John Walker had not wanted to risk waking up from an insufficient dosage of anesthesia. He had made sure that his heart would stop instantly. And it had. For those who loved him, it was a small comfort. He had not suffered for a moment.
The whispers that had cast Celeste Walker as a clever murderess who had killed her husband so that she could inherit millions and run away with her lover were silenced. But there were those who still suspected that Debora had played some part in driving John Walker to suicide. There always would be.
It was on that same day, December 5, 1995, that Drew Richardson, Supervisory Special Agent of the FBI, received the request from the Johnson County criminalist, Gary Dirks. Richardson examined the two containers of evidence that Dirks had sent him. One was a sealed plastic envelope containing a packet of Earl May castor beans. The other was a sample of blood from Dr. Mike Farrar.
Richardson knew that antibodies to ricin do not appear in the blood and tissue within a week or two of ingestion. Therefore, there is no way to test for ricin poisoning early in the treatment. The condition masquerades as a number of other illnesses. However, the human body has a remarkable ability to fight “enemies” that attack it. Months after poisoning with ricin, antibodies to this deadly poison do appear.
If he could find ricin antibodies in the blood and tissue samples taken from Mike Farrar, and if Debora Green should be bound over for trial, Richardson would be a powerful witness for the prosecution. His findings would also vindicate Mike, who had suffered so gravely from what had seemed to be a phantom illness.
Two weeks after Richardson received the ricin exemplars from Dirks, an incident in Arkansas demonstrated that ricin/castor-bean poisoning was not the uncommon weapon that it seemed. Thomas Lavy, fifty-four, was arrested on his Onia, Arkansas, farm and charged under the federal Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act with possession of a toxic substance—ricin—with intent to use it as a weapon.
Canadian customs agents had searched Lavy’s car at a border crossing between Alaska and Canada two years earlier and found $89,000 in cash, four guns, more than 20,000 rounds of ammunition, and a quantity of white powder. An analysis of the powder proved that it was not cocaine; it was ricin. FBI Agent Thomas Lynch said that because of a communications mix-up, he had not learned of the incident until early 1995. He had traced Lavy, who had earlier been indicted in Alaska on a federal charge of possession of a toxic substance with intent to use it as a weapon, to his Onia farm.
Agent Lynch knew a lot about ricin. He explained to the press that it is the third-deadliest toxin in the world; only plutonium and botulism are more deadly. “It has no known antidote,” Lynch said.
Investigators who searched Lavy’s farm found a copy of The Poisoner’s Handbook, which describes how to extract ricin from castor beans, and Silent Death, which discusses ways to use toxic compounds to poison people. When Lavy explained that he was carrying 130 grams of the poison from Alaska into Canada only because he wanted to bring it to Arkansas to kill coyotes that were preying on his chickens, prosecutors looked doubtful. U.S. Prosecutor Robert Govar explained, “It would be tantamount to saying you can use a thermonuclear device to protect your property from break-in or burglary.”
But there would never be a trial for Thomas Lavy. He was found hanging in his jail cell in Little Rock on December 23, 1995, and pronounced dead. The Associated Press dispatch on Lavy’s arrest and suicide ended by describing the Debora Green case in Kansas and the contention by prosecutors there that she had attempted to kill her husband with ricin.
By December 1995, Mike was ill again, suffering from severe frontal headaches. He called his doctor and said he was afraid he needed a CAT scan. After evaluating the results of a cerebral angiogram (where dye is introduced into arteries in the brain), his physician agreed that he had an abscess that had bled. “I was a walking time-bomb,” Mike recalled.
On December 11, he underwent a craniotomy. The clump of bacteria originating from his heart valve had found its way to the right front part of his brain. The surgeon who operated on him, Dr. Stephan Reintges, knew it had broken loose from the heart to roam through the bloodstream unchecked until it began building a potentially fatal abscess in Mike’s brain. “He may have had a stroke,” the surgeon told reporters. “Or the bacteria itself may have simply broken through.”
