Dr. Debora Green: An Estranged Wife's Fury Becomes a Mother's Ultimate Betrayal

Kate, Tim and Kelly Farrar, 1989 (photo source) 

The Fire

It was shortly after midnight on Tuesday, October 24, 1995 when Drs. John and Mary Forman were awakened from their sleep by their dog's frantic barking.  Their doorbell was ringing and someone was knocking on their side door.  After urging from Mary, John woke up and went downstairs to investigate.  Still half-asleep, he neglected to deactivate the home's burglar alarm when he opened the door, which began to screech and blare.  

The Formans' neighbor, Dr. Debora Green, stood at their home's side entrance.  Debora and her husband, Mike Farrar, also a doctor, and their three children (Tim, Kate, and Kelly) had moved next door to the Formans and into 7517 Canterbury Court in Prairie Village, Kansas in June of 1994.  Although the adults were doctors and had children in the same age range, the Formans and the Farrars weren't particularly close.  

So it must have been a shock for John and Mary to see Debora there, dressed in a pink nightgown with white collar and cuffs and an almost whimsical pattern of white sheep.  Debora's hair was very wet and unkempt.  "Call 111!" she screamed at John and Mary.  "My house is on fire!  My children are in there!  Call 111!"

Mary and John thought it odd that Debora, a doctor, asked them to call "111" instead of "911," even as they were looking out the south side of their house and to the Farrar four-car garage, which had explosive orange flames beginning to dance on the roof.  John called 911 from the closest phone to the door, stressing that three children were trapped inside the burning home, while Mary went to her car and used her car phone to do the same.   Due to to the strong winds blowing and the homes' close proximity to each other, the couple then woke their four sleeping children to put them into John's car and drive them down the street to safety.  Other neighbors were also waking to do the same as they worried that the blazing fire, teased along by the blustery wind, would incite all the homes on the street.  

7517 Canterbury Court before the fire (photo source) 

While this was going on, Debora left to return to her home, where she saw the small figure of her ten-year-old daughter Kate running along the roofline.  Kate had managed to crawl out the window of her bedroom on the front of the house and skirt the fire as she attempted to run to safety.  However, the fire was so close to the child that the roofline behind her began to cave in.  She was high up, at the peak of the garage roof, possibly only seconds between life and death when her mother ordered her to jump, spreading out her arms and promising to catch her.  Kate hesitated for just a moment, long enough to look behind her and see the garage roof being consumed by the fire, before throwing her arms over her head and jumping toward Debora.  Her mother failed to catch her with Kate instead landing at Debora's feet, saved by the massive cushion of leaves and grass on the lawn.  

The first officer on the scene arrived while Dr. John Forman was making his 911 call; he was responding to a 911 hang-up call that had come from the Farrar residence at 12:21 a.m.  That officer, Steve Hunter, ran to the yard, where he saw a woman and a young girl, both in nightclothes.  The child was hysterical, begging the officer to save her brother and sister, who were still in the house.  The woman was oddly passive, saying nothing, leaving Hunter to ask the little girl where her mother was and him thinking it odd that the quiet, immobile woman was the  mother of the two children still trapped in the house.  

The fire moved more quickly than the other responding police officers and firefighters could react to, or had ever seen.  Their valiant attempts to find the two children were unsuccessful and they had to vacate the home before they too became victims (two firefighters had a roof collapse on them but were unharmed.)  

Dr. Michael Farrar, Debora's estranged husband, had been called by Mary Forman around 12:30 a.m.  "Your house is on fire!" she had shouted.  "There are fire trucks everywhere!  Your wife is a fucking arsonist!"  

Mike sped from his apartment over to the home on Canterbury Court as quickly as he could, arriving within ten minutes.  He asked Steve Hunter where his kids were and the officer led him to a patrol vehicle, where Debora and Kate were sitting.  Mike was informed that two of his children were still inside the inferno.  Letting out a scream of anguish, he demanded of Debora, "What have you done this time?"  She didn't answer.

The fire at Canterbury Court was put out at 1:45 a.m., although it would be hours before the destroyed house would cool enough for the firefighters to go in and search for the remains of the children and days before investigators could begin to determine the cause of the fire.

