Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (42 page)

O’Brien thanked Dr. Hutchinson for her diagnosis of what had gone wrong in Debora’s life, or rather, for her diagnosis of the result of some early trauma.

At that moment, Dennis Moore rose to say that Debora had a statement that she wanted to read at an “appropriate time” before her sentence was pronounced.

“You’re welcome to go ahead,” Judge Peter Ruddick said.

All eyes in the courtroom were focused on Debora as she began to read her statement. She looked twenty years older than she had five months earlier. “The death of a child,” she began. “
any
child, under
any
circumstances, is a terrible human tragedy. The death of these children under these circumstances is a tragedy almost too great to bear. It is nevertheless a tragedy that I must bear for the rest of my life, and one for which I also must bear responsibility. Nothing that I can do or that can be done to me can bring my children back. In accepting responsibility for this crime, I recognize that I must face and accept the punishment as judged by the court and must also face the sorrow of the loss of my children and the reality of my role in their deaths.

“For many, the administration of punishment for crimes is the primary role of the criminal court system. Others see deterrence of future crimes as the most important result of criminal punishment. I ask that you look beyond even this basic aspect of deterrence and somehow the lesson that can be learned from this tragedy is that these deaths might well have been prevented.

“Alcohol, psychiatric illness and, even more, basic communications failure that were in our family set the stage for this tragedy. I do not seek to use this fact to escape my personal responsibility. I do hope—I
do
hope, however, that the recognition of these problems and the fact that the signs of these problems could have led to earlier intervention will be a lesson learned from these tragic deaths.

“Alcohol abuse and the psychiatric problems that both lead to alcohol abuse, and spring from it, are treatable diseases. They are not, however, diseases for which the afflicted person will readily seek help on their own. Many of you know in your own lives of persons in danger from these illnesses.

“It is never easy to intervene in the life of another. I would ask that you look at these opportunities for intervention in your own lives and take the steps that must be taken to salvage those lives in danger before it is too late—as it has become for me and my family.

“My desire in taking this course of action is to spare Lissa and the rest of my family any further trauma. Two members of my family are gone forever and those who survive will never be the same. It is my hope that today marks a new beginning for all, and, as I said, that we can all begin the process of healing.”

Debora was crying as she finished her statement, and she brought her hand up to cover her face. It was an important statement, and a beautifully written one. She had not, however, written it herself; it was a product of a collaboration, not with Ellen Ryan, but with another attorney whose philosophies were in line with Ellen’s. Only time would tell if Debora truly believed in the sentiments she had expressed.

Judge Ruddick was now ready to sentence Debora. He ordered her to serve two forty-year prison terms, to run concurrently but without possibility of parole. He added an “aggravating circumstances” clause: “I specifically find that the defendant knowingly or purposely killed or created a great risk of death to more than one person and that the defendant committed the crime in an especially heinous, atrocious or cruel manner.” He also added two sentences of ninety-seven months each, and one of forty-nine months for the crimes against Lissa and Mike, which were moot because they would run concurrently with the “hard forty.”

Judge Ruddick subtracted 191 days for time Debora had already spent in jail. That meant she now faced imprisonment of thirty-nine years, five months, and nineteen days. She was ordered into the custody of the Kansas Department of Corrections and would soon be transferred to the Topeka Correctional Institute in Topeka, Kansas, to begin the rest of her life.

45

M
ike was in the courtroom the day Debora was sentenced to prison. His eye was no longer discolored, but he had a deep scar on the right side of his forehead and his shaved head was just beginning to show a bit of stubble. He, too, had prepared a statement—one he had written himself—but in the end, he decided not to read it. It had been cathartic enough for him to write it, and he didn’t want to “pile on” Debora. Listening to Dr. Hutchinson’s evaluation of her personality, seeing her so diminished, he folded his statement and put it away. But he kept it; in a way, it was his own memorial to his lost children.

“Approximately one year ago,” it began, “my wife, Debora Green, and my son, Tim, and I all looked forward to a school trip visiting the Amazon River in Peru and Inca ruins in the Peruvian Andes. It was truly the trip of a lifetime and enjoyed by all. Unfortunately, it was the last great adventure in life for both Tim and Debora. While the trip itself had really very little to do with subsequent events, it now stands as an icon for a tragedy that will never be fully understood.

“October 24, 1995, took two innocent, promising young lives from all of us. Tim was a strong young man, both mentally and physically. He lived his life with vigor and the orneriness of a young teenaged boy, yet he had the courage to stand up to his peers when necessary and defend weaker children. This was surely an unusual and admirable trait in a young man. He came by his strong will honestly and because of this and my own similar attitudes, a stormy relationship between us was sometimes present. Regrettably, physical altercations occurred on a few occasions. For this, I take full responsibility. I am very proud of who Tim was. There is no credible evidence that he was ever involved in any part of the tragic events that ultimately cost him his life, and I will never believe that he was in any way responsible.

