The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (11 page)

While she was in an intensive-care unit, she had tried to get a message to Willingham, but apparently failed. Gilbert’s daughter later read her a letter that Willingham had sent her, telling her how much he had grown to love her. He had written a poem: “Do you want to see beauty—like you have never seen? / Then close your eyes, and open your mind, and come along with me.”

Gilbert, who spent years in physical rehabilitation, gradually regaining motion in her arms and upper body, says, “All that time, I thought I was saving Willingham, and I realized then that he was saving me, giving me the strength to get through this.
I know I will one day walk again, and I know it is because Willingham showed me the kind of courage it takes to survive.”

Willingham had requested a final meal, and at 4 p.m. on the seventeenth he was served it: three barbecued pork ribs, two orders of onion rings, fried okra, three beef enchiladas with cheese, and two slices of lemon cream pie. He received word that Governor Perry had refused to grant him a stay. (A spokesperson for Perry says, “The Governor made his decision based on the facts of the case.”) Willingham’s mother and father began to cry. “Don’t be sad, Momma,” Willingham said. “In fifty-five minutes, I’m a free man. I’m going home to see my kids.” Earlier, he had confessed to his parents that there was one thing about the day of the fire he had lied about. He said that he had never actually crawled into the children’s room. “I just didn’t want people to think I was a coward,” he said. Hurst told me, “People who have never been in a fire don’t understand why those who survive often can’t rescue the victims. They have no concept of what a fire is like.”

The warden told Willingham that it was time. Willingham, refusing to assist the process, lay down; he was carried into a chamber eight feet wide and ten feet long. The walls were painted green, and in the center of the room, where an electric chair used to be, was a sheeted gurney. Several guards strapped Willingham down with leather belts, snapping buckles across his arms and legs and chest. A medical team then inserted intravenous tubes into his arms. Each official had a separate role in the process, so that no one person felt responsible for taking a life.

Willingham had asked that his parents and family not be present in the gallery during this process, but as he looked out he could see Stacy watching; whatever calm he had obtained was lost, and with his last breaths he cursed her. The warden pushed a remote control, and sodium thiopental, a barbiturate, was pumped into Willingham’s body. Then came a second drug, pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm, making it impossible to breathe. Finally, a third drug, potassium chloride, filled his veins until his heart stopped, at 6:20 p.m. On his death certificate, the cause was listed as “Homicide.”

After his death, his parents were allowed to touch his face for the first time in more than a decade. Later, at Willingham’s request, they cremated his body and secretly spread some of his ashes over his children’s graves. He had told his parents, “Please don’t ever stop fighting to vindicate me.”

In December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, of the Chicago
Tribune
, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of Hurst’s report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation. The experts concurred with Hurst’s report. Nearly two years later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson had been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In August, 2009, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his conclusions, and plans to release its own report. The commission will likely narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. But some legal scholars believe that its findings could eventually lead to Texas becoming the first state to acknowledge that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

Just before Willingham received the lethal injection, he was asked if he had any last words. He said, “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.”

D
AVID
G
RANN
is a staff writer at
The New Yorker
magazine and author of the
New York Times
bestseller
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.
The piece about Cameron Todd Willingham is one of a dozen true stories included in Grann’s latest book,
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession,
which was recently published by Knopf Doubleday.

Coda

Days before the government commission on forensic science was scheduled to hear testimony from Dr. Craig Beyler about his findings, Governor Rick Perry removed the body’s long-standing chairman and two of its members. Perry insisted that the three commissioners’ terms had expired and the changeover was “business as usual.” But the chairman, Sam Bassett, who had previously been reappointed and had asked to remain, told the
Houston Chronicle
that he had heard from Perry’s staffers that they were “concerned about the investigations we were conducting.” Another of the removed commissioners told the Associated Press that Perry’s office had informed her that the Governor was “going in a different direction.”

