Green River, Running Red Read online

  The two women in the river itself had been “raped” symbolically by their killer, perhaps after a true rape. He had inserted triangular-shaped stones into their vaginas so tightly that they had to be surgically removed. That might mean he had been unable to achieve an erection, and in his fury, the rocks were a crude substitute. It might be his way to denigrate the victims. It could even mean that a woman was the killer. But, for the moment, and for years to come, this information about the three-sided rocks would be guarded carefully.

  When the last two victims were identified, one of them fit the profiles of Wendy Coffield, Debra Bonner, and Marcia Chapman. Cynthia Hinds was only seventeen, a vibrant and pretty girl who went by the name “Cookie.” She also made her living on the street. She had felt safe working the SeaTac Strip because she had a male “protector”—in reality, a pimp. He told detectives he had seen Cynthia last on August 11. Near the Pac HiWay and S. 200th, he had watched surreptitiously as she got into a black Jeep with a male driver, but he hadn’t written down the license plate and he couldn’t describe the driver. Like most pimps, he had offered her very little security. The moment Cynthia was alone with a stranger, she had no protection at all.

  CYNTHIA had never been arrested for soliciting.

  *The names of some individuals in this book have been changed. Such names are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time they appear.

  2

  DAVE REICHERT had almost tripped over the girl who lay in the reedy grass on the bank of the Green River, and he had to stand there, motionless, while measurements were taken for triangulation. He would never forget her—a petite, slightly chubby girl, with reddish hair.

  AFTER SKETCHES of her face in death were published, her traumatized family realized why she hadn’t come home. At the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, they identified her as Opal Charmaine Mills. She was barely sixteen. Opal had a mother and father and a big brother who cared deeply about her. They lived on the East Hill outskirts of Kent.

  Opal’s mother, Kathy Mills, told investigators that the last time she had seen Opal was three days before her body was found—on August 12. Opal had told her that Thursday morning that she was going to “work,” and called home again in the early afternoon, saying she was at a phone booth in Angle Lake State Park.

  For Opal, work didn’t mean prostitution. She was excited because she was going to be painting houses with her friend Cookie.

  Kathy Mills barely knew Cookie, and didn’t know her real name. She was a new acquaintance of Opal’s, and she had been to the Mills home only once. Cookie was, of course, Cynthia Hinds, whose body was found so close to Opal’s.

  While it was true that Opal sometimes stayed away from home for a day or so without checking in with her family, and she had even run away once, there was no indication that she was involved in peddling sex on the highway. Her best friend, Doris Davis, had known Opal since they were both in fourth grade and they saw each other every day. She was appalled that anyone would link Opal to streetwalking. She had never mentioned prostitution to Doris. “That’s why I couldn’t believe it. She always shared her problems with me.”

  From the time she was a toddler, most people called her “Little Opal,” because Opal Charmaine was always petite with chipmunk cheeks and a bright smile. She had put on a few extra pounds lately, but she still wasn’t much over five feet tall.

  Opal’s mother, Kathy, was once a farm girl in Missouri, a pretty strawberry blonde with pale skin and a tendency to burn if she was out in the sun too long. Her mother was only fourteen when Kathy was born, and she would eventually give birth to fourteen more children, but the family decided she was too young to raise Kathy. The baby girl was given to her uncle Herbert to raise. Herbert Gardner, a milkman, and his wife became her “real parents,” although they were not her birth parents. She knew her birth mother, however, because her extended family lived within blocks of one another. The Gardners were a proud family, able to trace their ancestors back many generations.

  Kathy was a tomboy who loved wearing cowboy boots and riding horses on the farm. She was an intelligent little girl, raised as an only child. She married in 1955 when she was in her late teens, and she and her husband moved to Denver. But in the early sixties, Kathy’s marriage was winding down. And shortly thereafter, she met someone whom the Gardners considered a most unlikely mate for her: Robert Mills. His sister, Irma, lived across the street from Kathy in Denver and invited her to a party. Mills was there—as dark and thin and tall as she was fair and plump.

