There but for the Grace of God 
Capital Punishment 
Letter From Midland
Separated At Death
Ernest Willis and Cameron Todd Willingham had a lot in common: same crime, same sentence, same questions about the forensic science that convicted them. The main difference? Willis is still alive.
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Police at first thought the fire was drug related, that someone had been freebasing or cooking heroin. Then they thought maybe it was set by one of the women’s ex-husbands or by a Mexican drug dealer named Santana. Finally the police settled on the hapless out-of-towner Ernest, who had, witnesses said, stood around impassively after the fire, smoking cigarettes and looking distant. He just didn’t act right. And he hadn’t coughed as much as Billy had. The police had very little to go on—there was no motive, no gasoline found in the house or on Ernest’s clothes, and no instances of violence in his past. Still, he was indicted for capital murder.
While he waited for trial, Willis—who had no history of mental illness and who the jailers all said was a model prisoner—was given, along with his back medicine, daily doses of powerful antipsychotic drugs. No reason for this was ever given. He was still on the drugs at the trial, where, Alton remembers, his brother wasn’t acting normal. The prosecutor made good use of the accused’s demeanor, pointing out his “weird eyes,” which would “pop open like in some science fiction horror film.” Willis didn’t express any emotion when prosecutors showed pictures of the bodies of the dead women. He wouldn’t look jurors in the eye. What they didn’t know was that there was a reason he was acting like a zombie. The drugs had turned him into one.
Arson investigators testified that marks on the floor were “pour patterns” left behind by an accelerant, like gasoline. Willis was found guilty. The jury took just an hour to give him the death penalty. He was hustled off to Huntsville. “I had a lot of anger my first two years there,” he told me. “I knew if I didn’t let it go I couldn’t survive. I let all that go. You can’t hate and hate and hate. I never did advertise the fact that I was innocent, because everybody else was saying they were innocent—when you know most of them were guilty. I thought, ‘It’ll all come out one of these days.’ ”
Willis received his first execution date in 1991. As it approached, he was asked to prepare for his death. Who would pick up his remains? “Alton.” What color pantsuit did he want to wear on the gurney? “Blue.” What did he want for his last meal? “A big ol’ greasy hamburger.” Willis readied himself for the end. Then, two days before he was set to die, he got a stay from the Court of Criminal Appeals.
Some time later, an inmate named Cameron Todd Willingham approached him in the rec yard and told him about his case. “I usually didn’t talk about my case with other prisoners,” Willis told me. “I was amazed—his case was just like mine.” They only talked four or five times, because they weren’t often in the rec yard at the same time and also because Willis never developed a friendship with Willingham. “I didn’t know Todd that well. He was mixed up in the Aryan Brotherhood. He was a young kid, but I get the impression he wanted to be the big dog.”
In 1995 Willis got the break that Willingham would never get: Latham and Watkins, took his case. (Like many large law firms, it offers its services on occasion to indigent death row inmates.) Lawyers found the jail records showing that Willis had been drugged during the trial. They found a psychologist’s report from 1987 saying Willis would not be a future danger to society—a report withheld from the defense that, had it been presented, could possibly have kept him from getting the death penalty. In 2000 the trial judge recommended he get a new trial.
Incredibly, the CCA overturned the order. I first visited Willis shortly after this, in 2002, and his spirits were still low from the CCA’s action. He looked like a three-hundred-pound teddy bear, with pale skin and dark circles under his eyes. The one bright spot for him was his new wife, Verilyn, whom he had married in prison in 2000.
Luckily for him, his attorneys refused to quit, and in August 2004, federal judge Royal Furgeson ruled that the state had to either retry Willis or set him free. Ori White, the Pecos County district attorney, hired Austin arson investigator Gerald Hurst to look at the evidence against Willis. Hurst’s report concluded, “There is not a single item of physical evidence in this case which supports a finding of arson.” White dropped the charges. On October 6, Willis was freed and given $100, a plaid shirt, and a pair of oversized green pants he had to hold up with one hand. His first meal in the free world? “A big ol’ greasy hamburger.”
After his release, Willis did a few interviews about his ordeal but turned down the rest—he wanted to get back to his life. He vowed never to set foot in Texas again and moved with Verilyn to her home in Mississippi. I saw him again in July 2005, when he drove to Fort Stockton for a hearing where he was trying to get his record cleared so he could carry a gun and go hunting. He looked good—he had lost a lot of weight—but he and Verilyn were not getting along. He had received $25,000 for each year he had spent on death row, netting about a quarter of a million after taxes, money that he and Verilyn would blow through quickly. Willis bought a car for her and her daughter and a boat for Shawn. He also bought three trucks, including an eighteen-wheeler, and started a business, hauling houses and RVs and later boats across the country. Sometimes Verilyn went with him. But they had more troubles and split in 2007. “It was first one thing and then another,” he says. “It was as much my fault as hers. I had little things I would say that would set her off. I would do that—I don’t know why, but I would do that.”
Willis moved to Oklahoma, where he had family, including Shawn. For the next two years he lived on a monthly $663 Social Security check along with money he borrowed from Alton. In August, Willis and his son moved to Midland, where Shawn has a daughter and an ex-wife. Things had changed since Willis’s vow to never return to Texas. Besides Alton and Shawn, Willis has two brothers in nearby Lovington, nieces and nephews in Midland and Odessa, plus two grandchildren in Lubbock. “I have roots here now,” he said.
He also has something of a mission. “I don’t like the limelight,” he told me, lighting a cigarette at his kitchen table. “But I want to help change the system. I want to let people know about the death penalty. And I think Governor Perry needs to do the right thing on this Willingham deal. He’s just trying to let it go by, and it’s not going to hush up—I’m not going to hush up. Governor Perry needs to step up to the plate and admit that we made a mistake. Texas executed an innocent man.”
A video of Ernest Willis talking about his case.
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