The murder of Susan Vesey

The solving of Susan Vesey's 1980 murder was, at its core, a Combined DNA Index System offender hit, although the hit that opened the door belonged to a different victim. For decades both the 1980 killing of Susan Vesey and the 1984 killing of Judy Weaver in Everett, Washington remained unsolved, with biological evidence preserved from each scene. The decisive forensic event was a CODIS database match developed from the Weaver case: when a DNA profile from that crime was uploaded to the national database, it returned a match to Mitchell Gaff. Gaff's DNA was already in CODIS not because of the Weaver or Vesey murders but because of a separate, unrelated felony conviction. In 1985 Gaff had been convicted of breaking into an Everett home and raping two teenage sisters, an attack that took place the same year Weaver was killed, and that conviction placed his genetic profile in the offender database where it sat for years until investigators uploaded the cold-case profile that matched it. Because the original DNA hit was developed years earlier and detectives wanted to be certain before moving against a man who was, by then, living as a free person, Everett police corroborated the database match through an undercover operation. Detectives posing as representatives conducting a chewing-gum flavor survey approached Gaff and asked him to taste-test gum; the discarded gum yielded a saliva sample, and the DNA from that gum confirmed the CODIS match in the Weaver case. With Gaff identified, investigators turned back to the earlier, still-unsolved Vesey homicide. The renewed attention had a human prompt as well as a forensic one. In January 2025, Everett cold case Detective Susan Logothetti returned an angry telephone call from Vesey's widower, who had demanded to know why his wife's killing had never been solved. Detectives re-tested physical evidence preserved from the 1980 scene, and in April 2025 DNA recovered from a white cord that had been used to bind Susan Vesey was matched to Mitchell Gaff. Forensic scientists at the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory in Marysville performed the analysis linking the evidence to Gaff. Prosecutors moved in stages. Snohomish County Superior Court prosecutors first charged Gaff in the Weaver case, then on March 13, 2026, charged him with aggravated murder and first-degree murder in the death of Susan Vesey. The prosecution did not require a trial. On April 16, 2026, Gaff pleaded guilty to two amended counts of first-degree murder with premeditated intent, admitting that he had bound, raped and strangled Susan Vesey in 1980 and that he had raped and strangled Judy Weaver in 1984. Court records over the years had described Gaff as a diagnosed sexual sadist. On May 13, 2026, Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Edirin Okoloko sentenced Gaff, then 68, to a minimum of 50 years and a maximum of life in prison for the two murders. The conviction rested on the CODIS offender hit and the confirmatory DNA testing of crime-scene ligatures, not on any family-tree or consumer-DNA genealogy work.