Bitter Harvest

  “Are you familiar with the plant?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would assume that this plant is like any other plant—that it could grow indoors?”

  “I suppose it would be possible.”

  “Is there any reason why it would not be possible?”

  “It would be difficult,” Stahl said, “to put it in a pot that would stay upright because of the large height of the plant. You’d have to have a very large pot.”

  “Aside from that?”

  “Possible light requirements, but—”

  “I don’t have anything additional,” Kevin Moriarty cut in. “Thank you.”

  The gallery was left to wonder if Tim had intended to grow castor-bean plants for a school project. His mother had bought enough seeds to grow 300 plants—plants that would have grown higher than the ceiling of his room. Had his mother purchased Gro-Lights, too, for this strange experiment? Or had she bought those seeds to grind them up and release the deadly poison at their center?

  Kansas hearings and trials are brisk and efficient, totally unlike the endless delays and ponderous day upon day of testimony from single witnesses that have come to be regarded as standard in California pretrial hearings and trials. On this, the first day of the State of Kansas’s show-cause hearing, four important witnesses, including Mike, had finished their testimony by late afternoon. Morrison called the last witness of the day: Velma Farrar, Mike’s mother.

  Velma Farrar, a retired grade school teacher, was old enough to have a forty-year-old son, but she scarcely looked it. Tall, with her brown hair perfectly coiffed, she had the figure of a much younger woman. It would be an easy bet that Velma and her daughter-in-law had little in common except for having each given birth to one son and two daughters. Mike said that they had made an effort to get along, but never at the same time.

  Morrison asked Velma the names of her children.

  “Michael Farrar . . . Vicki Farrar, and Karen Beal,” she replied.

  Both her daughters were married; Velma and William Farrar had been married for forty-two years. They lived, she testified, “North of the river.”

  “First of all,” Morrison began, “did you receive a telephone call on September twenty-fifth of last year to help with some child care?”

  “Yes. . . . I was in bed reading. . . . It was between eight o’clock or nine o’clock or so.”

  “Who was on the phone?”

  “Michael. . . . He told us he needed help and that he needed us immediately.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He told us that he was going to have Debbie committed against her will.”

  “What was his demeanor like when he called you?”

  “He was crying. . . . He was very upset.”

  Velma said that she and Bill had gone to take care of Tim, Lissa, and Kelly and spent the night in their son’s home. By the time they got there, Debora and Mike had already left; Karen Beal was with the children. A doctor had called from the hospital to talk to Tim. “I took the telephone up to him,” Velma said.

  She had not heard the conversation. Tim mostly said, “Yes,” “No,” or “What?” “He was answering questions,” Velma said. That would have been the call from Dr. Pam McCoy, trying to determine how Debora had been behaving lately.

  “I’m going to change gears now,” Morrison said, “if I might. Did you read anything that was laying [sic] on the counter in the kitchen of that home that night?”

  “Yes, I read a letter that was laying there,” she answered.

  “Was that a letter that was machine made, if you will, or printed on a machine?”

  “No, it was written on stationery like you pick up in a hotel or motel. . . .”

  “Did you recognize the handwriting?”

  “Yes I did . . . it was Debbie’s.”

  Velma had read the letter. “I cannot remember all of it, but the letter was supposedly from a friend. It said, ‘To Dr. Farrar,’ and it was signed, ‘From a friend.’ And the letter was trying to convince Mike that he should not divorce Debbie.”

  “And do you remember any specific lines in it?”

  “One of the things that this person—this friend—had written was that the children would not have a chance to be BOTARs or escorts. This person who wrote this letter was on one of the committees who helped select the people for this—that they normally did not take children from broken homes. . . .”

  Velma remembered another of the letter’s arguments against divorce. “It said that it was probably a midlife crisis and that more romantic times would follow.” She had found the letter odd, but that night everything was odd. She had left it on the kitchen counter.

  Dennis Moore cross-examined Mike’s mother. “Had Mike told you prior to this time that he and Debbie were having marital problems?”

