Cameron Todd Willingham – Accidental Fire Or Intentional Arson?

Accidental fire or intentional arson?  In the end, four lives would be lost.  Listen to the story of Cameron Todd Willingham and decide for yourself.

Corsicana Texas

Corsicana Texas is a small city northeast of Waco. It had prospered along with the first oil boom in Texas. By 1991 most of the wells were dry and the town looked nothing like the proud city it once was. More than 25% of the town had become impoverished.

It was in this town on December 23th, 1991 that eleven year old Buffie Barbee was playing in her backyard when she smelled smoke coming from her neighbors. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane. They hurried up the street 2 houses up to see the smoldering home of 23-year-old Cameron Todd Willingham.

Cameron Todd Willingham

Cameron Todd Willingham was born in Ardmore, OK in 1968. He was abandoned by his mother as an infant and was raised by his father, Gene, and stepmother, Eugenia. His father was a former marine and worked in a salvage yard. They lived in a small house and it was not a glamorous lifestyle.

As a teen, Cameron Todd Willingham was handsome with thick black hair but he struggled in school. An evaluation at 17 indicated that “He likes ‘girls,’ music, fast cars, sharp trucks, swimming, and hunting, in that order.” Sniffing paint was a hobby of his. He had also gotten into trouble for stealing a bike, shoplifting and multiple DUIs.

He met Stacy when he was 20 and she was a senior in high school. Her stepfather had killed her mother when she was just 4 years old, strangling her to death during a heated argument. Together, Todd and Stacy had a turbulent relationship. Todd was unfaithful and constantly drunk. Witnesses even said that he had hit Stacy before.

Fire!

Todd was standing on the front porch wearing only jeans covered in soot with his hair singed. He was screaming for his children. Two-year-old Amber, and one-year-old twins Kameron and Karmon were trapped inside. 

Diane raced back home to call the fire department while Todd found a stick and tried to break windows to get into the home. It was a one-story home. He first tried to break in the children’s window but fire lashed through the hole. He tried another but again flames burst through. It was at this point that he retreated to the front yard collapsing and kneeling in the grass. Diane returned and within moments the five windows of the children’s bedroom exploded.

Within minutes, the first firemen arrived but no truck or equipment. Finally, a water tank arrived and they began to beat back the flames. A fireman tried to enter through a window but was hit by forceful water and had to retreat. He re-entered through the front door. He came out moments later cradling 2-year-old Amber who had been found in the master bedroom. They performed CPR. While they did Todd, who was being held back by a fireman, broke free and ran toward the babies’ bedroom. He had to be restrained and handcuffed for his own safety.

Despite CPR, Amber could not be brought back and her cause of death was determined as smoke inhalation. Kameron and Karmon had been found laying on the floor of their bedroom, their bodies severely burned. The cause of death was determined to be smoke inhalation as well.

Todd had minor burns but no major injury. His wife, 22-year old Stacy Willingham, had gone out early that morning to do some last-minute Christmas shopping.

Investigation

In the days following the devastation, a full investigation would take place. Todd granted the inspectors permission to search the property. He explained that he wanted to understand how his babies were taken from him.

Douglas Fogg, who was then the assistant fire chief in Corsicana, conducted the initial inspection 4 days after the blaze. Chief Fogg was a 46-year-old Navy veteran with multiple purple heart metals. Upon return from Vietnam, he became a firefighter and fought flames for 20 years becoming an arson investigator. Soon he was joined by Manuel Vasquez, a deputy fire marshal and one of the state’s leading arson experts.

The process for investigating a fire is to review the least burned areas and progress to the most heavily burned areas. Collecting information that will be used to piece together a timeline with hopes of understanding how the fire occurred.

The house was on the small side, 975 square feet consisting of a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and two bedrooms. The investigators started at the back of the house in the kitchen. They entered the back door where they were just able to squeeze through because a refrigerator was blocking the doorway.

Mapping The Fire’s Path

There was only smoke and heat damage in the back, confirming that the fire did not originate there. So they pushed through down the hallway with the next room being the master bedroom where Amber had been found. There was also only heat and smoke damage. 

In the hallway further down there was charring at the base of the walls. They noticed that the fire had stayed low to the ground forming char patterns on the floor in the shape of puddles. There was also a V in soot on the wall in the hallway. This type of burn pattern is used to determine a point of origin for fires.

