Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (14 page)

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 seeds 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.

Whatever her motivations had been, Mike was now certain that Debora had been the cause of his repeated attacks. And one thing, at least, was obvious; if he intended to survive, he had to move out of the house after she came home.

He was surprised when she returned after only four days, seeming tremendously improved. Nevertheless, he packed a bag and left. He said nothing to Debora about his belief that she had tried to poison him; he would wait until he saw the results of the antibody tests.

It was the first week of October. Mike stayed with his parents for two or three nights, then moved into the Georgetown Apartments in Merriam, Kansas, only a ten-minute drive from his estranged wife and their youngsters. He would be close by and the children could stay with him on weekends.

Mike was concerned about the children’s psychological well-being. “Whenever I was home,” he said, “the situation was so volatile—Debora was saying horrible things to the kids in front of me, and I thought if I was out of the house it was clearly better for the kids.”

But Mike was not worried about any
physical
danger to Tim, Lissa, and Kelly. If she hated him, Debora loved them. There was no question of that in his mind.

Part 2

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

—EDGAR LEE MASTERS
Spoon River Anthology

The venom clamors of a jealous woman
Poison more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Richard III

14

E
llen Ryan had her master’s degree in social work and a doctorate in jurisprudence. Like Debora Green, she was an extremely intelligent woman. And like her, she was familiar with the medical community in the Kansas City area; Ellen had been married for two decades to a physician. The man she now called her significant other was both a physician and an attorney, and Ellen and her ex-husband had joint custody of four children, ranging from ten to sixteen years old.

At forty-seven, Ellen was a very attractive woman, whose strong face was spattered with freckles and framed by thick brown hair. In court, she dressed like an attorney; given her choice, she wore sweats and sneakers. With her partner, Ellen P. Aisenbrey, she ran a family-law practice and their offices were welcoming and modest, full of pictures and paintings of children. That was in keeping with Ellen’s chief concern. Having been raised by her grandparents, she understood the bewilderment of children whose families have broken up and reassembled in different forms. Although she was an unfailingly optimistic woman, she had seen a great deal of pain in the clients who came to her and she willingly reached out to help, more than most lawyers. But she was, after all, part attorney and part social worker.

“If at all possible,” she would explain, “I try to take an approach so that a couple can get through a divorce and be able to start over again. They’re not going to destroy each other—they’re going to be able to go ahead and parent their children together when it’s over. I have joint custody myself and I tend to have a personal preference for that. At the same time, it’s very important that we all play by the rules, ethically and legally. If my clients need to have an aggressive defense, then I will defend them aggressively as long as it’s within the rules.”

For the wives—and husbands, for that matter—whom she represented, Ellen could be a fierce advocate. She believed in a fair distribution of family assets, and she was adept at finding those assets. She was not so much a feminist as a humanist.

One of Ellen’s most recent clients was a doctor trying to decide whether to file for a friendly divorce or take an aggressive approach. A very sad man, he was hoping to have joint custody of his two sons. Ellen had tried to help him find a place to live. But as it turned out, her client never went through a divorce at all. And Ellen was still reeling from the staggering fact that he had committed suicide. Although she had not discussed the tragedy with anyone but her significant other and no one else knew that he had come to see her, her client had been Dr. John Walker. The public records of Walker’s estate included a bill for her legal services.

Ellen had expected John Walker to be able to move along with his life after the initial pain of divorce. Through a physician acquaintance, he had found a house to rent, and he had paid ahead on the lease. He’d had utilities and a phone installed. And then, suddenly, he was dead—a suicide, in what originally seemed to be questionable circumstances. “I said to myself [about John Walker]—I
still
say to myself”—“‘There must be some logical explanation. This does not happen in real life.’” Ellen sighed.

She would pursue the results of the postmortem on Dr. John Walker and the subsequent evaluations of the drugs he had used and the order in which he had used them until, finally, there was a “logical explanation.” But Ellen had no idea that there was any connection between John Walker and the woman who had scheduled an appointment in the last week of September. The woman’s name was Dr. Debora Green.

