by Ann Rule
Sandy didn’t know Bruce’s last name. She said that Donna had never talked much about him. “But Donna had very good judgment, and she must have thought he was O.K.”
Sandy couldn’t give them a detailed description of Bruce, and she didn’t know if he had been the driver of the Lincoln or not; she wasn’t close enough to see the driver—and, of course, it was dark.
Seattle newspapers carried the story of Donna Woodcock’s murder on the front page, along with a request for any information the public might have about the driver of the stolen gray Lincoln.
The phone rang in Homicide the next morning. It was the officer of the day at the Sand Point Naval Air Station.
“One of the marines stationed here just picked up the newspaper,” the naval officer said. “He recognizes the murdered girl and the Lincoln. He thinks he may know the man the girl left with. I have him here in my office now.”
“Keep him there,” Don Sprinkle said. “We’re on our way.”
Sprinkle and Austin Seth were at the Naval Air Station within 15 minutes. A young marine was there, waiting for them. His name was Fred Haws.
“Seattle is my home town,” he told Seth and Sprinkle. “And I graduated from Lincoln High School. I knew this guy in high school—and I saw him in the Triple XXX on the night the waitress was killed. I think he took her home that night.”
“Tell us about it,” Seth said.
“I got there sometime before two in the morning,” Haws said, “and this pretty, red-haired girl waited on me. I was kind of kidding—kind of serious—about asking her to go out with me. She said no, but she didn’t say why. She was a nice girl, and I didn’t really expect she would go, anyway.
“Anyway,” he continued, “this new gray Lincoln sedan pulled in. I was surprised to see that Jack Gasser was driving it. I left my car and walked over and talked to him. I hadn’t seen him for two years. He left high school to join the Navy before he graduated. He told me he was sent to China, and after his Navy service, he finished high school at Broadway High. I didn’t see how he could afford the fancy car, and then he told me the Lincoln belonged to his uncle.”
Fred Haws said he’d gone back to his own car to eat his sandwich, and he saw the girl he now knew was Donna Woodcock come out of the Triple XXX and go over to the Lincoln.
“They were talking, and I think Jack was asking her out, or maybe he knew her from before, and he already had a date with her. Anyway, they were still talking when I left.”
“We think she did go out with him that night,” Don Sprinkle said. “Another waitress saw her leave in a gray Lincoln. Do you know where this Jack Gasser lives?”
“I couldn’t tell you the address—but I could lead you there,” Haws said.
Seth and Sprinkle followed the young Marine to a house in the north end, but when they rang the doorbell, the man who answered said that the Gassers had moved two years earlier. He told them that the head of the household was named William Gasser.
The phone book showed a William Gasser on 35th Avenue West. Seth and Sprinkle felt a thrill of excitement. The address was only two blocks from where the stolen Lincoln had been abandoned a few hours after the murder.
“We drove there,” Austin Seth remembers. “It was a really hot night—I remember that well.”
Moths fluttered around the porch light, and a faint breeze made the heavy shrubbery around the steps brush against the railing. When they knocked on the screen door, a good-looking young man who looked to be about nineteen or twenty answered.
“We walked right in,” Seth says, “and I said, ‘Is Jack Gasser here?’ The boy who answered the door said, ‘That’s me.’ He didn’t seem nervous at all.”
In the light of the foyer, the two detectives studied Jack Gasser. He was six feet tall and very trim and muscular. His thick dark hair was heavily pomaded and combed straight back, except for one errant lock that he had deliberately curled so that it fell over his forehead in a style popularized by movie star Robert Mitchum. Jack Gasser had clear light eyes, but Seth recalls that there was a “dead” quality about them.
Of more interest to Seth and Sprinkle was the cluster of scratches on the left side of Jack Gasser’s face. They were deep and had barely begun to heal.
“Can we talk to you for a minute?” Seth asked.
“We’re just eating supper,” Gasser said, but he led them into the dining room, where his family sat around the table. His parents and his older brother stared at the detectives in open-mouthed surprise.
