But nothing Jan could say would dissuade Celeste. Mike needed her, and she needed him. They hoped to stay together with every force in the universe pulling them apart. They were trying to build a stable relationship on a crumbling foundation: John was dead, and Debora seemed to be going insane.
Mike was worried about the castor-bean packets he had found in Debora’s purse. Finally, on Monday, September 25, he asked her why she had them.
“I’m going to plant them,” she said.
“That’s baloney, Deb. I don’t believe that. You’ve never planted a seed in your life.”
She turned away from him, dismissing the subject, but he wouldn’t let it go. “Deb, what were you going to do with those seeds?”
“All right—if you have to know,” she said. “I was going to use them to commit suicide.”
Mike looked at his wife and wondered whether she was telling the truth. Things were getting so weird in their house; Debora was more out of control than he had ever seen her before. Nothing she did would really surprise him. But clearly they would never be able to get along; if either of them was to get back to normal, he knew he would have to leave the house.
Debora had told him over and over that she would not allow that, that she would kill herself first. And he was beginning to believe her. But it didn’t have to be this way, he thought. They could separate and still take care of their children. And the kids loved Debora very much. He could not bear the thought of their losing their mother to suicide. He had seen the terrible anguish in Celeste’s home after her husband took his life. Mike didn’t want Tim, Lissa, and Kelly to suffer that way.
However, as the day progressed, Debora’s behavior became so erratic, her drinking so heavy, that Mike realized he had to do something. He called the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, an hour’s drive away, and asked about the steps involved in arranging for voluntary or involuntary commitment. If Debora didn’t get some help to stop her downward spiral, he didn’t know what would become of their family.
Throughout that Monday, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Debora was behaving like a madwoman. Mike finally, reluctantly, called the Prairie Village Police Department, told the operator that he had serious concerns about the mental health of his wife, and asked for help.
All working police officers will acknowledge that “mentally disturbed subject” is one of the most potentially dangerous calls that ever come over their radios. Next to it is “family beef.” Police dread receiving these two calls because they have little information going in. Some mentally disturbed people are meek and noncombative; others are quite capable of killing the police who respond, and have no compunction about doing so. Family fights are almost as unpredictable.
Sergeant Wes Jordan of the Prairie Village Police Department was supervising patrol units in his sector during the evening shift on Monday night, and protocol for “mental” calls from the dispatcher dictated that a sergeant accompany the patrol units responding. The address given was 7517 Canterbury Court, not a neighborhood where police were called very often.
Jordan turned right off Seventy-fifth, following one of his men, Officer Kyle Shipps. It was 9:25 P.M. when they pulled up. A man stepped out of the impressive house as if he had been waiting for them. They learned that he was Dr. Michael Farrar. Two girls and a boy were in the entryway. “They were all huddled together there,” Jordan recalled. “They were all shaken. There were a few tears also. [The man] was visibly shaken. He was upset about the whole situation.”
The youngest child, a little blond girl about five or six, sobbed inconsolably while the older children tried to comfort her. This was the kind of call that good cops hate: seeing a family in such distress. It was the same whether they went to a hovel or a million-dollar house like this one.
Mike explained to the officers that he wanted to commit his wife and had made all the arrangements necessary for her admission to the Menninger Clinic. He told Sergeant Jordan and Officer Shipps that his wife had been threatening suicide and had been on a drinking binge for two or three days.
Standing there in the soaring entryway of the house, the two Prairie Village police officers exchanged glances, trying to figure out what to do. They had not seen the wife yet, but they had seen the frightened children. It was always worse when children had to observe a parent in trouble. Jordan’s concern was about where the suicidal woman was. Was she about to come down the winding stairway with a gun or a knife? Or if she was suicidal, he didn’t want her left alone for long.
“Where is she?” he asked Mike.
“She’s in the back bedroom—down that hall,” he directed.
The officers told Mike to stay with his weeping children in the entryway of the home while they checked on his wife. Then Jordan and Shipps walked toward the back bedroom, uncertain and a little anxious about what they would find.
Dr. Debora Green was there. The room was dimly lit but they could see that she was lying on her side, with her back to them, on top of the covers. Although she wore a T-shirt, it was pulled up and her underwear and buttocks were exposed. There was a strong odor of alcohol.