  “I did not know before that night. Is that what you’re asking me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “No,” Velma said. “I did not know about this.”

  “So Mike had never called you prior to September twenty-fifth when you were there that evening, when you found this letter, and told you that he and Debbie were having problems?”

  “He told us on the phone that they were having problems.”

  “But that was the night of September twenty-fifth? Prior to that night, had he ever told you that he told Debbie that he wanted to divorce her?”

  “No. But my parents were very, very ill. You know, they both have since died. And—”

  Moore interrupted and Paul Morrison asked that Mrs. Farrar be allowed to finish her answer.

  “Go ahead,” Judge Ruddick said, smiling at Velma.

  “And they were protecting me because I was spending most of my time with my father. Both of my parents died within—well, twelve weeks.”

  “Mrs. Farrar,” Dennis Moore asked, “did Mike tell you that after his return from his trip to Peru . . . he was having an affair with another woman?”

  “No, he did not.”

  “I believe you indicated that you told one of the police officers that Debbie had a very bad temper. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you also told the police officers that she never touched the children in anger. Is that correct?”

  “Not that I know of. She never touched them that I knew of.”

  Velma Farrar was excused. Although she had kept her dignity on the witness stand, it was obvious that she was humiliated and grieving, caught up in this tragedy, which had erupted so ferociously without warning. She had expected to lose her aged parents; she had never dreamed she would lose two of her grandchildren.

  It was almost five P.M. The streets outside the Johnson County Courthouse were dark and snow threatened. Some of the reporters and spectators on their way home pondered what a bad year 1995 had been for the Farrar and Jones families and those close to them: divorce, suicide, cancer, murder, fire, poisoning. Mike had lost two grandparents and two children within three months, and had nearly died himself. Debora’s mother was ill but was trying to stand beside her daughter nevertheless. And Debora herself was accused of crimes almost impossible to comprehend.

  Celeste Walker waited for Mike to tell her what had gone on in court. Everyone else saw the proceedings on the evening news. Sound bites from Paul Morrison, Dennis Moore, and Kevin Moriarty; file film of the actual fire, broadcast for the dozenth time; and film taken that very day in the courtroom, showing a stolid, almost expressionless Debora Green as she sat at the defense table.

  35

  It was 2 degrees in Olathe at dawn on Tuesday, January 30. A high of 11 was expected. That morning was devoted to medical testimony. Dr. Regina Beth Henry, the specialist in infectious diseases, was a small, pretty young woman. She answered Paul Morrison’s questions about Mike’s treatment and the puzzling aspects of his illness. He had come close to dying on the night of August 18.

  “On August 18,” she testified, “the nurse reported that he had a profound weakness—in fac
t, almost passed out—and his blood pressure had dropped some. And they also did a white blood cell count at the time of this incident in the evening. And previously in the day, it had been markedly elevated—approximately 17,000. And then that evening . . . his white count had dropped to less than 3,000, which is a tremendous difference, and basically a sign of sepsis.”

  The crux of Dr. Henry’s lengthy testimony was that “we never felt perfectly comfortable with any of the considerations that we had as far as the actual diagnosis of his symptoms and his problems because, quite honestly, it didn’t fit perfectly into any of the disease states we were considering.”

  “Did you look at any issues of whether or not Dr. Farrar was being poisoned?”

  “No, we did not. We had no reason to think that.”

  “Because nobody brought that up to you?”

  “No, we had no idea that there were any problems that would suggest that.” Besides, as she pointed out later in her testimony, she was not an expert on poison.

  Dr. Henry testified that Peru was not mentioned in papers on tropical sprue, and that even where the disease was common, those who contracted it had lived in the area for a long time, at least a year.

  Typhoid fever didn’t fit either. “Even though it’s an acute infection, [it] does not cause a tremendous elevation of the white blood cell count.”

  Dr. Henry believed that Mike had been septic more than once during his three hospitalizations.

