A case about arson murder was the subject of the first of the HumanDocs film series for this semester, and students were piling in to Ward Hall Wednesday night for the showing of “Incendiary: The Willingham Case.”
The case circles around Cameron Todd Willingham who got the raw end of the deal for years, even after death. He was caught in his house one day sleeping as a fire raged through his home. His young daughter and twin babies were also in the house. He woke to the heat of the flames and immediately started searching for his daughter.
Willingham said he thought he saw his daughter run outside to her mother, but once Willingham reached his front yard he realized his wife was still running errands and his three children were still inside the house that was now blazing with flames.
Neighbors and police officers had to restrain Willingham from running inside the house to save his girls. He was so distraught and desperate to get to his daughters by any means that police officers had to handcuff him, put him on a stretcher and transport him to the local hospital. Willingham suffered minimal burns to his arms, but he never saw his daughters again. They died in the house that day, barricaded by flames.
Inexperienced fire investigators said they found evidence of accelerators throughout his home in various areas that led them to believe the fire could have only been caused by arson. Willingham was the lead suspect. Officers and investigators said they made him the prime suspect because people said that Willingham was acting irrational outside the house and not like a father should have acted. They didn’t understand why Willingham at one point got in his car to move it away from the burning house. Investigators said he wasn’t showing enough sadness. Family and neighbors argued that there is no right way for a father to act when he knows his little girls are burning alive right in front of his eyes.
After years of investigation from expert after expert, evidence was found that there was no accelerator discovered in the home, and the way the fire burned did not line up with how an arson would burn a home. A lot of the information taken at the scene was found incorrect, and many argued that the fire investigators and local police department were to blame.
All of this happened while Willingham sat in ail on death row for setting a fire that killed his daughters, all the while knowing he was an innocent man.
The family could not get any headway on the case. It seemed as though the police department had ties with the judges and political system. The web of lies and deceit kept any party from admitting they did wrong for many years. The governor at the time was Rick Perry, and according to the film, he seemed to be behind the case also, supporting the state. Many thought–and still think–he helped cover up the lies.
David Martin, Willingham’s attorney, announced from the rooftops that he did not believe in Willingham and knew he was guilty of killing his girls. The prosecutors reached for anything they could to keep Willingham behind bars. They said that he was a Satanist and said that he intentionally burned his arms in the fire because there was no way that his feet should not have been burned in the fire if he had started it.
Martin, in disbelief of his client’s innocence, did not fight the charges to the best of his ability. He claimed that Willingham “was a young man charged with an extraordinary crime under great stress.”
He said that “it was against nature as we know it for a man to kill his children, but we hired an arson investigator and he said it was arson.”
Even though the arson investigator has been discredited to this day, the film said Martin still believes his original report. He used the excuse that they did not hire a second expert because the judge would not give them any more money to hire one. He also explained that Willingham’s statements were conflicting, illogical and extremely impossible to explain.
After Willingham was convicted, a jailhouse snitch named Johnny Webb claimed that Willingham had confessed to killing his daughters while incarcerated. Later on in the follow up investigation, Webb wrote in a statement that the police department promised him benefits if he lied about Willingham confessing. Webb also noted that he was forced to agree. Webb’s statement was conveniently lost. It was found during a follow up investigation after Willingham had already died.
Willingham was killed by lethal injection on Feb. 4, 2004.