May 28, 2026 • 47 mins
July 12, 1980, Everett, Washington: Married, mother of two, Susan Vesey, was found dead in her home the morning after her 21st birthday. Her children were home while she was tied up, beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled. Many possible suspects, including her husband and brother-in-law, were interviewed, but no arrest was made, and the case went cold. June 2, 1984, Everett, Washington: Passerby calls 911 from a pay phone to report a fire in a small apartment building. Firefighters rush in to put out the fire and find Judy Weaver, tied up with a phone cord, strangled, brutalized and dead. The investigation stalls and goes cold. In the Weaver evidence file - a piece of carpeting from the apartment and a cigarette butt from the potential suspect. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack dig into the files of Susan Vesey and Judy Weaver and explain how those murders were directly tied to a sexual assault in 1979 of a woman who was able to escape the monster and the sexual assault of two sisters in 1984, that landed the suspect in prison, his DNA in CODIS, and creative undercover investigators using the "chewing gum trick" to solve two cold case homicides.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quoddy bus with Joseph's got more. How many times you've
been walking down the street and you get to your destination,
or maybe even down a hallway and you feel something
on the bottom of your shoe and you lift your
(00:23):
shoe up and there there it Sits a hunk of
gump that came out of somebody's mouth and they just
deposed it on the side of the street where you're walking.
Or even worse, have you ever been to a theater
and you sat down in a seat and you realize
(00:46):
that when you get up to get more popcorn or
go to the restroom, it's a bit more difficult to
get up because somebody left bubblegum in the seat. Amazing.
I've never been one to do that, but obviously there
are people out there that do. Some do it because
they just don't have a garbage can nearby, or I
(01:09):
guess some of them do it because they think it'd
be funny. Today, we're going to talk about a couple
of cases that, interestingly enough, have become adherents over the years,
just like your foot does to discarded stick of gum.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs. Dave
(01:37):
you've got a favorite type.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Of gum, oh man, bubba ish is probably a hub abubba,
one of those, yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Hub abubba. Yeah, I had heard that in the longdown.
You know what My favorite was kid fruit stripe. Really,
I loved fruit stripe. The problem with fruit stripe though,
the flavors never lasted long enough, you know, you just
wanted to go on and on forever and everything. And
I became a big red fan. Oh, I love that,
you know. But yeah, I don't choose much gum anymore.
(02:07):
But yeah, I've always loved gum.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
But when I saw this story pop up, Joe, I'm
not kidding, I thought the gum trick, you know, And
I thought, yeah, investigators nowadays, you've got all great technology
and it You've mentioned this before, but the way technology
has grown, and I know that it seems very advanced now,
(02:29):
but I keep wondering, what's it going to be like
in ten years? What was it like ten years for us,
twenty years for you know, And I just can't imagine.
Eventually it's going to be where you're going to commit
a crime and cops are going to show up while
you're still there and just cuffy and take you away,
it's all done.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
You know, Minority Report if you ever saw that movie.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, but in this case, we had unsolved crimes, and
looking back at it now, I'm thinking there's going to
be a couple of people kicking themselves over not solving
these earlier, because it was it seems like almost a
one man crime wave in Everett, Washington from nineteen seventy
nine to nineteen eighty four eighty five. And in that pathway,
(03:10):
you had an assault in nineteen seventy nine on a
woman who became a police officer, and had she not
been able to get away, she'd been a murder victim.
You have a murder in nineteen eighty another one in
eighty four, and then you have the sexual assault of sisters,
(03:30):
and that's where our suspect got caught with those and
not the ones before at first. So as we look
at this case today, I'm thinking to myself, Joe, between
nineteen seventy nine and nineteen eighty four, you had a
five and a half year period of time where one
man reigned holy terror on the women of Everett, Washington.
(03:56):
That shocking to.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Me, Yeah, it is. And you know, you when you
have serial perpetrators mentimes. You'll see that there are these
lulls in activity, and it happens whether you're talking about
somebody that's engaged in essay sexual assault or you've got
somebody that's perpetrating serial homicides, and you know that's these
(04:20):
gaps that you see in these behaviors. You begin to think,
you know, what, where were they? What was going on?
And so these gaps many times run concurrent relative to
prison sentences that are going on, or maybe health problems
in an individual's life where it has kind of taken
(04:41):
them out of the field of play for lack of
a better term, and they're off the streets, they're not
out there perpetrating anything. And so I think that this
is this is one of those examples. And you know
the fact that these two sisters were rejected to this horror,
(05:02):
you know, kind of kind of gives you an idea
of I think the boldness of this individual, because you know,
a lot of these serial events that occur, the proximity,
the geographic proximity kind of spreads out. Probably the most
overtop example is probably Bundy. You could go back to
(05:23):
oddist tool whether he did everything along with Henry is
still suspect, but you know that kind of traveling about.
There's been a couple of other ones, you know, over
the years, but this is a very concentrated area. If
anybody's ever been to this particular region of our country,
(05:43):
the beautiful area ever Washington. But yeah, he did, in fact,
you know, terrorize this area, and it had to be
something that I would think the locals would be aware of,
and certainly the law enforcement community. And how much more
so that we've got a lady that in nineteen seventy
nine was a victim and she actually wands up becoming
(06:10):
a law enforcement officer.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's an amazing turn of events. And we'll get to
her in a few minutes. Okay, because you started off
with gum and I've got to ask you something, Joe.
Most of us, well, if you're watching this, okay, we're
crime people. So we watch crime shows, whether it's Dayline,
forty eight hours, Nancy Grace and all the shows she's done.
(06:33):
And we have over time seen how police have to
get a DNA sample from a suspect, and they can't
just walk up to them and say, hey, you know,
spit in my hands. There has to be a legitimate
way of getting We've seen them where they have an
idea they have something from the scene of the crime,
but they've got to get a confirmation DNA from their suspect.
And sometimes you'll see them where these suspects know this
(06:57):
and they're keeping up with all their trash, like they
don't even leave a cigarette bug behind, and you'll watch
the detectives following hims, like the dude will smoke cigarette
and put it out in his sad and it'll take
it with him not leaving picking up a napkin and
wiped his face with him putting in his pocket. Stuff
like that. In this case, we have a brilliant just
(07:17):
a brilliant move by a detective that allowed them to
get detectives, the investigators to get the DNA evidence they
needed from their suspect, and he gave it to them
with a smile on his face. He gave it to
them gladly. Joe. They tricked him in such a great
way that it just I had never heard of this before.
(07:37):
But when you send it to me saying the gum trick,
I knew what you were talking about. I'm like, oh,
they it worked. You know. It's like the hidden ball trick,
I really do, you know.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah, And for folks that aren't aware of this, this
this is one other kind of aside here. A recent
case that involves something kind of similar is your man.
You know, remember the scored you know when you think
about that, And so what's at the root of all
this from a biological standpoint is this uh saliva deposition.
(08:11):
And you don't think about you know, what is contained
within your saliva. It's not merely salivary amalays. You know
that actually you know, the digestion process actually starts in
our mouth, right, you know, we think about chewing, but
also the salivary amylase that's there begins to break the
food down and all these sorts of things. That process continues.
(08:33):
So within saliva, though it is a it is an
evidence rich source for DNA, and that's that's what it
comes down to. And and good on these detectives because
they recognize that early on that there their utility, the
(08:53):
utility of gum. And the thing about the gum is
that the gum is so and you know, going back
to what I was talking about earlier, just stepping in
and or sitting in it, or if you've ever had
a child that got gum in their hair? Oh my lord,
you know I've thought about that as well over the years.
You know, my daughter's had very long hair, and you know,
(09:13):
they'd always want this would happen, and you have to
cut it out right, It's not just like pulling it out.
Think about the tackiness of gum. Is that based upon
the way it is comprised. It's great for retention of
this biological evidence, right, and so you're going to have
that there. You think about the saliva. You know that
(09:36):
you are transferring onto that gum that is now coming
out of your mouth, and it can be deposited anywhere. Wow,
you know, and it goes to the beauty I think
the beauty of DNA science. We think about deposition of
DNA the saliva, but just just with touch DNA, these
(10:00):
these things that just and this is the beauty of
the trick. As you stay. We're so comfortable in our
own skin. We're so very comfortable. Nobody thinks about if
you're drinking something and you know, just a plastic cup
(10:20):
and are along the rim of that cup, You've got
saliva that is being deposited there, and you put that
cup aside, where you take it and you throw it
in the trash receptacle, where you take a napkin and
you wipe your face with it. You take it and
you throw it away, or just leave it on the table,
or whatever the case might be. Even just touch the enable.
