Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (12 page)

Now, in Debora’s purse, he had found what appeared to be a “practice” letter in her handwriting. What a grotesquely childish thing for her to do. After years of arguments, did she really think that an anonymous letter was going to make him change his mind? But clearly she had worked hard over that anonymous letter, producing a handwritten draft and then typing it on the computer.

He looked at the seed packets again. And now he saw the warning: castor beans were extremely toxic and were not to be taken internally. He stared blankly at the seed packets. Was it possible that Debora, who insisted that she could make a better home for him if he would only stay, was thinking about landscaping? It seemed totally unlike her, but lately everything she did was unlike what she had done before, as if she were on a slowly revolving platform, showing a slightly new side of her self each time the mechanism moved. The only thing recognizable about Debora were her temper tantrums. Those she seemed unable to change.

Fishing deeper into the roomy bag, Mike came up with three empty vials of potassium chloride, along with three used syringes. Potassium chloride is a common substance—as common as salt (which it basically is). It can be both life-giving and life-threatening, depending on the dosage. It is given to people suffering from heat prostration or profuse vomiting, to reestablish electrolyte balance. But too much potassium can throw the heart into a fatal arrhythmia. When it is found in syringes, it is usually to be added to an IV line.

Mike’s pik line hadn’t worked very well. “It wouldn’t run,” he said, “so after three days, I asked my doctor to take it out and he did.” But if Debora truly hated him enough, she could easily have killed him as he slept: all she had to do was inject the potassium chloride into the pik line. He would never have felt it. But she hadn’t done that. As far as he knew, she had only kept the intravenous nutrients and the massive doses of vitamins flowing into his veins, just as his doctors had ordered.

With every reason now to be suspicious, Mike wondered if his wife had been injecting the potassium chloride into the nutrient bag at the same time she injected the multivitamins. She had always added the vitamins out of his sight, in the rec room. That would account for the three used potassium vials and syringes; she might have used them during the three days the pik line was in. But the potassium would have been too diluted in the bag to harm him.

Mike was feeling better; he was able to eat without vomiting now, and he was even gaining a little weight. Maybe he was imagining the worst. Maybe Debora hadn’t meant the potassium chloride for him at all. She had been so abjectly miserable; maybe she meant to inject herself. She had said she wanted to die, had threatened to kill herself.

The castor beans were more of a mystery. Crumpled inside the tote-bag purse, Mike found a receipt from the Earl May Garden Center in Olathe, twenty minutes south of Prairie Village. The receipt, for several packets of seeds, was dated August 7, 1995.

Mike knew nothing at all about castor beans, but he planned to find out more. He put the seed packets, the used syringes, and the empty vials that had once held potassium chloride in a plastic bag and hid them in his closet.

12

I
n the wake of John Walker’s suicide, those who had been close to him tried to pull their lives into some kind of order. Celeste’s sister, Jan Johnson,
^*
flew to Kansas to help her. During her visit, she had a very odd conversation with Mike. As Jan recalled later, Celeste took her to meet him at a park near her home. Jan did not approve of Celeste’s affair with Mike, and she was prepared to dislike him. “I was against the whole thing,” she said, “because it was based on dishonesty. There was no honor in it, and Celeste had told him the way I felt.”

But Celeste believed in Mike. She had confided to Jan that he had told her she was “the love of his life,” that he “loved her more than life itself.”

Jan was dubious. “Maybe if he’d told you that after a year, I’d believe it,” she said. “But, Celeste, he can’t love you, he doesn’t
know
you well enough to say that.”

When they met in the park, Jan felt that Mike was trying to charm her. But she was not about to be charmed. And one thing that he said, an embarrassing gaffe, would stay with her forever. “He was telling us about this teenager named Jared
^*
who had been on the Peru trip and how Jared’s parents had divorced,” Jan recalled. “And Mike said that Jared was willing to talk to Tim and let him know that life after divorce was okay—that Jared had been through this and survived. And then Mike said that he could ask Jared to talk to Celeste’s boy Brett, too, about divorce, if she liked. And Celeste said,
‘What?’
And then Mike said, ‘Well, Brett is his name, isn’t it?’”

Of course, what had shocked Jan and Celeste was that Mike had completely forgotten: Celeste’s sons were not dealing with divorce—they were trying to cope with their father’s suicide.

“Divorce?” Celeste asked, as Mike stared at her.
“Divorce?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mike said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Jan believed that Mike had already forgotten that John was dead—that it was so unimportant to him, it had slipped his mind. When he apologized for his heedless suggestion, she didn’t want to hear it. She wanted her sister away from Mike, even though Celeste was clearly infatuated with him.

