Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice (11 page)

Sweat beaded on Mike’s forehead from the effort of talking to Tim and Lissa. He had lost thirty pounds, a fifth of his normal weight. What would become of his children if he didn’t get better? He couldn’t bear to think of that.

At home, Tim followed his father’s orders, gathering up large bottles of gin and vodka and hiding them outside the house. His mother had passed out again, and his little sisters were frightened and tearful. He put them to bed and tried to reassure them, but he knew he couldn’t very well hide all the alcohol; his father had hundreds of bottles of wine. And his mother knew where they were. She didn’t like wine very much, but she might drink it when she couldn’t find anything else.

10

C
eleste Walker had lived for a half dozen years with a man incapable of much more than mere survival, a man who went to work without enthusiasm and came home without joy. When she fell in love with Mike and began her first affair, she was incredibly vulnerable and naive. She saw a happy ending though common sense should have told her that there is no such thing as an affair that hurts no one.

John Walker marked his forty-fifth birthday in August 1995. One of his presents was a new bicycle. He showed as much enthusiasm as he could muster, but the truth was that his depression had become constant. His inner pain was almost palpable, obvious to everyone he worked and lived with. Celeste had tried for years to draw him out of his black funks, but nothing worked.

Now, Mike was ill and, she felt, in danger. He had told her how much he loved her, how much he needed her. “He said I was the love of his life,” Celeste remembered. He was just out of the hospital for the second time and she was afraid he was going to die. When she saw him she barely recognized him: he was so thin and his eyes were so hollow looking. He
did
need her—and John quite obviously didn’t. He had been telling her for years that he didn’t need her, that he planned to leave her just as soon as the boys were well on their way in life.

That August, Celeste decided to tell John that she wanted a divorce and that they should separate. It was not a new idea; one or the other of them had brought it up often in the last few years. Celeste believed—or had convinced herself—that her being with John would not make him less depressed. In fact, he might be happier if they made the break now rather than delaying the inevitable.

John seemed to take her decision fairly well. He even consulted a divorce attorney, although Celeste would not know that until later, when she saw the lawyer’s bill. She filed for divorce in late August, citing incompatibility.

John rented a house not far from the family home and began to move into it on Labor Day. Coincidentally, the house was owned by Mike Montgomery, one of Mike Farrar’s partners. Dr. Montgomery was visiting Mike in the hospital when Celeste dropped by. She mentioned that she was getting a divorce and that her husband was looking for a nice small house to rent. Montgomery suggested his house, and John had looked at it and rented it on the spot.

A number of John’s friends offered to help him move, but he insisted that he could manage by himself. He had made four trips with clothes to the new place, but most of his belongings were still at the house where Celeste and the boys would continue living.

“It was really tough for him,” Celeste recalled. “He was
crying
as he went back and forth, back and forth. I offered to help. And then I said, ‘Don’t
do
this.’”

They had been married for sixteen years. There was no hurry for John to move out; Celeste begged him to take his time, to accept her help and the help of his friends. “He came back home on Labor Day,” she recalled. And, perhaps to get through the memory, she used a term from psychiatric nursing. “He collapsed—he decompensated right in front of me. And I said, ‘Don’t do this, John … I know someone who can do the moving for you. You can have it done. Quit right now. Go on your fishing trip next week with your guys—and we’ll do it while you’re gone.’”

Celeste wanted to make things as easy for John as possible. But even as she tried to explain that he didn’t have to do the physical work of moving out, he kept saying, “I can’t do this…. I can’t do this,” and sobbing uncontrollably. “What I assumed he meant was that he couldn’t move his things,” Celeste said. “Later, I realized he meant he couldn’t go on. He couldn’t separate. He couldn’t have a life without me.”

John went to bed at four o’clock that afternoon. He woke at seven, watched television with Brett, ate a little bit of the dinner Celeste cooked, and then went back to bed. That wasn’t unusual for him. For months, he had gone to work, watched TV, and gone to bed early. Lately, he had been in the habit of getting up early to ride his bike before he went to work, but on the morning of September 5, he didn’t do that.