(10:41):
You're placing your hands on the surface of something. It's
something that we're so comfortable with that we don't think
about it. And that's that's the big thing, you know,
when when it comes to perpetrators, you know, you you're looking,
I think as an investigator for an individual to guard down.
And in this case, that's actually what happened.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
It's amazing that We'll get back to the gum in
a minute, but in this case, what we're actually dealing
with are two unsolved homicides that came out of Everett, Washington.
And you know, we mentioned about the assault in nineteen
seventy nine. That assault, the woman was able to save herself.
She got away from the suspect, She got from the
(11:26):
man who was going to rape and kill her. Two
other women were not as lucky. In nineteen eighty four.
I'm going to start with eighty four because Judith Weaver
is an accomplished woman. By June first of nineteen eighty four.
She owns a small little cafe with her mom. They
(11:48):
work really hard. She's not a wallflower. It was pointed
out to me that she carried a gun and kept
a gun at the restaurant, at the cafe in the
basement where she counted the daily till, because a lot
of times she was going to be there by herself.
And if you came to surprise her when she's counting
her money, one of you was going to leave there
(12:09):
in a bag.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
She's gonna surprouse for you.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah, and it wasn't going to be her. So she
gets off work June first, goes home. She walks home,
she stops by a dairy queen gets her little ice cream,
and it's kind of interesting because that's the last time
she was seen alive. It's a marker. She goes to
her apartment about a little after midnight on June the second,
(12:35):
nineteen eighty four. Someone uses a payphone, which I guess
if you're under the age of forty, we might have
to do a class and explain what that is used
to have these phones that now are? You know you
didn't have a phone with you all the time. You
had to stop somewhere and call. And in nineteen eighty four,
somebody used to payphone outside the apartment that Weaver lived
(12:55):
in and called nine one one. There was a fire,
and the fire was really concentrated in one specific apartment.
It was a It was an apartment building that housed
five apartments, okay, and the fire was really pouring out
of one apartment in particular, it was the apartment of
forty two year old Judy Weaver. And when the fireman
(13:16):
got there, Joe, they you know, I don't know what
firemen think when they're going into a building other than
we got fireless put it out. But I would imagine
if it's at night, you're wondering, okay, have we accounted
for everybody in this apartment building? You know, there's five
different apartments. Is everybody who lives here accounted for? I
don't know. But when they got to Beauty's apartment, they
(13:40):
found her. She was dead and the criminal, the suspect,
led her apartment on fire to try to destroy evidence.
And you know, Joe, when I read that, my first
thought was justice. Scott Morgan has taught me one thing.
Fire doesn't get rid of evidence. It seals the evidence.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
It does, and it also creates more evidence too. And
that's why I you know, I teach my students, you know,
not to flee in the face of the chaos that
is a fire scene, because it is truly chaos when
you walk in and and everything, and I mean everything
in that environment looks the same to the untrained eye.
(14:26):
It looks like if you've ever had a charcoal barbecue,
for instance, if you just go look at the coals
that are now burned, you'll see them in very shades
of gray and black and those sorts of things. And it,
you know, for me, even as a trained forensics person,
it's still confusion to me. That's why I think some
(14:47):
of the greatest forensic scientists out there that are unheralded
are our friends that are arson investigators, because you talk
about true application in the field as an investigator and
then what they see at a scene and firefighters as well,
because they can pick up on things that the normal
person cannot. That's one instance. This is one instance when
(15:12):
I would refer to myself as a normal person because
there used to being in that environment and they become
quite accustomed to it. You know and they see things
that none of us, many of us cannot even begin
to imagine. But when you walk into a scene, their
central goal as firefighters is to fight the fire, right
(15:32):
to extinguish the fire, because you don't want it jumping
anywhere else. We're talking about in a part complex too,
so there are so many other things that play here.
You've got adjacent apartments that where people you know, you
run the risk of them, you know, losing their lives.
You want to see if anybody else is in the
(15:53):
apartment that where she is eventually found to try to
save them. But then on once you get the fire extinguished,
suddenly suddenly you're staring potentially at one of the most
horrific things as a firefighter that you could possibly ever
(16:13):
come across. And you're sitting there thinking what in the
world happened here? Because it is the stuff of nightmares.
Brother Day, you were talking about this case from nineteen
(16:36):
eighty four and you used a term off air and
it has to do with time, and I would I
beg you please say this again so that all of
our friends can hear this and understand what this poor
woman went for.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
It was shocking. Okay, this is something that I actually
brought up to Joe before we started today, because Joe
and I have talked about firefighters, and Joe has talked
about his deep love and affection and h just reverence
for firefighters, and I've begun to understand what they go
through over the last couple of years in a much
(17:14):
different way because when the firefighters knocked the fire down
and realized they had a crime scene, they found forty
two year old Judy Weaver hog tied, hog tied, and
you know what that is. It's hands and behind your back,
(17:35):
tied to your legs so that you are one immobile.
You're not you can't do anything. And Joe, that to
me opens up a lot of questions because I don't
know when the firefighters come in and they see something
like that, do they like turn the water off as
(17:56):
they stop?
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Now they have to make the scene. They have to
make the scene secure because obviously, when you find somebody
in this state, they're deceased. And remember life the living
always trump the dead. Okay, if you're in an environment
like that, and that's that's what firefighters and EMTs understand.
You have to make sure that those things that are salvageable,
(18:17):
remain salvagable. Those things that are meant to be rescued
can be rescued, all right, And then they are not
forensic investigators. Okay, I am. It's up to me to
go back and work the scene in order to learn
what I can from the human remains. Now that they
play a key part, they being the firefighters, because we
(18:40):
actually go and have a sit down with them, I
doubt next question, yeah, the other I.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Just can't imagine how the conversation goes. How do you
explain what you just saw? To explain from them? That's unexplainable,
but you have to figure it out. Man.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Well, yeah, and that's one of the reasons we document
everybody that's at the scene. You know how you've heard
people talk about and this is in more of a
static environment, but you talk about the list of you know, like,
is there a young officer at the scene that's at
the tape and they're taking down everybody's name that's walking
onto the scene. It's kind of like that, but even
more critical here is that we're firefighters and emt s manytimes.
(19:19):
They beat the cops to the scene. Okay, if you
can imagine that going into these and they don't they're
not armed, you know, they're not there. They're there to
try to protect life in the in the critical sense
like that. And so they might go in and they will,
in fact, h if they find someone that you know,
(19:41):
they can identify as a person, they don't know if
they're alive, all right, so they're going to check for vitals.
They may even move the body. Well, the movement of
that body. Okay, it's going to be critical to those
of us in forensics to try to understand what the
state of the body was relative to the scene in
(20:02):
its pristine, untouched condition. Okay, so we we do sit
down and we get statements from firefighters, EMTs, whoever the
first person is that lays eyes on the body, and
that's going to be very important, and they will they
will kind of fill in the blanks for us. They'll
give us an idea, Hey, this is what we saw.
(20:24):
You know, the flames were primarily the hotspot was in
this area you can see right here on the wall
demonstrated this is where the most damage was. We were
trying to use the term knocking down, you knock down
that fire. The other thing too, is that fire can
get up into a ceiling. I've had this happen to
me before, where ceiling collapsed on my head and one
(20:45):
of the supports up there was still on fire. You
couldn't see it, oh man. So if you've ever like
I'll give you an instance. I used to love to
watch that show Rescue Me. And one of the reasons
I liked that show is you kind of got to
follow the firefighters into to this environment. It wound up
becoming more of a soap opera than it did a
firefighter show. I would have preferred the firefighters show them. Yeah,
(21:10):
and I love Dennis, but yeah. So you'll see firefighters
carry what are called pipe poles, and it's it's a
long pole that has a hook on the end, and
one of the things they're doing is they're grabbing the
ceiling with that, pulling it down to expose anything that's
still on fire up there. Because you can't say so,
they have to knock that down. That also brings debris
upon a layer of debris upon this evidence. So when
(21:32):
they would have seen her body, you would want to
know what their first impressions were. Even in that kind
of really uh just chaotic environment, they're going to be
able to there're so there's such pros that they'll be
able to say, yeah, we did note her on the
floor at that time, we got the fire suppress to
that point, and then we checked her for signs of life.
(21:55):
So but you don't what the question I would have is,
in the pristine condition, what was she like when you
first got there? Because if you moved her, then that
throws the narrative. All off. I want to know what
this perpetrator did with her? Now did with her? Is
key here? Because you hear hog time in two ways.
(22:20):
All right, So for years law enforcement and people in
mental health too. All right, Just so people understand this,
People have been hog tied in mental health institutions before,
and the reason they hogti them it's kind of like
a straight jacket. They used to hogtie them in order
to get control. Mental health stopped doing that. Police were
(22:42):
still doing it. They recommend strongly that you no longer
do it. And it's because you get somebody into a
position where they get into a heightened state of agitation anxiety,
and you can have people that will actually have a
heart attack. They can also compromise their ability to breed.