Mike, Debora and Kate were taken to the Prairie Village Police Department, after Kate was checked out for smoke inhalation.  Mike and Debora were put in different rooms to be questioned separately, beginning just after 4 a.m.  Despite the tragedy, Debora was talkative, almost cheerful.  She wasn't crying and didn't appear to have been crying.  Detectives noticed the slight odor of alcohol about her but she did not seem intoxicated.   

Debora's Story

According to Debora, she had had one drink, maybe a drink and a half, at dinner and had gone to bed between nine-thirty and ten.  She had awakened at eleven to a noise she discovered was Tim, getting something to eat in the kitchen.  It was, she said, the last time she saw her son.  She then contradictorily said that she had received a call from Mike around ten or ten-thirty; he had been paged from the house.  Debora denied paging her husband and offered to see if the children were awake.  She claimed to have checked and found none of the children awake.  She then went back to sleep, only to be awakened by the house's alarm going off.  Believing it was the burglar alarm going off accidentally, she said she tried to shut it off from the panel in her bedroom three or four times without success.  Opening her bedroom door, she found the hallway was full of smoke.  Scared, she left the home via the back door that led from her bedroom to the deck on the back of the house.  She said that when she went around the corner of her home to reach the neighbors, she heard Tim on the intercom.  Debora said that Tim was calling out to her, asking her what he should do.  She instructed him to wait where he was while she went to call 911.  Detectives noted that Debora described Tim as "he used to be my thirteen-year old" and that by telling him to stay where he was, answering in the negative when Tim suggested he try to get one of his sisters and crawl out his window, "I'm sure was the kiss of death."  

Debora did not - perhaps could not - explain why she had not simply called 911 from the phone in her bedroom.  

She spoke of the fact that her children went to the prestigious Pembroke Hill School -  "or at least the living ones do."   Tim had had a hockey game that night of Monday, October 23 and Kate had had ballet practice.  The four of them had dined on Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner.   The family's two dogs normally slept with her, she said, but on that night they had gotten into a bag of coffee beans and she allowed Russell, the Greyhound, to sleep with Kate and Boomer, the Labrador, to sleep with Kelly as she figured the two dogs would be overly energetic and wound up from the coffee. 

Debora admitted that she and Mike were in the process of a divorce, which had been affecting Tim and Kate very badly.  Both children in fact, according to her, hated their father for it, so much so that they would hurl expletives at him - a statement she made with a smile and pride - and Tim once had even punched his father in the face.  She also informed detectives that she too, like her estranged husband, was a doctor but had been forced to quit practicing by him and coerced into being a stay-at-home wife and mother.  

The detectives found that she spoke almost too rapidly to keep up with and while she had been somewhat unemotional when describing Tim and Kelly in the past tense, she was full of rage and vitriol toward Mike.  While she let loose on what a horrible person Mike was and how much the children hated him (vacillating between referring to Tim and Kelly in both the past and present tense),  in the next breath she told investigators how relieved she had been when Mike had moved out of the family home weeks earlier, that she hadn't been terribly upset or even emotionally invested in her marriage ending.  She now planned on going back to her career, this time in psychiatry and she hoped to work at the Menninger Clinic, where she herself had been a patient, briefly, only several months before. 

Despite being an obviously highly intelligent woman and claiming that she was going to go into psychiatry, she continued to alternate on the evening's timeline.  Detectives asked her to go over it multiple times, and each time she added or recalled something new.  Whereas she had said she had last spoken to her husband around 10:30, now she admitted to speaking to him after 11:30.  She recalled that several nights earlier, she had heard noises in the backyard.  She said it was clearly people but she assumed it was teens running around and smashing pumpkins.  

Over the course of their two-hour interview, Debora alternated from an almost childlike state to cheerful to ranting.   The detectives could barely keep up with her rapid-fire talk and flip-flopping mood swings.   One minute she would be talking about herself and praising that Kate had survived because of Debora herself; the next she would be screaming epithets at the firefighters and police officers who let Tim and Kelly die.  

