Q&AWith Ann SlegmanIsenberg (‘The Ultimate Betrayal,’ Forensic Files)
Whatever problems were plaguing Dr. Debora Green — depression, her husband’s cheating — no one foresaw what happened on Oct. 24, 1995.
Debora Green, M.D., in a prison mugshot
Debora, an oncologist who had stepped away from her career to care for the three kids she shared with cardiologist Michael Farrar, deliberately set fire to the family’s mansion in Prairie Village, an upscale neighborhood in Kansas City.
She and 10-year-old Kate escaped unhurt from the house. Kelly, 6, died of smoke inhalation and Tim, 13, sustained fatal burns. Debora wanted to kill the kids to punish her husband, prosecutors later contended.
By the time of the tragedy, Michael, who was living with his girlfriend, was ill from ricin, a toxin that Debora allegedly sneaked into his food.
Debora pleaded no contest to a variety of charges in 1996 and is serving her sentence at the Topeka Correctional Facility. Today, she’s 71 years old. Her first parole consideration date is in 2035.
For this week’s post, I talked to Ann Slegman Isenberg, a retired writer and editor who knew Debora before and after her transition from good-natured stay-at-home mom to universally condemned child killer. Excerpts of our conversation follow:
How did you meet Debora Green? I started taking a “three and a pro” tennis class at a little club near my house. I played singles and wanted to learn doubles tennis. Debora was no longer working as an oncologist and was also learning tennis, so we got to know each other.
Was Debora likeable? She literally had a genius IQ, so she was so quick and as funny a person as can be, kind of the life-of-the-party type of person.
Did you meet her husband, Michael Farrar? My husband and I socialized with her and her husband once at a tennis get-together. He was nothing to look at, kind of a drip, but was well-thought-of in his field.
Did you meet their kids? They went to private school and my kids went to public school. Some of Debora’s kids would come around at the tennis club, and I think they really did have a good relationship with their mother. Kelly was darling with a poof of blond hair.
Who says you don’t make nice friends in prison? Debora Green has participated in the KSDS Pooches and Pals program, whereby inmates train and care for assistance dogs
How did you first hear about the fire? My sitter came over that morning and said there was a fire on Canterbury Circle and I thought, please don’t be Debora. I called and her phone was busy, so I thought she was chatting on the phone and everything was OK. Then, when I took my son to the barber and saw on the news the fire was at her house, I thought, “Oh no, they’re going to think Debora did that because of that other fire.” [A year earlier, a fire broke out at a previous house owned by Debora and Michael.] I took flowers and left them at Mike’s doorstep. Debora was staying with friends, I think.
Were you surprised about the substance abuse claims? Debora did call me and it was obvious she was intoxicated — but she showed no signs of drug abuse before. As Ann Rule wrote, the night of the fire, she had taken a lot of Prozac and vodka. So she might have just been out of her mind.
Did you stay in touch when she was in custody? Debora reached out to me quite a bit. I visited her at the Olathe jail. When she went to prison in Topeka, I visited her there. She was always proclaiming her innocence. She wrote me a letter and asked whether I would perjure myself — and say that Tim said, “Sometimes I get so upset with my dad I want to burn the house.” I think I sent it to our lawyer, who sent it to the defense. And pretty quickly afterward, she pleaded no contest.
How did the people at the tennis club react to the murders? Debora had seemed so fun and sensible. So there was the whole thing of appearance vs. reality. I think a lot of us had to go to therapy over this.♠
That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Editor’s note: Michael Farrar died on August 23, 2023, at the age of 68. Media outlets have yet to disclose his cause of death.
P.S. Read Part I, an informed recap and epilogue of the “Ultimate Betrayal” episode Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
An M.D. Goes Medea on Her Kids, Breaking Bad on Her Husband (‘Ultimate Betrayal,’ Forensic Files)
Updated with news from August 31, 2023*
The world loves to hate mothers who kill their children, and Debora Green makes an especially incendiary target.
Just begun: Michael Farrar and Debora Jones Green
She not only plotted her kids’ demise but also chose the most horrific possible murder weapon, a fire.
Like Medea, the Euripides antihero 2,400 years before her, Debora carried out her awful deed to punish a husband who wasn’t exactly evil but betrayed her just the same.
Cinematic story. And like Walter White 19 years after her, she used ricin poisoning as part of her bid for revenge.
No wonder Debora’s crimes, which took place back in 1995, merited an Ann Rule book in 1997, a Forensic Files episode in 1999, and a Lifetime movie in 2021.
So, amid all the drama, are there any mitigating factors? Is sympathy possible for Debora Green, a medical doctor who violated her “do no harm” oath in a way that devastated her own family?
Normal childhood. For this week, I searched for answers to those questions and also looked for more background information on Debora’s life as well as updates on her status today, the life of ex-husband Michael Farrar, and the loyalties of the family’s surviving daughter.