That's that's category one category two or sadist, Oh god, okay,
(23:07):
And that means that there's some kind of sadistic thing
at work here, all right, and it's it's some kind
of pseudo sexual thing that's going on. So if you
see somebody that is hogtied, and as an investigator, one
of the things you're thinking, I'm dealing with somebody here
that is really twisted that they would do this to
(23:29):
a fellow human being. And I submit to you that
you can even have sadists, sexual sadists that never actually
commit a full on sexual assault, and they will restrain
somebody like this, and and and they they derive pleasure
from it, seeming to discomfort. If anybody right now, that's
that's that's seeing us right now. And you think about
(23:50):
hog time, think about how uncomfortable and how defenseless you
are in that position, because it compromises your ability to breathe.
It's hard to roll over, and even if you did
roll over, we can go because you can't. You can't
deploy your legs, you can't deploy your arms. You're restrained
in multiple ways, your wrist or tied or anchor to
(24:10):
your to your ankles. So this paints it's kind of
horror show now that she was involved in those last
moments of her life.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
And Joe just focusing on this. The according to the
police reports and everything that came out of this, she
was hog tied, beaten and raped sexually assault before she
was strangled. It wasn't I mean, it wasn't like he
(24:39):
hog tied her to prevent her from escaping. He hog
tied her as part of the assault. The ritual.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Yeah, okay, and then and I don't doubt that. Listen,
this perpetrator I again not a behavior. Yes, I just
know what I see, it seems and having worked enough
Cereal related to things, there are certain serialized behaviors that
come along with this. This is probably not new territory
(25:07):
for this person. It's either they have acted on it
before or they certainly fantasized about it. And so that
you know, for me, how many other cases might there
be out there that were never solved that this individual
could have been involved in where you actually did have
something like hot hog time going on. Joe.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Now, this case from with Judith, you know it didn't
get solved. Happened in nineteen eighty four June again, remember
June second, nineteen eighty four, the nine one one call
comes in invests in Everett, Washington, and police are working
this case there every day trying to solve this murder.
(25:45):
And nothing, yeah, nothing whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
It just except except maybe a cigarette.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Bike there you go.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Okay, maybe a bit of carpet wish they did.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Out of this apartment. Out of this apartment. How did
they come up with a cigarette? But to be tarp
That is.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
A beautiful question, David, I got to tell you. It
goes to the skill that was involved in nineteen eighty
four of them recovering this. And it also draws into
question how much how affected was her body by the flame?
All right? As you know, I actually had a case
involving two escaped prisoners that beat a photographer to death
(26:25):
and buried him in a grave in the swamp lands
in New Orleans. And these guys had escaped from State
penn in Florida. They always wound up in the French
world for some reason, either the French Quarter or Vege,
and so they fled to New Orleans. They picked a
sky up and sexually assaulted him, beat him to death
with a camera tripod, dug a shallow grave and while
(26:48):
these idiots were digging the shallow grave. He takes the
Marlborough out of his mouth that he had finished smoking
and thumps it down in the grave and then wow,
the body rolls over on it and they bearing. Okay,
think about a cigarette butt. Think about a cigarette butt.
(27:09):
I'm thinking about gum right now, but think about cigarette butt.
Just think about the action of taking a filtered cigarette
and inhaling, okay, And what points of contact are there
that are going to have biological value here, So the
outer the outer sheath of the of the butt itself,
(27:31):
and then that filter, which is very complex if you
look at how these filters are made. So just your
tongue touching the underside of that filter, you're actually you're
you are depositing your saliva in here, and now it's
protected even even in the face of heat. And depend
(27:52):
upon how quickly they got to the flame and knocked
it down, that thing's preserved. But what it came down
to was the evidence technician or there arson investigators out
there looked down and said, wait, because the question is
going to be does our victim smoke? Well, she doesn't smoke.
Who's been in this apartment? That's stumping their cigarette butts
(28:15):
out and leaving them there. And you know, the devil
is always in the details. Brother, You know, you can
reach down and that thing that you might think that
it's so insignificant might hold the key to everything. You know, Dave,
(28:43):
we've told this horrible story about Judy Weaver from nineteen
eighty four. But there's connectivity, isn't there. Isn't it amazing
how sometimes things that happen can tie back to those
things in the past that give you to kind of
open up a broader picture here and boy, in this case,
(29:04):
do we have a tale to tell.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
It's weird because looking back on this case, you know,
we focused on Judith Weaver because her case happened in
nineteen eighty four and it went unsolved. We told you
about the sisters being raped in nineteen eighty four, briefly
mentioned that that's going to come back to that in
a minute because it has something to do with this.
(29:27):
But again, Judith Weaver's case remained unsolved, Joe. As this
case stayed cold, there was another case that had kind
of been forgotten, you know, like any other business. Detectives
come and go, investigators come to police, come and go,
and over the years a case gets called, it doesn't
mean that the investigation is dead or that it's not
(29:49):
being looked at. It's just got new eyes on it.
And sometimes something that Joe or Dave might remember from
nineteen eighty four. While I didn't get there, I wasn't
there in nineteen eighty, I don't know what happened then.
Right in nineteen eighty, Susan VC had just celebrated her
twenty first birthday. She's a young, married mother of two.
(30:10):
She's got two little kids under the age of two, Joe,
they're babies, okay. And again, she just turned twenty one
the day before. And the shocking tail to the tale
is that in that apartment where Susan VC her husband
is at work, somebody came into their world. He was
(30:34):
just checking doorknobs, Joe walking around the neighborhood checking doorknobs.
Her door happened to be unlocked, and this monster in
nineteen eighty came into her house. He tied her, up,
beat her, raped her, strangled her with her two kids
(30:58):
in the house, two little babies in the house. And
again purely happens Thence Joe, the guy was just looking
to do some evil.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
When you think about that case and you think about
the nineteen eighty four homicide, you're looking for points of connection.
You know, this matrix that's created essentially where you're trying
to see are the commonalities. And again not disparaging the
investigators from back then. You know, things change over a
(31:30):
period of time and you have new faces that you know,
kind of burst on the scene and these sorts of things.
But what you're looking for these points where you can
kind of trace back. And it's not just about conducting
a profile for the sake of having a profile, all right,
because some people view it as like a parlor trick almost.
It's not about that. It's about trying to connect a
(31:54):
timeline to something because at the end of the day,
you know, profilers do something different than forensics, like cologists do.
I've never talked about this on air, but with forensic psychologists,
they go and they use a therapeutic model to evaluate
people that are currently incarcerated, okay, just to kind of
understand how their minds work. Profilers are dealing with an
(32:16):
unknown there's nobody to interview. So that's why, like with
crime scenes and the forensics that are collected, that's why
it all plays into it, you know, every little nuance,
the position of a body, the food stuffs that are
left behind, what type of knots are used. You know,
because now we've got another case that had occurred earlier
(32:40):
that again comes back to I think, what is sexual sadism.
You've got restraint being used here, and so those tie
backs would go to what type of person would do this?
And are there any other associated cases? But with this
poor mother, mother of two young kids, man, that answer
(33:07):
kind of comes up, and it's going to play a
part in this case with the two sisters that were assaulted,
and then a certain individual wound up doing time for it.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
And that's where we're headed because we had the murder
in nineteen eighty and we had the murder in eighty four.
Also mentioned earlier about the assault, the attempted murder in
nineteen seventy nine where the woman got free in her garage. Okay, well,
in nineteen eighty four, right, just not long after Judith
VC's murder, these two girls and again we're in Everett, Washington, Joe,
(33:44):
these sisters get raped and in this particular case, they
were not murdered. They were sexually assaulted and they got
they actually got a suspect, and this suspect ended up
getting convicted. Okay, now they hadn't tied everything together yet.
(34:09):
Mitchell Gaff, Mitchell Gaff was tried and convicted of the
rape of the sisters in nineteen eighty four. He was
sentenced to twenty years in prison or so even more
than that, and he served ten years, Joe. And at
that point, after ten years, he goes in prison ninety
(34:30):
eighty five is nineteen ninety five, he thinks he's getting
out because he's you know at that point where parole happens,
right well, because of how he was convicted and his sentence,
they determined that he wasn't getting out on parole. He's
going to our psychological hospital now he needs some help.
