At 6:00 p.m. on February 17, 2004, Cameron “Todd” Willingham was led into the Texas death chamber at Huntsville to be executed. He was an angry man. Chicago Tribune’s investigative reporter Steven Mills in a December 9, 2004 article described what happened next. Willingham angrily told all those present to witness his execution 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.” Mills reported Willingham then said goodbye to his friends and hurled curses at his former wife who was present to witness his execution for the 1991 murders of their three small children.

            I first heard about the Willingham case in 2007 when I attended an anti-death penalty seminar at Houston’s Rice University that featured former Bexar County, Texas, district attorney Sam Millsap as one of its lecturers. Millsap, who prosecuted and sent to death Reuben Cantu, talked not only about his belief that Cantu was innocent but that Cameron Todd Willingham was also innocent. Millsap observed that it was Willingham’s “hostile, angry attitude” as much as anything that got him charged with capital murder and ultimately executed.

            That observation stuck with me. Then in January of this year I read a small news clip that the state of Texas had approved an inquiry into the Willingham execution. Maryland fire scientist Craig Beyler has been hired by the Texas Forensic Science Commission to conduct an independent review of the arson forensic evidence that sent Willingham to his death in 2004 and determine if it was flawed science.

            “He [Beyler] appears to be one of the pre-eminent people in the fire and arson investigation field,” Samuel Bassett, an Austin attorney and commission member, was quoted as saying in a January 27, 2009 Tribune article.

            Barry Scheck, co-director of the New York-based Cardozo Innocence Project, was also quoted in the Tribune article as saying: “It’s essential that this matter is resolved for the sake of those who have been wrongfully convicted by unreliable arson evidence, as well as those under investigation in new arson cases. It’s critical that sound science is used in these cases.”

            Todd Willingham, as he was called by most people, was always an angry man. He had what is known in  prison jargon as a “fucked up attitude.” According to Mills, he was a 10^th-grade dropout from Ardmore, Oklahoma where, in earlier years, he had sniffed glue and paint, and committed a laundry list of crimes that included burglary, car theft, and grand larceny. He loved bars, drinking beer, and throwing darts. He was verbally, if not physically, abusive of his wife, Stacy.

December 1991 was a difficult time for the Willinghams at their residence on the south side of Corsicana, Texas. The house didn’t even have a stove. Meals were prepared on a twin-burner hot plate, or in a defective microwave that frequently “popped” when in use. A nearby countertop deep-fryer filled in when the luxury of “cooking with grease” occurred. Stacy was forced to take a job at a bar called Some Other Place in nearby Mustang to help make ends meet after Willingham had been laid off from his job several weeks earlier. Mills reported the couple was two months behind on their house rent and in the arrears on other bills, “some of which they had stopped paying to save money for Christmas.”

 Two days before Christmas Stacy left the trailer shortly after 9:00 a.m. to go to a local Salvation Army store to shop for Christmas gifts. She left Todd alone with their three children, Amber 2 and one-year old twins, Karmon and Kameron. Todd reportedly awoke just as Stacy was leaving after he heard the twins crying. He said he got up, gave them bottles, placed them on the floor, and put a childproof gate at the doorway of the bedroom. Mills tells us what happened next:

“Willingham told investigators that he was awakened about an hour after his wife left by Amber’s cries of ‘Daddy, Daddy.’

“The house, he said, was so full of smoke that he could not see the doorway leading out of the bedroom. Crouching low, he went into the hall. He said he saw that there was not much smoke in the kitchen but ‘couldn’t see anything but black’ toward the front of the house.

“With the electrical circuits popping, Willingham said he made his way to the girls’ bedroom. He saw an orange glow on the ceiling, but little else because the smoke was so heavy. He said he stood up to step over the childproof gate, and his hair caught fire.

“He crouched back down, he told investigators, and felt along the floor for the twins but could not find them. He said he called out for Amber and felt on top of her bed, but she was not there.

“When debris began to fall from the ceiling, burning his shoulder, he said he fled through and out the front door.”

Cameron Todd Willingham was certainly not the kind of man to “go down with the ship.” He was more like one of the rats fleeing from the proverbial sinking ship. And that really bothered some people. Neighbor Mary Barbee said almost immediately after the house fire that Willingham didn’t do enough to rescue his children, although another witness, Burvin Smith, who was one of the first people to arrive at the scene, said he had to restrain Willingham from going onto the porch of the burning trailer.

Also, both Barbee and Smith said Willingham was visibly upset about his children being trapped in the fire. Smith even said he was “real hysterical.” But fire department chaplain George Monaghan was not impressed with Willingham’s emotional upset at the scene. “It seemed to me that Cameron was too distraught” and that caused him to believe Willingham had deliberately set the fire.

Then there were those two disturbing things Willingham did that aroused suspicion against him. First, just as a large ball of fire came out of the front of the house, he rushed into his garage and pushed his car clear of the fire. Second, the day after the fire he complained, as he walked through the fire wreckage with music blaring from a friend’s nearby truck, that he could not find his dart board.

            A reasonable inference could be drawn that Willingham was more concerned  about his car and favorite dart board than he was about his children. What kind of man would walk through the wreckage of a fire that killed his three children the previous day looking for salvageable personal items like a dart board while listening to blaring music? What kind of man would leave his three children in a raging fire after suffering only a minor shoulder burn and singed hair yet rush back toward that same ball of fire to save his car? As former D.A. Millsap said, “Cameron Todd Willingham was his own worst enemy.”

