Little girl lost

AT 90 POUNDS, Heather Opel doesn't take up much space in life, or in the Snohomish County courtroom. Released from her leg and wrist restraints, the 14-year-old sits in a chair in an orange jumpsuit, chin in hand, fidgeting—seemingly a child, daydreaming at times. * She is 5 foot 4, about the height of her mother, Barbara. The two share other traits as well. * Both are dark blond. Both have blue full-moon eyes. Both are accused of murder. * Barbara Opel, a 38-year-old Everett divorced mother of three, is accused of trying to hire 11 children and one male adult to kill her employer and steal his money. By all accounts, Jerry Heimann graciously opened his North Everett house to Barbara, giving her a home and a job as caretaker of his 89-year-old mother. Opel wanted more, prosecutors say. * They say she eventually hired five teens, including daughter Heather, to kill Heimann last April. * They contend that Heather, 13 at the time, was a willing part of her mother's murder plan. When the girl and four other Everett youths allegedly beat and stabbed the 64-year-old Heimann to death, prosecutors say Barbara was in the basement of Heimann's home with her two other kids—a girl, 7, and a boy, 11—barking out murder commands.

She is said to have paid her kiddie contract killers anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few bucks. Heather was to get a dirt bike. Her trial will begin in a few months, followed by her mother's. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Deputy prosecutor George Appel calls the teens "monsters" and says they showed a "peculiar, cold indifference" to murder. The court seems to agree; it has decided that Heather and three of the other teens committed a crime too gruesome to qualify as merely juvenile.

Heather will stand trial as an adult. Just like mom.

The girl's attorney calls that a crime in itself. To put Heather in an adult prison is to abuse and write her off the way her calculating mother did.

Seattle attorney Michele Shaw, who is Heather's court-appointed attorney, says the girl was manipulated most of her life—especially in the days prior to the murder, when she was urged by her mother to sleep with a boy Barbara hoped to recruit for the killing.

"Her mother used her as payment for murder," says Shaw, "then commanded her to kill, too. She is a victim herself."

Like many teens, Heather kept a diary, jotting down nursery rhymes, thoughts on sports, and mundane happenings: "Today, I brought a lunch from home," she wrote last year. The next entry, a month before the murder and in apparent reference to the dirt bike, was: "So my mom said if I helped kill Jerry I can go get one."

If murder was equal to nursery rhymes, says psychologist Marty Beyer, who has read the diary, it's probably because Heather thought of it as fantasy. She "didn't believe that the murder was going to occur. And then as it started to happen, she felt that it wouldn't have made any difference if she had spoken up . . . she did what her mother told her to do."

ON WEDNESDAY, Jan. 16, Heather Opel's trial was set for June 3. If convicted of first-degree murder, she faces 20 years to life in the women's prison at Purdy. In juvenile court, she would have been released after seven years—no later than age 21.

Her mother faces life, or death. Charged with aggravated first-degree murder, Barbara Opel could become the first woman to be executed by the state. Prosecutors are still deciding whether they'll seek the death penalty.

The murder that mom and daughter are accused of stunned Everett last spring. The old mill and Navy town has no shortage of crime. But no one could fathom a harebrained contract hit by a group of troubled teens, "masterminded" by a mom using her own daughter to kill.

It was brutal. Confessed lead killer Jeff Grote—called the "boyfriend" of Heather, though he'd met her only days earlier—swung a full-sized aluminum baseball bat against the back of Jerry Heimann's head. Grote remembers it went "pinggg" with each blow. Then his helpers pitched in (see "Opel's 11," p. 22).

Heather's knife attack was savage, too, prosecutors contend. She confessed to stabbing Heimann repeatedly, they say, alleging she told witnesses, "That was fun. I want to do it again" (which the girl denies). Superior Court Judge Charles French was persuaded that putting her in prison—if convicted—was the only way to protect the public.

"There is more to Heather's behavior and personality than loyalty to, and manipulation by, her mother," French said in November, deciding that Heather would become one of the two youngest defendants ever to face adult murder charges in the county (the other youngest is Heather's friend and accused cohort Marriam Oliver, also 14).

"It is the violent 'hands-on' aspect of this killing that remains unexplained," French said. "The lack of any real family support for Heather is also discouraging and is likely to result in continued frustration, resentment, and anger."

As she prepares for the murder trial, attorney Shaw is appealing the judge's ruling in another court. She argues the court erred in its decision to decline a juvenile trial and contends it's unconstitutional to try teens as adults, based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. "Heather is my little golden girl," Shaw says. "She's no adult."