Bitter Harvest

  Craynor asked where they kept matches. Lissa was firm as she said she had never seen matches in their house. Never.

  “You know,” she said quietly, “Tim was always out on the roof. I don’t know why he didn’t jump.”

  Although Lissa betrayed no strain on her little pansyshaped face and her eyes were dry, she had once more worked her hands completely into her sleeves and clasped the cuffs of her sweater with her fingers so that her hands had disappeared.

  When the men sitting around the table asked if her mother had close friends, Lissa nodded vigorously. She had a lot of close friends. Lissa named several women, mothers of her friends. She said Debora used to play tennis often, but she didn’t play much anymore. “Because she had the flu, and she was vomiting a lot.”

  Lissa knew about her mother’s Monday appointments with Dr. Stamati, and about the pills she took. “I don’t know what they are but they have Dr. Stamati’s name on them.”

  When asked about her parents’ separation, Lissa said frankly, “My brother doesn’t like my dad for leaving. I am kind of mad at him too because my mom’s so sad.”

  Lissa spoke about their pet dogs, but, again, she held back her emotions. She had not been able to save them any more than she could help her brother and sister. When she went to bed Monday night, she took Russell, their new greyhound, into her room. She wasn’t sure whose turn it had been to have Boomer. She thought Tim, but then she thought it was probably Kelly. If Kelly had Boomer, her door would have been closed. This tied in with what the arson investigators discovered; Kelly’s door was closed, but the flames had burned through the center panel. Boomer’s body was found under Kelly’s bed.

  The three investigators needed answers to certain questions, but they hesitated to ask them of this little girl directly. They asked her who cut the grass at her house; she said she had cut it the last time, but usually her mother did. They kept a can of gasoline in the shed. They had two charcoal grills; the new one was on the deck and the other one was downstairs. Lissa said that Tim and her father were usually the ones who cooked on them.

  The interview with Lissa lasted about forty-five minutes. “If we need to talk to you again,” Baker said, “would it be all right with you?”

  “I have ballet practice every night,” Lissa said seriously. “And I’ll be in rehearsal this weekend.”

  “We’ll be sure to work around that,” Baker said with a smile, relieved that, for Lissa at least, her world was continuing. “We’ll probably talk to you tomorrow in the daytime if we need to.”

  “That would be all right,” she said solemnly.

  Baker did not delude himself about the effort it had taken for Lissa to talk about the awful night when her house and half her family disappeared in flames. He also knew that “tomorrow” was the day her brother and sister would be eulogized at their double funeral. He hoped mightily that he would not have to talk to Lissa again.

  24

  Tim and Kelly Farrar’s joint funeral was held on October 27, 1995, at the Village Presbyterian Church. Mike had made most of the arrangements, but both families attended. Family and friends and the funeral home staff were shocked by Debora’s behavior in the narthex before the service started. She was very angry and made no effort to lower her voice.

  “She was rude and she was mean,” one funeral home representative recalled. “I’ve never seen anyone behave that way at a funeral, even though people are often in shock and grieving. She complained about some part of the arrangements she didn’t like—Dr. Farrar had taken care of almost everything—and she swore at me over one detail or another. Everything we did was wrong in her eyes.

  “Her parents were there, and her sister, and they were very nice people. They came up and said, ‘Debora, don’t yell at him. It wasn’t his decision,’ and she lashed out at them. I remember she used the ‘F’ word. She said ‘I don’t need any more of this shit. Shut the fuck up. You can go back home.’ They were very kind to her, but she was so mean to everyone.”

  The two families, torn apart by tragedy, tried to present a united front. The Joneses sat in the front row of the main sanctuary, and the Farrars in the row behind them. “My parents and I sat directly behind Debora and Lissa,” Mike remembered. During one of the songs Mike had chosen, Debora stuck her finger in her mouth and pretended to gag.