  Back in Missouri, her adoptive father, Herbert, and the rest of her southern family found Robert Mills to be the last possible man they would have chosen for Kathy. To begin with, he was too old for her—seventeen years older. For another, he had been married before.

  Worst of all for a family steeped for generations in the prejudices of rural Missouri was the fact that Robert Mills was black. Although he was talented and charismatic and Kathy was thrilled when he paid attention to her, her family let her know that she would be as good as dead to them if she continued to associate with a black man.

  Maybe she didn’t really believe they meant what they said, or maybe Kathy was too much in love to break her romance off—in any case, she and Robert Mills decided to get married. However, Colorado had long-standing statutes against marriage between partners of different races. As archaic and shocking as those laws are today, they are not as remote in America’s history as we would like to believe. Even in the sixties, miscegenation (marriage between two different races) was listed as an “immoral act” under the vagrancy statutes in Denver. Any couple who defied this law and anyone performing the wedding ceremony would be fined between $50 and $500 and sentenced to anywhere from three months to two years in jail.

  “All marriages between Negroes or mulattoes of either sex and white persons are declared to be absolutely void” was the wording in the 1864 Territorial Assembly law that governed most of Colorado. Amazingly, the Colorado State Supreme Court found this law constitutional in 1942 and it stayed on the books—at least for part of Colorado. The part that had once been Mexico had no miscegenation law, so it didn’t apply to anyone living south or west of the Arkansas River or on the other side of a line drawn north from the river’s source at Climax.

  Kathy and Mills gave up the idea of getting married in Denver. Instead, they traveled to Yakima, Washington, where Kathy’s grandparents had been assigned as missionaries for their church. They, at least, were speaking to Kathy.

  Washington was one of only fifteen states with no miscegenation laws at the time. Kathy and Robert got married there. She was twenty-eight; Robert was forty-five. From that moment and over the next three decades, the Missouri branch of Kathy’s family cut off all ties with her. She sent them letters regularly, but they never responded. She would have felt even worse had she realized that during all those years her letters were tossed into a box, unopened.

  Robert Mills worked as a warehouseman, and Kathy in a luggage store. Together, they made a good living. In 1963, they had their first child, Garrett, who was born with a hole in his heart and one of his heart valves on the wrong side. He would need surgery in the years to come if he was to survive.

  Finally, when he was six, they could wait no longer. Garrett was scheduled for corrective surgery at Seattle’s Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. He had a close friend, a boy with very similar heart defects. “He had the surgery first,” Garrett recalled. “And he died. When I heard that, I decided they weren’t going to cut my heart open. I ran away from home, but I only got a few blocks. You know the old story: I wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone. So I came back, and I was lucky. My surgery worked.”

  “I was to be ‘The Hope,’ ” Garrett would remember, as he explained that his father expected him to become everything that he himself had failed to achieve. It was to be a great burden for Garrett, and Robert Mills used his own brand of tough love that often seemed to have no love at all behind it.

 
Little Opal Charmaine was born in Seattle’s Harborview Hospital on April 12, 1966. “She was the ‘Princess,’ ” Garrett said fondly. “From the time she was born, my main job, always, was to look after Opal and keep her safe.”

  He knew why his parents, particularly his father, were so adamant that Opal stayed safe. She was named after Robert Mills’s sister, Opal, who had been murdered in Oakland, California. The older Opal’s killer was never caught, and her death left a heavy burden on Mills.

  Her big brother didn’t mind looking after Opal. Garrett loved her and he’d always been in charge of her, so he didn’t question that he was both her brother and her main babysitter. Kathy went back to work as soon as possible, and they were latchkey kids. Garrett was in charge of the house keys. “I would always pick Opal up from school and walk her home,” he said. “We played in our yard or in the woods, sometimes in the park.”

  Garrett remembered Opal’s face shining with excitement as she carried what she called her “Hair Bear Bunch” lunch box on the first day of kindergarten. “She was a tiny little ‘Peanut’ with baby fat and her hair braided into pigtails.”