Mike and Debora's wedding in 1979 (photo source)

Mike's Story

Mike's interview began at 6:20 a.m.  Unlike his wife, his eyes were red from crying and his entire demeanor was one of tragedy.   Like Debora, he spoke very quickly but he was focused and he answered all questions put to him,  his voice cracking from his attempts, some unsuccessful, to hold back tears.  

He told detectives he was forty years old and a cardiologist and that he and Debora had been married for 17 years but he had filed for divorce in July.  Their separation was particularly acrimonious, with the children being put in the middle.  Debora had no real friends according to Mike and so she spoke to the children as if they were adult friends rather than just kids.  As a result, the three kids had known far more than they should have about the Farrar-Green marriage.  

Mike admitted that he was romantically involved with Margaret Hacker, a woman he had met through a school trip to Peru in which his son Tim and her sons had taken, along with Mike and Debora.  Although Margaret too was married at the time, unhappily as Mike himself was, their friendship turned into an affair.  Margaret's husband was an anesthesiologist who suffered for years with depression and who had committed suicide only six weeks earlier.  Debora knew about the affair, as did most of the community as Mike and Margaret had not been particularly discreet.  Debora had told Tim, Kate, and Kelly about it in particular detail, which certainly had not done anything to endear Mike to them - at least not to the two older children.  Kelly had still been so young that she had not developed any animosity toward her father.      

As part of his attempts to heal his relationship with Tim and Kate, Mike tried to spend extra time with them and attend as many of their extracurricular events as he could.  He agreed with Debora's statement that he had taken Tim to his hockey game on Monday evening, bringing Kelly along as well, since Kate had ballet practice and Debora had a therapy session.  He had accompanied the children inside the house when dropping them off, where Debora had been heating up Kentucky Fried Chicken for their dinner.  Debora did not speak to him as he collected a few items of his mail and left.  It was the last time he saw his children before the fire.  He had gone to have dinner with a few friends, including Margaret Hacker.     

He received multiple pages from the Canterbury house and he returned the calls, in case the children were trying to contact him.  Mike said that it wasn't unusual for Debora to page him repeatedly in an attempt to see where he was and who he was with and he suspected that was why she was paging him that night once he ascertained the children were fine and none of them had made the calls.  He told detectives that he could tell that Debora was drunk and admitted that he went off at her.  He chastised her for drinking to excess with the children there and the overall filthy state that the home always seemed to be in.  He informed her that people around town were talking about her and considering calling Social Services.  

Of particular interest was Mike's opinion that Debora could have started the fire.  He informed detectives that 18 months earlier, he and Debora had been on the verge of divorce.  He had moved out of their home in Kansas City in early 1994 and into an apartment.  The two had attempted to reconcile and thought buying the big house on Canterbury Court would give them a fresh start.  They had been preparing to sign the papers when Mike got cold feet; he realized they were doing what many couples did and attempting to solve their problems with either a baby or a house.  He told Debora he changed his mind.  She was irate but he would not be moved.   Days later, he got a call that the family home was on fire.  Fortunately, Debora, the kids and Boomer the Lab were out of the house at the time but the damage from the smoke and water (worse than the fire itself) made the house uninhabitable.  Debora and the kids moved into the apartment with Mike and he acquiesced to purchasing the big house in Prairie Village as he felt they didn't have much choice.  

From the start, Mike had wondered if Debora could have set the fire, either for insurance purposes (the Farrars actually came out ahead since they had new furnishings in the house and once repaired, the house sold for a tidy profit) or as a way to keep them together.  She had made certain everyone was out of the house.  

The thought that Debora could have set this fire, with the children sleeping in the house, set his teeth on edge.  Despite her problems over the years, first with prescription medication and then alcohol, Mike had considered her to be a good mother who had been involved in her children's lives and extracurricular activities and didn't want to entertain the thought that she could intentionally harm their children.

