True Crime Campfire - A Mother's Hate: The Crimes of Dr. Debora Green, Pt 1

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

In his play Medea, Euripides wrote the story of a mother scorned. Her husband, Jason left her for another woman and in her fury, Medea murders their children in revenge. As she prepared to poison her sons, she was asked if she was sure, and she said, “Yes, for this is the best way to wound my husband.” A mother, so overtaken with jealousy and hatred that she took the lives of the children that she claimed to love so dearly. Today’s story is about a mother like Medea. Someone who was so overcome with rage and jealousy that she used her innocent children as pawns in a sick game to get revenge on someone else. Join us for the story of an unthinkable multiple murder that shocked Kansas City to the core.Sources:Bitter Harvest by Ann RuleMurderpedia, various articles: https://murderpedia.org/female.G/g/green-debora.htmForensic Files, episode "Tennis and Madness" Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In his play Medea, Euripides wrote the story of a mother scorned. Her husband, Jason, left her for an mother woman and in her fury, Medea murders their children to get revenge. As she prepared to poison her sons, she was asked if she was sure, and she said, yes, for this is the best way to wound my husband. A mother so overtaken with jealousy and hatred that she took the lives of the children

that she claimed to love so dearly. Today's story is about a mother like Medea, someone who's so overcome with rage and jealousy that she used her innocent children as pawns in a sick game to get revenge on someone else. This is a mother's hate, the crimes of Dr. Deborah Green. So, campers, for this one, we're in Prairie Village, Kansas, October 23, 1995.

Prairie Village is a Shishi neighborhood, home to doctors, dentists, lawyers, and engineers, quiet and tucked away from the bustling urban sprawl of Kansas City. It was about 20 past midnight when doctors John and Mary Foreman were jerked out of sleep by their dog, barking like a maniac. They stumbled out of bed, and it was only then that they realized what their good boy was barking at. The doorbell was ringing, frantically over and over again. John made his way down the stairs, still half asleep, to open the door,

and standing there, in a pink nightgown with a little. cartoon sheep on it was his neighbor, Dr. Deborah Green. She looked disheveled and he noticed that her short, dark hair was wet. Call one-one-one, Deborah shouted. My house is on fire. My children are in there. Call one-one-one. Later, John would stay consistent in his recollection that Deborah kept saying one-one-one rather than 911. John could see flames licking the air over Deborah's garage, so he grabbed the nearest phone to call 911. He told the dispatcher that Deborah's three children were still inside the burning house. His wife had come downstairs, too, and she'd already run out to the garage to call 911 on her car phone, too. When John came back to the door, Deborah was gone, but he had no time

to wonder where she went. It was a windy autumn night. His house could be the next to catch fire. So he and Mary set about waking up their own four kids and getting them out of the house as fast as possible. Deborah, in fact, had gone back to her burning house. As she stood at the foreman's side door, she'd turned around to see Kate, her 10-year-old daughter, standing on the roof of her garage, rushing a little ahead of the flames that threatened to collapse the beams underneath her poor little feet. Kate was screaming, yelling for her mom to help her. Deborah ran to the garage and stood under it. Jump! She yelled up at Kate, holding out her arms.

I'll catch you! Kate shook her head. I'm afraid! Of course she was. Who wouldn't be? But the flames had almost eaten up the whole garage roof by now. There was no time to be scared. And in a commanding voice, Deborah ordered her daughter, jump, now.

And Kate jumped. But Deborah didn't catch her after all, and Kate crumpled to the ground, thankfully onto a pile of soft leaves so she didn't get hurt. It had probably just been an accident. Deborah just hadn't gauged the distance right or hadn't been strong enough to catch her. Maybe Deborah had just failed when one of her babies made a desperate leap of faith. But maybe it was more than that. A fire truck sped onto the street right about then, and firefighters and police rushed onto the scene.

