More than 40 years after the murder of a mother of two in Everett, Washington, Mitchell Gough has pleaded guilty to murder and detailed the murders in court.
DNA from old razors solves 41-year-old cold case
More than 40 years later, DNA evidence has linked the unsolved rape and murder of two California women to a man who died in prison.
america today
A Washington rapist has pleaded guilty to two cold-case murders linked to him through DNA taken from chewing gum while undercover.
Mitchell Gough, 68, pleaded guilty Thursday, April 16, in Snohomish County Superior Court to two counts of first-degree murder, according to the Everett Police Department, just north of Seattle.
Gough detailed the two murders in open court as part of his plea deal, which will likely result in him dying in prison, prosecutor Craig Matheson told USA TODAY.
Mr Matheson said “it was a good outcome for the family” of the victim. “They were able to get some answers without any real risk of jury misconduct or us making mistakes in court during the trial.”
Gough, a diagnosed sexual sadist and convicted rapist who had been living as a free man in recent years, was identified by a DNA hit in a national database known as CODIS as a potential suspect in the 1984 cold case murder of a 42-year-old mother of two named Judy Weaver.
Detectives wanted further tests. So they showed up at Gaff’s house posing as gum industry researchers and asked him to sample different flavors. They obtained a treasure trove of Gaff’s DNA from discarded gum, according to court records obtained by USA TODAY.
The resulting evidence not only linked him to Weaver’s murder, but also to the 1980 murder of a 21-year-old mother of two named Susan Vesey.
Gough was scheduled to go on trial for murder in September, but his guilty plea changed everything.
Here’s what you need to know about the case and what to expect at Gough’s sentencing next month.
The murders of two mothers remain unsolved for decades.
On July 12, 1980, 21-year-old Susan Vesey was attacked while alone in her Everett home with her 3-month-old baby and 2-year-old daughter.
When her husband returned home, she was tied up with electrical cords, raped, and strangled. Their children were unharmed.
The case was solved, and four years later, another woman was murdered in a similar manner just six miles away from Vesey’s home, but police at the time did not make any connection to the case.
On June 1, 1984, firefighters responded to a fire in 42-year-old Judy Weaver’s apartment and found her dead inside. She was tied with an extension cord, raped and strangled before her killer set her on fire, according to court records.
Gough detailed both crimes during Thursday’s court hearing, according to police and Jackie O’Brien, who survived Gough’s attack in 1979 and recently shared her story with USA TODAY.
“I’m just disgusted,” O’Brien told USA TODAY after attending a court hearing Thursday. “There are a lot of angry relatives there.”
How police linked Mitchell Gough to the murders
Detectives focused on Gaff in recent years after DNA taken from the wrist ligature used to kill Weaver was a hit on CODIS. But they wanted more.
So, according to court records, two undercover agents from the Everett Police Department knocked on Gough’s door in 2024 and introduced themselves as gum industry researchers.
O’Brien said the female detectives wore short pants and tight T-shirts in hopes of getting Gough to participate, but one of the detectives later told her the whole story.
Detectives asked Gough to participate in a gum tasting study, and he agreed, tasting several flavors before dumping them into a small cup with a lid, court records state. They then sent Gaff to a lab to extract his DNA and see if he matched the CODIS crime.
He did.
DNA taken from the gum came back as a match to vaginal swabs and neck ligatures taken from Weaver’s body, according to court records. He was arrested in May 2024 and has been imprisoned ever since pending trial.
In January 2025, Everett Police Cold Case Detective Susan Rogosetti returned an angry phone call from Vesey’s husband demanding to know why Gough had not solved his wife’s case even though he had been arrested for Weaver’s murder. When her husband described Vesey’s murder, Rogosetti immediately noticed “startling similarities” between the case and Weaver’s murder, according to court records.
Rogosetti submitted multiple items from Vesey’s crime scene to the Washington State Patrol’s forensic lab for updated analysis. In April 2025, DNA on the white cord used to bind Vesey matched Gaff, according to court records. Another white string found at the crime scene matched the gaff in March, according to court records.
Gough was charged with murder in Vesey’s death on March 13.
If Gough were to go on trial for murder, Matheson said he would want to present DNA evidence in the case to the jury.
“The evidence in both cases was Gough’s DNA left on the ligatures used to bind and strangle the two women,” he said. “That was pretty bad.”
Other crimes of Mitchell Gough
Long before Gough was charged with Weaver and Vesey’s murders, he was a convicted rapist and a diagnosed sexual sadist.
His first known crime was the brutal attack on 29-year-old Jackie O’Brien on the eve of Thanksgiving in 1979. As she was putting her lawn mower away in the tool shed of her Everett home, Gough, then 21, pointed a handgun (it turned out to be an air rifle) at her and told her to remain silent and kneel down.
