Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice

  “I told him I had a client who was in no condition to defend herself,” Ellen said, “that I didn’t want her going up on the floor or being questioned until I had figured out what was happening.”

  With his help, Debora was admitted to Shawnee Mission Hospital. She was, for the moment, safe from questioning and protected from harming herself.

  22

  Fire Marshal Jeff Hudson was a tall, good-looking man with black hair. His posture was so ramrod straight that he had an almost military bearing in his Shawnee, Kansas, Fire Department uniform: dark trousers, white shirt with four gold stars over his right breast pocket, a gold badge over his left, and the American flag on his right sleeve. His voice was soft but deep, and full of concern. “I always try to get something positive out of something negative—but this has been a tough one—totally senseless.”

  In 1995, Hudson was president of the Kansas chapter of the International Association of Arson Investigators. He had investigated more than a thousand suspicious fires, and after more than two decades with the Shawnee department, he probably knew as much about fighting fires and finding out who or what started those fires as any professional in America. He clearly loved his job. And there was a basic humanity about him, an unspoken wish that somehow there would be no more tragic fires.

  Whenever he heard the “tones” in the Shawnee firehouse, or sirens in the night, Hudson’s mind went immediately to the thought that someone might be in danger. In the middle of the night of October 23—24, home and off-duty, he heard the cacophony of sirens and hoped no lives were at risk. It sounded like a big fire, with a number of departments responding. That might well mean Hudson would be involved—if not that night, then soon.

  Jeff Hudson was a founding member of the Eastern Kansas Multi-Agency Task Force. He and others in law enforcement and fire departments saw the need for such a group effort in the mid-eighties. “We worked for about a year getting the task force set up,” Hudson said. “And then we went to the attorney general’s office with our paperwork and our mutual-aid agreement signed by cities in Leavenworth, Wyandotte, and Johnson counties.”

  Included in the task force were people from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI), and local law enforcement and fire departments. The concept worked well for a number of reasons. In the city of Shawnee, with a population of around 38,000, “doing fire investigations rests with me,” Hudson said. “And there’s only one of me. If we have a large loss or a loss with multiple deaths, that’s a lot of work for one person. With the task force, we have a lot of help to draw from. It’s like that bottomless cup of coffee; you can get equipment and people on the scene in a hurry. We have so much talent and experience on a scene in a few short hours.”

  Consolidated Fire District No. 2 provided fire protection for several communities in Johnson County, including Prairie Village. Gary Lamons, the fire marshal of District 2, knew that they were dealing with a suspicious blaze. At nine that Tuesday morning, October 24, he called Jeff Hudson and asked for help in activating the task force.

  “I suggested he contact Dave Plummer in Olathe, who was on the board of directors in our area,” Hudson said.

  The task force was called out, and by late morning that day, a team including Hudson reported to 7517 Canterbury Court in Prairie Village. Lamons briefed the men and women who showed up about when the fire had occurred and the events surrounding it. He told them that two children had died and that the medical examiner had already been there to oversee the removal of the victims’ bodies so that autopsies could be performed.

  Now the task force would do its own autopsy on the ruined house.

  Gary Lamons would be the investigative officer in charge of the task force; he would assign duties to other arson experts on the team, which included Dennis Craynor and John Mattox. Nancy Thomas from the Kansas state fire marshal’s office was there with her “sniffer dog,” Avon, a golden Labrador. Just as some dogs are trained to use their keen sense of smell to find heroin, marijuana, and cocaine, Avon could detect the presence of accelerants at a fire scene. Thomas worked Avon every day to keep her focused on her “job.” When Avon detected an accelerant, she sat down and put her nose to the spot. Thomas would say, “Show me. Show me,” and Avon earned her mistress’s praise and her supper for that day. At a fire scene, Avon went in first. And every time she “hit” on an accelerant odor, Thomas put down a flag so the evidence technicians would know where to gather samples.

  Some members of the task force would do the photography and videotaping, some would collect evidence, some would interview witnesses, and some would serve on the “origin and cause” team, led by Don Watkins, an investigator with the Kansas state fire marshal’s office.

  Jeff Hudson was one of the half-dozen experts assigned to the origin and cause team. He was—and is—a detective, just as much as a police homicide detective is, but he looked for clues in a different way. “It is really so simple,” he said of investigative work that is anything but simple. “We work from the least amount of damage back to the most amount of damage. Through doing that the same way every time, you can put everything back together and reconstruct the scene.”

  Arson investigators sift through layers and layers of debris and fall-down until they come to a place where they figuratively look the arsonist in the eye and know how a fire started. Usually, they begin by walking around the structure to assess the damage and see which areas are most affected. Next, they move through the inside, where again their trained eyes find the areas with least damage and those with the worst. They determine where they are going to begin removing debris. They look at burn patterns—at the telltale black “V’s” that give up secrets to arson investigators, although a layperson could not begin to understand them. To the untrained eye, charred wood and piles of ashes look like only that; to an arson expert, they are vital clues.

