Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (37 page)

“Yes.”

“He was in a good mood that day? He was upbeat?”

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t talking about bombs or rockets or blowing [up] anything or anything like that?”

“No,” Dane said. “He usually didn’t talk about that a lot. Just when he was looking at his drawings and stuff.”

“He was a nice kid, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“He was the kind of kid that stood up for other kids that got picked on in school, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

Thirteen-year-old witnesses are rarely spilling over with words, but Morrison kept trying—as Moore had. “And he had told you before that him and his dad didn’t get along very good?”

“Yes.”

“And, in fact, you knew about the trouble he got into over that can of gas at the next-door neighbor’s…. He had told you that he learned from that and that was a onetime thing, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

One more thirteen-year-old boy testified about Tim’s interest in bombs. “I was a pretty close friend, I guess,” Jed Trimble
^*
said. “I just never went to his house, though.”

“Did Tim ever talk to you about fire or bombs?” Moore asked.

“At a football game, he said that he knew how to make C-4 and he was going to make some and try to make a bomb out of it.”

“When was this football game, if you know?”

“I know it was in September, but I’m not sure of the date.”

“That would have been the month before his death in October of 1995?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jed,” Moore continued, “have you ever heard of a book called
The Big Book of Mischief?”

“Yes,” Jed testified. “Bill Lee
^*
talked about it and that’s about it.”

“Did you ever see the book?”

“No.”

The point was, of course, to show that Tim had lit fires and played at making bombs. But a bomb would have left entirely different evidence for the arson team to evaluate. And the defense had been unable to elicit strong testimony from Tim’s friends. Except for the primitive Molotov cocktail in Len Jurden’s backyard, it sounded as though Tim had done more talking than acting out.

The boys who had been Tim’s friends were neither photographed in court nor named in official records, but some television photographers waiting outside the courthouse caught them on film as they walked out after testifying.

Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty had another witness. Phyllis Grado had been employed by Debora and Mike as a nanny from 1989 to 1993. A sweet-faced, fiftyish woman who appeared to be of Hispanic descent, she testified that she had applied for the job after seeing an ad in the paper. Mike and Debora had interviewed her and hired her together. Phyllis Grado would prove to be an emotional woman, considerably more voluble than the last four defense witnesses.

“When you say you were a nanny for the Farrar children, how much time was involved?” Moore asked. “Can you give the court a sense of that?”

“Well, at the beginning it was like five hours a day, and that was only until she felt at ease with her children with me—that she could trust me enough with them. And then, a couple of months later, she started working her full eight hours.”

“Do you know where she was working at that point?”

“At Trinity Lutheran Hospital—she was a physician there.”

“After she started working full-time at Trinity, how much time were you working then?”

“Ten hours a day for her.”

Grado said she had gotten to know her young charges well; she gave the impression that she and Tim were very close. She remembered an episode that took place some three years earlier: “He was upset one morning when I came and I had asked him what was the matter with him, and he just kept saying ‘Nothing,’ shying away. And I finally got to him and he said, ‘My father was arguing with my mom again and he’s asking for a divorce—he wants my mom to give him a divorce. And the girls are going to go live with [my father] … and I’m going to stay with my mom. But it’s all my fault they’re getting a divorce. He’s always arguing and getting after her. I hate him. I hate him. I’m going to kill him.’”

Grado scarcely had to be asked a question, so eager was she to recreate a conversation that she insisted she had had with Tim. “He said he hated his dad for making his mother angry and sick,” she testified. “He said, ‘I can’t stand him. He’s not my father. I’m going to burn this house down and I’m going to burn everybody in it.’ I says, ‘Timmy, you’re going to hurt yourself by talking this way.’ He said, ‘I don’t care.’ He says, ‘If my dad’s going to do that to my mom, I’m just going to kill him. I hate him. And I’m going to start a fire. I’m going to burn this whole house down, everybody in it. I don’t care who gets hurt!’

