Bitter Harvest

by Ann Rule

  It was possible to close doors and turn away reporters, but it was not possible to ignore the charred skeleton of 7517. The house was not only an ugly and grim reminder, it was dangerous. The roof was gone from the north end where Kelly, Lissa, and Tim had slept. The powerful stream of water from the monitor had knocked down the roof beams. Now, it looked as if a strong wind could topple some of the walls, as indeed it could. The neighbors were anxious to have the house torn down as soon as possible, but of course that could not be done until the detectives and the arson investigators had finished.

  Once they had, Ellen Ryan began to receive calls from the Farrar-Greens’ neighbors and their lawyers, asking her to expedite the razing of the burned house. “It made me kind of angry,” she recalled. “They said their children were sensitive and upset by the memories that burned house brought back. But I kept thinking, ‘Why didn’t somebody call earlier? Why couldn’t someone have called for help for those three sensitive children who had lived them?’ Maybe none of it would have had to happen.”

  Rumors ran rampant throughout the legal and medical communities, and the fire was talked about by almost everyone who read a paper or watched television news in the Kansas City area. The case was the main topic of discussion in an ever widening circle. No one really believed that the fire was accidental, and stories—most of them apocryphal—circulated continually.

  Mike’s relationship with Celeste Walker was suddenly common knowledge. It would probably have been prudent for them to stay away from each other in the aftermath of the fire, but they were so in need of comfort. Their lives were in upheaval and they seemed able to find some surcease from the horror when they were together. They had fallen in love to escape from moribund marriages; they could never have foreseen what chaos lay ahead. If John had lived and Debora had not retreated into alcoholic oblivion, it is quite possible that their affair would have died of its own weight. Now, despite public opinion, they clung together.

  Celeste went with Mike one day to the ruin of his house. He had been given permission to enter the basement level and remove his wine collection. Someone alerted the media, and suddenly the house was surrounded by reporters and cameramen. Celeste was able to duck out a side door and escape through the backyard, but Mike appeared on all the evening news shows. It would have been a coup for the cameras if the lovers had been caught together with their arms full of expensive wine bottles, but they were spared that additional embarrassment.

  Mike was not well. His last hospitalization had ended on September 11, six weeks before the fire, and he had never again had the agonizing symptoms that had sent him to North Kansas City Hospital three times. But he was weak and ill. He couldn’t jog, sometimes he couldn’t walk very far without great fatigue. He couldn’t work. A little more than two months before, when he was hospitalized for his curious but violent illness, Mike had developed sepsis, an overwhelming infection, which had almost killed him. Bacteria had leaked into his bloodstream and, once loose, could invade any organ in his body.

  “Bacteria gain access to the bloodstream,” Dr. Beth Henry, the specialist on Mike’s case, explained, “and that’s a ‘cascade’ where the body produces protein substances that cause a tremendous reaction in the system. Typically, when we have bacteria in the bloodstream, we always get concerned about the possibility of it landing on a heart valve.”

  Mike didn’t realize it at the time, but he had developed bacterial endocarditis—an infection of the heart valves. Heart damage was the major danger, but a clump of material could easily break away from the little nodule of bacteria on the mitral valve and flow through the arterial system to his brain. The doctors at North Kansas City Hospital had treated him—one of their own—with extreme caution, doing more than a dozen blood cultures to look for bacteria after Mike’s first bout with sepsis. They had found none, but they knew there was a strong possibility that he might develop sepsis again.

  And, indeed, that was what was happening to him. Mike’s bouts with life-threatening illness were not over. He believed he knew now what had caused his problems originally—packets of castor beans like the ones he had found in his wife’s purse. The Prairie Village police investigators had them now. If necessary, they would go to the FBI lab, whose criminalists were said to have had some success in isolating ricin antibodies in a human being.

