UBC: Rule, Bitter Harvest

Bitter Harvest by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



True crime writers seem to be afflicted by what I am dubbing the Groucho Marx Fallacy, from Groucho's famous line, "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." True crime TV shows do this all the time, and I've seen it in more than one true crime book, the assumption that anyone with an interest in true crime must be ... a criminal! So I'm reading Rule describing Debora Green's interest in true crime as if it must correlate with what she did in 1995, as if she could only have been reading those books to pick up tips for how to commit murder and not get caught, and thinking, Well, I have all of your books, lady, so what does that make both of us?

And while I'm criticizing, the habit of Rule's that I am finding annoys me most is the way that she judges women, both victims and perpetrators, based on (a) their weight, (b) their housekeeping, and (c) their "attractiveness," meaning both whether their physical features are attractive and whether or not they wear make-up or get their nails done or wear "flattering" clothes. I understand perfectly where Rule's coming from, and I'm sure she got this habit as a stringer for true crime magazines, where she had to write under the pseudonym Andy Stack, because her editors told her their readers wouldn't read stories written by women. But for a woman whose moral purpose is to educate women against sexual predators of both the domestic and stranger-on-stranger kind, it's either hypocritical or a sign of some badly under-examined assumptions, because this is the Male Gaze in all its patriarchal bullshit glory. Again, telling me that Debora Green, in the '90s, wore jeans and t-shirts most of the time, as if that makes her a bad person, does not actually make me believe she's a bad person, especially since jeans and t-shirts constitute 94% of my own wardrobe.

With all of that said, this is an excellent book. It's counter to Rule's usual pattern, in that the perpetrator here of hideous and cruel domestic violence is a woman, and while she and her husband had a horribly dysfunctional marriage, she was the emotionally abusive one. I know at least one reviewer felt Rule was too sympathetic to Mike Farrar, but while she clearly empathizes with him and works to present him in the best possible light, she doesn't hide the character traits that must have made him a sometimes aggravating spouse. He was (presumably also is) a control freak and consumed by his job, and for all that he complained about Debora Green's housekeeping, I don't notice any evidence that he himself made any effort to clean the house or--since for a man routinely working twelve-hour days, that's not feasible--hiring a housekeeper, which the Green-Farrar household could most certainly have afforded. So, yeah, the domestic dysfunction wasn't all her. And, yes, he did have an affair in 1995 (which Rule does not condone, either). But the part where Green decided to poison him with ricin . . . no, I'm sorry. No matter how aggravating your spouse is, castor beans are not the answer. Especially when he has already asked you for a divorce, which you have refused to grant him, partly on the grounds that you will lose your position and lifestyle as a cardiologist's wife, but mostly on the grounds that you are a narcissist and see him as your possession.

And then there's what she did in October of 1995, which is entirely on her.

Green burned down their house, deliberately trapping their three children and two dogs inside. The youngest child and the Labrador succumbed to carbon monoxide without ever waking up. The oldest child used the house intercom to ask his mother what to do. She told him to stay put until firefighters rescued him; he obeyed her and died. The middle child escaped over the roof of the garage. When she was afraid to jump down, her mother promised to catch her and then didn't. It was pure chance that the little girl wasn't hurt. The greyhound's body was found by firefighters searching the wreckage of the house.

Police first suspected Green because, like many people with personality disorders, she couldn't figure out how to fake grief. But it was the arson investigation that convicted her. I first learned about this case from an episode of Forensic Files, because the arson investigators not only found accelerant and not only traced the path of the accelerant through the house, demonstrating that the children were not merely collateral damage but in fact the targets of the fire, they found that the accelerant trail ended at Green's bedroom door and furthermore disproved her story that she woke up and opened the door to find the house on fire, because the door was open when the fire started, and Green's hair was singed. Like many first-time arsonists, she wasn't prepared for how fast her accelerant ignited.

Bitter Harvest is a thorough examination of what Green did and why, both in the ricin poisoning of her husband and the arson-murder of her children, and how law enforcement figured it out.



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