Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (27 page)

Ellen Ryan was livid when she heard that Debora had been arrested in Jackson County, Missouri. She still believed that Debora would willingly have turned herself in to the Johnson County, Kansas, authorities—if they had only warned her that she was about to be arrested. Had Debora been taken to the Johnson County Adult Detention Center in Olathe, Ellen was sure she could have bailed her out immediately. Now, Debora would be locked up until Friday morning at the very earliest, in a holding facility that Ellen described as “built at the turn of the century. It is unbelievable.”

Ellen and her fiancé, who was both a physician and an attorney, were down to the holding facility the night of November 22. She wanted to get Debora’s medication to her, and she wanted her fiancé to make sure Debora was okay, not about to lapse into another of those strange states in which she seemed to lose touch with reality.

The jail was so overcrowded that night before Thanksgiving that there was no one to escort them on the elevator to the eighth floor. Visitors were not allowed on the elevators without an escort, so “We walked the eight flights of stairs,” Ellen recalled. “I had her eyeglasses and her meds. I wanted her to be able to sleep, at least. But she was in a cage with people who were screaming, and some who were so out of it that they had to be chained to a bed. They had the television going all the time, to try to calm the prisoners down. There is no sleep in that jail.”

Debora asked Ellen to be sure that Lissa knew she was okay, and Ellen promised to pass on that message. That was about all she could do. Debora would not have an extradition hearing until sometime on Friday, November 24.

Ellen went to see Lissa at her aunt Karen’s house and assured her that her mother was okay. “They are being very kind to her at the jail. It’s not a very nice place, but they’re treating her kindly.”

Ellen had a message for Lissa: “Your mother wants you to hold your head up and dance like a queen.”

Lissa straightened up, holding her head at a ballerina’s tilt. “I will,” she said. “Tell her I promise.”

28

A
s soon as Jackson County opened for business after the Thanksgiving holiday, Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty, a member of his firm who would join in Debora Green’s defense, appeared at an extradition hearing before a Missouri circuit judge. Debora sat in a holding area with several other prisoners, occasionally laughing as she talked quietly with her attorneys. Moore and Moriarty told the judge that their client would waive extradition and return willingly to Johnson County, Kansas, where her arrest warrant had been issued.

In court, Debora herself stared straight ahead. She seemed stunned, unbelieving. That may have been because she had not slept since Wednesday night. She wore the same long-sleeved black dress she’d had on when she was arrested. Although she had the smudgy, drawn look of extreme fatigue, the video cameras in the courtroom caught the intelligence in her eyes. Exhausted, shocked, disheartened, fearful, yes—but it was not possible for a woman of Debora’s intelligence to look stupid.

After the hearing, Ellen told reporters that Debora was in a state of “profound grief. All she talks about is worry about Lissa, and what the pressure is doing to Lissa,” she said. “I think she is still somewhat dazed and confused. She’s very surprised that she would be charged with these kinds of crimes. She lost everything in this fire—including her children,
everything
, and she’s astounded.”

Ellen had arranged Debora’s finances so that she could bail her client out of jail, but she had not foreseen the tremendously high bail that would be set by judge Peter Ruddick when Debora was arraigned in Johnson County.
$3 million
. That was the highest bail ever asked in Johnson County, and Debora didn’t have nearly enough money set aside. She would have to stay in jail until the preliminary hearing to determine whether Paul Morrison had presented enough evidence to warrant a trial.

Debora’s quarters in the 270-bed Johnson County Adult Detention Center in Olathe were palatial compared to the Jackson County holding cell. She occasionally had visitors from a small group of women she had known before. Lissa did not visit her mother in jail, but she did speak to her on the phone. Debora had no radio or television, but she did have books to read. Books had always been her refuge.

Johnson County’s courthouse, administration building, and jail were mostly new, built of stone and red brick and set on a full-city block-sized square of manicured grass with trees, lights, a clock tower, and a huge stone circle filled with flowers in season. It could well have been a movie set, a pleasant spot to linger—unless you had business there. Olathe, the county seat, where Debora’s preliminary hearing would be held, has about 70,000 citizens. The county buildings are located in the original part of Olathe, which dates back a hundred years or more. The businesses there are not thriving. Aside from lawyers’ offices, supermarkets, craft stores, and tiny strip malls, nothing much seems to be happening downtown; many storefronts are boarded up or papered over. Olathe’s citizens have not yet realized the worth of historic buildings. The newer half of Olathe was not nearly as endearing. Upscale—but quickly constructed—housing developments and apartments have sprung up, and franchises line the main drag for miles.