“Dr. Green? Dr. Green?” they said, and finally: “Dr.Green!” The woman on the bed rolled over and acknowledged their presence.
“I introduced myself,” Jordan said. “She was aware that we were coming. I explained why we were there, what we were going to do while we were there.”
“We told her we had responded to a complaint by her husband that apparently some comments had been made that he had interpreted as harmful,” Shipps added. “And she said she was depressed over the divorce.”
When Debora heard her husband’s name, she suddenly became hostile and very profane. “She was calling him names,” Shipps said. “The two that I can remember very clearly are ‘asshole’ and ‘fuckhole.’”
The woman on the bed was screaming out the words as if she wanted her husband to hear her. Debora didn’t argue with the officers themselves, however; all her animosity seemed to be directed toward Mike. Jordan left Shipps in the bedroom and went to talk briefly to Mike and his son. Shipps saw that Debora’s personal address book lay open on a dresser. In it, she had written the Olathe Earl May Garden Center’s address and phone number, and directions for how to get there. The notation meant nothing to Shipps, not then.
Mike had a psychiatrist from the Menninger Clinic on the line and Sergeant Jordan talked to him, meanwhile watching Mike. The man was crying. “He was upset,” Jordan said. “It seemed to me when I was evaluating the situation it was taking a toll on him having to do this. He seemed pained what this had led to—what their marriage had led to.”
Mike told the police sergeant that he had found what he believed to be a “suicide kit” and showed him the plastic bag with the packages of seeds, the vials of potassium chloride, and the syringes. “He was explaining to me what this chemical in the vials would do, once injected into your system, and how he feared that she was going to use this to kill herself,” Jordan said. He was convinced by what he had seen that Debora Green’s condition met his department’s protocol for commitment; he felt sure that she represented a significant danger to herself or others.
Back in the master bedroom, Officer Shipps talked to Debora for forty-five minutes to an hour. It was one of the oddest conversations of his life. The woman on the bed was clearly very intelligent, but her vocabulary was that of a fishwife. She didn’t seem to resent his presence, but she reviled her husband in a nonstop stream of invective.
While Jordan was convinced that they had to take Debora to a hospital for mental evaluation, he explained to Mike that the Prairie Village police could not take his wife to Menninger’s—that hospital was too far out of their jurisdiction. They could take Dr. Green to a facility in the Kansas City area, but not beyond. “We told him that we would have to first transport her to Kansas University Medical Center, which was in Wyandotte County, for a psychiatric screening,” Shipps recalled. “Based on the evidence of that, she would be transported el
sewhere.”
Debora didn’t want to go to the hospital. She saw no necessity for that. Yes, she was intoxicated, but she was in her own home, and she was not suicidal. “I have three beautiful children here,” she said, “and I don’t want to do anything to leave them.” Nevertheless, she cooperated in getting ready to go, pulling on a pair of sweatpants and a jacket. And the officers gave her an opportunity to say good-bye to her children.
Shipps looked away from the poignant scene of six-year-old Kelly trying to comb her mother’s hair so that she would look nice going to the hospital. “They were all talking among themselves. I don’t remember the exact words,” Shipps recalled, “but it was something to the effect that Dr. Green made the statement, ‘This is all just happening because of your father.’” Tim, Lissa, and Kelly weren’t crying as much now, although they were still upset and confused.
Shipps drove Debora to KU Medical Center, where she had once been on staff; Mike called his sister and asked her to come stay with the children so he could follow Debora to the hospital. He called his mother, too, letting her know for the first time how terrible his marriage had become. He was crying as he did so. Karen Beal, Mike’s sister, hurried over. His parents arrived later to spend the night.
Dr. Pam McCoy worked in the ER at the University of Kansas Medical Center. She had been there part-time for five years; since the previous May, she’d had a full-time post as an ER physician and a professor in emergency medicine. The emergency room at KU was an extremely busy facility, and Dr. McCoy’s students had an opportunity to do hands-on treatment of myriad cases.
On September 25, Dr. McCoy was working the three P.M.—eleven P.M. shift. She was just about to go off-duty when an ER nurse stopped her. “They said there was a physician who did not want to be signed in to the emergency department, didn’t want to be seen, who was in the custody of the police,” Dr. McCoy said. “They wanted me to go talk to her.” Surprised, and not knowing what to expect, she walked out to the police car and saw a disheveled woman who looked familiar. “It was Dr. Debora Green,” she said. “She and I had been colleagues at another hospital I had worked at—at Trinity Lutheran.”