“Kelly was a beautiful, loving child with tremendous maturity and insight despite her age. She was able to intellectually understand the turmoil of divorce and family discord, and served as the sole calming influence in a very dysfunctional situation. I have no doubt that Kelly would have lived to be a great person, a leader among humankind, someone who would have been kind and generous. The extent of her loss will never be fully realized.

“Perhaps the tragedy most overlooked in all of this is the person Debora Green has come to be. She is exceedingly bright and can be witty and vivacious. However, despite her brilliance, she was unable to manage the usual stresses of being a wife and mother, let alone those of being a physician. Her performance should have been exemplary, but serious—yet undefined—psychological flaws resulted in deadly behavior. Life is not easy for any of us and clearly I have made my fair share of mistakes as a husband and father. Nevertheless, these mistakes and pursuance of a divorce do not justify attempted murder and murder.

“I will never know for sure if Debora truly intended to kill me, either as a punishment or for insurance reasons, or if she simply meant only to physically torture me for my actions and desire for divorce. She may have simply wished to gain sympathy as a doting and loving wife, caring for me while I was critically ill.

“It is, however, clear to me that during a few hours on October 24, 1995, Debora intended to kill our children in order to prevent me from taking them from her. It was more acceptable for her to lose her children by her own hand than have them taken away by someone else due to her failure as a mother. I also strongly suspect that she again wished to punish me by killing those most dear to me. I do not believe that the children’s murders were premeditated. At this point, I do believe that she feels remorse for her actions and I do believe that she genuinely loves Lissa. It is therefore, despicable and incomprehensible that Debora would allow or encourage her attorneys to blame these crimes on Tim in order to absolve herself.”

Mike had written far into the night, finally putting his feelings down. “Predicting criminal human behavior is one of the most difficult tasks our society tries to perform. Few people thought Debora was likely to murder her children. Despite some apparent mental illness that Debora suffered, I certainly never anticipated a homicidal predisposition. Obviously, neither did professionals trained to identify, evaluate, and treat psychiatric disorders. Debora is truly a victim in that the system failed by not being able to force her to remain hospitalized and obtain desperately needed, intensive psychiatric evaluation and care, therapy that could have potentially averted this disaster.

“Of course, the most important question of all is what will happen to Lissa as a result of all of this? How will she deal with her adolescent and teenage years? Later in life, how will she function when she is contemplating marriage, a family, a career? Will she ever be able to love a man openly and experience the intimacy necessary to sustain a lasting relationship? Will she ever be able to nurture her children?”

For Mike, a healer by profession, any discussions of the morality of capital punishment had been merely philosophical—until now. He had always been a proponent of harsh punishment for crimes, and of the death penalty. But he was glad that Debora would not be executed, although some of his friends had told him, “This is too good for her.” Others had felt that a forty-year sentence was too severe.

“Harsher punishment to exact vengeance,” Mike wrote, “serves no real purpose…. Tim and Kelly are still dead, the potential that should have been realized in Debora’s life is still lost, and Lissa will still struggle. A lesser punishment, however, is not fair to society. Ultimately, I will recover from my health problems and hopefully resume a reasonably normal life. I hope that Debora can find a new beginning. I know that I can forgive her if she does. Although I hate what she has done, I do not hate her. Mostly, I feel sorry for her. However, at some point, I do expect Debora to say that she is sorry for what she has done; that she made a terrible mistake; that Timothy was an honorable young man and that blaming him for her actions was morally wrong. I expect the manipulation, the lying, and the evil that have become her primary method of dealing with life to end.

“Debora told me on several occasions prior to the fire that I would be sorry and unhappy forever if I left her. She is correct in that I am sad and unhappy because of the ensuing tragedy, but I refuse to remain paralyzed by sorrow and grief, and I will not allow my life and Lissa’s life to be destroyed.

“There is still some good that comes from any situation, however horrific. I feel that I have matured and gained certain unique perspectives that will make me a better human being. I have grown to know and understand Lissa better than ever before. There is certainly little adversity left in life that Lissa will have to face that matches what she has been through already. I have witnessed our government, represented by Mr. Morrison and his staff, and the Prairie Village police and others, exhibit thoroughness, integrity, sensitivity, and professionalism….

“Finally,”—Mike had written these last lines doubting he could read them in court without crying—“it appears that Tim’s suffering at the end was short-lived, and that Kelly never awakened to experience pain and panic. Thankfully, neither knew that their mother killed them….”

By the time Mike wrote that statement, he had made some difficult and important decisions about his life. He and Celeste were no longer together, and the parting had not been a friendly one. “He told me that he wanted to break up on May eighteenth,” Celeste recalled with bitterness, “the day before Mother’s Day. Right up until that day, he had still been calling me four times a day.”