Following the path of the puddles took them to the children’s bedroom. These puddle configurations are referred to as “pour patterns” since an accelerant being put on the floor and lit will cause them.

It had burned through carpet, tile, and plywood flooring. There seemed to be a concentration of heat under the children’s beds. There was a 2^nd point of origin identified in the children’s bedroom.

Upon examining glass from the broken windows, Fogg noticed a spiderweb pattern known as “crazed glass.” This is thought to be caused by a fire burning “fast and hot.” It is often linked to a liquid accelerant being used.

Once they had fully inspected the children’s room, they followed the puddle pattern that led from their room through the hallway to the front door. Additional burn marks at the threshold suggested a 3^rd point of origin. On the concrete front porch, they found brown stains that they believed showed, once again, that an accelerant had been used.

Intentionally Set By Human Hands

Vasquez later testified that multiple origins pointed to one conclusion: the fire was “intentionally set by human hands.”

Per their investigation, the timeline was as follows: 

Someone poured liquid accelerant in the children’s room, including under their beds and then continued to pour through the hallway and out the front door creating a “fire barrier.” 

There was also suggestion that the refrigerator had been intentionally placed to block any escape. 

Samples were collected to test for liquid accelerant on burned materials and one of the samples, coming from the front door threshold, contained “mineral spirits” which can be found in charcoal lighter fluid. 

With that evidence the case because a triple homicide with only 1 suspect, Todd Willingham. 

Todd Is Brought In For Questioning

On December 31^st Todd was brought in for questioning. The arson investigators were present along with Jimmie Hensley, a local police officer. 

Todd said that Stacy left around 9 am to go to the Salvation Army to get Christmas presents for the kids. The twins woke up around that time so he prepped bottles for both of them. Todd let them eat from their bottles and fall back asleep on the floor while Amber was still asleep in her bed. There was a safety gate in the bedroom that Amber could climb over, but not the twins. 

Amber, Get Out Of The House!

After getting the twins back to sleep he went back to bed. Next thing, he was awoken by cried of “Daddy! Daddy!” and the house was already full of smoke. He got up and felt on the floor for pants putting them on but he couldn’t hear Amber anymore. 

Todd yelled, Amber, get out of the house! 

He never sensed that she was in his room and didn’t know if she passed out by the time he stood up or if she came in afterward. Todd went down the hallway towards the children’s bedroom but it was all black and he couldn’t see anything. He crawled towards the children’s room hearing sockets and light switches popping from the heat. Eventually, he made it to the bedroom and stood, but his hair caught fire. 

Cameron Todd Willingham crawled around the floor feeling for his children. He thought he had one, but it was just a doll. Not being able to bear the heat anymore he felt he was passing out. He stumbled down the hallway and out the front door trying to catch his breath. When he went out the front he saw Diane and yelled for her to call the fire department. When she left, he continued to try and get back inside. 

I Don’t Know How The Fire Started

He said that he wasn’t sure how the fire started, but that he thought it started in the children’s room since that is where he first saw the flames. They used 3 space heaters in the house to keep it warm, and one was in the children’s room. He had taught Amber not to play with it, but she got “whoopings” every once in a while for touching them. He didn’t know if the heater was turned on that morning (per testimony from inspection after the fire, it was in an off position). Todd throught it may also have been something electrical since he heard all the popping noises. 

During questioning, Todd said, “I just don’t understand why anybody would take them, you know? We had three of the most pretty babies anybody could have ever asked for.” He went on, “Me and Stacy’s been together for four years, but off and on we get into a fight and split up for a while and I think those babies is what brought us so close together . . . neither one of us . . . could live without them kids.” Thinking of Amber, he said, “To tell you the honest-to-God’s truth, I wish she hadn’t woke me up.”

What About The Shoes?

After hearing Todd’s version of events, Fogg asked him, “did you put your shoes on before you fled the house?”

“No, sir,” 

Vasquez pointed to a map of the house indicating the main hallway, and Todd confirmed, that is how he exited. 

The problem was, that if the floor had liquid accelerant, there was no way that he could have exited that way without severely burning his feet. Per his medical examination, he has no injuries on his feet. 

