Forensic Files - Season 4, Episode 3 - Ultimate Betrayal - Full Episode | Forensic Files

on a windy october night in 1995 a mysterious house fire swept through the palatial home of a doctor and his family
two of the family members made it out alive two of the children did not in the debris
medical detectives discovered much more than simply how the fire started [Music]
michael ferrara and deborah green first met in medical school in 1977 both were gifted students with near
genius iqs there was an instant attraction and they married less than a year after they met
over the next 16 years the couple raised three children jennifer timothy and kelly in an affluent suburb of kansas
city kansas to outsiders their lives seemed perfect but the marriage was showing signs of
stress at the north kansas city hospital dr michael farrar was a successful heart
specialist who worked very long hours often at the expense of time with his children
deborah quit her own medical practice when the children were born she battled depression weight gain
and was rumored to have a drinking problem you got the impression that deborah wasn't
the easiest person in the world to live with she was i don't want to say well let's just leave it at that
in an effort to rekindle their marriage the couple decided to go on a school trip to peru with their son tim
while sightseeing along the amazon river and among the incan remains an attractive blonde nurse caught
michael's attention she was the mother of one of the other students when they returned to kansas city
michael continued to see his new friend which soon blossomed into a sexual affair it didn't take debra long to find
out about her husband's affair she moved into a separate bedroom and her drinking
increased her whole identity was her marriage and her family because she didn't she no longer had her own career
i felt it you know maybe it was just really hard for her to let go of that maybe she felt like
she could change or something could change and they could somehow stay together and michael had some serious problems of
his own shortly after the peru trip michael developed diarrhea vomiting and chill so
severe he was admitted to the local hospital he'd been in south america where he
might have had access to a whole variety of things that that could make him very
sick despite undergoing a full battery of tests doctors could not determine the cause of dr farrar's illness when i saw
him it's like mike man you look bad i'm sorry but you don't look good and he said he'd been really really violently
ill since he got back from peru he assumed that he got some tropical parasite from hell michael
ferrar was rapidly losing weight dropping to just 125 pounds whatever was causing this illness
was a mystery [Music] for a cardiologist who seemingly had it all dr michael farrar's life in 1995
was one crisis after another when he was released from the hospital for the illness many believed he caught
in peru michael took another step towards divorce by moving into his own apartment
across town his wife deborah was angry depressed drinking heavily and would stay in her
bedroom for days at a time [Music] michael was concerned for her welfare as well as the safety of their three
children while visiting the house to pick up some of his things michael noticed something
suspicious in his wife's purse a packet of castor beans on the label was a warning that the
beans were poisonous with so many packets of castor beans in her purse michael suspected that his
wife was planning to commit suicide so he was telling me that he was pretty sure she was going to try and kill
herself with these poisons which really to me didn't make any sense because dr green is a bright woman i mean she's
extremely bright woman and is an oncologist and if you're a doctor i mean doctors kill themselves all right i mean
in professional people do commit suicide but fortunately we've got the best of drugs available to us i mean if you're
going to go why would you go stooling yourself to death i mean you aren't going to want to die with
bloody diarrhea i mean that is a very horrible bad way to die dr ferrard decided to do a little
investigating of his own the castor beans were purchased from the earl may garden center
a receipt from that store in deborah's purse indicated she purchased the beans just four days before michael first got
sick while consulting his medical textbook farrar learned some terrible news that castor beans contain verizon
a deadly toxin with no known antidote and the symptoms of ricin poisoning were vomiting nausea diarrhea and
gastrointestinal bleeding symptoms which were identical to his own [Music] farrar quickly took a sample of his own
blood for testing but ricin leaves the body quickly and the lab could find no trace of it in his
system although he had no proof farrar was convinced that his wife had somehow poisoned him with ricin and this
was the cause of his mysterious symptoms a few days later michael confronted debra during an angry telephone call
i told her that i was very angry with her that i thought she was crazy that i thought she had been poisoning me that i
thought she needed uh serious psychiatric help i don't have to listen to this [Music]
one hour later around midnight a fire broke out in the farrar family home by the time firemen arrived the home was
totally engulfed in flames i've never seen a fire spread as fast throughout the house as i have on this one the heat
was tremendous there was no way that anyone can even get close to the house of course the flames were
roaring out probably 20 to 30 feet deborah and her ten-year-old daughter jennifer both escaped
