Bitter Harvest

  “Approximately one year ago,” it began, “my wife, Debora Green, and my son, Tim, and I all looked forward to a school trip visiting the Amazon River in Peru and Inca ruins in the Peruvian Andes. It was truly the trip of a lifetime and enjoyed by all. Unfortunately, it was the last great adventure in life for both Tim and Debora. While the trip itself had really very little to do with subsequent events, it now stands as an icon for a tragedy that will never be fully understood.

  “October 24, 1995, took two innocent, promising young lives from all of us. Tim was a strong young man, both mentally and physically. He lived his life with vigor and the orneriness of a young teenaged boy, yet he had the courage to stand up to his peers when necessary and defend weaker children. This was surely an unusual and admirable trait in a young man. He came by his strong will honestly and because of this and my own similar attitudes, a stormy relationship between us was sometimes present. Regrettably, physical altercations occurred on a few occasions. For this, I take full responsibility. I am very proud of who Tim was. There is no credible evidence that he was ever involved in any part of the tragic events that ultimately cost him his life, and I will never believe that he was in any way responsible.

  “Kelly was a beautiful, loving child with tremendous maturity and insight despite her age. She was able to intellectually understand the turmoil of divorce and family discord, and served as the sole calming influence in a very dysfunctional situation. I have no doubt that Kelly would have lived to be a great person, a leader among humankind, someone who would have been kind and generous. The extent of her loss will never be fully realized.

  “Perhaps the tragedy most overlooked in all of this is the person Debora Green has come to be. She is exceedingly bright and can be witty and vivacious. However, despite her brilliance, she was unable to manage the usual stresses of being a wife and mother, let alone those of being a physician. Her performance should have been exemplary, but serious—yet undefined—psychological flaws resulted in deadly behavior. Life is not easy for any of us and clearly I have made my fair share of mistakes as a husband and father. Nevertheless, these mistakes and pursuance of a divorce do not justify attempted murder and murder.

  “I will never know for sure if Debora truly intended to kill me, either as a punishment or for insurance reasons, or if she simply meant only to physically torture me for my actions and desire for divorce. She may have simply wished to gain sympathy as a doting and loving wife, caring for me while I was critically ill.

  “It is, however, clear to me that during a few hours on October 24, 1995, Debora intended to kill our children in order to prevent me from taking them from her. It was more acceptable for her to lose her children by her own hand than have them taken away by someone else due to her failure as a mother. I also strongly suspect that she again wished to punish me by killing those most dear to me. I do not believe that the children’s murders were premeditated. At this point, I do believe that she feels remorse for her actions and I do believe that she genuinely loves Lissa. It is therefore, despicable and incomprehensible that Debora would allow or encourage her attorneys to blame these crimes on Tim in order to absolve herself.”

  Mike had written far into the night, finally putting his feelings down. “Predicting criminal human behavior is one of the most difficult tasks our society tries to perform. Few people thought Debora was likely to murder her children. Despite some apparent mental illness that Debora suffered, I certainly never anticipated a homicidal predisposition. Obviously, neither did professionals trained to identify, evaluate, and treat psychiatric disorders. Debora is truly a victim in that the system failed by not being able to force her to remain hospitalized and obtain desperately needed, intensive psychiatric evaluation and care, therapy that could have potentially averted this disaster.

  “Of course, the most important question of all is what will happen to Lissa as a result of all of this? How will she deal with her adolescent and teenage years? Later in life, how will she function when she is contemplating marriage, a family, a career? Will she ever be able to love a man openly and experience the intimacy necessary to sustain a lasting relationship? Will she ever be able to nurture her children?”

  For Mike, a healer by profession, any discussions of the morality of capital punishment had been merely philosophical—until now. He had always been a proponent of harsh punishment for crimes, and of the death penalty. But he was glad that Debora would not be executed, although some of his friends had told him, “This is too good for her.” Others had felt that a forty-year sentence was too severe.

