Everyone wanted to see Dr. Debora Green, who had been invisible to the public for two months. It was rumored that her husband, Dr. Michael Farrar, would testify against her, and that his alleged mistress, Celeste Walker, would testify too.
And then, suddenly, Debora emerged from a room beyond the jury box, accompanied by Ellen Ryan. She wore a white sweater that was clearly too large for her over a pink turtleneck top and a pleated white skirt. She had obviously lost twenty pounds or more since her arrest. Without seeming even to glance at the spectators in the room, she moved quickly to her chair at the defense table. She had a faintly clumsy, almost masculine stride.
Once she took her seat, Debora looked only forward. She had to have been aware that every pair of eyes behind her was focused on her, but she never looked around to check out the gallery. Her hair was probably her best feature; chestnut brown and gleaming, it fell naturally into thick waves. She wore makeup, but very subtle makeup—a touch of eye shadow, a little lip gloss. Pearl stud earrings were her only jewelry.
Like most defendants, Debora had a yellow legal pad on the table in front of her, and she clutched a pen as if she planned to take notes. Her expression was alert, even wary, but she didn’t look worried. Ellen Ryan, sitting close beside her—for moral support only; she was not a criminal lawyer—did look worried, and she often glanced anxiously at Debora. The male attorneys, on both sides, looked businesslike.
No one outside the inner sanctum of the district attorney’s office and the Metro Squad knew for sure what evidence the State of Kansas might have against Dr. Debora Green. Ninety days after the fire that killed two of her children, the rest of the world was about to find out. There was a good chance they would also get some idea of what Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty would counter with in her defense.
The proceedings began with Paul Morrison asking Judge Ruddick if he might make an opening statement. He would not be talking to a jury; in this phase he had only the judge to convince. And, for the first time, step by step, in perfect chronological order, Judge Ruddick and the court watchers learned of the events that led up to the catastrophic inferno on Canterbury Court. In his deep calm voice, Morrison described the strange fire that happened on West Sixty-first Terrace after Dr. Michael Farrar left Debora Green the first time, and after he had reneged on the deal to buy 7517 Canterbury Court and on a reconciliation.
“Within a couple of days after that, Judge,” Morrison said, “their house in Kansas City, Missouri, burned, suffering severe damage, and it burned just a few minutes after Debora Green left one day with the children while Dr. Farrar was at work. Well, now the family had nowhere to go and that sort of forced a reconciliation. They moved in with him. And as part of that they went ahead and bought that house on Canterbury Court in Prairie Village.”
Morrison went on to explain that the couple had made an attempt to be happy together. But that attempt was shortlived. Michael Farrar wanted a divorce.
“After he told her that,” Morrison said, “Dr. Michael Farrar and others will document for this court a series of very bizarre, very obsessive, strange behavior by Dr. Debora Green. . . . [She] began to drink very heavily. . . . She began to make threats—mainly threats to commit suicide, but at times threats against other people, specifically Dr. Farrar. Sometimes, she would lay in bed for days and refuse to get up, causing a lot of problems within the family, particularly with the kids. The kids were scared. Dr. Farrar was scared.”
Morrison told about the time Debora had hidden in her own home and pretended to be calling her husband from someplace else. Those in the gallery stared at the back of Debora’s head, obviously curious about her reactions to Morrison’s accusations. But those who could see her face in profile saw that her expression never changed. Morrison might as well have been talking about someone else.
“In early August, Dr. Michael Farrar began to get sick,” Morrison said. “And it wasn’t just a minor illness, Judge.” He related the symptoms of Mike’s illness and the doctors’ puzzlement over what could be wrong with their colleague. “He was hospitalized for several days,” Morrison said. “He got better. . . . He went home. He ate food prepared by Debora Green. He got sick again. . . . He was eventually released on September eleventh after three fairly long hospitalizations, and the doctors could not figure out what was wrong with him—finally diagnosed him as having some sort of a tropical sprue syndrome because they’ll tell you that they really couldn’t figure out what else it could have been. . . .”
