Bitter Harvest

  Although ultimately she had to accept that John was beyond saving when she found him, Celeste refused to give up. She insisted that he be admitted to the ER at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, the hospital where he had administered anesthesia to hundreds of patients, where only that morning he had helped to save lives. Gently, the staff there told her that they could not admit a patient who had been dead for hours—not even one of their own.

  Sergeant Gary Hines of the Mission police had responded to the 911 call. Most suicides in garages are by carbon monoxide poisoning. But Dr. John Walker was a skilled anesthesiologist. When Hines arrived, he saw that the dead man had IV tubing in his left arm that was attached to two syringes. There was also a vial of some kind of medicine and a sterile-water solution. The victim’s shirt had been ripped open down the front and his tan trousers unzipped and pulled down a little. There were a few drops of blood on his thighs and some staining on the pants themselves.

  That wasn’t suspicious; as the three women had prepared to administer CPR, they would have torn and pulled at his clothing and ripped the IV needles from his hand, spilling the small amount of blood there. He would not have bled after death. The police presumed that Dr. Walker would have known exactly how much of certain drugs it would take to kill him. Even so, an autopsy was ordered to determine the exact manner of his death.

  There was one fact that only Celeste knew. John had carried a syringe of fentanyl with him always. She had found syringes in his jacket pockets and in his car. “It was like his ace in the hole, if things got too bad,” she said. “I don’t think he was abusing it; I think he just kept it close as his safety valve.”

  Fentanyl is a powerful painkiller, an opioid drug often used by anesthesiologists, but almost always in conjunction with assisted breathing because it tends to depress respiration. The speed with which it is introduced into the body is very important. Cases of sudden death from heart palpitations or tachycardia (racing heart), lack of oxygen, or severe electrolyte disturbance are not uncommon at doses of fentanyl over 25 milligrams. Fentanyl is also highly addictive.

  Mike was in the hospital when John Walker died, being treated for the fourth episode of the mysterious ailment that seemed to be bringing him closer and closer to death. Celeste couldn’t bring herself to call and tell him about John. “When I was back home and I got myself together a little, I called Carolyn and asked her to tell Mike. She did. He called me and he was very sympathetic, very comforting. He kept telling me that it wasn’t my fault. . . . But when Mike told Deb that John had killed himself, she got hysterical and started drinking. She called his sister Karen and told her, ‘Celeste killed John.’ She told her children that, too.”

  Later, a nurse who had been on the operating room team with John Walker the day he died remarked on his demeanor. “He was so sad that day, so depressed, that you could feel it. It was catching. I could barely bring myself to stand close to him and feel that much pain.”

  11

  One of Celeste Walker’s relatives would insist that she heard John talking on the phone to Debora a day or two before Celeste found him dead in the garage of his rented house. If Debora had, in fact, told him of the affair between her husband and his wife, it would have been a powerful incentive for him to check out of his bleak life, particularly after Celeste chose that day or the next to ask him for a divorce. Debora would deny that any such conversation took place; Celeste believed that it did, that Debora was so jealous that she would have done anything to get back at her and Mike. Anyone who knew John at all well would have known how fragile he was. Debora had known him since medical school. To tell him about the affair, bluntly and in the vulgar terms she used to tell her own children, would have been an unbelievably cruel thing to do.

  It was a ghastly time. John’s mother, Kathryn Walker,* had left for a long-awaited trip to France the day he killed himself. She had no sooner landed in Paris than she was greeted with the news that her son was dead, an apparent suicide. She never left the airport, but caught the next plane back to the United States.

  Kathryn Walker could not accept that her son had killed himself, even though other family members and his friends had said he was depressed. She admitted that John was “heartsick” about his divorce. “He did not realize anything until she filed,” Kathryn would claim. “He said he made a terrible mistake by not going to Peru.” She said that he had been thinking about the future. He was buying a new car and furniture. He had planned to go to Canada with six friends. Those, his mother insisted, were not the plans of a would-be suicide. Kathryn wanted to believe her son’s death was an accident. Even murder would have been easier for her to accept—although she named no suspects.

  Gossips said that Celeste wore too much makeup at John’s funeral services, that her clothes were inappropriate, and that the first thing she said when she got home afterward was “Who’s going to make the margaritas?” She was too merry a widow. “She laughed at his funeral,” one woman said disapprovingly. “She acted as though she was at a cocktail party.” But no one who knew Celeste would have been surprised by her behavior. She had long since learned to conceal her pain with laughter.

  Gossips also said that Celeste had John’s car detailed the day after his death, then billed his office for it. Some mean-spirited people would have pilloried her in the town square if they could have. They did not take into account the enormity of her horror when she looked through that mail slot into the garage. They did not know her well enough to know how she responded to an emotional blow. Celeste moved through the days following her discovery of John’s body like an automaton. She had wanted to be free of her sad marriage—but not like this.

  She had always expected that she and John would remain part of each other’s lives, that they would consult on raising their two sons. The trouble with her marriage had never been that she didn’t care about John. She did care, but she had exhausted every way she could think of to make him happy. Anyone who had seen her hysterically pleading with the ER staff at Shawnee Mission Medical Center to treat John, to save him—even though he had been dead for hours—could testify that she had wanted him to live.

