by Ann Rule
Ellen Ryan rose from her seat at the defense table and asked Judge Ruddick to allow her to withdraw as a defense attorney. “I am Dr. Green’s divorce attorney. I am not her criminal counsel. I have not signed off on any of the pleadings. But in order to be available to testify . . . I would request that I be allowed to officially withdraw from Dr. Green’s case, the criminal part of the case, today. I have discussed this with my client and she is in agreement with that.”
Judge Ruddick granted Ellen’s request but advised her that she would remain subject to the gag order that bound all the attorneys.
Debora Green would be arraigned in one week, on February 8, 1996. If all went smoothly, her trial would take place in the hot summer of 1996. Those in the gallery who had stayed for the last motions straggled out of the Johnson County Courthouse into a depressing, frigid dusk. It was six degrees above zero, and summer seemed years away.
40
Tony Rizzo, who covered high-profile cases in Johnson County for the Kansas City Star, commented on how the feeling of electricity vanished overnight in the courthouse. By Friday, February 2, 1996, those who had come to the preliminary hearing had scattered; some had flown home to one coast or another, and Kansas City residents who were curious about the case no longer had to rise early and drive over icy streets to Olathe. Court TV and A Current Affair had moved on to other sensational stories. However, courthouse habitués knew this was only the calm before the storm. “We can relax for about twenty-four hours,” one courthouse employee commented to Rizzo, “and then we have to start getting ready for the next step.”
Paul Morrison characterized the defense’s plan to blame the arson fire on Tim as “obscene,” as “character assassination.” Tim’s father felt the same way. “Tim was a strong-minded kid,” Mike said through tears, “but I don’t believe he would ever do those things. The defense exaggerated the situation. I don’t want people to believe that about Tim, and I want them to understand that I loved him and we were getting along much better at the time of the fire.”
It was hard enough on Mike to lose two of his children, without having people who had not been inside his home declare him the kind of father a son wanted to kill. It was not Tim who had brought him the plates of food that made him ill; it was Debora. And it was Debora who offered him the cup of cappuccino at the soccer match, insisting he drink it lest he hurt Tim’s feelings. Mike knew who had poisoned him, and it had not been his dead son.
One authority who grew angry at the defense’s insistence that Tim had not only poisoned his father but set the fire he himself died in was Jeff Hudson, the Shawnee fire marshal.“That fire didn’t start anyplace but in the south end of the main floor—in or near the master bedroom,” he explained, once again. “There was simply too much damage on the main floor. Fire burns up. Tim could not have set it on the first floor and made it back upstairs to his bedroom. It’s impossible.”
Conversely, Hudson said, if Tim had poured accelerant throughout the house and up the stairs, then lit it from the top of the stairs, the fire would have done more damage to the children’s upstairs bedrooms. But Hudson would stake his reputation on it: that had not happened. The fire that killed Tim came, he said, from the blazing living room directly beneath his bedroom. The flames from the large pool of accelerant there had flared up high enough to burn away the floor of Tim’s room completely, causing his bed, his furniture, and Tim himself to fall down into the living room.
* * *
Debora was once more shut away from the world in the Johnson County Adult Detention Center. Ellen visited her often. She had begun as Debora’s divorce attorney, and technically she still was, but Ellen was more: she was a caretaker. It was Ellen who had husbanded money for Debora from the marital estate, and Ellen who made out the checks to Debora’s defense lawyers. Now, having been so visible in the television coverage of Debora’s preliminary hearing, she began to get hate mail and angry phone calls. She was defending “that woman—the baby killer,” and one sector of the Kansas City public was furious with her.
“Then I had calls from businesswomen who had known Deb and they said she was innocent—that she was being set up,” Ellen said. “Associates of mine said I was risking my reputation as a lawyer by continuing to be concerned about Debora. Even my children were being teased at school. The teachers were asking if I wasn’t spending too much time on the case, and had I considered what it was doing to my children? Of course, they would never say that to a male lawyer. . . .
“I finally sat my children down and told them that I was helping a woman that a lot of people didn’t like, but that I had always tried to find the truth—and that’s what I was doing. They told me that I should keep on until I found out the truth.”
Surprisingly, Ellen’s children grew more attached to Debora from talking to her on the phone. She often called Ellen’s home in the evening now. “It was like the boys who had been Tim’s friends,” Ellen said. “They hugged Debora at the funeral; they really liked her. They and my own children told me, ‘You have to help that mom.’”
While she had always had difficulty establishing adult friendships, no one disputed that Debora was able to establish warm relationships with children. Youngsters who had grown fond of Tim and Kelly’s easygoing mom still refused to believe that she could have killed them.
Within weeks of the preliminary hearing, Paul Morrison had decided to ask for the death penalty if Debora should be convicted at trial. It was a risky decision, but one that he could not, in good conscience, avoid. Under Kansas statute, certain criteria must be met before the State can seek the death penalty. A capital murder has to be intentional and premeditated, and has to include one of several additional elements: A single act must have had more than one victim. Or a “common scheme” must have resulted in the deaths of more than two victims. Or the killing must have been committed as part of a kidnapping with intent to hold the victim for ransom, or a contract killing, or committed in the course of—or subsequent to—an act of rape or sodomy of the victim. Or, lastly, the killing must have been committed in the kidnapping of a child under the age of fourteen with the intent to commit a sex offense.