during questioning on the night of the fire debra learned the tragic news that her other two children had been
trapped and died in the fire oh god beautiful family beautiful joy are both dead
jesus christ did they make any attempt at all to save her six-year-old kelly died of smoke
inhalation in her own bed thirteen-year-old tim burned to death christ i saved one of the kids and i
could have gotten the second one out and didn't will never forgive myself for that
investigators immediately suspected arson it's fair to say that deborah greene was
a suspect early on it's fair to say that mike farrar was a suspect early on both had motive
both had opportunity if the fire had been deliberately set the charge would be more than arson
it would be murder [Music] while investigating the suspicious house fire that killed tim and kelly farrar
police looked a little deeper into the relationship between michael and his estranged wife deborah
a few weeks before the fire the couple had a fight at the house michael said his wife was intoxicated
angry and threatening to kill herself the police were called and took deborah to the hospital for psychiatric
evaluation dr pamela mccoy was the physician on duty pam mccoy indicated that at first she
was somewhat skeptical about whether or not debra green was really that mentally
ill and is sitting there in the uh in the waiting room of the ku medical center emergency room talking to debra
greene about these issues asking her if she's okay if there's anything she can do to help her and trying to get a read
on her mental state when in my in walks michael ferrara when they met in our kind of entryway there
she just like turns on him like she's i mean for a minute i kind of hold her like i think she's going to physically
attack him and she spits at him and calls him a cult and then she says you're going to get these kids over
their dead bodies deborah said she made the statement in anger and denied having anything to do
with the fire [Music] she said she was asleep when the fire alarm sounded she said she opened the bedroom door saw
flames and smoke closed the door and ran outside through a door in the bedroom [Music]
deborah said she told her son tim to stay inside until firemen arrived and ran to the next door neighbor's house
for help to find out whether an accelerant or flammable liquid was used in starting
the fire arson investigators used specially trained dogs that can identify vapors
which remain after the fire this is a dog that has been through several weeks of training
on how to how to detect different types of liquid accelerants like diesel fuel or
kerosene or gasoline or charcoal lighter fluid the dogs identified a number of suspicious areas
investigators found melted plastic containers on the floor possibly used to carry flammable liquids throughout the
house next to dr farrar's desk investigators found another clue that the fire had
been intentionally set we found an empty liquor bottle laying on the floor right behind
this desk again this it's possible that the contents of this bottle were poured out and ignited on the desk
a section of the basement floor had what appeared to be a poor pattern where an accelerant was ignited as a
test the accelerants also gave investigators a clear path of the fire the path led directly to deborah green's
bedroom door that fire was set at that bedroom door with the intent of doing a tremendous amount of damage
to that house and cutting off the escape route of those children upstairs and the analysis of the burn patterns on
the bedroom door contradicted debra greene's story debra said her bedroom door was closed
when the fire alarm sounded and that she closed the door before running outside for help
but the carpet underneath the door revealed the door had been open the door jamb revealed the same thing
if the door had been closed the door jamb would have been protected from the fire instead
it was completely covered with soot in the bathroom was debra's bathrobe wrapped in a ball
on the floor on the underside of the robe were burn marks at some point the person wearing the
robe had been very close to the flames the neighbors said deborah's hair was wet when she ran over asking for help
this did not come as a surprise to arson investigators when dr greene actually ignited that accelerant outside of her
bedroom door and in the hallway that there was enough vapors present that there was there was quite a flash
more of a flash than she probably was prepared for when she did that i believe that is when she got the hair
singed on the right side of her head with a search warrant detectives took a sample of deborah's
hair microscopic analysis revealed the deborah's hair showed signs of heat damage consistent with singing from a
high intensity flame the damage to deborah's hair was extensive since the sample wasn't
collected until after she had her hair cut for her children's funeral bill chapin is a forensic chemist whose
job was to analyze the fire debris evidence from the farrar home fire debris is stored in metal canisters
which preserve any vapors which may still be present the canisters are heated to between
80 and 90 degrees centigrade and the air inside removed if the vapors contain accelerants or
hydrocarbons they're trapped in charcoal filters the filters are then rinsed with the
neutral solvent carbon disulfide and the mixture is placed into a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer for
analysis after two days of testing bill chapin found what he was looking for in this particular case the accelerant