So let’s get going on the recap for “Ultimate Betrayal” along with extra information from internet research:
Debora Jones came into the world on Feb. 28, 1951, in Havana, Illinois, as the second of three children born to Joan and Bob Jones. The couple had married as teenagers but apparently figured out how to parent competently. Debora described her childhood as happy, according to Bitter Harvest: A Woman’s Rage, A Mother’s Sacrifice by Ann Rule.
One of the cool kids. It became apparent early on that Debora was exceptionally intelligent. The Lifetime movie, A House on Fire, pegged her IQ as above 160.
But she wasn’t a nerd. At Peoria High School, she found time for cheerleading in addition to her schoolwork.
The Green-Farrar house at 2517 Canterbury Court has been replaced by a grass-covered vacant lot
Debora, who also played the violin and piano, got a perfect grade-point average and ended up as co-valedictorian of her class.
Next up, the attractive girl with symmetrical features completed an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois.
Two specialists. Debora married a fellow engineer named Duane M.J. Green in 1974, but the union lasted only a few years and he would later complain to police that Debora jilted him after he helped pay her tuition, according to the Kansas City Star.
While studying at the University of Kansas Medical School, she met Michael Farrar and they married in 1979. The former Eagle Scout was four years younger than his new wife but also a high achiever on the path to earning a medical degree.
Michael went into cardiology, and Debora specialized in oncology and hematology.
Nice spread. They had their first child, Tim, in 1982. Although A House on Fire portrays Tim as having only one sister, he actually had two, the younger girl named Kelly and a middle child whom Forensic Files identifies as Jennifer and Bitter Harvest calls Lissa — but her real name is Kate Farrar.
Debora and Michael had no shortage of room for their kids: By 1995, the family had settled into a six-bedroom Tudor-style house in Prairie Village, an affluent section of Kansas City, Kansas.
At some point, Debora put her career on pause to stay home with the kids, although she still did some freelance medical peer-review work out of her house.
In the spirits. She became a soccer coach so she could spend more time with her children, who attended the private Pembroke Hill School.
Although by all accounts, Debora was dedicated to her job as a full-time parent, her marriage grew strained as she grappled with depression. She reportedly leaned on alcohol as a crutch despite that her doctor had advised her not to drink while taking antidepressants and antianxiety medications.
Still, she enjoyed playing sports and having fun. In a May 1996 Redbook article, her onetime tennis clinic friend Ann Slegman recalled:
“In this sea of affluent house-wives with their smartly cropped hairdos, tennis skirts, and Steffi Graf wanna-be attitudes, Debora was refreshingly different. Heavyset with short, razor-cut hair, thick glasses that were popular among the disco set in the 1970s, faded T-shirts, and sweat shorts, she joked and laughed her way through the tennis drills.“
International affair. In an effort to prop up their deteriorating union, Michael and Debora, along with son Tim, went on a hiking and boating trip to Peru sponsored by Pembroke Hill School.
Sadly, the excursion to South America did more harm than good for the marriage. Michael met a good-looking blond registered nurse named Margaret Hacker (called Celeste Walker in the Lifetime movie) and they starting seeing each other back in the U.S.A.
Kate, Tim, and Kelly Farrar
Debora “saw all the telltale signs” of an affair including “a new wardrobe, new exercise equipment, and a new, distant attitude toward her and the children,” according to the Redbook account.
Toxic person. She moved into a separate bedroom and started drinking more.
Soon, it was Michael’s turn to struggle with his health. On Aug. 7, he became violently ill with bacterial endocarditis, which causes severe diarrhea. His weight dropped to 125 pounds.
He eventually needed three hospitalizations, each time after he’d eaten food Debora prepared for him (Maynard Muntzing), but at first doctors couldn’t figure out what triggered his episodes. It was 1995, long before the AMC series Breaking Bad made ricin a household name.
Confides in kids. Once his health rallied, Michael vacated the family’s mansion on Canterbury Court and rented his own place in the Georgetown apartment complex across town.
Debora turned suicidal and ended up in a psychiatric hospital after Michael called police to intervene during an argument on Sept. 25. In the emergency room, she spat on Michael, called him an obscene name, and said he’d get the kids over her dead body.
Bitter and angry, Debora had also “used the crudest language to tell the couple’s children that Michael was having sex with other women,” the Kansas City Star reported.
Woman on the side. At some point amid the melodrama, Michael discovered in Debora’s purse packets of castor beans, which contain ricin.
At first, ricin didn’t show up in Michael’s lab tests. The chemical is hard to detect because it breaks down quickly. But eventually, a large number of ricin antibodies turned up in his blood.
