Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (34 page)

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P
aul Morrison had given Judge Ruddick and the gallery a crash course in how ricin poisoning affects the human body, and he had established that Mike Farrar still carried in his bloodstream the proof that he had been exposed to ricin several times. But the charges against Debora Green were bifurcated; Morrison maintained that she had tried to poison her husband, then gone on to set a fire that would trap her children. He now had to recreate what had happened inside the house on Canterbury Court just before the fire erupted and during the hour and forty-five minutes that it burned.

Except for the occasional movie with special effects that show what firefighters must do inside a burning building, the public tends to take them for granted—unless they are the ones who need help. Just as police risk their lives, so do firefighters. The jobs require slightly different mind-sets, although they both begin with the premise that the preservation of life is their most important duty.

Few of us would deliberately enter a burning building; for hundreds of years, firefighters have been running, crawling, and sliding into flaming, smoky structures that other people have fled. It is safer now than it used to be. Before the advent of masks and air tanks, firefighters, all unknowing, breathed in the by-products of burning chemicals and asbestos. As they pulled down ceilings with their picks, they often vomited over their shoulders from the effects of the poisonous gases they were forced to inhale. After years of exposure, any number of veteran firefighters contracted cancer—of the mouth, throat, lungs, and other organs damaged because they had no masks and no oxygen tanks. Nor did they have radios with which they could communicate with fellow firemen outside.

By 1995, Chief Maurice Mott and the men of his ladder company had the benefit of safety equipment. That meant they could breathe inside a burning structure, but it did not mean they were not in constant danger of becoming trapped in the fire themselves.

Mott, a compact man with black hair, took the witness stand and began to explain, with the help of slides, what he saw on the night of October 23—24. Along with three other firefighters, he had entered the house at the basement level on the south side, the opposite end from where Kelly and Tim were trapped. By the time Mott and his crew arrived, that was the only way left to get in. (The window he crawled through led into the basement bedroom where Debora had once spent the night hiding from her husband.)

Mott used a floor plan of the house to identify where they had been. “I think this is a hallway and this is a door here …. Across from that—this door here was closed. I opened the door, not knowing if it was a closet or whatever, and that’s when I visualized this entire fitness room was on fire. I could see through the floor joists to the first floor of the residence.”

“Up to this point, you saw no fire?” Morrison asked.

“No fire.”

“And you open this door and it’s like an inferno?”

“Yes ….”

The room above the fitness room was the living room; above
that
was Tim’s room. All three rooms were burning, fully involved in flames.

Mott testified that he and his partner searched the playroom, but they found no one—only dolls, teddy bears, and dress-up clothes and hats. They recognized a pool table by feel, but as they worked their way around it, sweeping their gloved hands beneath it, the ceiling fell in on them.

Debora watched the light and shadows of the fire scene slides. This charred structure had been her home. She seemed very alert now, as if watching for something.

Moore’s cross-examination of Chief Mott was basically a reprise of what Mott had already said. It is usually unwise for a defense attorney to quibble over small points with someone who has risked his life for strangers. Moore wanted to know if Mott remembered a fierce wind blowing that night; Mott did not.

“While you were inside the house,” Moore asked, “did you smell anything unusual?”

“In the basement area, I did not. When I went into the basement I had an air pack on, so once I made entry into that house, I wouldn’t be able to smell anything. Now, when I yelled into the windows, I did not have my face mask on.”

Mott had smelled nothing unusual. However, his job was not to determine the cause of fires; his job was to put them out and, if at all possible, save human beings trapped inside.

The next witness was someone who
did
determine the cause of fires: Jeff Hudson of the Shawnee, Kansas, Fire Department. Although Gary Lamons had been in charge of the investigation into the fire’s cause, Hudson represented the Eastern Kansas Multi-County Task Force in this hearing.

Hudson testified that the arson investigators had gathered at the site of the fire at eleven the morning after.

“And what role did you play?” Morrison asked.

“I played a role with the origin and cause team in removing debris and assessing the origin and cause of the fire.”

“How many of you were involved in the origin and cause [team]?”

“Probably five or six people were assigned to that.”

Hudson explained “layering”—how the arson investigators moved from the top down, tediously sifting through the levels of a burned structure in search of the fire’s cause. “All the way along, we’re documenting what we’re doing and photographing,” he testified. “And then we remove the contents of the room and get down to floor level.”

“And is that sometimes important?”

“It’s very important because you’re looking at burn patterns and the most significant damage to the structure. You’re coming across different parts of furniture. We can use that for reconstruction purposes to determine which way the fire moved and what areas of the room are more damaged than the other areas.”

“Is it important for you to be able to see whether or not there are the presence of burn patterns, for example, on a floor?”

“Yes.”

“Does that relate to your investigation of what might have caused your start of that fire?”

“Yes—it relates directly to that.”

“And is it important for you to know whether or not fires burn low or high in a room—and can you tell by looking at debris, walls, maybe pieces of furniture, the direction and path of travel of the fire?”

“Yes, you can.”

Hudson looked only at Paul Morrison; his eyes never shifted to the defense table. Debora sat up straighter; she seemed fascinated with this testimony.

Again, Morrison began projecting slides while Hudson described what they depicted. There was the home’s entry with its stone façade that rose toward the now ragged roof. The door was gone and the entryway resembled an open, toothless mouth. The camera moved in closer. Blackened windows. The window near the garage roof where Lissa had escaped. There was a shot of arson investigators shoveling debris into piles.

