When Mike told her about Debora’s hiding under the bed all night and secreting used syringes and empty vials and packets of castor beans in her purse, Dr. McCoy became more alarmed. Debora had been disheveled and embarrassed, certainly, but she had seemed on the safe side of normal—until she saw her husband. And then she had be come a spitting, frothing creature consumed by a maniacal temper.
Mike handed the bag of seed packets, syringes, and potassium chloride vials to Dr. McCoy. There was also a small bottle of Adriamycin, a cancer drug. She looked through the bag but was still doubtful. “Honestly, I kind of thought he was sort of pushing this suicidal thing,” she said. “An oncologist would have—or may have—chemotherapeutic agents around. Potassium chloride is something you could kill yourself with, although it’s not all that uncommon for a physician to have it as an additive that you put in IVs, especially if someone’s been vomiting a lot.” Of course, at that point, Dr. McCoy didn’t know that Debora had not been in her oncology practice for several years.
Later, when she asked her about the packets of castor beans, Debora laughed harshly. “Well, for heaven’s sakes,” she said, “you can’t even buy plant seeds anymore without somebody saying something about it!” Dr. McCoy’s own mother grew castor beans as an ornamental plant. “To commit suicide with a castor bean would be a very unusual way to do that,” the doctor thought. “I couldn’t imagine why anybody would do that.”
Still trying to be fair, Dr. McCoy reevaluated her two fellow physicians. They were both upset, but there was a difference. Debora was angry and full of rage; Mike seemed more anxious, worried, nervous. She knew she needed to talk to a third party—maybe a neighbor or an in-law. Mike said the only person who might know something about his wife’s recent behavior was their son, Tim. Debora had been housebound so much that the only one competent to evaluate what had been going on was their son.
Working long after her shift was over, Dr. McCoy dialed the number Mike gave her. An older-sounding woman—Mike’s mother—answered: Tim was in bed and she hated to wake him up.
“Well, it’s kind of important,” Dr. McCoy said. “I really need to talk to him.”
She waited while the woman went to Tim’s room and woke him. And then she asked the boy, “What’s been going on with your mom?”
Tim sounded young but intelligent. He also seemed to want to phrase his answers in a way that would not be a betrayal of his mother. Finally, he sighed and said, “She’s been very sad and very upset lately. . . . She hasn’t gotten out of bed for several days—just been laying around. She’s been drinking a lot.” He had been hiding bottles from her because she was drinking whole bottles of liquor, “the big kind, you know, that you get from the wholesale club.”
Dr. McCoy thanked Tim and told him to go back to bed, he didn’t have to worry about anything that night. She had her answers. From the honest words of a child, she had learned that Debora was showing signs of serious depression. Her hiding in the basement, her despondency, and her drinking so much that she didn’t get out of bed for days all indicated that she was probably seriously disturbed. This was much more than Debora had admitted to her. “And so I thought that Dr. Green was, in fact, going to need care,” Dr. McCoy said, a little bemused that Debora had managed to maintain such a reasonable façade that she herself had been fooled.
Dr. McCoy walked back to the cubicle near the ER waiting room where she had left Debora. She felt she had convinced her patient that it would look better for her in any divorce proceedings if she were cooperative now—if she agreed to talk to the psychiatrist. “It would make her look like she was . . . an okay person—that she wasn’t the crazy person her husband was trying to make her out to be.”
Dr. McCoy was startled to find Debora gone. At first, she thought she might have gone to the bathroom, or outside for a cigarette. Growing more and more concerned, she searched the bathrooms, the patient rooms, the whole ER wing. But she didn’t find Debora. And now she felt really worried and guilty, because she had tried to save Debora’s pride and had not asked for a police officer to guard her. Dr. McCoy had believed her fellow doctor, believed that she was eminently sane and in control of herself, believed that the odor of alcohol had come from a mere half-bottle of wine.
After an exhaustive search, Dr. McCoy conceded that Debora was clearly not inside the hospital. She summoned the KU security force and asked them to begin a search for a woman in her forties, wearing sweats, with uncombed hair, and on foot.