  Although they hadn’t seen their younger daughter often during her adult life, Joan and Bob Jones cared about her and were prepared to stay in the Kansas City area as long as Debora needed them. They had to find a place for the three of them to live, and, Debora hoped, where Lissa could stay with them at least part of the time. Not surprisingly, landlords were not anxious to rent to a woman who was suspected of burning down her own house—not once but twice. But finally, the Joneses rented an efficiency apartment in one of the chain hotels, the kind where everything from dishes to toasters to coffeepots is provided. There they would live with Debora, waiting for whatever happened next. Lissa was still staying with Mike’s parents, and all of them wanted to make her life as normal as possible. Debora especially wanted her to continue practicing for her role of Clara in the ballet.

  On October 27, three days after the fire, Fire Marshal Gary Lamons of Fire District No. 2, who was the spokesman for the task force, informed the Johnson County district attorney—Paul Morrison—and the Prairie Village police that his investigative team believed the cause of the deadly blaze to be arson, and that the fire, or rather, fires, inside the house had been started with an accelerant. The question now was who had set fire to 7517 Canterbury Court. The members of the investigative team had to be careful to avoid letting tunnel vision cloud their peripheral sight. Debora Green was the most bizarre and obvious suspect, but Celeste Walker and Michael Farrar were still suspects, too, and they knew it.

  Mike believed that Debora had poisoned him, but he could scarcely bear the thought that she had deliberately killed their two children. The night of the fire, when he knew they were trapped in the flames, he had confronted her and said, “What have you done now?” But he had uttered those words at the height of his despair and panic. He had lived with Debora for eighteen years; he had thought he knew her. And whatever her flaws as a wife, he had believed that she truly loved their children.

  Debora had told the police about a group of people who ran through her yard at least twice in the middle of the night, only days before the fire. She thought they might have had a grudge against someone in her house—perhaps Tim. But she also envisioned a much more diabolical plot. “Who had everything to gain?” she asked rhetorically. “Celeste. Celeste wanted my husband, and the only thing in the way of their being together were her husband, me, and my children. With me and the children gone, Michael wouldn’t even have to pay child support. Well, John is dead, and Celeste has three million dollars’ worth of insurance, and I almost died and so did Lissa. You figure it out.”

  Rod Smith and Gary Baker spent a lot of time canvassing the Canterbury Court neighborhood, and talking with friends and associates of Mike, Debora, and their children. Both had Metro Squad partners. Smith’s was Detective Bob Leever from the Overland Park Police Department; Baker was paired up with Roger Denton of the Grandview Police Department. No one had been arrested for the arson murders of Kelly and Tim Farrar, although Debora Green’s name remained the one being whispered the loudest.

  Fire Marshal Jeff Hudson had said he didn’t really care what accelerant had been used to set a fire that would fully involve the huge Farrar-Green home within mere minutes. Any house has the wherewithal. Most families have gasoline for lawnmowers and weed-eaters, fluid to ignite charcoal briquets, kerosene, lighter fluid, turpentine, alcohol. Hudson was quite sure it had not been gasoline; the cobwebs on the metal gas cans in the shed were still attached to the shed walls when he and his team checked. But it wasn’t nearly as important to know what flammable liquid had been used as it was to know that it had been used.

  Amateur arsonists have no idea how dangerous accelerant-fe
d fires can be. As they pour the “trailer” throughout a house, many of them light the last drop, fully expecting that they will have time to get out before the fire erupts. Depending on the amount of accelerant used, an instant explosion often slams doors shut and traps the arsonist himself in a ball of fire. Even those who do escape virtually unscathed rarely get away scot-free. They leave a blueprint of exactly what they did. That was what the fire-setter in the house on Canterbury Court had done. And the task force suggested to the Prairie Village detectives that the person who had set the fire might have burns or singed hair from the fire flash.

  Both Mike and Debora had given the clothing they were wearing on the night of October 23–24 to the police for testing: Debora’s hot-pink nightie with the sheep pattern and Mike’s shoes, socks, jeans, and gray wool sweater with the multicolored pattern. Bill Chapin, the crime lab officer for Johnson County, packaged the clothing and sent it to the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms laboratory to be tested. None of the clothing had tested positive for accelerants.