FROM
Texas Monthly

I

C
HARLES
D
ICKERSON WAS
the only officer on duty on March 1, 2008, when the call came into the Rains County sheriff’s office just after four-thirty in the morning that there had been a shooting at the Caffey residence. The Caffeys lived in a modest cabin set deep in the woods along a one-lane gravel road outside Alba, a rural community of 492 people halfway between Sulphur Springs and Tyler. Most folks around Alba and Emory, the nearby county seat, knew the family; Penny played piano at Miracle Faith Baptist Church, and her husband, Terry, was a home health aide and lay preacher. Their daughter, Erin, worked as a carhop at the Sonic. They also had two sons: Matthew, known as Bubba, who was in the seventh grade, and Tyler, a fourth-grader. The Caffey children—who had been home-schooled for three years—were shy and well mannered, though sixteen-year-old Erin was the least reserved. A slight, pretty blonde, she was known for her beautiful singing voice, which she showcased in soaring gospel solos at Miracle Faith on Sundays.

Dickerson headed east along U.S. 69 and turned down the road that led through the woods to the Caffeys’ house, following the crooked path as it rambled beneath pine canopies and over dry creeks, past a neighbor’s hand-lettered sign that read, “Acknowledge thine iniquity—Jeremiah 3:13.” Daybreak was still a few hours off, and the road beyond the glare of his headlights was pitch-black. Dickerson strained to see a mailbox or a landmark that might orient him to his surroundings, but the houses were few and far between. At a bend where the trees thinned out, he spotted a murky orange glow in the distance. As he drove nearer, he could see that a house was on fire. Dickerson realized that he was looking at the Caffey home.

The cabin appeared to have been burning for some time; the structure was engulfed in flames, and the metal roof had begun to buckle under its own weight. Dickerson radioed his dispatcher to mobilize the county’s volunteer fire departments and sped down the road to Tommy Gaston’s house, where the 911 call had originated.

Gaston, a genial man with a head of white hair, was the Caffeys’ closest neighbor, and he looked relieved to see the sheriff’s deputy at his door. Just beyond him, sprawled across the living room floor, was Terry Caffey. He had been shot five times: once in the head, twice near his right shoulder, and two more times in the back. His face and upper body were caked with blood. Although it was a cold night, the 41-year-old was wearing a T-shirt, pajama bottoms, no shoes, and a single wet sock. He had stumbled and crawled five hundred yards from his home, where he had been left for dead, to Gaston’s—a journey that had taken him nearly an hour, all told. Along the way, he had fallen into a creek, where he had almost drowned, but he had kept moving, staggering toward Gaston’s house as the fire behind him grew more intense. There was so much blood that Dickerson could not tell where he had been shot. “They’re all gone,” Caffey told the sheriff’s deputy, his voice breaking. “Charlie Wilkinson shot my family.”

T
HE AMBULANCE WAS
about to pull away from Tommy Gaston’s house when sheriff’s investigator Richard Almon, who had hurried to the scene, climbed inside. “I don’t think I’m going to make it,” Caffey sputtered, straining to catch his breath. Almon crouched beside the gurney and asked him a few hurried questions. Charlie Wilkinson was his daughter’s boyfriend, Caffey told the detective, and he and his wife had recently demanded that Erin stop seeing him. Charlie had broken into the house and shot Caffey and his family as they slept.

Almon clambered out of the ambulance and shared what he had learned with chief deputy Kurt Fischer. In rural communities as small as Alba and Emory, there are no strangers, and Fischer shook his head when he heard Charlie’s name. His boys were friends with the clean-cut high school senior and had fished and gone four-wheeling with him many times before; in fact, Fischer told the detective, he had spotted Charlie’s car parked outside Matthew Waid’s trailer while driving to the crime scene. Waid was a few years older than Charlie, and Charlie and his buddies sometimes drank at his place and stayed the night.

All the lights were out in the rundown blue single-wide when Fischer and sheriff’s deputy Ed Emig pulled up outside. A teenager whom Fischer did not recognize groggily came to the door; he was unsure if Charlie had spent the night or not, but he agreed to let the officers in. Fischer walked from room to room, stepping over piles of dirty clothes and empty beer cans as he went, startling Waid and his girlfriend from their sleep. Fischer told them he needed to talk to Charlie Wilkinson.

As Fischer continued down the hall, he saw that a blanket covered the empty door frame of one bedroom. Pulling the blanket back, he shone his flashlight inside. He could see Charlie lying on a mattress, awake, wearing only blue jeans. A semiautomatic handgun lay on the floor beside him.

“Charlie—it’s Kurt,” Fischer said. “Let me see your hands.”

