Last Dance, Last Chance

although her life began in Craig, Minnesota, a town so small that it no longer exists. She’d been married and divorced twice, and she’d come to Olympia from Utah 13 years earlier. She had worked in the office of the Parks and Recreation Department for the city of Lacey, a small suburb north of Olympia, but now she lived in a small apartment, subsisting on welfare. She had borne two sons and a daughter, all grown.
    Gerri loved to read, and she always had a couple of novels going. She also read everything she could find about foods that were good for health. Sadly, she defeated any beneficial effects of healthy eating by drinking too much alcohol. That hot July of 1982, Gerri was very worried about her health; she had recently had surgery for a growth in her esophagus (the tube leading from the throat to the stomach), and she was very frail. At 49, she sometimes felt that all her good times were behind her.
    When Gerri Barker’s body was removed from the ditch and taken to the Thurston County Medical Examiner’s Office for a postmortem examination, the deputy medical examiners carrying the litter barely felt her weight; she was so thin.
    Gerri had been sexually assaulted and strangled. She also had a broken nose, a broken jaw, and a broken rib. She couldn’t have put up much of a fight. Rather, it looked as though she had been beaten by someone in a towering rage. The pathologist performing the autopsy estimated that she had been dead for less than 12 hours.
    Thurston County Sheriff Dan Montgomery’s detectives went to the apartment house where Gerri Barker was said to live. The manager said that she often frequented the bar at the VFW Hall in East Olympia in the late afternoons and evenings. The bartender there nodded when they asked about her.
    “She was in yesterday afternoon about 4:30,” he said. “We had to cut her off at about 8 P.M. She had had too much to drink.”
    But Gerri had stayed at the club, nursing a soft drink and visiting with other patrons. Jack Gasser, who was also a member of the VFW club, showed up about 11 P.M. He had stayed for only half an hour, but when he left, he was with Gerri Barker.
    “They know each other before?” a detective asked.
    “I think so. They’re both regulars.”
     
    The Thurston County detectives obtained Gasser’s driver’s license photo and started a check to see if he had any prior record.
    Back at Gerri Barker’s apartment house, her neighbors recognized the photograph of Jack Gasser. Frank Braun, the manager, told detectives that he had seen him there at least a half dozen times. In early June, he’d seen Gasser knocking loudly on Gerri Barker’s apartment door. “I knew she was home,” Braun said, “but she didn’t come to the door.”
    They must have cleared up their differences. Gerri had left the VFW Hall with Jack Gasser on the night she was killed, and witnesses said they were getting along fine. She hadn’t had a drink for three hours, but she was probably still slightly affected by the drinks she had had earlier.
    Detectives found witnesses in Gasser’s apartment building, which was only a half mile from the club, who recalled seeing the pair together in the hallway near his apartment the night before. “It was about midnight,” one woman said.
    When the investigators finally located Jack Gasser on Tuesday, July 20, he wasn’t at his apartment in Olympia; he was in Everett, Washington, 90 miles north, doing an audit for the Department of Social and Health Services. Although at first he denied any part in Gerri Barker’s murder, he didn’t put up a fight when his car was seized with a search warrant. He returned to Olympia the next day and turned himself in to the Olympia Police Department, where he was arrested. He was surprised by that and refused to give any statement. He had long since become con-wise and didn’t care for cops.
    Search warrants were obtained for his apartment. The detectives found human blood inside the apartment, in the doorway, in the stairwell, and in Gasser’s 1978 Mazda. It was not of his blood type, but it did match Gerri Barker’s.
    On Thursday, July 22, 1982, Jack Gasser faced Thurston County Superior Court Judge Carol Fuller, charged for the second time with first-degree murder. Fuller ordered that he be held without bail.
    On December 28, 1982, Jack Gasser was convicted of first-degree murder for the second time. With the sentencing matrix, his first possible parole date was set for June 7, 2012,