The pitch sounded harmless. Three strangers in lime green shirts, a logo reading "Zolt Energy Gum" stitched across the chest, walked up to a house in Olympia in January 2024 with a story about a new energy gum about to launch at Safeway. They needed community members to taste test flavors and tell them which one to sell first. There was a gift card in it for him.
One of the three was Everett Police cold case detective Susan Logothetti. She knew what worked on him. "He loves to talk about himself," she would say later. "He wants to be complimented." So the detectives complimented his artwork. They complimented his property. And a 66-year-old man who called himself Sam Price stood in his own driveway, unwrapped stick after stick of gum, chewed it, and spit it into a ramekin the detectives had brought along for exactly that purpose.
He had no idea he was handing over the answer to two murders that Everett, Washington had carried, unsolved, for 46 years and 42 years, a combined eighty-eight years.
On May 13, 2026, in Snohomish County Superior Court, Judge Edirin Okoloko sentenced Mitchell Gaff, 68, to a minimum of 50 years and a maximum of life in prison for the first degree murders of a 21-year-old woman killed in her Casino Road home in Everett in July 1980, the day after her birthday, and a 42-year-old cafe manager killed in her Rucker Avenue apartment in June 1984. Gaff had pleaded guilty to both counts a month earlier. He is the same man Washington's civil commitment system evaluated, held for more than two decades as a "sexually violent predator," and released in 2018 after a state psychologist concluded his disorders did not make him a substantial risk to reoffend. This account draws on Snohomish County court proceedings, HeraldNet's reporting across the two-year span of the investigation and prosecution, and public records on the state program that supervised, and then freed, the man now sentenced to spend what remains of his life in prison.
Washington built its Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island in 1990, the first program of its kind in the country, to hold sex offenders who had finished their prison terms but were still assessed as dangerous. A judge or jury has to find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the person is more likely than not to commit another sexually violent act before the state can commit him indefinitely. Gaff went there in 1995, after a Snohomish County jury declared him a sexually violent predator as his earlier prison sentence neared its end. A second jury reached the same finding in 2000, and the judge in that hearing denied him community placement even though an expert had recommended it. He spent years moving between McNeil Island and a supervised transition facility in King County, sent back to the island in 2007 after staff found 44 videotapes containing sexual and violent content in his room, and again in 2009 for violating the terms of his transitional placement. In 2018, a psychologist named Dr. Daniel Yanisch evaluated Gaff and wrote that his diagnosed disorders, which on record include sexual sadism, narcissistic personality disorder, voyeurism disorder and frotteuristic disorder, did not render him a substantial risk to reoffend in a sexually violent predatory manner. The state let him go. He kept the name he had legally taken years earlier, Sam Wise Price, worked maintenance and construction jobs and as a sewing machine operator, and was ordained a Buddhist priest in January 2018, the same year he walked free.
The record the state was reviewing when it made that call already contained warning signs. In 2017, the year before his release, staff found Gaff with condoms and catalogs advertising guns, knives, handcuffs and law enforcement badges, items investigators would later describe as consistent with someone assembling a "rape kit." He had confessed in 1995 to four additional rapes he was never charged with, and admitted to a fifth in 1999. None of that changed the outcome. He was released.
What no one supervising him knew in 2018 was that his DNA was still sitting, unmatched, in evidence collected from a 1984 Everett murder.
The physical facts of that case are documented in charging papers and were repeated by Gaff himself in court. On June 1, 1984, a 42-year-old woman who managed the Bell-Ness Cafe had planned to call a cab home around 9:30 that night, then decided to walk instead. Gaff forced his way into her Rucker Avenue apartment. He bound her wrists with a drawstring and a length of telephone cord, sexually assaulted her, and strangled her. He then set fire to her bedroom, an act investigators have long read as an attempt to burn away evidence. It worked for almost forty years. Detectives in the 1980s pursued her boyfriend, a stepson, a business associate, a bar patron and a young man last seen with her near a Dairy Queen. None of them could be tied to the crime. The Snohomish County Medical Examiner's finding of death by strangulation was one of the few certainties in a file that otherwise went cold.
Investigators reopened the case in July 2020 and ran DNA recovered from the apartment's carpet against the FBI's national CODIS database. Nothing matched. It was the ligatures, tested later, that broke the case. In November 2023, the crime lab reported that DNA on the drawstring and phone cord used to bind her wrists matched a man already in the system: Mitchell Gaff, registered as a Level 3 sex offender, the state's highest risk designation, and living in Olympia under the name Sam Wise Price. A database match alone is rarely treated as sufficient to charge someone with murder. Investigators wanted a confirmatory sample collected directly from Gaff, which is what sent Detective Logothetti and two colleagues to his door in the lime green shirts. The gum worked. Charges of aggravated first degree murder followed on May 3, 2024.
