Bitter Harvest

  In spite of the conciliatory letters Debora had written Mike, asking his forgiveness, wishing him well, and promising to work together with him to help Lissa, she was obviously still very angry with him. “I think Lissa’s safe with him,” she said. “But he’s not fun. Lissa has no fun with him. And Lissa loves to have fun.”

  Mike had been, Debora said, not just a bad father but no father at all. He left for work between six and six-thirty and didn’t come home until between eight and ten. She felt he had been thrilled when Tim was born, less thrilled at Lissa’s birth, and with Kelly, “an accident,” not interested at all. She, on the other hand, had always put her children first. “My children are my life,” she said—a remark she was to repeat many times during the interview. “When I talked to Mike that last night,” she told me, “he threatened to take them away from me. That really scared me.”

  I asked Debora why she had not simply let Mike go. “You could have started a new practice. You could have supported yourself and the children. Why didn’t you?”

  “He was going to take our beautiful house for himself, and the children and I would have had to live in a smaller house. We had a place, a place in society. . . . I didn’t want to give that up. And the children wanted me to be home. Tim said to me, ‘Mom, we want you to be our mother and pick us up and go to our games and be there. We don’t want you to start your practice again.’”

  Debora had written to me of her belief that Celeste was the arsonist. Now, six months later, she thought both Celeste and Mike had been involved.

  “Are you saying that they actually set the fire?” I asked.

  “No—no, they wouldn’t do that. I think they paid someone to set it. They never do anything themselves. They always hired people to do what they wanted. Celeste always gets what she wants. Things weren’t happening quick enough for her.”

  Debora recalled John Walker from their days as anatomy partners in medical school in 1972. “He was very nice, very shy. . . . I knew he was depressed last year.”

  “Do you still think Celeste killed him?”

  Debora shook her head. “No. She didn’t murder him—but she drove him to suicide. He and I talked a lot around the pool after we came back from Peru.”

  “Did you and John talk about Mike’s affair with Celeste?”

  “Oh no,” she answered quickly. “John didn’t know about that.”

  Finally, Debora was ready to talk about the details of the night of October 23–24. She had been reading, she said, and she heard Tim in the kitchen. She had gone to see what he was up to and found him getting something to eat. She recalled that he had been dressed in just his pajama bottoms. They had talked and she had hugged him good night.

  That was the last time she ever saw her son.

  Back in her room, Debora had a late conversation with Mike, one that ended in angry words and his threat to take the children away from her. She told me she had swallowed a full glass of straight gin after that phone call. “And I passed out.”

  She no longer remembered anything about the alarms going off. She didn’t remember if she had locked the doors, or even if she had turned the burglar alarm on that night.

  I asked her if she had taken a lie-detector test about that night and she shook her head. “I’m afraid to. In college, we did these physiological studies using lie detectors. I’m the kind of person, that if they ask me what my name is, I’ll be so nervous that even if I give my own name, it will look as though I’m lying.”

  In the videotaped interview, Debora had told the police that she had opened her bedroom door and been confronted by smoke. She said she had slammed the door, afraid that she would “asphyxiate” right there. Never, in any statement, had she mentioned going into the flaming hall. Now she told me: “I started down the hall into the flames to save my children. There was so much fire and smoke that I was forced back. That was when my hair got burned. I went to the Jones Store with my mother to get my hair cut because I wanted to look nice for the funeral. It was a bad haircut, so days later I went and got another haircut—to fix up that bad one.”

  I tried to keep my expression neutral, although I wondered if my eyes betrayed me. I knew about her singed hair and the haircuts; this story seemed a deliberate attempt to explain away some of the strongest physical evidence against her.

  “I just can’t understand why Paul Morrison was so concerned about my haircuts,” she said. “He kept going back and forth, too. He wanted me to be drunk that night but he didn’t want me to be so drunk I couldn’t set the fire.”

  When Debora talked about what Tim had suffered, and the thought that Lissa had heard him calling, “Help me . . . help me,” she started to cry. Even though I could not believe she was innocent, I thought her tears were genuine.

  However, Debora told me that Tim had poisoned his father.

  I was not interrogating her, I was only listening, but, as she piled the blame on her dead son, she changed her own participation in the ricin poisonings with each sentence. “I bought the castor beans for Tim,” she said. “It was for a school project. Tim was always coming up with interesting projects. He wanted to try growing the castor beans using different pH levels in the soil, and where he could control the climate—but Tim was poisoning his father. I was so drunk I just wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. . . .”

  I said nothing.

  “You know,” she said slowly, “I may have been helping Tim poison Michael. If I hadn’t been drinking, I wouldn’t have done it. . . . I was angry with my attorneys for making it look like Tim set the fire. He wouldn’t have done it.”

  Debora said she was no longer taking Prozac and her thinking was clearer. Her whole time in jail in Johnson County, she confided, was a blur. She blamed this on the Klonopin and the Prozac. She blamed Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty for never coming to see her. As for Ellen Ryan and Sean O’Brien, “They think I should be content where I am because of the threat of the death penalty,” she said angrily.

