A mother fights to forgive
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Nineteen years after the slaying of her lively 16-year-old daughter, Kathy Mills faces an almost unthinkable challenge: finding it in her heart to forgive the suspected killer.
News that police had arrested Gary Leon Ridgway in the deaths of Opal Charmaine Mills and three others has brought no satisfaction to Kathy Mills.
It has reopened her anguish, even as she believes the Bible calls on her to forgive.
"It says in the Word that we have all sinned," Kathy Mills said. "The Lord told us about a lady they were stoning to death because she had sinned. He told them, 'Anybody without sin, cast the first stone.'
"OK, I go by that. I also go by the fact that it tells me in the Word that I have to love my brother and I have to forgive him or else I won't be forgiven this thing I've done. ... I hope if I ever see him face to face, I can say, 'I forgive you.' I know it won't be easy."
For the first time since Ridgway's arrest Friday, Mills spoke publicly about her deceased daughter, wanting her to be remembered as the loving child she was — not just as a victim. Mills' memories were punctuated by tears and an occasional smile as she spoke in the office of one of her pastors, the Rev. Wale Akinyemi, at New Direction Ministries in Kent.
Opal loved her Lhasa-apso dog, Muffy, and named the dolls and stuffed animals she had lined up on her bed. She was honored in church for memorizing Bible verses and later for reading the book cover to cover.
She and her older brother, Garrett, were an inseparable pair. The children of a white mother and black father, they grew up in Kent, at the time an overwhelmingly white community, and were sometimes taunted by other children because of their heritage.
Opal speed-walked with her mother and aspired to become a model. Fond of children, she was the godmother of a little girl who also was named Opal.
Like her father, Robert Mills, Opal was outspoken and sometimes angered teachers by challenging them. She once walked into a classroom to stop a teacher from spanking her brother.
Opal never made it to high school. In the summer after junior high she became engaged to be married. She had picked out a wedding dress.
It would have been an early marriage, Kathy Mills knew, but she approved of Opal's fiancé and thought "there were worse things" than marrying young.
One of Opal's habits did worry her parents: her frequent hitchhiking, It is not known whether she'd been hitchhiking the day she was killed.
Her last phone call was to her brother, asking for a ride. She said she was planning to do a painting job with her friend Cynthia Hinds. Garrett, who had worked late the night before and was asleep when the phone rang, asked if she could find another ride.
Three days later, the bodies of both girls were found along the Green River. "He hasn't forgiven himself for that all these years," Kathy Mills said.
Opal's family was devastated by her murder. Her father, a retired forklift operator with a history of strokes, "basically drank himself to death," Mills said.
For several years, Mills couldn't bring herself to drive across a bridge over the Green River near where the bodies of Opal and several other victims were found. Nor could she bear to go shopping, something she and her daughter loved to do together.
She went to her daughter's grave every couple of days "to get it through my head, 'Hey, she's gone.' "
Holidays were particularly difficult, when she missed Opal and the children Opal never had.
Kathy Mills didn't turn to drink as her husband had. "I couldn't do it. I had to depend on the Lord. Something of that magnitude, I couldn't handle it myself."
Gradually over 19 years, Mills came to accept the reality of the loss.
A retired Boeing worker and the operator of a small craft business named after her daughter, O Charmaine, she works as a secretary at New Direction Ministries. She has turned her loss to good purpose, working with other women who have lost loved ones.
Opal's brother had hoped the killer would be caught before their mother died; Kathy Mills hoped he wouldn't. Now, with a suspect in custody, she's re-experiencing the pain that, for a time, wasn't so overwhelming.
Mills' wish to forgive the killer doesn't mean she believes he should be set free. But her thinking about his fate has changed over time.
"Then, there wasn't anything bad enough to do to him. Now, I would say a lifetime (in prison) thinking about what he did. I don't know if he has that kind of conscience, but that's what I would say."