by David Grann
A map of the house was on a table between the men, and Vasquez pointed to it. “You walked out this way?” he said.
Willingham said yes.
Vasquez was now convinced that Willingham had killed his children. If the floor had been soaked with a liquid accelerant and the fire had burned low, as the evidence suggested, Willingham could not have run out of the house the way he had described without badly burning his feet. A medical report indicated that his feet had been unscathed.
Willingham insisted that, when he left the house, the fire was still around the top of the walls and not on the floor. “I didn’t have to jump through any flames,” he said. Vasquez believed that this was impossible, and that Willingham had lit the fire as he was retreating—first, torching the children’s room, then the hallway, and then, from the porch, the front door. Vasquez later said of Willingham, “He told me a story of pure fabrication. . . . He just talked and he talked and all he did was lie.”
Still, there was no clear motive. The children had life-insurance policies, but they amounted to only fifteen thousand dollars, and Stacy’s grandfather, who had paid for them, was listed as the primary beneficiary. Stacy told investigators that even though Willingham hit her he had never abused the children—“Our kids were spoiled rotten,” she said—and she did not believe that Willingham could have killed them.
Ultimately, the authorities concluded that Willingham was a man without a conscience whose serial crimes had climaxed, almost inexorably, in murder. John Jackson, who was then the assistant district attorney in Corsicana, was assigned to prosecute Willingham’s case. He later told the Dallas Morning News that he considered Willingham to be “an utterly sociopathic individual” who deemed his children “an impediment to his lifestyle.” Or, as the local district attorney, Pat Batchelor, put it, “The children were interfering with his beer drinking and dart throwing.”
On the night of January 8, 1992, two weeks after the fire, Willingham was riding in a car with Stacy when SWAT teams surrounded them, forcing them to the side of the road. “They pulled guns out like we had just robbed ten banks,” Stacy later recalled. “All we heard was ‘click, click.’ . . . Then they arrested him.”
Willingham was charged with murder. Because there were multiple victims, he was eligible for the death penalty, under Texas law. Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson, who had ambitions of becoming a judge, was personally opposed to capital punishment. “I don’t think it’s effective in deterring criminals,” he told me. “I just don’t think it works.” He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas—about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years. Plus, Jackson said, “What’s the recourse if you make a mistake?” Yet his boss, Batchelor, believed that, as he once put it, “certain people who commit bad enough crimes give up the right to live,” and Jackson came to agree that the heinous nature of the crime in the Willingham case—“one of the worst in terms of body count” that he had ever tried—mandated death.
Willingham couldn’t afford to hire lawyers, and was assigned two by the state: David Martin, a former state trooper, and Robert Dunn, a local defense attorney who represented everyone from alleged murderers to spouses in divorce cases—a “Jack-of-all-trades,” as he calls himself. (“In a small town, you can’t say ‘I’m a so-and-so lawyer,’ because you’ll starve to death,” he told me.)
Not long after Willingham’s arrest, authorities received a message from a prison inmate named Johnny Webb, who was in the same jail as Willingham. Webb alleged that Willingham had confessed to him that he took “some kind of lighter fluid, squirting [it] around the walls and the floor, and set a fire.” The case against Willingham was considered airtight.
Even so, several of Stacy’s relatives—who, unlike her, believed that Willingham was guilty—told Jackson that they preferred to avoid the anguish of a trial. And so, shortly before jury selection, Jackson approached Willingham’s attorneys with an extraordinary offer: if their client pleaded guilty, the state would give him a life sentence. “I was really happy when I thought we might have a deal to avoid the death penalty,” Jackson recalls.
Willingham’s lawyers were equally pleased. They had little doubt that he had committed the murders and that, if the case went before a jury, he would be found guilty, and, subsequently, executed. “Everyone thinks defense lawyers must believe their clients are innocent, but that’s seldom true,” Martin told me. “Most of the time, they’re guilty as sin.” He added of Willingham, “All the evidence showed that he was one hundred per cent guilty. He poured accelerant all over the house and put lighter fluid under the kids’ beds.” It was, he said, “a classic arson case”: there were “puddle patterns all over the place—no disputing those.”
