by Ann Rule
“Were they weathered?”
“Not a bit. . . . They were easily read and quite fresh.”
Over objections by the defense, Judge Ruddick allowed Forman to describe what he had read in the letter. “Well,” Forman began, “the letter accused Mike Farrar and Celeste Walker of moral indiscretion. It also praised Debora Green as a paragon of virtue. And it dealt with some adult issues that we didn’t think he [the Forman’s son] ought to be reading.”
“Did you find that letter—unusual?”
“It’s the only letter like that I’ve ever found.”
Dr. Forman testified that Debora had come to his house at about 12:20 or 12:25 A.M., asking him to call “111.”
“Where could you see the fire from?” Morrison asked.
“I could see it blazing over the top of the garage. . . . flames and a glow and smoke.”
“Did you recall anything unusual about Debora Green’s hair when you first saw her that night?”
“It looked to me as though it had been wet and dried expeditiously.”
“Was it wet?”
“It looked . . . The hair is wet—but it looked like it had been toweled off, dried quickly, but not dripping wet.”
Kevin Moriarty tried to get Dr. Forman to say that he and his wife did not like Debora.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“But you have said that before in this investigation.”
“That we did not like her?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think we said that.”
Moriarty drew out the information that Dr. Forman had not remembered Debora’s hair being wet until a day or so after the fire. But, Forman said, “When I made my realization about the hair, I called [Detective Burnetta] independently to see if that would be of interest to him.”
“The night that Debora came over, she was yelling, ‘Call the fire department’ whether it was ‘111’ or ‘911.’ Is that correct?” Moriarty asked.
“Yes, that is correct.”
“Did she make any comment about her children?”
“Yes, she did. . . . She said they were in the house and the house was burning.”
The defense position here was obvious: Moriarty wanted to show that John and Mary Forman had deliberately added to the investigators’ suspicions about Debora. “Did you tell the police that evening that you had concerns about Debora starting the fire?” Moriarty asked.
“I don’t believe so.”
“Do you know if your wife had concerns—and you can answer yes or no—first: the night of the fire and everything was going on, did she express concerns to you that she suspected Debora Green had started the fire?”
“I don’t think there was much question in either of our minds about that,” Dr. Forman answered evenly.
Moriarty was obviously beginning to annoy the State’s witness, but he kept after Dr. Forman, trying to get him to say that he and the other neighbors and Mike Farrar had all talked to the police immediately, expressing their opinions on Debora’s guilt.
“Did you communicate to Mike Farrar your concern that Debora Green had set the house on fire?” Moriarty asked Dr. Forman.
“That’s a difficult question to answer. I guess we talked about it, but not so directly.”
“Help me out,” Moriarty said. “I don’t understand what that means.”
“I asked him if he thought their other fire was a random event in light of what was going on now.”
Moriarty wondered why Dr. Forman had given the strange letter he found in his yard to the police at seven A.M. “You must have thought there was some significance of this letter and the house fire. Isn’t that correct?”
“Sure, I did,” Dr. Forman said, a tinge of anger in his voice.
“When did that strike you?”
“The moment I opened the door and saw the house burning down.”
“But you chose not to share that information or your concern with any police officers?” Moriarty said, incredulously.
“I guess I was more concerned with Lissa and Kelly and Tim getting out and our kids getting out,” Dr. Forman said with his jaw set. “I felt a little more concern about those things than trying to pin it on anyone at that point.”
Perhaps Moriarty had gone a bit too far. He ended by asking Dr. Forman the effects of Klonopin, and Forman said he couldn’t give those off the top of his head.
On redirect, Morrison asked Dr. Forman about his written statement of October 24. “Is that the one where you also said you did not believe Debora Green was genuinely hysterical?”
“That’s correct.”
“And it was at that time, and still is, your opinion that she did not exhibit any visceral concern in that situation?”
“I thought she was relatively devoid of emotion in what I considered to be a highly emotional situation.”
“Was she cool?”
“Cool—or just distanced.”
Moriarty tried again on recross. He clearly wanted to show Judge Ruddick that Debora’s neighbors had not liked her to begin with, and that they had built a case against her even before the ashes of the deadly fire were cool. It was already clear that Debora had not been a contender for Ms. Congeniality of Canterbury Court, but there was no evidence that anyone had conspired against her. There was only Mike’s testimony about Dr. Mary Forman’s frantic, angry call to him just after the fire was discovered: “Your wife is a fucking arsonist!”
“Had you had any contact with Mike about Debora,” Moriarty asked Dr. Forman, “before the fire and after he moved out?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“Do you know at the time of this evening that she was taking medication for depression?”
“No, I did not.”
“Do you know if that type of medication can affect one’s affect?”
“I was not familiar with what she was taking. I don’t know that much about antidepressants.”
“Can some medications affect one’s affect?”
“I supposed they can.”