“I never saw him that morning,” Celeste said quietly. “I jumped up and went upstairs to wake the boys, and when I came downstairs, John had left for work. He never said good-bye. He never said good morning to the boys. Nothing.”

Celeste went about her usual weekday chores. She fed the boys, took care of her house, and then drove Brett to soccer practice. She and Dan did errands until it was time to pick Brett up.

She expected to see John at home after he finished work as usual. Their separation was in an embryonic stage; technically they still lived together, and John had no pots and pans or groceries yet. But by 6:30, he wasn’t home, and he wasn’t at work at Shawnee Mission Hospital, although Celeste learned his staff there had had a meeting that kept him a little later than usual. He wasn’t at the golf course, and he wasn’t at any of the friends’ homes she called.

Out of ideas, Celeste called Janie, one of her best friends. “Maybe he’s over at his new place,” she said. “Maybe he’s just reading the paper over there—having some quiet time alone. I think he has a phone there, but I don’t know the number. I’ll go over and check.”

There was a long pause and then Janie said, “My dad killed himself. Don’t you go over there alone. I have a terrible feeling.”

Janie lived near the house John had rented. When Celeste got there, she was already standing in the driveway. They knocked and got no response. They tried the door; it was locked. They worked their way around the house, trying doors and windows, but they were all locked.

“John had taken me for a tour of the house a few days before,” Celeste said, “so I knew about this letter-drop thing into the garage. I opened that and I could see a light in there. There were no windows in the garage so it was completely dark, except for this light. I kept staring at it—and my brain just wasn’t computing. It wouldn’t let me identify what I was seeing. It didn’t make sense to me.
Finally
, I could
see
what I was seeing.”

Celeste’s subconscious mind had tried to keep her from recognizing what she was looking at. Her eyes saw the faded blue, pink, and tan checks of John’s shirt, but her mind would not process that information. Finally, she realized that the little light she saw was the dome light of her husband’s car. His head was thrown back and the light was shining down on his face.

He wasn’t moving at all.

Frantic, Celeste and Janie raced around to the back, where the garage door lifted up, but it was locked tight. Celeste called 911 on her cell phone, screaming for help. Neither woman would remember exactly how they got into the garage, but somehow they did. “Janie practically wrecked the door,” Celeste said, “but she got it up so we could get in.”

Janie managed to drag John from his car onto the garage floor; there, three women fought to save his life: Celeste, Janie, and a doctor who lived next door. The doctor, who was hugely pregnant, got down on the floor and tried to breathe air into his lungs, but her own lungs were so compromised by her pregnancy that she couldn’t even manage to lift his chest. Celeste pushed her out of the way and placed her own mouth over her husband’s. She willed him to live, and took heart when she saw that his chest
did
rise and fall.

“The reason we all fought so hard was because we thought there was time—he was still so warm,” Celeste would remember. They hadn’t stopped to think that it was 105 degrees outside. It wasn’t life that kept John warm, it was the weather. “He had been dead a long time,” Celeste recalled sadly. “He had left work at four o’clock and it was seven-thirty when we found him.”

Although ultimately she had to accept that John was beyond saving when she found him, Celeste refused to give up. She insisted that he be admitted to the ER at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, the hospital where he had administered anesthesia to hundreds of patients, where only that morning he had helped to save lives. Gently, the staff there told her that they could not admit a patient who had been dead for hours—not even one of their own.

Sergeant Gary Hines of the Mission police had responded to the 911 call. Most suicides in garages are by carbon monoxide poisoning. But Dr. John Walker was a skilled anesthesiologist. When Hines arrived, he saw that the dead man had IV tubing in his left arm that was attached to two syringes. There was also a vial of some kind of medicine and a sterile-water solution. The victim’s shirt had been ripped open down the front and his tan trousers unzipped and pulled down a little. There were a few drops of blood on his thighs and some staining on the pants themselves.

That wasn’t suspicious; as the three women had prepared to administer CPR, they would have torn and pulled at his clothing and ripped the IV needles from his hand, spilling the small amount of blood there. He would not have bled after death. The police presumed that Dr. Walker would have known exactly how much of certain drugs it would take to kill him. Even so, an autopsy was ordered to determine the exact manner of his death.

