Last Dance, Last Chance

by Ann Rule

  It didn’t change things at all. Jack Gasser was free.

  Austin Seth and Don Sprinkle weren’t partners any longer, although they were still close friends. Sprinkle had been elected the sheriff of King County. He also coached the semipro football team, the Seattle Ramblers. Seth stayed on in the Seattle Police Department.

  “And then we started getting reports,” Austin Seth remembers. “It seems that Jack Gasser was back trying to lure women into his car. He had a drinking problem—a big problem—and when he drank, he got mean. There were just too many complaints from women who’d been frightened by some guy in his thirties. One got his license plate number, and I checked it out. It was the Gasser family car.

  “Don and I got together and reported him to the parole board. They started the process of revoking his parole.”

  But Don Sprinkle didn’t live to see Gasser’s parole revoked. Tragically, Sprinkle suffered a massive heart attack in August 1963, as he rode in a car in the Chinatown Parade as part of the Seattle Seafair Festival. He was dead at the age of 47. It was a loss that Austin Seth would carry with him forever. He had other partners over the years, but none was ever as close as Don Sprinkle had been.

  In January 1964, Jack Gasser was arrested for public intoxication after another incident when a woman was frightened by his behavior. His parole was instantly revoked, and he went back to Walla Walla. He served a little over five more years. He was paroled again in September 1969. By this time, Austin Seth had retired from the Seattle Police Department, but he was far from retired. He became the chief of security at the Olympic Hotel, Seattle’s poshest hotel, where visiting presidents stayed when they were in town. So did national celebrities, some of whose antics shocked even the long-time homicide detective.

  Austin Seth also took the photo-finish pictures at the Longacres Race Track. An accomplished photographer, he had taken thousands of crime scene photos over the years.

  Although Seth never forgot Jack Gasser, he was no longer in a position to keep track of his movements.

  Actually, Jack Gasser, now forty, appeared to be the poster boy for rehabilitation of felons. He moved to Bellingham, Washington, where he attended Western Washington University and earned his accounting degree in 1971.

  The Bellingham Police Department has no record of any contact at all with Jack Gasser. However, Bellingham is in Whatcom County, and the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department has an unsolved murder dating back to1970. There are startling similarities to the case of Donna Woodcock more than two decades earlier.

  Nancy Winslow was a pretty 22-year-old waitress. She was five feet four and weighed 123 pounds. July 26, 1970, was actually her first full day on the job at the Beaver Tavern after three days of training. She was supposed to work only from two until five, and a teenaged relative was looking after Nancy’s two toddlers. Nancy didn’t have a car, and she didn’t have a ride either—but she planned to walk home when she finished her shift at the tavern on the outskirts of Bellingham. It would still be light out at five.

  The afternoon went well, but the woman who was supposed to work the late shift called in to say she was ill. Nancy volunteered to stay until ten, even though it meant canceling her plans to go to a picnic that night. Always a thoughtful and responsible mother, she called home to arrange for an older girl to baby-sit until 10:30. The afternoon sitter was too young to stay out so late. Nancy also bought hamburgers from the restaurant and sent them in a cab to her house to feed her children and the sitters. She wanted to keep her new job, but she was worried about her children.

  Nancy Winslow made several calls during the evening to try to find a ride home. She finally located her husband, but he said he wouldn’t be able to pick her up. He had to work late, too.

  “That’s O.K.,” the cook heard her say. “I’ll find a ride.”

  Nancy finished her shift and did her side work, filling catsup and mustard containers, sugar bowls, and salt and pepper shakers. She even did some dishes; she wanted to make a good impression. The owners of the Beaver Tavern offered to drive her home, but she said she didn’t want to bother them. She had found a ride.

  After she washed the last glasses, she put on her white mohair sweater with orange trim, picked up her straw purse, and started watching out the window.

  “There he is now,” she called to the owners, and she waved as she headed out to the parking lot. They saw her get into what looked like a 1952 gray or light tan Plymouth. They couldn’t see who was driving, but they were positive that there was only one person in the car.