Mike’s brain surgery would involve drilling burr holes in the right frontal portion of his skull until a “lid” of bone could be removed, exposing the brain beneath. Then the abscess could be drained. Because the original cause of the sepsis—the reason that bacteria had flooded Mike’s body organs and bloodstream—had yet to be isolated, Dr. Reintges took yet another sample of body fluid to be analyzed in the FBI lab.
The critical nature of Mike’s condition had not escaped Paul Morrison. The husband who was in the process of divorcing Debora Green was slated to be one of the prime witnesses against her. Mike had been there, behind the walls that hid their tumultuous family situation, for years. Morrison had to get his testimony first before a judge in a pretrial hearing and then in front of a jury if he was to have a prayer of winning a case that was mostly circumstantial.
Knowing that Mike could very well die during the surgery to drain his abscess, Morrison had asked him if he would agree to having his testimony videotaped. Both Morrison and Moore would examine him and cross-examine him before his surgery. Of course, Morrison had not said, “We need this in case you die before trial or in case you end up a vegetable,” but Mike was a physician himself; he knew the odds. If his surgery was successful, that videotape would never be used. If things went badly, at least his image and his voice would be there in the courtroom. He believed that Debora had killed two of their children and had meant to kill him. He felt strongly that she must not be allowed to escape retribution. So, with a nurse accompanying him, he gave his testimony before a video camera.
Mike had more wrong with his brain than an abscess, however. The cerebral angiogram showed that he also had a mycotic aneurysm in a main blood vessel in his brain. The vessel was thinning and weakening, assaulted by the bacteria spewed out during his attack of endocarditis. He would have four more brain angiograms over the next four months. His doctors wanted to keep track of the condition of the bulging artery, If anything, this was more dangerous than his infected heart and the abscess in his brain. The poison he had ingested was not static; it continued to do silent damage inside his body. Even the tests were so dangerous that he had to be hospitalized overnight each time. A small percentage of patients suffer strokes from the angiogram itself.
Christmas 1995 was a holiday that the principals in the Farrar-Green case would have to get through somehow. There were too many losses, too many memories, and no one knew what the new year would bring. Among the hundreds of photographs now kept in the district attorney’s office, there were scores showing Christmases past that Mike, Debora, and their children had shared: Debora decorating a succession of trees; Kelly gleefully unwrapping a present; Tim posing in his Kansas City Chiefs sweatshirt and pants while Mike looked on proudly; Tim, Lissa, and Kelly smiling as they cuddled on a sofa, their cheeks pink with excitement; Boomer happily sitting in a morass of crumpled wrapping paper. Looking at those pictures long after they had been snapped, it did not seem possible that this family could have been so tragically destroyed.
Kansas City, Missouri, once again celebrated Christmas by decorating the already picturesque County Club Plaza with thousands of colored lights. Their sparkling reflections on the snow and the old-fashioned streetlights slightly dimmed by yet another profusion of snowflakes make the city especially beautiful during Christmas. And so it still was, of course, in 1995—for most families.
Debora remained in jail, while her daughter held her head high and danced in The Nutcracker Suite. It was a beautiful performance. Lissa celebrated Christmas with her father and his family, but she was sad because her mother was not in the audience watching her dance. Celeste was trying to help her sons have a good
Christmas despite the fact that their father was gone. People in both Johnson and Jackson counties—indeed in all of Kansas and Missouri—clamored for news of the case, but there was none. Neither the prosecution nor the defense intended to reveal its cards. For Paul Morrison, Rick Guinn, Dennis Moore, and Kevin Moriarty, the holidays had to be short; they were girding up for one of the biggest legal battles the Kansas City area had ever known.
Part 3
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.