  But still there were rumors that Celeste had either killed her husband or deliberately driven him to suicide. “She got millions of dollars in insurance, you know,” the rumor mongers said, hugely inflating the actual amount.

  “The police investigated me,” Celeste would admit frankly. “They questioned me, and they cleared me.”

  Question her they did—not once but several times. They asked her to account for every moment of September 5. She remembered most of the day well, but she could not remember whether she had bought her younger son ice cream or taken him to a video arcade while they waited for Brett to finish soccer practice. That day had been endless, full of sadness, worry, anxiety—and, finally, panic.

  Celeste was not immediately eliminated as a suspect in her husband’s sudden death. It took two autopsies to explain the cause of his death—precisely because he was an anesthesiologist, who knew the most effective way to stop his heart instantly.

  Dr. Bonita J. Peterson performed the first autopsy, on the morning of September 6, 1995, approximately fifteen hours after John’s death. She noted that Dr. Walker had an intravenous line in his left hand, attached to tubing with two interconnected syringes. “One was labeled as being Pentothal. An empty vial labeled pancuronium bromide (Pavulon) was also found in the car.”

  Dr. Peterson found two anatomic conditions: pulmonary congestion and edema; and mild coronary and aortic arteriosclerosis. The former was the immediate result of John’s manner of death; the latter is common to almost all humans over the age of forty. It is the buildup of plaque—fat deposits—along arterial walls.

  Dr. Peterson was not entirely sure of just how Dr. Walker had died. As she wrote in her report, her final comment was, “This is the puzzling case of a 45-year-old white man, an anesthesiologist who was found dead, hooked up to IV tubing connected to a Pentothal syringe. Sterile w
ater and pancuronium were also present at the scene. Exhaustive toxicological examination failed to reveal Pentothal in the urine or blood, although Pentothal was present in the syringe. Examination for fentanyl was negative and potassium injection was also excluded. The specimens were taken by me personally to the toxicology laboratory on the day of collection . . . therefore, a mix-up of specimens is not a logical possibility. The death is an obvious suicide from the circumstances and sodium pentothal is still the most likely cause, even though, for unknown reasons, it cannot be confirmed in the body fluids.”

  John Walker had no drugs or alcohol in his system. He may have carried a syringe of fentanyl with him as security in case he was gripped by such overwhelming depression that he needed it. But he was not addicted to it; fentanyl was not present in his blood.

  For experts, the disturbing finding of the first postmortem examination and the toxicology screen was that Walker, a skilled anesthesiologist, seemed to have carried out an unnecessarily agonizing suicide by using the intravenous fluids in the wrong sequence. Pancuronium, or Pavulon, paralyzes the muscles, so the patient cannot move—not even to breathe. Pentothal is truth serum; it brings on unconsciousness. Anesthesiologists use pancuronium to immobilize patients during surgery; with a mechanical ventilator, they then “breathe” for the patient. Pancuronium’s effect lasts longer than the effect of Pentothal. Why would Walker deliberately paralyze his lungs when he knew he would awaken from the Pentothal and be aware that he was suffocating?

  Could this mean that someone else had administered the two drugs, attempting to make murder look like suicide? That seemed very doubtful. No one would calmly submit to such a procedure, and there were no bruises, no signs of struggle at all, on John’s body, save that the buttons had been ripped from his plaid shirt. That certainly had happened when his wife and the physician neighbor attempted CPR.

  A second postmortem evaluation was ordered; it might be weeks—or even months—before the questions about Walker’s death were answered definitively. Until then, his widow was the subject of continuing gossip.

  Dr. John Walker was dead; Dr. Michael Farrar had come very close to death, and was not out of the woods yet. Although he was released from North Kansas City Hospital on September 11, 1995, it was only with the proviso that he would have an intravenous-feeding setup at home.

  Dr. Beth Henry, weighing all the known factors in Mike’s curious illness, had come up with a best guess—that her patient had gluten-sensitive enteropathy. Every time he ate outside the hospital, he had to be readmitted with the same symptoms. “He was eventually placed on a very restricted gluten-free diet and also supplemented with IV nutrition.”

  For some reason, his doctors decided, Mike could not eat anything containing grain or certain other food products. “They put in a pik line,” he would explain, “which is a special type of IV that went into the antecubital vein [the vein on the inner side of the arm, at the elbow] in order to give me intravenous feeding.” Using this semipermanent line, Debora could attach the intravenous-feeding tube easily. An IV bag on a stand would hold a milklike substance; fat was added to it, along with multivitamins, which had to be injected directly into the bag. Debora kept the vials of vitamins in the rec room refrigerator downstairs.

  Mike was a smart doctor. He had made the connection that he became ill every time he went home. He was not yet sure why. But it could have been the stress associated with being around Debora that made his symptoms flare. It could also have been that he was used to eating a blander diet in the hospital than he got at home.

  Celeste and her friend Carolyn Stafford had a more sinister explanation: “They told me they were convinced that Debora was poisoning me.” Mike scoffed at the idea. “I just couldn’t imagine that she would do such a thing.”