“What does ‘flat affect’ mean?”
“Devoid of emotion.”
Moriarty had what he wanted, and he turned away briskly with a “Thank you very much.”
But Dr. Forman was a chest surgeon, not a psychiatrist. He had known Debora as a next-door neighbor, and that was how he was describing her for the judge. He had watched her as her children were trapped in a burning house and had seen not a scintilla of emotion on her face. If there were antidepressants that powerful, Dr. Forman didn’t know which ones they might be.
37
Paul Morrison had given Judge Ruddick and the gallery a crash course in how ricin poisoning affects the human body, and he had established that Mike Farrar still carried in his bloodstream the proof that he had been exposed to ricin several times. But the charges against Debora Green were bifurcated; Morrison maintained that she had tried to poison her husband, then gone on to set a fire that would trap her children. He now had to recreate what had happened inside the house on Canterbury Court just before the fire erupted and during the hour and forty-five minutes that it burned.
Except for the occasional movie with special effects that show what firefighters must do inside a burning building, the public tends to take them for granted—unless they are the ones who need help. Just as police risk their lives, so do firefighters. The jobs require slightly different mind-sets, although they both begin with the premise that the preservation of life is their most important duty.
Few of us would deliberately enter a burning building; for hundreds of years, firefighters have been running, crawling, and sliding into flaming, smoky structures that other people have fled. It is safer now than it used to be. Before the advent of masks and air tanks, firefighters, all unknowing, breathed in the by-products of burning chemicals and asbestos. As they pulled down ceilings with their picks, they often vomited over their shoulders from the effects of the poisonous gases they were forced to inhale. After years of exposure,
any number of veteran firefighters contracted cancer—of the mouth, throat, lungs, and other organs damaged because they had no masks and no oxygen tanks. Nor did they have radios with which they could communicate with fellow firemen outside.
By 1995, Chief Maurice Mott and the men of his ladder company had the benefit of safety equipment. That meant they could breathe inside a burning structure, but it did not mean they were not in constant danger of becoming trapped in the fire themselves.
Mott, a compact man with black hair, took the witness stand and began to explain, with the help of slides, what he saw on the night of October 23–24. Along with three other firefighters, he had entered the house at the basement level on the south side, the opposite end from where Kelly and Tim were trapped. By the time Mott and his crew arrived, that was the only way left to get in. (The window he crawled through led into the basement bedroom where Debora had once spent the night hiding from her husband.)
Mott used a floor plan of the house to identify where they had been. “I think this is a hallway and this is a door here. . . . Across from that—this door here was closed. I opened the door, not knowing if it was a closet or whatever, and that’s when I visualized this entire fitness room was on fire. I could see through the floor joists to the first floor of the residence.”
“Up to this point, you saw no fire?” Morrison asked.
“No fire.”
“And you open this door and it’s like an inferno?”
“Yes. . . .”
The room above the fitness room was the living room; above that was Tim’s room. All three rooms were burning, fully involved in flames.
Mott testified that he and his partner searched the playroom, but they found no one—only dolls, teddy bears, and dress-up clothes and hats. They recognized a pool table by feel, but as they worked their way around it, sweeping their gloved hands beneath it, the ceiling fell in on them.
Debora watched the light and shadows of the fire scene slides. This charred structure had been her home. She seemed very alert now, as if watching for something.
Moore’s cross-examination of Chief Mott was basically a reprise of what Mott had already said. It is usually unwise for a defense attorney to quibble over small points with someone who has risked his life for strangers. Moore wanted to know if Mott remembered a fierce wind blowing that night; Mott did not.
“While you were inside the house,” Moore asked, “did you smell anything unusual?”
“In the basement area, I did not. When I went into the basement I had an air pack on, so once I made entry into that house, I wouldn’t be able to smell anything. Now, when I yelled into the windows, I did not have my face mask on.”
Mott had smelled nothing unusual. However, his job was not to determine the cause of fires; his job was to put them out and, if at all possible, save human beings trapped inside.
The next witness was someone who did determine the cause of fires: Jeff Hudson of the Shawnee, Kansas, Fire Department. Although Gary Lamons had been in charge of the investigation into the fire’s cause, Hudson represented the Eastern Kansas Multi-County Task Force in this hearing.
Hudson testified that the arson investigators had gathered at the site of the fire at eleven the morning after.
“And what role did you play?” Morrison asked.
“I played a role with the origin and cause team in removing debris and assessing the origin and cause of the fire.”
“How many of you were involved in the origin and cause [team]?”
“Probably five or six people were assigned to that.”
Hudson explained “layering”—how the arson investigators moved from the top down, tediously sifting through the levels of a burned structure in search of the fire’s cause. “All the way along, we’re documenting what we’re doing and photographing,” he testified. “And then we remove the contents of the room and get down to floor level.”
“And is that sometimes important?”
