The role of a county prosecutor in the State of Kansas up until three decades or so ago was usually filled by a lawyer who was the least experienced and least skilled. The newest lawyer around would be tapped for the job. It was his “turn.” However, that philosophy changed radically in the sixties; now, attorneys who aspired to become prosecutors faced stiff competition. Suddenly, the cream of the crop of criminal lawyers wanted to be district attorneys. This was, of course, a boon for the citizens of Kansas, and bad news for defendants.
Morrison knew that when he graduated from law school in 1980 it would be difficult to get a job with the Johnson County prosecutor. To improve his chances, he began getting experience while he was still in law school. He interned at two or three prosecutors’ offices in rural counties under the Kansas Student Practice Act and was working as a student prosecutor almost full-time by his third year of law school. “I’d handled several hundred misdemeanor cases and I’d tried several jury trials,” he recalled.
Morrison had made sure he had substantial experience to offer Johnson County when he graduated, and he was hired by then–District Attorney Dennis Moore as one of his ten assistant district attorneys. Morrison served as an ADA for eight years. With his wife’s encouragement, he ran for district attorney of Johnson County in 1988, when Dennis Moore decided not to seek a fourth term. Morrison won both primary and general elections despite a long, difficult campaign in which his former boss supported his Democratic opponent. Basically apolitical, Morrison ran as a Republican. His biggest detractors came from the religious right in Johnson County, who found the moderate Morrison too radical.
Standing close to six feet, lean and full of energy, Morrison looked and sounded like pure Kansas. With his thick mustache, chiseled features, and icy blue-green eyes that could pinion a witness in their gaze, he could well have been a lawman a hundred years ago in the town of his birth: Dodge City, Kansas. His voice was a deep baritone, laced with a natural Kansas drawl. He was an individual. Where most men were fascinated with organized sports, he was a fan of the oddities in the sports world: lumberjack contests, log rolling, tree climbing. Probably his chief passion was keeping track of Alaska’s Iditarod dogsled races.
Morrison’s most publicized case was that of Richard Grissom, Jr., a case in which he faced criminal-defense attorney Kevin Moriarty. Grissom was, according to Morrison, “the closest thing to a serial killer to ever come around here.” (For some reason, such killers prowl the coastal parts of America; there are very few documented serial killers in the heartland.)
Richard Grissom, Jr., was half-Korean and half-black. The Grissoms, an Army family stationed in Korea, had adopted him through a Korean orphanage when he was four. Up to the time he was adopted, he had survived on his own in the rough streets of Seoul. Perhaps those early horrors had marked him forever.
The Grissoms took Rich Junior back to America—first to California, and then, when they were transferred, to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Rich Junior was a beautiful child and grew to be a handsome young man, who—much like Andrew Cunanan—could fit into any race or culture he chose. But he brought his adoptive parents only pain, and he cast a pall over their name.
Rich ran away from home in 1979, when he was sixteen. He headed for Lansing, Kansas, in the middle of a blizzard. Seeking warmth, he broke into the basement of an elderly woman’s house. The woman heard someone downstairs, and when she investigated, Rich confronted her and beat her to death. “He was tried as a juvenile,” Morrison recalled, “and he was sent to a youth center in Topeka. They let him out after four years. He did penny-ante crimes for three or four years, some of them in Olathe.”
By 1989, Rich seemed to have reinvented himself. He was a professional racquetball player, and he had the beauty and grace of a “Michelangelo. Perfect-looking individual,” Morrison said. “He was a chameleon. He could change his appearance at will. He could look like a white yuppie; he could look like a black rapper with cornrowed hair. But he could also look as though he was from the Far East or Hawaii or a Wall Street brokerage firm. He was a phenomenal athlete and owned a commercial painting business. But he was also robbing apartments throughout Johnson County.”
