Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (46 page)

Before she and Mike started a family, Debora showered affection on her pets.

Debora and Mike with their firstborn, Timothy, in their apartment in Cincinnati, August 1983

Tim Farrar, aged three and a half, was extremely bright and would grow to become very protective of his mother.

A delighted Mike held his one-day-old daughter, Lissa, in December 1984.

Debora, a devoted mother, always made special occasions of the holidays and her children’s birthdays.

Lissa, four, and Tim, six, were thrilled by their new baby sister, Kelly, born in December 1988.

A formal portrait of Lissa, Tim, and Kelly in 1989

Though their marriage was beginning to show signs of strain, Debora and Mike always had a good time together on family vacations, here with Kelly on Sanibel Island, Florida.

Debora took her children to Mexico without Mike in the early 1990s. By then she had given up her medical practice and no longer resembled the vibrant, slender woman he had fallen in love with.

Kelly playing with Boomer in her room. They were almost always together.

Fire—later ruled accidental—gutted Debora and Mike’s house in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1994, shortly after Mike asked for a divorce.

Reconciled and determined to keep their family together, Mike and Debora bought a luxurious new house on Canterbury Court in Prairie Village, Kansas.

Debora (third from left), Tim (to her left), and Mike (fourth from right) posed with a group of Pembroke Hill school parents on a trip to Peru in the summer of 1995. The trip marked the end of their marriage and the beginning of Mike’s near-fatal illness.