Cameron Todd Willingham’s house burned down in 1991, killing his three daughters. Fire investigators examined his burned house to determine the cause of the fire, and they identified twenty indicators of an intentional fire, such as puddle markings, burn patterns, and cracked glass. They said the fire had been very hot and likely set intentionally with a liquid accelerant, such as lighter fluid, poured over the house. Samples from the house were taken for testing, and one of them returned positive for lighter fluid.
Willingham was arrested and charged with arson and multiple murder. At the 1992 trial, neighbors testified against him, saying that he had not appeared very concerned. Diane Barbee, a neighbor, said that he appeared unconcerned and had not tried to rescue his children. Johnny Webb, another prisoner, said that Willingham had confessed to him. Father Monaghan, a police chaplain, said that Willingham appeared to be in complete control. Tim Gregory, a psychiatrist, testified on Willingham’s Iron Maiden poster (a flaming skull) and Led Zeppelin poster (fallen angels), saying he was cultish, focused on death, and Satanic. James Grigson, another psychiatrist, testified that Willingham was an extremely severe sociopath who was beyond the help of any treatment.
The prosecution presented Willingham as a sociopath who saw his daughters as an inhibition to a carefree, drunken lifestyle. Based on the evidence, and mostly on the results of the fire investigation, Willingham was convicted and sentenced to death. He refused a plea bargain. Prosecutors said it showed he was completely remorseless, and he was executed in 2004.
The jury and both the prosecution lawyers and the defense lawyers had no doubt that he was guilty. The only thing that confused them was that lighter fluid had only been found on the sample near the front door. No lighter fluid was found on any other sample.
On the surface, his tale is a classic criminal story: a murderer is discovered by capable forensics experts. Science triumphs and captures a dangerous criminal; society is safer as a result.
But a proper story starts at the beginning. Let us return, then, to the afternoon of the fire, and let us start over.
Eleven-year-old Buffie Barbee smelled smoke and called out her mother, Diane Barbee. They found Cameron Todd Willingham on the lawn before his burning house, hair and eyebrows singed, screaming “my babies are burning up!” While Diane ran inside to call the fire department, Buffie watched Willingham break several windows trying to return inside the house, but each time, flames shot through the broken window. The fire department arrived, and one firefighter had to restrain Willingham to keep him from returning to the house. Father Monaghan tried to calm him in the back of a fire truck. Willingham fought to return to the house, giving Monaghan a black eye, and firefighters handcuffed him for his own safety.
After police decided Willingham was a suspect, as a result of the fire investigation, people’s testimonies changed. Diane Barbee changed later testified that Willingham could have gone back to rescue his children and did not, saying that there had not been a lot of smoke. Firefighters initially reported that Willingham had been “hysterical”, and Monaghan initially reported that Willingham was “devastated” and risked his life, but after the investigation, he suggested Willingham’s emotion was staged and expressed a “gut feeling” that he was responsible for the fire.
The jailhouse informant Webb had testified that Willingham confessed burning his daughters to hide evidence of abuse on them. On close inspection, his testimony is questionable on several counts. The first is that he seemed unreliable and confused. He would later say of his testimony, “my memory is in bits and pieces. I was on a lot of medication at the time.” His testimony places the confession in a taped surveillance area. Willingham maintained his innocence to everyone else, including his own family, even refusing a plea bargain that would have spared his life, while Webb was a near-stranger. No other injuries apart from those caused by the fire were ever found on Willingham’s children.
And the two psychiatrists? Willingham had an Iron Maiden poster and a Led Zeppelin poster; that is not so exceptional. Grigson had given near-identical testimony on the character of Randall Dale Adams, labeling him an untreatable sociopath. Adams was convicted of killing a police officer, serving twelve years (twelve years!) on death row before being exonerated by new evidence. Grigson was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association in 1995 for ethical violations.
Neither psychiatrist had ever spoken so much as one word to Cameron Todd Willingham.
But the strongest of the trial evidence was the fire investigators’ report, and that is the evidence that deserves a second look.
In 1990, Gerald Wayne Lewis was charged with a very similar case of arson-murder as Willingham, based on very similar evidence: the same puddle shapes on the burned floor of his house, the same burn marks that indicated multiple points of fire’s origin, the same signs of liquid accelerant, the same witnesses’ testimony of unconcern. Prosecutors said Lewis had poured gasoline over his house and lit it aflame. But the case against Lewis was weakened by laboratory tests returning negative for gasoline and by a news camera that showed Lewis clearly upset and jumping in front of a moving car to contact the fire station.
