"LEADING FIRE INVESTIGATORS WHO REVIEWED THE CASE TOLD ME THAT WILLINGHAM’S FIRST-DEGREE AND SECOND-DEGREE BURNS WERE CONSISTENT WITH BEING IN A FIRE BEFORE THE MOMENT OF “FLASHOVER”—THAT IS, WHEN EVERYTHING IN A ROOM SUDDENLY IGNITES. THE LIME STREET EXPERIMENT, ON WHICH I GO INTO GREAT DETAIL IN MY ARTICLE, EXPLAINS WHY WHAT HAPPENED TO WILLINGHAM WAS CONSISTENT WITH ALL THE PHYSICAL AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE."
REPORTER DAVID GRANN: THE NEW YORKER. SEPTEMBER 4, 2009;
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Background: (Wikipedia); Cameron Todd Willingham (January 9, 1968 – February 17, 2004), born in Carter County, Oklahoma, was sentenced to death by the state of Texas for murdering his three daughters—two year old Amber Louise Kuykendall, and one year old twins Karmon Diane Willingham and Kameron Marie Willingham— by setting his house on fire. The fire occurred on December 23, 1991 in Corsicana, Texas. Lighter fluid was kept on the front porch of Willingham’s house as evidenced by a melted container found there. Some of this fluid may have entered the front doorway of the house carried along by fire hose water. It was alleged this fluid was deliberately poured to start the fire and that Willingham chose this entrance way so as to impede rescue attempts. The prosecution also used other arson theories that have since been brought into question. In addition to the arson evidence, a jailhouse informant claimed Willingham confessed that he set the fire to hide his wife's physical abuse of the girls, although the girls showed no other injuries besides those caused by the fire. Neighbors also testified that Willingham did not try hard enough to save his children. They allege he "crouched down" in his front yard and watched the house burn for a period of time without attempting to enter the home or go to neighbors for help or request they call firefighters. He claimed that he tried to go back into the house but it was "too hot". As firefighters arrived, however, he rushed towards the garage and pushed his car away from the burning building, requesting firefighters do the same rather than put out the fire. After the fire, Willingham showed no emotion at the death of his children and spent the next day sorting through the debris, laughing and playing music. He expressed anger after finding his dartboard burned in the fire. Firefighters and other witnesses found him suspicious of how he reacted during and after the fire. Willingham was charged with murder on January 8, 1992. During his trial in August 1992, he was offered a life term in exchange for a guilty plea, which he turned down insisting he was innocent. After his conviction, he and his wife divorced. She later stated that she believed that Willingham was guilty. Prosecutors alleged this was part of a pattern of behavior intended to rid himself of his children. Willingham had a history of committing crimes, including burglary, grand larceny and car theft. There was also an incident when he beat his pregnant wife over the stomach with a telephone to induce a miscarriage. When asked if he had a final statement, Willingham said: "Yeah. The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man - convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do. From God's dust I came and to dust I will return - so the earth shall become my throne. I gotta go, road dog. I love you Gabby." However, his final words were directed at his ex-wife, Stacy Willingham. He turned to her and said "I hope you rot in hell, bitch" several times while attempting to extend his middle finger in an obscene gesture. His ex-wife did not show any reaction to this. He was executed by lethal injection on February 17, 2004. Subsequent to that date, persistent questions have been raised as to the accuracy of the forensic evidence used in the conviction, specifically, whether it can be proven that an accelerant (such as the lighter fluid mentioned above) was used to start the fatal fire. Fire investigator Gerald L. Hurst reviewed the case documents including the trial transcriptions and an hour-long videotape of the aftermath of the fire scene. Hurst said, "There's nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson fire. It was just a fire."
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New Yorker reporter David Grann, author of an analysis of the Cameron Todd Willingham case called "Trial by Fire," offers a rebuttal to prosecutor John Jackson's defence of Willingham's conviction in a "note" published September 4, 2009, under the heading "The prosecution defends itself."
"Several people have asked me what I thought of the op-ed that John Jackson, the prosecutor in the Willingham case, recently published in the Corsicana Daily Sun," writes Grann.
"Some observers have already responded to the op-ed," he continues.
"In my article, “Trial by Fire,” I examine in depth all the key elements of the prosecution’s case that led to Willingham’s indictment and conviction. These elements included the jailhouse informant; the eyewitness testimony regarding Willingham’s behavior during and after the fire; and, most important to the case, the original arson investigation, which Jackson, in his article, acknowledges was “undeniably flawed.” The reporting in my article speaks for itself, but I thought that it was worth addressing a few points raised by Jackson in his op-ed.