In the jail in Olathe, Debora had a cell to herself and there was quiet. She later remembered that she was heavily dosed with Prozac and Klonopin, her mind so fogged over that she moved through the next few months in a haze. There was one other prisoner in her section, an Asian woman who spoke little English. “But we were never allowed in the common room together, so I never talked to her,” Debora said. This was just as well. The woman was also charged with child murder. She had decapitated her child and was later judged insane.

Debora would complain that Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty rarely came to see her. “They told my mother they came three times a week,” she said, “but it was more like every ten days—and then they only stayed for ten minutes.”

Ellen Ryan, who had little to do with Debora’s criminal defense, would be remembered a bit more favorably. She had promised Debora that she would be there, beside her, if she had to go to trial, and that she would sit with her at the preliminary hearing scheduled for late January 1996. Even so, Joan Jones would say bitterly that Ellen didn’t do enough for her daughter. “She just took all her money and gave it to those
lawyers
.” Indeed, in her mother’s view, Debora had been victimized by the whole world. If, in her desire to see her daughter succeed, Joan had railed at the child Debora and the teenage Debora, she now found no fault with her at all.

Celeste visited Mike in the hospital, and not a day went by that they didn’t talk by phone at least four times. Celeste stubbornly refused to believe that they could not wrest some kind of future out of, quite literally, the ashes of their lives. She knew that Mike’s family did not approve of her. Once, when they met at the hospital, his mother was frank in suggesting that Celeste should not be there. Celeste saw the distaste in Velma Farrar’s eyes. Still, she lingered in Mike’s room.

But what did it matter anymore how things looked? Celeste knew the truth. She had seen John waste years of his life in gray depression, and then rob himself of all the rest of his life in a moment of despair. She loved Mike and she was not going to stay away when he needed her. It may have been that Celeste was the one who loved more in their relationship. Mike was too ill, too grief-stricken, and too preoccupied by what new catastrophe the future might hold; he scarcely had time or the strength for love. Nor did he have time to listen to his parents’ admonitions about staying away from Celeste. He had to get well so that Lissa would have at least one parent to take care of her. And, somehow, he had to get strong enough to practice medicine again. It had been so long that sometimes he didn’t even feel like a doctor anymore.

But without a sure diagnosis, Mike was in limbo. He knew he had been sick enough to die during his illnesses, that he had endocarditis and a leaking mitral valve in his heart, but he still didn’t know for sure
why
he had suddenly become so ill. There was no definitive reason for it. Until some expert could validate his feelings about what was wrong with him—and why—he would never be truly well.

In the bitter cold of a Kansas winter, crews moved in and tore down what was left of the house on Canterbury Court. They hauled truckload after truckload of debris away until nothing remained but cinders. The pool was gone, and Tim’s basketball hoop, the stone façade that would have lasted a century, the four-car garage. Everything gone. And soon the snow covered even those minute reminders of the house that had stood there. The trees survived—even the slender white birches, although they had been scorched by the flames and nearly flattened by the firefighters’ hoses.

Now, when the Jurdens looked to the west, they saw only the Formans’ home. That was odd, but it was certainly better than seeing rain and snow invade the charred remains of 7517 Canterbury Court.

29

T
he Debora Green case would not be the first in which Paul Morrison had come up against his old boss, Dennis Moore. The men respected one another, and both were extraordinarily impressive in a criminal trial. In the courtroom, each was entirely focused on presenting his side of the case at hand. As one newspaper columnist termed it, the Green trial would be “a battle of the titans.” Debora might have the best in defense attorneys, but she also faced a prosecutor with a solid record of convictions. Both Morrison and Moore had graduated from Washburn Law School in Topeka, and between them, they had prosecuted several of East Kansas’s most notorious cases.

Moore was a big man, very tall—a handsome man with dark silver-streaked hair, whose courtly manner made him seem more like a Southern lawyer than a Midwesterner. Whatever his feelings were, they lay beneath the surface; he betrayed none of them to court watchers. He seemed—always—unruffled and confident.

During his three terms as Johnson County district attorney—from January 1977 until December 1989—Moore had prosecuted a number of high-profile cases. Among them was that of Danny Crump, who was convicted of planting a bomb that killed six members of an Olathe family. Another newsworthy case in which Moore won a conviction was that of Sue Ann Hobson, whose manipulations convinced her son and his friend to murder her stepson. Two books were written about the Hobson case; Danny Crump’s crime also received national attention.

Now, besieged by the media, Moore gave a number of interviews, not just to the Kansas City press and TV, but to tabloid shows such as
Inside Edition
. He hinted at a defense, rather than coming out with any absolute statements. He mentioned a run-in Tim had had with the Prairie Village police for lighting a Molotov cocktail in his neighbors’ yard. He managed to raise the question of a possible connection between Tim’s fascination with fire and the tragedy that killed him. Asked if Dr. John Walker’s death was truly a suicide, Moore said that his defense team was looking into that. He obviously wanted to leave the impression that his client was
not
the only suspect in the case. And he did that while adroitly managing to stay within the guidelines of Judge Ruddick’s gag order.

