Kris was born in Detroit to Robert Andrew Muller and Dorothy Brown Mason Muller. Her parents met in a college study group. Her mother volunteered at the League of Women Voters and later completed a degree in Social Work. Her father as a Navy Lieutenant, spent time at Oakridge Lab in Tennessee and had to wear a wrist Geiger counter. He died in 1966 of lung cancer. Five years later, Dorothy married Bob Headley, another old college classmate who Kris loved and admired.
Kris was close to her older sister, Gretchen. Kris said that Gretchen, who spent years as a subsistence homesteader and anti-nuclear activist, influenced her own choices in life. Gretchen says Kris had their mother's clear thinking, and good humored yet determined nature. Kris, age 3, Gretchen age 6 Kris and Gretchen’s mom was a major activist and life force.
Kris attended Cass Tech High School in Detroit, an innovative technical / arts magnate school that drew students from all over the city. At Antioch College in Ohio and at City College in New York, she opposed nuclear weapons and bomb shelters. At graduate school at the University of Michigan, she joined vigils against the Vietnam War and participated in Vietnam Summer. This was when she first encountered Quakers, and she developed a high regard for them: if they believed something was wrong, they stood publicly against it.
In college Kris had a son. She and her boyfriend chose to place their baby for adoption. When she finally met her son Warren, he was 50, and wearing a "Health Care For All," pin like Dorothy, Kris’s mother always wore. Knowing Warren, his wife Lea, and daughter Cicada made Kris happy, they had a lot in common and quickly became close.
Kris moved to the Bay Area in 1968 and met her first husband Bob Hiller, a middle school history teacher with three children. They were active in a Unitarian Universalist Church in Walnut Creek, (Kris’s mother had taken her to a Unitarian Church as a toddler and she experienced growing up in a loving community that embraced a diversity of beliefs). When the marriage ended amicably in 1978, she moved back to Berkeley, and worked at a social behavior research institute. Kris attended Berkeley Friends Meeting intermittently and some early Strawberry Creek meetings. She participated in a nonviolent invasion of Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, training in nonviolent direct action with David Hartsough.