Martin and Dunn advised Willingham that he should accept the offer, but he refused. The lawyers asked his father and stepmother to speak to him. According to Eugenia, Martin showed them photographs of the burned children and said, “Look what your son did. You got to talk him into pleading, or he’s going to be executed.”
His parents went to see their son in jail. Though his father did not believe that he should plead guilty if he was innocent, his stepmother beseeched him to take the deal. “I just wanted to keep my boy alive,” she told me.
Willingham was implacable. “I ain’t gonna plead to something I didn’t do, especially killing my own kids,” he said. It was his final decision. Martin says, “I thought it was nuts at the time—and I think it’s nuts now.”
Willingham’s refusal to accept the deal confirmed the view of the prosecution, and even that of his defense lawyers, that he was an unrepentant killer.
In August, 1992, the trial commenced in the old stone courthouse in downtown Corsicana. Jackson and a team of prosecutors summoned a procession of witnesses, including Johnny Webb and the Barbees. The crux of the state’s case, though, remained the scientific evidence gathered by Vasquez and Fogg. On the stand, Vasquez detailed what he called more than “twenty indicators” of arson.
“Do you have an opinion as to who started the fire?” one of the prosecutors asked.
“Yes, sir,” Vasquez said. “Mr. Willingham.”
The prosecutor asked Vasquez what he thought Willingham’s intent was in lighting the fire. “To kill the little girls,” he said.
The defense had tried to find a fire expert to counter Vasquez and Fogg’s testimony, but the one they contacted concurred with the prosecution. Ultimately, the defense presented only one witness to the jury: the Willinghams’ babysitter, who said she could not believe that Willingham could have killed his children. (Dunn told me that Willingham had wanted to testify, but Martin and Dunn thought that he would make a bad witness.) The trial ended after two days.
During his closing arguments, Jackson said that the puddle configurations and pour patterns were Willingham’s inadvertent “confession,” burned into the floor. Showing a Bible that had been salvaged from the fire, Jackson paraphrased the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whomsoever shall harm one of my children, it’s better for a millstone to be hung around his neck and for him to be cast in the sea.”
The jury was out for barely an hour before returning with a unanimous guilty verdict. As Vasquez put it, “The fire does not lie.”
When Elizabeth Gilbert approached the prison guard, on a spring day in 1999, and said Cameron Todd Willingham’s name, she was uncertain about what she was doing. A forty-seven-year-old French teacher and playwright from Houston, Gilbert was divorced with two children. She had never visited a prison before. Several weeks earlier, a friend, who worked at an organization that opposed the death penalty, had encouraged her to volunteer as a pen pal for an inmate on death row, and Gilbert had offered her name and address. Not long after, a short letter, written with unsteady penmanship, arrived from Willingham. “If you wish to write back, I would be honored to correspond with you,�
� he said. He also asked if she might visit him. Perhaps out of a writer’s curiosity, or perhaps because she didn’t feel quite herself (she had just been upset by news that her ex-husband was dying of cancer), she agreed. Now she was standing in front of the decrepit penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas—a place that inmates referred to as “the death pit.”
She filed past a razor-wire fence, a series of floodlights, and a checkpoint, where she was patted down, until she entered a small chamber. Only a few feet in front of her was a man convicted of multiple infanticide. He was wearing a white jumpsuit with “DR”—for death row—printed on the back, in large black letters. He had a tattoo of a serpent and a skull on his left biceps. He stood nearly six feet tall and was muscular, though his legs had atrophied after years of confinement.
A Plexiglas window separated Willingham from her; still, Gilbert, who had short brown hair and a bookish manner, stared at him uneasily. Willingham had once fought another prisoner who called him a “baby killer,” and since he had been incarcerated, seven years earlier, he had committed a series of disciplinary infractions that had periodically landed him in the segregation unit, which was known as “the dungeon.”