He writes that it has been “omitted” from reports on the Willingham case that Willingham had allegedly moved a refrigerator against the back door of the house. “Any escape or rescue route from the burning house was blocked by a refrigerator,” he says. But, as I detail in my story, I discovered during the course of my reporting that there were, in fact, two refrigerators in the house, and one of them was stationed by the back door. Both the police detective and assistant fire chief, who investigated the fire, told me that they had concluded that the fridge was not part of the arson plot. As the assistant fire chief, Douglas Fogg, put it to me, “It didn’t have nothing to do with the fire.” Even Jackson told me that he did not think the fridge was a “huge factor in the case.”
Jackson also alleges that the fire was “the third attempt by Todd Willingham to kill his children.” As I note in my story, there is evidence that Willingham hit his wife, even when she was pregnant, but there were no police reports or medical evidence indicating that Willingham had tried to abort or kill his children. And Willingham’s wife insisted during the trial and under interrogation that Willingham had not physically abused the children. She told police, “Our kids were spoiled rotten.”
Jackson further says that Willingham’s burns were so superficial that they seemed to have been “self-inflicted in an attempt to divert suspicion from himself.” During the trial, the fire investigator Manuel Vasquez speculated on this. But, as the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler writes in his recent report on the Willingham case for the Texas Forensic Science Commission (pdf), Vasquez never offers a rational basis for this or other conjectures; Beyler says that Vasquez’s method was more characteristic of “psychics.” Leading fire investigators who reviewed the case told me that Willingham’s first-degree and second-degree burns were consistent with being in a fire before the moment of “flashover”—that is, when everything in a room suddenly ignites. The Lime Street experiment, on which I go into great detail in my article, explains why what happened to Willingham was consistent with all the physical and scientific evidence.
Jackson argues that it is incriminating that Willingham did not suffer from severe carbon-monoxide poisoning. During the trial, Vasquez also suggested this, even though Vasquez had no medical expertise and did not meet with Willingham until about a week after the fire. As I note in my article, the Lime Street and other scientific experiments have proven that Vasquez’s notion of carbon-monoxide poisoning is no more than an old wives’ tale: before a room goes to flashover, levels of carbon monoxide outside the thermal cloud are relatively low.
Jackson also claims in his article that Willingham was offered a polygraph and refused. I do not know if this is true, though it may be. After Willingham was charged with murder, he stopped coöperating with authorities. (On death row, Willingham wrote to several legal organizations asking them if they could give him a polygraph so that he could prove his innocence.) But even if he refused to take a polygraph after he was arrested, polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, and are not admissible in a court of law. (I highly recommend Margaret Talbot’s piece on this subject, “Duped,” which appeared in The New Yorker, in 2007.) As a result, defense attorneys routinely do not let their clients take polygraphs. Ernest Willis, who I discuss in my piece, was also convicted of committing arson, in a case that was eerily similar to Willingham’s. He had taken a polygraph, and the results were interpreted by police and the prosecutor as a sign that he was guilty. Evidence later emerged, however, that he had not set the fire, and he was exonerated and released, after seventeen years on death row. The idea that a lie-detector test (or the refusal to take one) could be considered evidence cuts to the core of the problems in the Willingham case: a reliance on unreliable and unsound scientific techniques.
The other points that Jackson makes have to do with Willingham’s character and behavior. He reports that a witness overheard Willingham saying, beside his daughter’s coffin, “You’re not the one who was supposed to die.” In my article, I demonstrate that the eyewitness testimony concerning Willingham’s behavior grew increasingly damning once police suspected him of murder. Jackson also notes, as I point out in my article, that Willingham refused to accept the prosecution’s offer to plead guilty and take a life sentence. Jackson says Willingham almost had a physical confrontation with his lawyers over the offer, which, in his view, suggests that he was guilty.
But all these actions can just as easily be interpreted as evidence of Willingham’s innocence. If the arson investigators had concluded there was no scientific evidence that a crime had occurred—as the top fire investigators in the country have now determined—Willingham’s words at the funeral would surely be viewed as a sign that he was tormented by the fact that he had survived without saving his children. And his fury over the prosecution offer would have confirmed that Willingham would never, as he always insisted, admit to “something I didn’t do, especially killing my own kids.”"
The note can be found at:
http://stopexecutions.blogspot.com/2009/09/david-grann-of-new-yorker-responds-to.html
Two other rebuttals can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2009/09/cameron-todd-willingham-case.html
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;