  Celeste was suspicious enough to write down the date of every relapse and note every symptom. She would not be convinced that his illness was natural or accidental. But Mike continued to deny the possibility. He and Debora had certainly had their problems, but they weren’t living in a soap opera or a mystery novel. He suspected that his doctors would probably commit him if he mentioned his friends’ suspicions about poison. He said nothing.

  Mike had weighed only 125 pounds—about as much as Tim—when he left the hospital on September 11, but he began to gain weight from the intravenous feeding. He had been ill, he was getting stronger, and he hoped to be able to go back to work soon. Mike had a new understanding of what some of his patients had undergone, and of the hopelessness of constant illness. If he ever got well enough to practice again, he knew he would be a better doctor—one with considerable empathy.

  Although Debora was taking care of him, Mike knew that it was only a matter of time until he could move out and start divorce proceedings. He told her that he had not changed his mind about that.

  Debora was still drinking a great deal and it was not unusual for her to pass out at night. And she was saying very disturbing things to Mike. “She said she wanted to die—that she couldn’t live without me. That she wanted to commit suicide. She wanted somebody to kill her. And then she’d say she wanted me dead.”

  Mike had been home from his last hospital stay for about two weeks when his concern for Debora’s state of mind drove him to another search of their home. He wanted to make sure that she didn’t have something that she could take to commit suicide, some medication that she was hiding.

  Tim, Lissa, and Kelly were back in school by September 24, the day Mike searched the house and found Debora’s purse in the guest bedroom in the basement where she was sleeping. He didn’t believe in invading someone else’s privacy, but he was afraid of what Debora might do next. If she got out of control, he certainly wouldn’t be able to stop her physically. Debora would never tell him how much she weighed, but he suspected that she now outweighed him by about fifty pounds.

  When Mike opened the tote bag that Debora used as a purse, he found a collection more bizarre than he had envisioned in his wildest imagination.

  There were around a dozen seed packets that were all the same. The picture on the packets showed some kind of luxuriant vine with multi-colored bronze and purplish leaves and bright-colored bristling berries or seeds. The leaves were somewhat like those of the marijuana plant. The packets were labeled “Castor Beans: (Ricinus commonis.)” They were the seeds of the castor-oil plant. Mike was more puzzled than anything else. What on earth was Debora doing with a purse full of seed packets? He had never seen her plant so much as a petunia.

  In the tote bag was also a letter. It was in Debora’s distinctive handwriting, and as Mike read it, the hair stood up on the back of his neck. He had read this very letter before, but then the text had been typed on a computer. “I left the house one day and when I walked out the front door,” Mike remembered, “there was a letter sitting on the mailbox addressed to me. It said, ‘Mike Farrar’ on the envelope and those words were printed in pencil in what seemed to be a child’s handwriting.

  “And so I took the letter and read it and it was an anonymous letter from someone telling me that I should not divorce Debora, that she was a wonderful mother, hardworking for Pembroke Hill School, and that we had such a wonderful relationship.”

  The anonymous correspondent, who seemed to have been on the Peru trip, said that it would be devastating if he and Debora were to get divorced. Their children would be deprived of social activities in the future; the girls would never be BOTARs.

  Recognizing the font they had on their computer, upstairs in the room next to Tim’s, Mike had been suspicious. Who in his house had written this? One of the youngsters? Debora herself? He suspected Debora, because the phraseology and the arguments sounded like hers.

  Now, in Debora’s purse, he had found what appeared to be a “practice” letter in her handwriting. What a grotesquely childish thing for her to do. After years of arguments, did she really think that an anonymous letter was going to make him change his mind? But clearly she had worked hard over that anony
mous letter, producing a handwritten draft and then typing it on the computer.

  He looked at the seed packets again. And now he saw the warning: castor beans were extremely toxic and were not to be taken internally. He stared blankly at the seed packets. Was it possible that Debora, who insisted that she could make a better home for him if he would only stay, was thinking about landscaping? It seemed totally unlike her, but lately everything she did was unlike what she had done before, as if she were on a slowly revolving platform, showing a slightly new side of her self each time the mechanism moved. The only thing recognizable about Debora were her temper tantrums. Those she seemed unable to change.

  Fishing deeper into the roomy bag, Mike came up with three empty vials of potassium chloride, along with three used syringes. Potassium chloride is a common substance—as common as salt (which it basically is). It can be both life-giving and life-threatening, depending on the dosage. It is given to people suffering from heat prostration or profuse vomiting, to reestablish electrolyte balance. But too much potassium can throw the heart into a fatal arrhythmia. When it is found in syringes, it is usually to be added to an IV line.

  Mike’s pik line hadn’t worked very well. “It wouldn’t run,” he said, “so after three days, I asked my doctor to take it out and he did.” But if Debora truly hated him enough, she could easily have killed him as he slept: all she had to do was inject the potassium chloride into the pik line. He would never have felt it. But she hadn’t done that. As far as he knew, she had only kept the intravenous nutrients and the massive doses of vitamins flowing into his veins, just as his doctors had ordered.