Poor little Kate ran to them yelling, My brother and sister are still in there, you have to get them out. For her part, Dr. Deborah Green just stood there and stared at the flames, transfixed by the flickering light. Nothing would shake her out of her trance. When her estranged husband, Mike Ferrar, showed up, driving as fast as he could from his apartment, a police officer led him to where his wife and daughter were waiting. He'd already been told that two of his children and the family dogs were still in the house. He looked at his catatonic wife and could only ask,

What have you done this time? This time. But let's put a pin in that for a minute and get a little background. Deborah Green was born on February 28, 1951 to high school sweethearts Joanne and Robert Jones in Havana, Illinois. Joanne had given up on her dreams to become a man. math teacher in order to get married. Her dreams of nurturing the young minds of the future with a quadratic equation were shelved in favor of caring for the couple's two daughters, Pamela and Deborah.

Did she resent her life? No, no, of course not. She just expected her daughters to do what she couldn't, to achieve more than her. She pushed them, scolded them when she felt like they didn't study, and held them to an insanely high standard. I have no problem, right? Yeah, no big deal. Deborah didn't really need to work hard to meet these standards, though.

Later testing would confirm an IQ of about 165, which is about five points higher than Albert Einstein's. Yeah, we've talked about this before, but the IQ test is kind of useless, and it really pains me to say it, because mine's actually high and I wish I could brag about it, but I'm a massive dumbass, so like I know in my heart it's just not worth snot. That test is about as useful at consistently finding geniuses as Mensa is at finding well-adjusted, non-dushy. ones. Ooh, mensesing. Always. Deborah was a legit genius, though. She taught herself to read when she was two years old.

She'd write letters to family members. Like, at two, she'd write letters to people in different states. Yeah. Deborah was one of those kids that didn't really need to study to get good grades. To this day, Deborah insists that she had a great childhood. Her mom was the disciplinarian and her dad, who by this time was a truck driver for a bakery, was the fun parent. He would come home and play games with his girls and joke around with them. Debra's memories of her childhood were, if not good, neutral. She had nothing negative to say about either

parent. The only indication that anything might have been wrong with young Debra Green was the fact that she wet the bed until she was 12 years old. Maybe a sign of some deep down anxiety. But Deborah was popular in high school. She had a killer since a humor and she could turn almost anything into a joke. And her teachers were impressed by her brain, even if they didn't always like the sarcastic joke she made in class. One of her principals remembered her 25 years later and told crime writer Anne Rule, she seemed to follow all the rules. She didn't take drugs and she didn't drink. She was a rather aggressive girl. You could tell she was going to be successful. Could you, though? Because yeah, well, you're going to find out. It's funny because the way that's

phrased makes it seem like aggressive as a compliment, but like it's just true. Deborah was an aggressive girl. He did mean it as a con. I think he did mean it as a compliment. She was aggressive to be successful, but like it's not a word, like driven. You could have used driven, but okay, aggressive. You're right. It's a Freudian slip.

I think it's a Freudian slip. Totally, because she's, y'all are going to find out. She is aggressive. She is aggressive, absolutely. Deborah was the kind of student whose resume would impress even the pickiest admissions board. She was a cheerleader, a national merit scholar, member of the student council. She sang in the choir. She helped with the musical theater program.

She joined the French club, a music club, a club that volunteered with senior citizens, and worked on the yearbook. Damn, I'm tired just listening to that. I'm exhausted. She was insanely athletic, too, to the point where her high school boyfriend, Greg, a football player and a wrestler, said he was jealous of her sometimes. And he was no slouch himself. Unsurprisingly, Deborah nailed the SATs with a 1600 and got to be co-valedictorian at her high school graduation. By the time she got to the University of Illinois, it seemed like there was nothing Deborah Green could fail at. She started as an engineering major, but after being told that there were too many engineers in the field, she decided to try her hand at chemistry, specifically pre-med.