While Jack Gasser seemed to grow tense, his father was angry at the interruption and demanded to know why the two detectives were there. The elder Gasser, who owned an insurance agency in the University District, explained that he had just been elected commander of his district’s American Legion veterans’ group and that his installation was that evening. He didn’t appreciate being interrupted at such an important time.
“We told him that nevertheless we needed to talk to Jack, and we took him out to our car,” Seth recalls.
The Gassers were puzzled, but they didn’t object to Jack’s being questioned. Don Sprinkle and Jack Gasser slid into the back seat of the detectives’ unmarked car.
“It’s about a Lincoln sedan that was stolen last night,” Sprinkle said.
And, with that, Jack noticeably relaxed.
“It was found just a short distance from here,” Sprinkle said.
“Oh, that,” Gasser finally admitted. “I did steal that car. I didn’t hurt it, though. I just took it for a joyride. I know that was wrong. I’m sorry.”
Seth left his partner talking with Jack Gasser and went back inside the family home. Isabel Gasser was close to tears and her husband was apoplectic when he told them that they would be taking Jack downtown to police headquarters.
“This could ruin us socially,” Isabel said faintly. “Just when his father was going to get such a big honor tonight.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Seth said, a little puzzled by her priorities, “but we’re going to have to talk to him some more. You can come down later, if you like.”
As Seth pulled away from the curb, Don Sprinkle asked Gasser what he had been wearing the night before.
“Just slacks and a shirt,” he answered.
“Where are those clothes now?”
“At the cleaners—the one right up in the next block.”
Seth’s eyes met Sprinkle’s in the rearview mirror, and they both looked instinctively at their watches. It was almost 7 P.M., time for the cleaners to close. Seth hit the accelerator and wrenched the wheel, pulling to a skidding stop in front of the cleaners.
“I left Gasser sitting with Don and raced in to get those clothes before they were dry-cleaned. If any of Donna Woodcock’s blood was on them, we’d lose that evidence if they were cleaned. We made it just in time. All there was was a pair of slacks, but you could see they were heavily stained with dried blood. Later, Max was able to type it and match it to Donna Woodcock’s blood type.”
Austin Seth recalls, “At first, Gasser seemed relieved that we were only taking him to the station because of a car theft. He told us he’d been in the Navy, and he got a dishonorable discharge for punching out an officer. He was going to college and was in his sophomore year at Seattle University. But he didn’t want to talk any more about the car or anything else we might have in mind.”
It was hard for them to look at this kid with the clear eyes and realize that he was probably the monster who had mutilated the body of his victim after he raped and strangled her. He was polite and soft-spoken.
At headquarters, Sprinkle and Seth escorted Jack Gasser to an interview room. Seth began rolling a tape from a recorder, a machine considerably larger than today’s tiny tape recorders. The big spools revolved slowly, committing their conversation to posterity.
“Since you’ve admitted that you stole the car, you might as well tell us why you killed Donna Woodcock.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Jack Gasser said, his voice sudden
ly apprehensive.
“Her blood is all over that car you just told us you stole. We already have a witness who saw Donna get into your car Friday night.”
“Somebody’s wrong,” Gasser muttered, refusing to meet their eyes.
“And then,”Austin Seth said, “it was like he couldn’t hold it in. Within five minutes, he began to confess to killing her.”
Jack Gasser said he had had a couple of beers, and then he’d driven to the Triple XXX Barrel drive-in. He insisted he’d never seen Donna Woodcock before the moment she walked up to his car to take his order. He had kidded around with her.
“I offered to give her a ride home at closing time,” he said, “and she accepted.”
Gasser told a story that warred with the facts. He said he’d driven Donna home, and she’d gone inside and fed some scraps from the drive-in to her dog. “She came back to the car, and we went and parked in the field and drank a couple of beers apiece.”