But nothing Jan could say would dissuade Celeste. Mike needed her, and she needed him. They hoped to stay together with every force in the universe pulling them apart. They were trying to build a stable relationship on a crumbling foundation: John was dead, and Debora seemed to be going insane.

Mike was worried about the castor-bean packets he had found in Debora’s purse. Finally, on Monday, September 25, he asked her why she had them.

“I’m going to plant them,” she said.

“That’s baloney, Deb. I don’t believe that. You’ve never planted a seed in your life.”

She turned away from him, dismissing the subject, but he wouldn’t let it go. “Deb, what were you going to do with those seeds?”

“All right—if you have to know,” she said. “I was going to use them to commit suicide.”

Mike looked at his wife and wondered whether she was telling the truth. Things were getting so weird in their house; Debora was more out of control than he had ever seen her before. Nothing she did would really surprise him. But clearly they would never be able to get along; if either of them was to get back to normal, he knew he would have to leave the house.

Debora had told him over and over that she would not allow that, that she would kill herself first. And he was beginning to believe her. But it didn’t have to be this way, he thought. They could separate and still take care of their children. And the kids loved Debora very much. He could not bear the thought of their losing their mother to suicide. He had seen the terrible anguish in Celeste’s home after her husband took his life. Mike didn’t want Tim, Lissa, and Kelly to suffer that way.

However, as the day progressed, Debora’s behavior became so erratic, her drinking so heavy, that Mike realized he had to do something. He called the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, an hour’s drive away, and asked about the steps involved in arranging for voluntary or involuntary commitment. If Debora didn’t get some help to stop her downward spiral, he didn’t know what would become of their family.

Throughout that Monday, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Debora was behaving like a madwoman. Mike finally, reluctantly, called the Prairie Village Police Department, told the operator that he had serious concerns about the mental health of his wife, and asked for help.

All working police officers will acknowledge that “mentally disturbed subject” is one of the most potentially dangerous calls that ever come over their radios. Next to it is “family beef.” Police dread receiving these two calls because they have little information going in. Some mentally disturbed people are meek and noncombative; others are quite capable of killing the police who respond, and have no compunction about doing so. Family fights are almost as unpredictable.

Sergeant Wes Jordan of the Prairie Village Police Department was supervising patrol units in his sector during the evening shift on Monday night, and protocol for “mental” calls from the dispatcher dictated that a sergeant accompany the patrol units responding. The address given was 7517 Canterbury Court, not a neighborhood where police were called very often.

Jordan turned right off Seventy-fifth, following one of his men, Officer Kyle Shipps. It was 9:25
P.M.
when they pulled up. A man stepped out of the impressive house as if he had been waiting for them. They learned that he was Dr. Michael Farrar. Two girls and a boy were in the entryway. “They were all huddled together there,” Jordan recalled. “They were all shaken. There were a few tears also. [The man] was visibly shaken. He was upset about the whole situation.”

The youngest child, a little blond girl about five or six, sobbed inconsolably while the older children tried to comfort her. This was the kind of call that good cops hate: seeing a family in such distress. It was the same whether they went to a hovel or a million-dollar house like this one.

Mike explained to the officers that he wanted to commit his wife and had made all the arrangements necessary for her admission to the Menninger Clinic. He told Sergeant Jordan and Officer Shipps that his wife had been threatening suicide and had been on a drinking binge for two or three days.

Standing there in the soaring entryway of the house, the two Prairie Village police officers exchanged glances, trying to figure out what to do. They had not seen the wife yet, but they had seen the frightened children. It was always worse when children had to observe a parent in trouble. Jordan’s concern was about
where
the suicidal woman was. Was she about to come down the winding stairway with a gun or a knife? Or if she was suicidal, he didn’t want her left alone for long.

“Where is she?” he asked Mike.

“She’s in the back bedroom—down that hall,” he directed.

The officers told Mike to stay with his weeping children in the entryway of the home while they checked on his wife. Then Jordan and Shipps walked toward the back bedroom, uncertain and a little anxious about what they would find.

Dr. Debora Green was there. The room was dimly lit but they could see that she was lying on her side, with her back to them, on top of the covers. Although she wore a T-shirt, it was pulled up and her underwear and buttocks were exposed. There was a strong odor of alcohol.

“Dr. Green? Dr. Green?” they said, and finally:
“Dr.Green!”
The woman on the bed rolled over and acknowledged their presence.

“I introduced myself,” Jordan said. “She was aware that we were coming. I explained why we were there, what we were going to do while we were there.”

“We told her we had responded to a complaint by her husband that apparently some comments had been made that he had interpreted as harmful,” Shipps added. “And she said she was depressed over the divorce.”

