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Two media reports have surfaced in the past few days asserting that perhaps Cameron Todd Willingham was guilty after all.

Both stories contain some factual distortions.

(Here‘s background on Willingham — a likely innocent man executed in 2004 for allegedly starting a house fire that killed his three children.)

The local Fox affiliate in Fort Worth ran a five-minute segment on the Willingham case earlier this week. Gov. Rick Perry’s folks have been pushing this video as an “objective” media report. (Hat tip to Quorum Report.)

The story contains two main claims about Willingham’s guilt:

1. Willingham’s supposed confession to his ex-wife on death row (which, it seems, never happened, but more on that in a minute.)

2. The observations of a neighbor who was at the scene, but for some reason, hadn’t spoken to police until this month. Obviously his recollections of what happened 18 years ago are suspect (people’s memories can begin to distort facts after just a few weeks, to say nothing of 18 years.)

The Corsicana Daily Sun yesterday ran a story that made similar claims:

Two affidavits have been released by the City of Corsicana that seem to dispute the declarations in the national media that Cameron Todd Willingham was innocent when he was executed in 2004 for murdering his three daughters…..

The first is from Ronnie Kuykendall, brother of Stacy Kuykendall, who gave a statement to Kirby Hill regarding one of Willingham’s last visits with his ex-wife. Kuykendall said that on Feb. 8, 2004, a week before Willingham was to be executed, that Willingham’s ex-wife, Stacy called her family together to tell them about her last visit with her ex-husband….

The second affidavit is from a neighbor who gave a statement earlier this month about what he witnessed more than 18 years ago on that morning a few days before Christmas in 1991.Tony Ayala gave a statement to a Corsicana Police Detective Seth Fuller on Oct. 6, 2009. In his statement, he said he saw Willingham packing his car and moving it out of the carport that morning, while smoke was coming out of the house.Ayala told Fuller that he tried to tell police in 1991 what he saw, but he was rebuffed. Why he waited 18 years to make a statement is a little more murky.

I’ve already dealt with Ayala’s 18-year-old recollections.

Now, about the supposed confession.

The details about the confession are second-hand — they come from an affidavit by the brother of Willingham’s ex-wife.

Willingham’s ex-wife — Stacy Kuykendall — has stopped speaking to reporters in recent years.

But in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 2004, she said that Willingham didn’t confess to her. Here’s the full except from the Tribune story:

The response from local prosecutors included a two-paragraph affidavit from Ronnie Kuykendall, the brother of Willingham’s former wife. He said that Stacy, who had divorced Willingham while he was on Death Row, had recently visited him, then gathered the family to say that he had confessed.But she said in an interview that was untrue. At the time of the trial, she said she had believed in her husband’s innocence, but over the years, after studying the evidence and the trial testimony, she became convinced he was guilty.

In their final meeting, however, he did not confess, she told the Tribune.

Just to be clear: Willingham’s ex-wife — the person he supposedly confessed to — said in her last known interview that the confession never happened.

Moreover, I find it interesting that neither of these stories touched on the main reason people think Willingham was probably innocent — the flawed forensic evidence.

The Fort Worth Fox station ran five minutes on the story and glossed over the forensics by saying that “college educated” scientists were now disputing the conclusions of the old-school fire investigators. (Isn’t that interesting phrasing?)

The Fox reporter didn’t mention, say, the new understanding of flashover. We now know that flashover can make accidental fires appear to be arson fires. (Which is what likely happened in the Willingham case.)

The take-home message is this: People can debate forever whether Willingham was a bad person or whether he was upset enough at the scene.

But the heart of this case is the forensic evidence. Six of the top fire investigators in the country have looked at the evidence and determined the fire was likely accidental.

No arson, no crime.

Update: David Grann at the New Yorker also casts doubt on Willingham’s supposed confession.

Is it my imagination or is Rick Perry saying even nuttier things than usual on the campaign trail?

First it’s his comments yesterday about the Cameron Todd Willingham case which my fellow Observite Dave Mann has been doing a great job blogging about on The Contrarian. Perry’s repugnant sticking-to-his-guns banter makes him sound like an amoral Neanderthal.

He was in El Paso yesterday for a fundraiser and stopped to tour a Lucchese boot factory, according to the El Paso Times. Since it’s election time, Perry has been making much noise about sending the Texas Rangers to the border. He’s got a sexy name for it called “Ranger Recon” which sounds like a Chuck Norris movie that went straight to video (I guess they probably all do these days).

He’s just got to send the Rangers because the feds (i.e.) Kay Bailey Hutchinson don’t have the political cojones to secure the border.

He’s been very evasive, though, about how many Rangers he’s sending and what exactly they will be doing on the border. That’s probably because there are only 134 Rangers in the entire state. Rangers are already stationed in Presidio and El Paso and other sites along the border.  So that means he’ll be pulling Rangers off of important investigations in the rest of the state to go down to the border to make Perry look mas macho than Kay.

