Bitter Harvest

by Ann Rule

  If her children’s home was broken, Debora was certain, they would lose their chance to move among the most sought-after young people in the area. She had never been a debutante—not in Peoria—nor a beauty queen. The kudos she received had all been for her superior intellect; she seemed, now, to be living through her “beautiful children,” as she called them. She wanted them to move easily in the rarefied air of Kansas City society.

  Most of all, Debora did not want to lose any more of her prestige and her self-esteem. Mike was a well-known and successful cardiologist and she was his wife. For all the bragging she had done about her intellectual brilliance, she was not a confident woman. A long time before, she had been the one who had money, far more money than Mike; now she was dependent upon him for everything. Quite simply, Debora had failed at everything from the practice of medicine to the most basic housekeeping. And now she was facing a failed marriage.

  She buried herself in novels and books about bizarre crimes that summer, wasting her mind on escapist literature. She checked books out of the Johnson County Library and the Corinth Library in Prairie Village, usually eight or more at a time, and she bought numerous paperbacks. Her book selections were full of violence: Blood Oath; Wedded to Crime: My Life in the Jewish Mafia; Amy Fisher: My Story; Blood Sister; Blood Games: a True Account of Family Murder; Bodies of Evidence; The Murder of Little Mary Phagan; Smoked: A True Story About the Kids Next Door; Final Justice; and Before He Wakes: a True Story of Money, Marriage, Sex and Murder. Some of the books she chose were light novels—by Danielle Steel, for instance. Still, Debora seemed fixated on bloody murder—particularly within families—during the high summer of 1995.

  There seemed no way to achieve a happy or even a civil ending to their marriage. Mike didn’t move out; his children wanted him to stay, and he vacillated between desire and guilt. Debora moved to the guest bedroom on the lower level, which had its own private bath. That summer, she and Mike lived together in a wary, tight-lipped silence, as if in an armed camp.

  There was another reason Mike didn’t move out. Debora, who rarely had more than a glass of wine or a single highball, had suddenly begun to drink so heavily that he dared not leave the children with her at night. It was not unusual for her to drink a liter and a half of vodka or gin over a period of two days. Although there had been intervals when she was addicted to painkillers and sleeping pills, she had never been a heavy drinker. Now, with no practice and no hospital work to give her access to drugs, she was apparently filling the void with alcohol.

  Debora’s days took on a bizarre kind of order. Somehow, she drove her children to their lessons, their sports events, their friends’ houses; then, once that was done, she closeted herself with a bottle of liquor and drank until she passed out. On some days she was too drunk to get out of bed. Once, Mike found her passed out on the basement floor. And her language was foul. Her remarkably high consumption of alcohol loosened her inhibitions so much that she made no effort whatsoever to watch what she said in front of Tim, Lissa, and Kelly.

  Tim and Lissa wavered between begging Mike to stay and treating him with great hostility. They were angry at their mother, too, but their resentment was chiefly aimed at their dad. He had promised them that he would never leave, and now he was leaving. It did not matter to the children that his marriage had become unbearable, and he didn’t even attempt to explain that to them. It did not matter that he would have taken them with him, gladly, if their mother had let him. Predictably, their behavior toward him deteriorated. They became defiant and repeated much of the language their mother used in her descriptions of him.

  Kelly, only six, had always had a serenity that seemed to protect her from the storms erupting behind the stone façade of the wonderful house that was no longer a home. She clung to Boomer, the big Lab, or played outside with her friends. Lissa hovered nervously over her distraught mother, who was often sick with the “flu” and throwing up. And Tim was so angry, far too angry for a boy still six months from his fourteenth birthday.

  No problems are absolutely insoluble; the challenge is always which solution will do the most good for the most people. The rancor that was thick in the house on Canterbury Court that summer kept the family at an impasse, and there seemed no way out. Mike had, at least for a time, an escape into his work, and occasionally with his lover. He was gone from home from early morning until early evening. Debora escaped into a bottle.

  Tim and Lissa were highly intelligent children, and they quickly became the “parents,” watching over Debora as she flung herself headlong into self-destruction. Although she claimed to love her children above everything else, she allowed her pain over the impending divorce to be an excuse to virtually ignore them.

  Tim went off to camp, which left ten-year-old Lissa to handle things during the day at home. But she soon reached a point where she could not deal with her mother’s behavior: One Friday afternoon in early August, Lissa couldn’t get her mother to wake up. She was afraid that Debora was dead.

  Sobbing, she called her father at the hospital about 4:30. “I asked to speak to her mother,” Mike would recall, “but Debora apparently was unable to speak to me.”

  Mike headed for home at once, impatient in the Friday afternoon traffic. When he turned off Seventy-fifth onto Canterbury Court, he saw Lissa waiting anxiously at the edge of the cul-de-sac, watching for his car. She was very upset, and begged him to hurry to help Debora.

  He followed her into the house. In the master bedroom, he was shocked to find a scene of complete disarray. “Debora was completely nude except for a T-shirt or a kind of a chiffon top . . . lying face down,” he remembered. “She was clearly drunk. There was a one-and-a-half-liter bottle of gin that was largely empty lying next to her.”