  Dr. Pam McCoy, the ER physician at the UK Medical Center, testified next. “I work with residents and medical students. I teach them how to work in an emergency department. And usually . . . I go see patients, they go see patients with me; we talk about how you see a patient in the emergency department, how you take care of people, how you put in stitches, that sort of thing.”

  The KU emergency room is a very busy facility, but Dr. McCoy remembered the night of September 25 very well. That was when her former colleague from Trinity Lutheran Hospital had been brought in for possible mental commitment. At first, Dr. McCoy said, although Dr. Green had looked “bad” and smelled of alcohol, she didn’t seem any more upset than the average wife who was fighting over a divorce and had had too much to drink.

  Dr. McCoy could not force Debora to see a psychiatrist; she had to follow the same rules as the police. Was Debora dangerous to herself or others? “It’s not necessarily wrong to get into a knock-down, drag-out fight with your husband,” she said, “to be very angry and upset, and to have half a bottle of wine. . . . If we had somebody in the emergency department every time they had a fight with their husband, we’d be overloaded. . . .”

  But when Mike arrived, Debora had begun spitting at him and calling him a “fuckhole. I was trying to kind of pull her back because I actually was sort of afraid she was going to physically assault him. . . .”

  It was Pam McCoy who had heard the terrible threat Debora screamed at her husband: “And then she said to him, ‘You’re going to get these kids over our dead bodies.’”

  “Did you ever look at those castor-bean packets?” Morrison asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you show any of those packets to Debora Green at any time during that evening?”

  “We had a discussion about it, because I was asking her why Dr. Farrar would think she was suicidal. She kind of dismissed the fact of the medications. Then, when we talked about castor beans, there was some comment to the effect of, ‘Well, for heaven’s sakes, you can’t even buy plant seeds anymore without somebody saying something about it.’”

  Castor beans are commonplace in Kansas. Dr. McCoy testified that, while they are poisonous, it is very hard to extract the poison. “When someone calls and says, ‘My child has swallowed a castor bean,’ we don’t get too excited because it has a fairly hard coating on it. . . . It just passes through the system whole—kind of like if you swallow a pit from a plum. . . .”

  No, unless a child really bit down on a castor bean, it was not a serious problem. “And another thing,” Dr. McCoy said. “What I was thinking is that that kind of poisoning is a lot of vomiting and diarrhea and who’d ever want to kill themselves by ‘stooling’ themselves to death? I mean—to puke and vomit and stool yourself would be no way to kill yourself. A physician wouldn’t do that. . . . A doctor would figure out something smarter than that to do.”

  Dr. McCoy had auburn hair, a lovely complexion, and a no-nonsense manner. She had spent too much time in the emergency room to be surprised by anything she saw there. She had learned to seek out a neutral—or as close to neutral as possible—third party when she was confronted by two warring factions. That was why she had called Tim, the couple’s oldest child. He had admitted that he was a little scared and a little worried.

  “What did Tim tell you?” Morrison asked, over Kevin Moriarty’s objections about hearsay.

  “Well,” Dr. McCoy testified, “when I said, ‘What’s going on with your mom?,’ he said, ‘She’s been very sad and upset lately—that she hasn’t gotten out of bed for several days, just been laying around.’ And he said, ‘She’s been drinking a lot,’ that he actually hid bottles of alcohol from her because she was drinking whole bottles of alcohol, and he said, ‘The big kind like you get from the wholesale club.’”

  “‘Tim, do you think your mother could hurt herself?’” Dr. McCoy recalled asking. “He said that he thought that she was so sad that she might be able to hurt herself. And said, ‘I know she’s been drinking so much that she could hurt herself.’ And that he was worried about her because he was afraid when she went to the basement and hid, that he didn’t understand why she was doing that. And that he knew she was very mad at his dad.”