“It’s very important because you’re looking at burn patterns and the most significant damage to the structure. You’re coming across different parts of furniture. We can use that for reconstruction purposes to determine which way the fire moved and what areas of the room are more damaged than the other areas.”
“Is it important for you to be able to see whether or not there are the presence of burn patterns, for example, on a floor?”
“Yes.”
“Does that relate to your investigation of what might have caused your start of that fire?”
“Yes—it relates directly to that.”
“And is it important for you to know whether or not fires burn low or high in a room—and can you tell by looking at debris, walls, maybe pieces of furniture, the direction and path of travel of the fire?”
“Yes, you can.”
Hudson looked only at Paul Morrison; his eyes never shifted to the defense table. Debora sat up straighter; she seemed fascinated with this testimony.
Again, Morrison began projecting slides while Hudson described what they depicted. There was the home’s entry with its stone façade that rose toward the now ragged roof. The door was gone and the entryway resembled an open, toothless mouth. The camera moved in closer. Blackened windows. The window near the garage roof where Lissa had escaped. There was a shot of arson investigators shoveling debris into piles.
Using the slides, Morrison and Hudson took Judge Ruddick and the gallery around the outside of the house. Now you could see where Mott and his men had crawled into the lower-floor window; above that was the window that opened out from the Jacuzzi off the master bedroom.
The slides of the east side—the back of the house—showed the most damage. The roof was gone; the railings that ran along the back deck of the house were charred by flames that had shot out more than eight feet after the wall of windows and sliding glass doors shattered from the heat.
“Now, some of the charring around that one—that main set of sliding doors—I’ll call it the hotter part of the house,” Morrison said, “is that evident there on the right?”
“The wood is charred.”
“Now, what’s that just to the left of the wood?”
“That appears to be an intercom appliance.”
Those in the courtroom who had heard Debora’s recall of talking with her son through this intercom looked puzzled. If she had been able to stand there and converse with Tim in his room, there should have been plenty of time for him to jump out onto the roof and lower himself to the ground. Why hadn’t she encouraged him to do that? Why had she told him to wait for someone to help him?
Debora watched the screen and whispered occasionally to Ellen Ryan. The cameras were in the basement now; here were the two furnaces, the two electrical panels, the water heaters—all perfectly intact. They had not caused the fire. The carousel shuffled ahead, each new slide dropping into place to reveal another basement room in ruined condition. Some were damaged by water, some by falldown.
“We’re in the exercise room, a workout, weight room in the basement,” Hudson testified. “And this debris in this photograph has fallen down through the floor joists from the floor in the living room directly above this exercise room. You can see that the drywall that’s on the walls in this room is still intact. The dark part of the drywall is up high. The fire in this room moved from the top down. . . . The paint is still on the walls except up high where there was intense heat.”
“And does that tell you anything about whether or not the fire started in that room?”
“Yes,” Hudson said, directing a beam of light at the slide with a laser pointer. “This room was ruled out as an area of origin because it’s obvious that the fire came down from the floor above. . . .”
Next, the two men, prosecutor and arson investigator, moved on to the rec room, where most of the damage had been caused by water. “The room for the most part is intact and has very little damage,” Hudson testified. “With the exception of a burn pattern—an area of the carpet down low,
right next to that bar stool. The floor is burned in that area.”
Hudson explained that the carpet had melted and the fire had gone out. This fire had no connection to the others in the house. It had begun—or been set—separately.
“We’ve got an unconnected fire down there?”
“Certainly.”
The slide projector threw another image on the screen. A fireman’s glove held something, but it was impossible to discern what.
At the defense table, Debora turned her head away quickly and whispered urgently to Ellen Ryan, who then spoke to Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty.
“Judge,” Moriarty said, “we’d like—the defendant would like to voluntarily absent herself at this time. . . .”
There was a sidebar discussion between Judge Ruddick and the defense team. Debora looked agitated for the first time since this hearing had begun.
Moore explained: “Judge, we would state for the record that we understand there may be a couple of slides in this presentation Mr. Morrison’s making that would show some scenes that our client would not like to be present in the courtroom when they were shown. They are scenes that may be involving her children. . . .”
Debora was half out of her seat. “She understands she has the right to be present,” Moore continued, “but she’s giving up that right so she doesn’t have to witness this.”
“Is that correct, Debora?” Moore turned to his client.
“That’s correct.” For the first time, Debora spoke, and then she and Ellen hurried from the courtroom to the judge’s chambers.
The image on the screen was still puzzling; then, suddenly recognition hit. The glove was holding some part of a human being.
“Tell us what this depicts,” Morrison asked Hudson.
“This photograph was taken in the fitness-exercise room,” Hudson testified, his voice professional still, but slightly hushed. “And that’s a photograph of a foot that was found in the falldown debris as it was being removed from that room. It’s a human foot.”
There were gasps in the courtroom.
