Debora said she had ignored her husband while he flipped through his mail. “I guess he got bored and left,” she said, estimating the time at nine P.M.
Debora’s ceaseless monologue was bizarre, but Burnetta and Smith were not psychiatrists. They didn’t know if she was talking so fast because she didn’t want to think about the fire, or if she simply enjoyed having a rapt audience. Nor did they know if she was trying to present herself as a good mother and show them what a rotten father Mike was. She was clearly not drunk, nor did she seem to be under the influence of medication. Her memory for minutiae was perfect. She was so sure of times and places that she might have been reading out of an appointment book. And the two investigators most certainly did not know the motivation behind her barrage of words. They simply sat and listened.
Debora described the layout of her entire house, ending with the children’s wing on the upper floor at the north end. There were four bedrooms and two bathrooms in that wing. “They go up there and stay up there,” she said, laughing again, “because I don’t want to see their mess! They share it with the dogs.”
Usually, the two dogs slept with Debora, but on Monday Boomer and Russell had discovered a bag of coffee beans, dragged it out into the living room, ripped it up, and eaten countless beans. “So I said, ‘These dogs are not going to sleep again for a hundred years, so they’re not sleeping with me tonight,’ so each of the girls took a dog. Kelly took Boomer, the Lab, and Lissa took Russell.”
Then Debora performed another erratic leap. “He’s been so odd lately,” she said, referring to Mike and their phone conversations that night. “I said, ‘No, I’m not going to talk to you tonight. I’m just not interested …’ And then I hung up. And then I remembered something.”
She said she knew he was on his way home to his apartment in his truck, so she had called him. For a moment, she could not recall why—oh, yes. It was about their attorneys. She said Mike had been “really snotty” because she had taken too long deciding if she would accept Norman Beal, who had been their attorney, as Mike’s divorce lawyer. She said he had warned her a few days before that if she didn’t make up her mind, he would go out and get “a real nut-cutter attorney.” He had reverted to that refrain last night, she said, so she hung up on him. She had read for perhaps five minutes. After that, she went to sleep until the cacophony of some alarm had wakened her.
“You probably talked to him last at about what time?” Smith asked.
“Maybe eleven-twenty-five, eleven-thirty,” Debora said.
In the predawn hours of Tuesday morning, Gary Baker waited on the lawn at 7517 Canterbury Court with Sergeant Steve Hunter and Detective Trish Campbell. Most of the neighbors had finally gone to bed. Some families, like the Formans, were nervous about sleeping so close to the fire and had accepted the hospitality of neighbors further away. Except for some stubborn hot spots, the fire was out. But the wind still blew and it smelled of ashes and cinders and smoke.
Baker looked up to see one of the firefighters beckoning to him. The house had finally cooled enough to enable him to go in and assess the damage. Given a choice, he would have preferred to walk in the other direction. He didn’t want to see what waited inside.
The first body was about fifteen or twenty feet directly beyond the front door. From where Baker stood, he could see that an iron bed frame and springs had apparently dropped from an upper story and come to rest on the joists of the room in front of him. Just to the left of that pile of springs and iron posts lay a badly burned human body. He could not be certain who it was, but from its size he judged it was the missing teenage boy. The body had landed on the charred joists of the living room floor below his bedroom. The investigators would have to saw the joists in two in order to remove it.
Next the firefighters led Baker into what appeared to be the kitchen. They told him it was unsafe to try to get to the second story via the staircase; he would have to climb a ladder propped up in the kitchen closet. Baker climbed up the ladder until he could see into the room above. It was clearly a child’s room. When his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw the body of a small girl lying on her back in her bottom bunk, the covers pulled up to her waist. There were no signs that she had struggled at all. She and the big black Lab beneath her bed had been overcome by smoke and had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, in their sleep. Baker felt some slight relief at learning that Kelly Farrar had never awakened. And yet this was the sight hardest for him to bear: “It took me a long time to get Kelly out of my mind.”
The house was a burned-out shell. Furniture had actually vaporized; windows had been blown out; walls had disappeared. Everything above the basement was damaged or missing. Baker could stand on the joists where a hardwood floor had once gleamed and look up at the dawning sky above. He and his fellow detectives would work eighty hours of overtime over the next two weeks to find out what had led to the horrible deaths of two children and their pets in that inferno.
“And every night,” Baker would say, “the first thing I did when I got home was hug my kids.”
18
Back at the Prairie Village police station, Debora had not yet asked about Tim and Kelly. Nor had she asked where Lissa was. She just talked on and on and on.
Rod Smith led the conversation back to the window of time before and during the fire. He wanted to know exactly what time Debora had talked to Mike when he called to ask who had paged him.
It was after all the children had gone to bed, Debora said, but before Tim got back up and went to the kitchen around eleven. “Tim wanders,” she said, chuckling.
“So you said you went upstairs to see if they had called?” Smith asked.
“I just peeked in the doors and saw nobody was awake. Even the dogs were sleeping. I just assumed that if anybody had called, it must not be important—it wasn’t worth bothering about.” She had paged Mike to tell him the children were asleep.