  The Reverend Ralph Clark, Mike’s boyhood friend all through school and Boy Scouts, who had officiated at his wedding to Debora, conducted the funeral service. As he began, “Two days ago, when Bill Farrar called and asked me to be here today . . .” Debora turned around and snarled at her father-in-law, “Thanks, asshole.” She spoke under her breath, but loud enough for everyone nearby to hear.

  More than 300 mourners attended the heartbreaking and tense service. Lissa sobbed throughout, the enormity and finality of what had happened perhaps clear to her for the first time. One observer who was not related to the family commented that Debora was on a “roller coaster of emotions.” As he watched, she would greet people joyously and laugh, as if at a social event. “The next minute, it looked as if she were trying to show sadness—but it didn’t ring true.”

  Celeste Walker was at the funeral, and so were many of the friends from the summer trip to Peru. Ellen Ryan attended, still disturbed and puzzled by the unfolding of so many calamities in so short a time. Ellen didn’t see the mean or rude side of Debora. She did notice that a number of Tim’s friends came up and hugged her, that the children seemed to love her. Every time Ellen thought she had a fix on Debora, she discovered some new aspect of her client’s personality. “You know,” she would say a long time later, “I think I really thought of her as a child, as a little baby who needed to be held and comforted. She seemed so lost and so confused.”

  Ellen was very concerned about Lissa; she was only a little girl, but she was carrying the weight of the world on her frail shoulders. She had been her mother’s keeper for so long that she couldn’t easily abdicate her responsibility. Lissa worried about Debora constantly.

  Ellen desperately needed to talk to Debora, and she didn’t want to do it in front of Lissa. But she found it almost impossible to separate the child from her mother. Lissa was Debora’s shadow, clinging to her side, trying to look after her. It was as if Lissa sensed a certain weakness in her mother, as if she knew Debora was incapable of dealing with the world.

  “I didn’t talk to Lissa about the case,” Ellen remembered. “I don’t involve children in a divorce. A lot of lawyers bring the kids in and ask them a bunch of questions. I won’t do that.” But she did want to reassure Lissa that everything would be all right. “I will take care of your mother,” she said kneeling down to talk to the child. “I promise you that I will take care of your mother. That’s my job, and your job is to be a little girl. I want you to be a little girl.”

  Lissa studied Ellen’s face for a long time, and then she nodded. She seemed to have relaxed, if only a little.

  * * *

  The investigators sent representatives to the double funeral; they observed the crowd casually but carefully.

  At the Highland Park Cemetery, on the Kansas side of the state line, Mike ordered a huge marble monument that would hold the urns with his dead children’s ashes. His maternal grandparents had just been buried there, and many other Farrar relatives rested in the same cemetery. On the tablelike top of the monument, the name Farrar stood out in bronze letters. Beneath that, two bronze plaques read, “Timothy Scott: January 20, 1982–October 24, 1995,” and “Kelly Christine: December 13, 1988–October 24, 1995.” On the other side of the massive marker, there was a poem that has helped many families deal with loss.

  Do not stand at my grave and weep

  I am not here; I do not sleep.

  I am a thousand winds that blow,

  I am the diamond’s gilt on snow.

  I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

  I am the gentle autumn’s rain.

  When you awake in the morning’s hush,

&nbs
p; I am the swift uplifting rush

  of quiet birds in circled flight.

  I am the soft stars that shine in the night.

  Do not stand at my grave and cry,

  I am not here. I did not die.

  Etched into the shining slab of bronze were snowflakes, wind, rain, the moon and stars, circling birds, and wheat against a setting sun.

  Mike had to remind himself often that his last evening with his son had been a good one. It was a small comfort he could cling to: they had shared the joy of Tim’s glory on the ice rink. For the first time in a good while, they had been together as a father and son should be. When Mike saw Tim’s hockey coach, Jon Baskind, at the funeral, he said, “My greatest memory is of Tim playing that Monday.”

