undercover gum – Detective Susan Logothetti used an undercover “Zolt Energy Gum” pitch to collect DNA from Mitch Gaff, linking him to the 1984 murder of Judy Weaver and later to the 1980 killing of Susan Vesey. Gaff pleaded guilty in April, was sentenced in May to 50 years to
When Detective Susan Logothetti walked to Mitchell Gaff’s front door in Olympia, Washington, the moment felt almost impossible—drizzly weather, a risky plan, and the heavy knowledge that the man on the other side was capable of brutality beyond anything she’d seen.
She knocked anyway.
Gaff opened the door, wearing pajama pants and with a cat nearby. Logothetti had come with two other detectives. all dressed in lime-green T-shirts bearing a “Zolt Energy Gum” logo. ready to sell what sounded like a harmless neighborhood pitch: they said they were looking for community members to sample their product ahead of a launch planned for Safeway and to help choose flavors.
But the gum wasn’t the point. The point was the DNA.
Gaff had been convicted of a violent attack on an Everett woman in 1979 and of the brutal rape of two sisters in 1984—crimes that. decades later. would echo in cold-case evidence. Logothetti had spent less than a year handling cold cases with the Everett Police Department when a DNA match changed everything.
In a recent interview, Logothetti described the men she’d chased as a sex-crimes detective as not all the same. “He is a diagnosed psychopath,” she said. “Mitchell Gaff is a whole different animal.”
Logothetti’s path to the case began long before the gum ruse. An Illinois native. she worked with children who were victims of abuse at a foster care agency. then with felons as a probation officer—roles that shaped the way she approached both victims and offenders. She joined the Everett Police Department in 2012 and became a sex crimes detective in 2019.
She grew interested in the department’s only cold case detective. began asking questions. and eventually learned no one wanted the work. “I asked who was going to take over the cold cases when he retired and he said. ‘Nobody. because nobody wants to do them. ‘” she recalled. “So I asked if I could do them.”.
By the time she was working cold cases for the Everett unit—after the previous detective submitted a ligature used in the murder of Judy Weaver—she had the chance to become the detective she’d wanted to be.
Weaver’s case
Judy Weaver was murdered in her Everett apartment on June 1, 1984. She was a mother of two who was “brutally raped and killed,” according to court records, and firefighters responded to a fire at her apartment, finding her dead inside.
Her clothes had been cut off. She had been hogtied with an extension cord and a drawstring. Court records say she was raped, beaten, and strangled. A butcher knife lay near her body, and the killer had started a fire.
At the time, police suspected Weaver’s fiancé but had no proof. Despite similarities later tied to other attacks, detectives didn’t connect the dots, and the case went cold.
When Logothetti opened the report in late 2023, she saw a name she hadn’t heard before: Mitchell Gaff.
“I immediately looked him up. The first thing I saw was that Mitchell Gaff is a registered sex offender and deemed a sexually violent predator,” she said. “Then I was able to get copies of Mitchell Gaff’s prior crimes, and immediately I knew. He was the one.”
The pattern in Gaff’s past
Logothetti’s case file depicted a man who had already committed some of the most violent rapes she had come across in seven years as a detective with the Everett Police Department.
In 1979, court records say, Gaff attacked Jackie O’Brien in broad daylight as she wrapped up yard work the day before Thanksgiving. O’Brien, who had interviewed rape victims as an officer with the Washington State Patrol, recognized the danger and fought.
After Gaff beat her head repeatedly with a gun and slammed it into a cement floor, he had her on her knees facing away. She then saw a sex toy in his duffel bag and pounced.
O’Brien told investigators she threw her body against him, caught him off guard, and that he stumbled against a wall. She said she was trapped and that he told her, “You’re going to die now, you b—-.”
Court records state Gaff pulled out a hunting knife and slashed O’Brien across a hand she held up in self-defense. She said she shoved him and escaped into a garage and alley, screaming for help.
Gaff was arrested soon after but received a short sentence at trial. After a jury found him guilty of assault with a deadly weapon and burglary, the judge sentenced him to 30 days of jail with work release and five years of probation.
He was still on probation when he attacked the teenage sisters in 1984.
In that case, court records say Gaff hogtied two girls, ages 14 and 16, cut off their clothes with a knife, raped them repeatedly, beat them, choked them, and shocked one of them with an electrical cord while their mother slept in the basement of their Everett home.
Court records say the younger girl escaped and sought help as Gaff began choking her sister with the electrical cord. Both survived.
From prison to indefinite confinement
After his convictions, Gaff was sentenced to serve about a decade in prison and in an intensive sex offender treatment program. When his sentence was up, he did not get what many defendants do—release.
Prosecutors wanted Gaff confined indefinitely under a new Washington state law targeting violent rapists and child molesters who had finished prison terms but were deemed likely to reoffend.
After a court hearing, a jury found Gaff to be a violent sexual predator. He was kept under lock and key at the state’s Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island in Puget Sound. Archived news reports said the arrangement cost the state $550,000 a year.
In 2000, at age 42, Gaff again sought release. His therapists at the commitment center said he was ready after years of intensive therapy, and he told the Associated Press at the time that he had learned to handle his emotions and empathize with victims.
Gaff said, “I have an incredible amount of remorse and pain for the innocent people I’ve harmed,” adding, “There was no excuse, no rationalization for what I did to people.”