In her entire scholastic career, she'd never so much as gotten a bee. And remember how she'd never had to study to get those perfect grades? Yeah, that didn't last. As a lot of high school high achievers tend to find out once they get to college. Ms. Debbie got her first B at UI, and she took it hard. She felt like she failed the class. She had a total meltdown, and nobody could talk any sense into her about it. As one of those kids that didn't have to study super hard in high school,

I can tell you that learning how to study saved my ass once I got to college, and even now researching for this show. Like shout out to my college coach who made us do study hall and made sure we knew how to study because, oof, oof. Yeah. Well, I think we said in an earlier episode that this is a thing with people who are really, really smart sometimes is they never develop trying skills, you know, because they never had to try. And so then they get into a situation where they're in over their heads and they feel like huge failures. It's a shame, you know, but it happens a lot. Deborah had broken up with her high school boyfriend because he wasn't as smart.

as her and only went to community college, she said later. Ew. But she started going steady with an engineering student named Dwayne Green. They were both really intelligent and driven. To both families, it seemed like a great match. Deborah graduated from the pre-med program in just three years and was accepted to the University of Kansas Medical School. She graduated in 1975 with her MD. Around this time, she and Dwayne tied the knot. Later, Deborah acknowledged that as a mistake. She said, I'm not even sure why I married him, but I knew as soon as I did that we had absolutely no common interests. He was an engineer.

That pretty much says it all. Engineers are boring and they don't communicate well. Okay, look, I don't want to start nitpicking this early in the show, or maybe I do. I don't know. But didn't this bitch want to be an engineer too until somebody told her that the market was saturated? Oh, yeah. In fact, like, to the most recent interview I've seen, she's always said that engineering was the thing she was most passionate about.

All right, so like, what? Okay, never mind. We don't have time for this. Moving on. So the happy couple wasn't so happy and eventually got divorced in the late 70s. And after the divorce, Deborah was making doctor money. And for the first time in her life,

she didn't have to go to a million club meetings, sports practices, or, you know, spend time with her husband. So she bought a sports car. She started going on exotic trips to Belize or Mexico. She started dating around. She was witty. She was outgoing. She was pretty. At this point in her life, Deborah had everything going for her. And right around this time, she met a guy named Mike Ferrar. He was four years younger than she was. And he was finishing up his senior year of med school when he met her on an ER rotation. I think that's kind of a sexy way to meet, you know, like you meet as ER docks. Yeah. Years later, he told Anne Rule that he was drawn to her sarcastic bitter wit, which seems legit. Everybody said she was hilarious. And how full of life she seemed to be, always zipping around in her red car.

with the top down. They started a relationship, right on the heels of her separation with Dwayne, and in 1979 they got married, though she kept her first husband's last name for professional reasons. They went on a honeymoon trip to Tahiti, which would tend to make you think they were off to a great start, but not so much. Deborah seemed to sort of lose interest in Mike once he put a ring on it. Even on their wedding night, she told him she'd rather read a book than have sex with him.

Oh, no. Oof, yowch. They weren't really unhappy at first. Not exactly. I mean, they had some good times, but from pretty much day one, the marriage wasn't what Mike was expecting. She always kept him at arm's length,

both emotionally and in the bedroom. And as the years wore on, Deborah's behavior started to really concern the people closest to her. Once, she and Mike went to the grocery store, and Debra got mad when somebody else pulled into the parking spot she wanted. Yeah, you know, real high-stakes stuff.

Our girl felt like this other woman stole her spot, and instead of just letting it go and stewing over it for weeks trying to come up with the perfect response like you or I would, she got out of her car and started following the lady, yelling her head off all the way to the store. Mike was totally humiliated. Deborah had a tendency to fly off the handle at the teeny tini-tiniest slight. Not that I can judge, but she swore like a truck driver, and the slightest thing would set her off. At work, she was butting heads with other doctors, but especially her attending physicians. If anybody disagreed with her, even mildly, she'd freak out, call up her husband and rant and rave about how stupid everybody else was. Yeah, boy.

Speaking of stupidity, Deborah had very little patience for it. Or at least her standard of stupid. I think she thought that the show ER was a documentary and she'd be dealing with a constant stream of gunshot wounds and rare genetic diseases and, like, building. is exploding and George Clooney and stuff. But in reality, she was dealing with people who'd burn themselves on homemade fireworks or let small cuts turn into full-blown infections.

If a patient had let a medical issue go on too long, something they could have solved much earlier or easier with a visit to their GP, it would get right under Deborah's skin. And she didn't try to hide it. She felt like it was their fault she was having to deal with them, like their apathy or anxiety about whatever medical issue was a personal slight.

