Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice by Ann Rule Page A

with. In almost two decades of marriage, Celeste had gone from hope to despair to acceptance. John was a good man, a kind man, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not make him happy. She could not even get him to admit that the possibility of happiness might exist.
    Eventually, in order to survive, Celeste spent her days with her sons and with her many female friends, mostly in activities connected with Pembroke Hill School. She may have longed to be with a man who loved life as much as she did, a man who believed in the future—but she had never even come close to having an affair.
    Celeste’s sister and mother were both very much like herself—strong, fun, bright, and creative. Celeste’s mother, in her seventies, was “going steady.” Her sister lived in the deep woods of the Northwest, in a house she and her husband had built themselves. Both of them tried to bolster Celeste, to keep her spirits up and urge her to live her own life, to try to be happy even though John could find neither solace nor joy in his life.
    Celeste and John had met in a surgical recovery room when he was checking on a patient. It was a romantic way to meet and she was impressed with him right away. “He was so smart. That man knew everything,” she would remember. “You could ask him any medical question on any specialty. He had an unbelievable memory.” She did not see the sadness that was an integral part of John. Maybe it wasn’t there in the early days.
    They were married on October 6, 1979, four and a half months after Debora Green and Michael Farrar. John was twenty-nine and Celeste was twenty-seven. Coincidentally, John was the same John Walker who had been on Debora’s cadaver-dissection team in anatomy class at the University of Kansas Med School. They had been friends then, but had rarely, if ever, met since graduation.
    The Walker marriage, much like the Farrar-Green marriage, proved early on to suffer from flawed communication, with the marital partners working at cross-purposes. “I thought when we got married, we loved each other,” Celeste would write one day, trying to understand what had gone wrong. “But in the first few months, we found we had entirely different expectations. We both tried to make the marriage work, we had children, we built a life together.” But as time went on, Celeste realized that her husband was becoming more and more depressed. It seemed that she fought harder to bring new life to their marriage than he did. “He just didn’t have much energy—and just wanted to escape.”
    They managed to bumble along, somehow, until 1990. By then, they were both desperately unhappy; John said that he wanted to be out of the marriage. Still, when Celeste suggested that they separate, he balked. They went to a marriage counselor and things seemed to be better for a while—a very short while.
    “That was the point,” Celeste would remember, “where John realized the marriage was a failure, and he felt that he had in some way failed also. He became more depressed as time went on and we had fewer mutual interests. There was little affection or closeness and we grew apart and much more distant from each other until we reached a point where we were more like roommates. John still was a good friend and a wonderful person. He was always sympathetic when I was sick or down. I respected him and valued his opinion—but we just couldn’t connect on an intimate level.”
    Sometime in 1994, Celeste had accepted that she and John could not go on together. He had no interest in anything having to do with their home. When the roof leaked and the basement flooded, he simply walked away. “I confronted him,” she remembered. “I said, ‘Anybody else would be down there helping to clean up the basement and putting it back together, and getting the roof fixed and stop the leaking.’
    “He said, ‘Well, I figure all we have to do is have some damage repair. I really don’t care. I figure I’ll be gone