A sensational crime demanded a sensational arrest.
A man suspected of murdering his little girls could not be arrested simply by dispatching a couple of deputies with a warrant.
Three weeks after the fire, Todd and Stacy were driving at night when SWAT teams suddenly appeared out of nowhere and forced them off the road.
Heavily armed warrior cops surrounded the car with loaded guns and itchy fingers.
Todd, unarmed, surrendered without getting shot.
Stacy, also unarmed, was terrified.
She was also in disbelief.
She later told investigators that, yes, she and Todd had had their battles and that he had hit her, but he had never abused his girls.
The children had made them closer.
“Our kids were spoiled rotten,” she said.
Todd was jailed and charged with three counts of capital murder.
On the question of motive, the police at first had little to say.
The children were covered by life insurance policies that paid a total of $15,000, but Stacy’s grandfather had purchased them and was the beneficiary.
Before long, though, the authorities began their efforts to control the narrative and destroy any semblance of the presumption of innocence.
John Jackson, the assistant district attorney, chatted with a Dallas newspaper and described Todd as “an utterly sociopathic individual.”
As an indigent, Todd was assigned two lawyers, both of whom were convinced he was guilty.
Everyone was convinced he was guilty, and the trial should have been moved to a neutral site far away from Corsicana.
It was not, and eight months after the fire the case was called for trial in the local courthouse.
Stacy remained loyal to Todd and knew he would never harm his girls.
Though her family felt otherwise, they wanted to avoid the spectacle of a trial.
They approached the prosecutors, who agreed to offer an unexpected deal to Todd: a guilty plea in return for a life sentence.
Todd’s lawyers were delighted with the offer.
They knew he was guilty and that any random twelve jurors off the streets of Corsicana would quickly find him guilty and recommend death.
One of his lawyers, David Martin, was quoted as saying, “All the evidence showed that he was one hundred percent guilty.
He poured accelerant all over the house and put lighter fluid under the kids’ bed.”
Such was the public sentiment against the defendant.
His lawyers advised him to take the deal but Todd refused, saying, “I ain’t gonna plead to something I didn’t do, especially killing my own kids.”
They wanted the case to be tried anywhere but Navarro County, and asked the court for a change of venue.
At a hearing on the request, his attorneys introduced inflammatory statements the prosecutors had made to reporters.
They showed a video of a prosecutor chatting with the press and claiming, as a possible motive for the murders, that “the children were interfering with Todd’s beer drinking and dart throwing.”
The judge refused to change venue.
By capital murder standards, even in Texas, it was a quick trial.
The first witness called by the State was a surprise, a man named Johnny Webb.
Few capital trials are complete without the false testimony of at least one jailhouse snitch, and Todd’s was no exception.
Webb had been convicted of car theft, dealing drugs, forgery, and robbery.
He was in jail on a charge of robbing a woman at knife-point.
He admitted to being a drug addict who started using at the age of nine, and claimed he was traumatized after being raped in prison in 1988.
As a career criminal, he was well versed in the routines of snitching and fearful of another long stay in prison.
Webb happened to be in jail when Todd was arrested and spoke to him briefly one day.
Their encounter was seen by the sheriff, who approached Webb and asked what they were talking about.
The sheriff told Webb to talk to Todd again about the fire; maybe he would say something incriminating.
The sheriff reported this to John Jackson, the prosecutor in charge of the case.
Jackson arranged for Webb to come to his office in the courthouse.
There, they talked about the fire and Jackson was adamant that Todd had killed his daughters.
Jackson laid out photos of the dead girls, images that Webb could never forget.
The visit to Jackson’s office was repeated several times.
Finally, Webb asked what kind of “deal”
Jackson wanted.
Jackson promised to make the robbery charge disappear, either now or later.
Webb told the jury his story: He walked by Todd’s cell not long after he was jailed, and, oddly enough, Todd wanted to talk about his crime.
Through a narrow food slot in the cell door, Todd broke down and admitted to Webb, a total stranger, that he had deliberately set the fire by spraying lighter fluid on the walls and floors.
The alleged confession took place by a speaker system that allowed guards to listen to the prisoners.
Webb even juiced up his story with some additional fiction.
He testified that Todd admitted a motive.
It seems as though Stacy had been abusing the kids, had even hurt one of them, and Todd set the fire to kill the kids to cover up his wife’s abuse.
The children’s bodies were autopsied.
The cause of each death was smoke inhalation.
There were no additional signs of bruising or trauma.
Before Webb’s testimony, not a single person had mentioned or suggested child abuse by either Stacy or Todd.
For good measure, Webb assured the jurors that he had not been promised leniency by the prosecution.
Jackson was later quoted as saying he didn’t think Webb was a reliable witness.
Seriously? Then why did the prosecutor call Webb as the State’s first witness in such a sensational trial? Why use an unreliable witness to try to convict a man for the most horrible crime imaginable?
Next, the State called several neighbors to testify.
At the time of the fire, they had portrayed Todd as a frantic father screaming for help as he knocked out windows and tried to re-enter the burning house to save his children.
That was before the investigators began using the word “arson.”
Eight months later, testifying for the prosecution, they described Todd as being calm and indifferent, or perhaps he was acting, or in complete control.
The prime witness for the State was Manuel Vasquez, a veteran of the courtroom.
He explained in great detail the twenty indicators of arson and walked the jury through his exhaustive investigation and analysis.
In his opinion, the fire was deliberately started by Todd Willingham with the intent to kill his children.
As court-appointed counsel, the defense lawyers were on a limited budget.
The only expert they could afford agreed with the prosecution.
Todd insisted on testifying on his own behalf, but his lawyers were afraid he would make a bad witness.
He did not testify, nor did Stacy.
The white-flag defense called only one witness, a babysitter who said she did not believe Todd could have killed his children.
The trial lasted only two days.
The jury deliberated for an hour before finding Todd guilty of capital murder.
The following day, during the sentencing phase, Stacy and several family members testified in an effort to save Todd’s life.
When Stacy was on the stand, the prosecutor asked her about the significance of a large tattoo on Todd’s left bicep.
It included a skull and a serpent.
“It’s just a tattoo,”
she responded.
“He just likes skulls and snakes.
It that what you’re saying?”
“No.
Just had—he got a tattoo on him.”
It was part of the State’s strategy to portray Todd as a sociopath.
To further prove it, the prosecution called two medical experts.
The first, Tim Gregory, was a psychologist with a master’s degree.
His practice was devoted to family counseling.
The prosecution had several photographs that had survived the fire.
Two of them were posters of the heavy metal bands Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin.
Gregory was asked to interpret the images for the jury.
In his learned opinion, they revealed a focus on death and dying.
He stated, “Many times individuals that have a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic-type activities.”
The second expert was a forensic psychiatrist named James Grigson, the infamous Dr.
Death.
His role was to convince the jury that the defendant, in every case, was a hopeless murderer who would murder again if given the chance; thus it was the jury’s duty to stop him with the death penalty.
He described Todd as an “extremely severe sociopath”
who was beyond treatment.
Three years after Todd’s trial, Dr.
Grigson was kicked out of the American Psychiatric Association, as mentioned previously in the Kerry Cook case, because he had repeatedly arrived at a “psychiatric diagnosis”
without having first examined the individual in question; and for indicating, while testifying in court as an expert witness, that he could predict with 100 percent certainty that the individual would engage in future violent acts.
The jury unanimously recommended that Todd be executed.