Of even more interest to the detectives was Mike's belief that Debora had poisoned him over the summer of 1995.  In late July, Mike had asked her for a divorce and not long after, he got sick.  Very, very sick.  He was admitted into the hospital on August 18, the first of three admissions.  Despite the number of specialists who saw him, they had no diagnosis for why he was so critically ill.  During each admission, he improved in the hospital and then after returning home to Canterbury Court, where he would eat a meal, he would become violently ill and be readmitted to the hospital.  Mike didn't want to think that Debora could do something so intentionally cruel and vicious to him, at least not until he went through her handbag and found a dozen packets of castor beans.  His research led him to discover that the core of castor beans are extremely deadly; when removed from its hard, protecting coating and ground into a powdery substance, it becomes ricin.  Ricin is one of the most toxic naturally occurring substances with no antidote treatment.  Many persons who ingest ricin die within three to twelve days, making Mike Farrar an extremely lucky man to still be alive.  

There was a test that could be done that could detect the presence of antibodies to ricin in Mike's bloodstream but doctors would need to wait for the antibodies to form. 

Kate's Story

It was two days later when detectives sat down with ten-year-old Kate Farrar to get her account of the deadly fire.  Kate said that on Monday night she had awoken to the fire already burning and smoke creeping into her room.  She had opened her bedroom door and called out to Tim before closing the door and placing what would be the hang-up call to 911 at 12:21 a.m.  It was then that she crawled out her window to safety.  

According to Kate, Debora had been "terribly upset" when the little girl had been spotted on the roofline of the garage, although she had called to her daughter to jump into her arms.  It was only minutes after Kate jumped and landed in the grass and leaves that Mike arrived at the scene.  Per Kate, Mike was accusatory toward Debora, who was crying and worried about Tim and Kelly.

The little girl admitted that she was angry toward her father, whom she said had spurned her mother's sincere efforts for an amicable separation.  Kate said that she and her siblings had loved and respected their mother but she did admit that Debora was drinking large quantities of alcohol.  

Finally, Kate expressed surprise that Tim had not escaped the burning home the same way she had, out the bedroom window and onto the roof.

The Investigation at Canterbury Court

While the interviews, first with Debora and then with Mike, were being conducted in the early morning of October 24, the house on Canterbury Court, with the fire, other than a few hot spots, having been put out, was being inspected by firefighters and detectives.  All that was left of the once luxurious 5,000 square foot home was the garage and stonework on the front of the house.  Although Mike and Debora had decorated the home with new, and expensive, furnishings nearly everything had been incinerated with trained investigators unable to tell what some things were, other than "wood."  

Around 3 a.m., firefighters signaled they had found a body, which was relayed to detectives. Almost immediately, word was revised that the body was that of Russell, the family's greyhound.  The sense of relief did not last long.  Tim Farrar was found fifteen to twenty feet beyond the front door, resting on the joists of the room.  His body was badly burned and it appeared that he, along with his bed, had fallen from one of the upper stories and landed in the living room.  Kelly Farrar was found in her bedroom, laying in the lower bunk of a bunk bed, covers pulled up to her waist.  Unlike her brother, she did not appear to have wakened or struggled at all, but died of carbon monoxide in her sleep.  Boomer, the family's black Lab, was beneath her bed.  He too had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.  

Hours later, after the medical examiner had removed the children's bodies, members of the Eastern Kansas Multi-Agency Task Force were called to Canterbury Court, including a "sniffer" dog by the name of Avon.  Much like dogs who were trained to sniff out drugs, Avon could sniff out accelerants.  The investigators and task force were able to rule out an accidental fire started by faulty wiring or furnaces, the cause of many fires.  Pour patterns, the telltale signs of accelerants being spread, were detected at the ground and second floors, areas where Avon got hit after hit.  Ultimately, the arson investigation confirmed everyone's worst fears:  arson had led to homicide.  