Over a two-week period, Rich murdered three young women. “We never found the bodies,” Morrison said. “But we tried him in a four-week trial and we got him convicted. We made it through a cornucopia of circumstantial and physical evidence. We had a task force going for months, and we ended up with hair from his head and a few of his pubic hairs in two victims’ beds. We found a little, tiny spot of blood in the trunk of one of the victims’ rental cars. We did reverse maternity/paternity DNA with her parents and established it was her blood. He was taking these ladies around and draining their ATMs before he killed them. With one of them, we got ATM pictures. . . .”
Eight years later, the sadness Morrison felt about Grissom’s victims was obvious. “You couldn’t even look at those pictures without getting a lump in your throat. These were the last pictures of this girl alive, and she was all disheveled. In one, she was crying. Just a hell of a case.”
For a time, after Grissom, the fledgling D.A. believed that he had already tried his most complex case—that he would never again find a defendant who demanded almost more than he, his staff, and the police investigators could give. “I thought that that early in my career my biggest challenge was already behind me,” he said later. The Grissom case had, in fact, produced a landmark verdict, and also spawned a book: Suddenly Gone, written by an ex–FBI agent.
Paul Morrison and his wife, Joyce, had a good marriage, but, given their career choices, it wasn’t always easy. Many prosecutors are tempted to give in to the blandishments of the media and appear on television. Morrison had never been interested in publicity. When he was preparing and trying a case, Morrison would have been gratified if reporters just went away. He gave only the interviews he felt were absolutely necessary to let the public know the most basic facts about any case he was working on. Joyce’s highly successful career was, ironically, in the media: she was an assignment editor for Channel 5 News in Kansas City.
In 1995, the Morrisons had been married for sixteen years, and they had long since worked out the problems inherent in a marriage where one partner had inside information on some of the biggest crime stories to hit Kansas, and the other was a dedicated news seeker. He didn’t tell. She didn’t ask. That is not to say there hadn’t been times when he wanted to tell her just a little bit, and when she wanted to ask him a lot of questions. But their careers and their marriage were definitely in separate compartments.
The Morrisons had three children, who were almost exactly the age of the Farrar children at the time of the fire. Mary Amanda was fourteen, Drew was twelve, and Cole was seven.
Prosecutor Claire McCaskill of Jackson County, Missouri, praised Paul Morrison for his wariness about being seduced by the press. She cited a number of high-profile cases—including the O. J. Simpson trial—that were blown all out of proportion by prosecutors who chose publicity over the matter at hand. “Paul has always been regarded by his peers as a prosecutor’s prosecutor,” McCaskill said. “He believes in a public policy role when it comes to pushing for things like changes in how domestic violence cases should be pursued. But when he has a specific case, he is low-key and to the point.”
Although Morrison had handled administrative duties in the Johnson County D.A.’s office since January 1989, he still managed to try a number of cases himself. “If I couldn’t try cases,” he said, “I wouldn’t like doing this job.”
Nor did he want to try what he called “gold-plate cases” in which there were no complexities, no real challenges. After a hundred felony trials, including twenty murder trials, he looked for the cases that would test his skill the most, the ones in which a guilty verdict was not a sure thing.
Morrison was awakened early on the morning of October 24 by a call from the Prairie Village Police Department. He was about to be plunged into a case as convoluted as any
he had ever encountered, one that would come to make the Grissom case look almost prosaic. The Grissom task force had searched for physical evidence; the new case would raise questions not only about physical evidence but about the cunning and shocking aberrance of a human mind.
That morning, Paul Morrison and Rick Guinn, one of his assistant district attorneys, viewed the blackened shell of the house on Canterbury Court and were amazed that anyone had gotten out of it alive.
Later that day, they attended the postmortem examinations of Kelly and Tim Farrar, performed by Assistant Coroner Jill Gould. Kelly’s was the more difficult for Morrison to watch. She was such a little girl, and she seemed only to be sleeping as she lay on the autopsy table. Tim had suffered such terrible burns. They were mostly postmortem. Until he breathed in the overheated air and died, he had fought to stay alive. Neither child had wounds beyond the damage done by poison gas and fire. That was important to know: they had been alive when the fire erupted.