“I said, ‘Not even yourself?’ He said, ‘No, I don’t care.’ And this just kept going on every time he got angry. He always despised his father….”

“When he got angry, how would he react physically?” Moore asked.

“He would throw his fist up in the air and shake and turn all red with a tantrum. And he’d start throwing and banging things in his room. He’d destroy his set of hats he had. He’d just toss them all over on the floor. And I’d go behind him and pick them up the next day. And he’d take his clothes all out of the drawer and he would mix them with the dirty clothes and I would have to pick them up after him again. And this went on after my second year I was there.”

That would have been in 1990 or 1991, when Tim Farrar was only eight or nine years old.

“Mrs. Grado,” Moore asked, “did you ever have any conversations with Tim Farrar about fires and bombs?”

One would have thought she had already delved into the topic of fire, but Phyllis Grado continued, breathlessly. “I asked him where he was getting all this about fires and stuff. He said he read a lot of books, that he was into science and he knew what he was doing. And he had a little wooden box—and he hammered down some nails on it and some wires—
electrical wires
—that were tied together. And he had them plugged into the outlet of the bedroom. And then he had like a little tapping thing on it. He said … ‘If I want to, all I’ve got to do is tap this and that wall will burst into flames because that’s the way I have it set for it to go off.’”

Moore wasn’t keeping pace with his witness. His next question was almost comically late. “Did you ever see him with anything that concerned you … any kind of device, fire device, that concerned you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Matches. He was steady playing with matches. Just striking them, throwing them anywhere where they could catch on fire. Trash cans—”

“Did something ever happen with a trash can, Mrs. Grado?”

“In the basement of his home—he started a fire downstairs where he had his Nintendo.”

“How do you know he started a fire?”

“Because he was awfully quiet,” the witness continued with scarcely a pause for breath. “And I went to check on him … and he had started a fire in the trash can. And I … grabbed the can and I threw it into the shower room in the bathroom, and I told him, ‘Look what you’re doing to me,’ and he says, ‘I don’t care.’”

“Did you ever have any kind of similar experience at your home with Tim?”

“Yes,” Grado said firmly. “I used to take him to my house quite a bit when I cared for them during their summer vacation … and we’d wind up at my house…. One of those times, I left him in the kitchen, and I told Timothy, I said, ‘There’s pop and stuff in the refrigerator. You help yourself to whatever you like.’

“And I went into the living room to watch TV and then pretty soon I heard him laughing again. And I says, ‘Well, what’s he laughing about?’ So I went in there and sure enough, there was my trash can just engulfed in flames. I thought it was going to catch my ceiling because my ceilings are pretty low. So then I just threw water in it and I tossed the can out onto the patio.”

Grado testified that she had caught Tim with a Coke bottle that contained something strong-smelling and had a rag stuck in the neck. She had tried to get it away from him, but he grabbed it and dumped it in the backyard.

“Did he ever tell you what he could do with that bottle?”

“Yeah. He said that was a bomb. He could throw it against a wall and make it explode and start a fire with it—”

“Did he tell you where he learned how to do that?”

“No, he just said that he learned it by reading science books. And he liked to practice stuff like that.”

While Moore had allowed Phyllis Grado to ramble on about Tim and bombs and fires, Morrison attempted to rein her in on cross-examination.

She remembered that she had last worked for the Farrar-Greens in 1991 or 1993. She was not sure now.

“Now, in fact, you had not seen Tim Farrar for a couple of years before this fire, correct?”

“No, I hadn’t.”

“And so, just right off the top here, you don’t have any personal knowledge—”

“Well no, I did see him in the month of December …”

“Just bumped into them? All right. You don’t have any personal knowledge of what happened on October 24, 1995, do you?”

“No—but I don’t
need
to know, because—”

“You answered—”

“—I know
him
—”

“—the question. Thank you, ma’am.” Morrison turned away, but Phyllis Grado was still talking:

“—I know Tim.”

“You’ve answered the question.”

Judge Ruddick attempted to explain to the witness that she could not offer gratuitous statements.