Morrison believed that Debora had intentionally set the fire that killed her children; and she also qualified for a death sentence because there was more than one victim. However, he did not make his decision alone. “Most big decisions up here,” he explained, including his entire office in a sweep of his hand, “we usually ‘staff.’ With this case, we did some whole-office staffing; we had about twenty people in here. A lot of staff lawyers that might not necessarily have a whole lot of experience were great for bouncing things off of—to see what they thought.”
Morrison was lucky enough to have several excellent trial lawyers on his staff. “A half a dozen superb trial lawyers,” he said. “We run decisions by them. . . . On the death penalty, we talked about it a lot with them.
“Finally,” Morrison said, “for me, the decision came down that if you were not going to do it on this case, I don’t think you could do it on any case. You really work hard to be fair and try to treat everybody equal. And I just thought, ‘If we don’t do this, what are we going to do five years from now when some black guy or some Hispanic woman walks in and kills three or four people in an armed robbery?’ What are you going to say that’s different about them from Debora Green? In fact, you could almost argue that someone like Debora who’s had all the advantages—apparently—makes it even more inexcusable.”
If Debora’s jury should find her guilty of deliberately setting fire to a house in which her children were sleeping, of deliberately poisoning her own husband, no one could argue these were not heinous crimes. It should not matter that she was a physician, a wealthy woman who lived in a posh suburb.
“Plus,” Morrison said, his face turning sadly reflective, “I went to those posts, and I remember—when you see that little girl, who was just the cutest little girl in the world, laying there on that autopsy table, because Mom
wants to get back at Dad. That adds a little fuel to the fire, too, on a personal level. . . .”
And district attorneys, for all the bleak side of the population that they must deal with, are human, too. Morrison’s children were the same ages as Debora and Mike’s children; he could not help but feel this case on a personal level.
With the death penalty hanging over Debora, both Dennis Moore and Ellen Ryan had the same thought: Sean O’Brien. O’Brien was an attorney with the Missouri Capital Punishment Resource Center, a gentle man opposed to the death penalty. His philosophy and his career were devoted to the premise that capital punishment should not exist in America. Ellen went to see O’Brien, whom she remembered from law school.
“I spent a long time talking with him,” she said. “I explained to him that I didn’t know what had happened, that I had all these rumors that kept coming up, that I had a client who couldn’t participate in telling me what happened, and that I didn’t know what to do to save her. But I told him too, ’If she did it, I want to know that she did it—because I promised her I would find out and tell her if I thought she did it.”
O’Brien agreed to join the defense team. He started hiring investigators and suggested bringing in Bev Marchbank, a skilled mediator. The criminal defense attorneys began meeting every Monday to discuss what they would do, what motions they would file.
Debora knew she was going to be tried for murder. She also knew that she would be facing the death penalty. No matter that the death penalty had not been carried out for decades in Kansas; she was frightened. Her parents made plans to return to Texas; there was no longer any reason to help her keep an apartment, and they hated the cold weather and were nervous driving on icy roads.
As she waited for trial, Debora grew very quiet and seemingly very depressed. “She became almost catatonic,” Ellen recalled. “She could not initiate conversations. That was when her mother became concerned and I became concerned.”
Debora seemed to respond better to women; the male part of her defense team overpowered her. Alone in jail, she became convinced that her attorneys were not working hard enough. They didn’t come to see her often enough, and when they did, she felt they didn’t pay attention to what she had to say. She was not used to dealing with their brusque, businesslike manner. They were trying to protect her from the death penalty; they were not there to make small talk or to comfort her. She had problems dealing with men anyway, and Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty couldn’t be handled the way she had treated Mike and the detectives, Rod Smith and Greg Burnetta. She could not shout and swear at them or stamp her feet. They stood between her and the death chamber.
By court order, Debora’s phone conversations with Lissa had to be monitored by a psychiatrist. But on February 10, when the monitor, Dr. Rutger Weiss, * was out of town, Debora managed to get a call through. And afterward Lissa was once again preoccupied with what was going to happen to her mother. Debora had urged her not to tell anyone that they had talked. Either she was the “confused, out-of-it child” whom Ellen perceived most of the time, or she was a scheming murderess who didn’t care that she was upsetting Lissa once again, giving her mixed signals.
Or perhaps she was both.
Trying to cheer Debora up, Marchbank spent time with her, while Ellen tried to double her visits. As soon as she felt that someone was paying attention to her, Debora started to perk up. She was taking antidepressants; the doses were adjusted, too. She still claimed that she had no memory of the night of the fire, that she could not have torched her own house. And she certainly had not poisoned Mike.
The defense hired Marilyn Hutchinson, a psychologist, to examine Debora, administer some personality tests, and give the lawyers some idea of the woman they were representing. Debora enjoyed Hutchinson’s long visits.