  Next, the detectives wanted hair samples. Mike willingly allowed clumps of hair to be clipped from the front and sides of his head, so that they might be tested for singed ends. But Debora had been so angry with Rod Smith and Greg Burnetta at the end of their first interview, they doubted that she would give them a hair sample voluntarily. They obtained a search warrant, and on the afternoon of her children’s funeral, while she was in a meeting in Dennis Moore’s office, they walked in, slapped down the warrant, and demanded the samples. Moore was very angry at them for surprising Debora that way. She, too, was indignant, and once again told Smith and Burnetta what she thought of them. She assured them that no search warrant had been necessary; she would gladly have given them strands of her hair.

  However, something about Debora’s hair had apparently made her nervous. She had canceled her regular appointment with her usual stylist the day after the fire—Tuesday. That was understandable. But on Thursday, October 26, she and her mother went to another beauty shop, in the Jones Store in Prairie Village, and there a stranger cut her hair. “But it looked terrible,” she said, “and I had to get it cut again.” So, after the funeral, she had gone back to her regular hairstylist for yet another haircut.

  Using a scanning electron microscope, forensic chemist Gary Dirks of the Johnson County Criminalistics Laboratory found that despite her haircuts, a number of hairs from the front and side areas of Debora’s head showed significant singeing. This information was passed on to the district attorney’s office.

  When would Debora’s hair have been so close to the flames that it was singed? She had told detectives several times that she had opened her bedroom door, peeked out into the hall, and closed the door at once because of the suffocating black smoke. She had then gone immediately to get the key to open the glass door that led from the master bedroom to the back deck. Although flames were belching from the other windows and doors in the rear of the house by the time firefighters arrived, Debora hadn’t mentioned seeing exterior flames while she was talking to Tim on the intercom mounted on the wall next to the glass doors. She had gone directly to the house next door, where the Formans had been puzzled to see that her hair was soaking wet. Debora had gone back to the garage where Lissa huddled on the edge of the roof, afraid to jump. But there was no fire there; if there had been, Lissa would have been burned.

  25

  Debora had begged Ellen Ryan to find out who had set fire to her home and killed her children. She had flung down the gauntlet and asked authorities to “figure out” what she suggested was obvious. And, indeed, there were any number of people trying “to figure it out”: the Prairie Village Police Department; the Eastern Kansas Multi-Agency Task Force; the Metro Squad; Ellen Ryan and Dennis Moore; and Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison and his assistant D.A. Rick Guinn.

  Early-morning meetings to brainstorm and to compare notes on progress in the case were held every day at the Prairie Village Police Department. Morrison and Guinn attended to make sure they were up to speed with all new developments. If someone was arrested, the resulting trial would be unlike any eastern Kansas had ever seen.

  Both Moore and Morrison had long familiarity with media interest in their cases, but neither had seen anything like the present frenzy, which grew daily as the investigation of the fire on Canterbury Court continued. Every aspect of the probe was being kept under wraps; that fact undoubtedly added to its fascination.

  Ellen wanted the investigative team to be aware of her client’s suspicions about John Walker’s suicide and the ongoing affair between his widow and her husband. Morrison’s office was already familiar with that facet of the case. For every tip that came in suggesting Celeste Walker had killed her husband for his insurance money, another maintained that Debora had driven John Walker to suicide with her constant phone calls trying to enlist his help in breaking up the relationship between her husband and his wife. One source, extremely close to the Walkers, said that Debora had called John not once but three times the day before he died.

  Some tipsters claimed that Mike was a faithless husband who cared nothing for his children, but his closest associates had nothing but praise for him. “I think highly of him as a doctor,” said one nurse, a woman who had worked with both Debora and Mike. “She never talked about her husband and children in a loving way.” Other associates said that Mike’s family had been very important to him. “Probably the biggest thing was he told stories of his children and he showed pictures of his children,” one said. “It gave everyone a connection with him. I felt like I knew these children.”

