Debora Green

Green’s case is also forming the basis of a 2020 stage adaptation of Euripides’s “Medea,” starring Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). https://broadwaydirect.com/rose-byrne-and-bobby-cannavale-buckle-up-for-medea/?

The Farrar children were all engaged in activities outside the home. Timothy played both soccer and ice hockey, while Kate was a ballerina with the State Ballet of Missouri by the age of ten. During this time, Farrar worked long hours and Green accompanied the children to their activities, though perception of her by other parents at the activities varied—some felt she was a supportive mother, while others believed she drove her children too hard and put down their efforts too often.

On October 24, during the early morning, Farrar received a phone call at his apartment from a neighbor who shouted that his house—meaning the Farrar–Green family home in Prairie Village—was on fire. Farrar immediately drove there. A 9-1-1 call placed from the house at 12:20 a.m. alerted police dispatchers to possible trouble, though the caller did not speak before hanging up. A police cruiser found the house on fire. Fire trucks were dispatched at 12:27 to what was classed as a "two-alarm" fire. The first firefighters on the scene reported that Green and her ten-year-old daughter Kate were safely outside the house by the time they had arrived. Both were in their nightclothes. Kate begged firefighters to help her brother and sister, six-year-old Kelly and thirteen-year-old Timothy, who were still inside. Green stood next to her daughter, and was reported to have been "very calm, very cool". At least two firefighters attempted to search inside the home for the missing children, but the building was so consumed by flames that they could only access a small portion of the ground level before the structure became unsafe.

According to video of the police interview, Green reported that the family had a normal day before the fire. The children went to school and performed their chores before attending various after-school activities—Kate went to her dance class, Tim to a hockey game. Farrar had taken Tim and Kelly to the hockey game, while Green took Kate to ballet lessons. The family regrouped around 9 p.m. when Tim and Kelly were dropped back at the Prairie Village house for dinner.

The next day, he asked Green—who had no interest in gardening that he knew of—what she had intended to do with the seeds. Though she initially claimed that she was going to plant them, when pressed she said that she intended to use them to commit suicide. Green's drinking was especially heavy that day, and as her behavior grew stranger, Farrar contacted the police for assistance in placing Green into psychiatric care. Police who responded to the home described Farrar and the children as "shaken" and Green's behavior as "bizarre". Though Green did not seem to hold the police's presence against them and gave them no resistance, she denied being suicidal and called Farrar a series of obscenities. Farrar showed police the seed packets and other items he had found in her purse the day before, and the police transported Green to a nearby emergency room. The physician who attended her there found Green to be smelling strongly of alcohol, but not visibly drunk. Though Green appeared unkempt, the doctor felt her demeanor was not unusual for someone going through a bitter divorce and noted that Green professed no desire to hurt herself or others when the doctor interviewed her privately. However, when Farrar came into view in the hospital, Green's demeanor changed. According to the doctor, Green spat at him, called him obscene names, and stated that "You're going to get these kids over our dead bodies". Though Green, with some persuasion by the doctor, initially agreed to a voluntary commitment, she shortly thereafter left the ER without informing anyone. She was found hours later, apparently having decided to walk home from the hospital, and brought back to the hospital. There, she agreed again to a voluntary commitment to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

Farrar said that the day of the fire, about a month after Farrar's last release from the hospital, he had taken the day off from work—the first day of what he intended to be a week-long vacation to recover some strength after restarting his job post-hospital. He had spent the afternoon with Margaret Hacker and then picked up Tim and Kelly for Tim's hockey game. After dropping the children back off with their mother at about 8:45, he had dinner with Hacker, leaving her around 11:15 in the evening.

On April 13, the defense team notified district attorney Paul Morrison that Green wished to plea bargain. On April 17 the plea was made public when Debora Green appeared in court to plead no contest to five charges—two counts of capital murder, one of arson, and two of attempted first-degree murder. In exchange for avoiding the death penalty, the no contest plea called for Green to accept a prison sentence of a minimum of forty years without the possibility of parole. Green denied being under the influence of any drug which would affect her judgment in making her plea or her ability to understand the proceedings in which she was participating.

