[bloodrayne]

The Deadly Fire

In 1991, two days before Christmas, Willingham's wife left the house in the morning to pay the water and electric bills. Stacy Willingham then went to a Salvation Army store to shop for Christmas gifts.

Cameron Todd Willingham, 23 at the time, told fire investigators he woke up as his wife was leaving shortly after 9 a.m., and heard their 1-year-old twins, Karmon and Kameron, crying. He gave them bottles, laid them on the floor, and put up a childproof gate at the door to their bedroom.

Two-year-old Amber was still asleep in the same room. Willingham said that he went back to his bedroom across the hall and fell back to sleep.

According to police reports and interviews with family members, the couple struggled. Stacy worked at a bar called Some Other Place, in nearby Mustang, while Todd, as everybody called him, was staying home with the girls after being laid off weeks earlier.

They lived in Corsicana, a town of some 24,000 people an hour south of Dallas. The Willingham family was two months behind on the rent and in arrears on their other bills, some of which they had stopped paying to save money for Christmas.

They didn't have a stove, they had managed with a two-burner hot plate, a microwave that, Willingham said, frequently "popped" while in use, and a countertop deep-fat fryer.

Todd and Stacy fought often, and he sometimes left home. He enjoyed drinking beer and throwing darts; in fact, those hobbies would be singled out as his motive for the crime.

Willingham also had been in trouble with the law. A 10th-grade dropout , he had sniffed glue and paint, and he had committed a string of crimes, including burglary, grand larceny and car theft.

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, 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 fled through the hall and out the front door.

He tried to go back into the house, but it was too hot. He saw neighbors and told them to call the Fire Department, screaming, "My babies is in there and I can't get them out."

Neighbor Mary Barbee told police she saw Willingham in the front yard and she ran to ask a neighbor to call for help because her telephone was disconnected.

Meanwhile, Willingham took a pool cue and knocked out two windows overlooking the front porch to try to get into the bedroom.

Barbee said that when she returned, Willingham was standing by a chain-link fence as heavy smoke billowed from the house. Just as she neared his yard, "large fire suddenly bellowed out from around the front of the house," she told investigators, then the windows blew out.

She said that was when Willingham rushed to his garage and pushed his car away from the fire scene.

At that moment, Burvin Smith arrived after hearing the fire call over a radio scanner. Smith told police that Willingham was yelling that his "babies were in the house" and "acting real hysterical."

He said he restrained Willingham from going onto the porch.

Willingham became a suspect almost immediately, when neighbors such as Barbee told investigators they didn't believe he tried hard enough to rescue his children.

Firefighters thought Willingham's burns would have been worse if he had searched for the girls as he said he did. Though he had been burned on his shoulder and back and his hair had been singed, they noted that his feet, which had been bare, were not burned on the bottom.

The day after the fire, police said, Willingham complained that he could not find a dartboard as he walked through the wreckage. Neighbors said they heard loud music coming from the truck of a friend who came to help salvage belongings.

Eleven days after the fire, a police chaplain who had responded to the blaze said he had grown suspicious that Willingham's emotions were not genuine.

"It seemed to me that Cameron was too distraught," said the chaplain, George Monaghan.

Fire investigators, meanwhile, were concluding that the fire had been purposely set.

On Jan. 8, 1992, two weeks after the fire, Willingham was charged with murder. Patrick Batchelor, then the district attorney, told reporters Willingham set the fire because he wanted more time for beer-drinking and dart throwing. The children got in the way.