Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (19 page)

“Well, we can’t do that now,” Smith told her, his voice hushed in the face of this complete change from a garrulous, friendly woman to a raging shrew.

“Then I want to know where those kids are being taken,” Debora shouted, “because I want to be with them!”

“We’ll find out,” Smith said.

“‘We’ll find out,’” she said in a singsong. “I’ve heard that for four hours.”

“I’m sorry,” Smith said. “But they just can’t rush in there just now—”

“No, of course they can’t. There might be somebody still alive.”

“They’ve checked … unfortunately.”

“God damn it! That thirteen-year-old was alive. He asked me if he could leave that house…. This is pathetic!” Debora was building up a head of steam. “Not only is it pathetic the way it was handled. It’s pathetic what you guys have done to me. It’s pathetic! It’s inhuman. It’s cold.”

“Debora,” Burnetta said, “we haven’t had any more information than what you’ve had.”

“I can’t believe nobody went over there with a cellular phone. I can’t believe someone couldn’t have gotten some information from someone. This is the most disjointed setup I’ve ever had to deal with,” Debora said witheringly. And then she changed the subject. “I would love to see my husband—even though we’re getting a divorce—because he and I will be the only ones who can share in the mammoth grief. But I can’t do that. I can’t go to my home. I can’t see my dead children. I can’t see my husband. You people are pathetic.”

There was no placating her, whatever they said, so Greg Burnetta asked again if she would change her clothing.

“Why?”

“Well, quite frankly,” he said slowly, “we’d like to have that clothing to have it tested for a lab report.”

“Oh,” she said sarcastically. “You don’t think it’s going to have smoke smells?” Debora stalked to a small room off the interview room and Burnetta asked her to wait for the lieutenant. “What do you think?” she shouted. “I’m going out the window? This is pathetic, truly pathetic. You people need to rethink your policies and you need to enter into your equation possible family members of deceased people. I would never,
never
, treat anyone as much like an animal as you have treated me tonight.”

They were still trying to reason with Debora, still trying to be considerate and not allow her shocking outburst to make them respond in kind. Rod Smith asked her gently, “Would you have wanted us to come here and tell you that your children were dead and then find out that they weren’t?”

Debora insisted that the Prairie Village police had known her children were dead all along. But they had not seen her burning house. And
she
had. She had watched it blaze from the Formans’ driveway, and told Officer Steve Hunter, “I’m Mom” in a remarkably calm voice. If anyone in that room had firsthand knowledge of how much of the Canterbury Court home had been involved in fire, Debora herself did.

She raged on and on at them. “I cannot fucking believe that my two kids are dead. I want to go where my children are going, and it does not take two hours to find out where that is.”

Although she was a physician, Debora knew as little as any other civilian about crime scene investigations. Greg Burnetta and Rod Smith knew that the children’s bodies might remain in the house for many hours until the scene was thoroughly “worked” by both detectives and arson investigators. Meanwhile no one but official personnel would be allowed in. Besides, their own pity for this angry woman made them want to spare her the sight of her dead children in a charred and crumbling shell of a house.

Although she kept demanding to see her children, most of all, Debora wanted to be with Mike. “Jesus Christ!” she shouted. “There are two people here that care about what happened. So why can’t we be together? But apparently you don’t have compassion for anyone else…. I want to tell him.
I want to tell my husband that our babies are dead.”

19

T
he detectives were certainly not going to allow Debora to talk to Mike before they themselves did. They were already uneasy about this case. They had never seen anyone react to the dread news of a family fatality as Debora did. Her behavior baffled them. At this point, Greg Burnetta had no idea what her husband would be like. Would his affect be as skewed as his wife’s? Debora had continually characterized Mike as a thoughtless, selfish womanizer who cared nothing for his children. Was she only reacting like any woman scorned—or was he the SOB that she described?

Burnetta was about to find out. And he wanted to make his own assessment of Mike Farrar, without any preconceived notions. But more than that, he wanted to verify or refute the time line and other information that Debora had given him. He did not want the two parents comparing notes, and that was why they had been kept apart throughout the night.

Already, the Kansas City television and radio reporters were on the trail of a major news story. One of Mike’s partners was driving into the office for their Tuesday morning corporate meeting shortly before six A.M. when he heard the news bulletin about a disastrous fire on Canterbury Court in Prairie Village. The bulletin gave no names, but said only that two fatalities had been reported. His partner paged Mike at once, but Mike didn’t have time to call him back. He had just been summoned to the interview room.

This had been the longest night any of the principals—police or family—had ever known. It was 6:20 A.M. when Mike was brought downstairs to be interviewed. Sergeant Wes Jordan—one of the two officers who had come to the house when Debora was taken to the hospital on September 25—was with him. Jordan was a big, soft-spoken cop. His dark eyes mirrored Mike’s agony. Jordan remembered the troubled boy and the little blond girl who had tried to comb her mother’s hair so she would look “nice” when he took her away.