And so instead of getting out to be back on
(34:51):
the road again, n Gaff was sent to the state
hospital and they kept him there for eleven years. For
twenty one years, Mitchell Gaff was in the custody of
the state of Washington for twenty one years.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Joe.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
There was no resolution in the Judith Weaver case. There
was no resolution in this is the BC case. But
you mentioned those investigators did collect evidence and because of
Mitchell gaff being convicted of a sexual assault, his DNA
was eventually entered into COTIS. Now you've mentioned this before,
(35:34):
that having DNA having fingerprints, even it doesn't matter if
the person isn't in a national system. If they're not
in the database, you can have all the DNA in
the world. But if the suspect is not in the
database you just got, you're waiting, you know, you're just waiting.
Same thing.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Yeah, I'll give you even a better example of that
that a lot of people can understand because many people
have never been fingerprinted. Most people people, I'd say a
number of people have never had their DNA compared to anything.
Think about it in this sense, all right, think about
going to the dentist. Okay, how many of us have
sat in a dental chair open wider, open wider, Right,
(36:13):
what do they do when we go there. Well, they're
going to take pamiphlex X rays. You know, they're going
to do the whole thing. They're going to do detailed charting. Okay, Well,
all of us can identify with that. Many of us can, Okay,
that have a dentist, a dentist of record. All right, Well,
let's say we come across a body out in the woods, okay,
(36:36):
and we take that body and they still have all
of their teeth intact. I can have a forensic idontologist
come in and chart, do a postpartum chart of the teeth,
and it's beautiful. They've done a fantastic job. They've recognized
maybe the individuals have restorations done. They might have cavitated
areas in their teeth, they might have some kind of malclusion.
(36:58):
Teeth are can be rotated in a certain way. You
might have non erupted molars that are there. All those things,
and you've done such a good job. But guess what,
it's worthless because that person may have never been to
a dentist like many of us have. All Right, So
in that sense, if you have this postwort of chart
(37:20):
that you've generated, you ain't got nothing to compare it to.
But in our case with Gaff, he's he's now, he's
now in the books at this point in time. So
the police are looking at these two horrific crimes that
involve homicide, not just sexual assault. That's bad enough, but
(37:42):
you're talking about two restraint related sadistic homicides, and these
things are open and it's in the same community. And
for all we know, this person is still walking up
and down the street, right Yeah, And well when he
goes into the system, they think that they might they
might actually.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Got a detective. Her name is Susan Logothetti. Susan Logothetti,
detective on the case, starts looking at Judith Weaver's case
because I remember they had the cigarette butt and the carpet,
they had biological evidence on it, had evidence on it
that they could utilize now, and so they resubmit DNA
on the Weaver case. Detective Susan Logothetti gets a hit
(38:28):
on Weaver, and it comes back to the man who
was convicted and sentenced, you know, was in prison for
twenty one years for the sexual assault of the sisters.
We're back to mister Gaff again. So this is the
part that gets a little fun. I guess if there
can be any fun to this.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
It's a genius.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
It is Mitchell Gaff. He's sixty eight years old, he
served time in prison. He's changed his name over the
course of the year's Joe to hide his background. But
you can't hide from your DNA. You can change your name.
You can do a lot of things. But yeah, you
can do anything not changing your DNA. So a detective
log at that he changed put that, got it submitted,
and got a hit. Okay, there's a man right there,
(39:12):
and we need to get a current sample, because it's
not enough to say we got this old sample from
nineteen eighty four and we have a hit in the system.
You now have to get a current sample from your suspect.
And that's where well we started the show with the gum.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Yeah. I got to tell you, I don't know. Is
the term ruse a good.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Term here, like the gum trick, the gum ruse.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
I love this. I love this. I mean, out of
everything I think that we've covered, this might be one
of the more ingenious things. The police portray themselves going
door to door door.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
You're leaving the beaver man.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
This does not sound like the Fuller brushman. Yeah, the
electro Luxe vacuum cleaners salesman. This is this is beautiful.
So what they did was that the police obviously he's
on the radar, but they had to get a viable sample.
So they're posing as gum company representative salesman, and he
(40:17):
Mitchell gaff Out of everybody in the world has been
selected to do a test samply, and what they decided
to do was present him with some pairings, if you will.
It sounds like official wine stuff, right, It's not a pairing.
I'm just being facetious there. They give him gum, all right,
(40:42):
and what do you think, sir about the taste of this.
That was the premise that they we're gonna use you.
You're gonna be You're gonna be first, right, and we
want to know what your thoughts of were thinking about
putting this new brand of gum out? Can you do
it and retrospectively? Day, I gotta tell you there's there's
a fascinating little comment that one of the detectives that
(41:05):
was involved in this this whole process stated, and I
was just I was chuckling to myself. He said, when
Gaff deposited, because they had a special receptacle that you know,
you had to place the gun back into, when he
deposited that gum, they saw a long line of saliva
(41:25):
coming out of his mouth. And what is it that
pilots say that are bomber pilots. They say, we're over
the target area, buddy, PLoP right into the container. And
they've got this guy's DNA exactly. We got this guy's
DNA stone cold, and can you imagine I bet that
guy turned around and thanked him profusely. Thank you sir
(41:48):
for participating.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
Directors man, yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
You're going to be the face of the It will
be into my boy. Were they ever? Because they went out,
they went out and they compare what they had taken
previously because he was a convicted offender and compared that
with that sample from that gum and beingo they had him,
(42:13):
they were able able to close it out. And how'd
this wind up? Dated?
Speaker 2 (42:16):
They got they matched him with Judith Weaver. Okay, So
now this is where it gets really weird, because you
still had Susan v C from four years earlier. Okay,
it was still an unsolved murder. Now at the time
of for murder, remember I told you she was twenty one,
had just played one, she's married to the little kids,
and at the time of her murder, her husband was
(42:38):
a big suspect, as was his brother Jerry. Now after
they get gaff and they've got him locked up, okay,
they they've arrested him in the Judas Weaver case Jerry vs. Died. Okay,
his brother Ken VC, the husband of Susan Ken calls
the detectives say hey, I'm my brother Jerry passed away.
(43:01):
I was wondering if we could run he had. I'm
thinking he might have suspected that maybe his brother was
involved somehow.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
You know.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
It was that call though, that made a detective logo
that she didn't know anything about the VC case. Remember
I said earlier, you get coming in and out. Well,
she knew about Weaver in eighty four, she didn't know
anything about Susan VC in nineteen eighty. So bing, bang boom,
the husband calling to say, I want this case, Saul please,
and the detective goes, yeah, well let's run this bang
(43:34):
It was Gaff. So they've got this Mitchell Gaff. Now
they are he already served twenty one years on the
rape of the sisters in the sexual assault of the
sisters in eighty four. They've got him for Judith Weaver's
eighty four murder, and now they've got him for Susan b.
C's murder in nineteen eighty and Joe. As they were
getting ready to get all this in court, you know
(43:54):
what happened. They found out that nineteen seventy nine sexual
assault that take place in the garage of woman who
became a police officer later. Mitchell Gaff was the guy
that did it. They found out all this and you know,
you know, he chose her as a potential victim, the
very first victim of Mitchell Gaff in nineteen seventy nine.
(44:16):
He saw her mowing her yard. She's twenty nine years old,
mowing her own yard. Mitchell Gaff saw her as a
potential victim. She got away from saved her life. Susan Vace.
He got into her house because her door was unlocked,
and Judith Weaver taken him by surprise, and he tried
to burn his way out of that conviction ends up
(44:36):
he ends up in court. And one of the things
that did happen Joe, is that he ended up leading guilty.
You know, they had him dead to rights and he
gave a statement. I didn't care about here about what
the family members of the victim said. You know that
(44:57):
twenty nine year old from nineteen seventy nine who became
a now she's a retired police officer. She got to
take the stand and talk about getting away from him. Yeah,
the children of Susan v C who have now grown up,
they're younger, they're adults, grown up, talk about living life
without their mom. And Judus Weaver's family, you know, they
(45:18):
got to talk about how other family members died before
they knew it was responsible for her murder. Mom, dad, brothers,
sisters all gone. She did have her brother that showed
up in court and talked about it. But it all
came down to the ingenious the ingeniousness of a detective
getting that sample from a possible suspect without him ever
(45:40):
having a clue that she did it. It was amazing.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah, it is. And the numbers don't lie. The numbers
will always tell the truth you can rely upon. Now
if the testing is done correctly and it becomes reliable,
it's that benchmark, it's that steak in the sand that
we can set forth that we can rely upon and
the truth will eventually come out. A big tip of
(46:05):
the cap to those investigators and those forensic scientists up
in Effett that took the time to collect the evidence
generations ago, and they held on to that evidence that
they knew that all was not lost. All they had
to do was wait, in fact, for the science to
catch up with the evidence that they had collected, and
the truth prevailed. I think my big question now relative
(46:29):
to gaff how many others are there? Because yeah, he
did have a pause, but this ember, this flame, if
you will, began to burn in him a long long
time ago, and you think about how dark and evil
all of this evidence is everything he did to these victims.
