Over Our Dead Bodies

Debora Green was an oncologist trained in emergency medicine, living in a six-bedroom Tudor house on Canterbury Court in Prairie Village, Kansas. Her marriage to Michael Farrar, a cardiologist, had collapsed by 1995. After he told her he wanted a divorce, he began suffering bouts of violent stomach illness that no doctor could explain. He had been poisoned with ricin made from castor beans his wife had bought.

Farrar was hospitalized three times and moved out in late September. On October 24, 1995, fire tore through the house. Timothy, 13, and Kelly, 6, died. Green and their ten-year-old daughter Kate got out. Arson investigators traced pour patterns of liquid accelerant that cut off the stairway and stopped at Green’s bedroom door, and they noted that Green’s hair was singed in a way that did not fit the account she had given them. She was arrested on November 22, 1995.

Rather than face a capital trial, Green entered a no contest plea in April 1996, and on May 30 she was sentenced to two concurrent 40-year terms with no parole eligibility until 2035. She withdrew a 2000 bid for a new trial, and a second was denied in 2005. In January 2015 a Johnson County judge refused to lift the 40-year minimum. Michael Farrar died in Smithville, Missouri, on August 23, 2023, at 68.