(photo source)

Saying Goodbye to Tim and Kelly

On Friday, October 27, 1995, a joint funeral for Timothy Scott Farrar and Kelly Christine Farrar was held at the Village Presbyterian Church, where Mike had made the arrangements.  Debora was "rude" and "mean," according to one funeral home employee, who said he had never seen anything like it before.  Debora swore at him over the details that Mike had arranged.  When her family had requested that she not speak to him that way, Debora cursed at her own family and continued to rant about the arrangements.  Debora, with her parents and sister, and along with Kate sat in the front row of the sanctuary, while Mike and his family sat in the row behind them.  During one of the songs that Mike had chosen, Debora turned around, stuck her finger in her mouth and pretended to gag.  Worse, when the reverend presiding over the funeral service, who had married Mike and Debora in 1979, began his eulogy with "Two days ago, when Bill Farrar called and asked me to be here today," Debora turned around to say "Thanks, asshole," to her father-in-law, a sentiment that was heard by many in the church.

More than 300 mourners had attended the funeral service.  Kate cried throughout while Debora, according to some onlookers, greeted people joyously and even laughed.  Many of Tim's friends who attended the service went up to Debora and hugged her.  

Following the funeral service, the cremains of Tim and Kelly were interred together at the Highland Park Cemetery.  

The Murder and Arson Investigation Leads to An Arrest

Police began investigations not only into the arson case and the homicides of Tim and Kelly Farrar but also the poisoning of Mike Farrar.  The poisoning investigation led them to an Earl May store in Olathe where a clerk gave a description of the purchaser of the castor beans very similar to that of Debora Green and tentatively identified her in a photo lineup.  

Mike had not been well since his last hospitalization on September 11.  The three poisonings had come close to killing him and left him with weakness.  Still feeling something was wrong, Mike asked for an echocardiogram and it was found that he had a severely leaking mitral valve, caused by bacterial endocarditis, an infection of his heart valves.  Just before Thanksgiving, he was once again admitted to the hospital, scheduled to have a Groshong catheter inserted into his subclavian vein to receive intravenous antibiotics.  

On Wednesday, November 22, 1995, the day before Thanksgiving, Debora was arrested outside the Midland Theater in Kansas City, where Kate was appearing as Clara in The Nutcracker, and charged with two counts of first-degree murder, arson and two counts of attempted murder.  Debora was stoic and nonchalant, according to the arresting officers.  She was extradited from a local jail to the Johnson County Adult Detention Center in Kansas on a $3 million bond, the highest bail ever set in Johnson County.

A month later, after suffering from severe frontal headaches, Mike underwent a craniotomy, surgery to treat an abscess in his brain.  The abscess had formed after a clump of bacteria that had originated in his heart valve had traveled to the right front part of his brain.  As the abscess was bleeding, Mike was very much on borrowed time, with the bacteria breaking through or suffering a stroke being a very real possibility.  Worried that he would not survive the surgery in which burr holes would be drilled into the right frontal portion of his skull, allowing a portion of bone to be removed and exposing his brain beneath, he gave videotaped testimony beforehand to be used in his wife's trial.  (Mike survived and was able to testify in person.) 

In January of 1996, there was a pretrial hearing on Debora's case.  The galley was full of spectators who gathered not only to see the doctor accused of killing two of her children and attempting to kill her husband but to hear what the prosecution's case was.  

The defense team announced that it was not Debora who had set the deadly fire but Tim, who had once been caught setting off Molotov cocktails and had "an unnatural fascination with fire."  It was also Tim who had poisoned Mike, according to Debora's attorneys; Tim had done the majority of the cooking for the family.  Most of the spectators found the suggestion that thirteen-year-old Tim had set the fire that killed him and Kelly a repugnant defense tactic and perhaps a suggestion that Debora's case was very weak. 

Mike testifying (photo source)

 During the pretrial hearing, friends of Tim's testified for the defense that Tim was indeed fascinated by fire and had told them he knew how to make bombs.  A neighbor took the stand to recount catching Tim burning grass in the yard.  A former nanny of the Farrars testified that she heard Tim speaking of wanting Mike dead and had planned on burning the family house to the ground; she stated she had caught the boy multiple times in the process of setting fires.  

The prosecution, on cross examination, got the former nanny to admit that she had not seen Tim Farrar for a number of years and had not reported Tim's supposed fascination with fire to either Mike or Debora or the police.  