            But was he guilty of killing his three children because they got in the way of his beer drinking and dart throwing as Navarro County District Attorney Patrick Batcherlor told the media on January 8, 1992 as he announced Willingham’s indictment for capital murder?

            David Martin, one of Willingham’s defense attorneys, believed he was. “That crime scene was so replete with evidence of arson,” he was quoted by the Tribune as saying. “There was no other cause for the house catching on fire.”

            Navarro County Judge John Jackson, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Willingham, also firmly believes he was guilty, telling the Tribune he had “no reservations” about either the verdict or Willingham’s execution.

            But Steven Mills’ excellent investigative journalism uncovered new evidence in 2004 that cast serious doubt on Willingham’s guilt. He pointed to a February 10, 1992 “groundbreaking document in fire investigation” that was published by the National Fire Protection Association just two months after “the fatal fire at the Willingham house.” This document was prepared by 30 fire experts and was published as a “guideline for fire investigators.” Mills wrote that this report had played a role in the exoneration of another Texas death row inmate, Ernest Willis, earlier in 2004:

            “In Pecos County, in West Texas, District Atty. Ori White has to decide whether to retry Willis, who had been convicted of setting a fire that killed two women and had spent 17 years on Death Row. Willis had gotten a new trial on unrelated legal issues in the case.

            “Before making his decision, White asked [Gerald] Hurst to review the evidence. The prosecutor also asked [Kenneth] Ryland to conduct an independent review.

            “Hurst concluded there was no evidence of arson, that the fire mostly likely was accidental. Ryland concurred. White then dropped the case against Willis and Willis walked free. It was the 12^th time Hurst’s work had led to dismissal of charges or an acquittal.

            “Said White: ‘I don’t turn killers lose. If Willis was guilty, I’d be retrying him right now. And I’d use Hurst as my witness. He’s a brilliant scientist. If he says it was an arson fire, then it was. If he says it wasn’t, then it wasn’t.’”

            Hurst is a Cambridge-University-educated chemist who has investigated scores of fires in his career and Rayland is the Chief of the Effie Fire Department and a former fire instructor at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Steven Mills consulted with these two fire experts and two other private fire investigators, John Lentini and John DeHaan (both of whom were involved with the preparation of the 1992 NFPA’s fire investigation guidelines) for his investigation of the Willingham case. Hurst had a history with the Willingham case because he had earlier examined the evidence at the request of a Willingham family member and prepared a report concluding that Willingham had not intentionally set the fire that killed his children. The Tribune asked each of these experts to review documents, trial testimony and a videotape of the fire’s aftermath in the Willingham case.

            “There’s nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson,” Hurst concluded for the Tribune. “It was just a fire.”

            Ryland agreed. He said he tried to re-create the conditions the original fire investigators in the Willingham case in his workshop but could not. The inability to do so “made me sick to think this guy was executed based on this investigation … They executed this guy and they’ve just got no idea—at least not scientifically—if he set the fire, or if the fire was even intentionally set,” he told the Tribune.

            One of the original fire investigators in the Willingham case, Deputy Fire Marshal Edward Cheever, agreed with the conclusions drawn by the Tribune fire experts. “At the time of the [Willingham] fire, we were still testifying to things that aren’t accurate today,” he told the Tribune. “They were true then, but they aren’t now.” Cheever added that “Hurst was pretty much right on … We now know not to make those same assumptions.”

            One year after the Tribune published its findings in the Willingham case, the Texas Forensic Fire Commission was created to investigate allegations of forensic errors and misconduct. This spurred the Innocence Project in 2006 to hire four experts of its own to review the Willingham case. The group’s experts reached the same conclusion as the Tribune experts. The Innocence Project then filed a formal complaint with the TFFC which prompted the commission to hire Craig Beyler to review all the available evidence in the Willingham fire in order to make some kind of final determination about the case.

            But whether Beyler will, or even can, find Willingham “innocent” remains unclear. He could easily say that the fire forensic evidence utilized by the State of Texas to convict Willingham was flawed but stop short of a clear-cut finding of innocence.

            “If [Beyler’s report] is critical of the arson testimony,” commission member Bassett said, “then theoretically it’s possible that could be the basis for a broader conclusion about the original conviction.”

            There are two inherent tragedies in the Willingham case. The first was that “fuck up” attitude he had. His neighbors, even the fire marshal chaplain, all believed he was guilty of deliberately setting the fire that killed his children so he could drink beer and throw darts. His attitude was so unrepentant that one of his own lawyers firmly believed he was guilty and both lawyers dared not put him on the witness stand at his trial because they did not want the jury to see that “attitude.”

            The second tragedy is that Willingham turned down an opportunity to plead guilty for a life sentence to avoid the death penalty. He was apparently so wrapped up with being the “victim” – just as he was wrapped up in saving his car and dart board – that he couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Had he took the plea deal, he would be alive to walk out of prison as an exonerated man just like Ernest Willis did in 2004. But it was more important for him to go to his death angry at the State of Texas for wrongfully executing an “innocent man” and cursing his ex-wife in his final breaths than it was to save his own life and protect his family from the agony of his execution.

            But as a society we should not execute people simply because they have a “fucked up” attitude. The Stare of Texas—and in particular Gov. Rick Perry—had ample credible evidence with the Hurst report to know there was a reasonable probability that Willingham did not intentionally set the fire that killed his three children. But the State of Texas, like most others, would prefer to execute an innocent man than to admit it had wrongfully convicted him. That is the true nature of the death penalty machine in the South, particularly in Texas.