Debora continued to look straight ahead, watching Morrison as he spoke.
“The bizarre behavior continued,” Morrison said. “It got so bad, Judge, that Michael Farrar on September 25, 1995, attempted to have his wife committed involuntarily to a mental institution. . . .”
When Morrison said that Mike had found castor beans in his wife’s purse at about this time, reporters began to scribble furiously. What did castor beans have to do with the deadly fire? The few newspaper reports that mentioned castor beans and ricin had been tantalizingly brief.
Paul Morrison then described the strange night when the Prairie Village police had taken Debora to the KU Medical Center. She had been quite cooperative with her acquaintance, Dr. Pam McCoy—until Dr. Farrar had arrived. “As soon as he walked in that room, Pam McCoy will tell you that Debora Green turned around, spun around, assumed some kind of assaultive posture toward him, spit at him, screamed at him, ‘You fuckhole. . . . You will get those kids over our dead bodies!’”
Morrison moved next to the night of October 23–24. He detailed all the pages, the phone calls, the arguments as Mike phoned Debora first from Celeste Walker’s home, and then from his apartment. “He gets home, he calls her back. They have a heated conversation between . . . eleven-forty-five and probably five minutes until twelve. In that heated conversation, he will tell you that Debora Green was drunk, and that made him mad. He will tell you that he was angry because of the fact that the neighbors had complained to him about what had been going on over in his house during his absence. He was tired of dealing with the drunkenness of Debora Green. She wasn’t taking care of the house. He was worried about the kids.
“And he said to her, ‘I think you’re poisoning me. I think you’re poisoning me, you’re drunk, you’re abusive, you’re not taking care of those kids, people are threatening to call SRS. Get your act together.’”
Morrison told Judge Ruddick that Mike had received one last phone call from Debora. She had obviously not expected him to be home; she had thought he was calling her back from his car phone. “And Debora Green said to him, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were home. I was just going to leave a message.’ Click. Several minutes after that last call, Your Honor, the house at 7517 Canterbury was an inferno. . . . Kelly Farrar and Tim Farrar died in that fire. Ten-year-old Lissa Farrar, their middle child, got out through the window of her bedroom.”
Morrison promised the judge that over the next few days he would produce witnesses who would prove that Mike’s illness was neither a virus nor tropical sprue but something far more sinister. Morrison said he would put witnesses on the stand who would testify that the fire that killed Kelly and Tim Farrar had been deliberately set by someone who had poured accelerants around the house and then set fire to them. “And most importantly, Judge, in their opinion, based on the accelerant patterns in that house, the fire started from the defendant’s bedroom, which was the only room on the main floor of that house that was not heavily poured with accelerants and not heavily damaged. . . . Judge, Debora Green set that fire intentionally, knowing that it would kill all those children in that house.”
Dennis Moore rose to make an opening statement for the Defense. He assured Judge Ruddick that he would be brief. “As the Court well knows,” he began, “under Kansas law, the evidence in this case presented at this probable cause hearing has to be construed in the light most favorable to the State. So this is basically the State’s chance to show the Court . . . what they have.”
Moore
said that the Defense might present some evidence, but he viewed probable cause as a “very low standard” compared to what would later be a “beyond a reasonable doubt” jury trial. He would present only that evidence he deemed necessary at this time.
Moore allowed that Mike and Debora had not had a happy home for a long time. But he struck out at Mike for deciding he wanted a divorce without telling Debora before the trip to Peru in June, 1995. “He thought it wouldn’t be a happy occasion if he told her prior to that time that he wanted a divorce, that he wanted to leave the family, leave her and the children. So he kept a pretense up and basically lived a lie.”