And then Dr. McCoy jotted down several pages of notes about the startling events of the evening. At the very least, she suspected she might be called as a witness in what promised to be an ugly divorce. She was angry at herself because she had overestimated Debora’s truthfulness, and she wanted to reconstruct their encounter from the moment she was called to the driveway to deal with a recalcitrant patient to the time she realized that Debora had “eloped” from the ER. She was very worried about Debora and hated to think of her wandering around Johnson County and the suburbs of Kansas City after midnight in her condition.
She was afraid that Debora had gone off somewhere to kill herself.
Mike Farrar and Officer Shipps sat together in the ER waiting room, watching as people with all manner of injuries and illnesses came in. It was familiar territory for both. Mike had done his turn as a resident in the ER in Cincinnati, and Shipps had brought in scores of people in distress of one kind or another. Shipps would write in his follow-up report of this incident that Dr. Debora Green was initially “drunk, profane, bizarre—but cooperative.” He needed a formal statement about the reason for Mike’s complaint hours before; Mike wrote one out and signed it. Both men expected to be in the ER until dawn. They believed that Debora had been taken for a prescreening by a psychiatrist about 11:30; it might be a long time before she was officially admitted.
But when Mike and Shipps saw Dr. McCoy’s expression, they knew something was wrong.
The Prairie Village police radio put out a “want” on Dr. Debora Green. Shipps cruised along the area between the hospital and the house on Canterbury Court for an hour and a half. And eventually, Debora was spotted—miles away from the hospital, in Prairie Village, apparently headed for home. She was returned to the ER at the Kansas University Medical Center, although she insisted to Shipps that she was only walking home so she could go to sleep. She had been asleep when they disturbed her, and she had intended to go home and get a night’s rest. Shipps characterized her demeanor at this point as vacillating between “calm” and “irate.”
Once back in the ER waiting room, Shipps sat with Debora and kept a close eye on her. She was no longer pretending that everything was fine with her. She no longer claimed that she was being railroaded by her husband. As Shipps watched, her demeanor rapidly disintegrated into a temper tantrum like those Mike had long been familiar with. “Committals in general take quite a bit of time,” Shipps would comment. And his patient/prisoner was becoming extremely frustrated by the delays. In fact, the woman was coming apart before his eyes. “You know,” she said. “You’re really starting to piss me off. . . . This could really make me suicidal.”
Finally, Debora was interviewed by the psychiatrist on duty, who felt that she definitely should be committed for a mental evaluation. She could have stayed at KU, but Mike had already arranged for her admission to the Menninger Clinic. An ambulance transported her toward Topeka, through the toll plazas of the Kansas Turnpike, past the Topeka Correctional Institute for Women, and along the northern leg of the beltway that edges Topeka. Just beyond the governor’s mansion, the Menninger Clinic property sprawls at the west end of Topeka.
Menninger’s is actually a huge complex that resembles the stately homes of a royal family rather than a mental hospital. Its elegant gray buildings are situated far back from the frontage road, set among trees and shrubs on rolling land. Menninger’s has been—and continues to be—a preferred retreat for the wealthy and famous whose minds and willpower have become fragile.
r /> Once there, Debora voluntarily committed herself; and because she had agreed to be evaluated and treated, she could also leave at any time, whenever she decided she was ready to go.
It was six A.M., and it had been a long, hard night for everyone concerned, when Officer Shipps left the ER and went off-duty. He had with him the statement from Dr. Michael Farrar and the sealed bag of the suspect items Mike had given him: the syringes, the potassium chloride vials, the bottle of Adriamycin, and eight packets of castor beans. Whatever Dr. Debora Green had intended doing with this strange assortment of items, they would now be held in an evidence locker at the Prairie Village Police Department.
Mike went home to sleep, secure for the moment in the knowledge that Debora would be evaluated and treated at Menninger’s. Beyond her obvious depression and her violent reactions to frustration, there might be something else that he had been too close to see.
