Last Dance, Last Chance

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 knife—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.
    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.