Moore and Moriarty had pursued a number of avenues in Debora’s defense. During the preliminary hearing, Moore had kept Celeste Walker on hand as a possible witness. Moore let it slip that he was thinking of having John Walker’s body exhumed for yet another autopsy. “I was a murder suspect again,” Celeste said bitterly. “John’s picture was back on the news. People who didn’t even know us were wondering if there was some conspiracy between Mike and me to wipe out everyone who was in our way. It was terrible for John’s mother—for his brothers.”
In the end, neither the defense team nor Paul Morrison chose to call Celeste. She was the “other woman,” but there was absolutely no indication that she had any guilty knowledge of either her husband’s death or the killing of Mike’s children.
Now, the defense team pursued the possibility that Debora herself had no guilty knowledge about the fire. They hired a fire chief in North Kansas City, who said that the rumor was that there was no trace of accelerants in the house on Canterbury Court. There had been pour marks, yes—but according to the defense’s first arson expert, a lot of different things could cause pour marks. He did not feel the State had enough evidence to prove arson.
Despite Debora’s protestations of flawed memory, some facts disturbed her defense team. There was the matter of her hair. According to the Formans, her hair had been wet when she ran to pound on their door and beg them to call “111.” If she had gone to bed and was sound asleep when the fire alarm sounded, why would her hair have been wet? Was it possible that she had accidentally set her own hair on fire? Moore had been present when Rod Smith served the search warrant on Debora to obtain clippings of her hair. The hair had showed singe marks—a common finding in people who set accelerant-enhanced fires—and Debora had had two haircuts in the week following the deadly conflagration.
Physical evidence—which can often free a defendant—did not look promising for Debora. Her lawyers wanted to know the truth. If they knew the truth, they could work with it; if she continued to stonewall them with a failed memory, they would be defending her with one hand tied behind their backs. But when they were forceful with Debora, she fell silent. When they told her time was growing short, she didn’t speak. The insanity defense works in the movies; it rarely flies in real life. Debora was happiest talking to Ellen and Bev and Marilyn, but her happiness wasn’t the goal of her male lawyers.
Ellen, the most patient and understanding of all, could see that something had to be done. There had to be some way of confronting Debora with the emerging truth. If they did that, she might go to prison for the rest of her life, but she wouldn’t go to the death chamber.
41
Mike and Lissa were living together again, in an apartment instead of a huge house. They spent a lot of time together. When Kelly’s classmates dedicated “Kelly’s Corner” in their classroom, her father and sister were the special guests. The children had designed ceramic tiles with their drawings of all the things that Kelly had loved. There was Kelly swinging, Kelly with Boomer, Kelly with her friends, a tiny pair of pink ballerina shoes like the ones Kelly would have worn as an angel in The Nutcracker Suite, hearts, sunshine, clouds and stars. Her classmates could sit in that quiet corner of the classroom, among the memories of Kelly, and read. She had loved to read.
Mike and Lissa took a vacation trip to Mexico that March, just the two of them. One seriously ill man and one little girl. They were all that was left of the family that had been. Even if Debora were acquitted of the charges against her, she and Mike and Lissa would never again live together. Mike and Lissa could not help but think of other trips they had taken to Mexico, with Kelly and Tim along.
Lissa was still fiercely loyal to her mother—she had not told even her father that Debora had made forbidden phone calls to her from jail. Ellen had then explained to Lissa that she must never lie to her dad, and the girl had promised that she wouldn’t. But she still worried about her mother.
Slowly, tentatively, Lissa and Mike began to form a real father-and-daughter relationship—something they had never been able to enjoy before. Debora had always made Mike out to be a villain; the children believed what their mother told them. And it was true that he had been away at
work from before breakfast until after supper. He had been uncomfortable in his own home, waiting for another storm to erupt.
And he had been unfaithful to Debora, although only after a dozen years of marriage had not brought them any closer together than they had been on their wedding night, when she chose to read a book rather than make love. Still, no reasonable wife and mother would have pitted her children against their father. But now, beginning to doubt her mother’s many horror stories about him, Lissa wanted to feel closer to her father and to trust him.
Lissa did not like Celeste Walker. That was predictable. The transition had been too fast, and Debora had called Celeste all manner of obscene names, blaming her for the breakup of their family. Mike’s mother didn’t care for Celeste either, something Lissa was aware of. So asking Celeste along on the trip to Mexico would have been a bad idea.
Celeste understood, just as she understood that Mike was having a rough time emotionally in late February and early March. He faced the prospect of another operation on his brain; he was having headaches and felt unwell. Neither of them had been anywhere near ready for a new relationship, and that became more apparent as the immediate stress of Debora’s preliminary hearing receded. The reality that Tim and Kelly were gone sank in. The horror of the past five months would not go away soon. It would never go away completely.
Celeste’s boys, too, had problems dealing with the upheaval in their family. Initially, Celeste and Mike had been drawn together to escape their unhappy marriages. But Mike, at least, realized that their attraction for each other might not survive all the tragedies that had scarred their lives. They shared many interests, but whether that would be enough to keep them together was questionable. There were so many ghosts that haunted them.