Debora at her hearing (photo source)

Medical evidence was submitted by the State, which conclusively determined that Mike Farrar had a tremendous amount of ricin in his bloodstream, indicating that he had been repeatedly poisoned (and was very, very fortunate to be alive.)  

The first officer on the scene of the fire testified as to Kate Farrar's frantic, hysterical state and Debora Green's indifference.  Debora's attorneys argued that her psychiatric medications caused a blunted effect, which would make her appear unemotional.  

Arson investigators testified as to the origin and cause of the fire; accelerant used to purposely start the fire.  

The State played the videotape of Debora being questioned only hours after the fire and rested on January 31.    

The presiding judge found enough evidence to hold Debora for trial, which was set for summer.    Prosecutors elected to request the death penalty, which may have played a part in Debora's request for a plea.  

On April 17, 1996, Debora appeared in court to plead no contest to the five charges:  two counts of murder, one count of arson, and two counts of attempted murder.  The plea deal allowed her to avoid the death penalty but required her to accept a prison sentence of 40 years with no possibility of parole.

Debora read a statement to the court, in which she denied being under the influence of any drug which might affect her judgment and in which she stated she understood that the State had substantial evidence against her.  She said that she hoped by avoiding a trial, her daughter Kate might begin to heal.  One of her attorneys in a press conference following the plea said that Debora was accepting responsibility for the crimes but he did not believe she intended to kill her children.

Inmate #63205 (photo source)

On May 30, 1996, Debora Green was formally sentenced to two concurrent forty-year sentences, minus the 191 days she had already served.  She was then sent to the Topeka Correctional Facility where she became Inmate #63205 and began her sentence in isolation.  Only after she took mental and physical tests and became acclimated to prison life would she be allowed to move into general population.

After the Sentencing

In July, Debora and Mike's divorce was finalized.    That summer, Debora began writing to Kate, stating that she had limited recall of the night of the fire and that she had been taking more than the recommended doses of her medication.  She wrote similar letters to Mike, including claims that Margaret Hacker had set the fire.  She still insisted that it was Tim that had been poisoning Mike.

She also wrote to true crime author Ann Rule, wanting for the writer to tell her story.  Rule did, publishing Bitter Harvest in 1997 and taking the stance that Debora was indeed guilty of not only setting the fire that killed two of her children but in poisoning her husband.

In 2000, Debora, through her new legal team, filed a request for a new trial, citing that she was incompetent from prescription medications at the time of her hearings.  She also made the allegation that her initial attorneys had not represented her adequately, as they had been more focused on avoiding a trial and the death penalty.   Prosecutors indicated that should a new trial be granted, they would seek the death penalty against her; Debora withdrew her motion.  

In 2004, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional and Debora once again filed a motion for a new trial.  This time, she alleged that new scientific techniques invalidated the original findings that the fire was a result of arson.  In February of 2005, her motion was denied.

(photo source)

To date, Debora remains incarcerated at the Topeka Correctional Facility.  Since her incarceration, she has had two disciplinary reports; one, in October of 2000 and the other in February of 2003.  The Kansas Department of Corrections reports that she is working in a job without specification as to what that job is.  Her earliest release date is November 21, 2035, when she will be 84 years old.

Mike Farrar continued to have health-related issues.  In June of 1996, he traveled to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota to undergo tests on his heart and brain.  The tests revealed that his heart's mitral valve was damaged. Without open-heart surgery to close that damaged valve, he would develop congestive heart failure.  He had to wait for full recovery from his brain surgery before undertaking another major surgery and so it was two months later that he returned to the Mayo Clinic and on August 2 underwent the surgery for the valve repair.  The surgery went well but once back in Kansas, he suffered an often fatal complication:  cardiac tamponade.  Cardiac tamponade is when fluid in the pericardium, the sac surrounding the heart, builds up and results in compression of the heart.  It can happen when the heart is nicked during surgery.  Not immediately detected, the medication Mike was given to thin his blood and prevent clotting had increased the fluid building up around his pericardial sac.  

A cardiologist himself, Mike immediately knew why he was short of breath and very weak a week after the surgery and got himself admitted to the North Kansas City Hospital.  There, he had yet another surgery, this one to drain the blood that was compressing his heart.  It was his eleventh hospitalization in one year and would finally be his last.