Willingham greeted her politely. He seemed grateful that she had come. After his conviction, Stacy had campaigned for his release. She wrote to Ann Richards, then the governor of Texas, saying, “I know him in ways that no one else does when it comes to our children. Therefore, I believe that there is no way he could have possibly committed this crime.” But within a year Stacy had filed for divorce, and Willingham had few visitors except for his parents, who drove from Oklahoma to see him once a month. “I really have no one outside my parents to remind me that I am a human being, not the animal the state professes I am,” he told Gilbert at one point.
He didn’t want to talk about death row. “Hell, I live here,” he later wrote her. “When I have a visit, I want to escape from here.” He asked her questions about her teaching and art. He expressed fear that, as a playwright, she might find him a “one-dimensional character,” and apologized for lacking social graces; he now had trouble separating the mores in prison from those of the outside world.
When Gilbert asked him if he wanted something to eat or drink from the vending machines, he declined. “I hope I did not offend you by not accepting any snacks,” he later wrote her. “I didn’t want you to feel I was there just for something like that.”
She had been warned that prisoners often tried to con visitors. He appeared to realize this, subsequently telling her, “I am just a simple man. Nothing else. And to most other people a convicted killer looking for someone to manipulate.”
Their visit lasted for two hours, and afterward they continued to correspond. She was struck by his letters, which seemed introspective, and were not at all what she had expected. “I am a very honest person with my feelings,” he wrote her. “I will not bullshit you on how I feel or what I think.” He said that he used to be stoic, like his father. But, he added, “losing my three daughters . . . my home, wife and my life, you tend to wake up a little. I have learned to open myself.”
She agreed to visit him again, and when she returned, several weeks later, he was visibly moved. “Here I am this person who nobody on the outside is ever going to know as a human, who has lost so much, but still trying to hold on,” he wrote her afterward. “But you came back! I don’t think you will ever know of what importance that visit was in my existence.”
They kept exchanging letters, and she began asking him about the fire. He insisted that he was innocent and that, if someone had poured accelerant through the house and lit it, then the killer remained free. Gilbert wasn’t naïve—she assumed that he was guilty. She did not mind giving him solace, but she was not there to absolve him.
Still, she had become curious about the case, and one day that fall she drove down to the courthouse in Corsicana to review the trial records. Many people in the community remembered the tragedy, and a clerk expressed bewilderment that anyone would be interested in a man who had burned his children alive.
Gilbert took the files and sat down at a small table. As she examined the eyewitness accounts, she noticed several contradictions. Diane Barbee had reported that, before the authorities arrived at the fire, Willingham never tried to get back into the house—yet she had been absent for some time while calling the Fire Department. Meanwhile, her daughter Buffie had reported witnessing Willingham on the porch breaking a window, in an apparent effort to reach his children. And the firemen and police on the scene had described Willingham frantically trying to get into the house.
The witnesses’ testimony also grew more damning after authorities had concluded, in the beginning of January, 1992, that Willingham was likely guilty of murder. In Diane Barbee’s initial statement to authorities, she had portrayed Willingham as “hysterical,” and described the front of the house exploding. But on January 4th, after arson investigators began suspecting Willingham of murder, Barbee suggested that he could have gone back inside to rescue his children, for at the outset she had seen only “smoke coming from out of the front of the house”—smoke that was not “real thick.”
An even starker shift occurred with Father Monaghan’s testimony. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from risking his life. Yet, as investigators were preparing to arrest Willingham, he concluded that Willingham had been too emotional (“He seemed to have the type of distress that a woman who had given birth would have upon seeing her children die”); and he expressed a “gut feeling” that Willingham had “something to do with the setting of the fire.”
Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist who has done extensive research on eyewitness and expert testimony in criminal investigations, told me, “The mind is not a passive machine. Once you believe in something—once you expect something—it changes the way you perceive information and the way your memory recalls it.”
