Read Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice Page 45


  Joan and Joe Foley took a chance on me more than twenty years ago, and I still appreciate you both as agents and friends. Mary Alice Kier and Anna Cottle, I’m grateful that you storm the gates of Hollywood so that I won’t have to.

  Finally, because I wrote this book while my hill was sliding away in a continuous, frightening sea of mud, I thank my contractor, Martin Woodcock, for conquering one catastrophe after another and allowing me to keep my eyes on my computer and Puget Sound. I felt so confident that I hardly ever had to look over my shoulder at the mud creeping down the slope behind me. One day soon, I am confident that I will no longer have mud on my shoes, knees, elbows, and earlobes.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ann Rule is a former Seattle policewoman and the author of eleven New York Times national bestsellers, including Small Sacrifices, The Stranger Beside Me, Possession,If You Really Loved Me, Everything She Ever Wanted, A Rose for Her Grave, You Belong to Me, A Fever in the Heart, and Dead by Sunset. She has testified before U.S. Senate Judiciary Committees, and presented seminars to scores of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI Academy. She served on the U.S. Justice Department task force which set up VI-CAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), now in place at FBI headquarters to track and trap serial killers. She lives near Seattle, Washington.

  Photographic Insert

  Popular, brilliant, and very witty, “Debi” Jones graduated as covaledictorian from Peoria High School in 1969 and sailed through pre-med studies at the University of Illinois.

  Debora married Duane Green in 1974, while she was at the University of Kansas Medical School and he was working toward his Ph.D. in engineering at the University of Illinois.

  Robert and Joan Jones posed proudly with their daughter Debora in May 1975, the day she was awarded her medical degree.

  Separated from her husband, Debora was a senior resident in emergency medicine at the Truman Medical Center in Kansas City when Michael Farrar, four years her junior and still in medical school, fell in love with her.

  Debora and Mike at their lavish wedding reception in May 1979. Both dedicated and caring doctors, they were looking forward to a happy and prosperous future together.

  Before she and Mike started a family, Debora showered affection on her pets.

  Debora and Mike with their firstborn, Timothy, in their apartment in Cincinnati, August 1983

  Tim Farrar, aged three and a half, was extremely bright and would grow to become very protective of his mother.

  A delighted Mike held his one-day-old daughter, Lissa, in December 1984.

  Debora, a devoted mother, always made special occasions of the holidays and her children’s birthdays.

  Lissa, four, and Tim, six, were thrilled by their new baby sister, Kelly, born in December 1988.

  A formal portrait of Lissa, Tim, and Kelly in 1989

  CREATIVE IMAGES

  Though their marriage was beginning to show signs of strain, Debora and Mike always had a good time together on family vacations, here with Kelly on Sanibel Island, Florida.

  Debora took her children to Mexico without Mike in the early 1990s. By then she had given up her medical practice and no longer resembled the vibrant, slender woman he had fallen in love with.

  Kelly playing with Boomer in her room. They were almost always together.

  Fire—later ruled accidental—gutted Debora and Mike’s house in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1994, shortly after Mike asked for a divorce.

  Reconciled and determined to keep their family together, Mike and Debora bought a luxurious new house on Canterbury Court in Prairie Village, Kansas.

  Debora (third from left), Tim (to her left), and Mike (fourth from right) posed with a group of Pembroke Hill school parents on a trip to Peru in the summer of 1995. The trip marked the end of their marriage and the beginning of Mike’s near-fatal illness.

  Fire, fanned by a fierce Kansas wind, engulfed Mike and Debora’s house on Canterbury Court the night of October 23–24, 1995.

  Debora escaped the raging inferno through the glass door from the master bedroom to the outside deck.

  Lissa climbed out of her third-story bedroom window, scrambled across the garage roof, and, at her mother’s command, jumped toward Debora’s outstretched arms. Unfortunately, Debora failed to catch her.

  The third floor where the children slept was totally destroyed. Kelly and Boomer were asphyxiated in her room before the fire reached them. Tim’s badly burned body was found in the charred ruins of the house.

  The massive stone entryway was virtually all that remained of the front of the house. Firefighters and police investigators immediately suspected arson because the destruction was so great.

  Avon, the sniffer dog, trained to detect accelerants

  Johnson County Court House Square in Olathe, Kansas, where reporters and other observers flocked in January 1996 to watch an incredible case unfold

  District Attorney Paul Morrison of Johnson County thought he had already prosecuted his most sensational case—until he met Dr. Mike Farrar and Dr. Debora Green.

  Assistant District Attorney Rick Guinn joined Paul Morrison in investigating the tragic deaths of Tim and Lissa Farrar and the fire that destroyed their home.

  Jeff Hudson, the fire marshal of Shawnee, Kansas, drew a floor plan of Mike and Debora’s house to show where the fire had started and how it had spread.

  Attorney Ellen Ryan had no idea what a complicated series of tragedies she would encounter when she agreed to represent Debora in her divorce.

  ELLEN RYAN COLLECTION

  Detective Rod Smith of the Prairie Village Police Department interviewed Debora and Mike in the earlymorning hours after the fire when they learned that two of their children were dead. Was it a tragic accident, or arson and murder?

  Prairie Village Detective Gary Baker was only one of the homicide detectives assigned to investigate this very puzzling case.

  The investigation complete, D.A. Paul Morrison led the prosecution team in a preliminary hearing to determine whether there was enough evidence to bring the defendant to trial.

  DAVE KAUP

  Johnson Country District Court Judge Peter Ruddick presided over the hearing that could lead to a full-scale trial and a sentence of death.

  DAVE KAUP

  Former Johnson County D.A. Dennis Moore (right) and his co-counsel, Kevin Moriarty (left), argued that their client, Dr. Debora Green (center), was not guilty of an unspeakable crime: setting the fire that killed her own children.

  DAVE KAUP

  Dr. Mike Farrar, a scar from recent brain surgery clearly evident on his forehead, testified for hours at the preliminary hearing, detailing the shocking circumstances of his marriage and the cause of his mysterious illness.

  DAVE KAUP

  Debora rarely showed emotion at the preliminary hearing until the prosecution introduced into evidence photographs of her children who had perished in the fire.

  DAVE KAUP

  The monument that holds the ashes of Tim and Kelly Farrar, victims of a towering rage and compulsive desire for revenge

  Mike and Lissa, on a trip to Mexico in March 1996, began the painful process of healing and the reconstruction of strong and loving father–daughter ties.

 


 

  Ann Rule, Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice

 


 

 
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