Michael confronted Debora on the phone about poisoning him. She denied it and they had an angry discussion. On Oct. 23, he spent time visiting girlfriend Margaret Hacker at her house.
Great escape. On Oct. 24, 1995, Debora and Michael had another argument on the phone. An hour later, the Prairie Village mansion, where she and the kids were still living, caught on fire.
Debora, 43, got out through a bedroom door to the outside.
All sources agree that 10-year-old Kate escaped by climbing onto the roof through her second-floor bedroom window and jumping to the ground without injury. But accounts vary as to whether Debora caught her as she fell or tried to catch her and failed or just watched her descend.
The dog, too. Kate and her mother stood together as emergency workers arrived on the scene. The flames were so intense the firefighters couldn’t go inside.
Fire damage to the house
Golden-haired Kelly, who at age 6 already showed signs of being a gifted student, died of smoke inhalation in bed.
Tim, 13 years old and a popular soccer and hockey player, died of burns.
The family dog, a black Lab named Boomer, died of carbon monoxide poisoning, according to Medium’s True Crime Edition.
Suspicious blaze. Reports about Debora’s behavior at the fire scene differ. Some describe her as without emotion as she watched the blaze that killed two of her children. Another account said she was yelling at emergency workers, accusing them of not doing enough to save Kelly and Tim.
Authorities suspected arson and, at first, believed either parent could have done it.
Debora explained to police that on the night of the fire, she woke up to the smoke alarm, opened the bedroom door, saw flames, and ran outside.
On the intercom, she told Tim to stay in his bedroom until firefighters arrived and then she ran next door to ask for help from neighbors, Debora said. They noticed that her hair looked wet. A lab would later find singeing to her hair.
The robe. At the house, police found what looked like an empty accelerant bottle. The stairway that the children needed as an escape route had flammable liquid poured on it. The path of the fire led to Debora’s door.
Because the doorjamb to Debora’s bedroom was covered with soot, investigators believed the door was open when the fire started.
Her bathrobe, found in a ball at home, had burn marks.
Actress Stephanie March plays Debora Green in A House on Fire
Investigators ultimately concluded that Debora both set the fire and poisoned Michael with the castor beans.
Girlfriend shows up. Detectives discovered records indicating Debora had made two purchases of castor beans at Earl May Garden Centers around the time of the couple’s woes. She claimed that son Tim needed them for a science project and that Tim — who wasn’t around to defend himself — might have poisoned his dad.
By this time, Michael had asked for divorce; he filed the papers the day after the fire. Debora was not happy that gal pal Margaret Hacker attended the memorial service for the kids.
“Michael was in her bed while our house was burning down,” she complained to Slegman.
But in between the fire and the time of her arrest, Debora and daughter Kate continued to live as normal a life as possible after such a tragedy.
Neighbors unnerved. Kate got a role in a State Ballet of Missouri production of The Nutcracker.
On November 22, 1995, after Debora dropped off Kate for ballet practice at the Midland Theater in Kansas City, police arrested her and charged her with two counts of murder, attempted murder, and aggravated arson. A judge set bail at the unheard-of amount of $3 million.
The developments shocked residents of Prairie Village, who weren’t accustomed to having drama and police activity in their corner of the world.
Dedicated parent. According to an AP account, neighbors had to contend with the smell of smoke that lingered for weeks after the fire and the sight of cars slowing down to look at the charred $400,000 house at 7517 Canterbury Court.
The Kansas City Star reported that most neighbors refused to discuss the tragedy with the media. The few who did said that Debora loved her children and, while clearly the couple’s marriage had seen better days, no one imagined it would end in a burning hell.
Locals didn’t have to look at the wreckage of the once-palatial home for long. By November 1995, the city was making plans to demolish it.
Getting fluid. In preparation for the trial, the prosecution noted evidence that Debora had been reading a book about arson and literature about people murdered by family members.
The Prairie Village Shopping Center is typically upscale for the area
Authorities believed that after the couple fought on the phone, Debora poured accelerant on Michael’s belongings and also used the fluid to cut off the children’s escape routes from the house. Her hair and bathrobe sustained burns because she used too much accelerant near her own bedroom door. Then she told Tim to stay in the house with little sister Kelly until the fire trucks arrived.
And one more thing: This was not the first time a blaze had broken out in a Green-Farrar household. On May 21, 1994, when the family lived in Missouri and was considering a relocation to Prairie Village, a fire damaged the Missouri house — reportedly right after Michael had nixed the idea of the move over concerns about the future of the marriage, according to court papers available on Murderpedia.
No legal action resulted from the Missouri fire.
Daughter faithful. But there was no escaping the consequences of the Kansas inferno. The state kept Debora in custody during court proceedings. “She’s very surprised that she would be charged with these kinds of crimes,” Ellen Ryan, one of Debora’s three lawyers, told the AP. “She lost everything in this fire including her children, everything, and she’s astounded.”