Initially, Ellen Ryan was surprised by Dr. Green’s appearance. “I went to the lobby to see Deb Green,” Ellen said. “She looked kind of disheveled…. She had on a sweatshirt that was kind of dirty. Her hair was kind of messy.”

Clearly, Debora did not want to be in the office of a divorce attorney, and she was quite nervous. “I brought her back to my office,” Ellen said, “and she told me that her husband wanted a divorce. She also told me that she had been hanging out with a friend of hers for most of the summer—John Walker—whom she had gone to medical school with.”

Ellen was not sure what the relationship between Debora and John might have been. She was only mildly surprised that they knew each other; after all, they were both doctors. But then Debora went on to explain about the trip to South America; her husband, she said, had been “hanging out” with John Walker’s wife. She said that she and her husband had spent a lot of time during the past few months over at the Walkers’—as a family—and now John had ended up dead. “You know,” Debora confided, “he wasn’t suicidal.”

Ellen had been listening to Debora’s story without comment. Now, she fought to keep her expression bland. Was this woman before her implying that her husband had somehow been involved in John Walker’s death? Of all the attorneys Debora could have come to, why had she chosen Ellen—Walker’s attorney? She had been terribly upset by his suicide—if it was a suicide. It gave her chills to be listening to a woman who claimed she had been close to him during the days before his death.

“I could see that there was some kind of linkage,” Ellen recalled. “I didn’t understand it all then, and I cannot tell you what it was now. I know I will go to my deathbed and not understand, probably.”

Ellen saw another potential problem, beyond “Deb” Green’s connection to John Walker. (She would call her Deb almost from the beginning.) Debora said she and her husband, Michael, had been represented in the spring of 1995 by a lawyer Ellen knew—Norman Beal—to do some estate planning. At that time, their luxurious home in Canterbury Court had been transferred into a trust, the Debora Green Trust.

Usually, if an attorney has represented a client, the attorney does not go against that client in an adversarial situation later, unless the client waives his or her rights. Ellen would learn that Debora, without benefit of counsel,
had
waived her right not to have to face in the divorce action a lawyer who had once been her own attorney. Norman Beal (no relation to Mike’s sister’s husband) would be representing Mike in his divorce action against Debora. Ellen knew he was an ethical attorney, but he would, of course, have superior knowledge about the family finances since he had helped Mike and Debora plan their estate only months before.

Debora didn’t understand that Norman Beal’s representing Mike could be construed as a possible conflict of interest. Mike wanted to use Beal; he trusted him and they had a history. When Ellen would question this, Mike grew angry—although, in the future, theirs was to be a remarkably civilized business relationship. But in the beginning, Mike had allegedly threatened Debora, saying that if she didn’t agree to his using Norman Beal he would hire a “nut-cutter attorney” who could take everything she owned away from her. In the end, both Debora and Ellen were completely comfortable with Norman Beal representing Mike.

It was quickly apparent that Debora was completely unsophisticated about finances. “That put up a red flag for me in terms of how I was going to protect her,” Ellen said. And from the outset, she found Debora almost childlike. She didn’t seem aware that the house was in her name, in a trust. She dressed like a messy child and was often vague. She didn’t want a divorce and she didn’t know how to handle money. Ellen wasn’t aware of Debora’s recent trip to Menninger’s or that she had been out only a few days. She didn’t know that Debora had a drinking problem. And she certainly didn’t know about her new client’s ferocious temper. She was seeing an entirely different person from the one others had encountered. And it was apparent that this person was alone and lost. She needed help, and Ellen agreed to handle her divorce, including the financial settlement.

Johnson County, Kansas, has strict guidelines on spousal and child support, based on the husband’s (or wife’s) ability to pay. “I find the money,” Ellen explained confidently. And when she toted up what Mike was worth and submitted a figure based on the Johnson County guidelines, she fully expected a protest from Norman Beal.

Her knowledge of Mike’s alleged response came, however, from Debora. She called Ellen constantly, nervous and frightened, telling her attorney how furious Mike was, how he wasn’t going to pay support or look after her and the children. Debora kept asking, “What am I going to
do?”
Ellen felt sorry for her.

“Well, look, Deb,” she said soothingly, “he’s
going
to pay. They all do that in Johnson County when they see their guideline amounts. Don’t worry about it. Everybody’s going to adjust, and we’ll just kind of move on.”