Are there others that are out there? Are there those
(46:50):
that are unaccounted for that maybe you're missing from this
particular area. Is there some way they can get information
from him? I don't know, because it would be grand
if we can give other people answers to these questions
that have been gnawing away at families all over the
place forever and ever. The truth will in fact come
(47:13):
home to rest in the science. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
and this is Bodybags
Quoddy bus with Joseph's got more. How many times you've
been walking down the street and you get to your destination,
or maybe even down a hallway and you feel something
on the bottom of your shoe and you lift your
(00:23):
shoe up and there there it Sits a hunk of
gump that came out of somebody's mouth and they just
deposed it on the side of the street where you're walking.
Or even worse, have you ever been to a theater
and you sat down in a seat and you realize
(00:46):
that when you get up to get more popcorn or
go to the restroom, it's a bit more difficult to
get up because somebody left bubblegum in the seat. Amazing.
I've never been one to do that, but obviously there
are people out there that do. Some do it because
they just don't have a garbage can nearby, or I
(01:09):
guess some of them do it because they think it'd
be funny. Today, we're going to talk about a couple
of cases that, interestingly enough, have become adherents over the years,
just like your foot does to discarded stick of gum.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs. Dave
(01:37):
you've got a favorite type.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Of gum, oh man, bubba ish is probably a hub abubba,
one of those, yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Hub abubba. Yeah, I had heard that in the longdown.
You know what My favorite was kid fruit stripe. Really,
I loved fruit stripe. The problem with fruit stripe though,
the flavors never lasted long enough, you know, you just
wanted to go on and on forever and everything. And
I became a big red fan. Oh, I love that,
you know. But yeah, I don't choose much gum anymore.
(02:07):
But yeah, I've always loved gum.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
But when I saw this story pop up, Joe, I'm
not kidding, I thought the gum trick, you know, And
I thought, yeah, investigators nowadays, you've got all great technology
and it You've mentioned this before, but the way technology
has grown, and I know that it seems very advanced now,
(02:29):
but I keep wondering, what's it going to be like
in ten years? What was it like ten years for us,
twenty years for you know, And I just can't imagine.
Eventually it's going to be where you're going to commit
a crime and cops are going to show up while
you're still there and just cuffy and take you away,
it's all done.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
You know, Minority Report if you ever saw that movie.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, but in this case, we had unsolved crimes, and
looking back at it now, I'm thinking there's going to
be a couple of people kicking themselves over not solving
these earlier, because it was it seems like almost a
one man crime wave in Everett, Washington from nineteen seventy
nine to nineteen eighty four eighty five. And in that pathway,
(03:10):
you had an assault in nineteen seventy nine on a
woman who became a police officer, and had she not
been able to get away, she'd been a murder victim.
You have a murder in nineteen eighty another one in
eighty four, and then you have the sexual assault of sisters,
(03:30):
and that's where our suspect got caught with those and
not the ones before at first. So as we look
at this case today, I'm thinking to myself, Joe, between
nineteen seventy nine and nineteen eighty four, you had a
five and a half year period of time where one
man reigned holy terror on the women of Everett, Washington.
(03:56):
That shocking to.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Me, Yeah, it is. And you know, you when you
have serial perpetrators mentimes. You'll see that there are these
lulls in activity, and it happens whether you're talking about
somebody that's engaged in essay sexual assault or you've got
somebody that's perpetrating serial homicides, and you know that's these
(04:20):
gaps that you see in these behaviors. You begin to think,
you know, what, where were they? What was going on?
And so these gaps many times run concurrent relative to
prison sentences that are going on, or maybe health problems
in an individual's life where it has kind of taken
(04:41):
them out of the field of play for lack of
a better term, and they're off the streets, they're not
out there perpetrating anything. And so I think that this
is this is one of those examples. And you know
the fact that these two sisters were rejected to this horror,
(05:02):
you know, kind of kind of gives you an idea
of I think the boldness of this individual, because you know,
a lot of these serial events that occur, the proximity,
the geographic proximity kind of spreads out. Probably the most
overtop example is probably Bundy. You could go back to
(05:23):
oddist tool whether he did everything along with Henry is
still suspect, but you know that kind of traveling about.
There's been a couple of other ones, you know, over
the years, but this is a very concentrated area. If
anybody's ever been to this particular region of our country,
(05:43):
the beautiful area ever Washington. But yeah, he did, in fact,
you know, terrorize this area, and it had to be
something that I would think the locals would be aware of,
and certainly the law enforcement community. And how much more
so that we've got a lady that in nineteen seventy
nine was a victim and she actually wands up becoming
(06:10):
a law enforcement officer.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's an amazing turn of events. And we'll get to
her in a few minutes. Okay, because you started off
with gum and I've got to ask you something, Joe.
Most of us, well, if you're watching this, okay, we're
crime people. So we watch crime shows, whether it's Dayline,
forty eight hours, Nancy Grace and all the shows she's done.
(06:33):
And we have over time seen how police have to
get a DNA sample from a suspect, and they can't
just walk up to them and say, hey, you know,
spit in my hands. There has to be a legitimate
way of getting We've seen them where they have an
idea they have something from the scene of the crime,
but they've got to get a confirmation DNA from their suspect.
And sometimes you'll see them where these suspects know this
(06:57):
and they're keeping up with all their trash, like they
don't even leave a cigarette bug behind, and you'll watch
the detectives following hims, like the dude will smoke cigarette
and put it out in his sad and it'll take
it with him not leaving picking up a napkin and
wiped his face with him putting in his pocket. Stuff
like that. In this case, we have a brilliant just
(07:17):
a brilliant move by a detective that allowed them to
get detectives, the investigators to get the DNA evidence they
needed from their suspect, and he gave it to them
with a smile on his face. He gave it to
them gladly. Joe. They tricked him in such a great
way that it just I had never heard of this before.
(07:37):
But when you send it to me saying the gum trick,
I knew what you were talking about. I'm like, oh,
they it worked. You know. It's like the hidden ball trick,
I really do, you know.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah, And for folks that aren't aware of this, this
this is one other kind of aside here. A recent
case that involves something kind of similar is your man.
You know, remember the scored you know when you think
about that, And so what's at the root of all
this from a biological standpoint is this uh saliva deposition.
(08:11):
And you don't think about you know, what is contained
within your saliva. It's not merely salivary amalays. You know
that actually you know, the digestion process actually starts in
our mouth, right, you know, we think about chewing, but
also the salivary amylase that's there begins to break the
food down and all these sorts of things. That process continues.
(08:33):
So within saliva, though it is a it is an
evidence rich source for DNA, and that's that's what it
comes down to. And and good on these detectives because
they recognize that early on that there their utility, the
(08:53):
utility of gum. And the thing about the gum is
that the gum is so and you know, going back
to what I was talking about earlier, just stepping in
and or sitting in it, or if you've ever had
a child that got gum in their hair? Oh my lord,
you know I've thought about that as well over the years.
You know, my daughter's had very long hair, and you know,
(09:13):
they'd always want this would happen, and you have to
cut it out right, It's not just like pulling it out.
Think about the tackiness of gum. Is that based upon
the way it is comprised. It's great for retention of
this biological evidence, right, and so you're going to have
that there. You think about the saliva. You know that
(09:36):
you are transferring onto that gum that is now coming
out of your mouth, and it can be deposited anywhere. Wow,
you know, and it goes to the beauty I think
the beauty of DNA science. We think about deposition of
DNA the saliva, but just just with touch DNA, these
(10:00):
these things that just and this is the beauty of
the trick. As you stay. We're so comfortable in our
own skin. We're so very comfortable. Nobody thinks about if
you're drinking something and you know, just a plastic cup
(10:20):
and are along the rim of that cup, You've got
saliva that is being deposited there, and you put that
cup aside, where you take it and you throw it
in the trash receptacle, where you take a napkin and
you wipe your face with it. You take it and
you throw it away, or just leave it on the table,
or whatever the case might be. Even just touch the enable.
(10:41):
You're placing your hands on the surface of something. It's
something that we're so comfortable with that we don't think
about it. And that's that's the big thing, you know,
when when it comes to perpetrators, you know, you you're looking,
I think as an investigator for an individual to guard down.
And in this case, that's actually what happened.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
It's amazing that We'll get back to the gum in
a minute, but in this case, what we're actually dealing
with are two unsolved homicides that came out of Everett, Washington.
And you know, we mentioned about the assault in nineteen
seventy nine. That assault, the woman was able to save herself.