  Tom Deacy had coached Tim in soccer since the third grade. “He was very determined,” he recalled. “He practiced certain soccer skills at home. He was far and away better than most of the other kids.” Tim never wanted to waste time at practice. “He would be one of the first ones to say, ‘Let’s get back to doing what we were doing. . . .’ I felt like he was a pit bull on a tether sometimes,” Deacy said, “but he was a clean player.”

  Tim had been the same way as a hockey player. Jon Baskind had high praise for the boy he had seen grow from a little boy to a muscular teenager. “The neat thing about Tim was his intensity and his willingness to do anything to help his team win,” Baskind said. “He singlehandedly won one game. He had three goals and three assists. He was a coach’s dream.”

  Although Mike and Debora had taken hundreds of pictures of their children from birth up until a few weeks before the fire, they feared their photographs were lost. Fortunately, they were found intact in one of the two safes Mike had had installed; they were being kept by the Johnson County district attorney’s office for the time being. They smelled of char, and tiny particles of soot clung to them, but all of the good memories that had been committed to film were salvageable. The rest of Mike and Debora’s world was in shambles.

  Mike had remembered the safes the day after the fire; one held documents, wills, and some money—perhaps $500. The other held the photographs and family mementos. As it turned out, when the ashes had finally cooled, the fireproof safes were among the very few items in the house that survived the flames.

  Where would Lissa live? Both her parents loved her, but her mother was an emotional wreck and Lissa had voiced her anger at her father for leaving them and for being “rude” to her mother. Everyone was concerned for her well-being, and a court finally decided that she would live with her paternal grandparents, and Karen Beal, Mike’s sister, helped as much as she could. Debora would be allowed to visit Lissa—but, the order decreed, they must be supervised whenever they were together.

  Joan and Robert Jones were with Debora almost constantly; she was seeing her psychiatrist and her behavior seemed to have leveled out. The question of visitation was a hard call to make. But Lissa had been through far too much already. To cut her off abruptly from the mother she loved would have been too cruel. And if the continuing investigation absolved Debora, it would be terrible to have kept her from her one living child. Debora was allowed to accompany Lissa to her ballet practice; Lissa would continue in her role as Clara in the Christmas Ballet. She would also have visits with Debora, as long as her maternal grandparents were present.

  If there was one person whom everyone wanted to protect from further harm, it was Lissa. Her mother and father, both sets of grandparents, her aunts and uncles, and the investigators all made sure that she could fulfill her dream of dancing in The Nutcracker Suite. Whatever quarrels various factions had with one another, they would not let old resentments interfere with Lissa’s life. The fact that she was alive at all was a miracle; seeing her graceful tour jetés and her slender figure on point gave everyone hope who cared about her.

  Ellen Ryan worried about Lissa’s physical safety, but she didn’t know which parent was the one to watch. She knew Debora was a suspect, but Ellen considered Mike a suspect, too; she was troubled because there were no restrictions on his visits with Lissa. But there was nothing she could do about that. With the police watching both parents, she hoped that Lissa would be safe.

  Ellen was a pragmatist. She made sure that Mike would continue the court-ordered payments of $5,400 a month to Debora. That was the amount listed in papers filed in Mike’s divorce action against Debora. Out of that, Debora was expected to make a $3,400 monthly mortgage payment on a house that no longer existed.

  Debora and her parents adamantly insisted that she had had nothing to do with the fire and instructed Ellen orally and in writing to do whatever she had to do to find out who had set it. Ellen promised them that she intended to do just that. But as the days passed, she began to realize that there was a good chance that Debora would be arrested, and she started stockpiling Debora’s money for bail if that should happen.

  When Ellen warned Debora that she might be arrested, Debora looked perplexed. “I didn’t do this, Ellen,” she said, “so why would I be arrested?”

  Ellen usually ended up saying, “Just let me do what I do best. I explained to you in the beginning that I’m pretty good with money. I’m real careful with money.”

