Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (41 page)

“After counseling with my attorneys,” she began, “I plead no contest to all charges. I understand the court will find me guilty on all counts. I am aware that the State can produce substantial evidence that I set the fire that caused the death of my children. My attorneys are ready, willing, and able to present evidence that I was not in control of myself when Tim and Kelly died.”

The courtroom was very quiet. Each word dropped like a stone into water, sinking to the bottom. Debora was very thin, her complexion sallow from months behind bars; the pinkish sweater she had worn to her preliminary hearing in January hung on her now.

“However true that may be,” she continued, “defending myself at trial on these charges would only compound the suffering of my family, and my daughter, Lissa. I love my family very much. I never meant to harm my children, but I accept the fact that I will be punished harshly. I believe that it is best to end this now, so that we can begin to heal from our horrible loss.”

Debora had not actually admitted her guilt; she had only acknowledged that she believed there was enough evidence against her to result in a conviction.

“Dr. Green,” Judge Ruddick asked, “is your plea of no contest entered as to each and every count of the Amended Complaint, which is five counts?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“Dr. Green, I accept your plea as to each count. I find that plea to be voluntarily entered. I find that plea to be intelligently given and I find a factual basis exists for your plea on each count. I therefore find you guilty on each count of the Amended Complaint.”

And then it was over. Although formal sentencing would come next, the murder and arson and poisoning trial of Debora Green had shrunk to this short hearing.

The man who had been her husband for so many years watched silently from the back of the courtroom, his head swathed in bandages, his right eye purple and swollen. Although Mike was only five days past his surgery, he had flown home so that he might be present to hear Debora’s plea. Beyond keeping his promise to Paul Morrison, it was vital, somehow, that he hear her say the words that came as close to admitting she had killed their oldest child and their youngest child as she would allow herself to do.

A subdued press conference took place after Debora’s
Alford
plea. Answering reporters’ questions, Mike obviously felt no sense of triumph. The losses were still losses. “Despite what she did,” he said quietly, “this is still a human being. I was married to her for sixteen years….”

Paul Morrison said he had talked with Mike about accepting the plea agreement. “We decided this would be the best way to protect Lissa and still punish Mrs. Green.” Dennis Moore said that, although Debora had seemed calm in the courtroom, she had sobbed as she walked out. “Debora Green,” he said, “is a caring, living, breathing, human being. She’s not the monster that comes out of the stuff the prosecution was presenting.”

Paul Morrison was disciplined about keeping in shape, although most nights it was ten or later when he got to the gym. On this night, of all nights, he felt the need to work off the tension that had built steadily over the past six months. In a sense, he had trained hard for a race he would never run. No one but a trial lawyer would understand that feeling.

On that night in April, Morrison was at the gym, and possibly putting himself through a stiffer sequence of exercises than usual. He saw one of the firefighters who had been at the fire on Canterbury Court. “He came up to me and said, ‘My God, Morrison—what are you doing here
tonight
? Why aren’t you out boozin’ it up or something? Why aren’t you celebrating?’

“I told him, ‘Well, it’s nice that we’ve got a fair completion on this thing—but
I’m
really disappointed.’ I’m not sure if he understood that.

“My staff and I went back and forth with that plea. You don’t know if it’s going to happen or not, and then it happens,” Morrison recalled with a grimace, “and a pall kind of settles over you for a couple of days. You were ready to go, ready to go into battle. You’re a racehorse at the starting gate. And then it’s over—and it’s ‘Stand down.’”

In all probability, Morrison would have won his case. It was for Lissa’s sake that he agreed to the plea bargain. What was important was that Debora Green was going to prison for a hard forty.

44

W
hen unthinkable crimes are committed, the question of why? always arises. What was it about Debora Green that made her violate one of the strongest human instincts: mother love? A partial answer to that question came during her sentencing, on May 30, 1996.

Nothing that was said would make any difference in Debora’s sentence. She had agreed to serve forty years in a Kansas penitentiary rather than go to trial. She wasn’t insane; she had been interviewed and tested by psychiatrists and psychologists to determine whether she met the legal definition of insanity. Had she known the difference between right and wrong at the time of her alleged crime? Did she know the difference in the months after her children perished? The answer was yes.

Marilyn Hutchinson, the defense psychologist, had spent a great deal of time with Debora during her incarceration in the Johnson County Adult Detention Center. In large part, it was her evaluation of Debora’s state of mind that had convinced the defense to plea-bargain. Now she tried to explain what had driven Debora to arson, murder, and poisoning. Sean O’Brien, the defense lawyer who specialized in clients who faced the death penalty, questioned her.

“Have you had contact with Dr. Debora Green in this case?” O’Brien asked.

“I certainly have,” Dr. Hutchinson replied. “My first contact with her was on a court-appointed competency-to-stand-trial evaluation. I met with her for about two to two and a half hours on February 27, 1996. Subsequently, I met with her again for another two and a half hours on April 13 at the request of her private attorneys when they were asking me to evaluate her competency to plead … Since that time, I have met with her twice weekly conducting psychotherapy for her at her request, for a total of eighteen hours that I’ve met with her.”