Todd insisted that when he walked out, the fire was up towards the top of the walls, not on the floor, but they didn’t believe him. Based on their physical evidence, he had exited the home while lighting the fire. First in the children’s bedroom, then the hallway, and lastly the front door. 

What Was The Motive?

Now that they had a solid story for what had happened, they began looking for the why. 

The children did have life insurance policies, but only $15K each. Stacy’s grandfather, who took out the policies, was the beneficiary. (sidenote – the community took up a collection to pay for the children’s funeral) 

Stacy admitted that Todd had hit her, but that he would never touch the children and that they were spoiled. He could never have done anything to hurt them. 

Cameron Todd Willingham Is Taken Into Custody

On January 8^th, 1992 Todd and Stacy were driving when SWAT teams surrounded them pulling guns and taking Todd into custody. 

Todd was charged with 3 counts of murder and because there were multiple victims, was eligible for the death penalty. The prosecutor, John Jackson, who was the ADA of Corsicana considered Todd to be

an utterly sociopathic individual.

Despite this belief, he personally did not want to seek the death penalty. Reasoning that it doesn’t deter criminals and it is expensive. (3 times the cost of putting someone in prison for 40 to life.)

However, under the influence of his boss and due to the heinous nature of the crime, he mandated death. Two lawyers were assigned to Todd’s case, former state trooper David Martin, and local attorney, Robert Dunn. 

Shortly before jury selection, Jackson approached Todd’s lawyers with an offer that if he plead guilty they would give him a life sentence and he could avoid the death penalty. Todd refused to accept the offer. His lawyers even asked his father and stepmother to talk to him. The lawyers showed them pictures of the children to try to convince them. His father didn’t want him to take the deal if he was innocent and his mother begged him to. 

He refused. 

The Trial Last 2 Days

The trial began in August of 1992 in downtown Corsicana. There was a slew of witnesses describing Todd’s actions while the fire went on. The bulk of the case was based on scientific evidence gathered through the investigation with Vasquez citing more than twenty indicators of arson. 

Unable to find an expert to combat Vasquez’s findings, the defense presented only 1 witness, the babysitter. She testified that she could not believe that Todd would kill his children. 

The trial lasted 2 days. The jury was in deliberation for less than an hour coming back with a guilty verdict. 

Cameron Todd Willingham Is Sentenced To Death

Todd was sentenced to death and placed on death row at Huntsville Prison. Inmates refer to it as “the death pit.” Inmates on death row are housed in a prison within a prison. There are no attempts at rehabilitation and no educational or training programs. In 1999, after seven prisoners tried to escape from Huntsville, Willingham and four hundred and fifty-nine other inmates on death row were moved to a more secure facility, in Livingston, Texas. Willingham was held in isolation in a sixty-square-foot cell, twenty-three hours a day.

Todd Insists On His Innocence

It wasn’t until 1999 that Elizabeth Gilbert began looking into Todd’s case. She began writing him as a pen pal and even visited him a couple of times. He insisted on his innocence and at first, she didn’t believe him, but as she looked further into the case, her opinion shifted.

She began reviewing trial records and found discrepancies.

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.

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.”

“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.

Was The Space Heater Left On?

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.”

Even the refrigerator’s placement by the back door of the house turned out to be innocuous; there were two refrigerators in the cramped kitchen, and one of them was by the back door.

Forensic Psychiatrist Expelled For Violating Ethics

James P. Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist suggested that Willingham was an “extremely severe sociopath,” and that “no pill” or treatment could help him.

SideNote: Grigson had previously used nearly the same words in helping to secure a death sentence against Randall Dale Adams, who had been convicted of murdering a police officer, in 1977. After Adams, who had no prior criminal record, spent a dozen years on death row—and once came within seventy-two hours of being executed—new evidence emerged that absolved him, and he was released.

In 1995, three years after Willingham’s trial, Grigson was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association for violating ethics. 

Supreme Court Appeal

Cameron Todd Willingham appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in December 2003, he was notified that the court had declined to hear his case. He soon received a court order announcing that:

the Director of the Department of Criminal Justice at Huntsville, Texas, acting by and through the executioner designated by said Director . . . is hereby directed and commanded, at some hour after 6:00 p.m. on the 17th day of February 2004, at the Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville, Texas, to carry out this sentence of death by intravenous injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause the death of said Cameron Todd Willingham.