  Wherever Garrett went, he had to take Opal along. The boys he hung out with in elementary school didn’t mind; they all knew Opal was part of the deal. Even when he grew old enough to date, Opal was always there in the backseat at the drive-in movie. She was his responsibility and he accepted that.

  The Millses lived in a nice home east of Kent on the way to Maple Valley. There were flowers in the yard, along with a miniature windmill and a brightly painted totem pole. They attended the Church of God in Christ on Capital Hill in Seattle several times a week. The services were four or five hours long, and Garrett and Opal often grew restive and bored. “We weren’t allowed to move. We had to just sit there,” Garrett said. After that, they were very active in the Assembly of God church in Kent.

  Elementary school at Cedar Valley was a pretty good time for Garrett and Opal. Their closest friends from the fourth grade on were their neighbors’ children—Doris Davis for Opal and Eugene Smith for Garrett. The families sometimes took each other’s children on trips, and the Mills children were always welcome next door. Robert Mills owned campers over the years and they explored the western states for their vacations. Being mixed-race wasn’t really an issue during Garrett and Opal’s Cedar Valley school years.

  In 1973–74, Robert Mills was a den father for Boy Scouts and Kathy a Brownie mother. Garrett and Opal had their picture in the Kent Journal after they raised close to a thousand dollars in a Variety Club benefit to help pediatric heart patients.

  Early on, Opal had an optimistic view about the future. She told Garrett about all the kids she planned to have. “Naively, she would say, ‘And they will all be happy!’ Opal planned to be rich so she could take care of our mother, and she was going to buy her a big house someday,” Garrett recalled. “Even when she was seven, she struck me as someone who cared about others more than herself.”

  Outwardly, the Millses seemed to be a happy family. In fact, Robert Mills was probably the most popular man in their neighborhood. He was the “go to” guy who was always willing to help everyone who lived there. He was friendly and charming, easy to get along with. He could fix things, and he could get people good deals when they were looking to buy something. He had a lot of charisma.

  “And he could sing,” Garrett remembered. “He looked and sounded like Nat King Cole, so close that when I was younger, I thought he was Nat King Cole!”

  But Garrett Mills’s life at home was extremely difficult, and things were not what they seemed to be. Once the front door closed, the father whom the neighbors admired and looked up to was a man full of rage.

  “It’s hard to describe,” Garrett said. “In one way, my dad was the coolest person in the world, and I wanted to be like him. But I was also frightened of him. He always said, ‘People are rats!’ and if he thought I even looked the wrong way with my eyes, he’d hit me. He called me Whispering Smith because I was afraid to talk around him. He could never remember people’s names so he called them some celebrity’s name and they liked that.”

  Mills wanted Garrett to become a doctor or a famous saxophone player like Seattle’s renowned Kenny G. But Garrett wasn’t particularly adept at science, and he was only an average saxophone player, even though his father bought him the best instrument available. He took lessons for years and played in the school marching band, but Garrett just wasn’t musically talented. His dad could sing but he couldn’t.

  “My father was bitter and he was mean,” Garrett said. “But he wanted us to have everything material that we could—the best of everything. And we did, although he was very bad at handling money. He always had a job, except the one time he was fired after he saw one of his managers reading a ‘Klan’ magazine. He was so mad he went after the guy with a crowbar.”

  Robert Mills went to the union and appealed his firing on the grounds that it had come about because of racial prejudice, and he won. He was back on the job.

  Although his family had a nice house and furniture, and he drove fancy cars, Mills’s children never knew what would set his temper off. “He was always strict with us. But when he didn’t take his blood pressure medicine,” Garrett said, “he’d do things like shake down our bedrooms at one AM. We weren’t doing anything wrong, or hiding anything, but he’d just get these ideas, come in and wake us up and start searching for whatever.”

  Robert Mills never hit Opal, although he used cruel words with her. He did use physical punishment with Garrett, hitting him with everything from a belt to a hammer. Most of his verbal abuse bounced off Opal. She was happy, bubbly, and full of mischief.

