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

  Debora was wearing a long-sleeved black dress with an unflattering round neckline when she was arrested. Her hair was very short. If not for the enormity of the crimes she was accused of, it would have been easy for an observer to feel sorry for this plain, stoic woman, who would not see her daughter dance after all.

  Debora asked the officers what would happen to her car, and she kept repeating that she had to get in touch with Ellen Ryan. She was taken to the Jackson County, Missouri, jail where she was booked, fingerprinted, and photographed. She was given a jail uniform that resembled the “scrubs” she had worn in her days as a physician, only it was far too large for her and mismatched: the top was blue and the pants were gray. And as a final ignominy, she was handcuffed to other prisoners and led past media cameras.

  Unaware of what had happened to her mother, Lissa danced wonderfully onstage with the Missouri State Ballet company. Her father hadn’t been able to come to the dress rehearsal. Mike lay in the recovery room at North Kansas City Hospital after his surgery to implant the Groshong catheter.

  Now, while his estranged wife was being arrested, Mike slept a drugged sleep. He had survived the strain on his heart, and doctors were cautiously optimistic that he had made it—at least this time. But now they knew that the septic shock had left behind deadly bacteria, which could attach to any organ in the body. Mike was far from being out of the woods. He almost certainly faced more surgery to repair the leaking mitral valve in his heart.

  He learned only later that his wife had been formally accused of poisoning him as well as of killing their children. Mike had suspected her for some time. But could prosecutors prove the charge? If his condition was, in fact, due to castor-bean poisoning, it might be possible that advanced forensic techniques could isolate antibodies developed after ricin poisoning from the blood samples he had given.

  When the news broke that Dr. Debora Green had been arrested and charged with murder, arson, and two counts of attempted murder, Paul Morrison gave a press conference. Reporters, voracious for details, went away unsatisfied. Without tipping the investigation’s conclusion about the motive for murder, the Johnson County D.A. would say only, “It’s a domestic situation and that’s where I’m going to leave it.” Asked whether he would seek the death penalty, he shook his head and said it was too early to speculate.

  Morrison spoke of the dilemma that he and the investigators had faced. First of all, in every case they had to be sure the public was safe and that the suspect or suspects didn’t flee. But balanced against that consideration was another: they could not make an arrest before they had enough evidence to feel confident of winning a conviction. If they jumped the gun, they would surely lose. Morrison did not say what an agony waiting had been for everyone who had worked around the clock while the public was clamoring for an arrest. But finally, on the day before Thanksgiving, 1995, Morrison, Rick Guinn, the Metro Squad, and the Prairie Village detectives had agreed that they had enough evidence for a conviction. What that evidence was, the press would have to guess.

  * * *

  Debora’s parents had been present at her arrest. And Mike’s sisters, Karen Beal and Vicki Farrar, were at the theater to help break the news to Lissa—but they told her that her mother would be in jail for just a little while. Actually, Debora would stay in the Jackson County Jail for at least thirty-six hours. Jackson County did not hold hearings on Thanksgiving. The courts were closed.

  Debora later described her terror at being arrested. “Michael planned it that way,” she insisted. “He got together with the district attorney and they planned to arrest me at Lissa’s ballet theater—right before Thanksgiving.”

  She said she was horrified at being thrown into a crowded jail cell full of women unlike any she had seen since the days when she was an intern in the ER. She did not mention her children or the fire. She spoke only of what she had to endure.

  Debora was locked in a square cage that had been designed to hold eight women. She counted fifty prisoners. “It was so crowded, and there were no mattresses on the iron bunks—just the wire and the metal edge. If you sat on the ‘bed,’ you would get deep marks on your legs. When we tried to sleep, three of us would lie down on one bunk on the bare wire. But they never turned off the lights. They would feed us whenever they felt like it. Once, they fed us at two A.M. All we ever got was bologna sandwiches and water.”

