Last Dance, Last Chance

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