Forensic Files | Ultimate Betrayal | FULL EPISODE | HD | True Crime Procedure Investigation Drama | 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 Ferrar and Deborah Green first met in medical school in 1977. Both were gifted students with near
genius IQ's. 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 Ferrar 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. Um, she was uh 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.
[Music] 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 Deborah 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 uh she no longer had her own career. Um I I felt that, you know, maybe it was just really
hard for her to let go of that. maybe she felt like um 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 chills 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. Ferrar'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 had gotten
back from Peru. He assumed that he had gotten some tropical parasite from hell. Michael Ferrar was rapidly losing
weight, dropping to just 125 lbs. Whatever was causing this illness was a mystery.
For a cardiologist who seemingly had it all, Dr. Michael Ferrar'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. 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 caster 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 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. Ferrar decided to do a little investigating of his own. The caster beans were purchased from the
Earl May Garden Center. A receipt from that store in Deborah's purse indicated she purchased the beans just 4 days
before Michael first got sick. While consulting his medical textbook, Farrar learned some terrible news that
castor beans contain Ryson, a deadly toxin with no known antidote. And the symptoms of Ryson poisoning were
vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, and gastrointestinal bleeding. Symptoms which were identical to his own.
Farrar quickly took a sample of his own blood for testing, but Ryson 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 Ryson and this was the cause of his mysterious symptoms. A few days later, Michael confronted
Deborah during an angry telephone call. I told her that I was uh very angry with
her. Uh that I thought she was crazy. That I thought she had been poisoning me. That I thought she needed serious
psychiatric help. >> I don't have to listen to this. [Music] >> 1 hour later around midnight, a fire
broke out in the Ferrar 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. Uh there
was no way that uh anyone could get even get close to the house. Of course, the flames were were roaring out u probably
20 to 30 ft. Deborah and her 10-year-old daughter, Jennifer, both escaped. During questioning on the night of the
fire, Deborah 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 them? 6-year-old Kelly died of smoke inhilation in her own bed. 13-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. I'll never forgive myself for that. >> Investigators immediately suspected
arson. >> It's fair to say that Deborah Green was a suspect early on. It's fair to say
that Mike Ferrar 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 Ferrar,
police looked a little deeper into the relationship between Michael and his aranged 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 Deborah Green was really that mentally ill and is sitting there in the u in the waiting room of the KU medical
center emergency room talking to Deborah Green 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 walks Michael Ferrar
>> 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 cold 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. >> Tim, can you hear me? 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. Ferrar'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 uh the contents of this bottle were poured out
and 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 Deborah
Green's story. Deborah 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 opened. 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 Deborah'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. Green 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 uh
more of a flash than she probably was prepared for. Uh when she did that, uh 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 that Deborah's hair showed signs of heat damage consistent
with singing from a highintensity 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 Chapen is a forensic chemist whose
job was to analyze the fire debris evidence from the Ferrar 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° 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 a neutral solvent carbon dulfide and the mixture is placed into a
gas chromatograph mass spectrometer for analysis. After 2 days of testing, Bill Chapen
found what he was looking for. >> In this particular case, the accelerant that I found was an accelerant called
isoparafin. Isoparafins are often used in odorless uh charcoal lighter fluids. There was an empty container of charcoal
lighter fluid on the floor of the Ferrar'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 caster beans? When Dr. Michael Ferrar told police he was sure his wife had been poisoning him
with caster beans. Investigators were unsure of where to start. Since the local laboratory could find no evidence
of Ryson in Michael Ferrar's 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 Ryson based on a handful of cases that most everybody would know about. Very few people in the
lay public and and even highly trained professionals such as medical doctors would be quite unlikely to know much
about Ryson, if anything. Ryson 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 Ferrar's
system, Dr. Richardson used a technique called alysa, which stands for enzyme linked imunosorbent essay. A 96 well
plastic plate is coated with the solution containing Ryson. In theory, any Ryson antibodies in Dr. Ferrar's
blood would bind to the Ryson 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 Ryson. 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, Ryson. Dr. Richardson discovered something else. The number of Ryson antibodies in Ferrar'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 that 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. >> Deborah Green 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 accelerance led directly
to the door of Deborah 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. 10-year-old Jennifer survived by
crawling out her bedroom window and jumping to the ground. Deborah told Tim to stay inside with his 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 Ryson poisoning, but the trial never took place. Deborah Green 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 uh 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] Heat. Heat. [Music]

Season 4 Episode 3 | On a windy Kansas night in October 1995, a mysterious fire swept through the home of a prominent doctor. In the debris, investigators found evidence which told them much more than how the fire started.

Brief Summary

Deborah Green was sentenced to life for setting a fire that killed her two children amid a troubled marriage with Michael Ferrar.

Key points

A Mysterious House Fire. In 1995, a house fire claimed the lives of two children, leaving a family shattered.
The Affair That Changed Everything. Michael Ferrar's affair leads to turmoil in his marriage and sets off a chain of events.
The Poisoning Suspicion. Michael suspects his wife Deborah of poisoning him with caster beans after his mysterious illness.
Deborah's Arrest. Deborah Green pleads no contest to charges of murder and attempted murder after the fire.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I mean, if you’re going to go, why would you go stooling yourself to death?

A reflection on the absurdity of suicide methods.

5:40WatchOct 15, 2025

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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