  “Harsher punishment to exact vengeance,” Mike wrote, “serves no real purpose. . . . Tim and Kelly are still dead, the potential that should have been realized in Debora’s life is still lost, and Lissa will still struggle. A lesser punishment, however, is not fair to society. Ultimately, I will recover from my health problems and hopefully resume a reasonably normal life. I hope that Debora can find a new beginning. I know that I can forgive her if she does. Although I hate what she has done, I do not hate her. Mostly, I feel sorry for her. However, at some point, I do expect Debora to say that she is sorry for what she has done; that she made a terrible mistake; that Timothy was an honorable young man and that blaming him for her actions was morally wrong. I expect the manipulation, the lying, and the evil that have become her primary method of dealing with life to end.

  “Debora told me on several occasions prior to the fire that I would be sorry and unhappy forever if I left her. She is correct in that I am sad and unhappy because of the ensuing tragedy, but I refuse to remain paralyzed by sorrow and grief, and I will not allow my life and Lissa’s life to be destroyed.

  “There is still some good that comes from any situation, however horrific. I feel that I have matured and gained certain unique perspectives that will make me a better human being. I have grown to know and understand Lissa better than ever before. There is certainly little adversity left in life that Lissa will have to face that matches what she has been through already. I have witnessed our government, represented by Mr. Morrison and his staff, and the Prairie Village police and others, exhibit thoroughness, integrity, sensitivity, and professionalism. . . .

  “Finally,”—Mike had written these last lines doubting he could read them in court without crying—“it appears that Tim’s suffering at the end was short-lived, and that Kelly never awakened to experience pain and panic. Thankfully, neither knew that their mother killed them. . . .”

  By the time Mike wrote that statement, he had made some difficult and important decisions about his life. He and Celeste were no longer together, and the parting had not been a friendly one. “He told me that he wanted to break up on May eighteenth,” Celeste recalled with bitterness, “the day before Mother’s Day. Right up until that day, he had still been calling me four times a day.”

  Celeste, who felt burned by Mike’s decision, would insist that the breakup was sudden, and it was, but she had long had some sense that Mike was pulling away. She had been suspicious of women he mentioned to her, of any female friend he saw, and she had not really trusted him or his love. “I began to think that I was only good to use through the trial, and he was tired of me,” she said.

  Of course, the trial had never taken place. But if it had, Celeste might have been more a detriment to Mike’s image than an enhancement. She was a “scarlet woman,” in many people’s eyes, and she probably would have been one of the Defense’s star witnesses.

  Since coming to live with Mike, Lissa had been upset by Celeste’s presence. Celeste was a reminder of the bad days when Debora told Lissa that Celeste had taken their father away. And Debora had also told Lissa that Celeste had killed her own husband. That was untrue, but it was imprinted on Lissa’s mind. The situation was intolerable; when Mike wanted to see Celeste, he felt he was betraying Lissa. But in the end, their breakup probably came down to Mike’s need to rid himself of pain and loss. It is doubtful that he and Celeste could ever have looked at each other without
remembering Tim and Kelly—and John.

  Celeste’s legion of friends supported her, and so did her sister, who had never approved of Mike in the first place. “The only one who completely believed that Mike was right for me was Carolyn Stafford,” Celeste remembered. “She and I thought it was the perfect romance. After it was over, my other friends said that it was better this way.”

  Better, perhaps, but heartbreaking. Celeste decided that she could no longer stay in Johnson County—or in Kansas at all. If she did, she would always be watching for Mike. She would have to force herself not to glance over from the freeway to see if his red truck was parked in front of his town house. In a way, losing Mike had thrown her into delayed grief for John. Until now, she had managed to blunt the worst pain because Mike needed her. Now, for the first time in two decades, she had no man in her life.

  It was difficult for Celeste to leave her mother and her friends. She spent time in her backyard, wondering if she could take along cuttings of the plants she had cared for. It didn’t matter; she and her sons needed to leave. She put her house on the market.