Moore also hit at Mike for the “close relationship” he had developed with Celeste Walker on the Peru trip. “Well, it was more than just a friendship. The evidence will be that it was a very, very, close friendship. . . . Dr. Farrar came back and told various people that, in fact, the friendship had not turned sexual, romantic, until Dr. Walker’s death—Celeste Walker’s husband—which was on September 5. That was a lie. Dr. Farrar will admit that he lied to the police about that.”
Moore did not deny that Debora had begun to drink heavily, but he added that she was on medication and also seeing a psychiatrist. He insisted that she had “tried to maintain stability during that period of time.” As for the alleged poisoning of her husband, Moore said that medical reports had said the final diagnosis was tropical sprue. “They also said it could be some sort of typhoid—and noted the fact that during the trip to Peru, Dr. Farrar swam in the Amazon River, he ate food prepared by local people, and some of the symptoms that he had could have been caused by those things and [by] the so-called tropical sprue.”
As for the fire, Moore said that the defense would not dispute some of the evidence gleaned from the gutted house. But then he pulled out his trump card. He would name as the arsonist one of the fire’s victims: Tim Farrar.
“There’s going to be evidence presented that Tim Farrar, thirteen-year-old Tim Farrar, had an unnatural fascination with fire. He liked to strike matches. In fact, back in March of 1995, just a few months before the fire that took the lives of Tim and Kelly Farrar, Tim and another boy were caught by the Prairie Village police with a Molotov cocktail one or two houses down from where Tim Farrar lived. . . . Tim Farrar hated his father. Tim Farrar had a very, very, ugly relationship with Michael Farrar. In fact, the relationship turned violent.”
The spectators were electrified by Moore’s accusation, and frankly puzzled. This defense tactic was repugnant. Experienced court watchers suspected that Debora’s case was so weak that her attorneys were willing to risk the backlash that would surely come when they accused a dead boy of starting the fire that killed him and his little sister. Moore went on to explain to the judge that Tim had been a “very disturbed young man,” who disliked his father but feared his parents’ divorcing more than anything else. Still, it would require nimble rhetoric, indeed, for Moore to paint Tim as villain and victim at once.
Next, Moore told Judge Ruddick that Debora had been the sole suspect from the very beginning—that the investigators had ignored the possibility of other suspects. “The police had Michael Farrar drive over to the police station in Prairie Village,” he said. “The police transported Debora Green over to the police station in Prairie Village.”
But, of course, Debora had no other way to get there. The $40,000 Toyota Land Cruiser that she had wanted so much was sitting on melted tires in one of the parking bays in her burning home.
“Judge,” Moore said in conclusion, “I’m going to ask the Court, even at this probable-cause hearing, to keep an open mind and listen to all the evidence. There are at least two sides to every story. . . .”
Paul Morrison’s jaw muscles tightened when he heard Dennis Moore accuse a dead boy of setting the fire that killed him, and, for a fleeting moment, Debora looked distressed. Tim had been the child who was closest to her, the son she counted on. Had she agreed to this betrayal in order to save herself? Or was she as shocked as the murmuring gallery to hear her attorney shift the blame for the crimes she was accused of to her lost son?
31
Dr. Michael Farrar, the first witness for the State, was very thin and pale as he stood to take the oath. Debora Green shifted and turned slightly toward her estranged husband, whom she had not seen for months. Now she stared at him. Did she still love him? Was she uneasy about what he was going to say about her in front of the judge and the spectators?
Mike’s hair had just begun to grow out after his December brain surgery, and a long scar was visible on the right side of his forehead and back into his hairline. He looked as if he had just had a very close crew cut, and it made him appear much younger than his forty years. It seemed almost impossible that the man in the witness chair and the woman at the defense table had ever been in love, let alone married for sixteen years; it seemed impossible that they had conceived three children together. Although Debora was only four years older than Mike, there looked to be a decade’s disparity in their ages.
Mike had spent the day before forcing himself to go over the events of the previous two years, from the time when his marriage and his family’s lives had dissolved into macabre soap opera. He had kept his composure when he videotaped his testimony eight weeks before, and now he did not want to break down on the witness stand when he would have to again recall the last terrible days of his children’s lives.