To Debra, if you were stupid, you deserved whatever you got. Her attitude was, why are you bothering me with this? She seemed more focus on making sure her patients knew how irritated she was with them than she was on, I don't know, helping them. Basically, she had the bedside manner of Dr. Frankenstein, and she'd consistently brush off anybody who wanted to chat. Once, Mike asked her how she managed to get home so much earlier than he did, and she said, This is not a joke.

You spend too much time stopping and talking to people. She sounds fun. Yeah. Deborah was brilliant, but people didn't like her. She was aloof, sometimes even mean. And while she was funny, most of her jokes were at the expense of other people. Ugh. Anyway, that ER joint was the pits.

Patients were too stupid to admire her brilliance. She was bored. So she decided she'd take a crack at internal medicine. Her husband was already in the middle of his residency for the same thing. I mean, how hard could it be? Well, it turns out it's a lot harder when you're too much of an egomaniac to ask for help. She refused to ask how to do anything or where to find supplies. And this would be the beginning of Deborah's excruciatingly slow fall from medical grace.

In 1982, Mike and Deborah's first child came along, a little boy they named Timothy. And by all accounts, Deborah took to motherhood like a duck to water. Tim looked just like her, and she doaded on him. And two years later, they had a little girl named Kate. Deborah went back to work about six weeks after each baby was born. She hired a nanny to look after them and got a fellowship to study hematology and oncology. In true Deborah fashion, of course, she studied. hard and excelled. Just kidding. She didn't study at all, and she failed her oncology boards twice

and barely passed her internal medicine boards. Yeah, Mike said he couldn't remember ever seeing her crack a textbook. She tried, yet again, to rely on her big brain, which while impressive, wasn't going to pass a damn medical board exam, and she should realize that. But her ego got in her way, like it always did. Her and Mike's test results came in the mail on the same day, and when Deborah opened them and saw that Mike had passed and she didn't. She was big mad. It was his fault, she told Mike. She was taking care of two kids and he was the only one who had time to study.

Yeah, problem with that was, that was pretty much horseshit. They had a nanny, and Mike helped plenty with the kids. And then he'd go study and she'd go read a Danielle Steele. And this was typical for her whole career as a doctor. She never read any medical journals. She wouldn't keep up to date on medical breakthrough. She didn't go to conferences or lectures or nothing. But, of course, not passing the board.

only meant that she wouldn't be board certified. Didn't mean she couldn't practice. So Deborah did end up starting a private practice in oncology. Just a little advice. Don't go to a non-board certified oncologist. Bad idea. Check on that stuff. Yeah.

And I love this part. Deborah chose oncology, she said, quote, because I'm a people person. I really like people. Girl, what? It's just astonishing. It's like zero self-insight theater watching this woman. Apparently, Deborah has all the self-realization skills of a mealworm.

For example, one night while Debra was on call, one of her very sick patients needed her. To Mike, who overheard the conversation, quote, it was clear that the patient needed to go to the emergency room and Debra would have to go check on her. Deborah was supremely pissed about it and took it out on this poor patient over the phone, being all irritable and passive-aggressive with them. And I mean, you know, rightfully so, right? how dare a cancer patient need medical attention. They should really just learn how to control their carcinomas better, so Deborah wouldn't have to put down her book and do the job she signed up

for. God. I'm sure her attitude is just what this cancer patient needed that night, right? But no, Deb, you're a people person. Right. Good God. So anyway, in 1986, Mike was offered a job as a partner in a cardiology practice in Kansas City, Missouri, so he and Deborah pulled up stakes and moved. Deborah joined a group of doctors still practicing oncology and hematology. Now, usually after a year of working at a group practice, a doc will get offered a partnership. But when Deborah's year was up, Mbkus, which is a big deal, like a major slap in the ego. When it does happen, I think the technical term is you done fucked up. It was no mystery to Mike, though. He'd seen it himself. Deborah was just a dick to her patients. They didn't want to come back to her. She was cold and she'd lecture him about stuff. She had

zero people skills. There was also one other thing. The other thing meaning Deborah's addiction to painkillers, a problem that had cropped up a couple times before. Mike noticed the signs. Her speech would get slurred or temper would flare up and she'd walk funny.