—Excerpt from the sentencing statement of Debora Green, as quoted in Rule, p. 366

Authors Cheryl Meyer, Michelle Oberman, and Michelle Rone, discussing the Green case in their book Mothers Who Kill Their Children: Understanding the Acts of Moms from Susan Smith to the "Prom Mom", point out that Green was adjudged psychologically competent at what would be commonly considered the least-controlled point of any mental illness from which she was suffering: she was on a cocktail of drugs which could treat the symptoms of mental illness but not the illness itself, she had been drinking alcohol in amounts which she had been warned could interfere with her medications, and she was coping with the loss of her children. Nevertheless, she spoke for her own mental competence at the time, a judgment which was echoed by the court. Meyer, Oberman, and Rone speculate that Green could meet the diagnostic criteria for several mental illnesses, including antisocial personality disorder, but add that the fact that her crimes were a combination of impulsive—arson and the murder of her children—and premeditated—the poisoning of Michael Farrar—makes any mental illness extremely difficult to diagnose.

The surviving members of the Farrar–Green family were taken from the fire scene to police headquarters for questioning. Detectives were sent to the house to begin an investigation. Local Prairie Village detectives separated Green, Farrar, and their daughter (who was accompanied by Farrar's parents) and began to question Green.

In seeking to find who had set fire to the Farrar–Green home, investigators looked first for physical evidence of fire-setting upon those who had been in the house. They suspected that because of the use of accelerant, the fire may have flashed over at the point of ignition and singed or burned the setter. Accordingly, they tested clothing worn by both Farrar and Green that night and took samples of the hair of both. Neither Green's nor Farrar's clothing showed evidence of having been in contact with accelerant; Farrar's hair showed no singeing, but Green's—which had been cut twice between the time of the fire and the time the police took hair samples from her—showed "significant singeing". Detectives recalled that Green had denied ever having been in close proximity to flames; she had reported leaving the house after seeing smoke and not coming into contact with the fire either on the deck outside her bedroom or in the process of coaxing Kate off the garage roof. Neighbors of the family reported that when Green had come to their door to ask them to call for help, her hair had been wet. Though their suspicions pointed to Debora Green, investigators continued to receive tips attributing the fire to any number of people and the investigation continued with no public statement about suspects.

Deadly Women, a true-crime documentary program that focuses on crimes committed by women, featured Green's case in a 2010 episode about women who kill their children.

A 2002 working paper on bioterrorism, intended to "enable policymakers concerned with bioterrorism to make more informed decisions", included the Green case in a survey of illegal uses of biological agents. The paper noted that Green had refused to provide any detail on the manner in which she extracted and administered the ricin she used against her husband.

In 2000, represented by a new legal team, Green filed a request for a new trial on the basis of having been rendered incompetent by the psychiatric medications she was taking at the time of her hearings. She alleged that her original attorneys had failed to represent her adequately, instead focusing on avoiding a trial and the death penalty. She withdrew the request when prosecutors determined that they would seek the death penalty if a new trial was awarded. When, in 2004, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled the state's death penalty unconstitutional, she filed a second request for a new trial based on a claim of "manifest injustice". Green's attorneys claimed that new scientific techniques invalidated the evidence that the fire had been caused by arson. The request was denied in February 2005.

Green's murders and poisoning cases formed the basis for an episode of the forensic science documentary series Forensic Files, episode; "Ultimate Betrayal", originally aired; October 1999.

A pretrial show cause hearing in the Green case began in January 1996, with Green represented by Dennis Moore and Kevin Moriarty. Green's defense claimed that the fire in the family home had been set not by Debora Green, but by her son, Tim Farrar, who had once been caught by local police setting off Molotov cocktails. The defense also attempted to attribute Farrar's poisoning to Tim, who did much of the cooking in the household.

A series of legal maneuverings involving both sides took place in the late winter and early spring of 1996. Defense attorneys requested that cameras be barred from Green's eventual trial, but the request was rejected. Green was judged by court-appointed psychologists to be competent to stand trial and denied a reduction in bail. The presiding judge ruled that she would stand trial once, for all of the charges against her, rather than be tried separately on each.