21
Ellen Ryan had just returned from her Vermont vacation and was back at work beginning the week of October 23. She hadn’t been at all concerned about leaving Debora.
“Dr. Miguel Stamati [Debora’s therapist] said she was in very, very good spirits,” Ellen remembered. “She was talking about plans for the kids. She wanted to make the adjustment so they could spend more time with their dad, and she wanted to be able to make that relationship better. I think, in many ways, for self-preservation—because she wanted to do a residency. But also, she was just sort of moving on away from the divorce. She was angry still with him, and that would come up periodically. She said he was going through some kind of midlife crisis, buying this red truck and all. But she was really kind of moving on with her life.”
Ellen had no idea that Debora was drinking heavily again and that she was not nearly as sanguine about being on her own as she seemed. Ellen was in court Tuesday morning; she had been too busy to read the paper or turn on the news. When she got back to the office, she picked up her voicemail messages.
One was from Debora Green. “Deb said, ‘Ellen, something very terrible has happened. There was a fire and my children are dead. This is terrible. Lissa is with her dad and I’m afraid she is in danger. You’ve got to call me. Something very bad has happened.’” Debora left the number of the motel where she was staying.
Ellen stood there, stunned. “All of a sudden, I have three people dead in seven weeks,” she said. “I knew John Walker was dead. I didn’t know if these kids were dead or not. I wondered if she was psychotic.” She called her partner in to hear Debora’s frantic message. “I don’t know if she’s psychotic,” Ellen said. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
She had thought her client was doing great. She hadn’t seen a sign of trouble, but the message was too weird to be true. “I called the Prairie Village Police Department, anonymously,” Ellen recalled, “and I said, ‘By any chance was there a fire in Prairie Village last night, with two children dead?’ And the dispatcher said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’”
What Debora said was true, although Ellen could hardly believe it. How much more agony was her client going to have to suffer?
Then Dr. Stamati called. He had just learned that Tim and Kelly were dead. They had to find Debora, he said, or there might be even more tragedy. Ellen assured him that she would find Debora, who had said she was at the American Inn north of the river. Ellen dialed that number and asked to be connected with her client’s room.
Debora answered. “I said, ‘Deb, what has happened?’ and she said again, ‘My children are dead. There was a terrible fire. My children are dead.’ And then she kept asking me, ‘Ellen, is it possible for someone to survive this? I don’t think I’m going to survive this. What’s going to happen to Lissa? How is this going to affect her? What am I going to do, Ellen? What am I going to do?’”
Ellen told Debora to stay right where she was and she would come to get her. Like the psychiatrist, Ellen was afraid that Debora was suicidal; someone had to be with her right away. Still not knowing any of the details of the fire, Ellen ran for her car and headed for the American Inn. “I made the decision to go alone,” she said. “I just didn’t know what I was going to be seeing. I wanted to preserve attorney-client privilege if I needed to.”
But before Ellen left her office, she called ex-D.A. Dennis Moore, now a top defense attorney at the firm Moriarty, Erker & Moore of Overland Park. She had worked with Moore before; he was a good lawyer, he was ethical, and she trusted him. “I said, ‘Dennis, remember that one case I took for you that time? Guess what? I’ve got a big problem. . . .’” She paused, wondering how to explain what she wanted.
“Get to the bottom line,” Moore urged. “Get to the bottom line, Ellen.”
She told him about the big fire in Prairie Village and the two dead children. Moore knew exactly what she was talking about, of course—it was all over the papers, television, and the radio. He had not expected her to call about that. He had expected that Ellen wanted help with one of the child molestation cases that often accompanied ugly divorces.
