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.”