Free Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice by Ann Rule

months. They had made no attempts or promises to reconcile, and once he signed the papers the real estate agent was rushing to prepare, he would be agreeing to pay almost half a million dollars for a second house, while he wasn’t sure he could sell the house he already owned. Debora wasn’t working—except for occasional case reviews—the children’s school was expensive, and they had other debts, including payments and leases on several new vehicles. Mike made excellent money, but he felt as if they were running pell-mell into a hasty, ill-thought-out decision.
    “I backed down,” he admitted, “and, of course, everyone from the real estate agent to Debora and the kids were devastated. The realtor kept calling and asking me why? and I told her there were personal issues I didn’t care to discuss.”

    Two or three days later, on a Sunday in May, 1994, Mike was working at the North Kansas City Hospital when he got a call from his answering service. “I got a stat call, which seemed odd since I was on second call,” he remembered. “The doctor who was first up should have gotten the call. And then I knew something was wrong. I called the service and they said, ‘Call your neighbor. Your house is on fire!’”
    His neighbor on West Sixty-first Terrace was out of breath and panicky. She said Mike’s house was on fire. “I’m pretty sure that Debora and the kids aren’t there—but I’m worried about Boomer,” she said.
    Mike had no way of knowing who was or wasn’t inside his house. He ran to his car and raced home at “literally ninety miles an hour. There were seven fire trucks out in front, and an ambulance—which really shook me up—was parked on Ward Parkway. I ran out there through a huge crowd of people. There was smoke pouring out of the house, and water—but I couldn’t see any flames.”
    Frantic, Mike called Debora on her cell phone and asked her where the kids were. Tim was playing in a soccer game, she said cheerfully, and she had the girls and Boomer in the car with her. When Mike told her the news, Debora hurried home and they watched firefighters mopping up the last of the blaze. She told Mike over and over how glad she was that she had given in to Tim’s pleas to take Boomer with them. He would surely have died in the fire.
    Although the family was safe, there was massive damage to the house. The fire had apparently started in the basement and raced up a laundry chute. Most of the basement was ashes, as was the kitchen. Flames had even reached Tim’s room on the top floor before firefighters managed to put the fire out. The damage estimate was $80,000, almost half of the $205,000 they had originally paid for the house. But for Mike, the worst part was the time, which seemed endless, when he didn’t know where his family was. He never wanted to live through such an experience again; the sight of the parked ambulance, waiting, perhaps, for one of his children, haunted him for weeks.
    The Farrars’ insurance company sent an arson investigator, who determined that the cause was a rather unusual electrical problem. The cord of a practically new dehumidifier had been wrapped around a copper water pipe so tightly that it had shorted through, apparently in three small areas. The pipe had gotten so hot that it had heated adjacent wood paneling to the burning point.
    Mike discussed the fire with friends, one of whom said flatly, “She set it.”
    “What do you mean?” he asked, puzzled.
    “Debora set it.”
    “No …” he said, disbelieving. “Of course she didn’t set it.”
    “Believe what you like—but I’m telling you that Debora set that fire to make you come back.”
    Mike didn’t buy that theory for a moment. Even if Debora had deliberately set fire to their house, she had no expertise in arson. He knew that arson investigators could spot an amateurish effort. He accepted the insurance company’s opinion and figured his friend had an overactive imagination.
    “I never