that i found was an accelerant called isoparaffin isoparaffins are often used in odorless
charcoal lighter fluids there was an empty container of charcoal lighter fluid on the floor of the
farar's garage investigators were now convinced that deborah green set the fire that killed
two of her children the only question that remained had she also tried to kill her husband with castor beans
when dr michael ferrar told police he was sure his wife had been poisoning him with castor beans investigators were
unsure of where to start since the local laboratory could find no evidence of ricin and michael ferrara
system his blood was sent to the fbi to dr drew richardson an expert in chemical
and biological research at the naval medical research institute in washington dc people in the intelligence community
are quite familiar with ricin based on a handful of cases that most everybody would know about very few people in the
late public and even highly trained professionals such as medical doctors would be quite unlikely to know much
about rice and if anything ricin is an antigen that causes a breakdown of red blood cells at the
tissue level in large enough doses it can be fatal when an antigen enters the body the
immune system's response is to produce antibodies which fight the invading organism
to find out whether rice and antibodies were in michael ferrara's system dr richardson used a technique called elisa
which stands for enzyme-linked immunoabsorbent assay a 96-well plastic plate is coated with
the solution containing ricin in theory any rice and antibodies in dr farrar's blood would bind to the ricin coated on
the plate which is exactly what happened next dr richardson analyzed the blood of
goats that had been exposed to small amounts of ricin it appeared that the goats and michael ferrar both had
similar antibodies in their systems antibodies designed and structured to recognize and seek out the target
invader ricin dr richardson discovered something else the number of rice and antibodies in
farrar's system was staggering in the case of dr michael ferrar it's thought that perhaps he was exposed
three times a certain immune response would have been produced the first time a response would have lasted a few weeks
on second and third and perhaps other exposures a separate immune response would have been produced
for each one of those exposures and the latter exposures would have produced a response and antibodies that
would be present in the blood for again many months to perhaps a few years debra
greene was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder prosecutors believe that when deborah's
attempts to kill her husband failed she feared losing custody of her children in the impending divorce
i don't have to listen to this after the argument on the telephone prosecutors believe that deborah poured
accelerants throughout the house with special attention to michael's possessions and making sure to cut off
the children's escape route the path of the accelerants led directly to the door of debra green's bedroom
[Music] but she used too much accelerant the vapors ignited causing a mini explosion
that singed her hair while dousing her head with water she saw that her bathrobe had also caught
fire and discarded it ten-year-old jennifer survived by crawling out her bedroom window and
jumping to the ground deborah told tim to stay inside with the six-year-old sister until firemen
arrived sadly tim did what his mother had told him to do he and kelly both died before firemen
could reach them deborah green's trial was scheduled to begin one week after michael's brain
operation to repair damage caused by the rice and poisoning but the trial never took place
deborah greene pleaded no contest to the charges avoiding a possible death sentence
my attorneys are ready willing and able to present evidence that i was not in control of myself when tim and kelly
died however true that may be defending myself at trial on these charges would only compound the suffering of my family
and my daughter she was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole
for 40 years well i think these kids in this case were sort of the ultimate pawn
the ultimate weapon that deborah green used in this fight with michael ferrar she in some ways probably loved those
kids in other ways viewed them as an expendable resource to be used in this war [Music]
[Music] so [Applause] [Music] you

On a windy Kansas night in 1995, a mysterious fire swept through the home of a prominent doctor. In the debris, investigators found evidence which told them how the fire started.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

Michael Ferrar's marriage to Deborah Greene ends in tragedy after a house fire kills two children, leading to murder charges against Deborah.

Key points

Marital Strain. Michael and Deborah's seemingly perfect life hides deep marital issues and personal struggles.
Tragic House Fire. A mysterious house fire claims the lives of two children, leaving the family shattered.
Suspicion of Arson. After the fire, both Michael and Deborah become suspects in a potential arson case.
Deborah's Confession. Deborah pleads no contest to charges, avoiding a possible death sentence.
Life Sentence. Deborah is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 40 years.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I mean, doctors kill themselves, alright?

Discussion about the mental state of Deborah.

5:30WatchNov 4, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

More from Forensic Files

Solve the Crime

Read a real case one clue at a time, then see how your call held up against the investigators.