—A. E. HOUSMAN
30
Suspected arson, murder, and poisoning and the Debora-Mike-Celeste triangle made the case going into a pretrial hearing a barn-burner. It was a case any criminal defense attorney or prosecutor would be eager to try, and one any reporter would fight to cover. But reporters had been given the barest tidbits of information. Debora’s pretrial hearing would be open to the press and public, but would be held in a very small courtroom and seats would be at a premium. Morrison planned to present a startling item of evidence to Judge Peter Ruddick; the press could see and hear it, but would be forbidden to tape or film it before trial—that is, of course, if the Green case did go to trial.
Long before the preliminary hearing, court officials began preparing for the mass of reporters, producers, and writers expected to descend on the Johnson County Courthouse. Judge Ruddick asked for help from a specialist from the Kansas Supreme Court to keep track of the media and arrange the courtroom seating. Ron Keefover served as the Supreme Court’s education and information officer. He had experience in keeping a lid on Kansas trials that sparked national attention. The Debora Green trial promised to be the biggest thing to hit Olathe, and Ruddick needed Keefover. They both intended to keep it from becoming a circus.
Ironically, it had been another marital quartet murder that had demanded the most of Ron Keefover. In 1985, the Reverend Thomas Bird of Emporia stood trial for the murder of his wife, who was first thought to have perished in a car accident, and his mistress was charged with the shooting death of her husband. Mrs. Bird’s car had plunged off a bridge and Kansas State Trooper John Rule had become suspicious about the accident. Convicted, Thomas Bird and his lover became the subjects of a book and miniseries called By Murder Ordained.
Johnson County’s biggest trial to date had been that of serial killer Richard Grissom, Jr. In a face-off with Kevin Moriarty, Paul Morrison had won a conviction. During that trial, which ended on November 4, 1990, a hundred people or more had stood in line every morning, waiting to get into the courtroom. And, as at all sensational trials, there were outbursts of temper when reporters or others with reserved seats were allowed into the courtroom before people who had been in line for hours.
This time, Keefover advised Judge Ruddick to set up an “overflow room” with closed-circuit television sets and chairs for sixty people. The room, one floor below Ruddick’s third-floor courtroom, would double as a press room. There would be no still cameras or interviews on the third floor. This technique had worked remarkably well in many high-profile trials, beginning with Ted Bundy’s first trial in Miami, Florida, in the summer of 1979. Technology and the psychology of trial watchers had come to little Olathe in 1996.
Press credentials alone were not enough to get you into the Green preliminary hearing; what mattered was that your name was on Ron Keefover’s list. He was a friendly, laidback man, but he believed in organization. There would be no “musical chair” seating at the Green hearing.
During the preliminary—or show cause—hearing, Paul Morrison and Rick Guinn would have to convince Judge Ruddick that they had enough evidence to move on to trial. And Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty would fight to suggest that the wrong person had been arrested, that Debora Green was an innocent and grieving mother unjustly accused of arson and murder.
The hearing was scheduled for the last week in January 1996, and Olathe was icy cold—normal weather for natives, shocking to reporters who had flown in from more moderate climates. It was too cold and dry for Santa Fe Street, the main east—west thoroughfare that ran between the new and the old in Olathe, even to be slippery. The snow only feathered over Santa Fe. But there were drifts left by earlier storms around the parking strips of all the streets near the Johnson County Courthouse; the piles of old snow were four feet high and iced over. Navigating the diagonal sidewalks that led to the steps of the courthouse without the sense that noses, ears, and even lungs were actually freezing was a challenge. And, then, once you were through the many doors of the building, heat trapped in the outer lobby made coats unbearable.
Reporters, clutching their credentials but still nervous lest they might not find their names on Ron Keefover’s list, jogged down long corridors and snagged elevators headed for Judge Ruddick’s courtroom. There were only three rows of twenty seats, room for sixty people, in the courtroom. They were comfortable, theater-like seats, but the media and the fascinated spectators who had lined up to get in would not have cared if they had to sit on cement blocks. Witnesses were excluded from the courtroom before they gave their testimony, but as the week progressed, many of them would return after testifying to watch the rest of the case unfold. Paul Morrison was dealing with a mostly circumstantial case and he had predicted that “there won’t be many surprises left” after the preliminary hearing.