As she knelt with her back to Gough, O’Brien recently told USA TODAY that he began hitting her in the head with a gun, punching her in the head and banging her head against the cement floor and wall.
At one point, O’Brien said Gough put the gun down to bind her wrists. That’s when she took action.
“I threw myself at him and caught him off guard and he kind of tripped against the wall,” the now 76-year-old recalled. “When I got up, he locked me in and he said, ‘You’re going to die, you (expletive).’ And I knew I was dead.”
Gough then pulled out a hunting knife and slashed O’Brien across his defensive hand. “Then I pushed him and ran out into the one-way garage and alley screaming, thinking he was chasing me.”
Gough fled and changed clothes, but was quickly arrested. A jury later found him guilty of assault with a deadly weapon and robbery. The judge in the case sentenced him to 30 days in prison, requiring him to report to work every day, followed by five years of probation, a slap on the wrist that still haunts O’Brien.
Gough was still on probation for assaulting O’Brien when he sneaked into the Everett home where his mother and teenage daughters were sleeping on August 28, 1984.
Once inside, Gough attacked the girls, ages 14 and 16, and then subjected them to a living hell for the next two and a half hours while their mother slept in the basement. He tied them up with electrical cords, cut their clothes with a knife, raped them repeatedly, beat them, strangled them and gave one of them an electric shock with an electrical cord, according to court records. The younger girl was able to escape and get help when Gaff began strangling her sister with an electrical cord.
Gough escaped and the girls survived. Gough pleaded guilty to two counts of rape and robbery in the case, and the judge sentenced him to 11 and a half years in prison.
In a subsequent court hearing, Gough admitted to attempting to assault up to 30 women and girls a day in the early 1980s, and confessed to raping at least eight of them, according to court records and archived news reports.
Paul Stern, who prosecuted Gough, said in court in 2000, “I have never met anyone in 19 years who was as dangerous to the community as Mitchell Gough.”
Learn more about Mitchell Gough and his motivations
Gough was convicted of raping her teenage sisters in 1984 and served nearly 10 years in prison and an intensive sex offender treatment program. But on the day he was scheduled to be released in 1994, prison officials told him he would not be free to leave.
Prosecutors had hoped to keep Gough locked up indefinitely under a new state law aimed at violent rapists and child molesters who have completed their sentences but are considered likely to reoffend. After a subsequent court hearing, a jury found Gough to be a violent sex offender and allowed him to be kept in secure custody at the state’s special custody center on McNeil Island in Puget Sound. The arrangement cost the state $550,000 a year, according to archived news reports.
In 2000, at age 42, Gough again asked for release. Therapists at the state’s commitment center believe he is ready after years of intensive treatment and say he has changed.
“I feel incredible remorse and pain for the innocent people I hurt,” he told The Associated Press at the time, saying he has learned how to deal with his emotions and empathize with his victims. “There was no excuse or justification for what I did to people.”
Prosecutors once again fought to keep Gough behind bars. In 2000, another jury found Gough to be a violent sex offender, and he remained on McNeil Island for another six years.
In 2006, more than 20 years after his formal sentence began, Gough finally won some measure of freedom. He was released to an isolation facility in Seattle, where he lived under constant supervision and could not leave his home without an electronic tracking device.
Over the next decade, Gough bounced back and forth between so-called transitional facilities and full-confinement facilities for various violations of court-ordered conditions, including viewing sexual material and having contact with other men in the facilities. In recent years, Gough appears to be living a quiet life under a new name in Olympia, where he is registered as a sex offender at the highest level, police said.
Gough has spoken in interviews and court hearings about why he attacked women, alleging months of sexual abuse as a boy by a female babysitter, as well as alcohol and drug abuse as an adult.
“I’m different from anything I’ve ever done,” he told GQ in 1995, saying the switch was flipped at the end of more than two years of sex offender treatment. “A huge cog turned inside me and I thought, ‘Oh, I get it!’” It wasn’t, “Oh, I hope I never get raped again.” It was, “I know what to do now so that no one rapes me.” ”
What is happening now?
Gough’s sentencing is scheduled for May 13th. Gough could be sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, but prosecutors are asking the judge to set the minimum sentence at 61 years, Matheson said.
Before the judge in this case hands down the sentence Gough deserves, his victims and the loved ones of the women he murdered will be able to speak in court about the impact his crimes have had on them.
O’Brien said he has no intention of missing it.
Nearly 50 years after her attack, she still doesn’t play loud music or leave the TV on when she’s home alone. She needs to be able to hear everything, just in case.
“It never goes away,” she said.
She called the guilty plea “bittersweet” because Washington does not have the death penalty.
“But he will die in prison,” she said. “That makes me happy.”
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter covering cold case investigations and capital punishment for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.
