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

  Despite all the testimony about her use of drugs and alcohol, Debora seemed perfectly sober. Although she spoke rapidly in a nasal voice, her words made sense and she remembered the previous evening and the fire in detail. But she tended to relate her memory of the night in a dramatic way, putting her own and others’ statements in quotes. “Tim said, ‘Mom, what shall I do?’ I said, ‘Tim, wait where you are and I’m going to call 911 to come and save you.’ And he said, ‘Well, should I get one of the girls and try to come out?’ I said, ‘No’—which, I’m sure, was the kiss of death …”

  As, indeed, it was. But somehow Debora had managed to distance herself from the fire events, even though this tape had been made only three and a half hours after the first officer was dispatched to Canterbury Court. With her jolly attitude, she might well be talking about strangers and not her own family. Reporters noted—as Smith and Burnetta had—she did not refer to her children by name, but as “my thirteen-year-old” or my “ten-year-old.” The impression she made was that she had been raising her children for her own gratification rather than loving them for themselves.

  Every so often, Debora said something so outrageous that the sound of reporters’ pens hurriedly writing down her words was synchronized. Although she had not learned of Tim’s and Kelly’s fate—and, shockingly, had not even asked about them—she referred to them in the past tense: “As I went around the corner to inform the neighbors to call 911, that’s when I heard Tim on the intercom by the pool deck—he used to be my thirteen-year-old.”

  She told the detectives she had picked her children up from their Pembroke Hill schools at three o’clock Monday afternoon. “They all go to Pembroke Hill,” she said, speaking so fast it was hard to make out her words. “At least, theliving ones do….”

  And still she did not ask which of her children were living.

  When Debora recalled—reciting yet another dramatic dialogue—how she had saved Lissa, she took full credit for the rescue and she spoke of her daughter in a subtly deprecating way. “Lissa’s afraid of heights—she’s afraid of pretty much everything. I said, ‘Jump!,’ and she said, ‘No, I can’t do it,’ and I said, ‘You will! Jump to me now.’ And she jumped—and I missed her totally. I’m sure she’ll never trust anybody. And she fell down right at my feet, but she was not hurt. But I’m sure that’s the only reason we have Lissa alive.” This was true enough. But Debora, as witnesses testified, had made no effort to save her other children, nor had she expressed any concern for their safety. She had watched the fire that consumed them without a flicker of emotion on her face.

  One striking trait of the Debora on the television screen was emerging: her selfishness and total self-absorption. Worried that she might “asphyxiate,” she had fled the house in a panic for her own life. She spoke volubly about her plans for her future once her divorce was final. “A big deal in my life the last couple of weeks has been, ‘What am I going to do? Now.’ Because my life is changing whether I like it or not. So what I’ve decided I want to do is I want to do a psych residency, which will be a whole new deal for me … to live life the way I want.” Although she surely knew that Tim and Kelly were dead, this interview was all about Debora.

  Every bit of testimony in the preliminary hearing thus far had indicated that she had clung to Mike with a grip born of desperation, but in the interview, she denied that she even thought much about their looming divorce. Somehow, the “actress” on the screen was convincing when she brushed Mike away as a mere annoyance. Debora chuckled as she said, “I haven’t been particularly upset—or really even terribly emotionally involved. That’s not quite the truth. I felt a tremendous sense of relief when he moved out, which surprised him because he thought I’d be devastated.”

  She waffled continually on vital times. She could not remember when she went to bed, or when she talked to Mike on the phone. Her estimates of when she went to sleep changed from “between nine-thirty and ten-thirty” to “But Tim was up until about eleven. I talked to him for quite a while in the kitchen.” She had a “fuzzy” recall of when she had awakened to the sound of an insistent alarm. “Whenever. Maybe twelve-fifteen? It seems as if everything telescoped pretty close together. But I—honest to God—have no idea when the alarm went off. I didn’t look at a clock. It could have been as early as midnight—or as late as twelve-thirty.”