A Second Set Of Eyes

One day in January, 2004, Dr. Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed scientist and fire investigator, received a file describing all the evidence of arson gathered in Willingham’s case. Gilbert had come across Hurst’s name and, along with one of Willingham’s relatives, had contacted him, seeking his help.

Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a high-school education. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.”

In 1997, the International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a 1993 Supreme Court decision requiring experts who testified at trials to adhere to the scientific method.

Only A Few Weeks Before Execution

But he received the files on Willingham’s case only a few weeks before Willingham was scheduled to be executed. As Hurst looked through the case records, a statement by Manuel Vasquez, the state deputy fire marshal, jumped out at him. Vasquez had testified that, of the roughly twelve hundred to fifteen hundred fires he had investigated, “most all of them” were arson. This was an oddly high estimate; the Texas State Fire Marshals Office typically found arson in only fifty per cent of its cases.

1. The charred wood at the threshold under the aluminum fitting
2. The brown spots on the concrete porch 
3. The crazed glass
   • Yet, in November of 1991, a team of fire investigators had inspected fifty houses in the hills of Oakland, California, which had been ravaged by brush fires. In a dozen houses, the investigators discovered crazed glass, even though a liquid accelerant had not been used.
4. The paths and puddles 
   • Because all the furniture in the living room had ignited, the blaze went from a fuel-controlled fire to a ventilation-controlled fire—or what scientists call “post-flashover.” During post-flashover, the path of the fire depends on new sources of oxygen, from an open door or window.

After Hurst had reviewed Fogg and Vasquez’s list of more than twenty arson indicators, he believed that only one had any potential validity: the positive test for mineral spirits by the threshold of the front door.

Clues?

Scanning the files for clues, Hurst noticed a photograph of the porch taken before the fire, which had been entered into evidence. Sitting on the tiny porch was a charcoal grill. The porch was where the family barbecued. Court testimony from witnesses confirmed that there had been a grill, along with a container of lighter fluid, and that both had burned when the fire roared onto the porch during post-flashover. By the time Vasquez inspected the house, the grill had been removed from the porch, during cleanup. Though he cited the container of lighter fluid in his report, he made no mention of the grill.

Clemency Denied

On February 13th, four days before Willingham was scheduled to be executed, he got a call from Reaves, his attorney. Reaves told him that the fifteen members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which reviews an application for clemency and had been sent Hurst’s report, had made their decision.

“What is it?” Willingham asked.

“I’m sorry,” Reaves said. “They denied your petition.”

Though Reaves told Willingham that there was still a chance that Governor Perry might grant a thirty-day stay, Willingham began to prepare his last will and testament. He had earlier written Stacy a letter apologizing for not being a better husband and thanking her for everything she had given him, especially their three daughters. “I still know Amber’s voice, her smile, her cool Dude saying and how she said: I wanna hold you! Still feel the touch of Karmon and Kameron’s hands on my face.” He said that he hoped that “some day, somehow the truth will be known and my name cleared.”

He asked Stacy if his tombstone could be erected next to their children’s graves. Stacy, who had for so long expressed belief in Willingham’s innocence, had recently taken her first look at the original court records and arson findings. Unaware of Hurst’s report, she had determined that Willingham was guilty. She denied him his wish, later telling a reporter, “He took my kids away from me.”

Execution

On February 17th, the day he was set to die, Willingham’s parents and several relatives gathered in the prison visiting room. Plexiglas still separated Willingham from them. “I wish I could touch and hold both of you,” Willingham had written to them earlier. “I always hugged Mom but I never hugged Pop much.”

He received word that Governor Perry had refused to grant him a stay. (A spokesperson for Perry says, “The Governor made his decision based on the facts of the case.”)

His heart stopped at 6:20 p.m. The cause of death listed on his death certificate was “Homicide.”

Investigating The Investigators

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists.

By mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire.

Resources

• The New Yorker Trial by Fire
• Fresh doubts over a Texas execution
• Cameron Todd Willingham #899
• Jury Clears the Prosecutor Who Sent Cameron Todd Willingham to Death Row
• Death by Fire: An Update | Death by Fire | FRONTLINE
• 5 Things You Need To Know About The Conviction & Execution Of Cameron Todd Willingham

You May Also Like