Green was formally sentenced on May 30, 1996, following testimony by the psychologist who had adjudged her competency. According to Dr. Marilyn Hutchinson, Green was immature and lacked the adult-level ability to cope with emotion. Green read another statement to the court and was formally sentenced to two concurrent forty-year prison sentences, minus the one hundred and ninety-one days she had already served. Green is serving her sentence at the Topeka Correctional Facility. As of August 2012, Kansas Department of Corrections records show her earliest possible release date as November 21, 2035—when she will be 84 years old.

After her sentencing Green continued to maintain that her recall of the night of the fire was limited. In the summer of 1996, she wrote to her daughter claiming that she had taken more than the recommended doses of her medications that night. Similar letters to Michael Farrar varied from claims that she had no recollection of the night to firmly stating that she was innocent of the arson. She theorized that Margaret Hacker had set fire to the family's house, and reiterated her claim from the show-cause hearing that Tim had been the one to poison his father. Green wrote to author Ann Rule in 1996 asserting that, due to alcohol abuse, she had not had the mental capacity to start a fire. In a later interview with Rule, she blamed her cloudy thinking during the court hearings on her Prozac prescription, and stated that once she was off the drug, her mind became much clearer.

Ann Rule began corresponding with Green in 1996, and interviewed her in person in 1997. Rule recalls in her book on the case that Green's letters denied any unhappy childhood memories. Green claimed that though her behavior in the summer and fall of 1995 had been neglectful, she had neither the desire nor the wherewithal to set fire to her house or harm her children or her husband. Rule—who was neither a doctor nor a psychologist, but had a background in criminology and law enforcement—believed that even Green does not understand what caused her to attempt to murder Michael Farrar beyond the fact that she had come to hate him. Rule's theory was that in destroying Farrar, Green would have been able to preserve her own ego, in that Farrar would not have been able to leave her for another woman. Psychiatrist Michael H. Stone, using Rule's book as a source of information about Green, identifies Green as showing characteristics of psychopathy, borderline personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder.

A May 1996 issue of Redbook featured an essay by Ann Slegman, a friend of Green's who lived in the same neighborhood as the Farrar family. The article covered the author's personal history with Green, the fire, and the subsequent investigation and ended with the author's statement that "It is also possible that an entirely different personality—disassociated from the Debora I knew—committed this crime.[...] The Debora I knew would not have killed her children."

Green married Michael Farrar in 1979 while practicing as an emergency physician. The marriage was tumultuous, and Farrar filed for divorce in July 1995. Between August and September 1995, Farrar repeatedly fell violently ill, and despite numerous hospitalizations his doctors could not pinpoint the source of his illness. Green's emotional stability deteriorated and she began to drink heavily, even while supervising her children. On October 24, 1995, the Farrar family home, occupied by Green and the couple's three children, caught fire. Kate Farrar and Debora Green escaped without harm, but despite the efforts of firefighters, Timothy and Kelly Farrar died in the blaze. Investigation showed that trails of accelerant in the house led back to Green's bedroom, and that the source of Michael Farrar's intractable illness had been ricin, a poison served to him in his food by Green.

Upon her arrest on November 22, 1995, Green was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of attempted first-degree murder, and one count of aggravated arson. She was held on $3,000,000 bail—the highest ever required by Johnson County, Kansas—and maintained her innocence throughout pre-trial motions and a show cause hearing. However, when the defense's own investigators verified the strength of forensic evidence against Green, she agreed to an Alford plea to all charges. On May 30, 1996, she was sentenced to two concurrent forty-year prison sentences. Green has petitioned for a new trial twice since her conviction. Her first request, which she eventually withdrew, was based on a claim of having been rendered incompetent for plea bargaining by the psychiatric medications she was taking at the time of her hearings; her second, which was denied by a judge, claimed that the evidence used to convict her of arson had been rendered obsolete by scientific advances.

During their trip to Peru in June 1995, sponsored by The Pembroke Hill School, Farrar met and befriended Margaret Hacker, whose children also attended the school. Hacker was a registered nurse married to an anesthesiologist, and also unhappy with her marriage. The two began an affair shortly after both families returned from Peru. In late July, Farrar again asked Green for a divorce. Green responded hysterically and told the children that their father was leaving them. Green was especially upset that a broken home might later disqualify the children from debutante events such as the Belles of the American Royal.