There was one fact that only Celeste knew. John had carried a syringe of fentanyl with him always. She had found syringes in his jacket pockets and in his car. “It was like his ace in the hole, if things got too had,” she said. “I don’t think he was abusing it; I think he just kept it close as his safety valve.”

Fentanyl is a powerful painkiller, an opioid drug often used by anesthesiologists, but almost always in conjunction with assisted breathing because it tends to depress respiration. The speed with which it is introduced into the body is very important. Cases of sudden death from heart palpitations or tachycardia (racing heart), lack of oxygen, or severe electrolyte disturbance are not uncommon at doses of fentanyl over 25 milligrams. Fentanyl is also highly addictive.

Mike was in the hospital when John Walker died, being treated for the fourth episode of the mysterious ailment that seemed to be bringing him closer and closer to death. Celeste couldn’t bring herself to call and tell him about John. “When I was back home and I got myself together a little, I called Carolyn and asked her to tell Mike. She did. He called me and he was very sympathetic, very comforting. He kept telling me that it wasn’t my fault…. But when Mike told Deb that John had killed himself, she got hysteri cal and started drinking. She called his sister Karen and told her, ‘Celeste killed John.’ She told her children that, too.”

Later, a nurse who had been on the operating room team with John Walker the day he died remarked on his demeanor. “He was so sad that day, so depressed, that you could feel it. It was catching. I could barely bring myself to stand close to him and feel that much pain.”

11

O
ne of Celeste Walker’s relatives would insist that she heard John talking on the phone to Debora a day or two before Celeste found him dead in the garage of his rented house. If Debora had, in fact, told him of the affair between her husband and his wife, it would have been a powerful incentive for him to check out of his bleak life, particularly after Celeste chose that day or the next to ask him for a divorce. Debora would deny that any such conversation took place; Celeste believed that it did, that Debora was so jealous that she would have done anything to get back at her and Mike. Anyone who knew John at all well would have known how fragile he was. Debora had known him since medical school. To tell him about the affair, bluntly and in the vulgar terms she used to tell her own children, would have been an unbelievably cruel thing to do.

It was a ghastly time. John’s mother, Kathryn Walker,
^*
had left for a long-awaited trip to France the day he killed himself. She had no sooner landed in Paris than she was greeted with the news that her son was dead, an apparent suicide. She never left the airport, but caught the next plane back to the United States.

Kathryn Walker could not accept that her son had killed himself, even though other family members and his friends had said he was depressed. She admitted that John was “heartsick” about his divorce. “He did not realize anything until she filed,” Kathryn would claim. “He said he made a terrible mistake by not going to Peru.” She said that he had been thinking about the future. He was buying a new car and furniture. He had planned to go to Canada with six friends. Those, his mother insisted, were not the plans of a would-be suicide. Kathryn wanted to believe her son’s death was an accident. Even murder would have been easier for her to accept—although she named no suspects.

Gossips said that Celeste wore too much makeup at John’s funeral services, that her clothes were inappropriate, and that the first thing she said when she got home afterward was “Who’s going to make the margaritas?” She was too merry a widow. “She laughed at his funeral,” one woman said disapprovingly. “She acted as though she was at a cocktail party.” But no one who knew Celeste would have been surprised by her behavior. She had long since learned to conceal her pain with laughter.

Gossips also said that Celeste had John’s car detailed the day after his death, then billed his office for it. Some mean-spirited people would have pilloried her in the town square if they could have. They did not take into account the enormity of her horror when she looked through that mail slot into the garage. They did not know her well enough to know how she responded to an emotional blow. Celeste moved through the days following her discovery of John’s body like an automaton. She had wanted to be free of her sad marriage—but not like this.

She had always expected that she and John would remain part of each other’s lives, that they would consult on raising their two sons. The trouble with her marriage had never been that she didn’t care about John. She
did
care, but she had exhausted every way she could think of to make him happy. Anyone who had seen her hysterically pleading with the ER staff at Shawnee Mission Medical Center to treat John, to save him—even though he had been dead for hours—could testify that she had wanted him to live.

But still there were rumors that Celeste had either killed her husband or deliberately driven him to suicide. “She got millions of dollars in insurance, you know,” the rumor mongers said, hugely inflating the actual amount.