While Debora was away, Mike took care of their children. Because of his illness, he had not worked since August 18; now he welcomed the chance to stay home with Tim, Lissa, and Kelly. It was a serene, happy time. He and the children got along better than ever before. And without Debora there to whip them into a froth of anger and competition, even his relationship with Tim improved.
It was Mike who combed Kelly’s hair when she needed to look nice for her school picture. Her thick blond curls made it a daunting task for a clumsy father. He finally twisted her hair into a bun, but it was an attractive bun: Mike had bought a book on children’s hairstyles to be sure he did it right. Kelly’s pictures turned out beautifully.
The days they spent alone together were the calm after a violent storm. The night of Debora’s commitment had been so distressing for all of them, and the weeks leading up to it had been horrendous. Tim, who was the eldest child of an alcoholic and whose father was often away, had taken on the role of the man of the house. He had done much of the cooking and watched over his sisters. Although he liked to cook and he loved his sisters, he was an angry boy.
With Debora away and being treated for her rage and depression, her family’s constant apprehension, which had come to seem almost normal, began to diminish. Those days were, of course, only an island of tranquillity. Although Mike wasn’t sure when Debora would come home, come home she would. And then he would have to leave. They could never again live together. He hoped they could find a modicum of peace apart.
Mike was in touch with Celeste often, more by phone than in person. Taking care of three children didn’t leave much time for an affair. Celeste needed him; John had been dead for only three weeks, and she and her sons were grieving. Mike’s children, too, were upset. And after Debora’s commitment, the lovers were caught up in a faster-spinning whirlwind of vicious gossip.
Celeste had sent Brett and Dan back to school right after John’s funeral; she thought it would be better for them to jump right in, rather than delay facing their peers. Some people criticized that. When she visited Mike in the hospital only days after John’s suicide, the news quickly made the rounds of the medical community in both Johnson and Jackson counties.
Celeste was the main topic at cocktail parties and picnics alike. Some maintained that she was pretty and “ditzy, but didn’t have a mean bone in her body”; others said she was a manipulative seductress who could make a man do anything she wanted, even have his wife committed. She was, of course, neither. She was alone for the first time in almost twenty years, and she clung to Mike. Debilitated by his violent illness and facing the prospect of a messy divorce, he was not a very strong support.
At Menninger’s, Debora was diagnosed with a “major bipolar depression with suicidal impulses” and started on medications: Prozac (an antidepressant), Tranxene (an anti-anxiety medication), and Klonopin (which calms the nervous system, much as Valium does, but is long-acting enough to be taken just once a day). After four days, however, she signed herself out. Asked why, she would later say, “I am so forceful that people do what I want. I told my psychiatrist that I wanted to leave. And I did.”
The medications Debora was taking for her depression were definitely not to be mixed with alcohol. To do so would produce a synergistic effect, greatly enhancing the potency of each substance, perhaps to fatal levels. Debora assured her psychiatrist that she would not drink while she was on her “meds.”
While Debora was away, Mike had come to an almost unthinkable realization. He had puzzled over the packets of castor beans; when he gave them to Officer Shipps, he had held one packet back so he could do a bit more research. The directions said, “Plant in early spring,” so why would Debora have the seeds in September? The packet also warned that castor beans were very toxic. Some of Mike’s friends had bombarded him with the opinion that Debora was trying to poison him, pointing out that he always got better in the hospital, then became ill again when he came home. But Mike had resisted their reasoning. It was too ugly to think that Debora hated him enough to kill him in such a tortuous way. And, too, if the poisoning theory was true, didn’t he look stupid to have continued to eat the food Debora cooked for him?
But the fact remained that he had become violently ill each time he returned home from the hospital. He could not explain this away. As most people do when they become terribly nauseated after eating, he remembered precisely what he had eaten before each incident: a chicken salad sandwich; spaghetti; ham and beans and cornbread. Each time, Debora had served him separately, rather than calling him to the table to eat with the family. And each time the food had tasted slightly bitter. He had explained that away, thinking his illness had probably thrown his taste off. But while he still denied the possibility that his own wife would deliberately try to poison him as too far-fetched to be believed, he had to know more.