When he answered Paul Morrison’s and Dennis Moore’s questions, Mike would seem at times almost clinical, a demeanor those in his profession often assume when they have to give bad news or face the certain death of patients. He showed his emotion by the way he clenched and unclenched his hands on the rail in front of him. Rarely would he glance at Debora, and then only with a sidelong shift of his eyes skimming over the defense table.
“Doctor,” Morrison asked, “was your marriage to Debora Green a happy one?”
Debora seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for the answer. When it came, she flinched almost imperceptibly.
“In my eyes it was not,” Mike answered. “It was a long-term loveless marriage that was characterized by a lack of care, compassion, understanding. There was no mutual respect, no outward affection.”
“. . . Is that from both of you or is that one way?”
“Well, I think it was mostly on her part.”
Debora’s eyes stayed fixed on her husband. She didn’t shake her head, or open her mouth to protest, or look to Ellen Ryan for comfort. If she had done what the State asserted, set fire to “her babies” in a storm of jealous, possessive rage, she had done it to take revenge on a man who spoke now of the ordeal of being married to her.
Mike said he had stayed in the marriage because he didn’t want his children to grow up in a broken home. He added that he was not a man who liked to fail, and that failure at marriage seemed to him the worst kind. “I tried to stick it out for their [the children’s] sake. And then I think later I was worried that when we did get a divorce—because of the nature of Debora’s behavior—I thought it would be a horrible divorce. . . .”
“What about the nature of her behavior made you feel that way?” Morrison asked.
“She was an extremely volatile person,” Mike said, “had temper tantrums characterized by particularly foul language—oftentimes in public. She was chronically depressed. She felt ill all the time. . . . Her mood was always dark and pessimistic. She was a very difficult person to deal with, very unpleasant.”
Debora frowned and turned slightly toward Ellen Ryan, who whispered something to her. She barely shook her head, her eyes still fixed on her husband.
In response to Morrison’s questions, Mike described the sixteen years of his marriage to Debora. He spoke of the failure of her medical practice, and of how, when she finally realized that private practice was not for her, he had urged her to stay home. “I said that was fine. I encouraged her to do anything that I thought would make her happy. The problem was she was never happy at doing anythin
g she ever did.”
Mike went on to describe the first fire, his tentative reconciliation with Debora, their final decision to buy the house on Canterbury Court, and the long-planned trip to Peru. Before the trip, and for a month after their return on July 6, he said he had been in good health.
Mike said he had never changed his mind after deciding to ask Debora for a divorce in midsummer of 1995, although he dreaded her reaction. It was, as he expected, a temper tantrum.
“Did her behavior change after you announced those divorce plans to her?” Morrison questioned.
“Her depression became more severe,” Mike answered. “She started drinking heavily. She would go on alcoholic binges where she could drink a liter and a half of vodka or gin over a couple of days. I found her passed out on the basement floor. There were days when she had to stay in bed all day because she was too drunk. She would also say horrible, vile things to the children about me. . . . She told the children one day that I was out fucking three women. . . . She told the children that I was running around Peru chasing women with my dick hanging out.”
“Those are quotes?”
“Absolute quotes. In front of the children . . .”
“How did the children take this impending divorce?” Paul Morrison asked.
“Tim and Lissa reacted to it very negatively,” Mike said. “They were both very angry, very hostile. Their behavior deteriorated significantly. They became defiant. They repeated a lot of the foul language that their mother said. . . . They wanted me to move back in. They were very angry with me for moving out.”
It was obvious that this had become a marriage made in hell, the most combative marriage the majority of those listening in the courtroom had ever contemplated. Mike also testified that much of the worst arguing and profanity—and Debora’s drinking—took place after he became violently sick with the illness no one could diagnose. For the first few weeks, he had tried to keep going. After that, he was either ill at home or ill in the hospital.