by Ann Rule
“She said that she would be up later to pick up the seeds.” And later that day, sometime in mid-afternoon, the woman did come in and buy the ten packets of castor beans. She explained that she needed them for a school project—either for herself or for one of her children, Stahl couldn’t remember which. But the explanation made sense to her; the woman certainly couldn’t plant the seeds outside when the first frost was only weeks away.
When Sergeant John Walter first asked her about the woman, Stahl had trouble remembering what she looked like—not surprisingly, since she waited on so many customers every day. But this sale had stood out. Stahl didn’t sell that many castor beans, even in spring; this was a special order for seeds that were exotic, deadly poisonous, and out of season. And Stahl was able to will her memory back to that day in September when she saw the woman who had special-ordered castor beans. The customer had probably been in her mid-forties, Stahl remembered, of medium build but leaning toward the heavyset side. Her hair was medium dark and chin length.
Stahl said Earl May’s cash register tapes could offer even more precise information about the sale itself: its time and date, the department, the number of items, the total amount of the sale, and whether the customer had paid by cash, check, or charge card. At Detective Rod Smith’s request, Stahl asked to have the tapes returned to her from the home office in Iowa, where they were stored. She pored over them and found the transaction she recalled. She also remembered that the cash register used at the time of the sale was off by one day. Although the tape read “September 21, 1995,” it should have been either “September 22, 1995,” or “September 20, 1995.” The time was correct, however: 3:27 P.M.
The tape showed 10 packets of seeds sold at $1.29 apiece, for a total of $12.90 plus 83 cents’ tax. The woman had paid with a $20 bill and received $6.27 in change. The price of castor beans was $1.29, but Stahl could not prove that the ten packets of seeds had actually been castor beans because the tape did not specify the type of seed. She could tell detectives only that her memory was that this was the castor-bean sale.
As for identifying the woman who had bought the castor beans, Stahl looked at a photo laydown of eight women that Sergeant Walter showed her. Was one of them her customer? She sighed and finally pointed to a picture of Debora Green. “I told him I had about a seventy percent chance that I was sure it was that person,” she said, “but there were a few differences in hair, possibly in weight.”
Stahl had seen news coverage of the fire in Prairie Village before she looked at the laydown, but she had seen only pictures of Tim and Kelly Farrar and the burning house. She had never seen a picture of Debora Green. And she had no idea that Debora’s husband had suffered four agonizing bouts of nausea and diarrhea during the late summer of 1995, and had experienced the exact symptoms of castor-bean poisoning.
The Earl May store where Leighann Stahl worked in the fall of 1995 was in Missouri, some distance from where Debora lived in Prairie Village. The other four stores in the Kansas City area were in Lee’s Summit, Olathe, Overland Park, and on 169th and Barry Road; two of those were much closer to Canterbury Court. If the middle-aged, heavyset woman with short dark brown hair who bought the castor beans was Debora Green, it was certainly judicious for her to travel as far away from home as possible to buy the beans. And this was probably at least her second such purchase: Mike had first become ill on August 11.
But within three days or so of Debora’s latest purchase of castor beans, Mike had found them. Debora responded to his questions by saying she was going to use them to commit suicide. Was she? Or had she been planning to try once more to poison Mike?
Whatever Debora’s plans were, they were foiled by her commitment to Menninger’s that same day. And by the time she came home, Mike would eat nothing she served to him. It wasn’t so much a matter of Debora’s cooking; she rarely cooked, preferring to bring in fast food. But Tim liked to cook, and if they had home-cooked meals that summer of 1995, it was usually Tim who cooked them. Even though the police had the castor-bean packets in evidence, Mike had not felt safe. He moved out within days of Debora’s release from the Menninger Clinic.
26
Celeste Walker had a long interview with Rod Smith and two Metro Squad members on Halloween. They watched the animated woman with the soft voice, and saw that she had a femininity and an effervescent manner so totally unlike Debora’s demeanor. Both women were talkers, however, and Celeste was not at all hesitant about going back over her life, her marriage, her husband’s suicide, and her relationship with Dr. Michael Farrar.
