Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  “Her face would get red and she’d put her tiny fist up and be ready to square off.”

  In their last year in school together, the new principal was also African American, and she really tried to help. She took them to see Jesse Jackson and encouraged them to be proud of who they were. The irony was that both Opal and Garrett were paler than many of the Italian or Slavic kids; they looked as though they had really good tans—the kind people lie in the sun to achieve—but they were just different enough to be singled out for derision. It seemed to roll off Opal’s back, probably because her brother was always there to shield her from the worst of it, but it made his school years a nightmare.

  By the time Garrett moved on to high school, he admitted that he had a “major chip” on his shoulder, but he’d put on weight, and he wasn’t bullied any longer. He’d still pick Opal up from junior high school, but he moved away from home when he was sixteen, unwilling to endure his father’s attitude any longer. Almost anything he did annoyed Robert. His father bad-mouthed any girl he dated—even before he met her.

  “I lived with my friends Eugene and Glen on Capital Hill, but I was still pretty young,” Garrett recalled. “I came home to visit my mom and Opal, and to have dinner and do my laundry. Glen was really big and tall. My dad called him Fat Albert.”

  Opal was fifteen, still best friends with Doris Davis, and still a terrible dancer. She had songs she liked: Tina Marie’s “Square Biz” and “I Heard It on the Grapevine,” the instrumental version. Her favorite was a slow song, “Love Begins with One Hello.” They would play that song at her funeral.

  At about fifteen, Opal started to put on weight and tried so hard to slim down. To remind herself that she had to diet, she plastered their refrigerator with her drawings and warnings. She was quite talented as an artist. She wrote: “Flat stomach!” “Size 5,” “Skinny,” “Drink Your Water!” “Tight Jeans,” and “Short Shorts,” illustrating them all before she taped them to the refrigerator. It was a struggle for her, though. Her mother had always had to fight weight, and Opal took after Kathy instead of Robert, who never seemed to gain an ounce. Although he was no longer skinny, Garrett was like his father.

  In April 1982, Opal turned sixteen. Garrett was living away from home, but they were in touch and he still felt responsible for her. She was “kind of engaged” to his roommate Glen, and really seemed to care about him, but she was too young to consider marriage seriously. Garrett knew she was spending time in Tacoma with friends there—a change from her having a best friend who lived right next door.

  In truth, Opal was what used to be called “boy crazy.” Where she had once collected candy bar wrappers and movie posters, now she collected male names and telephone numbers. She’d made up stories about her dolls’ lives, and now she fashioned fictional adventures about herself. She wanted to impress her friends, and sometimes she even copied names from the phone book—men or boys she didn’t even know—and showed her lists to her girlfriend. She was “engaged” lots of times, but only in her own mind. She developed almost instant crushes on boys she did know.

  Opal did date Glen, Garrett’s roommate, quite often. They went to drive-in movies and on typical teenage dates. Opal didn’t have access to a car, and she had to take a bus wherever she wanted to go unless her parents drove her.

  She also fancied herself going steady with a man a few years older than she was, even though he was dating another girl far more often than he saw Opal. She wrote him a very dramatic and angry letter, but she didn’t send it. Later, detectives found it among her belongings and tracked the man down.

  He was bewildered about why she would be so upset with him, but then he shrugged and said, “She was just fascinated with writing letters to people. I did date her, and she got mad when I wouldn’t drive from downtown to the East Hill of Kent to come see her. She’d be upset when she had to take a bus to come and see me. It’s possible that she saw me with my other girlfriend—I don’t know. But I was dating the other girl a long time before I dated Opal, and after she was murdered, too.”

  In many ways, Opal had one foot in childhood and one foot on a dangerously adult track. She tried marijuana, but didn’t smoke it more than a few times. She was probably sexually active. She dropped out of school and was transferred to a continuation school in Renton, where she met older, more worldly, girls who were working toward their GEDs.

  But Opal still loved to do the silly things she’d done as a little girl. “About a week before Opal disappeared, we had a ‘me and her day,’ ” Garrett recalled. “She came up to Broadway where I lived and we were just goofing around. We went to Dick’s for hamburgers, and we walked around. We swiped a grocery cart and rode downhill—just like we were seven or eight. I think we both realized it was kind of the end of an era.”

  LESS than two weeks after that last day they spent together, Garrett Mills went with his parents to identify Opal’s body. Because she had been strangled by ligature, her face still bore the mask of her final agony. Robert Mills told a reporter that he could identify her only by her slightly crooked toes.

  Garrett had nightmares for years after. He had promised Opal when they were children that he would never leave her, and that he would never let anyone hurt her. He felt that he had failed her when she needed him most.

  As the media showed Opal’s picture over and over, rumors and lies “took on a life of their own,” Garrett remembered. But no one who went to school with them truly understood what a tightly bonded relationship Garrett and Opal had, two children growing up in a very difficult world.

  “Dave Reichert questioned me for four hours,” Garrett said. “I realized that I was a suspect. The thing that pains me the most is that some people thought I actually had something to do with the killings.”

