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

really believed that Debora set that fire,” he said later. “We had to board the house up, of course, and Debora and the kids had nowhere to live. They moved into my apartment. We were reconciled by the fire as much as anything. A day or two later, we put the bid back on the house on Canterbury Court. The owner asked for more earnest money this time— quite a bit more earnest money—but I didn’t blame him.”

    Their mortgage insurance paid off the burned house. Almost everything Debora and Mike owned had been extensively damaged, too, if not by the flames then by smoke. Furniture, clothing, books, objets d’art. “We had fifty-seven pages of inventory,” Mike recalled. “You don’t realize what you own until you have a fire. We had to go through every room, every drawer. It took five months for us to go to stores, establish prices, replacement costs. They paid us about $48,000 on our possessions alone.”
    The insurance companies paid off without question, and Mike and Debora repaired the house and replaced their lost property. And they sold the Sixty-first Terrace house for $20,000 more than they had paid for it, so their plunge into the much more expensive estate-like home on Canterbury Court was not as financially ill-advised as Mike had feared.
    Mike, Debora, and their family moved the few blocks to Canterbury Court. It took only five minutes to go from one house to the other, although the first was in Missouri and the second in Kansas. The whole family took a trip to Disney World; then, on the first day of summer, June 21, 1994, settled into 7517 Canterbury Court.
    Where life had been bleak for Debora only a few months before, now things were looking up. Her husband had rejoined the family and they had a brand-new house—grander than anything she had ever dreamed of owning—new furniture, their own pool, a four-car garage. They had a red pickup truck and a Lexus—paid off with proceeds from the insurance—and Mike wanted to get a minivan to use on family vacations. “Debora didn’t want that,” he recalled. “She wanted a Toyota Land Cruiser, a $40,000 vehicle.” Again, Mike capitulated. If it would make her happy, they would all benefit.
    Mike felt optimistic about the future. Once he had committed himself to the new house and to a renewed and better marriage, he relaxed and enjoyed their second chance. He saw how beautiful their new home was, and he and Debora furnished the rooms to make them fit their needs exactly.
    “Things had calmed down,” he said of this period. “And they seemed better. In Debora’s defense, I think she really tried to change. And I thought—initially—that I was happy. The house was certainly nice. It was a wonderful neighborhood. We had a swimming pool. The kids were happy with that.”
    Debora had never been an enthusiastic cook, usually plunking down a pot of something or other—simple mid-western stews or spaghetti—on the table, or sending out for fast food. But she tried to become more involved in the actual running of her wonderful new home. And she was there for her children and their activities, driving endless car pools, buying birthday cakes, cheering Tim on in soccer or hockey, encouraging Lissa’s genuine promise as a ballerina. As far as all that went, Debora was a good mother. But too often she still failed to see the demarcation between mother and child in emotional disputes. It was almost as if she herself was a child.
    But Debora was trying. She even made an effort to clean house, although she would later admit that she had a hard time getting her children in gear to pick up their rooms. “Tim is the smartest of my children,” she said. “Kelly was next. Lissa will do whatever she needs to do to succeed—Tim and Kelly would do it if they felt like it. Tim’s room was absolutely immaculate, like a drill sergeant was going to inspect it. Kelly’s was a mess. One time, I told Tim I’d give him a new CD he wanted if he’d clean Kelly’s