Debora said she had spoken to her husband a third time. “And then I called him again because I figured he’s up and he’s on his car phone. I was just calling to make sure he got that message from the lawyer…. That was probably no more than five minutes after he called me.”
“How long did that conversation last?”
“Probably five minutes.”
“You had a discussion that was pretty calm?”
“No.” She laughed. “It was pretty apathetic.”
“He say where he was at?”
“He just said he was on his way home in the truck. When I asked him earlier—when I paged him—he said he was ‘out with friends.’”
“You lost me at one point,” Smith drawled easily.
“I’m sure.” Debora laughed. “I lost myself at several points.”
“He called you about ten-thirty—”
“Right—whenever that was.”
“There had been an earlier conversation when he called you about the lawyers?”
“I think that was yesterday when he called me.”
Debora explained again that she and Mike had used the same attorney for the trust fund and for estate planning. “And then he got this wild hair and decided he wanted a divorce. And I said it seems to me there’s a major conflict of interest.” She told the detectives about the waiver she had finally signed, and how her lawyer had “an absolute fit” to learn that, and then had gone off to Vermont on a vacation and “left everything up in the air.” But the attorney—Ellen Ryan—had come back from vacation and said she had no real objection to Norman Beal as Mike’s lawyer. And that, Debora said, was why she had phoned her husband in his truck.
Debora clearly wanted the detectives to be aware that she was totally uninterested in the details of her pending divorce; she said it was only in the beginning stages, and no temporary support had been set up. “I don’t even think there’s been a paycheck [for Mike] since all this started. There’s enough money in all the accounts just to live on for now.”
The interview in the stark, pale room had gone on for near
ly an hour and Debora still had not asked about her children.
She said she had talked to Mike for only five minutes in the call she made to his truck, about the attorneys. “I was really tired.”
“What woke you up?” Smith asked, coming back to the vital times from another direction.
“… It was more of a buzzer sound, not an alarm sound—no, there was an alarm type sound along with the buzzer…. There’s a panel in my room, one by the front door, and one by the garage door. In fact,” she said, “they’re probably registering right now whatever set off the alarm—I just didn’t think to look at it. I just tried to get it to shut off.”
“What time did that wake you up?” Smith asked.
Debora wasn’t much help. “Whenever. Maybe twelve-fifteen? It seems as if everything telescoped pretty close together. But I—honest to God—have no idea when the alarm went off. I didn’t look at a clock. It could have been as early as midnight, or as late as twelve-thirty.”
She agreed that it couldn’t have been very long after she had gone to bed. At first, she had told them she went to bed between 9:30 and 10:30; then she decided it was after 11:30.
“So what did you do when you woke up?” Smith asked.
Debora repeated her story of struggling to turn off the alarm, of opening the hall door. “It was really full of smoke, so I turned around and closed the door.” She unlocked the door to the deck and went outside. “And that’s when I told Tim to wait. He was talking into the intercom in his room to the speakers on the pool deck. He was fairly calm but I could tell he was nervous.”
Tim had said, “Mom, what should I do?”
“‘Stay where you are,’ I said. ‘And stay calm, and I’ll call 911 and they’ll come rescue you.’ And he said, ‘Shall I get out?’ and I said, ‘Why don’t you go figure out where Kelly is?’”
“Kelly?”
“She’s my six-year-old.” Debora had a tendency to refer to her children by their ages rather than their names, and she never said “our children”; it was always “my children.”
Somewhere, far back in the inner rooms of the police station, a phone rang. It seemed to bring Debora back to the reason why they were talking. For the first time, her voice lost its perky, humorous tone; there was a quaver in it as she said, “And I know that if Tim or Kelly—either one—had made it, we’d know by now.”
Smith and Burnetta didn’t know, not for sure. Smith quickly asked Debora another question, the ages of all her children. She responded quickly, perhaps afraid herself of what might have happened to them.
“No,” she answered to Smith’s next question, another repeat, “I didn’t think of calling 911 in my room. It never entered my mind. When I opened the door, there was so much smoke. It was very acrid-smelling and -tasting—and I closed the door quickly, trying to make sure that I didn’t get a whole lot of smoke in my room … and I went across the room and had a little trouble finding the opening. And I think I got a little scared. I think I thought, ‘God, I’m going to asphyxiate right now….’ so when I got the door open, all I thought of was getting out.”
But she had told Tim to wait, and finally said, “If you feel like you have to do something, go find Kelly.” (“She’s on the same half of the hall he is,” Debora explained.)
“Did you see Tim?”
“No, I just talked to him. If I had backed away from the house and looked up, I might have been able to see him.”
“Could you see fire?”
“The back of my house is pretty much all glass. And I could see the full length of the hall inside with a few interruptions. Looking in the front hall from the pool deck, I could see flames, and I started to hear glass explosions. I couldn’t tell what was exploding, but glass was starting to explode pretty vigorously.”
