Last Dance, Last Chance

anything they could link to her killer.
    “Let’s try upstream,” Pete Kuehnel said, and they made their way a quarter of a mile to the Dead Horse Creek Road bridge. Inching along the railing, they found a clump of black hair caught in the wood rail, and they sealed it in a plastic bag.
    They were already convinced that the killer had thrown Nancy Winslow into the river from one of the bridges upstream. The hair, however, would prove to be animal hair.
    They got a break the next day. A mountain rescue volunteer, Doug Hamilton, who operated a power plant further upriver, called Pete Kuehnel to say that he had found a sweater on the Wells Creek Road that might have some connection to the murder.
    “At first, I thought it was a deer hide that some poachers had thrown there,” Hamilton said, “but then I got closer and it was a sweater.”
    He led Kuehnel to where it lay—150 feet from the Mount Baker Highway and 20 feet down a mossy bank. It was the white mohair sweater with orange trim that Nancy Winslow had borrowed the night she vanished.
    Optimistic after this find, detectives and Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts spent the next two days searching the area for more clothing or her purse. They found nothing at all.
    Although both the Whatcom County Sheriff’s men and the Bellingham police worked on this baffling murder case for months—for years —questioning scores of witnesses and a dozen suspects, they never solved it. Nancy Winslow might as well have walked into another dimension when she left the Beaver Tavern at 10:30 on the night of July 26, 1970. But she was gone, lost to her children and her husband. Today she would be 54 years old.
     
    Nancy had arranged for a ride home, but the cook, who answered the phone, said that all of the calls coming in for her were from women or girls, and all the calls she made—except for the one to her husband—were to women. The only other way she could have found a ride was with someone who was a customer at the restaurant.
    Nancy Winslow was a faithful wife, and while she might laugh and joke with a customer, she would never consider dating another man. The owners of the Beaver Tavern were able to remember most of the customers who had come in on that Sunday afternoon and evening 32 years ago.
    One of them was a man who sat in the bar section of the restaurant. “He spent a lot of time teasing Nancy,” the owner’s wife said. “He kept calling her over to him, and he was kind of hustling her. I think he got to her with his jokes, because he made her nervous enough to confuse her orders.”
    “What did he look like?” Pete Kuehnel asked.
    It was hard for the witness to judge age, but she guessed he was in his thirties, somewhere around six feet. He had dark brown hair, combed over his forehead in waves and then slicked back on the sides. “He had on a dark ski jacket and dark pants.”
    “Moustache?” Kuehnel asked. “Beard?”
    “No, he was clean-shaven.”
    “When did he come in?”
    “About eight or nine. He finished his meal and left about an hour before Nancy finished her shift.”
     
    More than three decades have passed since Nancy Winslow drove away with her killer. However, although her murder remains unsolved, there are too many connections to Jack Gasser not to wonder:
Like Donna Woodcock, Nancy was a 22-year-old waitress.
She accepted a ride home with a stranger after working a late shift.
Her killer threw her clothes away after he killed her.
Her body was left in water.
She was killed in July.
She was strangled with an article of her own clothing.
She was probably beaten in the face and on the head (injured portions of the body decompose first).
Her purse was never found.
She was found nude.
    Jack Gasser lived in Bellingham, attending college, at the time Nancy Winslow died.
    Although another waitress knew Jack Gasser as a regular for breakfast at the Beaver Tavern, she never connected him to Nancy’s murder. He lived in a rooming house nearby, and he seemed like a good guy to her. In 1970, she certainly didn’t know Jack’s background. He was just another young guy going to college. It would be many years before she finally read something in the paper that made her wonder.
    At any rate, Jack Gasser was never a suspect in Nancy Winslow’s murder. His name never even came up in1970. He was on active parole and had to report to his parole officer regularly until December 1975. As far as the parole officer could tell, Gasser was making a