She got away from the suspect, She got from the
(11:26):
man who was going to rape and kill her. Two
other women were not as lucky. In nineteen eighty four.
I'm going to start with eighty four because Judith Weaver
is an accomplished woman. By June first of nineteen eighty four.
She owns a small little cafe with her mom. They
(11:48):
work really hard. She's not a wallflower. It was pointed
out to me that she carried a gun and kept
a gun at the restaurant, at the cafe in the
basement where she counted the daily till, because a lot
of times she was going to be there by herself.
And if you came to surprise her when she's counting
her money, one of you was going to leave there
(12:09):
in a bag.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
She's gonna surprouse for you.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah, and it wasn't going to be her. So she
gets off work June first, goes home. She walks home,
she stops by a dairy queen gets her little ice cream,
and it's kind of interesting because that's the last time
she was seen alive. It's a marker. She goes to
her apartment about a little after midnight on June the second,
(12:35):
nineteen eighty four. Someone uses a payphone, which I guess
if you're under the age of forty, we might have
to do a class and explain what that is used
to have these phones that now are? You know you
didn't have a phone with you all the time. You
had to stop somewhere and call. And in nineteen eighty four,
somebody used to payphone outside the apartment that Weaver lived
(12:55):
in and called nine one one. There was a fire,
and the fire was really concentrated in one specific apartment.
It was a It was an apartment building that housed
five apartments, okay, and the fire was really pouring out
of one apartment in particular, it was the apartment of
forty two year old Judy Weaver. And when the fireman
(13:16):
got there, Joe, they you know, I don't know what
firemen think when they're going into a building other than
we got fireless put it out. But I would imagine
if it's at night, you're wondering, okay, have we accounted
for everybody in this apartment building? You know, there's five
different apartments. Is everybody who lives here accounted for? I
don't know. But when they got to Beauty's apartment, they
(13:40):
found her. She was dead and the criminal, the suspect,
led her apartment on fire to try to destroy evidence.
And you know, Joe, when I read that, my first
thought was justice. Scott Morgan has taught me one thing.
Fire doesn't get rid of evidence. It seals the evidence.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
It does, and it also creates more evidence too. And
that's why I you know, I teach my students, you know,
not to flee in the face of the chaos that
is a fire scene, because it is truly chaos when
you walk in and and everything, and I mean everything
in that environment looks the same to the untrained eye.
(14:26):
It looks like if you've ever had a charcoal barbecue,
for instance, if you just go look at the coals
that are now burned, you'll see them in very shades
of gray and black and those sorts of things. And it,
you know, for me, even as a trained forensics person,
it's still confusion to me. That's why I think some
(14:47):
of the greatest forensic scientists out there that are unheralded
are our friends that are arson investigators, because you talk
about true application in the field as an investigator and
then what they see at a scene and firefighters as well,
because they can pick up on things that the normal
person cannot. That's one instance. This is one instance when
(15:12):
I would refer to myself as a normal person because
there used to being in that environment and they become
quite accustomed to it. You know and they see things
that none of us, many of us cannot even begin
to imagine. But when you walk into a scene, their
central goal as firefighters is to fight the fire, right
(15:32):
to extinguish the fire, because you don't want it jumping
anywhere else. We're talking about in a part complex too,
so there are so many other things that play here.
You've got adjacent apartments that where people you know, you
run the risk of them, you know, losing their lives.
You want to see if anybody else is in the
(15:53):
apartment that where she is eventually found to try to
save them. But then on once you get the fire extinguished,
suddenly suddenly you're staring potentially at one of the most
horrific things as a firefighter that you could possibly ever
(16:13):
come across. And you're sitting there thinking what in the
world happened here? Because it is the stuff of nightmares.
Brother Day, you were talking about this case from nineteen
(16:36):
eighty four and you used a term off air and
it has to do with time, and I would I
beg you please say this again so that all of
our friends can hear this and understand what this poor
woman went for.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
It was shocking. Okay, this is something that I actually
brought up to Joe before we started today, because Joe
and I have talked about firefighters, and Joe has talked
about his deep love and affection and h just reverence
for firefighters, and I've begun to understand what they go
through over the last couple of years in a much
(17:14):
different way because when the firefighters knocked the fire down
and realized they had a crime scene, they found forty
two year old Judy Weaver hog tied, hog tied, and
you know what that is. It's hands and behind your back,
(17:35):
tied to your legs so that you are one immobile.
You're not you can't do anything. And Joe, that to
me opens up a lot of questions because I don't
know when the firefighters come in and they see something
like that, do they like turn the water off as
(17:56):
they stop?
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Now they have to make the scene. They have to
make the scene secure because obviously, when you find somebody
in this state, they're deceased. And remember life the living
always trump the dead. Okay, if you're in an environment
like that, and that's that's what firefighters and EMTs understand.
You have to make sure that those things that are salvageable,
(18:17):
remain salvagable. Those things that are meant to be rescued
can be rescued, all right, And then they are not
forensic investigators. Okay, I am. It's up to me to
go back and work the scene in order to learn
what I can from the human remains. Now that they
play a key part, they being the firefighters, because we
(18:40):
actually go and have a sit down with them, I
doubt next question, yeah, the other I.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Just can't imagine how the conversation goes. How do you
explain what you just saw? To explain from them? That's unexplainable,
but you have to figure it out. Man.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Well, yeah, and that's one of the reasons we document
everybody that's at the scene. You know how you've heard
people talk about and this is in more of a
static environment, but you talk about the list of you know, like,
is there a young officer at the scene that's at
the tape and they're taking down everybody's name that's walking
onto the scene. It's kind of like that, but even
more critical here is that we're firefighters and emt s manytimes.
(19:19):
They beat the cops to the scene. Okay, if you
can imagine that going into these and they don't they're
not armed, you know, they're not there. They're there to
try to protect life in the in the critical sense
like that. And so they might go in and they will,
in fact, h if they find someone that you know,
(19:41):
they can identify as a person, they don't know if
they're alive, all right, so they're going to check for vitals.
They may even move the body. Well, the movement of
that body. Okay, it's going to be critical to those
of us in forensics to try to understand what the
state of the body was relative to the scene in
(20:02):
its pristine, untouched condition. Okay, so we we do sit
down and we get statements from firefighters, EMTs, whoever the
first person is that lays eyes on the body, and
that's going to be very important, and they will they
will kind of fill in the blanks for us. They'll
give us an idea, Hey, this is what we saw.
(20:24):
You know, the flames were primarily the hotspot was in
this area you can see right here on the wall
demonstrated this is where the most damage was. We were
trying to use the term knocking down, you knock down
that fire. The other thing too, is that fire can
get up into a ceiling. I've had this happen to
me before, where ceiling collapsed on my head and one
(20:45):
of the supports up there was still on fire. You
couldn't see it, oh man. So if you've ever like
I'll give you an instance. I used to love to
watch that show Rescue Me. And one of the reasons
I liked that show is you kind of got to
follow the firefighters into to this environment. It wound up
becoming more of a soap opera than it did a
firefighter show. I would have preferred the firefighters show them. Yeah,
(21:10):
and I love Dennis, but yeah. So you'll see firefighters
carry what are called pipe poles, and it's it's a
long pole that has a hook on the end, and
one of the things they're doing is they're grabbing the
ceiling with that, pulling it down to expose anything that's
still on fire up there. Because you can't say so,
they have to knock that down. That also brings debris
upon a layer of debris upon this evidence. So when
(21:32):
they would have seen her body, you would want to
know what their first impressions were. Even in that kind
of really uh just chaotic environment, they're going to be
able to there're so there's such pros that they'll be
able to say, yeah, we did note her on the
floor at that time, we got the fire suppress to
that point, and then we checked her for signs of life.
(21:55):
So but you don't what the question I would have is,
in the pristine condition, what was she like when you
first got there? Because if you moved her, then that
throws the narrative. All off. I want to know what
this perpetrator did with her? Now did with her? Is
key here? Because you hear hog time in two ways.
(22:20):
All right, So for years law enforcement and people in
mental health too. All right, Just so people understand this,
People have been hog tied in mental health institutions before,
and the reason they hogti them it's kind of like
a straight jacket. They used to hogtie them in order
to get control. Mental health stopped doing that. Police were
(22:42):
still doing it. They recommend strongly that you no longer
do it. And it's because you get somebody into a
position where they get into a heightened state of agitation anxiety,
and you can have people that will actually have a
heart attack. They can also compromise their ability to breed.