  Nancy Winslow never made it home that night. Her worried husband went to the Bellingham Police Department to file a missing persons report the next afternoon. He was insistent that she would never have left her children willingly. He’d come home from work late the night before to find a worried baby-sitter, who hadn’t heard from Nancy since she had sent hamburgers home for them to eat. She had promised she would be there by 10:45 at the latest.

  Although the Bellingham police checked with hospitals and surrounding law enforcement departments, they found out nothing about Nancy Winslow. She had simply walked out of the Beaver Tavern into the darkness and driven off with someone. They didn’t even know whether the driver was a man or a woman.

  It was two weeks to the day on August 9 when a couple, enjoying an outing in the forested tranquility of the Bridge Camp Ground some 40 miles east of Bellingham, noticed that their dog was behaving strangely. He kept dashing to the edge of the Nooksack River, barking and growling. The camping area near the foot of Mount Baker is a virtual wilderness, and they assumed that their dog had caught the scent of a bear or a cougar. But he seemed to be barking at something that lay on a rocky bar that jutted out of the river below. They walked over to see what it was.

  As they moved closer they saw the naked body of a woman sprawled on the rocks. They corralled their dog and hurried to the closest ranger station. An urgent call went into the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office, and Sergeant Ward Crutcher and Detective F. Scott Notar were dispatched to the body site on the Nooksack River.

  The detectives and the ranger waded through the swift current to the gravel and rock bar. The body of the woman was badly decomposed by the ravages of summer heat. Most of the head and neck were nearly skeletonized. It would be impossible to identify her visually.

  She was completely naked except for a nylon stocking that had been used as a garotte around her neck. They would learn it was a type sold by J. C. Penney, called “Clingalon,” with lacy elastic at the top.

  “She was probably thrown into the river upstream,” Crutcher surmised. “With the heat of the last two weeks, the river’s gone down a lot, and it exposed this bar. Otherwise, the body would have ended up much farther downstream.”

  The body in the river was taken to Whatcom County Coroner Dr. Robert Rood’s office for a postmortem examination.

  The corpse appeared to be that of a young woman, well under thirty. With the high temperatures and the body’s long immersion in the river, it was no longer possible to tell the extent of the injuries the victim might have suffered, or whether she had been raped. Nor could Dr. Rood give a time or even a day of death. The murder weapon was the stocking; she had died of strangulation by ligature.

  Nancy Winslow, the 22-year-old waitress, was the only woman missing in Whatcom County who fit the general description of the body in the Nooksack. A comparison of her dental records and those of the river victim verified that she had been found.

  She had disappeared from the city of Bellingham, but her body was found in Whatcom County, so it became essentially a county case, although the sheriff’s detectives would work closely with the city investigators.

  An outdoor crime scene is very difficult to work; wind, water, changing weather, and wild animals all combine to move or destroy any evidence that might have been left behind by the killer. Detectives Pete Kuehnel from the county and Telmer Kvevin from the city drove the 40 miles to the lonely river campsite. They knew that they
had little chance of finding Nancy’s clothing; it had probably all washed away in the river—but they hoped they might find something.

  With the help of forest rangers, Kuehnel and Kvevin searched the campgrounds. They dug through garbage piles and even probed portable “Honey Buckets” placed there for campers to use. It was an onerous task. They were looking for the bright orange and white daisy-printed shift Nancy had worn, her black patent-leather pumps, the white sweater she’d borrowed, and her big straw basket of a purse. But, after frustrating hours under a burning sun, they found nothing they could connect to the murdered woman.

  Nor did they discover anything they could link to her killer.

  “Let’s try upstream,” Pete Kuehnel said, and they made their way a quarter of a mile to the Dead Horse Creek Road bridge. Inching along the railing, they found a clump of black hair caught in the wood rail, and they sealed it in a plastic bag.

  They were already convinced that the killer had thrown Nancy Winslow into the river from one of the bridges upstream. The hair, however, would prove to be animal hair.