“The police investigated me,” Celeste would admit frankly. “They questioned me, and they cleared me.”

Question her they did—not once but several times. They asked her to account for every moment of September 5. She remembered most of the day well, but she could not remember whether she had bought her younger son ice cream or taken him to a video arcade while they waited for Brett to finish soccer practice. That day had been endless, full of sadness, worry, anxiety—and, finally, panic.

Celeste was not immediately eliminated as a suspect in her husband’s sudden death. It took two autopsies to explain the cause of his death—precisely
because
he was an anesthesiologist, who knew the most effective way to stop his heart instantly.

Dr. Bonita J. Peterson performed the first autopsy, on the morning of September 6, 1995, approximately fifteen hours after John’s death. She noted that Dr. Walker had an intravenous line in his left hand, attached to tubing with two interconnected syringes. “One was labeled as being Pentothal. An empty vial labeled pancuronium bromide (Pavulon) was also found in the car.”

Dr. Peterson found two anatomic conditions: pulmonary congestion and edema; and mild coronary and aortic arteriosclerosis. The former was the immediate result of John’s manner of death; the latter is common to almost all humans over the age of forty. It is the buildup of plaque—fat deposits—along arterial walls.

Dr. Peterson was not entirely sure of just how Dr. Walker had died. As she wrote in her report, her final comment was, “This is the puzzling case of a 45-year-old white man, an anesthesiologist who was found dead, hooked up to IV tubing connected to a Pentothal syringe. Sterile water and pancuronium were also present at the scene. Exhaustive toxicological examination failed to reveal Pentothal in the urine or blood, although Pentothal
was
present in the syringe. Examination for fentanyl was negative and potassium injection was also excluded. The specimens were taken by me personally to the toxicology laboratory on the day of collection … therefore, a mix-up of specimens is not a logical possibility. The death is an obvious suicide from the circumstances and sodium pentothal is still the most likely cause, even though, for unknown reasons, it cannot be confirmed in the body fluids.”

John Walker had no drags or alcohol in his system. He may have carried a syringe of fentanyl with him as security in case he was gripped by such overwhelming depression that he needed it. But he was not addicted to it; fentanyl was not present in his blood.

For experts, the disturbing finding of the first postmortem examination and the toxicology screen was that Walker, a skilled anesthesiologist, seemed to have carried out an unnecessarily agonizing suicide by using the intravenous fluids in the wrong sequence. Pancuronium, or Pavulon, paralyzes the muscles, so the patient cannot move—not even to breathe. Pentothal is truth serum; it brings on unconsciousness. Anesthesiologists use pancuronium to immobilize patients during surgery; with a mechanical ventilator, they then “breathe” for the patient. Pancuronium’s effect lasts longer than the effect of Pentothal. Why would Walker deliberately paralyze his lungs when he knew he would awaken from the Pentothal and be aware that he was suffocating?

Could this mean that someone else had administered the two drugs, attempting to make murder look like suicide? That seemed very doubtful. No one would calmly submit to such a procedure, and there were no bruises, no signs of struggle at all, on John’s body, save that the buttons had been ripped from his plaid shirt. That certainly had happened when his wife and the physician neighbor attempted CPR.

A second postmortem evaluation was ordered; it might be weeks—or even months—before the questions about Walker’s death were answered definitively. Until then, his widow was the subject of continuing gossip.

Dr. John Walker was dead; Dr. Michael Farrar had come very close to death, and was not out of the woods yet. Although he was released from North Kansas City Hospital on September 11, 1995, it was only with the proviso that he would have an intravenous-feeding setup at home.

Dr. Beth Henry, weighing all the known factors in Mike’s curious illness, had come up with a best guess—that her patient had gluten-sensitive enteropathy. Every time he ate outside the hospital, he had to be readmitted with the same symptoms. “He was eventually placed on a very restricted gluten-free diet and also supplemented with IV nutrition.”