  “We both were kind of mischievous,” Garrett remembered. “We were home alone so much that we’d get bored. My parents had a hard time getting babysitters for us because we had a reputation, but not for anything really bad. We did stuff like dragging lawn sprinklers to the front of a babysitter’s door—she lived in our cul-de-sac—and we’d turn it on so it would get her wet when she opened the door. Or we’d coast downhill in a grocery cart. Once, our cul-de-sac had a meeting about our pranks and what should they do with us?”

  The only times that Garrett grew annoyed with his little sister was when Opal tattled on him for something. She was something of a snitch, often telling on her father, too, when he drank too much or flirted openly with other women.

  “I was never supposed to hit Opal,” her brother said. “But she could do anything she wanted to me, and sometimes she pushed it. If I got mad, she’d call my dad at work and I’d have to move out of the house for a couple of days.”

  Most of the time, however, Opal and Garrett were there for each other. Their mother had no power to stop her husband from his cruel punishments, which became more frequent after he had a series of little strokes. Although Garrett wanted her to leave his father, he knew she always held on to her belief that things were going to get better, that everything would turn out all right.

  In the early years of their marriage, the Millses had had a lot of dogs—chows for Robert and collies for Kathy. But as the years passed, Robert’s rage grew and he was no longer a kind pet owner. Asked if he and Opal had pets when they were children, Garrett shook his head and mumbled so softly that he was almost inaudible. “No…he’d get mad and kill them—so after a while, we didn’t try.”

  While he bought the biggest TV sets and a series of cars for Garrett, the elder Mills sometimes thought his children ate too much, so he locked up the food cupboards and the refrigerator. He complained that their showers used up too much hot water, so they often went next door to eat and to use Doris and Eugene’s folks’ bathroom.

  “I didn’t feel like I was abused,” Garrett said. “I didn’t know anything different from the way it was for us.”

  While Garrett grew more quiet and tried to stay out of his father’s way, Opal seemed happy. She always had “weird collections,” said her brother. “One time, she papered one wall of he
r room with candy bar wrappers. Another time, it was posters from some movie she liked. She kept every doll she ever had, and she made up stories about all of them—really complicated stories because she had a great imagination.

  “I remember us going to school, hours before anyone else, to dance in the school cafeteria with the jukebox. For those few hours we were free to be happy, free from ridicule and worry. We would tire out and sit and talk about the future as usual, and all her big dreams.”

  Opal and her friend Doris Davis would dance together at parties; Garrett laughed, remembering, “Opal couldn’t dance at all!”

  And so they lived with a nurturing mother, a father who was growing increasingly bitter, and had good friends. Things got much worse as Garrett went to junior high school. Kent was very different in the seventies than it is now. There were only twenty-five minority students in the entire Kent school system, and Garrett found himself a target for bullies.

  “I was goofy-looking with a small head and big glasses. I was so skinny that my chest caved in. First, they called me ‘gay’ because there was this gay guy on Soap—the TV show that was popular then. Then, with the Iran war, they called me Sand Nigger, and then Kunta Kinte after Roots.”

  It was a very hard time for him. He tried out for football, but “I just didn’t understand it.”

  Robert Mills urged Garrett to use violence to strike back at the students who teased him, and he put crowbars in his son’s car to encourage him to do that. But Garrett didn’t feel that was the answer to anything. He was not a fighter.

  It got worse when Opal moved up to junior high. “Opal, Doris, Eugene, and I were the only black students in the school,” Garrett said. “I tried not to let Opal see how I was treated. She would want to fight back and stand up for me.”

  Opal had always been feisty as well as fun, and she couldn’t stand to see anyone mistreat her big brother. “When people picked on me for being multiracial, the Klan jokes, chasing me, shutting me out of everything, I didn’t want her to be ashamed of me, but she never was. Opal would say, ‘That’s my brother and you better shut your mouth or get a knuckle sandwich!’