Wearing a long-sleeved white sweater and a gold charm on a long golden chain, Celeste was a very attractive woman. Her nervousness was revealed only by her frequent gestures: brushing back her shiny wedge-cut hair, sinking her chin into her hands, sighing, grimacing, and looking up at her questioners from lowered eyelids. She laughed often, although the laugh was more ironic than amused. She seemed surprised to find herself caught in the middle of this tumbling-down of lives. She did not deny her affair with Mike, and blushed only a little when she was asked to recall their first meeting, her attraction to him on the Peru trip, and, finally, the first time they had made love.
Celeste said she had kept a record of almost everything on her calendar at home. She asked for a calendar now, and tapped her fingernail on certain dates that she thought were important. She explained that she was aware early on in Peru that Debora did not like her. Debora’s eyes, Celeste said, slid over her as if she were invisible, and she always directed her hilarious stories to someone else, never to her.
Celeste’s memory and record keeping were very helpful in the police probe. If she didn’t always provide new information, she certainly verified information that Mike—and even Debora—had given them. Celeste knew the very day when Mike had first become ill, and the dates and symptoms of his subsequent relapses. She believed absolutely that Debora had been trying to poison him, although she hadn’t any idea with what—at least, not until Mike found the castor beans.
In a strange kind of way, Celeste was happy. She had lost her husband, a man she’d cared for but who had drained joy from her life. Now, she remained a woman in love, despite her sister’s misgivings about Mike and the tragedies on Canterbury Court. She obviously felt terrible about the way her husband had chosen to give up on life, and her voice dropped as she described finding him dead in the garage. She regretted the loss of Tim and Kelly Farrar, although she seemed oddly unconnected to that tragedy. Perhaps it was simply too much for her to deal with—so many catastrophes in such a short space in time.
Celeste told the investigators that Debora was crazy, nuts, bizarre. No, she had not seen her in the throes of a temper tantrum, but Mike had told her about them. And she had seen Mike come close to death for no explainable medical reason. The investigators hadn’t really expected that Celeste would have much good to say about Debora. She was “the other woman,” and she had no more liking for Debora than Debora had for her. But they saw that, if anything, Celeste was afraid of Debora. They also saw that she had no intention of walking away from Mike, especially not now, when he needed her.
She talked to the detectives for more than an hour, and then apologized, saying she had to leave to pick her sons up at school.
* * *
And then it was November, and the bright yellow and apricot-tinted leaves had blown away in the relentless Kansas wind. Now the hawks were visible again as they perched on bare, black limbs. They had been there all along, watching for vulnerable prey far below.
Everyone connected to the Farrar-Green case seemed to be in stasis. Debora and her parents still lived in the temporary apartment; Mike lived in his apartment in Merriam; and Lissa visited back and forth. She was practicing with the Missouri State Ballet almost every day. The adult members of the Nutcracker cast had taken her under their protection, too.
On November 1, the Metro Squad announced that its list of suspects in the arson murders on Canterbury Court had narrowed to p
ersons close to the family who had access to the house. That pretty well eliminated strangers running through the yard at night, or some passing itinerant who happened to be a pyromaniac. Then, on November 3, the news from the Metro Squad was more electrifying. The press was told that the investigation had now isolated one suspect only. That person was not named.
Curious media buffs in the Kansas City area were getting their news in slivers, just enough to keep them at bay. On November 8, the Metro Squad finally acknowledged that it was investigating more than the arson. Members of the squad were also looking into the possibility that Dr. Michael Farrar had been poisoned at least three times, and that he had come close to death in one of his hospitalizations. Friends who had known the Farrar-Greens were aghast at the news. Strangers who had long considered life in Prairie Village all that anyone might hope for shook their heads in bewilderment.