For some reason, his doctors decided, Mike could not eat anything containing grain or certain other food products. “They put in a pik line,” he would explain, “which is a special type of IV that went into the antecubital vein [the vein on the inner side of the arm, at the elbow] in order to give me intravenous feeding.” Using this semipermanent line, Debora could attach the intravenous-feeding tube easily. An IV bag on a stand would hold a milklike substance; fat was added to it, along with multivitamins, which had to be injected directly into the bag. Debora kept the vials of vitamins in the rec room refrigerator downstairs.

Mike was a smart doctor. He had made the connection that he became ill every time he went home. He was not yet sure why. But it could have been the stress associated with being around Debora that made his symptoms flare. It could also have been that he was used to eating a blander diet in the hospital than he got at home.

Celeste and her friend Carolyn Stafford had a more sinister explanation: “They told me they were convinced that Debora was poisoning me.” Mike scoffed at the idea. “I just couldn’t imagine that she would do such a thing.”

Celeste was suspicious enough to write down the date of every relapse and note every symptom. She would not be convinced that his illness was natural or accidental. But Mike continued to deny the possibility. He and Debora had certainly had their problems, but they weren’t living in a soap opera or a mystery novel. He suspected that his doctors would probably commit him if he mentioned his friends’ suspicions about poison. He said nothing.

Mike had weighed only 125 pounds—about as much as Tim—when he left the hospital on September 11, but he began to gain weight from the intravenous feeding. He had been ill, he was getting stronger, and he hoped to be able to go back to work soon. Mike had a new understanding of what some of his patients had undergone, and of the hopelessness of constant illness. If he ever got well enough to practice again, he knew he would be a better doctor—one with considerable empathy.

Although Debora was taking care of him, Mike knew that it was only a matter of time until he could move out and start divorce proceedings. He told her that he had not changed his mind about that.

Debora was still drinking a great deal and it was not unusual for her to pass out at night. And she was saying very disturbing things to Mike. “She said she wanted to die—that she couldn’t live without me. That she wanted to commit suicide. She wanted somebody to kill her. And then she’d say she wanted me dead.”

Mike had been home from his last hospital stay for about two weeks when his concern for Debora’s state of mind drove him to another search of their home. He wanted to make sure that she didn’t have something that she could take to commit suicide, some medication that she was hiding.

Tim, Lissa, and Kelly were back in school by September 24, the day Mike searched the house and found Debora’s purse in the guest bedroom in the basement where she was sleeping. He didn’t believe in invading someone else’s privacy, but he was afraid of what Debora might do next. If she got out of control,
he
certainly wouldn’t be able to stop her physically. Debora would never tell him how much she weighed, but he suspected that she now outweighed him by about fifty pounds.

When Mike opened the tote bag that Debora used as a purse, he found a collection more bizarre than he had envisioned in his wildest imagination.

There were around a dozen seed packets that were all the same. The picture on the packets showed some kind of luxuriant vine with multi-colored bronze and purplish leaves and bright-colored bristling berries or seeds. The leaves were somewhat like those of the marijuana plant. The packets were labeled “Castor Beans: (Ricinus commonis.)” They were the seeds of the castor-oil plant. Mike was more puzzled than anything else. What on earth was Debora doing with a purse full of seed packets? He had never seen her plant so much as a petunia.

In the tote bag was also a letter. It was in Debora’s distinctive handwriting, and as Mike read it, the hair stood up on the back of his neck. He had read this very letter before, but then the text had been typed on a computer. “I left the house one day and when I walked out the front door,” Mike remembered, “there was a letter sitting on the mailbox addressed to me. It said, ‘Mike Farrar’ on the envelope and those words were printed in pencil in what seemed to be a child’s handwriting.

“And so I took the letter and read it and it was an anonymous letter from someone telling me that I should not divorce Debora, that she was a wonderful mother, hardworking for Pembroke Hill School, and that we had such a wonderful relationship.”

The anonymous correspondent, who seemed to have been on the Peru trip, said that it would be devastating if he and Debora were to get divorced. Their children would be deprived of social activities in the future; the girls would never be BOTARs.

Recognizing the font they had on their computer, upstairs in the room next to Tim’s, Mike had been suspicious. Who in his house had written this? One of the youngsters? Debora herself? He suspected Debora, because the phraseology and the arguments sounded like hers.