  Debora was transferred to an “isolation pod” in the I-MAX section of the Topeka Correctional Facility. Perhaps her last glimpse of freedom came along the Kansas Turnpike, Route 70, during the trip of some 60 miles from Olathe. The route passed through Lawrence, site of the University of Kansas, and the city where Mike was born.

  The Kansas Turnpike is not particularly scenic. Travelers can stop at combination fast-food restaurants and gas stations, but, of course, the vehicle that carried Debora to prison did not stop. She had been to Topeka only eight months before, when she voluntarily committed herself to the Menninger Clinic. Her new living quarters would be far less plush.

  The prisoner van went through the last toll booth before Topeka and almost immediately turned right. The route to the women’s section of the Topeka Correctional Facility led away from the Beltway that circles Topeka, through scrubby trees, and then turned left onto Southeast Rice Road.

  The prison itself sat on the left side of the road, across from a neighborhood of small, nondescript houses. Close to the road were picnic tables and swings, and, beyond that, a reception building. But the van bringing Debora followed a meandering prison road that cut off to the right, past massive reddish stone buildings that had weathered decade after decade of Kansas winters and summers, up to a low building with fences and cages and razor wire and a tower where a guard watched. Dr. Debora Jones Green was now Prisoner #63205.

  Her hard forty began in isolation. She could have no visitors as she acclimated to prison, took the mental and physical tests required of all those in the “fish tank,” and prepared for her time in the most secure facility on the prison’s grounds.

  If the Peru trip had been an “icon,” as Mike had called it in his unread statement, it was a marker too. Just a year ago, Debora and Mike had appeared to be totally “married,” and Debora had been so witty and hilarious that she kept everyone on the “dream trip” laughing. In isolation, she must have dwelled on thoughts of all she had thrown away, and dreamed about her other life as she slept.

  In every sense, her life had turned to ashes.

  Mike faced yet another surgery. In June, he had journeyed to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to undergo tests on his heart and brain. Some of the results had been encouraging. The neurological tests, the neuropsychiatric tests, and the CAT scans of his brain were all normal. However, the treadmill test for oxygen consumption and the echocardiogram reconfirmed that his heart’s mitral valve was damaged. Mike knew the inevitable progression of such a condition. Without open-heart surgery to close the damaged valve, he would develop congestive heart failure, which would result in irreversible heart damage. But he had to recover from his brain surgery before he could undergo the mitral valve repair. He was weak, but he was impatient. He wanted to get back to work; it had been eight months now, and he missed his practice.

  Two months later, Mike was admitted to the Mayo Clinic; and on August 2, he underwent surgery for mitral valve repair. The operation seemed to go well and Mike was released to return home. But back in Kansas then he suffered a frightening and often fatal complication: cardiac tamponade.

  The heart is surrounded by a sac called the pericardium. Surgery, or an accident, or even the wound of a slim-bladed knife can nick the heart, allowing blood or fluid to seep into the pericardium. With every beat, the heart is compressed more tightly as the space between it and the pericardium fills with an increasing amount of fluid.

  After Mike’s heart surgery, the seepage was not apparent right away, and Mike was given Coumadin to thin his blood and to prevent clotting. The drug increased the fluid building up in his pericardial sac.

  A week after the mitral valve surgery, Mike noticed that he was short of breath and becoming very weak. He knew what was wrong. He was suffering from pericardial effusion; the sac that held his heart was literally strangling it. He called for help and was admitted to North Kansas City Hospital after an emergency run.

  There was one more surgery. Under general anesthetic, the blood compressing Mike’s heart was drained and the leak into his pericardium was repaired; but he remained hospitalized, with indwelling chest tubes to carry off excess blood. “I am hopeful,” he wrote a friend, “that this represents my last medical problem and that I will return to work in October or November.”

