Cold case killer who chewed cops’ undercover DNA bait faces survivor, families in courtroom showdown
Mitchell Gaff, a 74-year-old man, was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison for the murders of Susan Vesey and Judith Weaver, committed in the 1980s. Investigators linked him to the crimes through a DNA sample obtained from a piece of gum he chewed during an undercover operation. In court, Gaff expressed remorse for his actions, attributing his violent behavior to substance abuse.
- ▪Mitchell Gaff pleaded guilty to the murders of Susan Vesey and Judith Weaver in Everett, Washington.
- ▪He was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison after being linked to the crimes through DNA from a piece of gum.
- ▪Gaff apologized to the victims' families in court, citing drugs and alcohol as factors in his violent history.
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Record
| Original publisher | Fox News — Latest |
| Canonical URL | https://www.foxnews.com/us/cold-case-killer-chewed-cops-undercover-dna-bait-faces-survivor-families-courtroom-showdown |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 15:22:56 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T19:34:56.983Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T19:34:56.983Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ojixiAU-PWuZ · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Cold Case Cold case killer who chewed cops’ undercover DNA bait faces survivor, families in courtroom showdown Mitchell Gaff, 74, pleaded guilty to the 1980 and 1984 killings of Susan Vesey and Judith Weaver in Everett By Julia Bonavita Fox News Published May 18, 2026 3:22pm EDT Facebook Twitter Threads Flipboard Comments Print Email Add Fox News on Google close Video Illinois detectives use podcast to solve 42-year-old cold case Detectives Andrew Houghton and Matt Vartanian speak with Fox News Digital about how the Elgin Police Department's podcast, Somebody Knows Something, helped solve the 42-year-long mystery surrounding the disappearance of Karen Schepers.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fox News — Latest.
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