* * *
Debora was devoting almost all her time to Lissa. She sat for hours in a darkened theater in Kansas City, Missouri, while Lissa rehearsed the part of Clara. She fussed over Lissa’s hair, making sure it was just right for a fledgling ballerina. Lissa loved her costume, and she looked like a professional dancer, only in miniature. Debora watched avidly, caught up in the music and her child’s talent.
Flo Klenklen, the Missouri State Ballet School administrator, told reporters that Lissa was one of the youngest ballet students ever to be cast as Clara. She felt that Lissa had the strength and drive to become a professional dancer. “She is not timid when it comes to things she’s interested in,” Klenklen said. “To excel in ballet, you can’t be shy.”
Both Debora’s daughters should have been dancing in The Nutcracker—Lissa as the star, and Kelly as an angel. Debora did not comment on that, but neighbors and passersby noticed that several times she had shown up outside the burned-out wreck that had once been her home. One Sunday, she came with Ellen Ryan. Waiting television crews filmed Debora in a bright yellow rough-weather jacket and pants, as if to ward off the least smudge of soot from her clothing. What was she thinking?
Ellen said she knew what Debora was thinking. “She asked me to take her back inside the house. She said she could never accept that Tim and Kelly were dead unless she saw where they had been found. So I took her, and I led her around by the hand. I showed her where Tim’s body had fallen onto the beams holding up the living room floor, and I took her into the kitchen and told her that we couldn’t get up to Kelly’s room anymore, but that that was where Kelly had been found, in her own bed.”
According to Ellen, the whole scene had been surreal. Dennis Moore, who had not yet acknowledged that he was representing Debora in anything more than her divorce from Mike, came along with Ellen and Debora. Moore had brought a wine expert to put a price on Mike’s wine collection. Mike and his divorce attorney, Norman Beal, were also there. All the men were in the comparatively undamaged basement level of the house.
“They were tasting wine downstairs,” Ellen remembered, rolling her eyes. “And Deb and I were walking through the upstairs part of the house, where it looked as though an explosion had hit it. It was like something out of a Fellini movie. She was sobbing, just hanging on to me, sobbing, frightened, confused . . .”
Debora apparently accepted finally that her children were dead. Once, however, she went to a soccer game in which Tim’s team played, she sat on the sidelines, and wept. She was an odd, lonely figure. No one rushed over to comfort her, not at her blackened house or at the soccer match. She had become a pariah, someone to be whispered about. No one wanted to talk to her; she was a little frightening. She had only her daughter, her parents, and her lawyer.
Ellen kept running into facets of the case that either puzzled or angered her. Now, when it was far too late, she heard about all the suspicions that people in the medical community or at Pembroke Hill School or in the neighborhood had had about Debora’s fitness as a mother. “All they had to do was pick up a phone,” she said vehemently, “if they were concerned. Why didn’t someone report Debora—if they thought there was child abuse going on? Nobody did. They just gossiped about it. Maybe a tragedy could have been averted—but no one wanted to get involved.”
Not one of the gossips had called. Mike was the only one who had tried to get help for Debora and for his family. He had called the Prairie Village police to help him commit his drunken, abusive wife. She had checked herself out of Menninger’s within a few days. And, despite Mike’s belief that his call would raise red flags, no one had reported Debora to child protection authorities.
“I wanted the children,” Mike said fervently, “but I was told I could not get them away from her—that a father wouldn’t have much of a chance of winning custody.” And Debora had seemed so much better after Menninger’s that Mike dared to hope they could share in raising their children, even if they were divorced. But she had hidden her anger so well. Now, Tim and Kelly were gone, and no amount of finger-pointing was going to change that.
There was a feeling of foreboding in the air in the early weeks of November, more palpable than the chill of an early winter. The Metro Squad had announced that there was only one suspect. Now the case had either to be dropped or it had to move ahead.