His relationship with Margaret Hacker did not survive; she and her sons moved to the West Coast in 1996.  In 1997, he married an attorney and together with her child and Kate, began a new life.  Currently 66 years old, Mike still practices cardiology in Kansas City.

Kate, now 36 years old, still supports her mother's claims of innocence and reportedly has a deep, solid relationship with both of her parents.  During the awful time after the fire and while her father was struggling to survive, she lived with her paternal grandparents.  She is married and resides in Kansas City.

Although prosecutors never had the chance to try Debora Green for her crimes, they believe that on the night of October 23-24, 1995, after being berated by her estranged husband (whom she had poisoned at least three times during the summer of 1995) and hearing that people were talking about her mental state, Debora decided to set fire to the house on Canterbury Court with the deliberate intention to kill her children.  They weren't certain of exactly what accelerant she used, although they knew it wasn't gasoline.  The pour patterns of the accelerant led from the master bedroom, indicating that Debora had begun pouring there, outside the bedroom, and the trail led up the stairs to the doors of the children's bedrooms.  It would have been virtually impossible for anyone to have gotten out from upstairs once the fire was lit.  Debora had also splashed accelerant randomly around the house, around and on top of furniture.  Although Debora had stated that she awoke to hear the house's alarm going off and had opened her bedroom door to see smoke, the investigation revealed that the door had been opened when the fire was set.  The prosecution believed that Debora had lit the fire from her bedroom doorway and like most laypeople, had managed to singe her hair in the process.  Because of this, and also possibly because she had wanted to be sure she and her clothing would be free of accelerants, Debora had taken a shower while a flame had snaked through the house and upstairs, trapping her children.  The shower would account for the wet hair her neighbors noticed when she knocked on their door for help.   (Tests done on Debora's hair would show that despite a haircut within days after the fire, she had singed portions of hair.)  At some point, Debora had also attempted to start a fire in the master bathroom via the vanity, which had burned out on its own.  

It's unknown what Debora must have thought when she heard Tim on the intercom, calling for help and asking her what to do.  What is certain, though, is that Debora, rather than telling him to get out by any means necessary, told him to wait until help arrived - an unthinkable thought for most.   Neither the investigators nor the prosecutors knew why Tim didn't attempt escape from his bedroom window as Kate did and could only speculate that he may have attempted to get to Kelly's room to save her or became overcome by the smoke, heat and flames in his own room, where he perished.   

As Debora has never spoken about a motive for her crimes, prosecutors and investigators believed that although she clearly hated Mike Farrar enough to want to kill him in an agonizing manner in which she could watch, she also wanted him back.  It may have been made especially clear to her on the night of October 23, 1995 that Mike was never coming back and with the community noticing her behavior and threatening to report her to Social Services, Debora's world was finally going to crumble.  Did she think the ultimate punishment to Mike was to take away his children forever?  It may never be known.  The only thing certain is that Debora Green never intended for Tim, Kate and Kelly to survive that fire.    

The final resting place of Tim and Kelly Farrar (photo source)

Sources: 
Rule, Ann. Bitter Harvest. Simon & Schuster, 1997.

AP News. (1995). Doctor-Mother Charged With Killing Two Children; Poisoning Husband (apnews.com)

The Kansas City Star. (2014). Debora Green seeks new sentencing in arson fire that killed two children | The Kansas City Star

Kansas Department of Corrections. (2021). https://www.doc.ks.gov

Killers Without Conscience. (2014). Flickering Flames Finish a Farrar Family Fury | Killers Without Conscience (wordpress.com)

MEAWW. (2021.) Where is Debora Green now? Chilling story of woman who set house on fire, killed 2 children and poisoned husband | MEAWW

Murderpedia, the Encyclopedia of Murderers. (2021). www.murderpedia.org/female.G/g/green-debora.htm

The Washington Post. (1998). THE UNSPEAKABLE CRIMES OF DEBORA GREEN, MODERN MEDEA — The Washington Post