After another jury ruled in 2000 that he remained a violent sexual predator, he stayed on McNeil Island for another six years before eventually winning freedom.
He later described his attacks in court and interviews, blaming months of sexual abuse by a female babysitter when he was a boy, combined with alcohol and drug abuse as an adult.
In a 1995 interview with GQ, Gaff said, “I am not what I’ve done,” describing a turning point after sex offender treatment: “A giant cog turned inside me, and I was like, ‘Yeah! I got it!’ It wasn’t, ‘Oh, I hope I never rape again.’ It was, ‘I know what to do now so that I don’t rape anyone.’”
Police said there was no evidence that Gaff committed any crimes after his release.
Weeks of surveillance, then the undercover plan
The Judy Weaver case depended on more than a DNA match. Logothetti needed to confirm the link with enough Gaff DNA to move the investigation forward.
She and her team conducted weeks of surveillance hoping he would discard something with DNA—like a soda can or a wad of gum. When that didn’t happen, the undercover approach was born.
Logothetti knocked on Gaff’s door that drizzly day in Olympia without expecting him to play along. She said she was startled seeing him in his pajama pants with his cat.
At first, she said, Gaff seemed reluctant to accept the gum pitch. To close the distance, Logothetti used compliments and the promise of a Safeway gift card.
She remembered thinking: “I really was like, ‘I don’t know, most guys in prison won’t fall for something like this.’”
But Gaff’s psychology helped the plan. “He loves to talk about himself … He wants to be complimented,” Logothetti said. She said the other female detective complimented his artwork in the house, and that Gaff responded at length. “We were definitely complimenting his yard and house and art.”
Gaff agreed to the “survey.” He discarded multiple wads of chewing gum into carafes and handed them back.
Logothetti said that when Gaff switched flavors, he said, “Oh I got to spit out this gum,” and she remembered controlling her excitement. “We were all giddy.”
A second DNA confirmation arrived in 2024. Detectives said the DNA from his gum came back consistent with vaginal swabs and a neck ligature taken from Weaver’s body.
Gaff was arrested in May 2024 and was ordered held in jail until trial.
Then the case broadened again
For Logothetti, it wasn’t over. In January 2025, she received a call from an angry man demanding to know why detectives had made no progress in their investigation of his wife’s death in Everett in 1980.
Logothetti said the description rang a bell immediately. She recognized “startling similarities” between the case and Weaver’s killing.
On July 12, 1980, Susan Vesey’s husband returned home from work to find her brutally killed the day after her 21st birthday. Court records say their 3-month-old baby was on the bed in the same room as her mother’s body, and their 2-year-old daughter was in a crib in another room.
Vesey was hogtied, her clothes were mostly removed, and court records state she was raped and strangled.
Logothetti submitted multiple items from the Vesey crime scene to the Washington State Patrol’s forensic lab for updated analysis. In April 2025, DNA from a white cord used to bind Vesey matched Gaff, court records say. In March 2026, another piece of white cord from the crime scene matched Gaff, court records say.
Gaff was charged on March 13 with murder in Vesey’s death.
Guilty plea changes the timeline
Gaff, now 68, had been set for trial in September on murder charges in the deaths of Weaver and Vesey. Instead, he unexpectedly decided to plead guilty in April.
According to the account in open court, he described the two murders in detail as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors.
At the sentencing in May, family members who had waited more than four decades to find out who killed Weaver and Vesey were finally able to confront him in court.
Vesey’s son. Joshua Vesey. said in a statement read during the sentencing hearing: “I was in the same room when the defendant killed my mother … I was found swaddled on her bed. This is the beginning of my life. ” adding. “What the defendant took from me and my sister was not just a life − it was a mother’s unconditional love. the kind of love that shapes who you become before you can understand it.”.
Prosecutor Craig Matheson told the judge about “the predatory randomness” of Gaff’s crimes.
“He is in fact the bump in the night that should make people aware that there is mortal danger at hand,” Matheson said. “It could have been anyone that caught his attention.”
In court, Gaff addressed the judge with little emotion, saying he was “without excuse or defense” and apologizing to his victims and their loved ones.
“Nothing I can say or do can make up for what I’ve done,” he said.
Judge’s sentence: 50 years to life
The judge sentenced Gaff to 50 years to life in prison, effectively guaranteeing that he will die behind bars.
For Logothetti, it was described as one of the most gratifying days in her career. She sat front and center during the hearing and later said she watched Gaff get angry when Jackie O’Brien confronted him about his attack.
After sentencing, Logothetti said she handcuffed Gaff and walked him back to the jail with correction officers.
“It was kind of for my own closure,” she said. “But I also think a female really needed to be the one to cuff him.”
The human cost of a decades-old case closing didn’t arrive with a neat bow. It arrived with names. ages. and dates that had lived in court records for decades—Judy Weaver. killed on June 1. 1984; Susan Vesey. killed on July 12. 1980; and the victims whose lives were shattered by a man who had been convicted long before detectives could prove what DNA would ultimately confirm.
And in the end, the case that took 40 years to crack hinged on a drizzly knock at the door—lime-green T-shirts, “Zolt Energy Gum,” and a quiet decision to risk being wrong.
Mitch Gaff Susan Logothetti undercover DNA cold case murder Judy Weaver Susan Vesey Everett Police Department Special Commitment Center McNeil Island Washington State Patrol Chewing gum DNA Safeway gift card 50 years to life