Seth and Sprinkle knew that Donna Woodcock’s blood alcohol level was zero. She hadn’t drunk any beer—and if she had gone into her house, her mother and sister, who always checked to be sure she was home safe, would have heard her.
Gasser said he was kidding Donna. “I was just sitting there,” he said, surprise in his voice. “I hadn’t laid a hand on her.”
But he admitted he’d been teasing her, claiming that all carhops were floozies and easy, saying that he had no respect for them. And then she flared up at him, very angry. “I evidently said something she didn’t like at all. She slapped me,” he said.
“I grabbed her and started to choke her and everything seemed to go black.”
Austin Seth had heard the words, “Everything went black” too many times. He pressed Gasser to give them a few more details. Gasser admitted that he remembered having Donna down on the seat on her back, and that he’d punched her in the nose and in the right eye. But he wouldn’t discuss cutting her or stuffing her bra down her throat. And he certainly would not admit to sexually assaulting her. He did remember wanting to see her naked.
“I started to take her clothes off, and then I pushed her out of the car. She fell partway into the mud hole. I pushed her into it until she lay there facedown. Then I threw the sweater on top of her. I knew she was dead. I felt for her pulse, and there wasn’t any.”
Still, Gasser hadn’t mentioned the sexual assault or the way Donna’s body was mutilated. If she had any scratches, he insisted that that must have happened when he was dragging her toward the ditch. Maybe she’d been cut by one of the beer bottles they’d thrown out the window.
“He did admit to me,” Seth says, “that he didn’t get any kick out of raping a woman—it was the act of overcoming her that he found exciting. He liked to have complete control.”
After he left the body site, Gasser said he’d noticed Donna’s clothes in the back seat of the car, and he’d thrown them out of the car window while driving down Sand Point Way. He had driven to Magnolia Bluff and left the stolen Lincoln a block and a half from his home.
William Gasser and his wife, Isabel, had waited anxiously while their son was being questioned. After Jack was placed under arrest on suspicion of first-degree murder, they were allowed to see him. They asked to see him alone, but Austin Seth told them that wasn’t possible.
“He put on a really good act for them,” Seth remembers. “He told them that Donna Woodcock came on to him and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He made it sound as if he were just an innocent young boy, and this older woman with no morals had practically attacked him. His mother hugged him and sobbed.”
They promised they would get him a good lawyer and that it would all be straightened out.
The next morning, Jack Gasser led Don Sprinkle, Austin Seth, and Edmund Quigley, the Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney of King County, to the empty lot where he had left Donna Woodcock’s body, reenacting the crime for them. He held out his arms, showing Quigley how he had pulled Donna from the car and dragged her to the ditch.
There was no question any longer that he had killed Donna: he went unerringly to the exact spot where her body had been found. He showed the first emotion he’d exhibited since they arrested him, complaining that it really depressed him to have to come back to this place. “You really know how to make a guy feel bad,” he whined.
Velda Woodcock insisted that Donna must have known Gasser before the night she was killed. “She wouldn’t have gone with a stranger—I’ll bet he’d been into the Triple XXX Barrel before. She probably thought she knew him. But I know she would have fought him. She was really strong for a woman, and she would have struggled hard to save her life.”
As indeed she had—from the look of the many deep scratches on Gasser’s face. Donna’s purse, containing her tuition money, was never found, despite intense searches at the body site and near where the stolen Lincoln was left.
Jack Gasser had people who spoke up for him, too. His parents, of course, were his biggest support. One of his professors at Seattle University, a Jesuit school where only the brightest students were admitted, described him as a “nice boy who had everything going for him.
“He was industrious and he did above-average work. He was a nice boy—very pleasant, and seemed to get along with everyone.”
John Russell Gasser went on trial in Superior Court Judge Howard M. Findley’s courtroom on November 29,1948. Despite the fact that extensive psychological testing indicated he was quite sane and understood the difference between right and wrong at the time he killed Donna Woodcock, Gasser pleaded not guilty by reason of mental irresponsibility.
Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Vogel, 38, represented the state as he told a jury of eight men and four women about the death of Donna Woodcock.
Dr. Gale Wilson, the pathologist who had performed the autopsy on the victim, explained her wounds to the jurors. Besides being strangled with her own bra, her nose was fractured, two of her teeth were broken off when her bra was stuffed down her throat, and she had suffered a terrible beating. The jurors’ faces paled as they looked at the morgue photographs that showed the repetitive slicing of her body with the broken beer bottle. It looked as if the killer had been studying Krafft-Ebing and the Marquis de Sade, carrying murder far beyond the death of his victim.
“I ask you for the death penalty,” Vogel said. “I doubt that you ever have heard—or ever will hear—of a more cold-blooded crime.”
Jack Gasser sat at the defense table, his youthful face a study of innocence and regret. He was only 20; to recommend that he be executed would require that the jurors believed that he could never be rehabilitated. Attractive defendants traditionally have much less chance of being sentenced to death than those who look dangerous. And Gasser looked like a choirboy.
On December 2, the jurors retired to deliberate. They were back in three hours with their verdict. Jack Gasser had been found guilty of murder in the first degree, but two of the women on the jury had balked at voting for the death penalty. They all believed that he would be locked up forever.
Five days later, Judge Findley sentenced Gasser to a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. The community breathed a sigh of relief.
The physician whose brand-new Lincoln had been stolen got it back. “It still looked new and didn’t have a scratch on it,” Austin Seth remembered, “but his wife would never ride in it again. He had to turn it in on another sedan.”
Laws can change. Voters swing back and forth from one extreme to another when it comes to punishment of criminals. And in the late forties, rehabilitation was the key word. The death penalty was considered cruel and unusual.
By 1951, the State of Washington had a new policy regarding “life” sentences. The new law set a 20-year minimum for those sentenced to life in prison, and reduced that by one third with time off for good behavior. As a result, most life terms really meant 13 years and 4 months. If a killer had used a deadly weapon—such as a gun or a k
nife—in his crime, a mandatory 5 years could be added, to run either consecutively or concurrently.
For Jack Gasser, it was a “Get out of jail free” card. He had been a model prisoner, a friend to other prisoners and guards alike. He took a two-year correspondence course in basic accounting, and he even earned four postgraduate credits in accounting. He passed a shorthand course, worked as a clerk in the inmates’ store at Walla Walla, and then was put in charge of the curio store, where he handled money for both guards and prisoners. He was charming and cooperative and seemed to get along well with almost everyone he met in prison.
From 1956 on, there were notations in his file that he should be considered eligible for parole; he seemed an ideal candidate for rehabilitation. In 1962, two members of the Washington State Parole Board went over Gasser’s files carefully. They certainly had dealt with hard-core antisocial personalities before. Helen Shank had been superintendent for the state’s Maple Lane School for delinquent girls. H. J. “Jimmy” Lawrence had been the chief of the Seattle Police Department. They read all the reports from psychiatrists and psychologists about Jack Gasser. They read a study that said sixty-five murderers had been paroled in Washington State since the new law came in, and not one of them had killed anyone.
“I recall many, many cases that were murders of passion and were a one-time thing,” Helen Shank remarked a long time later.
But Jack Gasser’s crime hadn’t been a traditional “murder of passion.” It wasn’t a case of a one partner in a love relationship catching the other in flagrante delicto with another person. Jack Gasser had killed a complete stranger because he wanted to control her and torture her.
Nevertheless, on Shank’s and Lawrence’s recommendation to the parole board, Gasser was paroled on August 7, 1962. He was still a young man—only thirty-three—when he walked out of prison.
The murder of Donna Woodcock had been one of the most shocking ever to hit Seattle. Citizens remembered it, even though the general public never heard all the grotesque details. When newspapers reported that the killer who’d been sent up for the rest of his natural life was walking free among them, there were letters to the editors, editorials, and outraged disbelief.
