent to the Washington State Patrol crime lab for testing. Among them was a piece of white electrical cord, cut from her body all those years before and preserved ever since, waiting for a level of technology that hadn’t existed when it was first collected.

The wait for results stretched across months. In April of 2025, the lab reported strong support for the idea that Gaff’s DNA was present on that cord. It wasn’t the final word yet, but it was enough to keep moving. Then in March of 2026, full confirmation came through. The DNA on the cord used to bind Susan Vzy matched Mitchell Gaff.

Court documents laid it out in plain terms. There was no innocent explanation for his DNA to be present. He had no known connection to Susan Vy. No reason to have ever been near her unless he was the person who took her life. He had now been formally connected to both murders. Two women killed four years apart, attacked in strikingly similar ways.

Both cases cold for decades. both finally traced back to the same person. The only thing left was for him to answer in a courtroom for what he had done to both of them. On the 16th of April, 2026, Mitchell Gaff stood in a Snowomish County courtroom and pleaded guilty to two counts of firstdegree murder. One for Susan Vi, one for Judy Weaver.

He didn’t simply enter a plea and sit back down. He gave a statement describing what happened on both nights. In his own words, he said he had been trying random doors around the neighborhood and found Susan’s unlocked. He described binding her, assaulting her, and strangling her. Of Judy, he said, before leaving, I wrapped cords around her neck and lit the corner of the bedspread in an attempt to cover up my crime and with the intention of killing her.

 He added, “Miss Weaver died because of my actions.” He told the court he hadn’t known either woman before he attacked them. Two lives taken by a stranger who chose them for reasons that made sense only to him and to no one else in that courtroom. He had admitted to everything in his own words with no ambiguity left. But an admission delivered decades after the fact raises a different question.

What does justice actually look like for two women who waited this long for the truth to come out and who would never get to witness this moment for themselves? The sentencing hearing took place on May 13th, 2026 in Snomish County Superior Court. The room was full. Family members from both sides of the case were present and so was someone else who had waited a very long time to be there in person.

Jacqueline O’Brien, the woman who had fought gaff off in her garage back in 1979, had followed his court proceedings remotely for years. She later said she had refused to let him see her cry and that this was part of why she stayed away in person for so long. But for his guilty plea, she finally showed up. >> I wish I had been able to kill him.

My name is Jacqueline O’Brien. I’m the first known known victim of Mitchell G. >> She told the court that her nightmare had happened 47 years earlier and that it still felt in her words like yesterday. Susan V’s daughter, Deborah Newton, spoke about more than four decades of not knowing who had taken her mother.

She told the court that late justice was better than no justice at all and that this moment could still offer some measure of it. Not just to her, but to her brother and to everyone who had loved Susan and carried her loss for so long. Judy Weaver’s family spoke as well. Her brother, Leon Gregory, told the court it had been a long 42 years, and that his parents and two of his siblings had died without ever learning who had killed Judy.

 Her niece told the judge her only wish was that Gaff receive the maximum sentence allowed, and that he never see daylight again. When it was Gaff’s turn to speak, he offered an apology and pointed to years of drug and alcohol use as a factor behind his history of violence. He told the court, “I am sorry, not because I was caught, but the consequences.

No one did anything to deserve me coming into their lives.” The judge rejected the defense’s request for the minimum possible sentence, pointing to Gaff’s history of violence and his repeated efforts across two separate crime scenes to cover up what he had done. The judge told the courtroom that the appropriate sentence at minimum should equal the number of years the two families had been made to wait for an answer.

Mitchell Gaff was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison. What finally closed these two cases wasn’t a witness coming forward. It wasn’t a confession offered out of guilt. It was a small degraded sample of DNA on a decades old piece of cord and the patients of scientists who kept working at it until it gave up an answer.

It was a man agreeing to spit gum into a dish, thinking nothing of it at all. Detective Loggoetti, reflecting on the case afterward, said Mitchell Gaff had created more victims than the two women he killed. that the harm reached families who never knew Susan Vzy or Judy Weaver personally, but who spent years, sometimes their entire lives, waiting for an answer that never seemed to come.

 For 46 years, two families lived with a silence they never chose and never deserved. It ended not because someone finally spoke up and not because someone came forward with a memory they’d been holding on to. It ended because the smallest, most overlooked piece of evidence in the case finally caught up with the technology that could read