Last Dance, Last Chance

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