Trial by fire poster

Reckon we have something wrong? Let us know. Full review. Chicago Sun-Times There's that masterpiece of a micro-performance by Jeff Perry, in that single scene. Vulture The movie is painstakingly well made and murderously hard to sit through. Boston Globe Powerful stuff, but unpowerfully told Film Threat The performances are inspired.

Independent Forces Willingham through a kind of poetic transformation. IndieWire What Zwick lacks in artistry, he makes up for in anger, and Trial by Fire burns with a righteous fury that spreads right off the screen. Hollywood Reporter Without flair or fresh insights into its chosen subject, this just seems like spinning more wheels about on oft-discussed subject.

Sign in to Flicks Keep track of the movies you're waiting for and get the latest movie and tv release news. The tragic and controversial story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was sentenced to death in Texas for killing his three children even after scientific evidence and expert testimony bolstered his claims of innocence. Cameron Todd Willingham : Thanks to you, I have tried to make my peace. You showed me that love is always there if you just open yourself to it. You helped me to learn to enjoy the simple blessings of being alive.

Sign In. Play trailer Biography Drama. Director Edward Zwick. Top credits Director Edward Zwick. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Trial by Fire Official Trailer. Trial by Fire. Clip Photos Top cast Edit. Jack O'Connell Todd as Todd. Laura Dern Elizabeth as Elizabeth. Emily Meade Stacy as Stacy.

Chris Coy Daniels as Daniels. Jeff Perry Hurst as Hurst. David Wilson Barnes Reaves as Reaves. Darren Pettie Horton as Horton. Fogg examined a piece of glass from one of the broken windows.

On the concrete floor of the porch, just outside the front door, Vasquez and Fogg noticed another unusual thing: brown stains, which, they reported, were consistent with the presence of an accelerant.

By now, both investigators had a clear vision of what had happened. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap. The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant. The sample had been taken by the threshold of the front door.

The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham—the only person, besides the victims, known to have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the prime suspect. Police and fire investigators canvassed the neighborhood, interviewing witnesses. Several, like Father Monaghan, initially portrayed Willingham as devastated by the fire. Yet, over time, an increasing number of witnesses offered damning statements. Diane Barbee said that she had not seen Willingham try to enter the house until after the authorities arrived, as if he were putting on a show.

I had the feeling that [Willingham] was in complete control. The police began to piece together a disturbing profile of Willingham. Born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in , he had been abandoned by his mother when he was a baby. His father, Gene, who had divorced his mother, eventually raised him with his stepmother, Eugenia. Gene, a former U. In , he met Stacy, a senior in high school, who also came from a troubled background: when she was four years old, her stepfather had strangled her mother to death during a fight.

Stacy and Willingham had a turbulent relationship. On December 31st, the authorities brought Willingham in for questioning. Fogg and Vasquez were present for the interrogation, along with Jimmie Hensley, a police officer who was working his first arson case.

Willingham said that Stacy had left the house around 9 A. Amber was still in bed, Willingham said, so he went back into his room to sleep. Get out of the house! He never sensed that Amber was in his room, he said. Perhaps she had already passed out by the time he stood up, or perhaps she came in after he left, through a second doorway, from the living room. After he patted out the fire on his hair, he said, he got down on the ground and groped in the dark.

Finally, he stumbled down the corridor and out the front door, trying to catch his breath. He saw Diane Barbee and yelled for her to call the Fire Department. After she left, he insisted, he tried without success to get back inside. The investigators asked him if he had any idea how the fire had started.

Willingham speculated that the fire might have been started by something electrical: he had heard all that popping and crackling. We had three of the most pretty babies anybody could have ever asked for. During the interrogation, Vasquez let Fogg take the lead.

Finally, Vasquez turned to Willingham and asked a seemingly random question: had he put on shoes before he fled the house? A map of the house was on a table between the men, and Vasquez pointed to it. Vasquez was now convinced that Willingham had killed his children. If the floor had been soaked with a liquid accelerant and the fire had burned low, as the evidence suggested, Willingham could not have run out of the house the way he had described without badly burning his feet.

A medical report indicated that his feet had been unscathed. Willingham insisted that, when he left the house, the fire was still around the top of the walls and not on the floor. He just talked and he talked and all he did was lie.

Still, there was no clear motive. Ultimately, the authorities concluded that Willingham was a man without a conscience whose serial crimes had climaxed, almost inexorably, in murder. On the night of January 8, , two weeks after the fire, Willingham was riding in a car with Stacy when SWAT teams surrounded them, forcing them to the side of the road.

Then they arrested him. Willingham was charged with murder. Because there were multiple victims, he was eligible for the death penalty, under Texas law.

Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson, who had ambitions of becoming a judge, was personally opposed to capital punishment. They had little doubt that he had committed the murders and that, if the case went before a jury, he would be found guilty, and, subsequently, executed. Martin and Dunn advised Willingham that he should accept the offer, but he refused.

The lawyers asked his father and stepmother to speak to him. His parents went to see their son in jail. Though his father did not believe that he should plead guilty if he were innocent, his stepmother beseeched him to take the deal. Willingham was implacable. It was his final decision. In August, , the trial commenced in the old stone courthouse in downtown Corsicana.

Jackson and a team of prosecutors summoned a procession of witnesses, including Johnny Webb and the Barbees. Dunn told me that Willingham had wanted to testify, but Martin and Dunn thought that he would make a bad witness. The trial ended after two days. The jury was out for barely an hour before returning with a unanimous guilty verdict. A forty-seven-year-old French teacher and playwright from Houston, Gilbert was divorced with two children.