“What’s going on?” Charlie said. He hesitated, and Fischer thought he might reach for the gun.

“Let me see your hands,” repeated the chief deputy.

He led Charlie outside in handcuffs and sat him on the porch; he read the teenager his Miranda rights and told him that he was being taken in for questioning. The Caffey family had been attacked and killed earlier that morning, Fischer informed him. Charlie hung his head and was quiet.

“Were you involved in this?” Fischer asked.

“No, sir,” Charlie said, shaking his head. “I got drunk last night and passed out.”

Deputy Emig went inside to get Charlie a shirt and his cowboy boots. As Emig carried them out to the porch, he noticed that they were spattered with blood. The officers put Charlie in the back of the squad car, where he stared out the window in silence as they drove through the woods toward Emory in the predawn gloom.

At daybreak, the fire was still smoldering. Volunteer firefighters had struggled for several hours to put out the flames, but the house had burned down to its foundation. Later that day, when the bodies of the two Caffey boys were pulled from the rubble, one firefighter, overcome with emotion, fell to his knees.

A
FTER
C
HARLIE WAS
brought to the county jail, Fischer obtained a search warrant from the justice of the peace and returned to the trailer to collect any evidence that might tie Charlie to the crime scene. In the living room, he found a camouflage-colored purse with a driver’s license inside it belonging to Erin Caffey. He began searching the back bedroom where Charlie had been found. There was no overhead light, so he pulled a blanket off one of the windows to illuminate his view. Spent shell casings lay scattered across the carpet, and next to the mattress sat a box of ammunition. Fischer picked up a black-and-white Western shirt, and a used condom slipped onto the floor.

Near the closet, he lifted up a blanket that was piled on the floor and noticed a shock of blond hair. For an instant, he thought he had found a doll. He pushed the hair aside to get a better look and watched, dumbfounded, as two eyes opened.

A girl was sitting with her back to the wall, in a fetal position. Fischer drew his gun and commanded her to show him her hands, but she just stared at him.

“What’s your name?” Fischer asked.

“Erin,” she stammered. Fischer recognized her from her driver’s license photo.

The chief deputy brought her into the living room, where Matthew Waid and his girlfriend sat on the couch. Fischer had already informed the couple that the Caffey family was dead. Waid stared at the girl in disbelief and confirmed that she was Erin Caffey.

“How did you get here?” Fischer asked her.

Erin stood wide-eyed in her pajamas, bewildered, as she surveyed the room. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

“Where am I?”

II

Erin’s pastor, Todd McGahee, once joked that if he had five more of her, he could fill his church on Sundays. Erin was cute and petite, with blue-gray eyes and a flirtatious smile, and she thrived on attention. Boys often came to Miracle Faith just to see her, and several of them credited her with bringing them closer to Jesus. At the Sonic on Emory’s main drag, she was the only carhop who delivered her orders wearing roller skates, and most afternoons, her admirers parked on whichever side of the drive-in she was waiting on. Yet despite her effect on boys, she struck people as hopelessly naive. “She gushed innocence,” remembered a coworker (who, like many teenagers interviewed for this story, asked to remain anonymous). “A lot of guys flirted with her, and she would just blush and smile and duck her head down and skate inside and tell me, ‘That guy wanted my number!’ And I’d say, ‘Did you tell him that your mom would be answering the phone?’”

Terry and Penny Caffey were protective—some said overly protective—of their daughter. Her homeschooling had begun when she was thirteen, after the family had moved to Alba from Celeste, a small town about an hour’s drive away. Terry and Penny had wanted to be closer to Miracle Faith, where they were then serving as the church’s youth ministers. Erin and her brothers had initially enrolled in their new public schools; she started the eighth grade at Rains Junior High, and Bubba and Tyler attended Rains Elementary. Then, that fall, an incident at the junior high had upset Terry and Penny: A girl who had been showing interest in Erin had kissed her in the hallway. The Caffeys abruptly pulled their children out of school a month into the academic year, and Penny began teaching them a Bible-based curriculum at home. She and Terry hoped that the individual instruction might benefit Erin, who had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and lagged behind her classmates. It was an isolated existence for an otherwise social girl whose life was largely circumscribed to Miracle Faith and her parents’ house, six miles from town.

