"Grann, intrigued by the possibility that Texas had killed an innocent man, spent a year conducting his own intensive parallel investigation. After spending days with fire experts, his article concludes that the 20 “indicators” of evidence relied on by the prosecution “proved to be old-wives’ tales.”
“There was overwhelming evidence of, if not actual innocence, a wrongful execution,” said Grann.
Grann’s storytelling employs novelistic techniques, he told the library audience of 45. He began the Willingham piece setting out the prosecution’s case.
"By the end of that section, I assure you you will have no doubt of Willingham’s guilt,” he said. But by reaching out to reliable experts, his probing artfully turns the tables around. Readers are unable to look away from the piece without feeling a fomenting sense of anguish for Willingham and a criminal justice system that had gone seriously off the track."
REVIEWER NANCY BURTON: WESTFORD PATCH (CONNECTICUT);
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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." Legendary "Innocence" lawyer Barry Scheck asked participants at a conference of the National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers held in Toronto in August, 2010, how Willingham, who had lost his family to the fire, must have felt to hear the horrific allegations made against him on the basis of the bogus evidence, "and nobody pays any attention to it as he gets executed." "It's the Dreyfus Affair, and you all know what that is," Scheck continued. "It's the Dreyfus AffaIr of the United States.
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"David Grann, Staples Class of 1985, returned to Westport on Wednesday to talk about his blossoming career as an award-winning writer whose quirky investigations provide glimpses into the human condition, probe good and evil and illuminate large themes," Nancy Burton's review, published on august 13, 2010 begins, under the heading, "Just like Sherlock Holmes: But all true; Intrigue, murder, madness, giant squids and executing the innocent attract the writing gifts of David Grann, Staples class of 1985."
"His subject as a guest speaker at the Westport Public Library was The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession, a collection of articles published in March. Most were published first in The New Yorker magazine where he has been a staff writer since 2003. Grann’s first book, The Lost City of Z, hit The New York Times bestseller list the week it first appeared in February of last year," the review continues.
"Grann’s talk highlighted his September 7, 2009 New Yorker piece, “Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?” It’s a chronicle of Grann’s intensive investigation of the prosecution of Cameron Todd Willingham, a father of three, on charges he deliberately set his home on fire, an act of arson that claimed the lives of his children. A jury found him guilty after deliberating one hour and he was executed in 2004.
But soon after the execution, serious doubts arose about Willingham’s guilt, Grann explained. A fire investigator reviewed key documents in the case and an hour-long video of the aftermath of the fire scene. He found nothing to suggest to a serious arson investigator that arson was involved. “It was just a fire,” he concluded.
The state of Texas ordered an unprecedented re-examination of the case; the fire forensic expert it hired said the finding of arson was unsupportable and he concluded the key testimony of a fire marshal at the trial was “hardly consistent with a scientific mind-set and is more characteristic of mystics or psychics.”
Grann, intrigued by the possibility that Texas had killed an innocent man, spent a year conducting his own intensive parallel investigation. After spending days with fire experts, his article concludes that the 20 “indicators” of evidence relied on by the prosecution “proved to be old-wives’ tales.”
“There was overwhelming evidence of, if not actual innocence, a wrongful execution,” said Grann.
Grann’s storytelling employs novelistic techniques, he told the library audience of 45. He began the Willingham piece setting out the prosecution’s case.
"By the end of that section, I assure you you will have no doubt of Willingham’s guilt,” he said. But by reaching out to reliable experts, his probing artfully turns the tables around. Readers are unable to look away from the piece without feeling a fomenting sense of anguish for Willingham and a criminal justice system that had gone seriously off the track.
Grann employs the same investigatory and literary techniques to probe 11 other true-life mysteries in his collection, from the death of a Sherlock Holmes aficiando to a classic con man caught up in someone else’s deceptions.
“I was always reading Sherlock Holmes" while growing up in Westport and attending the public schools here, he said. He was attracted to Holmes’ fictional ability to “restore order to a bewildering universe,” he writes in the introduction to the book.
“It is the messiness of life, and the human struggle to make sense of it, that drew me to the subjects in this collection.” Grann is fond of quoting Holmes’ dictum: “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
In each piece in the collection, his aim is to ascertain the truth of what really happened.
“Reporting, like detective work, is a process of elimination,” he writes. “It requires that you gather and probe innumerable versions of a story until, to borrow a phrase from Sherlock Holmes, ‘the one which remains must be the truth.’”
The common element in each of Grann’s 12 stories is intrigue.
“Unlike the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, these tales are all true. The protagonists are mortal: as with Dr. Watson, they can observe, but they don’t necessarily see,” he writes.
“Pieces of the puzzle often remain elusive. Their stories do not always end happily,” he continues. “Some of the characters are driven to deception and murder. Others go mad.”
One of Grann’s adventures takes him to New Zealand where he joins up with a “squid squad” consisting of an academic and graduate student, two of a great number of marine sleuths who, according to Grann, are obsessed with finding a living giant squid.
“There is no report of one ever having been seen alive,” he said. “There are giant squid hunters who, like Ahab, wander the world in search of the giant squid,” he said. Part of the fascination is their size, with 60-foot tentacles and eyes the size of hub caps.
“We know they’re real because their tentacles have been found washed ashore,” he said.
“The Squid Hunter” is Grann’s harrowing account of a seaborne quest he joined. The Squid Squad went out in a 20-foot skiff despite a threatening typhoon and the conditions – walls of 20-foot waves encountered in the dark, when the giant squid are thought to be lurking at sea level - were life-threatening.
By luck, they captured a tiny creature with all the characteristics of a baby squid – but as they were transferring it to a larger container it disappeared.
That event – devastating for the squid hunter - was revelatory of human character, including his own, Grann acknowledged. He was a journalist who feared for his reputation if he came back from the costly journey without a giant squid on his literary belt.
But he rationalized the near-miss as being a perfect ending by leaving his protagonist in his obsessive state, perhaps with greater self-understanding.
The other true-life mysteries are equally absorbing, written by a master of the suspenseful retelling.
“Thank you! You’re keeping my babies in diapers,” said the 41-year-old author jokingly, the father of two young children, as he autographed the six copies of his book a fan placed in front of him after his talk.
Grann’s best-seller, The Lost City of Z, has been translated into 20 languages. It’s the story of legendary British explorer Percy Fawcett who disappeared in the Amazon with his son in 1925 while on a quest for the lost city of Z. Grann retraced the explorer’s travels and made his own discoveries.
Unlike 100 predecessors who died or disappeared in similar quests for Fawcett's remains and the lost city, Grann’s journey, as retold, has been optioned by Hollywood.
Grann’s mother Phyllis was head of Putnam-Penguin books and his father, Victor, is a hematologist-oncologist. Grann now lives in Westchester County and his parents live in New York."
The review can be found at:
http://westport.patch.com/articles/just-like-sherlock-holmes-but-all-true
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be accessed at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2010/07/new-feature-cases-issues-and.html
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;