  “We begin to remove the debris,” Hudson explained, “by layering down through the damage until we get down to floor level. We photograph as we go along, we draw diagrams as we go along. We want to remove the top portion of the structure first—the uppermost portion that fell in. We will remove that layer. It might be part of the roof material that’s on top of the pile of debris. Then we’ll look at what’s underneath that layer, and we’ll get down to floor level. If we’re on a second floor, we will go next to the ceiling of the room below, and then we’ll get down to the contents of the room, and on down to that floor level.”

  All the while, as they sift through debris, arson experts are looking for burn patterns on walls, on floors. They can tell whether a fire was fast-burning or slow-burning. They can tell whether it burned low or high in a room, whether it burned up or down. Given certain conditions, they can even determine the direction a fire has traveled. Fire tends, usually, to burn up from its point of origin; it burns down only when it has consumed everything above it.

  An accidental fire has only one point of origin; a fire set deliberately may have several. Gary Lamons’s team had an enormous job in front of them, one that would take not hours, but days. The Farrar-Green house had been close to 5,000 square feet of luxurious living space on three separate levels. And it had been almost totally destroyed.

  The first thing to strike Jeff Hudson was that, although the front of the house certainly showed evidence of fire damage, there was almost nothing left of the rear (or east side) of the residence. The railings around the main floor’s rear decks were a good eight to ten feet from the wall of windows and sliding glass doors, but they had been charred black by flames blasting out of what had been the living room or “great room.”

  The origin and cause team began their investigation on the ground floor, because it was the least damaged. This was significant to Hudson because many of the most common sources of accidental fires are in basement areas. “In the back part of this basement storage area,” he said, “there appeared to be two water heaters and a gas furnace. To the right, there w
ere two electrical panels. They were all ruled out as the cause of this fire. There was a second gas furnace near the fitness room.” That furnace checked out, too. Moreover, the house had underground utility lines which would have been unaffected by Monday’s wind storm.

  Moving south in the basement level, Hudson’s team came to the workout or fitness room. The weight machine, treadmill, and other exercise equipment were all in fairly good shape. However, the investigators could look up through the ceiling joists that had once supported the living room floor. Directly above that, there had been another room: a bedroom. A section of the ceiling beams of the fitness room was gone, sawed through. Hudson’s team knew why, of course. In order to remove Tim Farrar’s body for autopsy, the medical examiner had asked members of the engine company to remove the joists he had fallen on.

  The fire had begun to burn down into the fitness room; the drywall was intact, even to the paint on the walls, but there was soot and charring at the top of the walls. The heat had come from above as the living room was completely destroyed. The fitness room was excluded as a point of origin of the fire. However, the floor of the room was deep in fall-down, some of which had come from two stories up—from Tim’s bedroom. Parts of his bed and his furniture still hung from the floor joists of the living room.

  Photographing and bagging evidence as they went, Hudson and his crew entered the recreation room, where the ceiling had fallen in on Maurice Mott and Wayne Harder as they searched for survivors. There was a pool table in the center of the room; there was a television set. The ceiling had fallen in not so much because of fire, as from the weight of water from firefighters’ hoses. Hudson was satisfied that the fire had not started here.

  Next there was a family room with a fireplace, a big-screen TV, a large wet bar with a refrigerator, bookcases, and racks of videotapes. This room, too, was basically in tact. Two bar stools were still pulled up to the bar. However, Hudson noticed, some carpet next to one of the stools had been burned. It had melted in an irregular pattern, and then the fire had gone out because the carpet had been pretreated with retardant.

  And there was no reason for the carpet to burn, not unless someone had tried to start a fire there. The ceiling overhead was unscarred by smoke or flames; the walls were intact. This was an unconnected fire: to arson experts, a red flag.

  The guest bedroom, where Maurice Mott had crawled through the window in his desperate search to find Tim and Kelly, looked almost normal. The king-sized bed was neatly made up. There was a bathroom there, too, equally untouched. However, the vertical blinds that Mott had ripped out had burn marks on them, burn marks for which there was no explanation except that someone had tried to set them on fire.

  Another unconnected fire.

  The basement level was not where the main fire had begun. Even the family’s 700-bottle wine collection, stored in the unfinished north end, was intact.

  Satisfied that they had not yet located the source—or sources—of the huge conflagration of Monday night, Hudson moved his crew to the main floor. Their work here was more dangerous; the structure had been weakened by the heat and flames, and what floor was left could buckle at any moment.

  Months later, Hudson could still diagram the house on Canterbury Court from memory. The foyer just inside the front door was two stories high, flanked by stone. It faced the living room, which was straight ahead and one step down. The single stairway to the children’s upstairs wing was to the left of the foyer. Farther to the left, there had been a formal dining room, and beyond that a breakfast area, a huge kitchen, and a laundry room. To the right of the foyer, the main hallway of the house led to the music room, a guest bathroom, the den, and the master suite to the left. Hudson found out later that by shutting and locking three doors, it was possible to virtually seal off the den and master suite on the south end of the main floor with its master bath and jacuzzi.