Dr. Hutchinson testified that she had not had access to Debora’s medical records, but that she had spoken with Dr. Stamati of Menninger’s regarding her brief commitment there. “That had been initiated by her husband because he was concerned about the possibility of her either harming herself or her children. At the time she was admitted to Menninger’s, however, because she was not expressing anything of a verbal nature about that aggressiveness, there was not a commitment past the initial twenty-four hours. It did not meet the legal criteria for involuntary commitment.”

Dr. Hutchinson said that in assessing Debora’s competency she administered a number of tests, including the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and subscales from the Wechsler Memory Scale. Debora, of course, had scored almost off the scale on intelligence. “I also used the competencies as defined by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,” Dr. Hutchinson testified, “to determine what her competency to stand trial was. I did that through both verbal and paper and pencil instruments.”

The DHEW definition of competency included thirteen factors. The person being evaluated has to: “realistically consider possible defenses to the crime charged; manage his/her own behavior at a trial setting; be able to relate to his/her attorney; be able to participate with his/her attorney in planning a defense; understand the roles of the participants in the trial (know who the judge, jury, prosecutor, witnesses, defense attorney, etc., are); understand typical court procedures; appreciate the charges that he/she faces; appreciate the nature and range of possible penalties; perceive realistically the likely outcome of a trial; provide his/ her attorney with available pertinent facts; be able to testify relevantly; and be motivated toward self-defense.”

“Can you briefly describe your findings as a result of that first competency evaluation?” O’Brien asked.

“About fifty percent of those criteria are really cognitive tasks,” Dr. Hutchinson said. “What does a judge do? What happens after you get a direct examination? The kind of thing that people pick up from watching television and reading accounts in the newspaper—just a common working knowledge of what is a trial like.”

Dr. Hutchinson explained that some competency questions are “purely emotional. Can the person manage their behavior during the trial? Are they likely to get up and scream or are they going to be unable to stop crying[?] … The other one that I see as purely emotional is: Is the person motivated toward self-defense? And I found that in both of those purely emotional ones and in the ones that were purely cognitive, she was competent.”

However, some aspects of Debora’s personality disturbed Dr. Hutchinson during the assessment of her competency to stand trial. All these troubling areas came back to a level of emotional capability that Debora seemed to lack. “When I asked an emotional question, she was never able to give more than a minimal yes or no response, without any kind of elaboration. She described to me that when she begins to get emotional, her long-term strategy is to shut down or tune out—really not even to listen to what is being said—so that she wouldn’t become overwhelmed with emotion.”

Would Debora be able to participate in planning legal strategy? If she “shut down” her mind while they were testifying, could she challenge prosecution witnesses? In the same vein, could she herself testify with any relevance? Although the vast majority of murder defendants never take the stand—to avoid probing questions from the prosecution—Dr. Hutchinson wondered what would happen if Debora was faced with questions that evoked feelings she wanted to shut out.

In the end, she had concluded that Debora was competent to stand trial, within the prescribed parameters. Later, when Dennis Moore, Kevin Moriarty, and Sean O’Brien were discussing the possibility of a no-contest plea with Debora, they asked Dr. Hutchinson to examine her again. “They needed another opinion about whether she was emotionally getting this—well enough to make such a plea.”

And so Dr. Hutchinson had come back into Debora’s life. “I met with her again for about two and a half hours, and we talked about the consequences that she saw to her relationship with Lissa [if she pled no contest]. About the consequences of it [her plea], really meaning that her life as she had known it, as she had thought about her life in the future, would be coming to an end. I observed that she was still very emotionally blunted, emotionally flat, that during the entire time there were only … ten to fifteen seconds of breakthrough crying. That was pretty minimal considering the topic…. However, she was intellectually understanding it, and, to the best of her ability, she was processing it emotionally.”

By the time of this second evaluation, Dr. Hutchinson had an affidavit from Dr. Stamati at Menninger’s, along with Debora’s records from her brief stay there. “I found that she was admitted to Menninger’s with a diagnosis of either major depression or possibly bipolar depression, with suicidal impulses. It was noted that she was doing a great deal of binge drinking…. She was given medicine for gastrointestinal problems that were the result of the intense drinking she had done.”

Debora had told Dr. Stamati that the violence between her son and her husband had made life very difficult for her. But probably the most compelling information to come from Dr. Hutchinson’s testimony was about Debora’s score on a GAF (Global Assessment Function), a test of an individual’s ability to exist, interact,
cope
with the world he or she lives in.