  They got a break the next day. A mountain rescue volunteer, Doug Hamilton, who operated a power plant further upriver, called Pete Kuehnel to say that he had found a sweater on the Wells Creek Road that might have some connection to the murder.

  “At first, I thought it was a deer hide that some poachers had thrown there,” Hamilton said, “but then I got closer and it was a sweater.”

  He led Kuehnel to where it lay—150 feet from the Mount Baker Highway and 20 feet down a mossy bank. It was the white mohair sweater with orange trim that Nancy Winslow had borrowed the night she vanished.

  Optimistic after this find, detectives and Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts spent the next two days searching the area for more clothing or her purse. They found nothing at all.

  Although both the Whatcom County Sheriff’s men and the Bellingham police worked on this baffling murder case for months—for years—questioning scores of witnesses and a dozen suspects, they never solved it. Nancy Winslow might as well have walked into another dimension when she left the Beaver Tavern at 10:30 on the night of July 26, 1970. But she was gone, lost to her children and her husband. Today she would be 54 years old.

  Nancy had arranged for a ride home, but the cook, who answered the phone, said that all of the calls coming in for her were from women or girls, and all the calls she made—except for the one to her husband—were to women. The only other way she could have found a ride was with someone who was a customer at the restaurant.

  Nancy Winslow was a faithful wife, and while she might laugh and joke with a customer, she would never consider dating another man. The owners of the Beaver Tavern were able to remember most of the customers who had come in on that Sunday afternoon and evening 32 years ago.

  One of them was a man who sat in the bar section of the restaurant. “He spent a lot of time teasing Nancy,” the owner’s wife said. “He kept calling her over to him, and he was kind of hustling her. I think he got to her with his jokes, because he made her nervous enough to confuse her orders.”

  “What did he look like?” Pete Kuehnel asked.

  It was hard for the witness to judge age, but she guessed he was in his thirties, somewhere around six feet. He had dark brown hair, combed over his forehead in waves and then slicked back on the sides. “He had on a dark ski jacket and dark pants.”

  “Moustache?” Kuehnel asked. “Beard?”

  “No, he was clean-shaven.”

  “When did he come in?”

  “About eight or nine. He finished his meal and left about an hour before Nancy finished her shift.”

  More than three decades have passed since Nancy Winslow drove away with her killer. However, although her murder remains unsolved, there are too many connections to Jack Gasser not to wonder:

  Like Donna Woodcock, Nancy was a 22-year-old waitress.

  She accepted a ride home with a stranger after working a late shift.

  Her killer threw her clothes away after he killed her.

  Her body was left in water.

  She was killed in July.

  She was strangled with an article of her own clothing.

  She was probably beaten in the face and on the head (injured portions of the body decompose first).

  Her purse was never found.

  She was found nude.

  Jack Gasser lived in Bellingham, attending college, at the time Nancy Winslow died.

  Although another waitress knew Jack Gasser as a regular for breakfast at the Beaver Tavern, she never connected him to Nancy’s murder. He lived in a rooming house nearby, and he seemed like a good guy to her. In 1970, she certainly didn’t know Jack’s background. He was just another young guy going to college. It would be many years before she finally read something in the paper that made her wonder.

  At any rate, Jack Gasser was never a suspect in Nancy Winslow’s murder. His name never even came up in1970. He was on active parole and had to report to his parole officer regularly until December 1975. As far as the parole officer could tell, Gasser was making a remarkably successful return to society.

  In the fall of 1970, a few months after Nancy Winslow was murdered, Jack Gasser got married. His wife, Trudy*, was divorced and the mother of four children. Jack told her about his past, or at least some of it. “He said that he had killed this girl, but he twisted it around so that it didn’t sound so bad,” Trudy recalled later.

  When he graduated from Western Washington University in 1972, Jack and his new family moved to Olympia, Washington, the state capital. He had a job there as an accountant for the state Department of Ecology. He got a better job with the State of Washington in 1974 as an auditor with the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS). His work required that he travel around the state frequently.