  Adultery, suicide, poisoning, arson, murder—these were enough to make the media salivate. But Morrison kept a tight lid on what he already knew. For all his news producer wife learned about the case from him, she might as well have been married to a plumber.

  * * *

  There were still many, many loose ends to weave into the case. And until that was accomplished, no arrest warrant could be issued. Among the mysteries was the matter of the castor beans. There was no proof that it was Debora who had poisoned Mike with them; indeed, the Prairie Village detectives had only Mike’s word that he had found them in her tote-bag purse. In order to absolutely connect Debora to the seed packets, it would be necessary to prove that she had bought them, whether in person or by mail.

  A great deal of detective work is boring and routine, even if the case itself is interesting. To find one possibly essential bit of information, detectives have to plow through door-to-door canvassing, make endless phone calls, and listen to “witnesses” who really have no information at all, but only theories.

  The Prairie Village detectives had to find which garden store in the Kansas City area had sold the castor beans and to whom. The label read “Earl May,” the name of a chain of midwestern garden stores with headquarters in Shenandoah, Iowa, and at least a half dozen branches in the Kansas City region. Earl May Garden Centers sold fertilizers, planters, hoses, and all manner of gardening equipment, as well as pet supplies. And they carried over 600 different kinds of seeds, from the most common to the truly exotic.

  Officer Kyle Shipps had seen the address of the Olathe Earl May store in Debora’s address book on September 25, while he waited for her to dress for her trip to the hospital. Although detectives believed she might have bought castor beans there—perhaps in late July or early August, before Mike first became ill—they hadn’t been able to find proof. No one at the Olathe store remembered her.

  Leighann Stahl had worked for the Earl May stores for five years, beginning in Lincoln, Nebraska, and then transferring to a store in the Gladstone area, in a Kansas City, Missouri, suburb north of the river. Her store manager, Steve Ogden, received a call from a detective around Halloween who asked whether anyone in his store recalled selling a dozen or so packets of castor beans. Although Ogden didn’t remember such a sale, he said they did carry castor beans in season; he promised to ask his clerks if they remembered such a sale. At that mom
ent, Leighann Stahl walked in—and in reply to Ogden’s question, she said that she had sold a large order of castor beans about a month before.

  Stahl said that one of the other clerks had put a request for the beans on her desk in late September, after a woman had called to ask if the store had any castor beans on hand. They did not, but the clerk said they could try to order them.

  There was a good reason why Earl May had no castor beans in September: smart merchandising. The castor bean is an ornamental annual that gardeners sow in the spring. The plant is fast-growing but short-lived. “They’re large,” Stahl explained. “They get anywhere from six to ten feet tall, depending on the site. They’re used usually for quick cover and they have a kind of tropical appearance to them. [But] they’ll die off with a freeze, so you plant them in the spring and they grow up very rapidly. Within a few weeks’ time, you can have a two- or three-foot plant. People plant them as a screen along a fence line.”

  In Kansas and Missouri, the planting time for castor beans would be around April 15 to May 1. Leighann Stahl had never heard of anyone buying castor beans in the fall. When she saw the request for ten packets, Stahl hadn’t even bothered calling the four other Earl May stores in the area; they wouldn’t have any in stock, either. The only way to fill the order would be to get the seeds directly from the warehouse in Shenandoah.

  About a week after Stahl placed the order, a woman called to ask whether the seeds had come in. “I told her I had them up at the front register, waiting for her,” Stahl said. The woman asked for directions and told Stahl the town she lived in, but Stahl, who was new to the area, now couldn’t remember anything more than that the customer said she was coming from “south of the river.” Stahl had told her she could give her directions from I-35 but wasn’t familiar with anything beyond that.