Debora Green (née Jones; born February 28, 1951) is an American physician who pleaded no contest to setting a 1995 fire that burned down her family's home and killed two of her children, and to poisoning her husband with ricin with the intention of causing his death.

[3] During the period the Greens were separated, Debora met Michael Farrar, a student in his twenties completing his last year of medical school.

[4] Farrar recounted that Green seemed to lack the coping skills most adults bring to bear in challenging times; when she went into a rage, she sometimes harmed herself or broke things, and rarely gave any thought to whether she was in private or in public during these episodes.

[11] On October 24, during the early morning, Farrar received a phone call at his apartment from a neighbor who shouted that his house—meaning the Farrar–Green family home in Prairie Village—was on fire.

[14] At least two firefighters attempted to search inside the home for the missing children, but the building was so consumed by flames that they could only access a small portion of the ground level before the structure became unsafe.

[13] The fire had spread rapidly, and although high winds contributed to the intensity, authorities deemed the speed with which the house had become fully involved suspicious enough to bring in arson investigators.

Investigators at first assumed he had died trying to escape,[13] but later determined that he had perished in or near his bedroom, most likely of smoke inhalation and heat, and that his body had fallen through burned flooring to where it was discovered.

[15] Green told police that she had one or two drinks after dinner and went to her bedroom, leaving it only to speak to Tim in the kitchen some time between ten and eleven in the evening, shortly before he went to bed.

Where previously she had been cooperative and friendly with the detectives interviewing her, she now began to attack them verbally, calling investigators and their methods "pathetic",[15] alleging that they had withheld from her knowledge of the children's deaths, and demanding to be allowed to see Farrar and the remains of the family's house.

Doctors identified Streptococcus viridans, which had probably leaked through damaged digestive tissue as a result of Farrar's severe diarrhea, as the source of the sepsis; however, they could not pinpoint the root cause of the gastrointestinal illness itself.

Basing their conclusions on the likelihood that his illness was related to the Peru trip, doctors narrowed down the possible causes for Farrar's gastrointestinal issues to a handful, though none fitted his symptoms perfectly: typhoid fever, tropical sprue, or gluten-sensitive enteropathy.

[20] Though Green was caring for Farrar in the family home while he recovered from his repeated bouts of illness, she was also continuing to drink heavily and, increasingly often, claiming to be contemplating suicide or to want Margaret Hacker dead.

In her purse, he discovered seed packets labeled as castor beans, a copy of a supposedly anonymous letter that had been sent to Farrar urging him to not divorce Green, and empty vials of potassium chloride.

[11] While in the hospital for treatment, Green was diagnosed with "major bipolar depression with suicidal impulses" and placed on Prozac, Tranxene, and Klonopin.

He stated that Green had been "very concerned about money" in the context of their impending divorce, and that she may have set fire to the house to garner an insurance payout, but that she had never given any indication of intending to harm her children.

They determined that the basement level of the home, which contained the furnaces, had not been a point of origin, though two small orphan fires unconnected to the main burning had occurred in that area.

[19] Detectives recalled that Green had denied ever having been in close proximity to flames; she had reported leaving the house after seeing smoke and not coming into contact with the fire either on the deck outside her bedroom or in the process of coaxing Kate off the garage roof.

Register tapes in the store's records showed that a purchase price corresponding to ten packets of castor beans had been rung up on either September 20 or 22.

In a subsequent press conference, District Attorney Paul J. Morrison cited a "domestic situation" as the motive for Green's alleged crimes.

[34] A police officer testified that as the first responder to the fire scene in the early morning of October 24, he had found Kate Farrar to be "very frantic" with worry over her siblings, but that Debora Green had showed little, if any, emotion or concern.

[39] In exchange for avoiding the death penalty, the no contest plea called for Green to accept a prison sentence of a minimum of forty years without the possibility of parole.

[31] In a subsequent press conference, defense counsel Dennis Moore told reporters, "She is accepting responsibility for [the crimes]" but said that "I don't think she ever intended to kill her children.

She theorized that Margaret Hacker had set fire to the family's house, and reiterated her claim from the show-cause hearing that Tim had been the one to poison his father.

Green wrote to author Ann Rule in 1996 asserting that, due to alcohol abuse, she had not had the mental capacity to start a fire.

[43] In 2000, represented by a new legal team, Green filed a request for a new trial on the basis of having been rendered incompetent by the psychiatric medications she was taking at the time of her hearings.

[45] When, in 2004, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled the state's death penalty unconstitutional, she filed a second request for a new trial based on a claim of "manifest injustice".

[46] Though Green has granted no interviews regarding her mental state, a number of sources have attempted to classify her pathology, if any, and her motivation for committing the crimes of which she was convicted.

[39] Hutchinson described an affidavit from the doctor who had treated Green during her commitment to the Menninger Clinic, which reported that she had been admitted on the basis of having either major or bipolar depression.

Green claimed that though her behavior in the summer and fall of 1995 had been neglectful, she had neither the desire nor the wherewithal to set fire to her house or harm her children or her husband.

Rule—who was neither a doctor nor a psychologist, but had a background in criminology and law enforcement[47]—believed that even Green does not understand what caused her to attempt to murder Michael Farrar beyond the fact that she had come to hate him.