She'd gotten off the drugs twice before, but the cycle started up again when she fell walking up some stairs and somehow got a puncture wound in her knee that got so infected that she needed to be hospitalized for 10 days. I wonder if any of her doctors were dicks to her about having the audacity to get an infection.

Oh, don't be silly. Deborah's special. Nothing like her patients who were bad, dumb, and doing patienting all wrong, right? No, but for real, I hope they were. I hope she had doctors exactly like her. Some doctors need that, you know? Lots of doctors are great, but every now and again, you get yourself one who just really needs to experience a doctor just like them when they're in pain and suffering, see what it's like. So, anyway, while she was in the hospital for her need, they gave her pain meds and the problem started all over again. figured it out pretty quickly that it was happening again and he looked all over the house for

her stash till he found it. What was really disturbing was she was clearly stealing meds from her, which is not only really bad for her and really bad for the patients, but also super illegal. So Mike confronted her reminded her that she could lose her license for this, not to mention go to jail. And Deborah seemed to finally get it. She got rid of her stash and Mike never found another one after that. After being passed up for the partnership, Deborah opened her own private practice, and that seemed to be where she excelled. She was finally able to work without anybody second-guessing her or arguing with her or looking at her wrong. But of course, as we know, all good things must come

to an end. And Deborah's private practice ended when she got pregnant with her third child, Kelly. Deborah seemed to resent Mike for getting her pregnant and ruining her private practice. She would try to set it up again later, but it didn't work out. Kelly was a sweet kid, intelligent and wise beyond her years and full of love. Deborah may have been pissed off at Mike for knocking her up, but she adored Kelly. Now, I do have to amend our earlier statement. Deborah was, by all accounts, a good mom to babies and very young children, you know, before they start getting their own opinions and stuff.

She was always doing special things for our kids, and she loved playing with them. Once they got older, though, she started treating them more like little therapists or confidants, more friends than children. Pretty early on, the kids learned that they were responsible for managing their mom's emotions. And that is one of the worst things you can do to a kid. Plus, she was not shy about bitching and moaning about them. At their ballgames, Deborah would sit in the bleachers and talk smack about them to the other parents, her own kids, to the point where the other moms would cringe.

When she was mad at Mike, Deborah would complain to Tim about it, which a little parenting tip from two ladies of no kids. That's not a cool thing to do. Pitting a child against their other parent is almost always going to end in tears. The kids were witnesses to more and more of Deborah's bizarre tantrums. On family trips, she'd have absolute shit fits at any minor inconvenience. Once they were heading to Santa Belle Island and their flight got delayed due to storms, they were going to have to wait four hours for another one. And Debra just wigged out. She marched up to the counter and proceeded to go full Karen on the poor employees. We will never fly on this damn airline again. You are incompetent, ridiculous, and you have no consideration for the people who pay

your salary. Oh God, poor Mike was just mortified trying to get her to shut the hell up. But Debra just steamrolled over him, started smacking the counter with her hands like a toddler. She was like, my husband, Dr. Farrar, agrees with me. And I am Dr. Green. You are a very poor excuse for an airline. Don't you agree, Michael? Michael, tell them what you think of this kind of lousy, stupid, fucking inefficiency. Poor Mike, Jesus.

Now, I'm not exactly sure what she expected the airline to do here. Did she think that when the poor desk associate heard that they were dealing with not one, but two doctors, they'd go, oh, oh, we're so sorry, let us break out our definite real weather machine and just make those storms disappear. What are they supposed to do? There's a storm. Yeah. It's just amazing these people. True Crime Queen Anne Rule, who was always a pretty perceptive lady, pointed out that Deborah's behavior took an especially sharp turn after she became a stay-at-home mom. She stopped putting effort into her parents. She stopped doing any housework and just kind of let stuff pile up, and she was probably clinically depressed. See,

Deborah had always been special. She was the smartest, funny. person in any given room, at least in her own mind. After her medical career ended, her ego couldn't handle not being that person anymore and all that anger and narcissism got worse. She'd scream and curse and sometimes she'd hurt herself in the middle of arguments with Mike. She'd hit herself in the head with books or punch herself in the thighs. And Dembra fought nasty. On top of the screaming tantrums, she'd make sure her kids would be there to see him. Tim was her first confidant, but as Kate and Kelly got older, Debra made sure to let them know exactly what she thought of their father.