  There was extensive damage on the main floor, but not so extensive that an appalling discovery could be hidden: Hudson spotted “pour patterns” where someone had spread accelerants on the floors.

  The foyer’s floor had been expensive tile, giving way to the central hallway’s solid oak. The stairs leading up to the children’s wing had been carpeted. Hudson was working without emotion at this point. He could not risk feelings; he was going on training, experience, and intuition. He examined the amorphous patches he detected on the floor and the stairs. A flammable liquid had soaked into the carpeted stairs; the treads had burned so vigorously that the flames had “rolled” underneath the treads to burn the risers, some of which had actually burned through.

  Climbing the stairs carefully, Hudson discovered that the landing at the top had been drenched so completely with some accelerant that it must have gone up in a wall of fire. Now, in the aftermath of the inferno, that landing was unstable and riddled with burned-out sections. Hudson shook his head in disbelief. An unseen hand had effectively blocked any escape for three sleeping children and their two dogs.

  When Mike and Debora moved into this house, they had used the insurance settlement from the earlier fire to purchase almost all new furniture. The formal dining room had been beautiful, with a large oak dining room table and twelve chairs. A very expensive oriental rug had covered the floor, and a china cabinet stood along one wall. But the couple rarely, if ever, entertained there. They had invited fellow Peru tourists over, but those guests had stayed in the recreation room and near the pool.

  Hudson, of course, had never seen the dining room as it had been. He could tell where the china cabinet had stood, but the table had been reduced to rubble. It was possible to stand on the floor—it was much more stable than that of the music room—but the floor was about all that was left.

  Removing debris by layering down, Hudson and his team found pieces of furniture so small that they were identifiable only as “wood.” There was no way to say how big the dining room table had once been. There was no sign at all of the rug. And when they got down to the bottom, they found a tongue-and-groove wood floor. Some intensely flammable liquid had pooled in the center of the room, charring the wood deeply in a flowing irregular pattern.

  The breakfast area had the same pour patterns and a closet in the kitchen area had been destroyed. Looking up, the arson investigators saw that it was directly below Kelly’s room. One by one they climbed up on a ladder, which was the only way to reach Kelly’s room now, and they saw where she had lain. There was a pale child-sized outline on the smoke-stained bedclothes. In all likelihood, Kelly had gone to sleep and never awakened as deadly carbon monoxide and smoke filled her room. This was just as well, became she had had no way to escape.

  The living room, with its window walls and sliding glass doors overlooking the back deck and the pool, had no floor at all, and every room leading back toward the master bedroom showed signs of isolated charring or low uneven burning where flammable liquid had been poured. With Avon leading them excitedly, her nose to the floor, and Nancy Thomas setting flag after flag after flag, the investigators moved down the long hall.

  In the study, a couch against one wall was burned but recognizable, while an oak rolltop desk had burned so completely that it had collapsed in on itself. Accelerant had to have been splashed over it for it to have crumbled into ashes. The carpeted floor had heat damage and was discolored. However, one section of carpet was missing completely, and, once again, Hudson saw the telltale pooling or puddling outlines.

  From the door of the study, they could look directly across to the master bedroom and see the end of a bed. Fall-down covered the bottom of the door, holding it firmly in the position it had been in during the fire. Open.

  What the origin and cause team members had found was clear evidence of arson. The proliferation of pour patterns and the heavy charring in certain areas were strong indicators for arson experts. Starting at the north end of the main floor, someone had saturated the dining room and kitchen floors with accelerant. The heavy soaking of the stairway carpet leading to the chi
ldren’s rooms could have been nothing less than a deliberate attempt to kill them; once the flames had exploded the children had no way out. This arsonist was also a murderer.

  Not satisfied, the fire starter had gone on to spread accelerant in the living room and music room, and then down the central hall all the way to the door of the bedroom where Debora said she had been sleeping. Had that, too, been a murder attempt? But the bedroom had not burned, although, curiously, the investigators found evidence of still another unconnected fire close by. In the bathroom off the master bedroom, a drawer in the double-sink vanity was charred. The rest of the bathroom was intact.

  Hudson didn’t care what accelerant had been used. “I don’t know what it was,” he said, “and I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter. There are many, many substances that will burn like that …” And there were: gasoline, lighter fluid, kerosene, charcoal lighter, even gin or vodka will make flames race through a house. Nor did Hudson know how much accelerant had been used in the house on Canterbury Court. “This is only conjecture,” he would say cautiously, “because I can’t be precise. I’d venture to say that it was less than ten gallons and more than three gallons.”

  Obviously, someone had wanted to make sure the fire destroyed that house.

  There were now scores of photographs of the house, and hours of videotape. Some showed the house as it was burning; others were a room-by-room record of what the fire had done to it. The pour patterns stood out distinctly, outlining exactly where the liquid accelerant had hit the tile and oak floors. In some photographs, Avon, the sniffer dog, stood poised, immobile, like the hunting dog she was. She had found what she was trained to find: accelerant.