  She was not content where she was. Debora said she had written to Legal Services for Prisoners in Topeka but they couldn’t help her file an appeal. She had also contacted the National Organization for Women. “They expressed interest in helping me, but their funds are all earmarked for other things.” NOW had suggested that Debora write to Alan Dershowitz, and she had done that, but he had not yet responded to her.

  “I think Ellen thought I was guilty from day one,” she said with some bitterness.

  “But she fought so hard for you,” I said, surprised. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she went and got Moore and Moriarty.”

  “They’re the best criminal defense attorneys around. Whether she thought you were innocent or guilty, she got the best she could for you.”

  “Maybe that’s right”

  Except for her parents and Lissa, Debora felt that everyone had deserted her. When I asked about her sister Pam, she said sardonically, “I got a Christmas card from her. She’s pulled away from me.”

  Debora hated being in prison, but she was no longer frightened. She felt safer, somehow, in prison. She said she had managed to get the best room in I-MAX, a corner room with a plastic window, in the MAX Swan Pod. Most of the rooms had only a bed, a toilet, and a metal desk. “My room has a little space at the end of my bed,” she told me, “and in the other rooms, the beds go from wall to wall. I have a television set in my room. I’ve never liked television, but they have two sets out in the main room and they’re always on MTV or PET stations.”

  The irony of her being happy to have a foot or two of space at the end of her bed when she had once lived in a luxurious mansion was stunning, but Debora did not seem to notice. She said she did not spend much time in her room, however. She usually went out in the main room and crocheted. “I have a lot of friends,” she said. “They are people I would never have gotten to know otherwise. I get along fine with everyone.”

  As Debora had written to Lissa, she had achieved her hope of becoming
a trainer for the Helper Dog program. This seemed an invitation to heartbreak because she was only allowed to keep a dog for seven weeks, after which it went on to the next step of its training. She admitted that she was dreading the day her current dog moved on, but she enjoyed her job. “I get to be outside when I work with the dogs.” She worked with the dog each morning and again in the afternoon. Her days were regimented, divided into predictable segments. The food in prison wasn’t very good and the portions were small. There weren’t enough stools to sit on in the dining hall, so if all the inmates showed up, some had to wait a turn to sit down.

  Most of all, Debora said, she hated the noise of so many women living together—and the lights. She said she had been delighted when the light in the hall outside her room burned out. “I could sleep in the dark for a week—until they put in a new bulb.”

  She said she had eight years to serve before she could hope to be moved into medium security. “I can’t stand this now,” she murmured. “How can I stand eight years?” We didn’t talk about the real sentence. The “hard forty.” That was too long to contemplate.

  Debora gave me an overview of her life, beginning in high school. She felt that she had never really loved Duane Green. She met Mike when she was still legally married to Green, and she was attracted to him because he was “calm and a nice guy.” She was looking, she said, for security. Not financial security chiefly, but emotional security. She spoke of security a great deal. I wondered if Debora had been looking not for a husband but for a father.

  Perhaps the most difficult subject of all to get Debora to talk about was her childhood and her family. It was as if her life had begun in high school. Pressed, she repeated what she had told me in her first letter. She had had a perfect childhood.

  “Who was the boss in your family?” I asked.

  “My mother,” she answered immediately. “My mother runs the family. She’s the strong person in the family. My father is a nice guy who’s a lot of fun. He plays with the kids.”

  My letter from Joan Jones had been full of vitriol about Mike Farrar, particularly about the ghastly post–Mother’s Day dinner when Mike and Tim fought. Now Debora agreed with Mike’s account of that day. She recalled that Tim had been misbehaving badly and that her parents had sided with her husband, saying they would not have put up with such behavior as long as he had.

  Debora said that her family had lived in modest circumstances when she was a child, but that they always had enough to be comfortable and happy. She knew her dad had driven a bread truck, but, unlike Mike, she could not name the company he worked for. She said she had always had the things that were important to her. Except for pets. “I could never have enough pets,” she commented. Her mother had allowed only one dog and a few cats over the years, because she felt that generally pets were too much trouble.

  I asked Debora if she remembered anything traumatic in her childhood, and she said no at once. Everything had been “idyllic.” She could play the piano. She could play the violin. She was the top student in her school—always. She was good at tennis and soccer.

  If she had been traumatized or sexually molested as a child, either she did not remember or she would not tell me. Something had happened to her, I was sure, but the troubled woman in front of me would not say what it was.

  “Did your parents drink?” I asked. It was a reasonable assumption: Her sister was a drug and alcohol counselor, and Debora was blaming the fire and the poisonings on her own alcoholic haze.

  “No, they never drank to excess,” she answered quickly. “Neither one.”

  It was 3:30 on Sunday afternoon, March 16, 1997, and visiting hours were over on this last day I would spend with Debora. I had promised her to have my editor send her some books directly from the publisher—the only route by which prisons will accept books from outside. As always, she could lose herself in a book, but the prison library was sparse compared to what she was used to.

  I could not promise Debora that I would write a book that proved her innocent. Even in talking to me, she had slipped and changed her story. I think it is necessary for the survival of her personality that she construct an elaborate scenario that allows her to believe she did not pour the fluid, strike the match, light the fire that destroyed her children. It is vital that she remembers that she “saved” Lissa. It may be just as important—or more important—for her to believe Tim poisoned Mike.