“It was noted,” Dr. Hutchinson said, “that she had a Global Assessment Function of 35. And this is on a scale of 1 to 100. Short of normal, walking-around functioning for most people is 80 to 85. And she was given a rating of 35. That kind of rating [indicates] there were either gross reality disturbances [or] gross impairment in communication and/ or most aspects of functioning….” That meant that at the time of Debora’s brief sojourn at Menninger’s in late September, a month before she set fire to her own home, she was functioning “minimally” on a daily basis.

But why? She was not the first—or the last—woman whose husband wanted a divorce. She was assured of an income with which she could maintain an upscale lifestyle, even if she didn’t go back to work. She had a medical degree, her children were all in school, and she had the ability, seemingly, to make a handsome living on her own. She could even have made the mortgage payments on the Canterbury Court home.

Sean O’Brien asked Dr. Hutchinson what her psychological findings about Debora were. “I find that Debora has a very limited internal self—or ego,” she said. “Whatever it is inside that makes us a person, who we are—that comes from her childhood and comes from our genetics, that really is the driving force of our personality—I found that ego or self within Debora is a very, very, immature person. She is really quite unable to handle most emotional experiences, or to handle those things that require emotional responses. So she has the emotional capabilities of a very young child—even younger than a toddler, perhaps—in her ability to process or sustain emotion.”

That was a shocker. Could a woman with an IQ of 165 and a biting, facetious wit, a woman who had zipped through college and medical school, be a child emotionally?

Hutchinson’s diagnosis was that Debora had a “schizoid personality. And it’s really the ‘empty inside’ diagnosis,” she explained. “There is no self in there. And consequently, people learn to imitate what it’s like to be a human being. They imitate what it’s like to have relationships. They imitate or pretend to be like the people they see around them.

“I also learned that because of some life experiences that happened to her as a preadolescent, that at that age, her ability to imitate became further compromised,” Dr. Hutchinson further testified. “So, overall, although she was pretending to be an adult, really she had the sort of outside social skills of a ten-year-old, and the inside emotional capability of a one-year-old. And we have those two trying to walk around and pretend to be a grown-up.

“Unfortunately and fortunately
both
,” Dr. Hutchinson continued, “because of her intellect, she was able to mask and able to get along in the world. She was not a troublemaker. People didn’t recognize … the intense amount of emotional difficulty she was having.”

When O’Brien asked what external factors had affected Debora’s mental condition, Dr. Hutchinson cited the problems in the marriage, the “violence” between Mike and Tim, and the fact that Mike was leaving her. “It was her understanding that Dr. Farrar had promised he would never leave again the last time that he had left the marriage. And so when he began coming back and then leaving again … she became extremely distressed…. Her emotions about the end of that marriage were more than she could handle.”

“In performing your evaluation of Debora’s competence, did you discuss her decision to enter a plea of no contest?” O’Brien asked.

“I did.”

“And what did you find her motivation to be?”

“Predominantly, her motivation was to end the trauma and drama for her daughter, Lissa. She felt that things needed to settle down so Lissa could have her life again. Secondly, I think she had given a great deal of thought about what it would be like if she were convicted to a death sentence—what that would be like for her daughter. I think she had some information about other children whose parents were in that situation and how difficult it was for them. And,” Dr. Hutchinson continued, “I also saw some healthy self-preservation operating, which is the fear of facing a death penalty for herself. She was aware that there were certainly some mental health defenses that could have been advanced … and she also understood that juries don’t usually listen or respond favorably to mental health defenses regarding the killing of children.”

“Doctor, in your examination of Debora, did you uncover any factor that would cause you to believe that she couldn’t knowingly and voluntarily enter into this agreement?”

“I certainly had some concerns when I first met her—that were mitigated a bit at the time of my second evaluation,” Dr. Hutchinson said. “For the first several months after the fire, it was her fairly standard coping mechanism to pretend the fire hadn’t ever existed. And I find that on some occasions, she still copes with this tragedy that way. So she was pretty numb—and although not fully catatonic, was close to that state prior to some of our regular contacts.”

“What do you mean by ‘catatonic’?”

“Catatonic [catatonia] is a defense an individual will use where they become deaf and dumb and are literally unable to respond to the world externally because the … situation they’re in is just too overwhelming for them. Debora, at times, had that kind of feel about her, although she was minimally responsive.

“Since then … I find that she is able to express some very brief moments of emotions. She is experiencing emotions of profound grief. She was terribly confused about how this all happened. She’s very remorseful about her daughter’s suffering and about the loss of her other two children in this tragedy. And she’s very guilty that she wasn’t somehow able to stop the terrible downward spiral that her family was in—to predict how it might end up.”

Marilyn Hutchinson, like Ellen Ryan, perceived Debora as a nearly helpless “child.” She ended her testimony by saying that Debora was as healthy at that moment as she had been at any time in the last year. “It’s clear to me that she is not sociopathic and it’s certainly clear to me that she’s not an evil person. I see her struggling … to come to terms with her emotions and that she’s moved from a time of being out of control prior to the fire to being numb and disconnected after the fire, and now she’s in a very profound state of remorse and grief, trying to deal with what all happened.”