Debora’s defense lawyers floated the possibility that Tim had set the fire.
Meanwhile, Kate Farrar remained loyal to her mother. She left a vase full of roses at the courthouse for Debora, and the two talked on the phone.
Curiosity high. Michael, who had to make $5,400 monthly payments to Debora as a run-up to their divorce, showed up in court with a partially shaved head because he’d needed brain surgery to drain an abscess probably caused by the ricin poisoning. He would also need a heart operation to counteract the damage.
The murder case was such big news that true crime author Ann Rule, who wrote The Stranger Beside Me and Small Sacrifices, attended the preliminary hearing and brought an assistant to help take notes.
Prosecutors had assembled a roster of 300 prospective witnesses and planned to start out by calling 20 of them to the stand. Olathe courthouse employees outfitted a backup room for media outlets; there were only 60 seats in the courtroom
But the trial never happened.
Not her intention. On April 17, 1996, Debora Green pleaded no contest in a deal to take the death penalty off the table. The AP reported that, “in a fast monotone,” Debora read a statement maintaining that she wasn’t in her right mind on the night of the fire — her psychiatric and alcohol problems set the stage for the tragedy — and she didn’t want to compound the suffering of her family with a trial.
Michael Farrar, M.D., in a recent photo
“She’s accepting responsibility for [the fire],” said Debora’s lawyer Michael Moore. “I don’t think she ever intended to kill her children. She’s a caring, living, breathing human being.”
On May 30, 1996, she received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years for attempted murder, premeditated killing, and aggravated arson.
Hair we go. Once Debora had spent a few years behind razor wire, she began recasting her story.
According to Bitter Harvest, Debora made claims that Michael and his girlfriend might have hired someone to start the fire. She also told Ann Rule that the homewrecking Margaret drove Margaret’s former husband to suicide.
Debora also noted that she cut off her singed hair not to obscure it as evidence but rather to look her best for Kelly and Tim’s funeral.
About-face. In 2000, Debora briefly tried a new tack. She requested new sentencing based on a claim that her no-contest plea to arson resulted from her own confusion caused by prescription psychiatric drugs.
She would also need to defend herself over the ricin allegations. “No one in an alcoholic fog would have been capable of the intricate planning it took to locate, purchase, and grind up the deadly castor beans,” Ann Rule wrote in Bitter Harvest.
Once Debora realized the motion might put capital punishment back in play, she withdrew it.
Too late. Four years later, she made a bid to have her plea thrown out because new advances into arson investigations refuted the pour pattern evidence against her, she contended. The fire might have come from a vanity in her bedroom that ignited on its own, Debora said.
Kate Farrar, then 19, attended a hearing on that matter — and sat with Debora’s supporters, according to the Kansas City Star. Michael Farrar showed up as well but sat away from his daughter. In 2005, District Judge Peter Ruddick ruled against Debora.
In 2015, a judge scuttled Debora’s request for resentencing because she based it on recent state and federal rulings on “Hard 40” prison terms that didn’t apply retroactively. Johnson County District Judge Brenda Cameron also noted that Debora understood the terms of her plea deal when she agreed to it.
Author touched. Today, Debora Green resides in Topeka Correctional Facility in medium-high security, with the first prospective release date in 2035. According to the Kansas Department of Corrections, she has a job in prison. At 5-foot-4 and 188 pounds, she’s not staging any hunger strikes.
So does Debora Farrar deserve any sympathy? To this writer, it sounds like a long-sustained period of temporary insanity resulting from her husband’s infidelity, her clinical depression, and the loss of a career that brought her respect, personal fulfillment, and a high salary.
“Even though I could not believe she was innocent,” wrote Anne Rule, “I thought her tears [for her children] were genuine.”
Debora Green in a recent mugshot
New wife. As for the husband she tried to eliminate, Michael Farrar survived and worked as a cardiologist at North Kansas City Hospital for 29 years. He recently served as medical staff president and enjoyed traveling, bird hunting, dining out, and learning more about history, according to a recent interview on the hospital’s website.
And what of the extramarital relationship that helped fuel the modern-day Greek tragedy? According to Medium writer Lori Johnston, Michael Farrar and Margaret Hacker broke up. He ended up marrying a lawyer, and daughter Kate Farrar eventually went to live with them — but at the same time, Kate, now 36, still believes in her mother’s innocence, according to Medium.
*Michael Farrar died on August 23, 2023, at the age of 68. Media outlets have yet to disclose his cause of death.
If you can’t find the movie “A House on Fire” on TV, you can watch it on Amazon for $2.99. I was able to see it on the Lifetime website free of charge, but the link no longer works.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
P.S. Read Part II, ‘Dr. Debora Green: Tennis and Madness’ Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