  The tape seemed to be coming to an end. There were long spaces where no one was in the pale green room. But suddenly the pace picked up; Burnetta, Smith, and Debora reappeared. Burnetta was telling Debora that he had official notification that Tim and Kelly had died in the fire. She dropped her head to the table and sobbed, but only for a moment. And then she turned to the detectives—and a totally different woman emerged, a woman seething with anger and accusation. It was as if she had three entirely separate personalities: the quiet woman at the defense table, the talkative and friendly woman who had been on the screen for over an hour, and now a furious and profane woman. For those watching the videotape, the shock of her metamorphosis was palpable.

  “Oh Jesus Christ!” Debora said. “I should have let my—I should have let Tim come out when he wanted to! Jesus fucking Christ! … Oh God. Beautiful Tim and beautiful Kelly are both dead? Jesus Christ! Did they make any attempt at all to save ’em? I saved one of the kids. I could have gotten the second one out and didn’t. I’ll never forgive myself for that…. “She demanded to go back to Canterbury Court and see her dead children, and she was enraged as Burnetta and Smith told her that wasn’t possible. This swearing, out-of-control woman was the Debora her husband had spoken of in his testimony; she had replaced the garrulous, affable Debora in a heartbeat.

  And then, very softly, Debora was asking, “Does my husband know? I would love to see my husband—even though we’re getting a divorce—because he and I will be the only ones who can share in the mammoth grief. But I can’t do that. I can’t go to my home. I can’t see my dead children. I can’t see my husband. You people are pathetic.”

  Most of all, Debora wanted to be with Mike. “Jesus Christ!” her taped voice rang out in the courtroom. “There are two people here that care about what happened. So why can’t we be together? But apparently you don’t have compassion for anyone else…. I want to tell him. I want to tellmy husband that our babies are dead….”

  The screen dissolved into a blur. The videotape was over. In the press row, reporters were still writing as the screen were blank, getting down the words that echoed in their heads. Later, those who agreed to compare notes would share an ominous suspicion. Debora had had one house catch fire, after which her estranged husband had returned to her. Could it be that she had set fire to the house on Canterbury Court and destroyed her own children so that her husband would take her back one more time? Although she had continually denigrated Mike during the interview on the night of the fire, in the end it was he she wanted to be with. She wanted to be the first to tell him that Tim and Kelly were dead. Was it so he could comfort her? Or, more chillingly, having set the fire that killed them, did she want to see Mike’s face when he heard the news?

  39

  The State rested on Wednesday. It had been an emotional day in court, beginning with Jeff Hudson’s testimony that the fatal fire had been deliberately set, and concluding with the videotape of Debora’s bizarre interview with the police. Frustrated television reporters who had hoped to get copies and sound bites from that interview were left with only their notes. But even those were dynamite.

  What ammunition would the defense team have to refute the damning testimony that Morrison had presented—the most damning, perhaps, being the defendant’s own words? Moore and Moriarty had subpoenaed a number of witnesses, among them Celeste Walker, who would most assuredly not be friendly to Debora’s camp and who dreaded going on the stand to discuss her affair with Debora’s husband.

  Morrison knew what Moore and Moriarty intended to do to save their client, and he was appalled. The person they would attempt to indict, as it were,
would never be subpoenaed. He could not be. He was dead. The defense planned to accuse Tim Farrar as the arsonist.

  It was a monstrous plan, one that would enrage Mike and that Debora would later deplore, but there was a possibility that the defense contention was true. Tim had been an angry, troubled boy—and for good reason. He had been a pawn between two desperately unhappy parents. Debora had used him—the child who most resembled her in looks and, she felt, in intelligence—as the “man of the house.” Mike and Tim had dealt with the usual father-teenage son rivalry, but it had been exacerbated by Debora’s deliberate pitting of one against the other. If she could not have Mike, she had apparently decided she would encourage the continued animosity between Mike and Tim. She was losing her husband, but she was robbing Mike of his son.