  Debora was often given to hyperbole. But no one could argue that the Jackson County Jail would not seem like a descent into the bowels of hell for a woman who had so recently resided in an eighteen-room mansion with a four-car garage. Debora had dreaded even a minor stepdown in her lifestyle if Mike left her. Indeed, loss of face, loss of prestige for herself and her children, and having to live in a less grand house were the reasons she gave for fighting the divorce.

  Now, on Thanksgiving Eve, as Lissa danced at the Midland Theater and Mike slowly came to in North Kansas City Hospital, Debora sat amid the cacophony of jail: the shrill voices and sometimes maniacal laughter of her fellow prisoners; the sound of the omnipresent television set turned to peak volume. She had always hated noise, and now she was surrounded by it, enveloped in it.

  Ellen Ryan was livid when she heard that Debora had been arrested in Jackson County, Missouri. She still believed that Debora would willingly have turned herself in to the Johnson County, Kansas, authorities—if they had only warned her that she was about to be arrested. Had Debora been taken to the Johnson County Adult Detention Center in Olathe, Ellen was sure she could have bailed her out immediately. Now, Debora would be locked up until Friday morning at the very earliest, in a holding facility that Ellen described as “built at the turn of the century. It is unbelievable.”

  Ellen and her fiancé, who was both a physician and an attorney, were down to the holding facility the night of November 22. She wanted to get Debora’s medication to her, and she wanted her fiancé to make sure Debora was okay, not about to lapse into another of those strange states in which she seemed to lose touch with reality.

  The jail was so overcrowded that night before Thanksgiving that there was no one to escort them on the elevator to the eighth floor. Visitors were not allowed on the elevators without an escort, so “We walked the eight flights of stairs,” Ellen recalled. “I had her eyeglasses and her meds. I wanted her to be able to sleep, at least. But she was in a cage with people who were screaming, and some who were so out of it that they had to be chained to a bed. They had the television going all the time, to try to calm the prisoners down. There is no sleep in that jail.”

  Debora asked Ellen to be sure that Lissa knew she was okay, and Ellen promised to pass on that message. That was about all she could do. Debora would not have an extradition hearing until sometime on Friday, November 24.

  Ellen went to see Lissa at her aunt Karen’s house and assured her that her mother was okay. “They are being very kind to her at the jail. It’s not a very nice place, but they’re treating her kindly.”

  Ellen had a message for Lissa: “Your mother wants you to hold your head up and dance like a queen.”

  Lissa straightened up, holding her head at a ballerina’s tilt. “I will,” she said. “Tell her I promise.”

  28

  As soon as Jackson County opened for business after the Thanksgiving holiday, Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty, a member of his firm who would join in Debora Green’s defense, appeared at an extradition hearing before a Missouri circuit judge. Debora sat in a holding area with several other prisoners, occasionally laughing as she talked quietly with her attorneys. Moore and Moriarty told the judge that their client would waive extradition and return willingly to Johnson County, Kansas, where her arrest warrant had been issued.

  In court, Debora herself stared straight ahead. She seemed stunned, unbelieving. That may have been because she had not slept since Wednesday night. She wore the same long-sleeved black dress she’d had on when she was arrested. Although she had the smudgy, drawn look of extreme fatigue, the video cameras in
the courtroom caught the intelligence in her eyes. Exhausted, shocked, disheartened, fearful, yes—but it was not possible for a woman of Debora’s intelligence to look stupid.

  After the hearing, Ellen told reporters that Debora was in a state of “profound grief. All she talks about is worry about Lissa, and what the pressure is doing to Lissa,” she said. “I think she is still somewhat dazed and confused. She’s very surprised that she would be charged with these kinds of crimes. She lost everything in this fire—including her children, everything, and she’s astounded.”

  Ellen had arranged Debora’s finances so that she could bail her client out of jail, but she had not foreseen the tremendously high bail that would be set by judge Peter Ruddick when Debora was arraigned in Johnson County. $3 million. That was the highest bail ever asked in Johnson County, and Debora didn’t have nearly enough money set aside. She would have to stay in jail until the preliminary hearing to determine whether Paul Morrison had presented enough evidence to warrant a trial.