Mike could find nothing about castor-bean poisoning in his edition of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, but Celeste had a copy of an earlier edition that discussed the topic. As he pored over the old textbook, Mike’s neck prickled. It wasn’t the bean itself that was so potentially deadly; it was the core. Freed from its protective hard coating, the inside of the castor bean could be ground into a substance known as ricin.
Mike went to North Kansas City Hospital and asked the librarian to search for articles and tracts that mentioned castor-bean or ricin poisoning. As he learned, opinions varied on how dangerous castor beans were. The articles cited a number of case histories of patients—some of them children—who had swallowed the hard beans whole or after chewing them. The vast majority not only survived, but were hardly ill at all. However, cases had also been found in which, despite heroic efforts on the part of their physicians, patients who had eaten castor beans died within three to twelve days. Chillingly, the symptoms of castor-bean poisoning were much like those of tropical sprue.
Mike found a reference to the doyenne of mystery writers, Agatha Christie. Christie’s 1929 book Partners in Crime included the story “The House of the Lurking Death,” which featured a murder by poisoning—and the poison was ricin. Mike wondered if Christie’s book had been included in Debora’s extensive reading of mysteries and true crime.
Remarking that “Ricin is reputed to be one of the most toxic naturally occurring substances . . . ,” one text on poisonous plants listed the results of ingesting the center of the castor bean: “Symptoms of poisoning may not appear for several hours—or even for a few days . . . [They include] burning of the mouth and throat, nausea, vomiting, severe stomach pains, diarrhea (sometimes containing blood and mucus), thirst, prostration, shock from massive fluid and electrolyte loss, headache, dizziness, lethargy, impaired vision, possible rapid heartbeat and convulsions.” To Mike, those horrific symptoms were all too familiar.
The North Carolina Medical Journal had published a paper on castor beans, “The Baddest Seed—Ricin Poisoning.” In it, Dr. Robert B. Mack, a professor of pediatrics, minced no words. “This plant may be the most dangerous plant grown in the United States . . . [;] probably all parts of the plant are toxic, but the seed
s appear to contain the largest amount of toxin—ricin. . . . Milligram for milligram, ricin is thought to be one of the top two or three deadliest poisons available.”
Again and again in various articles and books, Mike read about the fatal potential of ricin ingestion. There is no antidote: treatment is aimed at the symptoms, to ameliorate the effects of dehydration, shock, and acute renal failure. Mike had suffered most of the symptoms listed, but unlike the patients in the case histories, who had endured only one episode of ricin poisoning, he had suffered three. The evidence seemed overwhelming. Mike was now certain that Debora had poisoned him at least three times.
Opinions varied on just how big a dose of ricin it took to kill a human being, but a 1983 paper in Human Toxicology estimated that the “lethal dose in man is one milligram per kilogram. This approximately corresponds to eight ingested seeds.” Mike had no idea how many seeds he might have ingested. Debora had had almost a dozen packets of them in her purse, which meant she must have used others to poison him. Mike wondered how you ground up castor beans. Perhaps in a coffee grinder? A food processor? The granular fragments could easily have been mixed with spaghetti sauce or ham and beans.
Mike took the journal articles to the doctors who were treating him and they had to agree that, given the circumstances and the symptoms, he could well have been poisoned. Tests were possible to detect the presence of antibodies to ricin in his bloodstream. But they might not give a definitive answer. It would take a while for antibodies to form, and it had only been a few weeks since his last episode of illness.
Faced with the painful realization that his wife had poisoned him, Mike tried to understand her motives. Was it possible that she wanted him to stay in their marriage so desperately that she intended only to make him too sick to leave? Maybe she had never meant to kill him. Maybe she had only wanted him to depend on her to take care of him. As far as Mike could tell, he had not been poisoned since his last hospital release, even though Debora could easily have tampered with his intravenous feedings.