Celeste, who felt burned by Mike’s decision, would insist that the breakup was sudden, and it was, but she had long had some sense that Mike was pulling away. She had been suspicious of women he mentioned to her, of any female friend he saw, and she had not really trusted him or his love. “I began to think that I was only good to use through the trial, and he was tired of me,” she said.

Of course, the trial had never taken place. But if it had, Celeste might have been more a detriment to Mike’s image than an enhancement. She was a “scarlet woman,” in many people’s eyes, and she probably would have been one of the Defense’s star witnesses.

Since coming to live with Mike, Lissa had been upset by Celeste’s presence. Celeste was a reminder of the bad days when Debora told Lissa that Celeste had taken their father away. And Debora had also told Lissa that Celeste had killed her own husband. That was untrue, but it was imprinted on Lissa’s mind. The situation was intolerable; when Mike wanted to see Celeste, he felt he was betraying Lissa. But in the end, their breakup probably came down to Mike’s need to rid himself of pain and loss. It is doubtful that he and Celeste could ever have looked at each other without remembering Tim and Kelly—and John.

Celeste’s legion of friends supported her, and so did her sister, who had never approved of Mike in the first place. “The only one who completely believed that Mike was right for me was Carolyn Stafford,” Celeste remembered. “She and I thought it was the perfect romance. After it was over, my other friends said that it was better this way.”

Better, perhaps, but heartbreaking. Celeste decided that she could no longer stay in Johnson County—or in Kansas at all. If she did, she would always be watching for Mike. She would have to force herself not to glance over from the freeway to see if his red truck was parked in front of his town house. In a way, losing Mike had thrown her into delayed grief for John. Until now, she had managed to blunt the worst pain because Mike needed her. Now, for the first time in two decades, she had no man in her life.

It was difficult for Celeste to leave her mother and her friends. She spent time in her backyard, wondering if she could take along cuttings of the plants she had cared for. It didn’t matter; she and her sons needed to leave. She put her house on the market.

Debora was transferred to an “isolation pod” in the I-MAX section of the Topeka Correctional Facility. Perhaps her last glimpse of freedom came along the Kansas Turnpike, Route 70, during the trip of some 60 miles from Olathe. The route passed through Lawrence, site of the University of Kansas, and the city where Mike was born.

The Kansas Turnpike is not particularly scenic. Travelers can stop at combination fast-food restaurants and gas stations, but, of course, the vehicle that carried Debora to prison did not stop. She had been to Topeka only eight months before, when she voluntarily committed herself to the Menninger Clinic. Her new living quarters would be far less plush.

The prisoner van went through the last toll booth before Topeka and almost immediately turned right. The route to the women’s section of the Topeka Correctional Facility led away from the Beltway that circles Topeka, through scrubby trees, and then turned left onto Southeast Rice Road.

The prison itself sat on the left side of the road, across from a neighborhood of small, nondescript houses. Close to the road were picnic tables and swings, and, beyond that, a reception building. But the van bringing Debora followed a meandering prison road that cut off to the right, past massive reddish stone buildings that had weathered decade after decade of Kansas winters and summers, up to a low building with fences and cages and razor wire and a tower where a guard watched. Dr. Debora Jones Green was now Prisoner #63205.

Her hard forty began in isolation. She could have no visitors as she acclimated to prison, took the mental and physical tests required of all those in the “fish tank,” and prepared for her time in the most secure facility on the prison’s grounds.

If the Peru trip had been an “icon,” as Mike had called it in his unread statement, it was a marker too. Just a year ago, Debora and Mike had appeared to be totally “married,” and Debora had been so witty and hilarious that she kept everyone on the “dream trip” laughing. In isolation, she must have dwelled on thoughts of all she had thrown away, and dreamed about her other life as she slept.

In every sense, her life had turned to ashes.

Mike faced yet another surgery. In June, he had journeyed to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to undergo tests on his heart and brain. Some of the results had been encouraging. The neurological tests, the neuropsychiatric tests, and the CAT scans of his brain were all normal. However, the treadmill test for oxygen consumption and the echocardiogram reconfirmed that his heart’s mitral valve was damaged. Mike knew the inevitable progression of such a condition. Without open-heart surgery to close the damaged valve, he would develop congestive heart failure, which would result in irreversible heart damage. But he had to recover from his brain surgery before he could undergo the mitral valve repair. He was weak, but he was impatient. He wanted to get back to work; it had been eight months now, and he missed his practice.

Two months later, Mike was admitted to the Mayo Clinic; and on August 2, he underwent surgery for mitral valve repair. The operation seemed to go well and Mike was released to return home. But back in Kansas then he suffered a frightening and often fatal complication: cardiac tamponade.