  Debora’s quarters in the 270-bed Johnson County Adult Detention Center in Olathe were palatial compared to the Jackson County holding cell. She occasionally had visitors from a small group of women she had known before. Lissa did not visit her mother in jail, but she did speak to her on the phone. Debora had no radio or television, but she did have books to read. Books had always been her refuge.

  Johnson County’s courthouse, administration building, and jail were mostly new, built of stone and red brick and set on a full-city block-sized square of manicured grass with trees, lights, a clock tower, and a huge stone circle filled with flowers in season. It could well have been a movie set, a pleasant spot to linger—unless you had business there. Olathe, the county seat, where Debora’s preliminary hearing would be held, has about 70,000 citizens. The county buildings are located in the original part of Olathe, which dates back a hundred years or more. The businesses there are not thriving. Aside from lawyers’ offices, supermarkets, craft stores, and tiny strip malls, nothing much seems to be happening downtown; many storefronts are boarded up or papered over. Olathe’s citizens have not yet realized the worth of historic buildings. The newer half of Olathe was not nearly as endearing. Upscale—but quickly constructed—housing developments and apartments have sprung up, and franchises line the main drag for miles.

  In the jail in Olathe, Debora had a cell to herself and there was quiet. She later remembered that she was heavily dosed with Prozac and Klonopin, her mind so fogged over that she moved through the next few months in a haze. There was one other prisoner in her section, an Asian woman who spoke little English. “But we were never allowed in the common room together, so I never talked to her,” Debora said. This was just as well. The woman was also charged with child murder. She had decapitated her child and was later judged insane.

  Debora would complain that Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty rarely came to see her. “They told my mother they came three times a week,” she said, “but it was more like every ten days—and then they only stayed for ten minutes.”

  Ellen Ryan, who had little to do with Debora’s criminal defense, would be remembered a bit more favorably. She had promised Debora that she would be there, beside her, if she had to go to trial, and that she would sit with her at the preliminary hearing scheduled for late January 1996. Even so, Joan Jones would say bitterly that Ellen didn’t do enough for her daughter. “She just took all her money and gave it to those lawyers.” Indeed, in her mother’s view, Debora had been victimized by the whole world. If, in her desire to see her daughter succeed, Joan had railed at the child Debora and the teenage Debora, she now found no fault with her at all.

  Celeste visited Mike in the hospital, and not a day went by that they didn’t talk by phone at least four times. Celeste stubbornly refused to believe that they could not wrest some kind of future out of, quite literally, the ashes of their lives. She knew that Mike’s family did not approve of her. Once, when they met at the hospital, his mother was frank in suggesting that Celeste should not be there. Celeste saw the distaste in Velma Farrar’s eyes. Still, she lingered in Mike’s room.

  But what did it matter anymore how things looked? Celeste knew the truth. She had seen John waste years of his life in gray depression, and then rob himself of all the rest of his life in a moment of despair. She loved Mike and she was not going to stay away when he needed her. It may have been that Celeste was the one who loved more in their relationship. Mike was too ill, too grief-stricken, and too preoccupied by what new catastrophe the future might hold; he scarcely had time or the strength for love. Nor did he have time to listen to his parents’ admonitions about staying away from Celeste. He had to get well so that Lissa would have at least one parent to take care of her. And, somehow, he had to get strong enough to practice medicine again. It had been so long that sometimes he didn’t even feel like a doctor anymore.

  But without a sure diagnosis, Mike was in limbo. He knew he had been sick enough to die during his illnesses, that he had endocarditis and a leaking mitral valve in his heart, but he still didn’t know for sure why he had suddenly become so ill. There was no definitive reason for it. Until some expert could validate his feelings about what was wrong with him—and why—he would never be truly well.