  Dr. McCoy had asked Tim if he was ever afraid for himself and his younger sisters. She always asked that question, because she worried about kids caught up in domestic disputes: sometimes the grown-ups were so angry and so concerned about their feelings that they didn’t realize the heavy load their children were carrying.

  “And he said that right now they were okay because there was somebody there to take care of them. And I said, ‘Well, are you afraid for yourself?’ and he says, ‘Well, sometimes I’m afraid.’”

  Debora had denied that she was suicidal, but her son was afraid for her. That was enough to convince Dr. McCoy. She arranged for Debora to be evaluated.

  “His [Tim’s] concern was primarily geared toward Debora Green’s hurting herself?” Moriarty asked Dr. McCoy on cross-examination.

  “I didn’t ask him exactly what he was afraid of,” she replied. “I asked him specifically, Was he afraid his mother would kill herself? And he said he was afraid she could kill herself.”

  Moriarty ended his cross with a question, “When you asked Dr. Green if she was suicidal, she was very clear and she told you that she was not and that she had to stay around so she could make sure that she could take care of her children. Is that correct?”

  “That’s exactly what she said,” Dr. McCoy agreed.

  On redirect, Morrison asked about potassium chloride. “It is a common substance that you find around hospitals, correct?”

  “It’s very common. . . . It’s an IV additive. When people become dehydrated or on certain other medications . . .”

  “You wouldn’t take a hit of potassium chloride to get high?”

  “No. In fact, it burns a great deal if you put it into an IV. It’s very painful for a direct injection. So it has to be added to large bottles of fluid.”

  Morrison asked Dr. McCoy why she had taken careful notes after the episodes with Debora and Mike Farrar on the night of September 25. “I took those notes because I was worried about what had happened after Dr. Green eloped from the emergency department,” she said. “I thought things were worse than I had initially interpreted her response to be when I first saw her. I thought—if she’s left—that looked like a bad sign to me. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe she is going to kill herself.’ So I was really afraid about what would happen that night. . . . Frankly, I
thought that I was going to get called into a really ugly divorce and custody thing. I wanted to be clear about what had happened, and what people had said.”

  “And, speaking of messy divorce,” Morrison asked, “who was doing the yelling? Debora Green or Michael Farrar?”

  “Dr. Green yelled at Dr. Farrar.”

  “Who was doing the cussing? Debora Green or Michael Farrar?”

  “Dr. Green cussed at Dr. Farrar.”

  “Who made the threats about what’s going to happen? Debora Green or Dr. Farrar?”

  “Dr. Green.”

  “I have nothing further.”

  Kevin Moriarty returned for recross.

  “The fact that she was yelling and calling him names is actually just a reflection of the frustration she was having that night? Is that correct?”

  Of course, Paul Morrison objected. “That’s outside the scope of her knowledge.”

  Judge Ruddick overruled him twice.

  “Dr. Farrar was having an affair with another lady; he told his wife he wanted to get a divorce,” Moriarty said. “I would assume that some people might think he’s a fuckhole. Is that correct?”

  Dr. McCoy gazed down at him. “I think that if Dr. Green was very angry with Dr. Farrar for having an affair and wanting a divorce, that would be an appropriate response.”

  “And it was Dr. Farrar who actually set up this entire evening to get her there to be committed? Is that correct?”

  “To my knowledge; I was told by the police that Dr. Farrar had called for assistance, yes.”

  At long last, Dr. McCoy was allowed to step down. She had feared she might be involved in a messy divorce and custody hearing. She had no idea she would be a prime witness in a case of attempted and double murder.

  The thirtieth of January was to be devoted to witnesses who spoke in medicalese. Reporters spelled the long, unfamiliar words as best they could; later they would look them up in a medical dictionary. This clinical testimony was not surprising in a trial that involved two medical doctors and an arcane poisoning. The reporters were challenged even further when Drew Campbell Richardson of the FBI laboratory explained, finally, what ricin was and why it was so hard to identify in the human body. But most important, would he testify that he had isolated ricin antibodies in Dr. Michael Farrar’s blood?