“But there’s more, Dennis,” Ellen went on. “You’ve known me a long time, and you know I’m not crazy. I’m not making things up.” She told him how John Walker had hired her for a divorce, only to end up a suicide a few weeks later. Then Debora Green had come to her—and now two of Debora’s children had died violently. “I know this story sounds unbelievably bizarre, and I don’t know what to do. You’ve got to help me figure out what to do. I’ve got these three people who are dead, all in seven weeks.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Moore said. “Let’s bring her in.”
“I will bring her in—if she’s still alive,” Ellen said. “And if she’s still alive, I’ll make sure she doesn’t kill herself.”
“Fine. I’ll be there for you when you need me,” Moore promised.
When Ellen arrived at the American Inn, she realized she didn’t know which room was Debora’s. She told the manager that she had a client who had just lost her children, and that she needed to find her right away. “She took me to the room and I went in,” Ellen recalled. “Deb was in the room. She had on clothes I guess they’d given her in the jail—some brown stretch pants—and she was out of it. She had a bottle of booze next to her, some clear fluid. I don’t hard liquor, so I don’t know what it was, but it was a big bottle.”
Debora was talking on the phone. Finally managing to get her to hang up, Ellen asked, “What is going on, Deb? Tell me what happened.”
“My babies are dead. My babies are dead,” Debora repeated over and over in a singsong litany of grief. And then she would vanish into her mind somewhere; she spoke, but what she said made no sense at all. Periodically, she leaned toward her attorney and asked, “Ellen, are my babies still dead? Ellen, are they dead?”
“Yes, the babies are dead,” Ellen answered gently. “The babies are gone, and I am so sorry, Deb.”
Ellen began to search the room. She had four children of her own who needed her, and she still didn’t know whether her client was psychotic, drunk, dangerous, or delusional. She was looking for a weapon, or for drugs that Debora might have overdosed on. The situation was almost hallucinatory; Ellen herself felt a little like Alice Through the Looking Glass as she searched in the closet and peered under the bed.
Then she noticed fresh blood on Debora’s pillow. She couldn’t see any wounds, but wondered if she was hemorrhaging from her gastrointestinal system after drinking so much.
“I couldn’t put her in the car to take her anyplace,” Ellen remembered, “because in the state she was in, I was afraid she might jump out on the freeway. So I called the paramedics.”
Firefighter-paramedics Mark Fuller and Marvin Landes out of District 1 of the North Kansas City Fire Department responded to the emergency call: “Ambulance requested American Inn, nature unknown,” at 2:17 in the afternoon with sirens wide open. “We run ‘hot,’” Landes said, explaining that they always raced to the scene w
hen they had no idea what the problem was.
When they arrived at the American Inn, followed by a pumper truck, they found two police officers in the hallway, waiting to lead them to the person in trouble. They didn’t know if they were about to see a heart attack or a suicide attempt—they had no specifics at all. Landes, with thirty-three years on the fire department, loped ahead.
What he and Fuller found was a woman lying crosswise on one of the beds with her face to the wall. She was crying and very distraught. Another woman in the room introduced herself as the patient’s attorney. She said she was worried because her client might have suffered a GI bleed; she thought the woman belonged in a hospital.
Mark Fuller rounded the corner, carrying his airway bag and a heart monitor. Landes was already trying to assess the situation. Fuller heard a scrap of conversation that startled him. He thought he heard the woman on the bed say, “I killed my babies. . . .”
Marv Landes was having trouble getting Debora to cooperate. To find out if she had hemorrhaged from the mouth or lower intestine, he asked her whether the blood had been bright red or like coffee grounds, and she kept answering “No.”
Scanning the room, Fuller saw a large amount of money lying on one of the end tables, and a huge bottle of gin on the nightstand. It was, he said, a 1.75-liter bottle. Someone had drunk or poured out enough to bring the liquid level below the neck and two fingers down into the wide part of the bottle. A cell phone lay between the room’s two beds.