Bitter Harvest

  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 children’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.

  Two of the pictures that the designated photographer, Ted McIntosh, took of the fire damage were truly ironic. They showed two books, intact but singed around the edges: Necessary Lies and Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive. Detective Gary Baker had found the latter lying on the floor in front of the wet bar in the basement recreation room. The words of the title were emblazoned on a red cover. He had been summoned by firefighters to see the bodies of Kelly and Tim when he spotted the book. “It gave me a chill,” he remembered.

  The arson investigation confirmed what police and firefighters had suspected from the beginning: the Prairie Village Police Department was confronting a criminal case. Or, rather, there was a series of cases, and they were far too convoluted for a relatively small police department to handle alone. While Prairie Village is not often the scene of a homicide, it now looked as though there might well have been two homicides attributable to arson. And then there was John Walker’s suicide, only six weeks before the fatal fire, and the suspected multiple poisonings of Mike Farrar.

  On October 26, two days after the deadly fire, the Prairie Village Police Department asked that the Metro Squad be activated. This, too, was a task force, but one oriented to death investigation rather than arson. Designed to aid police departments in the Kansas City area, it was comprised of detectives and police officers from many jurisdictions who had attended a four-day training session on death investigation. Officers who had completed this class and another on the workings of the Metro Squad had their names added to the list of available backup detectives.

  When Prairie Village requested help in the Farrar-Green case, the Metro Squad board placed calls to police departments in both Kansas and Missouri asking for trained officers who were available to work on the case. Twenty-one investigators responded. Prairie Village detectives worked alongside the Metro Squad investigators, paired up with men and women who had expertise in various aspects of death investigation. A TIPS Hotline was set up so that anyone with information about the fire could call it in—anonymously, if need be.

  Lieutenant Mark Kessler of the Overland Park police was designated the Metro Squad officer in charge, while Lieutenant Gary Pruitt of the Prairie Village Police Department was the lead officer, who would hand out the “lead cards” to detectives to follow up. Rumors and tips were already pouring in to the hotline. Tom Robinson of the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department served as the press officer—an extremely stressful job in this case. The AP wires had carried the story of the mysterious fire, and even The New York Times had reported it.

  Usually, the Metro Squad was activated for a set number of days. But if leads kept coming in on a case, the requesting department could ask for an extension. The investigation of this case would be a little like a military operation: the battalion facing the heaviest barrage could call for backup troops. Chief Charles Grover of the Prairie Village Police Department was gratified by the response from the Metro Squad. Gary Baker, Rod Smith, and Greg Burnetta would keep working on the case, but they would have all the help they needed.

  23

  By Wednesday, October 25, Debora was coherent, but now she was asking Ellen Ryan the questions that Ellen had asked her the night before. “She told me, ‘There has been a fire,’” Ellen said. “‘What has happened? How could this happen? How could there have been a fire? What’s going on?’”

  “Deb,” Ellen answered, “they think the fire may have been arson.”

  “Arson?” Debora gasped. “Who would want to do this to my family?”

  “Well, we don’t know for sure yet, Deb,” Ellen said. “But we have to look at that.”

  “Do you think Tim was fighting with someone?”

  “I don’t know,” Ellen said, puzzled by the question. She had no idea who might have wanted to set fire to Debora and Mike’s house.

  When Joan and Bob Jones learned that two of their grandchildren had perished in a fire, they set out immediately from El Paso, Texas, and drove straight through; it took them twenty hours to reach Kansas City. They were naturally very upset, but they were completely shocked when they saw Debora. They had spoken to her on the phone often since Joan’s diagnosis of breast cancer, but they had not seen her for five months. In that brief period, she had metamorphosed into someone who didn’t look at all like their daughter, their brilliant valedictorian, their med school graduate, the slender young mother of their grandchildren. Yes, she had put on a little weight in the last few years, but they had never seen her so bloated. Her sister Pam, who had not seen Debora in years, was stunned at how different she looked.

  “We don’t recognize our daughter,” the Joneses said to Ellen. “Something has happened to her. What’s wrong with her? She’s swollen up like a balloon—her face doesn’t even look like her.”

  Ellen could only shake her head in sympathy and bewilderment. She had seen Debora go from a frowzy, illkempt, dependent woman, to an angry, vindictive woman, to a competent optimistic woman, to a babbling psychotic, and, now, to a coherent, questioning, normal-seeming person.