The second case took another two years to charge. Court documents describe a 21-year-old woman found dead on July 12, 1980, in her Casino Road home in Everett, the morning after her birthday. Her husband discovered her body after returning from a night shift. Her two young children, a toddler daughter and an infant son, were in the home and were physically unharmed. According to the account Gaff himself gave the court, he had been trying random doors in the neighborhood and found hers unlocked. He hid inside, in a bedroom closet, waited, and grabbed her from behind with a knife when she came in. He bound her, raped her, and strangled her. New DNA testing conducted in 2025, building on the same lab work that had identified Gaff in the 1984 case, connected him to this scene as well. Prosecutors filed aggravated murder and first degree murder charges on March 13, 2026.
Both killings happened before July 1, 1984, the date Washington's Sentencing Reform Act took effect and replaced the state's old indeterminate sentencing model with fixed ranges. Because of that timing, both of Gaff's murder convictions are sentenced under the law that existed before the reform: the court sets a maximum term, life in a first degree murder case, and the state's Indeterminate Sentence Review Board, the successor agency to the parole board that once had jurisdiction over cases like his, holds ongoing authority over the minimum term and whether Gaff is ever found fit for release. Judge Okoloko's sentence set that minimum at 50 years. But the board, not the judge, is the body that will administer that sentence at hearings held over the decades to come, the same kind of expert panel that decided, in 2018, that Gaff no longer needed to be confined.
At sentencing, Judge Okoloko told the courtroom the number the state landed on was not arbitrary. "The appropriate sentence at a minimum is the number of years that the families had to wait," the judge said. Snohomish County Prosecutor Craig Mattheson, in his own remarks, rejected any framing of Gaff as an aberration confined to the distant past. "He, in fact, is the bump in the night that should make people aware that there is more than danger at hand," Mattheson told the court. Defense attorney Heather Wolfenbarger argued for context, if not leniency: "He is simply not the same person sitting here before you today that he was at the time he was committing these terrible offenses."
Gaff addressed the court directly. He did not contest what he had done. "I cared for nothing except what I wanted and what I thought I deserved," he told the judge, describing the man he had been in the 1980s. He went further, calling himself "a runaway train through the lives of everyone I came in contact with, violent, selfish and aggressive." In his own statement, he acknowledged responsibility for the 1984 killing without El Tejano repeating the language he used to describe her by name. No one from El Tejano reached out to Gaff or his attorney separately. His allocution in open court, on the record and delivered under oath, stands as the only statement from him this story relies on.
One relative of the victims, addressing the court on behalf of a family that had waited more than four decades for a name, put the stakes in plain terms the legal record could not. "My wish," she told the judge, "is that he never gets to just carry on with his life again."
Washington's civil commitment system, the one that held and then released Gaff, is not an outlier program running quietly on the margins of the justice system. It is the state's primary answer to a hard question: what happens to a man the state believes is still dangerous after his criminal sentence is served. A statewide review of the program's outcomes found that roughly one in four people released from the program are later arrested for new crimes, and about one in seven reoffend seriously or violently. In the most recent year on record, 68 residents were released from McNeil Island, a record number, part of a trend that has seen more people released than admitted to the island every year since 2012. Twenty states, the federal government and the District of Columbia now run similar civil commitment programs, holding an estimated 6,300 people nationwide as of 2020. Gaff was one data point in that system for twenty-three years. He is a very different kind of data point now.
The accountability question does not end with Gaff's guilty plea. It runs through every desk that handled his file between 1995 and 2018: the psychologists who evaluated him, the review board that weighed the 2007 videotapes and the 2009 violation and let him back into the community anyway, and the evaluator who in 2018 looked at a man found a year earlier with condoms and catalogs for guns, knives and police badges, and cleared him. Two Everett families were not told, because no one knew, that the evidence to solve their cases already existed in a lab. It took a renewed cold case DNA analysis of decades-old evidence, not the state's predator review process, to finally connect Gaff to the killings the state's own commitment system was designed, at least in theory, to prevent.
Detective Logothetti built her sting around one insight into Gaff's character: that he wanted, more than almost anything, to be told he was interesting, that his work mattered, that someone was paying attention to him. It was true in 2024, dressed in a lime green shirt over a plate of chewed gum, and it may have been true in 1980 and 1984 too, in rooms where no one was offering compliments. Fifty years is the number a judge chose because it matched how long two families waited. Whether Mitchell Gaff, now Sam Price, ever again stands before a board deciding whether he gets to carry on with his life is a question the sentence sets in motion but does not answer.