When Debora heard her husband’s name, she suddenly became hostile and very profane. “She was calling him names,” Shipps said. “The two that I can remember very clearly are ‘asshole’ and ‘fuckhole.’”

The woman on the bed was screaming out the words as if she wanted her husband to hear her. Debora didn’t argue with the officers themselves, however; all her animosity seemed to be directed toward Mike. Jordan left Shipps in the bedroom and went to talk briefly to Mike and his son. Shipps saw that Debora’s personal address book lay open on a dresser. In it, she had written the Olathe Earl May Garden Center’s address and phone number, and directions for how to get there. The notation meant nothing to Shipps, not then.

Mike had a psychiatrist from the Menninger Clinic on the line and Sergeant Jordan talked to him, meanwhile watching Mike. The man was crying. “He was upset,” Jordan said. “It seemed to me when I was evaluating the situation it was taking a toll on him having to do this. He seemed pained what this had led to—what their marriage had led to.”

Mike told the police sergeant that he had found what he believed to be a “suicide kit” and showed him the plastic bag with the packages of seeds, the vials of potassium chloride, and the syringes. “He was explaining to me what this chemical in the vials would do, once injected into your system, and how he feared that she was going to use this to kill herself,” Jordan said. He was convinced by what he had seen that Debora Green’s condition met his department’s protocol for commitment; he felt sure that she represented a significant danger to herself or others.

Back in the master bedroom, Officer Shipps talked to Debora for forty-five minutes to an hour. It was one of the oddest conversations of his life. The woman on the bed was clearly very intelligent, but her vocabulary was that of a fishwife. She didn’t seem to resent his presence, but she reviled her husband in a nonstop stream of invective.

While Jordan was convinced that they had to take Debora to a hospital for mental evaluation, he explained to Mike that the Prairie Village police could not take his wife to Menninger’s—that hospital was too far out of their jurisdiction. They could take Dr. Green to a facility in the Kansas City area, but not beyond. “We told him that we would have to first transport her to Kansas University Medical Center, which was in Wyandotte County, for a psychiatric screening,” Shipps recalled. “Based on the evidence of that, she would be transported elsewhere.”

Debora didn’t want to go to the hospital. She saw no necessity for that. Yes, she was intoxicated, but she was in her own home, and she was
not
suicidal. “I have three beautiful children here,” she said, “and I don’t want to do anything to leave them.” Nevertheless, she cooperated in getting ready to go, pulling on a pair of sweatpants and a jacket. And the officers gave her an opportunity to say good-bye to her children.

Shipps looked away from the poignant scene of six-year-old Kelly trying to comb her mother’s hair so that she would look nice going to the hospital. “They were all talking among themselves. I don’t remember the exact words,” Shipps recalled, “but it was something to the effect that Dr. Green made the statement, ‘This is all just happening because of your father.’” Tim, Lissa, and Kelly weren’t crying as much now, although they were still upset and confused.

Shipps drove Debora to KU Medical Center, where she had once been on staff; Mike called his sister and asked her to come stay with the children so he could follow Debora to the hospital. He called his mother, too, letting her know for the first time how terrible his marriage had become. He was crying as he did so. Karen Beal, Mike’s sister, hurried over. His parents arrived later to spend the night.

Dr. Pam McCoy worked in the ER at the University of Kansas Medical Center. She had been there part-time for five years; since the previous May, she’d had a full-time post as an ER physician and a professor in emergency medicine. The emergency room at KU was an extremely busy facility, and Dr. McCoy’s students had an opportunity to do hands-on treatment of myriad cases.

On September 25, Dr. McCoy was working the three
P.M
.—eleven
P.M
. shift. She was just about to go off-duty when an ER nurse stopped her. “They said there was a physician who did not want to be signed in to the emergency department, didn’t want to be seen, who was in the custody of the police,” Dr. McCoy said. “They wanted me to go talk to her.” Surprised, and not knowing what to expect, she walked out to the police car and saw a disheveled woman who looked familiar. “It was Dr. Debora Green,” she said. “She and I had been colleagues at another hospital I had worked at—at Trinity Lutheran.”

Dr. McCoy introduced herself, explaining that she had been married since they last saw each other. Her maiden name had been McVey; as she told Debora, she had changed it only slightly to McCoy. Then she asked Debora the most pressing question: Why had she been brought in?

Debora seemed embarrassed and said, “Oh, great. Here’s somebody I
know
.”

Dr. McCoy explained that patient confidentiality applied to everyone; Debora didn’t have to worry about her privacy. She noted a strong odor of alcohol, but she could not say that Debora was drunk. At least, her speech didn’t seem slurred. And when she got out of the patrol car, she didn’t have the characteristic “ataxic gait” of someone completely drunk.