  A school official told a reporter that “Opal’s pimp” picked her up at school, but it wasn’t her pimp; it had been her big brother, seeing that she got home safely, as he always had. Some gossip painted Garrett as a drug dealer and said that the police were following him everywhere, long after he was cleared of any suspicions.

  “All the while, I was just a gangly insecure kid who played the saxophone and had two guinea pigs,” he said sadly.

  His father had come home from identifying Opal’s body and killed one of his pets in his rage and grief. Even so, Garrett moved home to help his parents face the tragedy as much as he could. He stayed about six months, but it didn’t work. His father drank before; after Opal was murdered, he sank into alcoholism. Nine years later, Robert Mills died.

  Was Opal about to become a prostitute? That is a question no one can answer. She loved attention and romance and excitement, and despite her voluptuous figure, she was emotionally immature. Even her brother didn’t know how much influence her new friends from Renton and Tacoma had over her.

  She would have been extremely guileless if a slick and persuasive pimp promised her freedom, money, and adventure.

  Having her killer go unpunished made losing Opal all the more painful. There was no ending to it. Not for them, and not for any of the other families.

  3

  DICK KRASKE had been wise to keep as much information from the media about the five bodies in the Green River as he could. “They hammered us from day two and never let up,” he remembered, wincing. “Throughout the rest of my time in this investigation, my attitude was you should not get into a pissing contest with a skunk—or anyone who buys ink by the barrel. There were times when I thought it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to go across the street and apply [for a job] at the Fire Department.”

  The press and local television investigative reporters were anxious to link the victims by concluding that they had all worked the highway stroll. It made natural headlines. Prostitutes being murdered suggested a titillating story. Moreover, citizens, living in nice safe houses, whose wives and daughters were never alone on the streets could be reassured. Their female family members weren’t offering sex for money, and they had no tattoos or drug hab
its, so they could conclude that a roving killer was no danger to them.

  DICK KRASKE had wasted no time. On Monday, August 16, he organized the initial Green River Task Force with twenty-five investigators from King County, the Seattle Police Department, the Tacoma Police Department, and the Kent Police Department. It was a prescient decision. No one could have even imagined what lay ahead.

  They didn’t know at that point how many killers they were looking for. It was possible there was more than one. Killing partners were not unknown. In the early eighties, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were boasting of over three hundred victims in their deadly travels around America, and Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono had racked up a tragic toll of young female victims in Los Angeles before Bianchi moved to Bellingham, Washington, and committed more murders on his own. Two men working together and obsessed with killing wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual. One man, bringing a single body, day after day, to this river hiding place was a more likely scenario. Perhaps he even had a vehicle large enough to hold more than one of his victims, all of whom needed to be hidden as soon as possible.

  With the discovery of the last three bodies in a secluded site along the river, the consensus was that probably all five of the victims had gone into the Green River at that point. But Wendy Coffield’s and Debra Bonner’s bodies had drifted downstream until they were caught on something.

  The investigators had no doubt that the killer had watched the nightly news, realized his mistake at not weighting the dead girls down, and rectified that with the rocks and boulders. He was crafty, obviously unafraid to take five victims in one month, but smart enough to hone his technique to evade the detectives who were now stalking him. But his “dump site” had been discovered and he couldn’t go back there now.

  4

  PEOPLE who lived in King County, Washington, weren’t afraid. Yes, there were five unsolved murders in the county, and it might even be true that the deaths were in all likelihood connected to a common killer or killers. But the backgrounds of the victims, soon manipulated and smoothed and shaped into a single image by the media, showed them to be young female prostitutes who hitchhiked. Every one of them had died within a month, as if some deadly tornado had swept through the Kent Valley, a faceless killer who had destroyed them and then moved on. The lay public wanted to believe their murderer was a drifter who had already left the area.

  The girls who were still out on the streets were working because most of them had no other way to survive. They were a little anxious, and a lot of them tried to get a gun, or they carried a knife in their shoes. Outreach workers advised them to “Stay in groups. Don’t go out on ‘dates’ unless you’ve known them before. If you get a negative feeling, don’t get in the car. Follow your intuition.”

  But they weren’t dealing with Girl Scouts or students on a school trip. How often would young prostitutes know the men who stopped to pick them up? They had to take chances.

  “We even tell them to get off the streets,” one of the more naive social workers said. “But that’s a joke to them. They think they can handle anything.”

  And some of the working girls believed they could, while others worried about what to do. Many relocated to Portland, finding Seattle too scary. One teenage prostitute shook her head and said, “Even Portland isn’t safe. They think a ‘trick’ maybe killed all those girls. Well, just like we travel, tricks do, too. You never know whether he is here today or will be here tomorrow.”

  Needing rent or food or drug money, most of the girls returned to their regular haunts. The weather was warm in late August and it was light out until nine or so. They knew other people whose world was the Strip and they began to feel safe again.

  The rest of August 1982 passed without incident. The bad times were probably over. At least everyone wanted to believe it was over, something frightening that had touched them briefly but hadn’t really interfered with their lives.

  Still, what had happened was not nearly as isolated as it first seemed to be. Looking at those hellish weeks in July and August was like walking into a movie in the middle. Maybe the summer of 1982 was not the first chapter of horror after all.