That's that's category one category two or sadist, Oh god, okay,
(23:07):
And that means that there's some kind of sadistic thing
at work here, all right, and it's it's some kind
of pseudo sexual thing that's going on. So if you
see somebody that is hogtied, and as an investigator, one
of the things you're thinking, I'm dealing with somebody here
that is really twisted that they would do this to
(23:29):
a fellow human being. And I submit to you that
you can even have sadists, sexual sadists that never actually
commit a full on sexual assault, and they will restrain
somebody like this, and and and they they derive pleasure
from it, seeming to discomfort. If anybody right now, that's
that's that's seeing us right now. And you think about
(23:50):
hog time, think about how uncomfortable and how defenseless you
are in that position, because it compromises your ability to breathe.
It's hard to roll over, and even if you did
roll over, we can go because you can't. You can't
deploy your legs, you can't deploy your arms. You're restrained
in multiple ways, your wrist or tied or anchor to
(24:10):
your to your ankles. So this paints it's kind of
horror show now that she was involved in those last
moments of her life.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
And Joe just focusing on this. The according to the
police reports and everything that came out of this, she
was hog tied, beaten and raped sexually assault before she
was strangled. It wasn't I mean, it wasn't like he
(24:39):
hog tied her to prevent her from escaping. He hog
tied her as part of the assault. The ritual.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Yeah, okay, and then and I don't doubt that. Listen,
this perpetrator I again not a behavior. Yes, I just
know what I see, it seems and having worked enough
Cereal related to things, there are certain serialized behaviors that
come along with this. This is probably not new territory
(25:07):
for this person. It's either they have acted on it
before or they certainly fantasized about it. And so that
you know, for me, how many other cases might there
be out there that were never solved that this individual
could have been involved in where you actually did have
something like hot hog time going on. Joe.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Now, this case from with Judith, you know it didn't
get solved. Happened in nineteen eighty four June again, remember
June second, nineteen eighty four, the nine one one call
comes in invests in Everett, Washington, and police are working
this case there every day trying to solve this murder.
(25:45):
And nothing, yeah, nothing whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
It just except except maybe a cigarette.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Bike there you go.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Okay, maybe a bit of carpet wish they did.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Out of this apartment. Out of this apartment. How did
they come up with a cigarette? But to be tarp
That is.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
A beautiful question, David, I got to tell you. It
goes to the skill that was involved in nineteen eighty
four of them recovering this. And it also draws into
question how much how affected was her body by the flame?
All right? As you know, I actually had a case
involving two escaped prisoners that beat a photographer to death
(26:25):
and buried him in a grave in the swamp lands
in New Orleans. And these guys had escaped from State
penn in Florida. They always wound up in the French
world for some reason, either the French Quarter or Vege,
and so they fled to New Orleans. They picked a
sky up and sexually assaulted him, beat him to death
with a camera tripod, dug a shallow grave and while
(26:48):
these idiots were digging the shallow grave. He takes the
Marlborough out of his mouth that he had finished smoking
and thumps it down in the grave and then wow,
the body rolls over on it and they bearing. Okay,
think about a cigarette butt. Think about a cigarette butt.
(27:09):
I'm thinking about gum right now, but think about cigarette butt.
Just think about the action of taking a filtered cigarette
and inhaling, okay, And what points of contact are there
that are going to have biological value here, So the
outer the outer sheath of the of the butt itself,
(27:31):
and then that filter, which is very complex if you
look at how these filters are made. So just your
tongue touching the underside of that filter, you're actually you're
you are depositing your saliva in here, and now it's
protected even even in the face of heat. And depend
(27:52):
upon how quickly they got to the flame and knocked
it down, that thing's preserved. But what it came down
to was the evidence technician or there arson investigators out
there looked down and said, wait, because the question is
going to be does our victim smoke? Well, she doesn't smoke.
Who's been in this apartment? That's stumping their cigarette butts
(28:15):
out and leaving them there. And you know, the devil
is always in the details. Brother, You know, you can
reach down and that thing that you might think that
it's so insignificant might hold the key to everything. You know, Dave,
(28:43):
we've told this horrible story about Judy Weaver from nineteen
eighty four. But there's connectivity, isn't there. Isn't it amazing
how sometimes things that happen can tie back to those
things in the past that give you to kind of
open up a broader picture here and boy, in this case,
(29:04):
do we have a tale to tell.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
It's weird because looking back on this case, you know,
we focused on Judith Weaver because her case happened in
nineteen eighty four and it went unsolved. We told you
about the sisters being raped in nineteen eighty four, briefly
mentioned that that's going to come back to that in
a minute because it has something to do with this.
(29:27):
But again, Judith Weaver's case remained unsolved, Joe. As this
case stayed cold, there was another case that had kind
of been forgotten, you know, like any other business. Detectives
come and go, investigators come to police, come and go,
and over the years a case gets called, it doesn't
mean that the investigation is dead or that it's not
(29:49):
being looked at. It's just got new eyes on it.
And sometimes something that Joe or Dave might remember from
nineteen eighty four. While I didn't get there, I wasn't
there in nineteen eighty, I don't know what happened then.
Right in nineteen eighty, Susan VC had just celebrated her
twenty first birthday. She's a young, married mother of two.
(30:10):
She's got two little kids under the age of two, Joe,
they're babies, okay. And again, she just turned twenty one
the day before. And the shocking tail to the tale
is that in that apartment where Susan VC her husband
is at work, somebody came into their world. He was
(30:34):
just checking doorknobs, Joe walking around the neighborhood checking doorknobs.
Her door happened to be unlocked, and this monster in
nineteen eighty came into her house. He tied her, up,
beat her, raped her, strangled her with her two kids
(30:58):
in the house, two little babies in the house. And
again purely happens Thence Joe, the guy was just looking
to do some evil.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
When you think about that case and you think about
the nineteen eighty four homicide, you're looking for points of connection.
You know, this matrix that's created essentially where you're trying
to see are the commonalities. And again not disparaging the
investigators from back then. You know, things change over a
(31:30):
period of time and you have new faces that you know,
kind of burst on the scene and these sorts of things.
But what you're looking for these points where you can
kind of trace back. And it's not just about conducting
a profile for the sake of having a profile, all right,
because some people view it as like a parlor trick almost.
It's not about that. It's about trying to connect a
(31:54):
timeline to something because at the end of the day,
you know, profilers do something different than forensics, like cologists do.
I've never talked about this on air, but with forensic psychologists,
they go and they use a therapeutic model to evaluate
people that are currently incarcerated, okay, just to kind of
understand how their minds work. Profilers are dealing with an
(32:16):
unknown there's nobody to interview. So that's why, like with
crime scenes and the forensics that are collected, that's why
it all plays into it, you know, every little nuance,
the position of a body, the food stuffs that are
left behind, what type of knots are used. You know,
because now we've got another case that had occurred earlier
(32:40):
that again comes back to I think, what is sexual sadism.
You've got restraint being used here, and so those tie
backs would go to what type of person would do this?
And are there any other associated cases? But with this
poor mother, mother of two young kids, man, that answer
(33:07):
kind of comes up, and it's going to play a
part in this case with the two sisters that were assaulted,
and then a certain individual wound up doing time for it.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
And that's where we're headed because we had the murder
in nineteen eighty and we had the murder in eighty four.
Also mentioned earlier about the assault, the attempted murder in
nineteen seventy nine where the woman got free in her garage. Okay, well,
in nineteen eighty four, right, just not long after Judith
VC's murder, these two girls and again we're in Everett, Washington, Joe,
(33:44):
these sisters get raped and in this particular case, they
were not murdered. They were sexually assaulted and they got
they actually got a suspect, and this suspect ended up
getting convicted. Okay, now they hadn't tied everything together yet.
(34:09):
Mitchell Gaff, Mitchell Gaff was tried and convicted of the
rape of the sisters in nineteen eighty four. He was
sentenced to twenty years in prison or so even more
than that, and he served ten years, Joe. And at
that point, after ten years, he goes in prison ninety
(34:30):
eighty five is nineteen ninety five, he thinks he's getting
out because he's you know at that point where parole happens,
right well, because of how he was convicted and his sentence,
they determined that he wasn't getting out on parole. He's
going to our psychological hospital now he needs some help.
And so instead of getting out to be back on
(34:51):
the road again, n Gaff was sent to the state
hospital and they kept him there for eleven years. For
twenty one years, Mitchell Gaff was in the custody of
the state of Washington for twenty one years.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Joe.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
There was no resolution in the Judith Weaver case. There
was no resolution in this is the BC case. But
you mentioned those investigators did collect evidence and because of
Mitchell gaff being convicted of a sexual assault, his DNA
was eventually entered into COTIS. Now you've mentioned this before,
(35:34):
that having DNA having fingerprints, even it doesn't matter if
the person isn't in a national system. If they're not
in the database, you can have all the DNA in
the world. But if the suspect is not in the
database you just got, you're waiting, you know, you're just waiting.