In fact, Debora and Mike did seem to be adjusting and moving on. Debora was definitely bitter about the upcoming divorce and her husband’s affair with Celeste, but she was far less violent and profane. With Mike living in an apartment and Debora in the house on Canterbury Court, the children were spared any more family conflict. Mike hadn’t wanted any more pets. But now that he was gone, Debora adopted a greyhound through a program that found homes for racing dogs that were too old or too slow to compete and would otherwise be put down. She named the thin, nervous dog Russell.

The kids were back in school, Tim was playing soccer, and Debora was thrilled when Lissa won the role of Clara in the State Ballet of Missouri holiday production of
The Nutcracker Suite
. Kelly wasn’t left out; she would have a role as an angel. Although she was still “pre-ballet,” she was tall for her age and graceful, and she followed directions perfectly.

Mike invited the children to spend weekends or portions of the weekends at his apartment, and sometimes they came. Tim and Lissa were still angry at him for leaving after he had promised to stay. And there were occasions when they called their mother to come and take them home. But Mike made a determined effort to be at Tim’s soccer matches and hockey games, to prove to his son that he
did
care about him, and that while he was divorcing their mother, he still wanted to be part of his children’s lives. Debora was, if not pleasant, at least civil to Mike when he came to the house. But he always refused anything to eat.

***

A week or so passed and Ellen was optimistic about Debora’s progress. She was dressing better, her hair was combed, she looked better all the way around, and she seemed to be getting a grip on her life. She told Ellen she had been so impressed with the Menninger Clinic that she planned to apply for a residency there, in psychiatry. She explained that she and Tim were very close—that she understood adolescent problems well and cared a great deal about teenagers. She had pretty much decided to become a psychiatrist specializing in counseling teenagers.

If anyone thought it odd that a woman who was not yet a month past her own voluntary commitment for mental illness should be considering a residency in psychiatry, no one said so. Three months earlier, Debora had told Celeste Walker that she planned to start a practice in family medicine. Of course, she had already been an ER physician and an oncologist.

There was still much that Ellen did not know about Debora, but she was confident that she was pulling out of her despondency. She was especially concerned that Debora’s children were faring well. No one had mentioned “one word” to her about any conceivable danger to them. “That’s significant,” Ellen said, “because I am one of the few lawyers in the metropolitan area who has included in their retainer agreement the right to withdraw from any divorce case if I think things are not being done in the best interest of the child.”

Because of her background in social work, Ellen knew exactly what steps to take to get a child out of an injurious home environment
immediately
if the need arose. She never had reason to think that Tim, Lissa, and Kelly were in a precarious situation. Her own children, who were approximately the same age, liked Debora, who often called Ellen at home. It was also clear that Tim’s friends were devoted to his mother—that she was a mom who always showed up for soccer, hockey, and school projects. Kids were welcome in her home, and she didn’t fuss at them for making a mess. An immaculate house didn’t matter to her.

“Deb had gone from being real angry and bitter and scared she could never start over again,” Ellen said, “to talking about joint custody. She wanted to do her residency at Menninger’s, a week-on-week-off program. She wanted Mike to share the kids, but she didn’t think he would. Deb said he only had a two-bedroom apartment and ‘He won’t help me with the kids—he’s never helped me with the kids.’”

Ellen reassured her, saying that more often than not people change after divorce, and they
do
want to spend time with their children. And she was right. Mike was asking for joint custody and was looking forward to it. Debora was vehement, however, when she told Ellen that Tim hated his father and would never live with him. “But that’s part of the process,” Ellen said later. “At the beginning of every divorce, people are very polarized, so you have to take things with a grain of salt.”

As for Mike, he believed that his children were doing well with Debora in her post-Menninger’s state of mind. He had lived through seventeen years of histrionics, insults, tantrums, sullen silences, and accusations. But Debora had always been a caring mother, except for her verbal assaults in front of the children and the last days of her drunken near comas, when they had looked after her. Mike felt hopeful that things were going to be all right. He believed that she might try to harm him again—he had betrayed her, at least in her opinion—but he had no reason to doubt her love for their children.