Greg Burnetta had stepped out of the room, leaving Rod Smith to keep the conversation going. He asked Debora if she had any power outages on Monday because of the high winds. She replied that they had lost power around three, but only enough to cause “brownouts.” Still, she believed the power had gone off for a while because her clocks were flashing when she brought the children home from school at 4:20.
The wind had been “fierce”; Debora told Smith she had actually hoped they would lose power, because she loved the smell of burning vanilla candles. “We could not find either a cigarette lighter or matches, so nothing got lit,” she said, laughing again.
Smith and Debora were obviously tap-dancing around possible causes for a fire. “What about the food you cooked?” he asked.
“When I brought the stuff home from Kentucky Fried Chicken, I put it in the oven on Low. When they all got home and were ready to eat, I took that food out and turned it off. So I didn’t forget and leave anything on in the kitchen,” Debora assured him. “At least, not that I know of.” She laughed. “Wouldn’t be the first time if I had—that’s for sure.”
“How many staircases going upstairs?” Smith asked.
“One. It goes up and down.”
Burnetta walked back into the room and sat down without saying anything. Debora asked again about what was happening at her house. Her voice dropped and her questions were more insistent now.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Smith said. “I haven’t been down there. The fire department’s still down there. I don’t know enough about the fire to tell you what could happen—I haven’t been in contact with anybody down there. For all I know, they could be at the hospital.”
For the first time, there was a bite in Debora’s voice, a tinge of anger. “If someone had taken my kids to the hospital, wouldn’t they notify us?”
Smith was stalling. Debora knew that. Probably all of the people sitting around the table knew it. Once the two detectives found out for sure that Kelly and Tim Farrar were dead, the interview would almost certainly come to a halt. And it was desperately important to Burnetta and Smith to get as much information as possible from this bizarrely cheerful woman first. They had a “hinky” feeling about this case. They had told Debora that she could stop the interview at any time, but she showed no interest in doing that. She seemed almost to enjoy talking to them.
“Well,” Smith said, making a Freudian slip, “in the heat of the moment, the first thing they’re going to do is probably get the kids to the hospital. I would think they’d get them medical attention first.”
“Yeah,” Debora said, and asked for a glass of water.
To quiet some storm that seemed to be brewing behind Debora’s still-calm façade, Smith asked her her birthdate, her phone number, the children’s birthdays—the easy questions. She told him of her parents in El Paso, her sister in Louisville.
They made small talk about birthdays in December, so close to Christmas. Both Kelly and Lissa had December birthdays. Debora’s voice was not as confident now, and she seemed to be listening for other voices.
“When you were in bed,” Smith asked, “did you hear anything as far as noise?”
That was a question Debora could deal with. “Now that you mention it,” she said, “two days last week, I heard two people running in my yard between two-thirty and three in the morning. They sounded like they were probably young. It was such an odd hour that it was probably kids. And I thought maybe it was pumpkin-smashing stuff, but my pumpkins were still fine the next day. And my dogs are both such coma dogs. I don’t even think either one of them noticed…. One night they [the footsteps] were in my backyard—in the pool area. It was just something I noticed, and I thought, ‘Should I start to be worried about this?’ I was afraid they might be going to break through my back windows … but it was only two days, and I never heard anything more.”
“No problem with anybody?”
“No.”
“Your kids?”
“They don’t even bicker with the neighbors. They don’t know them well enough.”
Lieutenant Terry Young, a detective, walked into the room; Burnetta introduced her to Debora and said Young would get her some warmer clothing.<
br />
“When are we going to get some information?” Debora asked.
“I don’t know,” Burnetta said. “I’ll try to do some checking.”
Debora went with Lieutenant Young but would agree only to put on some socks and athletic shoes. She walked back to the interview room still wearing her pink nightgown.
It was 5:30 Tuesday morning when Burnetta approached her with the news she had been both expecting and dreading. Gary Baker had called to verify that her oldest child and her youngest were dead. Breaking such news is the worst job any police officer ever has to do.
“Both the other children are deceased,” Burnetta said quietly.
“Oh Jesus Christ!” Debora cried. “I should have let my—I should have let Tim come out when he wanted to! Jesus fucking Christ!”
For just a moment, Debora dropped her head to her arms on the table. Smith and Burnetta stood by, trying to offer sympathy, but she did not want it. “Oh God,” she said tearfully. “Beautiful Tim and beautiful Kelly are both dead?”
And then Debora’s demeanor changed, in an instant, to rage. “Jesus Christ! Did they make any attempt at all to save ’em? I saved one of the kids. I could have gotten the second one out and didn’t. I’ll never forgive myself for that….”
There was a strange flatness in her inflection. The words themselves were right, but she sounded as if she were reading the lines. There had been, perhaps, thirty seconds of tears, violent rage and swearing, and then accusations at both the firefighters and herself. But the tone was so very odd.
The detectives suggested that they take a break, but Debora would have none of it. “No. No. I’m not taking any more breaks. If you have any more information, I want to know it. I’ve been sitting here for almost four hours. Okay. Where are the kids?”