Oh, that just makes me so mad. It's so bad. Mike admits that he dove into his career as an escape. He was relieved to go to work in the morning. He tried managing his wife's anger first by arguing, then by using the Grey Rock method, and then he'd just leave the house for anywhere between a few hours to all day. They'd been married for 12 years when, in January 1994, Mike decided he was done. He asked Deborah for a divorce, and she took it big.

In the middle of their conversation, she moved from the bedroom, where it had been a private conversation, to the basement, where she was sure Tim would hear her yelling. She started throwing things around the room, telling Tim, now look what he's going to do. I've done so much for him. You know that, and now he's going to cheat us out of what's ours. Now, keep in mind, Tim was 12 at this point, and his mom is screaming, your father's going to leave us and we'll lose everything we have. I'll have to go back to work, and I don't know where we'll live. I don't know who's going to take care of you. Oh, my God. And Tim, bless his sweetheart, said,

Mom, it'll be okay. I think this is one of the things that makes me really hate Deborah's guts. And here was a sweet little boy who trusted and loved her, and rather than protect him from what's going on, she's just throwing it all over him.

Wasn't Tim's responsibility to fix her marriage? That is way above a 12-year-old's pay grade. But here you have this grown woman throwing a tantrum and wrapping her school-aged son into an adult conflict. Ugh, no. Deborah's tantrum didn't prevent Mike from leaving. If anything, it just made his decision that much clearer. He moved out, and he and Deborah shared time with the kids. He was still supporting the family financially. Despite the anger the two older kids felt in him for leaving, Mike said they still had fun when they visited him at his new place.

Of course, four months into the separation, Deborah was on her best behavior, and Mike thought maybe he wouldn't have to end his marriage after all. She was being all accommodating and friendly, and there were no signs of her nasty temper. So they talked about getting back together. They decided they wanted to move, new house, new start kind of thing. So Mike put an offer on a $400,000 house in the Prairie Village neighborhood of Kansas City. But before long, he started to get nervous. Had Deb really changed? He couldn't really be sure.

Plus, there was money stuff to consider. He was the only one working, and the kids were going. to private school, and now he had a brand new mortgage, and they hadn't even sold the old house. He had cardiologist money, but cardiologist money isn't infinite. So Mike did the prudent thing. He withdrew his bid on the house. The kids and Debra were upset, but Mike was sure he made the right call. Three days later, Mike got an urgent call to his pager, which was weird since he wasn't on call. When he called back to see what was wrong, his answering service gave him the news. Mike, they told him, your house is on fire.

In a panic, he hauled ass for the house. Were Deb and the kids there? Was Boomer, the dog? Mike broke every speed limit to get home and the fire department was already there. He frantically called Deborah on her cell and, thank God, she, the kids, and Boomer were all okay. They were all at Tim's soccer game. Debra rushed home and told Mike how Tim had begged to bring Boomer to the game that day and how lucky they were that she listened to him. It's convenient.

It is, isn't it? In total, the fire did $80,000 worth of damage, and when the insurance company sent out a fire investigator, he found the cause was an electrical problem with a new dehumidifier. But Mike's friends had a different theory. When Mike told them about the fire, one friend was immediately suspicious. She said it, he said. To get you to come back, go through with the new house.

Mike thought that was crazy. Deborah didn't know anything about setting fires, and the arson investigator said there was no sign of foul play. The insurance company paid in full. Whether she set it or not, though, the fire did bring Deborah and Mike back together. The couple made the necessary repairs to the house and sold it so they could move into their new house,

the one that Mike had previously withdrawn the bid on. The fire was a turning point for all of them. Deborah, who had never been interested in keeping house, actually made an effort to keep the place clean and make home-cooked meals. Mike started working shorter hours and decided to be home more. For six months, things were better. And then they weren't. Mike started to notice little things. The house wasn't picked up.