On December 5, there was, finally, a conclusive report on Dr. John Walker’s death. J. Michael Boles, M.D., the coroner of the Tenth Judicial District of Kansas, released his conclusions about the suspected suicide. Boles’s review of Bonita Peterson’s autopsy explained why the Pentothal found at Walker’s death scene had not been recovered from venous blood in his body. The chief question raised by Dr. Peterson’s postmortem was why it appeared that Walker had chosen to be awake when he would have known he could not breathe voluntarily. Surely no anesthesiologist would choose suffocation as a manner of death.

And, mercifully, Walker hadn’t. Dr. Boles’s autopsy review verified that he had been an extremely intelligent and well-informed anesthesiologist. His choice of drugs and the way he administered them to himself showed that he was fully cognizant of what he was doing when he chose a final escape from his constant depression.

“The most probable reason Pentothal could not be recovered from the venous blood is as follows,” Boles wrote. “The subject first injected the paralytic agent (Pancuronium.) As he began to feel the effects of this agent (inability to breathe), he then injected the Pentothal. At this time the subject would have been in a state of respiratory acidosis with associated high CO
₂
(Hypercapnia) and also would have large levels of circulatory endogenous adrenalin[e] [normally present in the body, to help humans respond to danger]. Both Hypercapnia and high adrenalin[e] levels have been associated with Sudden Cardiac Death during the induction of anesthesia with Pentothal. In this scenario, one would expect to recover little, if any, Pentothal from the blood stream, since the heart has no time to recirculate the small amount available back to the tissues…. Thus death in this case was due to sudden cardiac arrest secondary to Pentothal administration.”

John Walker had not wanted to risk waking up from an insufficient dosage of anesthesia. He had made sure that his heart would stop instantly. And it had. For those who loved him, it was a small comfort. He had not suffered for a moment.

The whispers that had cast Celeste Walker as a clever murderess who had killed her husband so that she could inherit millions and run away with her lover were silenced. But there were those who still suspected that Debora had played some part in driving John Walker to suicide. There always would be.

It was on that same day, December 5, 1995, that Drew Richardson, Supervisory Special Agent of the FBI, received the request from the Johnson County criminalist, Gary Dirks. Richardson examined the two containers of evidence that Dirks had sent him. One was a sealed plastic envelope containing a packet of Earl May castor beans. The other was a sample of blood from Dr. Mike Farrar.

Richardson knew that antibodies to ricin do not appear in the blood and tissue within a week or two of ingestion. Therefore, there is no way to test for ricin poisoning early in the treatment. The condition masquerades as a number of other illnesses. However, the human body has a remarkable ability to fight “enemies” that attack it. Months after poisoning with ricin, antibodies to this deadly poison
do
appear.

If he could find ricin antibodies in the blood and tissue samples taken from Mike Farrar, and if Debora Green should be bound over for trial, Richardson would be a powerful witness for the prosecution. His findings would also vindicate Mike, who had suffered so gravely from what had seemed to be a phantom illness.

Two weeks after Richardson received the ricin exemplars from Dirks, an incident in Arkansas demonstrated that ricin/castor-bean poisoning was not the uncommon weapon that it seemed. Thomas Lavy, fifty-four, was arrested on his Onia, Arkansas, farm and charged under the federal Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act with possession of a toxic substance—ricin—with intent to use it as a weapon.

Canadian customs agents had searched Lavy’s car at a border crossing between Alaska and Canada two years earlier and found $89,000 in cash, four guns, more than 20,000 rounds of ammunition, and a quantity of white powder. An analysis of the powder proved that it was not cocaine; it was ricin. FBI Agent Thomas Lynch said that because of a communications mix-up, he had not learned of the incident until early 1995. He had traced Lavy, who had earlier been indicted in Alaska on a federal charge of possession of a toxic substance with intent to use it as a weapon, to his Onia farm.

Agent Lynch knew a lot about ricin. He explained to the press that it is the third-deadliest toxin in the world; only plutonium and botulism are more deadly. “It has no known antidote,” Lynch said.

Investigators who searched Lavy’s farm found a copy of
The Poisoner’s Handbook
, which describes how to extract ricin from castor beans, and
Silent Death
, which discusses ways to use toxic compounds to poison people. When Lavy explained that he was carrying 130 grams of the poison from Alaska into Canada only because he wanted to bring it to Arkansas to kill coyotes that were preying on his chickens, prosecutors looked doubtful. U.S. Prosecutor Robert Govar explained, “It would be tantamount to saying you can use a thermonuclear device to protect your property from break-in or burglary.”