  Jack and Trudy became the parents of two sons in the early years of their marriage. He seemed to be completely rehabilitated, although Trudy worried sometimes. He still had a problem with alcohol. His personality changed radically when he drank. When he was sober, you couldn’t ask for a nicer guy. When he was drunk, his wife was afraid of him. She hoped she wasn’t being paranoid, but there always seemed to be news of a woman being murdered in the cities where Jack went to go over the books of the different DSHS offices.

  On January 31, 1981, Trudy and Jack separated at her instigation. She filed for divorce and asked for a restraining order against him.

  On July 4, however, he came to her home, drunk, and attacked her physically. On December 8, Trudy Gasser asked for a second restraining order that would bar Gasser from being “inebriated or consuming alcoholic beverages” in front of her six children.

  In her divorce petition, she said that he had piled up $8,000 worth of debt without her knowledge, and that she had reluctantly agreed to refinance their house so they could get $15,000 in cash. It was either that or file for bankruptcy.

  Through it all, Gasser kept his job with the State of Washington. He made $1,370 a month, which wasn’t a munificent salary, but he had good benefits, and he could do free-lance accounting on the side. Ironically, the State of Washington was now paying him approximately the amount it had cost each year to keep him in the penitentiary.

  The Gassers’ divorce became final on July 6, 1982. Trudy Gasser was awarded custody of the children, but Jack was given visitation rights.

  It had been 34 years, almost to the day, since a young Jack Gasser had killed Donna Woodcock, and 12 years since Nancy Winslow’s murder. Gasser scarcely resembled the handsome young man he’d once been. He was almost 54 now, and he carried a lot of weight. His features seemed larger, too; his nose was hawk like, and his brow was deeply furrowed. In repose, his face could look like a study of rage. But Jack had kept his full head of dark hair, and many single, middle-aged women were attracted to him.

  He was still a ladies’ man, and he continued to drink—more heavily all the time. However, his neighbors in the apartment complex on Martin Way in Olym
pia found him a great guy, even when he was drinking. There were several single women in nearby apartments. One, a 49-year-old waitress, said, “Every woman up here was treated as a lady by him. He was a gentleman, nice in the halls. Even if he came in drinking, he did not cuss and raise Cain. He was a very quiet man.”

  Perhaps.

  He had been officially single for only eleven days when John Russell Gasser made headlines again. It was July once more, which might have been mere coincidence, or perhaps it was a month that brought Gasser’s buried anger to the surface. He was bitter about women, he told friends. His wife had left him, and he couldn’t see his children when he wanted to.

  At 11:30 on the morning of July 17, 1982, two boys were walking near a ditch on Johnson Point Road about five miles north of Olympia. The Nisqually River empties into the Henderson Inlet there, where Henderson Bay nudges the lowlands off Interstate 5. The boys looked down into the ditch and saw what they first thought was a store mannequin.

  But it wasn’t. It was the naked body of 49-year-old Gerri Barker. Gerri was a lonely woman, worried about her health, nearing middle age. Someone had thrown her away in this ditch, her battered body mute evidence of a terrible beating.

  Geraldine Ann “Gerri” Barker had once been an Air Force wife, and she had lived in many exotic spots around the world, although her life began in Craig, Minnesota, a town so small that it no longer exists. She’d been married and divorced twice, and she’d come to Olympia from Utah 13 years earlier. She had worked in the office of the Parks and Recreation Department for the city of Lacey, a small suburb north of Olympia, but now she lived in a small apartment, subsisting on welfare. She had borne two sons and a daughter, all grown.

  Gerri loved to read, and she always had a couple of novels going. She also read everything she could find about foods that were good for health. Sadly, she defeated any beneficial effects of healthy eating by drinking too much alcohol. That hot July of 1982, Gerri was very worried about her health; she had recently had surgery for a growth in her esophagus (the tube leading from the throat to the stomach), and she was very frail. At 49, she sometimes felt that all her good times were behind her.