Last Dance, Last Chance

remarkably successful return to society.
    In the fall of 1970, a few months after Nancy Winslow was murdered, Jack Gasser got married. His wife, Trudy * , was divorced and the mother of four children. Jack told her about his past, or at least some of it. “He said that he had killed this girl, but he twisted it around so that it didn’t sound so bad,” Trudy recalled later.
    When he graduated from Western Washington University in 1972, Jack and his new family moved to Olympia, Washington, the state capital. He had a job there as an accountant for the state Department of Ecology. He got a better job with the State of Washington in 1974 as an auditor with the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS). His work required that he travel around the state frequently.
    Jack and Trudy became the parents of two sons in the early years of their marriage. He seemed to be completely rehabilitated, although Trudy worried sometimes. He still had a problem with alcohol. His personality changed radically when he drank. When he was sober, you couldn’t ask for a nicer guy. When he was drunk, his wife was afraid of him. She hoped she wasn’t being paranoid, but there always seemed to be news of a woman being murdered in the cities where Jack went to go over the books of the different DSHS offices.
    On January 31, 1981, Trudy and Jack separated at her instigation. She filed for divorce and asked for a restraining order against him.
    On July 4, however, he came to her home, drunk, and attacked her physically. On December 8, Trudy Gasser asked for a second restraining order that would bar Gasser from being “inebriated or consuming alcoholic beverages” in front of her six children.
    In her divorce petition, she said that he had piled up $8,000 worth of debt without her knowledge, and that she had reluctantly agreed to refinance their house so they could get $15,000 in cash. It was either that or file for bankruptcy.
    Through it all, Gasser kept his job with the State of Washington. He made $1,370 a month, which wasn’t a munificent salary, but he had good benefits, and he could do free-lance accounting on the side. Ironically, the State of Washington was now paying him approximately the amount it had cost each year to keep him in the penitentiary.
    The Gassers’ divorce became final on July 6, 1982. Trudy Gasser was awarded custody of the children, but Jack was given visitation rights.
     
    It had been 34 years, almost to the day, since a young Jack Gasser had killed Donna Woodcock, and 12 years since Nancy Winslow’s murder. Gasser scarcely resembled the handsome young man he’d once been. He was almost 54 now, and he carried a lot of weight. His features seemed larger, too; his nose was hawk like, and his brow was deeply furrowed. In repose, his face could look like a study of rage. But Jack had kept his full head of dark hair, and many single, middle-aged women were attracted to him.
    He was still a ladies’ man, and he continued to drink—more heavily all the time. However, his neighbors in the apartment complex on Martin Way in Olympia found him a great guy, even when he was drinking. There were several single women in nearby apartments. One, a 49-year-old waitress, said, “Every woman up here was treated as a lady by him. He was a gentleman, nice in the halls. Even if he came in drinking, he did not cuss and raise Cain. He was a very quiet man.”
    Perhaps.
    He had been officially single for only eleven days when John Russell Gasser made headlines again. It was July once more, which might have been mere coincidence, or perhaps it was a month that brought Gasser’s buried anger to the surface. He was bitter about women, he told friends. His wife had left him, and he couldn’t see his children when he wanted to.
     
    At 11:30 on the morning of July 17, 1982, two boys were walking near a ditch on Johnson Point Road about five miles north of Olympia. The Nisqually River empties into the Henderson Inlet there, where Henderson Bay nudges the lowlands off Interstate 5. The boys looked down into the ditch and saw what they first thought was a store mannequin.
    But it wasn’t. It was the naked body of 49-year-old Gerri Barker. Gerri was a lonely woman, worried about her health, nearing middle age. Someone had thrown her away in this ditch, her battered body mute evidence of a terrible beating.
    Geraldine Ann “Gerri” Barker had once been an Air Force wife, and she had lived in many exotic spots around the world,