  There were some similar cases in the Greater Seattle area from early in 1982 that troubled those who remembered them—cops and reporters and families who had lived through them. Adding to a faint sense of dread was the phenomenon that occurs in slow news periods. Columnists and TV news producers look for crime statistics or murders that might be connectable to scare up a story. Way back on Valentine’s Day, popular columnist Rick Anderson filled an entire page of the Sunday Seattle Times with the details of the deaths of three young women.

  Leann Wilcox was sixteen in October 1981, and she was a lovely-looking girl, but from the moment she entered puberty, she changed from an agreeable child to an incorrigible thirteen-year-old who was placed in a group home in Spokane when her mother could not control her. By the time she was sixteen, she was familiar with the street life and had four arrests for prostitution. She came home occasionally and vowed to change her life. But nothing lasted. Leann left for good on October 17, 1981.

  Her mother’s final phone conversation with her was typical of the acrimony that marked their struggles with each other. Leann said she wasn’t going back to school and she wouldn’t be home for Christmas either.

  Exhausted and frustrated, her mother said something she would always regret: “Leann, my door has always been open to you; you know that. But as long as you live like you are, then I don’t want you home anymore.”

  Leann hung up on her. A month later, on January 21, 1982, two men found her body facedown in a weed patch at S. 380th and Military Road South. Friends had seen her only two days before. With her wine-colored jacket thrown over her, she seemed almost to be sleeping, but she was dead, beaten and strangled.

  On January 29, 1982, Virginia Taylor, eighteen, headed for a bus in southwest Seattle. It would take her to her job as a dancer in a peep show on the seediest section of First Avenue. Virginia had visualized her life as so much happier than it was. She was a bride, but her groom slept alone on a prison bunk, serving five years for theft. Virginia’s job, where men sat in booths and dropped quarters into a slot to raise the curtains so they could watch half-nude girls gyrate and strip behind a glass wall, didn’t pay that well. But it sure paid more than taking orders in a drive-through burger joint. Virginia hated her shifts in the booth. She was more modest than most of the girls at the peep show, so she wasn’t a favorite of the patrons. And the piles of quarters weren’t worth stripping all the way or accommodating requests from kinky customers.

  Despite her job, Virginia was generally cautious, yet she occasionally hitchhiked. Nobody saw her get on the number 20 bus that January day, and nobody remembered seeing her beyond two blocks from her sister’s house.

  Schoolchildren found her body later that day in a muddy field. She was fully clothed and she had been strangled. The only suspect was a girl Virginia’s own age who had threatened her in a silly feud over a stolen coat, and that had been a year before her murder. It was unlikely that a female would have had the strength to choke Virginia to death.

  Joan Conner, sixteen, had lived with her mother in a small house in the far north end of Seattle. On Thursday morning, February 4, 1982, her mother left a bus pass for Joan and suggested it was a good day for her to look for a job. Joan had dropped out of school, and she hadn’t worked since she left McDonald’s employ the previous fall.

  “Okay, Mom,” she said. “But I’m going to try to sell some Campfire mints, too.”

  Joan belonged to the Campfire Horizon Club for teenagers, and she had no ties at all to prostitution or First Avenue. But she encountered someone infinitely dangerous. Joan was found dead later that day. She had been beaten and strangled and her body thrown out of a car on Fremont Street near the Ship Canal. Her purse, her identification, her GED certificate were all missing.

  Joan Conner’s mother, who had worried all Thursd
ay night when her daughter failed to come home, was nervously watching the noon news the next day. She saw a young woman’s body being placed in the medical examiner’s van and she knew in her heart it was Joan. “That’s Joan. That’s Joan,” she gasped to a friend, not knowing how she knew, but feeling ice in her veins as she saw only the form in a body bag.

  Tragically, she was right.

  The three victims hadn’t known each other. They shared only their youth and the manner of their deaths. The public had well-nigh forgotten them by August 1982, but the detectives who worked to find their killer or killers remembered them. The question was: Were they connected to the Green River murders?

  Perhaps they were, but their cases were not initially considered to be part of the Green River puzzle.

  In any city of considerable size, there are always open homicide cases. Detectives work those cases they call “losers” more avidly than laymen ever realize. They do it quietly and with great determination, but they know too well the falsity of the old adage “There is no such thing as a perfect murder.”

  If you use the criteria that some killers are never caught, then there are countless perfect murders. Strangers who kill strangers and move on are the most likely to evade detection. However, if they continue to kill, the chance that they will leave behind clues that can be traced back to them grows. But computers were not generally in use in most homicide units in the eighties; they were expensive, complicated, and not considered to be of much value in investigations.

  Furthermore, nobody voiced a concern in 1982 that a serial killer might be loose in King County. As widespread as they are today in movies, books, and on television, serial killers were virtually unrecognized as such by the general public and by most members of law enforcement. Few had even heard the term serial killer. Certainly, Ted Bundy, with more than three dozen young female victims, was a serial killer. But when he was sentenced to death in 1979 and again in 1980, the media referred to him as a “mass murderer.”