Same thing.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Yeah, I'll give you even a better example of that
that a lot of people can understand because many people
have never been fingerprinted. Most people people, I'd say a
number of people have never had their DNA compared to anything.
Think about it in this sense, all right, think about
going to the dentist. Okay, how many of us have
sat in a dental chair open wider, open wider, Right,
(36:13):
what do they do when we go there. Well, they're
going to take pamiphlex X rays. You know, they're going
to do the whole thing. They're going to do detailed charting. Okay, Well,
all of us can identify with that. Many of us can, Okay,
that have a dentist, a dentist of record. All right, Well,
let's say we come across a body out in the woods, okay,
(36:36):
and we take that body and they still have all
of their teeth intact. I can have a forensic idontologist
come in and chart, do a postpartum chart of the teeth,
and it's beautiful. They've done a fantastic job. They've recognized
maybe the individuals have restorations done. They might have cavitated
areas in their teeth, they might have some kind of malclusion.
(36:58):
Teeth are can be rotated in a certain way. You
might have non erupted molars that are there. All those things,
and you've done such a good job. But guess what,
it's worthless because that person may have never been to
a dentist like many of us have. All Right, So
in that sense, if you have this postwort of chart
(37:20):
that you've generated, you ain't got nothing to compare it to.
But in our case with Gaff, he's he's now, he's
now in the books at this point in time. So
the police are looking at these two horrific crimes that
involve homicide, not just sexual assault. That's bad enough, but
(37:42):
you're talking about two restraint related sadistic homicides, and these
things are open and it's in the same community. And
for all we know, this person is still walking up
and down the street, right Yeah, And well when he
goes into the system, they think that they might they
might actually.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Got a detective. Her name is Susan Logothetti. Susan Logothetti,
detective on the case, starts looking at Judith Weaver's case
because I remember they had the cigarette butt and the carpet,
they had biological evidence on it, had evidence on it
that they could utilize now, and so they resubmit DNA
on the Weaver case. Detective Susan Logothetti gets a hit
(38:28):
on Weaver, and it comes back to the man who
was convicted and sentenced, you know, was in prison for
twenty one years for the sexual assault of the sisters.
We're back to mister Gaff again. So this is the
part that gets a little fun. I guess if there
can be any fun to this.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
It's a genius.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
It is Mitchell Gaff. He's sixty eight years old, he
served time in prison. He's changed his name over the
course of the year's Joe to hide his background. But
you can't hide from your DNA. You can change your name.
You can do a lot of things. But yeah, you
can do anything not changing your DNA. So a detective
log at that he changed put that, got it submitted,
and got a hit. Okay, there's a man right there,
(39:12):
and we need to get a current sample, because it's
not enough to say we got this old sample from
nineteen eighty four and we have a hit in the system.
You now have to get a current sample from your suspect.
And that's where well we started the show with the gum.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Yeah. I got to tell you, I don't know. Is
the term ruse a good.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Term here, like the gum trick, the gum ruse.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
I love this. I love this. I mean, out of
everything I think that we've covered, this might be one
of the more ingenious things. The police portray themselves going
door to door door.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
You're leaving the beaver man.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
This does not sound like the Fuller brushman. Yeah, the
electro Luxe vacuum cleaners salesman. This is this is beautiful.
So what they did was that the police obviously he's
on the radar, but they had to get a viable sample.
So they're posing as gum company representative salesman, and he
(40:17):
Mitchell gaff Out of everybody in the world has been
selected to do a test samply, and what they decided
to do was present him with some pairings, if you will.
It sounds like official wine stuff, right, It's not a pairing.
I'm just being facetious there. They give him gum, all right,
(40:42):
and what do you think, sir about the taste of this.
That was the premise that they we're gonna use you.
You're gonna be You're gonna be first, right, and we
want to know what your thoughts of were thinking about
putting this new brand of gum out? Can you do
it and retrospectively? Day, I gotta tell you there's there's
a fascinating little comment that one of the detectives that
(41:05):
was involved in this this whole process stated, and I
was just I was chuckling to myself. He said, when
Gaff deposited, because they had a special receptacle that you know,
you had to place the gun back into, when he
deposited that gum, they saw a long line of saliva
(41:25):
coming out of his mouth. And what is it that
pilots say that are bomber pilots. They say, we're over
the target area, buddy, PLoP right into the container. And
they've got this guy's DNA exactly. We got this guy's
DNA stone cold, and can you imagine I bet that
guy turned around and thanked him profusely. Thank you sir
(41:48):
for participating.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
Directors man, yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
You're going to be the face of the It will
be into my boy. Were they ever? Because they went out,
they went out and they compare what they had taken
previously because he was a convicted offender and compared that
with that sample from that gum and beingo they had him,
(42:13):
they were able able to close it out. And how'd
this wind up? Dated?
Speaker 2 (42:16):
They got they matched him with Judith Weaver. Okay, So
now this is where it gets really weird, because you
still had Susan v C from four years earlier. Okay,
it was still an unsolved murder. Now at the time
of for murder, remember I told you she was twenty one,
had just played one, she's married to the little kids,
and at the time of her murder, her husband was
(42:38):
a big suspect, as was his brother Jerry. Now after
they get gaff and they've got him locked up, okay,
they they've arrested him in the Judas Weaver case Jerry vs. Died. Okay,
his brother Ken VC, the husband of Susan Ken calls
the detectives say hey, I'm my brother Jerry passed away.
(43:01):
I was wondering if we could run he had. I'm
thinking he might have suspected that maybe his brother was
involved somehow.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
You know.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
It was that call though, that made a detective logo
that she didn't know anything about the VC case. Remember
I said earlier, you get coming in and out. Well,
she knew about Weaver in eighty four, she didn't know
anything about Susan VC in nineteen eighty. So bing, bang boom,
the husband calling to say, I want this case, Saul please,
and the detective goes, yeah, well let's run this bang
(43:34):
It was Gaff. So they've got this Mitchell Gaff. Now
they are he already served twenty one years on the
rape of the sisters in the sexual assault of the
sisters in eighty four. They've got him for Judith Weaver's
eighty four murder, and now they've got him for Susan b.
C's murder in nineteen eighty and Joe. As they were
getting ready to get all this in court, you know
(43:54):
what happened. They found out that nineteen seventy nine sexual
assault that take place in the garage of woman who
became a police officer later. Mitchell Gaff was the guy
that did it. They found out all this and you know,
you know, he chose her as a potential victim, the
very first victim of Mitchell Gaff in nineteen seventy nine.
(44:16):
He saw her mowing her yard. She's twenty nine years old,
mowing her own yard. Mitchell Gaff saw her as a
potential victim. She got away from saved her life. Susan Vace.
He got into her house because her door was unlocked,
and Judith Weaver taken him by surprise, and he tried
to burn his way out of that conviction ends up
(44:36):
he ends up in court. And one of the things
that did happen Joe, is that he ended up leading guilty.
You know, they had him dead to rights and he
gave a statement. I didn't care about here about what
the family members of the victim said. You know that
(44:57):
twenty nine year old from nineteen seventy nine who became
a now she's a retired police officer. She got to
take the stand and talk about getting away from him. Yeah,
the children of Susan v C who have now grown up,
they're younger, they're adults, grown up, talk about living life
without their mom. And Judus Weaver's family, you know, they
(45:18):
got to talk about how other family members died before
they knew it was responsible for her murder. Mom, dad, brothers,
sisters all gone. She did have her brother that showed
up in court and talked about it. But it all
came down to the ingenious the ingeniousness of a detective
getting that sample from a possible suspect without him ever
(45:40):
having a clue that she did it. It was amazing.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah, it is. And the numbers don't lie. The numbers
will always tell the truth you can rely upon. Now
if the testing is done correctly and it becomes reliable,
it's that benchmark, it's that steak in the sand that
we can set forth that we can rely upon and
the truth will eventually come out. A big tip of
(46:05):
the cap to those investigators and those forensic scientists up
in Effett that took the time to collect the evidence
generations ago, and they held on to that evidence that
they knew that all was not lost. All they had
to do was wait, in fact, for the science to
catch up with the evidence that they had collected, and
the truth prevailed. I think my big question now relative
(46:29):
to gaff how many others are there? Because yeah, he
did have a pause, but this ember, this flame, if
you will, began to burn in him a long long
time ago, and you think about how dark and evil
all of this evidence is everything he did to these victims.
Are there others that are out there? Are there those
(46:50):
that are unaccounted for that maybe you're missing from this
particular area. Is there some way they can get information
from him? I don't know, because it would be grand
if we can give other people answers to these questions
that have been gnawing away at families all over the
place forever and ever. The truth will in fact come
(47:13):
home to rest in the science. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
and this is Bodybags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.