Serial Saturday #3

OK, so this has nothing to do with our story, it's one of the new tiles in the remodeling job in my parent's master bath, the shower stall tile. Being that the events that unfolded on August 15, 1982, happened downstream of last weeks meat plant photo but way before the duck pond and green bridge from the week before (a distance of less than 1/2 mile), the photo would of pretty much looked like last week's. So I decided to take a bunch of unrelated photos today and this one won.

So, kind of related to the glass tile above, the next find came from someone that put a raft in upstream of the meat plant on a nice weekend morning. He was planning to spend the day hunting for antique bottles and bits along the river. He floated downstream and somewhere around noon made the big bend in the river at the meat plant. Just past there he noticed two bodies under the water, apparently being weighed down with rocks. They were Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds, both known prostitutes, one 31 and one 17. The sheriff's office responded and a detective on his way down the riverbank to get to the bodies nearly tripped over a third body when he got to the edge. This was Opal Mills, who had just turned 16 years old. 20 years ago I roomed with someone who had gone to school with her at the time, and would always remember the day her former classmate was found. This would be my second known connection to the activities happening around me to girls my age. This would also be the day that everyone in our area came to suspect that another serial killer was at work, so close after the Ted Bundy murders that plagued the King County Sheriff's Office in the late 1970's. They weren't ready for yet another deluge of female bodies popping up here and there on their turf, but they at least had some experience under their belts.

The problem that KCSO faced now was that 3 days earlier Debra Bonner had been found less than 1/4 mile upstream. Were these bodies there then and had they missed them, or had the killer come back and put them there after the sheriff's office had already been there? Was Opal left on the bank because the killer was interrupted? What had KCSO missed? 5 bodies in a month in a 1/2 mile stretch of river, what was going on?

This would be the last time the "Green River Killer" would use that river as a dumping site, but even so, the name stuck.