  In the bitter cold of a Kansas winter, crews moved in and tore down what was left of the house on Canterbury Court. They hauled truckload after truckload of debris away until nothing remained but cinders. The pool was gone, and Tim’s basketball hoop, the stone façade that would have lasted a century, the four-car garage. Everything gone. And soon the snow covered even those minute reminders of the house that had stood there. The trees survived—even the slender white birches, although they had been scorched by the flames and nearly flattened by the firefighters’ hoses.

  Now, when the Jurdens looked to the west, they saw only the Formans’ home. That was odd, but it was certainly better than seeing rain and snow invade the charred remains of 7517 Canterbury Court.

  29

  The Debora Green case would not be the first in which Paul Morrison had come up against his old boss, Dennis Moore. The men respected one another, and both were extraordinarily impressive in a criminal trial. In the courtroom, each was entirely focused on presenting his side of the case at hand. As one newspaper columnist termed it, the Green trial would be “a battle of the titans.” Debora might have the best in defense attorneys, but she also faced a prosecutor with a solid record of convictions. Both Morrison and Moore had graduated from Washburn Law School in Topeka, and between them, they had prosecuted several of East Kansas’s most notorious cases.

  Moore was a big man, very tall—a handsome man with dark silver-streaked hair, whose courtly manner made him seem more like a Southern lawyer than a Midwesterner. Whatever his feelings were, they lay beneath the surface; he betrayed none of them to court watchers. He seemed—always—unruffled and confident.

  During his three terms as Johnson County district attorney—from January 1977 until December 1989—Moore had prosecuted a number of high-profile cases. Among them was that of Danny Crump, who was convicted of planting a bomb that killed six members of an Olathe family. Another newsworthy case in which Moore won a conviction was that of Sue Ann Hobson, whose manipulations convinced her son and his friend to murder her stepson. Two books were written about the Hobson case; Danny Crump’s crime also received national attention.

  Now, besieged by the media, Moore gave a number of interviews, not just to the Kansas City press and TV, but to tabloid shows such as Inside Edition. He hinted at a defense, rather than coming out with any absolute statements. He mentioned a run-in Tim had had with the Prairie Village police for lighting a Molotov cocktail in his neighbors’ yard. He managed to raise the question of a possible connection between Tim’s fascination with fire and the tragedy that killed him. Asked if Dr. John Walker’s death was truly a suicide, Moore said that his defense team was looking into that. He obviously wanted to leave the impression that his client was not the
only suspect in the case. And he did that while adroitly managing to stay within the guidelines of Judge Ruddick’s gag order.

  On December 5, there was, finally, a conclusive report on Dr. John Walker’s death. J. Michael Boles, M.D., the coroner of the Tenth Judicial District of Kansas, released his conclusions about the suspected suicide. Boles’s review of Bonita Peterson’s autopsy explained why the Pentothal found at Walker’s death scene had not been recovered from venous blood in his body. The chief question raised by Dr. Peterson’s postmortem was why it appeared that Walker had chosen to be awake when he would have known he could not breathe voluntarily. Surely no anesthesiologist would choose suffocation as a manner of death.

  And, mercifully, Walker hadn’t. Dr. Boles’s autopsy review verified that he had been an extremely intelligent and well-informed anesthesiologist. His choice of drugs and the way he administered them to himself showed that he was fully cognizant of what he was doing when he chose a final escape from his constant depression.

  “The most probable reason Pentothal could not be recovered from the venous blood is as follows,” Boles wrote. “The subject first injected the paralytic agent (Pancuronium.) As he began to feel the effects of this agent (inability to breathe), he then injected the Pentothal. At this time the subject would have been in a state of respiratory acidosis with associated high CO2 (Hypercapnia) and also would have large levels of circulatory endogenous adrenalin[e] [normally present in the body, to help humans respond to danger]. Both Hypercapnia and high adrenalin[e] levels have been associated with Sudden Cardiac Death during the induction of anesthesia with Pentothal. In this scenario, one would expect to recover little, if any, Pentothal from the blood stream, since the heart has no time to recirculate the small amount available back to the tissues…. Thus death in this case was due to sudden cardiac arrest secondary to Pentothal administration.”