But there would never be a trial for Thomas Lavy. He was found hanging in his jail cell in Little Rock on December 23, 1995, and pronounced dead. The Associated Press dispatch on Lavy’s arrest and suicide ended by describing the Debora Green case in Kansas and the contention by prosecutors there that she had attempted to kill her husband with ricin.

By December 1995, Mike was ill again, suffering from severe frontal headaches. He called his doctor and said he was afraid he needed a CAT scan. After evaluating the results of a cerebral angiogram (where dye is introduced into arteries in the brain), his physician agreed that he had an abscess that had bled. “I was a walking time-bomb,” Mike recalled.

On December 11, he underwent a craniotomy. The clump of bacteria originating from his heart valve had found its way to the right front part of his brain. The surgeon who operated on him, Dr. Stephan Reintges, knew it had broken loose from the heart to roam through the bloodstream unchecked until it began building a potentially fatal abscess in Mike’s brain. “He may have had a stroke,” the surgeon told reporters. “Or the bacteria itself may have simply broken through.”

Mike’s brain surgery would involve drilling burr holes in the right frontal portion of his skull until a “lid” of bone could be removed, exposing the brain beneath. Then the abscess could be drained. Because the original cause of the sepsis—the reason that bacteria had flooded Mike’s body organs and bloodstream—had yet to be isolated, Dr. Reintges took yet another sample of body fluid to be analyzed in the FBI lab.

The critical nature of Mike’s condition had not escaped Paul Morrison. The husband who was in the process of divorcing Debora Green was slated to be one of the prime witnesses against her. Mike had been there, behind the walls that hid their tumultuous family situation, for years. Morrison had to get his testimony first before a judge in a pretrial hearing and then in front of a jury if he was to have a prayer of winning a case that was mostly circumstantial.

Knowing that Mike could very well die during the surgery to drain his abscess, Morrison had asked him if he would agree to having his testimony videotaped. Both Morrison and Moore would examine him and cross-examine him before his surgery. Of course, Morrison had not said, “We need this in case you die before trial or in case you end up a vegetable,” but Mike was a physician himself; he knew the odds. If his surgery was successful, that videotape would never be used. If things went badly, at least his image and his voice would be there in the courtroom. He believed that Debora had killed two of their children and had meant to kill him. He felt strongly that she must not be allowed to escape retribution. So, with a nurse accompanying him, he gave his testimony before a video camera.

Mike had more wrong with his brain than an abscess, however. The cerebral angiogram showed that he also had a mycotic aneurysm in a main blood vessel in his brain. The vessel was thinning and weakening, assaulted by the bacteria spewed out during his attack of endocarditis. He would have four more brain angiograms over the next four months. His doctors wanted to keep track of the condition of the bulging artery, If anything, this was more dangerous than his infected heart and the abscess in his brain. The poison he had ingested was not static; it continued to do silent damage inside his body. Even the tests were so dangerous that he had to be hospitalized overnight each time. A small percentage of patients suffer strokes from the angiogram itself.

Christmas 1995 was a holiday that the principals in the Farrar-Green case would have to get through somehow. There were too many losses, too many memories, and no one knew what the new year would bring. Among the hundreds of photographs now kept in the district attorney’s office, there were scores showing Christmases past that Mike, Debora, and their children had shared: Debora decorating a succession of trees; Kelly gleefully unwrapping a present; Tim posing in his Kansas City Chiefs sweatshirt and pants while Mike looked on proudly; Tim, Lissa, and Kelly smiling as they cuddled on a sofa, their cheeks pink with excitement; Boomer happily sitting in a morass of crumpled wrapping paper. Looking at those pictures long after they had been snapped, it did not seem possible that this family could have been so tragically destroyed.

Kansas City, Missouri, once again celebrated Christmas by decorating the already picturesque County Club Plaza with thousands of colored lights. Their sparkling reflections on the snow and the old-fashioned streetlights slightly dimmed by yet another profusion of snowflakes make the city especially beautiful during Christmas. And so it still was, of course, in 1995—for most families.

Debora remained in jail, while her daughter held her head high and danced in
The Nutcracker Suite
. It was a beautiful performance. Lissa celebrated Christmas with her father and his family, but she was sad because her mother was not in the audience watching her dance. Celeste was trying to help her sons have a good Christmas despite the fact that their father was gone. People in both Johnson and Jackson counties—indeed in all of Kansas and Missouri—clamored for news of the case, but there was none. Neither the prosecution nor the defense intended to reveal its cards. For Paul Morrison, Rick Guinn, Dennis Moore, and Kevin Moriarty, the holidays had to be short; they were girding up for one of the biggest legal battles the Kansas City area had ever known.