Jordan led Mike into the same celery-colored interview area where Debora had been questioned. Mike had on jeans and a multicolored sweater, the clothes he had worn to Tim’s hockey game. He was very thin and pale.

Burnetta could see immediately that Mike’s demeanor was diametrically opposed to his wife’s. His eyes were red from crying and it was clearly taking everything he had to keep himself together. He was braced for whatever terrible news they had to tell him.

Burnetta introduced himself. “Mike, I’m Greg Burnetta. It’s a shame to have to meet you under these circumstances. Go ahead and have a seat.”

Burnetta explained that he had been called at home to come in and talk to Debora. Mike nodded; the two officers shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

“Are you up-to-date on the most current information?” Burnetta asked.

“I haven’t heard anything,” Mike answered, his voice weak with dread.

“I wish I didn’t have to tell you this—but your two kids are dead.”

Mike’s whole body sagged. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it as soon as I got there—when they told me they weren’t out. Did you find them, at least?” His voice was trembling.

“The firemen found the bodies,” Burnetta said, “and some of our police officers are present at the house.”

At this point, Burnetta and Jordan stepped out of the room for a few minutes, sensing that Mike needed time alone. While Burnetta and Rod Smith had attempted to comfort Debora when she got the awful news and been rebuffed by her rage, Burnetta knew that men usually reacted differently; they needed space to absorb their pain in privacy.

Mike, still watched by the mindless eye of the video camera, sat alone. He sighed deeply, covered his eyes with his hands, and cried softly. It seemed hours before Jordan and Burnetta came back, but only three minutes had passed.

“I wish there was some way I could make you feel better,” Jordan said.

“I know,” Mike said. “I’ve told enough people their loved ones were dead to know how bad they feel.” And of course he had. As a cardiologist, he had had to explain so many times that a heart was too worn out or too flawed to keep beating. He had seen relatives’ faces turn white, seen their mouths protest, and then seen them come to a single awful moment when they accepted that what seemed unbearable had, somehow, to be borne.

Now, it was his turn.

Burnetta handed Mike a white paper cup of coffee, and he held it in both hands as if the warmth might help.

Jordan reminded Mike of the last time they had sat together at dawn, and of how he had made it through the terrible scene on Canterbury Court. “That was a pretty unpleasant task at your house when we had to take your children’s mom away. But they did pretty, well.”

“I know.” Mike nodded, clearly anxious to fill the stark room with words. “I know. And they did fine when she was gone, too.”

Burnetta, seeing how close Mike was to breaking down, hurried ahead with the basic questions, the easy questions. Mike gave his birthdate—March 3, 1955—his office address, his pager number.

Other parts of the station house were moving into daytime mode. The aroma of coffee filtered into the interview room; garbled-sounding radio messages crackled, and occasionally someone laughed, as if the world had not ended after all.

Mike did quite well until the room grew silent, hushes that somehow were louder than their conversation. And then either Jordan or Burnetta began to ask questions, many designed solely to keep the devastated man in front of them focused. Jordan wondered when it was that he and officer Kyle Shipps had been summoned to the Farrar-Green home. “How long ago was that? Three weeks?”

“Yeah, I think—about three weeks,” Mike said weakly.

In truth, it had been exactly four. So much had happened in those four weeks.

Burnetta now suggested the ominous possibility that each of the three men had already considered. He asked if Debora might have started the fire, if she might have to be considered a suspect.

“I think it’s a likely possibility,” Mike said. “She’s been mentally unstable, drinking, severely depressed.” He told Burnetta about her four-day commitment at the Menninger Clinic. He said it was so strange, the way she had suddenly started drinking heavily. He had never known her to drink like that before. He himself could come up with no real answers.

“I could never talk to her psychiatrist,” Mike said. “I could only deal with the social worker at Menninger’s as an intermediary. When I saw that Debora had started to drink again—after Menninger’s—I confronted her. She denied it, denied it, denied it. I reported my concerns to the social worker.”

Mike said he’d been certain, the night before, that his wife was drunk. “She has a very characteristic pattern of speaking. Clearly, to my eyes she was drinking. I suppose it’s conceivable that she was drunk enough and drugged enough that she left a burner on. I have to tell you she’s done some odd things.”

He told Burnetta about their first house fire, only eighteen months before. That, too, had occurred after he had moved out. They had talked of reconciliation before that first fire, and had put a bid on the Canterbury Court house. “But I realized that was just like having a baby when a couple is having a problem, and I withdrew the offer,” Mike said. “Two days later our house burned. The arson inspectors couldn’t find a cause, but the insurance company did. They said it was a wire wound around a pipe too tightly. Anyway, we all moved into my apartment together, and we resubmitted our bid on the house—the house that burned tonight.”