  Debora had ensured Tim’s loyalty by demeaning his father. He had obeyed her even in the last minutes of his life. He could have saved himself from a fiery death, but he had waited, just as she ordered, “until the professionals come to get you out.” He had waited as the floor disintegrated beneath him and the roof over his head burned away. Whether Debora thought she was doing what was best for Tim at the time didn’t matter; what mattered was that Tim had automatically followed whatever instructions a patently disturbed mother threw at him.

  Morrison argued that the defense’s plan to dredge up Tim’s past behavior contravened Kansas case law, which does not allow “prior bad acts” by a defendant to be introduced into trial, “the theory being that you can’t just present carte blanche bad acts of a witness or victim if they were remote in time.”

  “All we’re trying to do is present the theory of the defense,” Moore insisted, “whether Mr. Morrison agrees with it or not. We believe case law is abundantly clear as to what the defendant has a constitutional right to do, and the due-process law gives that right under the United States Constitution.”

  Most states do not allow former arrests, convictions, or other negative information about a defendant to come out during the trial proper, just as most states do allow that information during the trial’s penalty phase, once a jury has found a defendant guilty and is deliberating over the punishment. The exception to be filed in Kansas was 60-455, a legal loophole that would allow prior bad acts of a witness or defendant or victim into a trial.

  As he had with many other issues in this preliminary hearing, Judge Ruddick decided that since there was no jury listening, he would hear what the defense had to say about Tim. This did not mean, however, that he would rule similarly during an actual trial.

  The first witness for the defense was a twelve-year-old boy, Todd Balsam,* who was in the seventh grade and had been Tim’s friend. Todd testified that he had played on Tim’s soccer team and then later Tim had moved onto his street, Canterbury Court. He had visited Tim’s house and had seen the computer that he often used. Tim had talked to Todd about making bombs.

  “What did Tim tell you about fires or bombs, Todd?” Moore asked.

  “He told me that he had a book on his computer about how to make bombs and rockets—he said that he made them for his friends.”

  Todd could not remember the exact name of the book Tim had downloaded into his computer, but thought it was something like “The German Book of Bombs.”

  “Do you know if Tim had any interest in science?”

  “No,” Todd answered; he did not know.

  “Do you know if he had any interest in fires and bombs?”

  “Well, he talked about it a lot and he lit matches and stuff…. He lit matches inside his house, but he never lit anything on fire. And then outside, he lit stuff on fire like leaves and pine needles.” Todd said he had seen Tim starting leaf fires in the yard “five or six times.”

  Under cross-examination, Todd told Morrison that he and Tim had lived fifteen houses apart. And although they had once been good friends, they seldom saw each other toward the end of Tim’s life, because they attended different schools.

  Len Jurden, whose family lived on the east side of the Farrar-Green house, took the stand next. Court watchers expected that he would be questioned about his former next-door neighbors, much as John Forman had been. But, with Jurden, the defense was about to spring a surprise.

  Jurden testified that he—or rather, his wife—had had occasion to call the Prairie Village police on March 10, 1995, seven months before the fatal fire next door.

  “I was walking from the kitchen to my dinner table and looked out the window,” he said, continuing in his clipped, shorthand way of speaking, “saw a fire, two boys standing around it, went out the front door, asked them what was going on; they took off running.”

  Jurden testified that he had hurried to the fire—in the northeast corner of his yard—and put it out. It had involved no more than the grass, and he could not determine how it had started.

  “What did you do after you put the fire out?” Moore asked.

  “I saw one of the boys going around the corner through the neighbor’s yard and went after him and caught him…. It turned out to be Tim Farrar.”

  Jurden had never met Tim before, and told the Court that he did not speak to the boy’s parents about the fire. He knew the police were on the way and he took Tim back to his yard to wait for them. “The other boy returned voluntarily…. The police arrived, we went over and I showed him the spot, and the policeman began to question the boys.”