They'd eaten fast food for dinner three days in a row, and he could sense that Deborah's short fuse was seconds away from lighten up. The new house was like slapping a My Little Pony Band-Aid over a scept. chest wound and hoping it stopped the bleeding. Despite all his efforts, Mike just couldn't rekindle his feelings for Debra. There was just too much damage to a marriage that had never had a lot of emotional intimacy in the first place. He was having serious second thoughts about their reconciliation, but Mike didn't think it was the right time to leave again.

Tim's school was getting ready to take the kids on a trip to Peru, and Mike and Debra were signed up to be chaperones. Mike wanted his kids to have one last good family memory before he asked Deborah for a divorce again. Tim and Mike's relationship was more strained than ever. Tim was outrageously disrespectful, and their arguments sometimes devolved into physical scuffles between the two of them. Mike was horrified by that, and we want to be clear, by the way, as you see here and as you'll see in part two, yeah, sorry, loves, this is going to be a two-parter. Mike makes some decisions in the story that definitely are not the best, but that doesn't mean that

he deserved what happened to him. We're not the arbiters of right and wrong here. We're just here to tell you the story, and Mike is just as much a victim in this one as Tim or Kelly or Kate. People aren't perfect. You know, they make mistakes, and sometimes they regret them for the rest of their lives. It was on the Peru trip that Mike met a woman named Margaret.

Margaret was a psychiatric nurse, and despite working and living in the same circle, she'd never met Mike or Debra. She was married to another doctor, an anesthesiologist named David, who coincidentally enough had gone to med school with Debra. Margaret said she was immediately attracted to Mike.

Her own marriage was on its last legs. Her husband hadn't gone on the Peru trip, and she saw Mike as handsome and fun and adventurous, whereas her own husband was struggling hard with depression and refusing to get help for it. One day, while the other parents and kids decided to go shopping in town, Margaret suggested a hike, and Mike agreed to go along. Both Tim and Margaret's son went too,

and they all had a great time hiking up to a waterfall in Agua Caliente. After they got back, though, there was a palpable shift in Deborah's attitude toward Margaret. Not toward anybody else in the group, just Margaret. She'd go out of her way to try and exclude Margaret from activities and she'd talk to everybody else but her. Yeah, those wife instincts were running full throttle, even though nothing had happened. Yet. The trip was a ton of fun. The kids got to hike Machu Picchu and pet llamas or whatever. Almost everybody got a raging case of the traveler's poops for the first couple days, but it wasn't too, too bad. And other than that,

everybody got back in one piece. When they got home, Deborah drove to St. Louis to pick up her middle daughter, Kate, who'd been staying with some relatives, and Mike stayed behind to unpack and do some laundry. Except when he started unpacking, he realized he had some of Margaret's souvenirs in his bag. Any international traveler knows a struggle to find space in your suitcase coming home, so everybody on the trip would sort of stashed stuff in other people's bag, just wherever they could find some room. So Mike decided to leave Kelly home with Tim and drop off the stuff at Margaret's house. her husband wasn't home that day and you know yeah the sexual tension that started on that hike in

Peru came a bubbling up and they started an affair mike had been planning to leave deborah even before he met margaret this just solidified his decision i mean it's not as if he and deborah were happy together they were hanging on by a thread but when he approached her about it deborah freaked out as bad as he'd ever seen her she screamed and hit herself and of course she'd dragged the poor kids into it like she always did in the most traumatic way she could. Their father didn't love them. Their father was leaving them. Their father was evil. The kids hated their father after that. And with Mike gone again and Deborah starting to spiral, they became her worried little caretakers.