She had never visited a prison before. Several weeks earlier, a friend, who worked at an organization that opposed the death penalty, had encouraged her to volunteer as a pen pal for an inmate on death row, and Gilbert had offered her name and address.

Not long after, a short letter, written with unsteady penmanship, arrived from Willingham. He also asked if she might visit him. She filed past a razor-wire fence, a series of floodlights, and a checkpoint, where she was patted down, until she entered a small chamber. Only a few feet in front of her was a man convicted of multiple infanticide. He had a tattoo of a serpent and a skull on his left biceps. He stood nearly six feet tall and was muscular, though his legs had atrophied after years of confinement.

A Plexiglas window separated Willingham from her; still, Gilbert, who had short brown hair and a bookish manner, stared at him uneasily. Willingham greeted her politely.

He seemed grateful that she had come. After his conviction, Stacy had campaigned for his release. Therefore, I believe that there is no way he could have possibly committed this crime.

The aftermath of the fire on December 23, When Gilbert asked him if he wanted something to eat or drink from the vending machines, he declined. She had been warned that prisoners often tried to con visitors.

Nothing else. And to most other people a convicted killer looking for someone to manipulate. Their visit lasted for two hours, and afterward they continued to correspond. She was struck by his letters, which seemed introspective, and were not at all what she had expected. I have learned to open myself. She agreed to visit him again, and when she returned, several weeks later, he was visibly moved.

They kept exchanging letters, and she began asking him about the fire. He insisted that he was innocent and that, if someone had poured accelerant through the house and lit it, then the killer remained free. She did not mind giving him solace, but she was not there to absolve him. Still, she had become curious about the case, and one day that fall she drove down to the courthouse in Corsicana to review the trial records. Many people in the community remembered the tragedy, and a clerk expressed bewilderment that anyone would be interested in a man who had burned his children alive.

Gilbert took the files and sat down at a small table. As she examined the eyewitness accounts, she noticed several contradictions. Diane Barbee had reported that, before the authorities arrived at the fire, Willingham never tried to get back into the house—yet she had been absent for some time while calling the Fire Department. Meanwhile, her daughter Buffie had reported witnessing Willingham on the porch breaking a window, in an apparent effort to reach his children.

And the firemen and police on the scene had described Willingham frantically trying to get into the house. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from risking his life. Once you believe in something—once you expect something—it changes the way you perceive information and the way your memory recalls it. But he said that he had loved his children and would never have hurt them. Gilbert was unsure what to make of his story, and she began to approach people who were involved in the case, asking them questions.

Gene, who was in his seventies, had the Willingham look, though his black hair had gray streaks and his dark eyes were magnified by glasses. Eugenia, who was in her fifties, with silvery hair, was as sweet and talkative as her husband was stern and reserved. The drive from Oklahoma to Texas took six hours, and they had woken at three in the morning; because they could not afford a motel, they would have to return home later that day.

Gene said that his son, though he had flaws, was no killer. The evening before the fire, Eugenia said, she had spoken on the phone with Todd.

She and Gene were planning on visiting two days later, on Christmas Eve, and Todd told her that he and Stacy and the kids had just picked up family photographs. If something was bothering him, I would have known. Over the next few weeks, Gilbert continued to track down sources. Many of them, including the Barbees, remained convinced that Willingham was guilty, but several of his friends and relatives had doubts.

So did some people in law enforcement. Eventually, Gilbert returned to Corsicana to interview Stacy, who had agreed to meet at the bed-and-breakfast where Gilbert was staying. Stacy was slightly plump, with pale, round cheeks and feathered dark-blond hair; her bangs were held in place by gel, and her face was heavily made up. According to a tape recording of the conversation, Stacy said that nothing unusual had happened in the days before the fire.

She and Willingham had not fought, and were preparing for the holiday. Though Vasquez, the arson expert, had recalled finding the space heater off, Stacy was sure that, at least on the day of the incident—a cool winter morning—it had been on.

Willingham had often not treated her well, she recalled, and after his incarceration she had left him for a man who did. The prosecution cited such evidence in asserting that Willingham fit the profile of a sociopath, and brought forth two medical experts to confirm the theory. Neither had met Willingham. His practice was devoted to family counselling. At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. A focus on death, dying.

Many times individuals that have a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic-type activities. The other medical expert was James P. Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist. He testified so often for the prosecution in capital-punishment cases that he had become known as Dr. Grigson had previously used nearly the same words in helping to secure a death sentence against Randall Dale Adams, who had been convicted of murdering a police officer, in After Adams, who had no prior criminal record, spent a dozen years on death row—and once came within seventy-two hours of being executed—new evidence emerged that absolved him, and he was released.

After speaking to Stacy, Gilbert had one more person she wanted to interview: the jailhouse informant Johnny Webb, who was incarcerated in Iowa Park, Texas. She wrote to Webb, who said that she could see him, and they met in the prison visiting room. A man in his late twenties, he had pallid skin and a closely shaved head; his eyes were jumpy, and his entire body seemed to tremble. As Gilbert chatted with him, she thought that he seemed paranoid.

Johnny Webb claimed that Willingham confessed to him in prison. Gilbert was dubious. It was hard to believe that Willingham, who had otherwise insisted on his innocence, had suddenly confessed to an inmate he barely knew. The conversation had purportedly taken place by a speaker system that allowed any of the guards to listen—an unlikely spot for an inmate to reveal a secret.

Jailhouse informants, many of whom are seeking reduced time or special privileges, are notoriously unreliable. According to a study by the Center on Wrongful Convictions, at Northwestern University Law School, lying police and jailhouse informants are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in capital cases in the United States.