27
Mike had enjoyed only a few weeks of moderately good health. But after the fatal fire, his condition declined again. Debora had always maintained that his illness was all in his mind, that he was overreacting to every little symptom; he hadn’t been really ill in the first place, not with anything anyone could diagnose. She was the one who had been under so much stress that she had actually vomited up blood, if only a minute amount.
In November, sensing something was wrong, Mike asked for an echocardiogram to see what was happening in his chest. The test showed he had a severely leaking mitral valve, caused by a bacterial infection of the heart. His physicians had feared this might happen. Once again Strep viridans showed up in his blood culture. Mike was hospitalized with endocarditis just before Thanksgiving, scheduled for surgery to insert a Groshong catheter into his subclavian vein so that he could receive intravenous antibiotics at home.
Two days before his surgery, Gary Dirks, the forensic chemist from the Johnson County Criminalistics Lab, received a vial of Mike’s blood from Gary Baker. Dirks locked it in the evidence freezer and kept it there until he was instructed to mail it to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, in early December. He sent it, along with a packet of castor beans, to Dr. Drew Richardson. Dirks also sent samples of Mike’s blood to forensic serologists at the U.S. Naval Academy. He printed the Johnson County Lab number on the sealed evidence: L-95-2941.
Although she was not aware of it, Debora’s activities were being closely monitored in the week before Thanksgiving. She spent some of her time on the Kansas side of the state line in Johnson County, but she was living south of the river, in Missouri; Lissa’s dance rehearsals at the Missouri State Ballet took place in Kansas City, Missouri. Ellen Ryan practiced in Missouri, too.
The Prairie Village police, the Metro Squad, and D.A. Paul Morrison and Rick Guinn were convinced that there was only one logical suspect in the deaths of Tim and Kelly Farrar. And that suspect was Debora Green. They also believed that she had poisoned her estranged husband, either to prevent him from leaving her or to keep him from being with another woman. With all the physical evidence they had gathered, with the circumstantial evidence that had evolved from the enormous number of interviews the Metro Squad had conducted, the case had come down to a scenario like the Greek myth of Medea. Medea’s husband, Jason, had left her for another woman; and to punish him for his treachery, she killed their beloved children. It was the harshest revenge she could mete out to him.
To investigators, it appeared that Debora had done the same thing. She had set a fire with the deliberate intention of killing her own children. Her last phone call before the fire roared had been to the man she both hated and wanted: her husband. He was leaving her for another woman. Worst of all he had shouted at her that
she was an unfit mother, that people were talking about her and threatening to call the authorities. She was in danger of losing her children, her beautiful house—everything that gave her life meaning. And, investigators believed, she had destroyed it all in a vengeful rage.
All the men and women who had been working on the arson murders and the suspected poisonings for four weeks had come to a consensus: their prime suspect—their only suspect—was Debora Green. Despite her IQ and her vast knowledge of so many subjects, the investigative teams were convinced she had made a number of clumsy errors as she set out to destroy what she loved most.
“We felt good about going for an arrest,” Gary Baker said. “Because Paul Morrison was so confident. He wouldn’t have ordered the arrest warrant if he hadn’t felt he could get a conviction.”
“He was with us all the way,” Rod Smith agreed. “All the police departments in Johnson County believed in Morrison. He and Rick were there every day, evaluating, planning strategy. If he said it was time to move in and arrest her, then it was time.”
* * *
Dennis Moore and Ellen Ryan had told Morrison that if an arrest was coming down, they preferred not to have Debora picked up; instead, they would bring her in to surrender. However, the police and the district attorney’s office saw a gaping flaw in that plan. They trusted Moore and Ryan, but they had no idea what Debora might do if she knew she was going to be arrested. They had seen her be cooperative and accommodating; and they had seen her so angry that she was completely out of control. If she knew she was being charged with the murders of two of her children, there was no telling what she might do. In fact, there would be four charges listed on the arrest warrant: aggravated arson, murder, and two counts of attempted murder (against Lissa and her father, Mike Farrar.)