Faith was the cornerstone of the Caffeys’ lives. They attended Bible study on Wednesday nights and church every Sunday and set aside several hours each week to rehearse gospel songs—with Penny playing piano, Bubba on guitar and harmonica, and Erin singing vocals. (Tyler, the youngest, preferred to play outdoors.) Terry and Penny had met at a revival meeting in Garland when she was 21 and he was 24, and their strong Baptist faith had always bound them together. Above their driveway hung a polished cedar plank with the inscription: “The Caffeys—Joshua 24:15.” The verse, which Terry had committed to memory, was a reminder that they had chosen a righteous path: “If it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve…as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Their children also shared their devotion. Bubba used to witness to whoever would listen, and Erin cried tears of joy when she sang her Sunday church solos—so much so that sometimes she had to stop, mid-verse, to collect herself. “I know there’s no such thing as perfect, but in my book, they were,” said Tommy Gaston, who was a frequent guest in their home and played in a gospel band with Penny.

When Erin turned sixteen, in July 2007, she got her driver’s license and an old Chevy pickup and started working at the Sonic. “She was
so
sheltered,” said her co-worker. “It was like she was seeing the world for the first time.” One day at a church fellowship meeting, Miracle Faith’s new youth director came upon Erin making out with a teenage boy. Several kids had already seen her sitting on a picnic table behind the church, kissing the boy while he eased his hand up her shirt. Erin had invited him over to her house before and considered him to be her boyfriend. But Terry and Penny, who separated the two teenagers that day at Miracle Faith, were deeply embarrassed by her behavior. “You’re not going to see that boy no more,” Terry told her.

C
HARLIE
W
ILKINSON WAS
not the most polished guy to take an interest in Erin. He always seemed to be broke, and he drove a beat-up 1991 Ford Explorer that had to be push-started. He was good-looking in an unassuming kind of way, with sandy hair and light-blue eyes, and he nearly always wore Wranglers, black cowboy boots, and an oversized black Western hat. (On MySpace, he went by the name Hillbilly.) He had met Erin at the Sonic a few weeks before the start of his senior year, having just returned home from boot camp at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with his Texas National Guard unit. Charlie would later remember the electricity of the moment when Erin had glided up to his car window to deliver his order. “Instant vibe,” he said, snapping his fingers.

Charlie lived in the country with his father, his stepmother, a stepbrother, a stepsister, and a half-sister. His dad worked at a paper mill outside Dallas. His mother had moved to Del Rio after his parents divorced, and he saw her only once or twice a year. An avid hunter, he spent much of his time fishing and tracking wild hogs through the brush, and like most of his friends, he was proficient with a firearm. He planned to go on active duty after graduation. He had never been arrested, and at school, he had no serious disciplinary problems—but he was hotheaded, and other students knew it was easy to get a rise out of him. “Some guys would really tease him and pick at him until he would get angry,” remembered a classmate. Charlie might strike his desk or storm out of the classroom when he was provoked, but he usually walked away from a fight.

Throughout the fall, Charlie visited the Sonic to see Erin. For Halloween, she dressed up as a fifties carhop, coasting around the Sonic in a homemade pink-and-white poodle skirt with a pink scarf knotted at her neck. Shortly after that he worked up the nerve to ask her out. She was instantly taken with him, and Charlie too seemed to be infatuated. “He was totally in love with her and considered her his soul mate,” Dion Kipp Jr., a friend of Charlie’s, later told investigators. “Charlie talked about Erin twenty-four-seven.” Though the Caffeys would not allow Charlie to take Erin out alone, the two teenagers still managed to spend much of their time together. Charlie dropped by the Sonic every afternoon during Erin’s half-hour break, and at night, he was a frequent guest at the Caffeys’ house. If Erin and her brothers built a bonfire in the backyard after supper, as they often did, he lingered by her side. At nine o’clock, the Caffeys made sure that Charlie was headed for the door—but after he said goodbye, Erin usually called him and talked to him until her ten o’clock phone curfew. (On the weekends, they had until eleven.) Charlie also began attending church at Miracle Faith. “What I knew of Charlie, he seemed like a nice boy,” said Pastor McGahee. “I don’t think anyone worried about him and Erin at first. We thought it was just puppy love.”