Deborah had always been a big reader, but after Mike asked her for a divorce, her taste in books took a sinister turn. She started devouring true crime books. Not that we can judge her for that. I mean, we both have a library's worth, but it was a brand new interest for Deborah. Mike decided that he wanted to live in the house he'd just bought, at least until the divorce was final, partially because he wanted to be close to his children, but also because Deborah, who'd never been a drinker before, had started getting sloppy drunk on the regular, and poor Tim and Kate had to take care of her when she did. Mike was worried. He wanted to be sure she was sober enough to take care of the kids. On August 11th, Mike got home from work after the kids had already eaten dinner.

But luckily, Deborah had saved him a chicken salad sandwich in the fridge. As he ate it, Deborah sat next to him at the table and chatted with him. This tastes a little funny, he said, kind of bitter. But Deborah just shrugged, and he ate it anyway. Within a couple hours, Mike was violently sick. Throwing up, diarrhea, horrible nausea, and sweats, awful stuff. He assumed it was a 24-hour bug. It was the weekend, but he was on call, so he had to see patients here and there,

and he kept having to leave the exam room to throw up. Oh, God. He felt better after a couple days, but it didn't last. A few nights later, the vomiting came back with a vengeance. At one point, it was so bad that he was on his hands and knees throwing up in the shower. Oh, God, poor dude. Yeah. And at this point, he knew it wasn't a bug.

His doctor admitted him to the hospital for severe dehydration. While he was there, he was spiking fevers as high as 104 degrees. He developed sepsis, and he shook so much he couldn't stand. Oh, my Lord. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. They tested him for almost everything they could think of. They thought maybe he caught something while in Peru, but couldn't be sure. Eventually, by August 25th, he was stable enough to go home,

but the doctor still had no idea what was wrong with him. He got home, hungry, for the first time in weeks, and Debra made him a spaghetti dinner and brought it to him while he was, camped out on the couch. Within hours, he was back in the hospital. Mike was a doctor himself, and the only pattern he could suss out was that he was getting sick about every seven days or so. He'd lost 30 pounds at a month, and he was so weak he couldn't work. Yeah, I think this is another case where the truth was just too awful to face, because I mean, I know what y'all are thinking. I know what I was thinking, but Mike just, you know, bless his heart. It's just too awful.

Deborah, who was juggling, caring for her children, and caring for her husband, told her family that Mike was sick. Her mom, Joanne's response was that Mike, who she called Ferrar, was just being a pussy. He wasn't that sick. He was just being dramatic. In fact, she was sure it was just his diet. She told Anne Ruhl, quote, we knew Ferrar was sick, but we're not surprised because he'll eat anything, no matter how gross if he thinks it's native. He's also a terrible boob when he's ill. Charming.

and kind of racist. Yeah, yeah, Joanne's a peach, just like your daughter. Anyway, Mike was released again at the end of August, and on September 4th, it seemed like he was finally out of the woods. On Labor Day, he was watching the Kansas City Chiefs play, and Deborah very sweetly brought him a plate of dinner. He remembers being touched, like, oh, okay, even though we're splitting up, you still care about me.

A few hours later, like clockwork, Mike was back in the hospital, with the same symptoms that had plagued him for months. The doctors decided that they needed to put in a feeding tube. They diagnosed him with tropical sprue, an illness that tends to make you gluten intolerant. He could only eat a very short list of actual food and the rest would be fed through a pick line. They sent him home and Deborah agreed to take charge of his meds and feeding tube. Great, super idea. What could possibly go wrong? Now, Mike hadn't changed his mind about leaving Deborah.

His illness was an obstacle for sure, but he wasn't happy. Deborah, on the other hand, was laying it on thick, and by that I mean she kept threatening to kill herself if Mike left her. It wasn't the first time she'd done that, but something in her tone seemed a lot more serious this time. This worried Mike so much that he decided to take the time to search the house again for any medications or chemicals that Deborah might use to hurt herself.

And when he searched her purse, he found something he wouldn't have expected in a million years, a dozen or so packets of seeds. The packets featured a picture of a viny plant with bright magenta, spiky fruit. They said, castor beans, ricinous, commonus. And there was a warning label on them. Caster beans are extremely toxic and are not to be taken internally. All right, y'all knew it was coming.

This one's got to be a two-parter, and we're going to end it here for part one. But don't sweat it. You know we'll have part two for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay. safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much

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