Mike shared one characteristic with Debora; he spoke very rapidly. However, he stayed on track and his answers were responsive to Burnetta’s questions. Unlike Debora, he was not enjoying himself as he talked about family secrets. He was finally saying things out loud that had haunted him for months.

“Some of my friends were convinced that Debora burned our first house down to get me back,” he said. “At the time I thought it was absurd. I didn’t think she could outsmart the investigators. But I will tell you that this woman is a brilliant woman. She is
brilliant
. She reads avidly—who knows what she reads about.”

Mike told Burnetta that his marriage had been deteriorating badly over the last six months. He had known he was going to ask for a divorce when they came back from Peru. It was inevitable. “In late July, I asked her for a divorce, and things started getting weirder,” he said. “It was more than the bad behavior and swearing I was used to. All her emotions were laid wide open to the kids.”

Wes Jordan sat silently, nodding slightly from time to time. He had seen Debora lose control the night of September 25.

“And then I got sick,” Mike continued. “I was in the hospital for a total of three weeks—I was admitted three times starting with August eighteenth. There was no diagnosis. I had a number of specialists. It was a serious illness. There was one point in time where I damn near died. I was critically ill—more so than I realized at the time.”

That was easy for Burnetta and Jordan to believe. Mike was pale, slight, and fragile-looking. Although he was close to six feet tall, he couldn’t have weighed more than 130 pounds.

“Each time I went back in the hospital,” Mike said, “I had eaten a meal at home that had kind of a bitter taste. But I thought, ‘That’s nuts—crazy—nuts.’ And then I went through her purse, and I found the packets of castor beans.”

Mike turned toward Jordan. “I saved one package and I gave you all the rest. I started thinking about it. I found an old internal medicine textbook—the seventh edition of
Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine
—and I looked up the symptoms and they all fit: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, low blood pressure. Then I went to the North Kansas City Hospital library and had them do a literature search.” He had asked that any articles turned up by the search be mailed to Celeste Walker’s address; he didn’t want Debora to open the mail and learn what he was up to.

“Honest to God”—Mike shook his head as he spoke—“when I started reading [the articles], I started shaking. I found out that even the KGB had used castor beans—ricin—to eliminate people. The problem is, unless you do a toxicology screen at the time of the illness, you can’t get the diagnosis. It’s impossible to get a diagnosis now.”

Mike also told Burnetta and Jordan about the mysterious letters that had been left on his porch and in the neighbors’ yard. He knew Debora’s turns of phrase and he recognized the same font as their own computer. “That threw me for a loop,” he said. “I confronted her, and finally she admitted it.”

The letter the Formans had found was addressed to the headmaster of Pembroke Hill School. Mike said that he had been asked to give a presentation about their Peru trip at the school, and the letter said the school shouldn’t let someone with such low morals, someone who would betray his wife, speak to its students.

Surreptitiously, Burnetta glanced at his notes. Only two hours ago, Debora had said, “I haven’t been particularly upset—or really even terribly emotionally involved. That’s not quite the truth. I felt a tremendous sense of relief when he moved out, which surprised him because he thought I’d be
devastated.”
One of them was either lying or glossing over some facts, Burnetta thought. But that certainly wasn’t unheard-of in messy divorces.

Mike began to describe the last six months of what sounded like a hellish marriage. Debora had done “just strange things. She told me she was going to Africa to do missionary work. And then she said she had been accepted at Louisville for a psychiatric residency and that all the arrangements had been made. I checked our phone bill. She hadn’t made one call to Louisville. It was all made up.

“The house was absolutely in shambles. There were food wrappers all over every floor. There were clothes strewn about. You know how messy a house can be with three kids, but this was far more than that.”

Greg Burnetta, tired as he was, was fascinated. Debora had painted quite a different picture of herself and her marriage. She had described her husband as totally uninvolved, coldly uninterested, and herself as a warm, loving mother who skillfully handled everything to do with her children. She had insisted that neither she nor her children needed Mike.

Mike began talking even faster now, as if under terrible pressure to finally get the story out. The planned visit from the kids to his apartment on the weekend just past had culminated in another screaming fight. Tim and Lissa had never come to his apartment at all. “Debora was screaming at Tim, and Tim was screaming at her.” He ended up taking only Kelly. And after that, the neighbors told him that Tim had locked Lissa outside. She was banging on the door and screaming.

Sighing, Mike said that Debora had become totally dysfunctional. “She’s been very concerned about the money. I don’t know if she would have considered this [arson] for insurance. I have to admit that last time, we came out ahead. They replaced all our furniture and everything we lost. It was all new, and they wrote us a big check. I don’t know if that fire was an insurance issue, or meant to scare me, or was so they would move in with me again. But I certainly think she’s capable of setting a fire.”

Mike gave his version of the debate over lawyers: Debora had delayed and delayed, even about getting an attorney for herself. Then she did everything she could to ignore the divorce. Yes, he had told her that he’d get a tough lawyer if he had to. He was tired of waiting.