Dr. McCoy introduced herself, explaining that she had been married since they last saw each other. Her maiden name had been McVey; as she told Debora, she had changed it only slightly to McCoy. Then she asked Debora the most pressing question: Why had she been brought in?
Debora seemed embarrassed and said, “Oh, great. Here’s somebody I know.”
Dr. McCoy explained that patient confidentiality applied to everyone; Debora didn’t have to worry about her privacy. She noted a strong odor of alcohol, but she could not say that Debora was drunk. At least, her speech didn’t seem slurred. And when she got out of the patrol car, she didn’t have the characteristic “ataxic gait” of someone completely drunk.
“I asked her again why she had been brought in,” Dr. McCoy recalled. “And she told me that her husband, Mike Farrar, was accusing her of being a drunk and was trying to frame her into looking like she was crazy and a drunk…. She said she had drunk a half a bottle of wine.”
Debora appeared to Dr. McCoy to be stressed and having a “rough time. I mean, she just looked bad.” She knew that women—particularly women doctors—who are going out usually make much more effort to look presentable. Kelly’s attempt to neaten her mother’s hair hadn’t succeeded; Debora’s thick wavy hair was a mess.
Dr. McCoy was in a sticky situation. Debora was telling her that her husband wanted a divorce, and that he was having an affair with some “bitch.” He’d called the cops on her; she was upset and embarrassed because she didn’t want to be admitted to KU. She was sure her husband was trying to make her look as if she were crazy.
Dr. McCoy asked Shipps if he had actually seen Debora behaving in an overtly homicidal or suicidal manner, and he admitted he had not. He had relied on Dr. Farrar’s statements. He said Farrar would be arriving as soon as he could find someone to care for their children.
Dr. McCoy began asking Debora the standard questions used to screen potential psychiatric patients: Did she know her name, the date, the time, who the president was? She did. “I asked her if she was going to harm herself, and she said, ‘Absolutely not!’ I asked her if she was going to hurt anybody else and she said, ‘No.’ And so my assessment at that time was I was in the middle of one very ugly domestic dispute.”
Dr. McCoy was trying to be fair and empathetic. “I was looking at her and thinking, ‘Well, if I was in this situation, I would be very upset if my husband had called the police and said, ‘My wife’s a lunatic, come take her to the hospital.’”
Debora appeared rational; Dr. McCoy, doing her best to make a valid assessment, asked Debora if she would come in and see the psychiatrist on call. She thought that after that Debora would probably be able to go home. “I did not think she would be a committable patient.”
Debora agreed to go in. The two women were in the entrance to the ER when Mike arrived. And as he began to walk toward Dr. McCoy, Debora’s whole demeanor changed. She became extremely agitated and approached her husband in what could only be called a menacing manner. “She kind of spit at him,” Pam McCoy said. “And called him a fuckhole.” McCoy was stunned at the sudden change in her patient. Debora looked as though she was about to physically attack her husband. Dr. McCoy quickly stepped forward and grabbed her arms, hoping to stop a fight in the ER.
“She was very angry,” Dr. McCoy said. “She called him a fuckhole—which I remember very clearly since I hadn’t heard that expression before—and then she said, ‘You’re going to get these kids over our dead bodies.’”
For a moment the trio of doctors froze in the entryway to the ER. They all knew one another—at least, Dr. McCoy had thought she knew Debora. She looked at Mike and was struck by how “very thin, very pale, ill-appearing, very anxious, very distraught” he seemed.
Debora’s words hung in the air. “You’re going to get these kids over our dead bodies….”
13
Doing their best to avoid open warfare in the ER waiting room, Dr. McCoy and Officer Shipps moved Debora off to one side, assuming that she would wait there to have a consultation with one of the psychiatrists on duty. Debora had begged not to be treated like a mental patient forced into the hospital.
Because she knew there were two sides in any domestic dispute, Dr. McCoy sat down with Mike and asked him what was going on. The events he related were bizarre and outlandish. He told her that he was seeking a divorce and that Debora had become more and more upset, agitated, and angry. “He said that she was drinking large bottles of alcohol at a sitting, was becoming very despondent—wouldn’t get out of bed for days at a time.”
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 pla
nt. “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.