After Gilbert’s visit to the courthouse, she kept wondering about Willingham’s motive, and she pressed him on the matter. In response, he wrote, of the death of his children, “I do not talk about it much anymore and it is still a very powerfully emotional pain inside my being.” He admitted that he had been a “sorry-ass husband” who had hit Stacy—something he deeply regretted. But he said that he had loved his children and would never have hurt them. Fatherhood, he said, had changed him; he stopped being a hoodlum and “settled down” and “became a man.” Nearly three months before the fire, he and Stacy, who had never married, wed at a small ceremony in his home town of Ardmore. He said that the prosecution had seized upon incidents from his past and from the day of the fire to create a portrait of a “demon,” as Jackson, the prosecutor, referred to him. For instance, Willingham said, he had moved the car during the fire simply because he didn’t want it to explode by the house, further threatening the children.
Gilbert was unsure what to make of his story, and she began to approach people who were involved in the case, asking them questions. “My friends thought I was crazy,” Gilbert recalls. “I’d never done anything like this in my life.”
One morning, when Willingham’s parents came to visit him, Gilbert arranged to see them first, at a coffee shop near the prison. Gene, who was in his seventies, had the Willingham look, though his black hair had gray streaks and his dark eyes were magnified by glasses. Eugenia, who was in her fifties, with silvery hair, was as sweet and talkative as her husband was stern and reserved. The drive from Oklahoma to Texas took six hours, and they had woken at three in the morning; because they could not afford a motel, they would have to return home later that day. “I feel like a real burden to them,” Willingham had written Gilbert.
As Gene and Eugenia sipped coffee, they told Gilbert how grateful they were that someone had finally taken an interest in Todd’s case. Gene said that his son
, though he had flaws, was no killer.
The evening before the fire, Eugenia said, she had spoken on the phone with Todd. She and Gene were planning to visit two days later, on Christmas Eve, and Todd told her that he and Stacy and the kids had just picked up family photographs. “He said, ‘We got your pictures for Christmas,’” she recalled. “He put Amber on the phone, and she was tattling on one of the twins. Todd didn’t seem upset. If something was bothering him, I would have known.”
Gene and Eugenia got up to go: they didn’t want to miss any of the four hours that were allotted for the visit with their son. Before they left, Gene said, “You’ll let us know if you find anything, won’t you?”
Over the next few weeks, Gilbert continued to track down sources. Many of them, including the Barbees, remained convinced that Willingham was guilty, but several of his friends and relatives had doubts. So did some people in law enforcement. Willingham’s former probation officer in Oklahoma, Polly Goodin, recently told me that Willingham had never demonstrated bizarre or sociopathic behavior. “He was probably one of my favorite kids,” she said. Even a former judge named Bebe Bridges—who had often stood, as she put it, on the “opposite side” of Willingham in the legal system, and who had sent him to jail for stealing—told me that she could not imagine him killing his children. “He was polite, and he seemed to care,” she said. “His convictions had been for dumb-kid stuff. Even the things stolen weren’t significant.” Several months before the fire, Willingham tracked Goodin down at her office, and proudly showed her photographs of Stacy and the kids. “He wanted Bebe and me to know he’d been doing good,” Goodin recalled.
Eventually, Gilbert returned to Corsicana to interview Stacy, who had agreed to meet at the bed-and-breakfast where Gilbert was staying. Stacy was slightly plump, with pale, round cheeks and feathered dark-blond hair; her bangs were held in place by gel, and her face was heavily made up. According to a tape recording of the conversation, Stacy said that nothing unusual had happened in the days before the fire. She and Willingham had not fought, and were preparing for the holiday. Though Vasquez, the arson expert, had recalled finding the space heater off, Stacy was sure that, at least on the day of the incident—a cool winter morning—it had been on. “I remember turning it down,” she recalled. “I always thought, Gosh, could Amber have put something in there?” Stacy added that, more than once, she had caught Amber “putting things too close to it.”