  Kelly was also home, of course; she, too, was sobbing. Neither of the little girls had been able to get their mother to respond. They weren’t sure what was the matter with her; they had never seen her have the “flu” as badly as this.

  On the way home, Mike had called his sister, Karen, who lived on the Missouri side of the state line, to tell her something was wrong and ask her to take the girls for the night. She had agreed instantly. With Debora alive and apparently well except for the fact that she was completely intoxicated, Mike scooped up his daughters and took them to their aunt’s. It was now about six P.M.

  Knowing that, at least, they were safe, he then hurried back to his house to see what he could do about Debora. He had told her—although he didn’t know whether it registered—where he was going and asked her not to leave until he got back. “I really didn’t expect her to go because I thought she’d be too drunk,” he recalled.

  But Debora wasn’t in the master bedroom, and she didn’t answer when he shouted her name. Worried, he looked in the garage and was grateful to see the Land Cruiser still there. At least, she wasn’t out on the road someplace, a danger to herself and everyone else.

  Filled with foreboding, Mike searched their huge house. On the lower level were a playroom, the bedroom Debora was using, an exercise room, a recreation room, and the room where he kept his wine collection. The kitchen, dining room, living room, music room, master bedroom, and den were on the main floor. A single staircase to the third floor went up from the foyer just inside the front door. The children’s bedrooms and a computer room were up there, along with the children’s bathroom.

  It was an eerie search. Mike looked in closets, in crannies, behind shower curtains, his heart pounding. When he hadn’t found his wife on the two lower levels, Mike went quietly up the carpeted stairs to the third floor. “I looked through every room in the house,” he remembered. “I honestly expected to find her dead.” He was afraid that Debora had hanged herself or cut her wrists. She could not have left the house on foot—the neighbors would have seen her—and she had been half-naked an hour and a half before. But she was nowhere to be found.

  Mike didn’t know whether he should call the police. If Debora had somehow gotten out of the house a
nd was wandering around, the police would probably find her. If she was sleeping off her drunkenness someplace close, he didn’t want to make things any worse than they already were. He didn’t want to embarrass her. It had grown dark now, and he didn’t know where to look for her next.

  Mike paced through the huge house and searched the yard. Tired to the bone, he knew he couldn’t sleep. As bad as things had become between them, he didn’t want Debora to hurt herself or be hurt by someone else. He didn’t want her humiliated. She was the mother of his children, and they had suffered enough already.

  The phone rang and Mike leaped to answer it. It was Celeste. “I’m so glad you called,” he said gratefully. He told her what had happened, and she was as mystified as he. The profound change, in a matter of weeks, from the witty woman who had kept everyone on the Peru trip laughing uproariously to this drunken harridan was more than Celeste could visualize. She realized what Mike had been living through, but she felt a little guilty: knowing Mike had asked for a divorce, she wondered if she was the cause of Debora’s drunken disappearance.

  After he hung up the phone, Mike tried to think where Debora might have gone. She had no friends. She had never seemed to need them. There were women she used to play tennis with, some mothers she knew casually from Pembroke Hill School, people she had met on their recent trip. But she had no one remotely like a confidante, no one she could call to pick her up to get her away from the house, no neighbor she might conceivably go to to spend the night with. Mike had no idea where she was. He circled the yard again, checked the shed where they kept the lawnmower and yard tools, looked inside the cars in the garage, and still found no sign of her.

  With no place else to look, Mike lay down, although he knew he couldn’t sleep. He jumped when the phone rang at eleven P.M. “Hello?”

  “It’s me. . . .” It was Debora. She didn’t sound drunk.

  “Where are you?”

  “As if you cared.”

  “Debora,” Mike said evenly, “tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you.”

  “I’m at a friend’s house.”

  “Whose house?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Someplace where I can think.”

  Before Mike could respond, the line went dead. It rang again immediately. It was Debora. “We have to talk,” she said. “We never talk, Mike. How can we get a divorce if we never talk about it?”

  “Where are you?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  She hung up on him again, only to call back the moment Mike set down the phone. He was relieved, but annoyed. She was someplace safe, apparently. She had a phone at her disposal. And she sounded completely sober, if argumentative.

  “Debora,” he said wearily, “why don’t you come home, get some sleep, and we’ll talk tomorrow?”

  “What’s the point? I don’t trust you.”

  “Debora—”

  The phone went dead again. Debora couldn’t seem to make up her mind whether she was angry at him or wanted him to call off the divorce. She was talking in circles. And she seemed to be enjoying his concern, enjoying her power to cut him off.

  The phone shrilled again, for the sixth or seventh time. Mike picked it up without saying anything.

  “Mike, you think you have secrets, but you don’t have any secrets. You’re so stupid and transparent. I know everything about you—”

  This time, Mike hung up the phone. And then he unplugged it. He was exhausted and he needed to get at least a few hours’ sleep. Wherever Debora was, she was all right. In the blessed silence, he fell asleep almost immediately.