Morrison got Mrs. Grado to admit that Tim had been eight when he was angry with his father and talking about setting fires. “Okay. All right,” he cut in before she took up her monologue once more. “What did you do? Did you call the police department or the fire department when you had these fires over at your house?”

“I didn’t call them at all.”

“Oh, you didn’t?”

“No,” she said, slightly subdued. “I took care of it myself … but my husband said that in the near future ‘Just make sure that he doesn’t get ahold of matches and stuff when he’s here.’”

“And, in fact,” Morrison continued, “you didn’t even tell his parents about that, did you?”

“No, I didn’t tell them. No.”

Phyllis Grado stepped down. How odd that she would not have consulted the parents of an eight-year-old boy who was experimenting with fire. She had not been a believable witness. What she said about Tim was upsetting, but her manner blunted the effect of her testimony.

The courtroom waited. Celeste Walker would naturally be the next witness. People glanced at the double doors to the hall. No one came through them. Moore told Judge Ruddick that the defense was resting. Celeste would not have to answer the subpoena the defense had issued. Moore would not explore her relationship with Mike, which the prosecution contended was Debora’s primary motive for setting the fire that had killed her children. Nor would Moore offer any evidence that it was Tim who had poisoned his father.

***

The preliminary hearing was over. And now it was up to Judge Ruddick. If he found there was not enough evidence against Debora Green to bind her over for trial, she could walk free. If there should be a trial, Paul Morrison wanted to include all the charges against Debora as part of a pattern. As he saw it, the poisoning and the arson murders were “inexorably entwined,” evolving from a single motive, and therefore should be tried as one case. “It’s our theory,” Morrison told the judge, “that, frankly, those children were killed by Debora Green because Mike Farrar was no longer available to her. We’re arguing, Judge, and in fact have pled this case as such—these transactions are all related to one another by motive, if not by plan.”

Moore wanted to sever the poisonings from the arson. “We intend to challenge that,” he told the judge. “But the evidence the State produced is that Debora Green, they say, attempted to murder Michael Farrar by poisoning, a
wholly
different method and manner of murder, if you will, than arson and a person burning to death in a fire….”

Judge Ruddick had listened carefully to both the prosecution and the defense for almost four days and he was ready to make his ruling. “Based on the evidence that’s been presented at preliminary hearing,” he said, “I
do
find that the crime of capital murder as defined in K.S.A. 21-3439(a)(6)
was
committed in Johnson County, Kansas, on or about the twenty-fourth day of October, 1995. That is Count I of the Amended Complaint. There is probable cause to believe that the defendant in this case committed that crime, and she is therefore bound over under Count I.” (This was the charge of killing Kelly.)

Debora allowed no emotion to cross her face as she heard she would be tried for murder. Ellen, however, looked stricken. She had promised Lissa that she would take care of her mother; a murder trial meant this would be increasingly more difficult.

There was more. Judge Ruddick also found probable cause to try Debora on four other charges: a second charge of capital murder, (for killing Tim) and charges of aggravated arson, attempted murder, and attempted capital murder. The State would now have to prove to a jury of Debora’s peers that she had deliberately set fire to her own house, thus killing two of her children, and attempting to kill a third—and that she had meant to kill her husband with poison.

Judge Ruddick had done his best to keep potential jurors from being prejudiced by hearing or reading everything that had been presented in the preliminary hearing. But there was no way of knowing in February who might receive a jury summons in June or July. The public had not heard Debora’s voice or seen her alternately blasé and furious image on the videotape recorded the morning of the fire in the Prairie Village police station. Judge Ruddick had not prevented reporters from printing or repeating those phrases they had captured in their notes, but without the sound of Debora’s voice, and her facial expressions, they would not be nearly as prejudicial as the tape itself.

Judge Ruddick said he would delay his decision about whether there would be separate trials—one for murder by arson, another for attempted murder by poisoning. Morrison was not prepared to say whether he would seek the death penalty if the defendant were found guilty.