  In exactly one year, Mike had been hospitalized eleven times. He realized that he had diagnosed himself—correctly—at the onset of each critical episode. He had called his doctors and asked for the tests that would confirm his sense of illness: the septic shock, the brain abscess, the aneurysm, the hole in his mitral valve, and, finally, the cardiac tamponade. Even so, he had come close to dying twice. “It’s strange,” he commented. “I almost died during my first hospitalization and my last. And then, finally, it was over.”

  This time, no shocking event coincided with his surgery. Mike began to get better in earnest. Debora was in prison, and it was time for him to begin putting his life back together.

  46

  Locked away in I-MAX, Debora wrote a number of letters. She could not see Lissa while she was in isolation, and even when she returned to the general prison population, she would have to find someone to bring her daughter to Topeka on visitors’ days: Saturday and Sunday. She could not really expect Mike to do that, and her parents were in El Paso. They would visit as often as they could, and, when they were in Kansas, they, of course, would bring Lissa to see her.

  Debora had always had beautiful handwriting, and even though she sometimes had to write in pencil on plain lined paper, her letters were perfect. She set about mending fences.

  Debora wrote to Mike’s sister Karen Beal, to apologize. She was not able yet to apologize to William and Velma Farrar. “But that letter will be even harder to write,” she confided. “. . . But all I can do is apologize to those I have hurt and hope you will forgive me.

  “I’ve been working on getting in touch (?back in touch) with my spiritual self. . . . I have been studying the New Testament plus Proverbs. As soon as I’m out of this orientation unit and in the general population, I’ll be able to attend church services several times a week and join a Bible study group. Getting in touch with God has helped me accept my situation with some degree of peace. Of course I’m still devastated with grief for Tim and Kelly, but I’m starting to come to terms with it a little bit.”

  Learning that her divorce would be final in July, Debora told her ex-sister-in-law that she hoped Mike would remarry before too long, so that Lissa would have a stepmother. It sounded like a whole new Debora, but Karen viewed the letter with some wariness. Debora urging Mike to take a new wife was hard to believe.

  While she was still in isolation, Debora talked to Lissa once a week on the phone. Mike didn’t listen in; he wanted Lissa to have some contact with her mother. It would be too cruel to her to break the tenuous connection abruptly. As long as Lissa handled her contacts with
her mother well, he would not interfere.

  In July, Debora wrote her eleven-year-old daughter a letter that began appropriately enough: she talked about her hope to become a helper–dog trainer and said how much she looked forward to visits from Lissa. But then, as if writing to another grown woman, she discussed Mike’s faults and her own need to drink. “I drank until I started to have ‘blackouts’ which are times when I had no idea what I was doing or had done. I didn’t do a very good job of taking care of you kids, but you never stopped being the most important thing on earth to me.”

  Heedless of the fact that Mike was doing his best to raise Lissa, Debora reminded her daughter that Tim had hated his father and had threatened to kill him with his bare hands “when he bulked up.” Perhaps she was only trying to ensure that she would be first in Lissa’s heart. Perhaps she was laying the groundwork for a legal appeal. “Tim was even close enough to you,” she wrote to Lissa, “that he told you that he decided to kill your father by poisoning him. I took the blame for this to spare Tim’s reputation.”

  But Debora had allowed her attorneys to ruin Tim’s reputation.

  Now she explained that she had had many, many drinks the night of the fire and that she had taken far more of her “medicines from Dr. Stamati” than she should have. It was all because she had argued with Mike. “The first thing I remember was being at the Formans’ door and seeing you on the garage roof. I was in total shock.”

  But Debora had given Detectives Rod Smith and Greg Burnetta a precise account of her actions from the time the fire alarm went off.

  “The police questioned me that night and I was totally inappropriate. I lied about my drinking and my drugs (medicines). I seemed not to care about Tim and Kelly, but this was the alcohol, the drugs, and the shock. There is a tape of this session. If you see it someday, keep this in mind.”