  Who was Debora Green? Even her own attorney didn’t really know. There were so many ramifications of the disasters that had befallen John and Celeste Walker and Mike and Debora. Ellen became accustomed to prefacing almost every opening discussion with someone about the intermingled cases with a standard warning: “You know me. You know I’m not crazy—b
ut this is going to sound really weird.”

  And weird it was. Ellen, too, was asking herself if John Walker’s suicide, Debora’s and Mike’s divorce, and, now, the fatal fire on Canterbury Court were isolated tragedies or whether there was some arcane connection between them. When she looked at a photograph of a laughing group of tourists at the highest point of some far-off Peruvian mountain range, it was hard to believe that three and a half months later two of the families pictured there would be destroyed and the rest would be asking bewildered questions.

  Shortly after 2:30 in the afternoon of October 26, two days after the fatal fire in her home, Lissa was interviewed. Winsomely pretty, with her dark hair pulled back in a ballerina’s bun, she was a remarkably poised little girl. She wore a long-sleeved gray sweater, and betrayed her anxiety only by occasionally pulling its sleeves down so far that she seemed to have no hands at all. She spoke in the present tense about her family and her home. It was still too soon for a ten-year-old girl to truly accept that both her brother and sister were gone, and that her home was in ashes.

  Lissa sat at the interview table and nodded politely when Gary Baker introduced himself. This was a meeting that Baker had both been looking forward to, as a detective, and dreading, as the father of small children. “I made a promise to Lissa in the very beginning,” he recalled. “I told her that I would never lie to her, even though she might not like to hear some of the true things I would tell her. And I kept my promise to her—always.”

  Sitting in on the interview were a task force investigator—Dennis Craynor of the Kansas City, Kansas, Fire Department—and a Metro Squad detective—Roger Denton of the Grandview Police Department. Denton and Baker had been paired for the duration of this investigation.

  Baker asked Lissa if she remembered talking to him on the night of the fire. She nodded. She was a very dignified little girl, who didn’t seem at all intimidated at the prospect of being questioned by three men. She sipped daintily from a can of pop as she answered their questions. It was apparent that they were bending over backward not to bring up anything that might upset her any more than they had to.

  Baker asked Lissa to recall the night of the fire for them, and she said she had awakened either to the smell of smoke or to the sound of the smoke alarm. She had fallen asleep with the light on, so she had been able to see smoke curling under her door and from every corner of her room. “I had no idea what was going on,” she said. “I opened my door and I yelled, ‘Tim!’ I heard him across the hall, and he was yelling, ‘Please! Please . . .’”

  Lissa could not see Tim because there was so much black smoke in the hallway. She closed her door and went to the phone and called 911, but there was so much noise in the house from the alarms that she couldn’t hear anything on the other end. So she had hung up. “And I was afraid my room was going to blow up on me, so I pushed the window out and crawled out.”

  Looking at pictures of the house that took up most of the front page of the Kansas City Star, Lissa pointed out the window through which she had escaped onto the roof of the garage. Because the flames were close behind her, she’d had to climb up over the peak of the roof and down on the back side of the garage. She had seen her mother in the Formans’ yard and called out to her, but she said her mother hadn’t heard her at first.

  “My mother was terribly upset,” she said firmly. “Really upset. She said, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’”

  When Debora had finally spotted Lissa, she came over to stand directly below where her daughter clung to the roof and told her to jump, promising to catch her. Lissa said she had jumped from the roof and hit the ground. “But I wasn’t really hurt,” she hastened to add. “A minute later the police came.”

  Lissa said that she and her mom were “very cold” and they got into a police car to warm up. “Two minutes later, my father came,” she said primly. “He was kind of rude to my mom. He said, ‘Deb, Deb, what did you do?’ and she said, ‘What do you mean what did I do?’ She was very upset.”

  Lissa was the only person who recalled that Debora was upset on the night of the fire. She was adamant that her mother had been frantic. “She was crying and really sad,” Lissa told the investigators. “She said, ‘My babies are in there and they’re going to die.’ I saw her reach out to hug Mary Forman and Mary pushed her away, and wouldn’t hug her back.”

  Lissa said that later she had gone to a neighbor’s house, used the bathroom, and gotten some warm clothes. Then she had waited in a “van,” her term for the paramedics’ ambulance.

  “This was all pretty scary, wasn’t it?” Baker asked.

  Lissa nodded her head, watchful, waiting for his questions.

