Death of a Jovial Guy

When Maryland Representative William O. Mills joined his congressional colleagues for a formal picture-taking session last week he seemed not at all troubled. Those who sat near him that day said he laughed and joked, much as he usually did. The next day, however, Mills was found sprawled in the doorway of a barn about a mile from his home in Easton. A 12-gauge shotgun lay on the floor near by. Mills had been shot once in the chest, an apparent suicide at the age of 48.

The death came only five days after the General Accounting Office disclosed that Mills had received a 1971 contribution of $25,000 from the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President. The money, according to the GAO, was part of an unreported $900,000 in cash spent by the Nixon campaign committee before the April 1972 mandatory disclosure date. According to Maryland law, all congressional campaign contributions must be reported to the state's board of elections, and any donation of more than $2,500 from a single source is illegal. Mills' office never reported the contribution. A prosecution for such an apparent violation could have led to penalties of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

A small-town boy who never went to college, Mills worked his way up to an executive position at the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co. Next, though a Democrat, he served eight years as an aide to Republican Congressman Rogers C.B. Morton. Mills switched to the G.O.P. in 1970 and won Morton's seat in a special 1971 election after Morton resigned to become Secretary of the Interior. Morton last week described the C.R.P. contribution as a "loan" to the Mills campaign, and said that he himself reimbursed the Nixon committee by working as a surrogate speaker for the President during the 1972 campaign.

"I have done nothing improper," Mills said after the deal was disclosed. Indeed, there was no sign that the Maryland authorities had any intention of prosecuting him, but he began worrying about his possible ruin. Before he died, Mills wrote half a dozen suicide notes. One apologized to his constituents for not having served them better. Another was to his 16-year-old son (the younger of two from his marriage to Norma Lea Nichols Mills), warning him always to be honest.

Most of Mills' friends were baffled by the suicide. Said one: "He was kind of a jovial guy, always joking with people. I never saw him lose his temper." Rogers Morton agreed: "He was always cheerful, optimistic about life."

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