So, yesterday Perry was stroking boots at Lucchese and coincidentally talking about “The fact that the federal government needs to be addressing our requests for additional boots on the ground” (nice photo op). Perry told reporters that “criminals were using spots along the border as their personal playgrounds.” Oh really? Are they building swing sets?

He then went on to say about his campaign nemesis Kay “I hope she stays in Washington D.C., and continues to stop that Obama health care and the (anti-pollution legislation) and the other assaults on our freedoms.”

Uh, what?

 

Houston Chronicle has the goods:

GALVESTON — A seaside getaway on Galveston Island used by pop star Beyoncé Knowles’ family has run afoul of the Texas Open Beaches Act.

Hurricane Ike pummeled the beachfront vacation house that the General Land Office says is owned by Knowles’ father, Mathew Knowles, a successful music executive who manages Beyoncé and her sister, Solange. Mathew Knowles also is founder of Houston record label Music World Entertainment and was executive producer for Obsessed, the 2009 film staring Beyoncé.

A contractor hired by the elder Knowles to repair the home, which was on the tax rolls for $423,000 in 2008, poured a concrete slab under the structure, GLO spokesman Jim Suydam said.

The problem is that Ike scoured away the beach in front of the house, placing it on the public beach where hard structures like concrete slabs are prohibited, Suydam said.

Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said Knowles is being cooperative and his department won’t seek any penalties as long as he’s correcting the problem.

Probably the most shocking about this story is that GLO Commissioner Jerry Patterson hadn’t heard of Beyonce.

“I didn’t know who Beyoncé Knowles was,” Patterson said. “If he’s getting special treatment it’s not because of me.”

He?!!! The man needs to get out more.

Just hours before Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death for a crime he likely didn’t commit, Gov. Rick Perry’s office received clear mitigating evidence that showed the forensics in Willingham’s case were flawed.

What did Perry’s office receive?

We know — from Lise Olsen’s story in Sunday’s Houston Chronicle – that Willingham’s lawyer sent a five-page fax to Perry’s office on Feb. 17, 2004, just 88 minutes before the scheduled execution.

In that five-page fax was a report from Dr. Gerald Hurst, a nationally renowned fire expert who’s helped exonerate dozens of people. In his report, Hurst said the forensic evidence against Willingham — a man about to be executed — was outdated and incorrect. Hurst concludes that the 1991 fire that killed Willingham’s three kids was accidental.

I’ve posted the full report here (it’s in pdf format).

You can read for yourself exactly what Perry and his staff saw before they OK’d Willingham’s execution.

(A note about the report: Hurst is a scientist, and the report can be technical in parts, but it’s understandable to a layperson.)

Hurst wrote:

As will be shown later, most of the conclusions reached by the Fire Marshall [in this case] would be considered invalid in light of current knowledge.”

One-by-one, Hurst debunks the supposed evidence that the fire at Willingham’s house was arson: the pour patterns, the multiple origins, the V-shaped burn patterns, the burns under the door threshold, the burned tiles, the supposed presence of gasoline, the crazed glass, the brown burn patterns on the porch.

This is the essence of the case. It’s inconsequential whether Willingham was a nice guy or a “monster,” as Perry contended yesterday.

The central issue is whether a crime was committed.

You would think that a report from a nationally respected scientist like Hurst that challenged the forensic evidence in a death penalty case would give someone pause before allowing an execution to go forward. Why not postpone the execution to check the veracity of Hurst’s conclusions? Perry has postponed and rescheduled executions many times.

We don’t yet know what kind of attention Perry’s office gave Hurst’s report. (Perry’s office has refused to release the relevant records.)

But it doesn’t really matter whether they read and ignored the report or never even looked at it.

Either way, Perry’s office knew — or should have known — before the execution that Willingham’s case was flawed.

The Fort Worth Weekly has a great story, “Sacrificed to Shale,” out today on DISH.

Reporter Peter Gorman finds a town more or less destroyed by gas companies: People’s ranchettes chewed up by eminent domain; plunging property values; dying trees coated with sulfur dust; young, healthy folks suddenly having neurological problems; and, of course, horses dropping dead.

Here’s the lede:

Lloyd Burgess owns the Lucky B horse farm in Denton County. He made a good living raising and boarding horses there from 1993 until 2006, good enough to pay for a $350,000, 45-stall barn a few years back. These days though, it’s not so lucky.

Everything changed for him in October 2006, when an explosion occurred at a gas compressor station just beyond the edge of his 30 acres. Burgess, who had been out of town, returned to discover that one of his mares had aborted her foal. Two weeks later, the same thing happened to a second mare.

Bad things just kept happening after that, on his farm in the oddly renamed town of DISH, just up the road from Justin. Several months later one of his stallions got sick and finally had to be put down. Then a mare went blind. Then another stallion, a valuable quarter horse, got sick and was saved only when a friend offered to take if off Burgess’ property, away from the compressor stations on Burgess’ back fence line, to nurse it back to health.

The whole story is worth reading.