  Baker, Denton, and Craynor asked her about which alarm she had heard first. She was quite sure it had been the smoke alarm. “It went ‘beep-beep-beep.’” She knew the difference between that and the burglar alarm—she had heard them both before. At some point during the fire, she had heard two separate alarms, the smoke alarm and the break-in warning.

  No, Lissa said, she had not seen any flames, only the thick black smoke curling right through the walls of her room and obscuring her view of the hall when she looked for Tim. She said her room faced the front of the house, while Kelly’s and Tim’s faced the back and looked down on the pool.

  Carefully, Baker asked Lissa how things had been around their house lately.

  “Well, my father moved out . . . after school started,” she said. “My mom wanted to be a divorced couple that got along really well. My dad was really rude to her. My father didn’t get along with her very well. He blamed her for things. He told her she wasn’t a good role model. But she was a good role model. I really loved her. I thought she was a good role model.”

  “In what way?”

  “She was very smart, very caring, very kind to everyone, very nice to everyone. If we got in trouble, we had to apologize very nicely.”

  Lissa said that her mother disciplined them by removing privileges. Yes, Debora had gotten along well with Tim. “If she had problems with him, she told him she was the boss,” Lissa said. “She would threaten to send him to military school. But we had a really good relationship all together.”

  It was remarkable. In a family whose emotions had spun completely out of control, this ten-year-old was very mature and well-spoken. She paused before she answered, and she was clearly struggling to present her mother as a wonderful, well-adjusted person. Apparently all of the children had banded together to protect Debora from a world she could not cope with. Baker remembered hearing how little Kelly had combed her mother’s hair before Debora was taken to the hospital.

  Of her father, Lissa would say only that he was often “rude.” She viewed her mother as a victim, a vulnerable person who had been unfairly maligned and betrayed—and, of course, that was exactly how Debora viewed herself.

  But, no, Lissa said in answer to an investigator’s question, her parents had not argued the night of the fire. Everything had been normal. Her father had come in to look at his mail, but he had not said anything “rude” to her mother on Monday night. Lissa recalled that earlier her mother had taken a Jacuzzi and was wearing her “red robe with the white sheep” on it when her father brought Tim and Kelly home. She and her brother and sister had eaten, but her mother had not. “I think she still had the flu.”

  Lissa thought her father had left about 9:30. “I went to bed after he left. I usually go to bed at nine-thirty or ten and read or do homework until I go to sleep.”

  Baker asked Lissa if her mother and father drank alcohol, and she said, “Sometimes. At special times. But only wine or champagne.” But then, reluctantly, she acknowledged that once her mother had been drinking gin because she “got really sad because of my dad. But it was only a bottle, but it was all in a week.” She wavered. “Maybe it was more than a bottle. . . .”

  Lissa said that her mother had been embarrassed to visit Pembroke Hill School because of rumors that she had been drinking heavily. “My dad tol
d everyone at school,” she said. “Once I didn’t get my homework done, and my teacher said that was okay because she knew things were difficult at my house. That was awful.”

  When she was asked again about the burglar alarm, Lissa’s response proved she had been adept at programming it: “‘47211’ is the code to turn it off. I mean, the code is ‘4721’ and then you punch ‘1’ for off.” She didn’t know what all the lights meant, but she knew that if the alarm sounded, the security company would call the house and one of the family had to give another code, “4663.” If whoever answered the phone didn’t do that, the police would come. She and Tim both knew the codes; Lissa wasn’t sure whether Kelly knew how to work the alarm. They always set the alarm when they left the house. At night, when they were staying in, they pressed “3.” “My brother set off the motion detector at night, sometimes,” Lissa said, “when he’d get up and go downstairs.”

  There were two phone lines into their house, Lissa said; she and her brother and sister each had a phone in their rooms. Both phone lines came into their computer’s modem. The children’s phone line was also wired into the basement and the laundry room. She said that her family had two safes behind a hidden door in the den closet; they kept their photographs there.

  Did the family keep the house locked all the time? Lissa explained that they locked the exterior doors at night. They had to have a key to get out. Most of the keys were kept in a basket in the kitchen, but her mother’s was on a shelf in the master bedroom. It fit both the front door and the glass door from the master bedroom to the deck. “We have a maid who cleans—Wendy—but she doesn’t have a key,” Lissa said.

  The detectives asked how the intercom worked. People inside the house, Lissa said, could push a button to call to the intercom box mounted on the rear of the house, but there was no button on the outside to talk back. The person inside had to press the “listen” button and wait for the person outside to respond.