Using the slides, Morrison and Hudson took Judge Ruddick and the gallery around the outside of the house. Now you could see where Mott and his men had crawled into the lower-floor window; above that was the window that opened out from the Jacuzzi off the master bedroom.

The slides of the east side—the back of the house—showed the most damage. The roof was gone; the railings that ran along the back deck of the house were charred by flames that had shot out more than eight feet after the wall of windows and sliding glass doors shattered from the heat.

“Now, some of the charring around that one—that main set of sliding doors—I’ll call it the hotter part of the house,” Morrison said, “is that evident there on the right?”

“The wood is charred.”

“Now, what’s that just to the left of the wood?”

“That appears to be an intercom appliance.”

Those in the courtroom who had heard Debora’s recall of talking with her son through this intercom looked puzzled. If she had been able to stand there and converse with Tim in his room, there should have been plenty of time for him to jump out onto the roof and lower himself to the ground. Why hadn’t she encouraged him to do that? Why had she told him to wait for someone to help him?

Debora watched the screen and whispered occasionally to Ellen Ryan. The cameras were in the basement now; here were the two furnaces, the two electrical panels, the water heaters—all perfectly intact. They had not caused the fire. The carousel shuffled ahead, each new slide dropping into place to reveal another basement room in ruined condition. Some were damaged by water, some by falldown.

“We’re in the exercise room, a workout, weight room in the basement,” Hudson testified. “And this debris in this photograph has fallen down through the floor joists from the floor in the living room directly above this exercise room. You can see that the drywall that’s on the walls in this room is still intact. The dark part of the drywall is up high. The fire in this room moved from the top down …. The paint is still on the walls except up high where there was intense heat.”

“And does that tell you anything about whether or not the fire started in that room?”

“Yes,” Hudson said, directing a beam of light at the slide with a laser pointer. “This room was ruled out as an area of origin because it’s obvious that the fire came down from the floor above ….”

Next, the two men, prosecutor and arson investigator, moved on to the rec room, where most of the damage had been caused by water. “The room for the most part is intact and has very little damage,” Hudson testified. “With the exception of a burn pattern—an area of the carpet down low, right next to that bar stool. The floor is burned in that area.”

Hudson explained that the carpet had melted and the fire had gone out. This fire had no connection to the others in the house. It had begun—or been set—separately.

“We’ve got an unconnected fire down there?”

“Certainly.”

The slide projector threw another image on the screen. A fireman’s glove held something, but it was impossible to discern what.

At the defense table, Debora turned her head away quickly and whispered urgently to Ellen Ryan, who then spoke to Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty.

“Judge,” Moriarty said, “we’d like—the defendant would like to voluntarily absent herself at this time ….”

There was a sidebar discussion between Judge Ruddick and the defense team. Debora looked agitated for the first time since this hearing had begun.

Moore explained: “Judge, we would state for the record that we understand there may be a couple of slides in this presentation Mr. Morrison’s making that would show some scenes that our client would not like to be present in the courtroom when they were shown. They are scenes that may be involving her children ….”

Debora was half out of her seat. “She understands she has the right to be present,” Moore continued, “but she’s giving up that right so she doesn’t have to witness this.”

“Is that correct, Debora?” Moore turned to his client.

“That’s correct.” For the first time, Debora spoke, and then she and Ellen hurried from the courtroom to the judge’s chambers.

The image on the screen was still puzzling; then, suddenly recognition hit. The glove was holding some part of a human being.

“Tell us what this depicts,” Morrison asked Hudson.

“This photograph was taken in the fitness-exercise room,” Hudson testified, his voice professional still, but slightly hushed. “And that’s a photograph of a foot that was found in the falldown debris as it was being removed from that room. It’s a human foot.”

There were gasps in the courtroom.

“The fitness room is below the living room on the main floor,” Morrison said. “Was the floor of the living room still intact or was it gone?”

“The floor in the living room—the subfloor—was burned away and all that was left of the floor and structure were the floor joists.”

“Now, my next question is, What room is above the living room?”

“It would be a bedroom that belonged to—to my understanding—to Tim.”

“Was there any floor left other than joists between the two rooms?”

“No, there was not.”

“In other words, Tim’s floor was gone …. Did you find some other things down there—either in the basement or on the joists in the living room that had fallen down from Tim’s bedroom?”

“Yes, we did. Bed parts and furniture debris. Clothing.”

One more slide appeared; this time, the gallery recognized what it depicted. Hudson explained to the judge: “This photograph was taken in the fitness room and it’s showing another human foot that was found in the debris in that fitness room.”

“So you found two feet?” Morrison asked.

“Yes.”

As the horrifying handful of slides showing the damage done to Tim’s body ended, Debora was escorted back into the room. She half-smiled at Moore as she took her seat.

The direct examination continued; Hudson explained how his origin and cause team had made its way through the house to determine the origin of the fire. On the screen, the foyer of the house appeared.

“What’s significant to you as a fire investigator about what you see in that picture?” Morrison asked.

“There were several significant things just inside the front door,” Hudson said. “First of all, the floor in the foyer had varying degrees of damage … You could see the floor had been subjected to some significant heat down very low. There was a pattern on that floor that told me it was subjected to different temperatures right next to each other. That’s an indicator of a liquid accelerant being poured on the floor. And that [pattern] ties into the wood that’s around the stairs and the baseboard to the right and left of those stairs.”