The courtroom was modern and almost sumptuous. Everything was curved: the shining wood in front of the jurors’ box; the tables where the prosecutors would sit on the left and where Debora Green and her defense team would sit on the right. Even the judge’s “bench” was curved. Ruddick, who looked too young and too benign to be a judge, was both—but courthouse regulars knew that he was very, very good at his job.
A television camera was mounted on “sticks” in front of the empty jury box; the cameraman of the day would distribute the film in a pool to Kansas City television stations. There would be no jury, of course, during this preliminary hearing. And it might prove difficult to select a jury if the case proceeded to trial. Every television station in the greater Kansas City area planned to feature the Green hearing at the top of the news at noon, at five, and at ten P.M.
Even with a press pass, it was not easy to get into the courtroom. Johnson County deputies searched purses and briefcases, and everyone had to pass through a metal detector. Every trip down the hall to the phone or the restroom meant another search and another slow walk through the scanner.
Tony Rizzo of the Kansas City Star and Andy Hoffman of the Olathe Daily News were in the courtroom. Mark Lorber, a producer from Hollywood, attended, and there were at least a dozen women who were about Debora’s age. Some of them said they had known her; one woman was eager to tell the rest of the gallery that she and Debora had been “very close” and often played tennis together. Others were there because this case mesmerized them.
Everyone wanted to see Dr. Debora Green, who had been invisible to the public for two months. It was rumored that her husband, Dr. Michael Farrar, would testify against her, and that his alleged mistress, Celeste Walker, would testify too.
And then, suddenly, Debora emerged from a room beyond the jury box, accompanied by Ellen Ryan. She wore a white sweater that was clearly too large for her over a pink turtleneck top and a pleated white skirt. She had obviously lost twenty pounds or more since her arrest. Without seeming even to glance at the spectators in the room, she moved quickly to her chair at the defense table. She had a faintly clumsy, almost masculine stride.
Once she took her seat, Debora looked only forward. She had to have been aware that every pair of eyes behind her was focused on her, but she never looked around to check out the gallery. Her hair was probably her best feature; chestnut brown and gleaming, it fell naturally into thick waves. She wore makeup, but very subtle makeup—a touch of eye shadow, a little lip gloss. Pearl stud earrings were her only jewelry.
Like most defendants, Debora had a yellow legal pad on the table in front of her, and she clutched a pen as if she plann
ed to take notes. Her expression was alert, even wary, but she didn’t look worried. Ellen Ryan, sitting close beside her—for moral support only; she was not a criminal lawyer—did look worried, and she often glanced anxiously at Debora. The male attorneys, on both sides, looked businesslike.
No one outside the inner sanctum of the district attorney’s office and the Metro Squad knew for sure what evidence the State of Kansas might have against Dr. Debora Green. Ninety days after the fire that killed two of her children, the rest of the world was about to find out. There was a good chance they would also get some idea of what Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty would counter with in her defense.
The proceedings began with Paul Morrison asking Judge Ruddick if he might make an opening statement. He would not be talking to a jury; in this phase he had only the judge to convince. And, for the first time, step by step, in perfect chronological order, Judge Ruddick and the court watchers learned of the events that led up to the catastrophic inferno on Canterbury Court. In his deep calm voice, Morrison described the strange fire that happened on West Sixty-first Terrace after Dr. Michael Farrar left Debora Green the first time, and after he had reneged on the deal to buy 7517 Canterbury Court and on a reconciliation.
“Within a couple of days after that, Judge,” Morrison said, “their house in Kansas City, Missouri, burned, suffering severe damage, and it burned just a few minutes after Debora Green left one day with the children while Dr. Farrar was at work. Well, now the family had nowhere to go and that sort of forced a reconciliation. They moved in with him. And as part of that they went ahead and bought that house on Canterbury Court in Prairie Village.”