  In the end, I think Mike may have been the most important thing on earth to Debora, perhaps even more important than her children. He was the father who would not stay home, and she was the little girl who threw tantrums to keep him there. When that didn’t work, she punished him by taking away what he loved the most: his children.

  The guards herded us into a manageable group—parents, husbands, children, and me—while the prisoners stood on the other side of the rail and watched us as we prepared to walk the gauntlet past the guard tower. Debora stood apart from the group, and she seemed the loneliest person I had ever seen. And just for that moment, my last glimpse of her, I could see the “child” whom Dr. Marilyn Hutchinson had described.

  And still, I was left with questions to ponder. Debora had been convicted of two vastly diverse crimes. Setting the deadly fire might have been an impulsive act—horrible to contemplate, yes, but done in a rage fueled by a temporary alcoholic psychosis and Mike’s angry accusations. To poison her husband, however, required an entirely different mindset. She had to research methods of poisoning and decide to use ricin (certainly), and potassium chloride (quite possibly). No one in an alcoholic fog would have been capable of the intricate planning it took to locate, purchase, and grind up the deadly castor beans.

  How Debora must have hated Mike as she carried him plates of food with a smile—and then watched him become desperately ill again and again. Poison, traditionally a woman’s weapon, has always struck me as the most coldhearted way to kill. Debora knew the symptoms of ricin poisoning; she knew that her husband would soon be on his hands and knees vomiting in the shower, and that he would suffer terribly before he finally succumbed. This attempt at murder was deliberate, premeditated, and prolonged. A plan designed by a monstrously cruel woman.

  Why did she hate him that much? I doubt that anyone—perhaps not even Debora herself—could explain her motivation. Mike had betrayed her with another woman, but many wives forgive an unfaithful husband. Those who cannot forgive seek divorces; rarely do spurned wives set out to destroy the men they once loved. No, Debora truly wanted Mike to die in agony.

  In a sense, her hatred for her husband was self-hatred. Mike had failed to make Debora happy, and she had long since placed the burden of her self-esteem on his shoulders. At the same time, she had submerged her own personality so completely in her role of wife and mother that if she allowed him to leave her, she would be a woman made of air. By killing Mike with slow poison, Debora would wreak her revenge. And, quite simply, she would save her ego. Mike wouldn’t leave her for a blonde who was pretty and slender; instead, he would die in her arms.

  What Debora did not consciously realize was that as she acted out her rage, she would die, too. Had she succeeded in administering one more dose of poison to Mike, he would certainly have died. When that failed, she destroyed her children, which was also an act of self-destruction, and she became a woman who was not a wife, not a mother, not a doctor, nobody.

  Even if she had escaped the death penalty, Debora Green received a terrible punishment. In essence, she has been condemned to spend the rest of her life alone with the person she most despises—herself.

  That is, I think, worse than dying in an execution chamber.

  Celeste Walker sold her home in Overland Park and spent her last Christmas in Kansas in 1995. She has moved her sons to the West Coast, 2,000 miles away from tragic memories.

  Dr. Michael Farrar’s divorce from Dr. Debora Green was final on July 25, 1996. He has regained his health, and is practicing medicine full-time again. He makes arrangements for Lissa to vi
sit her mother regularly. Mike married Gillian Matthews, * an attorney, in May 1997. They live with Lissa and Gillian’s child in a new house on the Missouri side of the state line.

  Greg Burnetta has left the Prairie Village Police Department and works for federal law enforcement in Kansas City.

  Detective Gary Baker has also left the Prairie Village Police Department. He now works as an investigator for the public defender’s office.

  Detective Rod Smith is still working for the Prairie Village Police Department. He will remember the Debora Green case, as will his fellow investigators, for the rest of his life.

  Jeff Hudson is still the Fire Marshal for the Shawnee, Kansas, Fire Department.

  Paul Morrison was reelected as district attorney of Johnson County in the 1996 elections.

  Ellen Ryan is still practicing domestic law in Kansas City, Missouri—a field which she finds “more dangerous today than criminal law,” given the emotions that divorce can unleash.

  Debora Green did not write to me after our visits in mid-March, 1997. Reportedly, she is increasingly sorry that she pleaded no contest and is seeking a new trial—one that could cost her her life.

  In what I knew would be my last visit to 7517 Canterbury Court, I took photographs to help me remember the street and the trees that had once surrounded the house where Mike, Debora, Tim, Lissa, and Kelly had lived. I knew that the lot where that house once stood would never again be a homesite. It had long since been leveled and planted in grass. And the neighbors on either side purchased it from Mike Farrar in 1997. Still, it was hard to forget the lives that had been lost and the hopes that had been buried there.

  Then I saw two small creatures scampering across the grass—a wild rabbit and a squirrel. They seemed unafraid, and that somehow made me feel better. I could hear the noise of a lawn mower several lots away, and the thunk, thunk of boys shooting baskets. Although nothing would ever be the same again, life on Canterbury Court had not ended for everyone.