  Jurden, who appeared to be a reluctant witness, testified that he had seen a bottle of some sort in the burned area. His reason for calling the police was to impress upon Tim Farrar and his cohort how dangerous fire was and that it was not to be played with. Jurden said he had children aged four and two and wanted to protect them. He commented that the final fire had disrupted the whole neighborhood, frightening the children who lived there and had to look at the burned-out house.

  Bob Thomas, a Prairie Village patrol officer, was the next defense witness. He recalled the incident in March.

  “Did you see what was set on fire?” Moore questioned.

  “It was a coffee can [jar] which had evidently been filled to some extent with gasoline.”

  “Okay. And what had actually caught on fire?”

  “A small amount of grass.”

  Thomas said he had spoken with the boys’ parents. Tim’s mother, whom the officer referred to as “Mrs. Green,” had appeared concerned at the time. The coffee jar had had some kind of cloth or vinyl rope fuse in it, which had been ignited. The resulting fire had burned a circle of grass that Thomas estimated as “a foot and a half” in diameter. Len Jurden had not wanted to prosecute the boys for arson and the case was closed.

  So Tim had been playing with a rudimentary Molotov cocktail. The question naturally arose: Would he have set a fire that would almost certainly trap him, his little sisters, and his dogs on the top floor with no way to escape? Tim loved his sisters and he loved his pets. He had been angry but he was certainly not stupid. If he was going to set fire to something out of rage, would he not have destroyed something of his father’s?

  Two more boys waited to testify about Tim’s fascination with fire and explosives. The first was thirteen-year-old Dane Wilson,* who attended Pembroke Hill. He said that Tim had been a “very close friend. [I knew him] through school. I’d often go over to his house … and one time I went on a trip with him … to Breckenridge, Colorado.” Dane had also been in science class with Tim.

  “Do you know what kind of a relationship Tim had with his dad?” Moore asked.

  “It wasn’t a very good relationship. In the times that I was over there they’d often get into arguments, yelling arguments. They’d go into the next room and argue about something as little as not taking out the trash …”

  Over Morrison’s vigorous objections, Judge Ruddick allowed Dane to discuss Tim’s and Mike’s problems with each other. “One day last year,” Dane said, “Tim came to school with a black eye, and he told everybody that his dog caused this black eye…. [Later] he said his dad and him got into a figh
t and his dad caused the black eye.”

  However, Tim had given as good as he got, or better. “Tim told us,” Dane testified, “about him constantly giving his dad bloody noses when they were fighting. And he even told us he broke his dad’s nose one time.”

  “Dane,” Moore asked, “did you ever hear Tim talk about fires or bombs?”

  “Yes, once in a while. And I also saw drawings of them. He had made his own descriptions of bombs and rockets in his spiral notebook … His own drawings … They were good drawings. He had chemicals needed for it labeled on the side.”

  “Chemicals for what?”

  “Making the bomb.”

  Tim had had access to computers both at home and in science class at Pembroke Hill.

  “Have you ever heard of a book called The Big Book of Mischief?” Moore asked.

  “I heard that through Tim.”

  “Did you ever see Tim with a copy of The Big Book ofMischief?”

  “In Breckenridge … I looked at the contents page.”

  “What did you understand the table of contents to contain?”

  “Explosives, descriptions of bombs, lock picking, rockets.”

  Moore attempted to enter The Big Book of Mischief into evidence, but Morrison objected on the grounds that there was no proof that the looseleaf book Moore held contained the same information as the book Dane Wilson had seen in Breckenridge, Colorado. The book, which resembled revolutionary underground “cookbooks,” was full of recipes for all manner of destructive projects. (Once available on the Internet, it has since been removed.)

  The first page of the book would be a natural draw for a teenage boy, smacking of forbidden secrets and programs like The X-Files.