  Ellen got permission from Mike and his attorney to divide up the Farrar-Green IRAs, and she took as much money as she could from the marital estate so that Debora would not be left without resources. She opened a separate bank account in Debora’s name only, so that if she was arrested, Ellen would be able to draw on it to help her. Debora was basically helpless with money, and she might need it to pay for her defense against a murder charge.

  And all the while, Debora looked at her lawyer uncomprehendingly. Ellen was being overly concerned, she said. Why should she have a defense when she was totally innocent? But Ellen had felt the wind change, and she knew that her client was being watched very, very carefully. If Debora was going to deny that she was in danger, someone had to look out for her. Ellen had two priorities. The first was Lissa; Lissa’s life had to turn out all right, no matter how much she had already lost. Her second priority was Debora; if she could not protect herself, someone had to take care of her.

  Debora was staying with her parents in a motel, but they were looking for something less transient. Debora was having a rough time; she could not sleep, often staying awake for twenty-four hours at a stretch. When, out of sheer exhaustion, she did fall asleep, she managed only a few hours. She dreamed, always, she said, of happy times with her children. As for awakening, she likened it to facing the terrible truth all over again: her children were gone. Meanwhile, her parents were exhausted because they couldn’t sleep if she couldn’t sleep. Joan had recently suffered a stroke and undergone breast surgery, and she needed her rest.

  Ellen was kept busy seeing that Debora had the proper medications and care; it was she who arranged Lissa’s visits. In a way, Ellen felt as if she were looking after not one little girl but two. She could not believe that Debora had started the fire, but she didn’t know who else might have done it. If Debora had burned down her own house, Ellen was convinced that she was unaware that she had.

  Meanwhile, Prairie Village detectives under Chief Charles Grover, along with the Metro Squad and the arson task force, continued to quietly investigate the fatal fire. As any good detective knows, in an unexplained death, you look first at murder, second at suicide, third at accident, and at natural causes only as a last resort. “Early on,” Grover would tell reporters later, “we decided to investigate it as a homicide, hoping it would be a fire of natural causes and everything would be fine. It didn’t turn out that way.”

  It would be some time before the origin and cause team from the task force would publicly announce its conclusions about how the fire had started in the Farrar-Green house. Many team members, however, had formed strong private opinions. As for the public at large, rarely would there be such divergent opinions about the guilt or innocence of a suspect. Perhaps it was the crime itself—the murder of o
ne’s own children—that evoked such partisan stances. Husbands kill wives. Wives kill husbands. Lovers kill lovers. But we want to believe that mothers protect their young; they do not set fire to them in a Medea-like rage.

  Grieving friends and curiosity seekers got as close as they could to the blackened ruins; at 7517 Canterbury, only the stone arch over what had been a front door, and the massive stone fireplace, seemed solid. The yellow crime scene tape held them far back from the actual property. Many people left flowers—red roses and florists’ pastel bouquets that seemed incongruous next to the brilliant autumn foliage.

  Life continued on Canterbury Court, but it was a different kind of life. The many children who lived there were forced to deal with sudden, violent death far sooner than they should have been. The friends of both dead children had difficulty coping with the concept that Tim and Kelly had been there one day and dead the next. They had been welcome at Debora’s home, and nobody cared if they were noisy or made a mess. If this could happen to Kelly and Tim, something bad could happen to them too. All humans come to ponder our own mortality, but usually such reflections intrude on our serenity when we have grown older.

  The parents on Canterbury Court shut their doors to the media and closed their blinds to the public. This was not a neighborhood where anyone relished being featured on the nightly news, giving opinions on those who had died or speculating on what had caused the fire. Although Canterbury Court was not a gated community, it was—or, rather, it had been—a kind of oasis, whose gardens and trees and houses with fenced yards seemed to keep the rest of the world away. The doctors and lawyers and other highly paid professionals who lived there had to deal with illness and death and legal woes during their workaday lives. They hated to see scandal invade their haven. But there was such intense interest in the third house from the corner that Canterbury residents saw their street on television almost every night. Even the tabloid television shows sent scouts.