[bloodrayne]

Inmate, Experts Testify

Willingham went to trial in August 1992, eight months after the fire. Batchelor and first assistant John Jackson offered a deal--a life term in exchange for a guilty plea. But Willingham turned it down, insisting he was innocent.

Prosecutors presented as their first witness jail inmate Johnny E. Webb, a drug addict who said he took psychiatric medication for post-traumatic stress syndrome, the result of being raped behind bars.

Webb testified that Willingham, after repeatedly denying he had caused the fire, confessed to Webb one day as they spoke through a chuckhole in a steel door at the county jail.

Webb said Willingham told him he set the fire to cover up his wife's physical abuse of one of the girls. The girls, however, had no injuries other than those suffered in the fire.

"I don't know if that dude did that crime or not," Webb said in a prison interview. "I know what he told me."

The prosecution's case also relied on the neighbors who said Willingham could have done more to save his family and two fire investigators, assistant Corsicana fire chief Doug Fogg and deputy state fire marshal Manuel Vasquez, who testified that the fire was arson.

The Texas state fire marshal's office declined to comment for this article. Vasquez, who led the fire investigation, died in 1994.

Fogg, in an interview at his home in upstate New York, stood by his investigation.

"Fire talks to you. The structure talks to you," he said. "You call that years of experience. You don't just pick that knowledge up overnight."

He said he first eliminated accidental causes, including electrical malfunctions-- though his report noted possible shorts in two places in the house.

More than a dozen samples of debris from around the house were tested for accelerants, and one sample, at the front door, tested positive for a byproduct of charcoal lighter fluid. Fogg determined the fire was intentionally started near the front door. Vasquez testified that there were three points of origin.

Fogg then called the state fire marshal's office, which helps small departments investigate fires. Vasquez, who was assigned the investigation, concluded that the fire was arson as well.

At trial, both he and Fogg testified to assumptions about fire that no longer hold.

"The fire tells a story," Vasquez testified. "I am just the interpreter. I am looking at the fire, and I am interpreting the fire. That is what I know. That is what I do best. And the fire does not lie. It tells me the truth."

Vasquez testified that of the 1,200 to 1,500 fires he had investigated, nearly all had been arson, and he had never been wrong.

All four consultants said Vasquez made serious errors in his testimony. For example, when he said an accelerant must have been used to set the fire because wood could not burn hot enough to melt an aluminum threshold, he was wrong. It can.

"The fire investigators ruled the fire to be incendiary because it failed to live up to their expectations of what an accidental fire should look like," said Lentini, a former Georgia crime lab analyst who has testified for prosecutors and the defense in arson trials.

"They used rules of thumb that have since been shown to be false. There was no evidence to support a conclusion that the fire was intentionally set. Just an unsupported opinion."

The experts said that finding evidence of the charcoal lighter fluid was not as ominous as Fogg and Vasquez suggested. They noted that the firefighters found melted remains of a plastic container of lighter fluid on the front porch, and that it was possible firefighters' hoses propelled the fluid under the threshold as they extinguished the fire.

And all four experts were incredulous at two statements Vasquez made: that he had never been wrong in his many years of fire investigation, and that nearly every fire he had investigated he had determined was arson.

Figures from the Texas state fire marshal's office suggest that claim was an exaggeration. Since 1990, the percentage of fires declared incendiary has ranged from 41 percent in 1998 to 60 percent in 1991, when the Willingham fire occurred.

The experts who reviewed the case didn't put any stock in the claims that Willingham's behavior was damning. They say experience shows that there is no way to predict how people will react in a fire or to the grief of losing loved ones.

Prosecutors, though, often rely on such circumstantial evidence, especially when children die in a fire and a parent survives. "When you are building a case of arson on the attitude of the survivor, that's when things can go really wrong, particularly if the victims are children," said DeHaan, a consultant based in California who testifies for both prosecutors and defense lawyers.

Willingham did not testify in his defense. His lawyers feared that he would not handle aggressive cross-examination very well and would not present a good image for jurors.

"To me, he was not repentant," said Robert C. Dunn, one of Willingham's trial lawyers. "He had this attitude and air about him that he was wrongfully charged."

The jurors deliberated a little over an hour before finding Willingham guilty. In interviews, they said there was never a question.

Laura Marx said she would have found Willingham guilty even without the arson finding solely because he did not try to save his children.

Jurors deliberated only slightly longer in handing out the death penalty.

David Martin, the other trial attorney for Willingham, believed he was guilty. "That crime scene was so replete with evidence of arson," he said. "There was no other cause for the house catching on fire."