He Thought He Got Away With It for 40 Years, Then Police Knocked
For more than forty years, Mitchell Gaff lived with a secret.
To the people around him, the worst parts of his criminal past appeared to be exactly that.
The past.
He had already been arrested.
Already been convicted.
Already spent years behind bars.
Eventually, he was released.
He grew older.
Decades passed.
People moved.
Investigators retired.
Technology changed.
Witnesses aged.
And two women who had been murdered in Everett, Washington remained at the center of cases police had never been able to close.
For forty years, their families lived without knowing exactly who was responsible.
Mitchell seemed to believe those crimes had disappeared into history with them.
Then, on May 1, 2024, police knocked on his door.
Mitchell was 66 years old.
The officers standing outside had come to arrest him for murder.
A murder committed roughly four decades earlier.
What Mitchell did not initially understand was how investigators had finally reached him.
They had not found a forgotten eyewitness.
Nobody had suddenly confessed.
A detective had not discovered an old photograph hidden in a box.
Instead, police had used something that barely existed as an investigative tool when the murders happened.
DNA.
And before they knocked on his door to arrest him, investigators had already tricked Mitchell into giving them exactly what they needed.
A fresh sample.
They did it with chewing gum.
By the time Mitchell understood what had happened, the case he apparently believed had been buried for decades was alive again.
And detectives had another question.
If Mitchell had been connected to two murders that remained unsolved for forty years, how many other women might there have been?
The answer required going backward.
Back before the DNA.
Back before the cold-case unit.
Back before Mitchell became a 66-year-old man sitting across from detectives.
Back to 1979.
Because the murders did not emerge from nowhere.
Years before Susan Vessie and Judith "Judy" Weaver were killed, Mitchell Gaff had already shown police exactly how dangerous he could be.
In 1979, fear was beginning to spread around Everett, Washington.
Women had been attacked.
One of those victims was 29-year-old Jackie O'Brien.
According to the case account, Mitchell attacked her, but a police officer arrived during the incident and intervened.
The officer physically fought Mitchell off.
That intervention may have prevented the attack from becoming even worse.
Mitchell was arrested.
He was convicted of first-degree burglary and second-degree assault.
It was already serious violent conduct.
There was already a woman who had survived an attack.
There was already a court record.
There was already an opportunity for the justice system to remove Mitchell from the community for a significant period.
Instead, according to the source, he received only thirty days in jail followed by five years of probation.
Thirty days.
That sentence would later look almost incomprehensible when investigators reconstructed what happened next.
Mitchell did not stop.
The short time behind bars did not end the behavior.
And the five years of supervision that followed did not prevent him from committing more serious crimes.
In the summer of 1980, Everett police were called to another horrifying scene.
On July 12, 21-year-old Susan Vessie was found dead inside her home on Casino Road.
She was young.
Her death was violent.
And investigators did not know who had killed her.
No arrest came.
No trial followed.
The case went cold.
At that time, investigators did not have the forensic tools available today.
DNA profiling was not yet the routine investigative weapon it would later become.
Evidence could be collected and preserved, but detectives in 1980 had no realistic way of predicting what laboratories might be capable of doing with that evidence forty years later.
A biological trace too small or too limited to identify a suspect at the time might one day become the most important clue in the case.
But investigators had no guarantee that day would ever come.
For Susan's family, there was only absence.
Someone had killed her.
Somewhere, that person continued living.
Years passed.
Then another woman was murdered.
On June 2, 1984, firefighters responded to a fire at a residence in Everett.
Inside was 42-year-old cafe owner Judith Weaver, known as Judy.
She was dead.
Once again, investigators were staring at a violent death without a clear killer.
Once again, a family wanted answers police could not provide.
Judy was not simply a name inside a police file.
She had children.
She had a brother named Leon Gregory.
She had a business.
People knew her.
People around her had theories.
And because police could not identify the killer, suspicion began attaching itself to people who had been part of her life.
One of those people was her business partner, Bill.
Judy worked around a cafe referred to in the transcript as the Bell or Bell Nest Cafe.
After her death, Leon and another brother became deeply suspicious of Bill.
They confronted him.
Why had he not been around?
What did he know?
Was there something happening around the business that could explain Judy's death?
Bill insisted he had been working.
There were witnesses who appeared to support him.
But the family remained uncertain.
There had also been another break-in associated with the business shortly before Judy's death.
A court hearing connected to that case was approaching.
That created another theory.
Maybe Judy had been targeted because she was a witness.
Maybe her murder had something to do with people around the business.
Maybe drugs or other criminal activity in the neighborhood had played a role.
When police cannot provide an answer, families often create their own possibilities.
They have to.
The human mind does not tolerate unexplained violence easily.
If someone you love is murdered, every unusual conversation becomes important.
Every suspicious person becomes a possibility.
Every unresolved argument becomes a potential motive.
Leon spent decades thinking about those possibilities.
He talked to people.
At reunions, he asked whether anyone had heard anything.
He kept the case alive in his own mind even when the official investigation had gone cold.
For approximately half of his life, according to the investigators speaking with him decades later, Leon was looking for his sister's killer.
And for much of that time, he believed the answer might be connected to Bill.
He was wrong.
The killer, according to the later investigation, was a stranger.
And that stranger was someone police had already arrested multiple times for violence against women.
Mitchell Gaff.
What makes the timeline even more disturbing is what happened only months after Judy's death.
In August 1984, Mitchell entered another home.
Inside were two teenage sisters.
Their mother was elsewhere in the residence.
Mitchell tied the girls up and assaulted them.
According to the interrogation material, he had apparently gone into the house without knowing the family personally.
He later told detectives that he had simply been walking through a residential area.
One house somehow stood out to him.
There was a television on.
The house attracted his attention.
He claimed he did not know the girls.
He had not selected them because of a personal dispute.
They were strangers.
Opportunity was enough.
That statement would become critically important decades later.
Because detectives trying to understand the cold-case murders wanted to know whether Mitchell chose victims based on a specific pattern.
Did he stalk them?
Did he know them?
Did he choose certain neighborhoods?
Were there particular houses he preferred?
Or was he simply moving through communities searching for vulnerability?
Mitchell's description suggested something more frightening.
Sometimes, he claimed, there was no elaborate plan.
He drove.
He walked.
He saw a house.
He went inside.
People became targets because they happened to be available.
During the 1984 attack on the sisters, something interrupted Mitchell's plan.
According to investigators speaking to Judy's brother decades later, Mitchell had admitted that he intended to kill the girls.
Part of his plan apparently involved making them believe more than one offender was inside the house.
But the sisters fought for survival.
One sister's actions drew Mitchell's attention away from the other.
Their resistance disrupted what he was trying to do.