LITTLE ROCK — It’s a tidy life if you’re all wrapped up in a single-cause special interest.
There’s no forest to not see for looking at the trees-there’s only one tree.
There’s no big picture, no spectrum of hues, no shades of gray. The world is colored by only one cause. Worrying about how everything else fits together is somebody else’s problem.
Unfortunately, most of us reside in the real world, with a complexity that never ceases to amaze and a capacity for violence and cruelty that never fails to appall.
This is something to keep in mind the next time you hear the name “Cameron Todd Willingham.”
Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the December 1991 murder of his three young children, has become the latest cause celebre for the antideath penalty coterie.
The facts are gruesome. On the morning two days before Christmas, the unemployed Willingham was alone in his wood-framed house in Corsicana, Texas, with his 2-year-old daughter Amber and 1-year-old twins Karmen and Kameron.
A fire ravaged the house, killinghis children. Willingham escaped with minor injuries.
As authorities investigated, fishy circumstances cropped up. Willingham’s extensive criminal record included numerous arrests and a couple of felonyconvictions, on offenses ranging from burglary to assault to drugs to carrying an illegal weapon.
When he started talking about the fire, he couldn’t tell the same story twice. What he did tell rarely comported with the facts.
He said his children were all in the same room before the fire started, but Amber was found in his bed.
He said he searched for his children in their small, smoke-filled bedroom. But when investigators spraypainted the outlines of the tiny bodieson the floor, one of them was partially in the doorway and the other was in the center of the room.
Tests showed only minute traces of carbon monoxide in Willingham’s lungs, not enough to support his claim of rummaging around in the smoky interior.
The first fireman on the scene said the floor was burning in the hall and the children’s room, but Willingham’s barefoot soles-unlike Amber’s-were unburned.
Neighbors who first saw Willingham outside his house encouraged him to try and go back in to get his kids, but he never did.
What he did do, once the flames erupted through the windows, was rush over to the driveway and push his car back from the inferno.
Early on, Willingham worried aloud to friends that he might be accused of setting the fire. He suggestedsquirrels in the attic might have started the blaze.
He didn’t mention his threat to his wife “to take away what’s most precious” if she ever tried to leave him, or the couple’s marital problems.
The fire itself wasunusual, and suspicious. The floor burned more than the ceiling, common when fueled by accelerants. It never even reached the attic, and appeared to start in the children’s bedroom, where investigators ruled out electrical, gas or accidental causes.
Willingham’s defense team tried to hire its own fire expert to counter the official conclusion that the fire had been intentionally set, but that expert reached the same conclusion.
Recently, other fire experts have questioned the methodology of 1991investigation techniques, but none of them has been able to rule out arson-or come up with a definitive alternate cause.
Few people in Corsicana, including jurors who took only 77 minutes to reach the guilty verdict, believe justice was miscarried in Willingham’s case. One juror said the panel gave little weight to a jailhouse snitch’s testimony, and complained of national news outfits seeking support for Willingham’s innocence rather than the truth.
“They’re wanting me to say I can’t sleep at night . . . to say I did wrong,” she said. “I can’t say that.”
Willingham’s defense lawyer is also convinced of his client’s guilt, declaring him to be “a true sociopath.”
None of that matters to groups like the Innocence Project, whose focus ignores all the guilty murderers on death row-and their legion victims. What to do about procuring justice in those instances? That’s handily irrelevant to the one-way agenda of ending the death penalty.
So is information such as Willingham’s behavior in his final hours, after all appeals had been reviewed and rejected.
Just before his execution, his exwife said he confessed to her that he never went into the babies’ room. It was too hot, he said, but he lied because he was afraid of what people might think if he told the truth.
For his final words, Willingham asserted his innocence, but then looked over toward his ex-wife, tried to raise his middle finger and unleashed a repetitive string of the most vile obscenities, among them “I hope you f-- rot in hell, b--.”
Willingham behaved like a guilty man, and the closer one gets to Corsicana and the scene of the crime (and the further away from national propaganda), the more clear and convincing his guilt becomes.
Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 08/26/2011