Police interviewed Farrar at 6:20 a.m, informing him immediately that the bodies of Tim and Kelly had been recovered. He told police about the deterioration of his marriage and health over the past six months. In August 1995, Farrar had fallen ill with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. He initially assumed it was a residual effect of the traveler's diarrhea many people on the Peru trip had contracted while there. Though he recovered from the initial bout of symptoms, he relapsed about a week later, and on August 18 Farrar was hospitalized with severe dehydration and high fever. In the hospital, he developed sepsis. Doctors identified Streptococcus viridans, which had probably leaked through damaged digestive tissue as a result of Farrar's severe diarrhea, as the source of the sepsis; however, they could not pinpoint the root cause of the gastrointestinal illness itself. Though Farrar's illness was severe and possibly life-threatening, he eventually recovered and was released from the hospital on August 25. That night, however, shortly after eating a dinner that Green had served him, Farrar again suffered vomiting and diarrhea and had to be hospitalized. A third bout of symptoms struck on September 4, days after he was released from the hospital for the second time. Basing their conclusions on the likelihood that his illness was related to the Peru trip, doctors narrowed down the possible causes for Farrar's gastrointestinal issues to a handful, though none fitted his symptoms perfectly: typhoid fever, tropical sprue, or gluten-sensitive enteropathy. Farrar had noticed that each time he returned home from the hospital, he became ill again almost immediately, and he speculated that it may have been due to the stress of his dissolving marriage or the change from a bland hospital diet to a normal home one. When Farrar's girlfriend, Margaret Hacker, told him she suspected Green was poisoning him, he initially wrote off the idea as ridiculous.

Farrar underwent surgery in November 1995 to treat an aneurism that his doctors believed had been caused by the poisoning. Before the surgery, he submitted blood samples to Johnson County's crime lab to be tested for ricin antibodies.

Media reports in the first week of November 1995 suggested the investigation had narrowed the field of suspects, first to those intimately familiar with the house, and later to one person. Based on the trajectory of the police investigation, news reports in the following days speculated that the apparent poisoning of Michael Farrar may have been linked to the case, but officials declined to name the person suspected in either the arson or the poisoning.

Michael Farrar underwent surgery in December 1995 to treat an abscess in his brain caused by the poisoning. Fearful that Farrar would not survive the proceedings, and knowing that his testimony was key to their case, prosecutors videotaped his testimony beforehand. The surgery was successful, and Farrar testified in person and recounted Green's problems with alcohol and the break-up of their marriage. Under cross-examination by Green's counsel, he admitted that both he and Green had contributed to the problems in the couple's marriage and that his relationship with his son had been so adversarial that they had sometimes come to blows.

In January 1994, Farrar asked Green for a divorce. Although she believed Farrar was having affairs outside the marriage, she later claimed to have been taken by surprise by his desire to end the marriage and responded to his asking for a divorce explosively, shouting and throwing things. Farrar moved out of the family home, though the two remained in contact and informally shared custody of the children. With the pressure of living together removed, they attempted reconciliation, and decided that a larger house would ease some of the disorganization that had affected their marriage. In May, after four months of separation, they put in a bid on a six-bedroom home in Prairie Village, Kansas, but backed out before the sale went through. Farrar later said that he had "backed down" in the face of his ongoing worries about the state of his marriage and the couple's debt load.

The couple put extra effort into avoiding the issues that had caused strife before their separation: Despite being an indifferent cook and housekeeper, Green tried to focus on cooking and keeping the new house cleaner, while Farrar vowed to curtail his work hours so that he could spend more time with the family. The improvements lasted mere months, however, and by the end of 1994, both Green and Farrar had fallen back to their old habits and the marriage was again floundering. Fearful of another confrontation with Green, and looking forward to a trip to Peru the family had planned for June 1995, Farrar nevertheless decided to wait until after the trip to raise the issue of a divorce again.