  He woke at 5:30 and searched once more for Debora, thinking she might have come home. But she wasn’t there. Earlier in the week, Mike had arranged to go birdwatching with a group of friends—including Celeste—and then have breakfast. He knew the children were all being cared for, and he knew that Debora had found someplace to stay the night. He needed to be with happy people, even if just for a little while.

  He was home by nine. “Debora was there. She was sitting back in the dark den on the main floor—on the couch.” Coming into the dim room from the bright sunshine, he saw only her outline.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I have been out wandering in the streets of Prairie Village,” she said quietly, “hoping that someone would run over me with a car and kill me. That would solve everybody’s problem, wouldn’t it?”

  “You know that’s not true,” Mike said. “I care about you; the kids care about you. Where did you really spend last night?”

  She wouldn’t tell him.

  Mike realized he was seeing only a heightened version of her usual histrionics; she was like a child threatening a parent that she will do something she has no intention of doing. It would be weeks before she would finally admit to him that she had never left the house at all that Friday night. “She told me that all that time she had been hiding under the bed—or behind the bed—in the basement bedroom,” Mike said. “There are two phones in the bar area. One is the children’s line and one is our regular line. So she could easily have called from the children’s line to our main phone number.”

  Mike had not thought to look under the beds when he searched for Debora; he had been so convinced that he would find her hanging, or bleeding, that he had been racing around the house to find her in time to cut her down or stop the flow of blood. He was chagrined when he finally learned that she had been playing a spooky game of hide-and-seek with him. He had to wonder if Debora had been as intoxicated as she seemed when he had rushed home from the hospital after Lissa’s frantic call. She appeared to have the ability to seem passed-out drunk and then quite coherent within a very short time.

  What Mike didn’t realize until much later was that Debora had been listening in on Celeste’s call that night. She had never trusted Celeste, and now her suspicions about Mike and Celeste had been confirmed.

  Later, Debora would recall that she had done a good job taking care of Tim, Lissa, and Kelly that summer in spite of her drinking. “I always drove them where they needed to go,” she explained. “I was home with them.” Asked if she didn’t feel that she had taken chances, driving them and their friends when she was intoxicated, she shrugged. “Nothing bad happened. If it had, it would have been better than what happened later.”

  9

  A few weeks after the late-July pool party at the Walkers’, Debora and Mike hosted a similar party. Celeste would remember being shocked at the chances Mike now took in his own home, after they had always been so discreet. She was terrified that Debora might see him touch her. “He kissed me in the basement of their home. She could have seen us,” Celeste said. “And, at our pool a week later, he put his arm around me when Lissa and Kelly were playing on the other side. It was as if he didn’t care if Debora knew.”

  And perhaps he didn’t care, anymore. Debora’s overnight disappearance had terrified their little girls and left Mike frightened and enraged. Maybe he was angry enough to want to punish her. Or perhaps he felt that Debora would agree to a divorce if she understood he was in love with another woman. If that was his motive in being openly affectionate toward Celeste, it didn’t work.

  Debora was angry, too. She knew Mike was having an affair and she had begun to feel completely displaced, totally adrift. “He wanted the house,” Debora said later. “He wanted to live in that beautiful house, and he wanted the children and me to live in a smaller, cheaper house. He just wanted to be rid of us. I couldn’t have that.”

  “That wasn’t even remotely true,” Mike said when the accusation was relayed to him.

  On Friday, August 11, Mike arrived home between six and 6:30. The rest of his family had already eaten, but Debora said she had saved a chicken salad sandwich in the refrigerator for him. He stood in the kitchen and talked to her while he ate it. Still worried about the children, he had not yet moved out. They continued to live in a stand-off.

  The sandwich tasted slightly odd, and Mik
e commented to Debora that it was “a little bitter.”

  “We all had them—and nobody else’s tasted funny,” she said.

  Maybe it was because the sandwich was cold, or perhaps it had taken on a taste from something else in the refrigerator. It was not so bitter that Mike stopped eating; the slightly off taste was very subtle. He was hungry and he ate the whole thing.

  After dinner, he changed his clothes and he and Debora went to the Ward Parkway Shopping Center, where they both bought running shoes; then they picked up the children from their activities. Debora, who had said she was going to start getting back in shape, chose not to jog that night. Mike went for his usual run, but he didn’t seem to have any stamina. “When I got home that night, I felt sick,” he would remember. “I was nauseated. Initially, I thought it was probably from overexerting myself when I wasn’t in terrific shape. But shortly after that, I started vomiting. I developed abdominal pain, diarrhea.”

  What he was suffering from felt like a twenty-four-hour virus; the nausea and vomiting were “bothersome but not terribly severe.” He was on call that weekend at North Kansas City Hospital, and he got up the next morning and went to work. In fact, he worked all weekend, although the nausea continued. “I remember I had to leave patients’ rooms several times—and I left the heart catheterization laboratory because I was suddenly sick again—but I still managed to work.”

  His illness lasted three or four days but he continued to work. “I improved, but I still didn’t feel great.” Besides the nausea and diarrhea, Mike had abdominal pain—not cramping, but a “burning sensation.”