The prosecutors arranged an elaborate experiment with John Lentini and John DeHaan, their fire experts. They wanted to show that the patterns found in Lewis’s house were caused by an intentional fire, caused by pouring accelerant (such as gasoline or lighter fluid), and then lighting it on fire in several different places. The house right next to Lewis’s burned house was to be demolished, so they got permission to use it for experiment. It was near-identical, and prosecutors filled it with the same kind of carpeting and furniture that had been in Lewis’s house. They lit a couch on fire (as though by accident), and did not use any lighter fluid. They wanted to show that fires without lighter fluid looked different than what they found in Lewis’s home.
Instead, they found the same burn marks and puddle patterns that had been in Lewis’s house. It burned much faster than they expected. They thought wood fires could not burn as quickly or as hotly as liquid accelerant fires. It turned out that wood fires burned just as fast. The room grew hot enough that everything in the room caught on fire. Lentini and DeHaan realized they had helped the defense, and charges against Lewis were dropped. Lentini was horrified. He said, “I almost sent a man to die based on theories that were a load of crap.”
In 2004, a scientist named Gerald Hurst received and began to study Willingham’s court documents. He was immediately reminded of the Lewis case. He characterized the signs used to detect arson as “old wives’ tales”, saying that investigators were looking at fires with a “flat-Earth approach”.
Hurst debunked every one of the twenty indicators of arson that the prosecuting investigators had given. All of them were based on outdated science. All of the signs they said showed lighter fluid and intentional fire were actually caused by natural fires as well. Even the lighter fluid they found by the porch came from the family grill, and not from arson.
With his execution date looming, Willingham was applied for clemency from the Board of Pardons and Paroles. Hurst hurriedly wrote a report and sent it out without proofreading so that it would reach the Board in time. They received it, but nonetheless voted unanimously to deny Willingham’s request. Not one of the fifteen members read the report.
Cameron Todd Willingham was put to irreversible death on February 17th, 2004. In his last statement, he said “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit.” But that was not to be the end of it.
Since then, five separate fire experts were commissioned to review the case, and every one of them ruled it a natural, accidental fire. One of them, Craig Beylor, was prepared to testify in 2009 to a commission that might have ruled Willingham the first officially-recognized wrongly-executed innocent. At the last minute, Governor of Texas Rick Perry abruptly replaced three of the commission’s members. He derided the fire experts, calling them a waste of taxpayers’ money and “latter-day supposed experts”. The new commission refused to comment on the Willingham case.
Counting Hurst, six independent fire experts have agreed that the science in the case was “characteristic of mystics or psychics”. There was no arson. And rather than supporting Cameron Todd Willingham after he lost his children in an accidental fire, his community condemned him as a sociopath and locked him away before putting him to death.
Rick Perry recently proudly announced his support for capital punishment during a televised interview and was applauded by the audience. He said he never struggled with the thought that any of the 234 people executed under his governance might have been innocent. Ignorance parading as confidence.
Justice Antonin Scalia argues that there never was a proven innocent who was executed, and that if there was, there would be no need to search, for the innocent’s name would be “shouted from the rooftops”. But as in Kitzmiller v. Dover, those in power can and do ignore scientific consensus. We could have had Willingham’s name shouted from the rooftops, but Governor Rick Perry suppressed it.
In suppressing inquiry, he does injustice to the citizens of Texas. If the evidence argues Willingham is innocent, keeping the public ignorant does not make him guilty. It simply does disservice to his name and his family.
As Eugene Gendlin writes,
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
We desire (and rightfully so!) to believe the truth about someone’s guilt or innocence. If Willingham is truly guilty, then that is what we want to believe. And if it turns out that he is an innocent wrongly executed, then that is what we want to believe, even if it makes us feel bad. We know it is injustice otherwise.
I have very sharply abridged Cameron Todd Willingham’s case to communicate the crux of it, but I hope it strikes you to the core. I hope it stirs you enough to read this comprehensive article detailing the case, from its very beginning to it’s yet-unfinished present day. I hope it troubles you as the nightmare that it is. And I hope your confidence in the sanctity of capital punishment in the U.S. is shattered forever.
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