As the Farrar children grew older, they were enrolled in The Pembroke Hill School, a private school in Kansas City. Green was reportedly a good mother who wanted the best for her children and encouraged them in their activities of choice. Though she attempted to resume her medical career after her last maternity leave, her practice faltered and her chronic pain increased. In 1992, she gave up her practice and became a homemaker, working part-time from the family's house on medical peer reviews and Medicaid processing. Medical professionals who worked with her during this time described her as being distant and cold towards her patients and displaying obsessive behavior towards her husband.

Farrar admitted that the marriage was never ideal. He later said that neither one had expressed their love to each other, even at the early stages of marriage. Farrar recounted that Green seemed to lack the coping skills most adults bring to bear in challenging times; when she went into a rage, she sometimes harmed herself or broke things, and rarely gave any thought to whether she was in private or in public during these episodes. By the early 1990s, Farrar worked long hours away from the home to avoid arguments and what he perceived as his wife's shortcomings as a homemaker. When the couple fought, Green responded by treating the children, especially Tim, as small adults and telling them about what their father had done wrong. Swayed by their mother's opinions about their father, the children began to resent and disobey Farrar, to the point where Timothy and Farrar had physical altercations.

Two years later, a second child, Kate, was born. Green again returned to her studies after maternity leave, and by 1985 had completed her fellowship. She went into private practice in hematology and oncology while Farrar finished the last year of his cardiology fellowship. Later Green and Farrar both joined established medical practices in the Kansas City, Missouri, area. After a year, Green started her own private practice, which prospered until she became pregnant and took time off work for another maternity leave. The couple's third child, Kelly, was born on December 13, 1988.

By the early 1980s, the Farrars were living in Cincinnati, Ohio. During this time Green suffered a number of medical issues, including surgery on an infected wrist, cerebellar migraines, and insomnia. The Farrars' first child, Timothy, was born on January 20, 1982. After a six-week maternity leave, Green returned to her fellowship in hematology and oncology at the University of Cincinnati.

During the period the Greens were separated, Debora met Michael Farrar, a student in his twenties completing his last year of medical school. Farrar was struck by Green's intelligence and vitality, though he was embarrassed by her habit of explosively losing her temper at minor slights. In contrast, Green felt that Farrar was a stable, dependable presence. The couple were married on May 26, 1979. When Farrar was accepted for an internal medicine residency at the University of Cincinnati, the couple moved to Ohio. Green went into practice at Jewish Hospital as an emergency physician, but grew dissatisfied and eventually switched specialties. She began a second residency in internal medicine, joining Farrar's program.

Throughout her undergraduate and medical school attendance, she dated Duane M. J. Green, an engineer. The couple married while she was studying at the University of Kansas. The couple lived together in Independence, Missouri, while Debora finished her residency, but by 1978 they had separated and then divorced. Debora cited basic incompatibility as the reason for the divorce—"[...W]e had absolutely no common interests", she was later quoted as saying—but the divorce was friendly.

Green attended the University of Illinois from the fall of 1969, where she took a major in chemistry. Though she had intended to pursue chemical engineering as a career, she opted to attend medical school after graduating in 1972, believing the market was flooded with engineers. She attended the University of Kansas School of Medicine from 1972 to her graduation in 1975. Green chose emergency medicine as her initial specialty and undertook a residency in the Truman Medical Center Emergency Room after her graduation from medical school.

Debora Green (née Jones; born February 28, 1951) is an American physician who pleaded no contest to setting a 1995 fire which burned down her family's home and killed two of her children, and to poisoning her husband with ricin with the intention of causing his death. The case was sensational, and covered heavily by news media, especially in the Kansas–Missouri area, where the crimes occurred. Though Green has petitioned for a new trial twice in recent years, her requests have not been successful.

Green was born February 28, 1951, the second of two daughters to Joan and Bob Jones of Havana, Illinois. She showed early intellectual promise, and is reported to have taught herself to read and write before she was three years old. Green participated in a number of school activities at the two high schools she attended and was a National Merit Scholar and co-valedictorian of her high school class. Those who knew her at the time later described her as "[fitting] right in" and someone who was "going to be successful".