Woman said pen pal, death row inmate was not a ‘monster’

HOUSTON—The table in Liz Gilbert’s apartment is covered. Stacks of paper fill it, page after page of handwritten scrawl, enough to fill three binders two inches thick.

The letters are filled with words from a friend, but it did not start that way for Liz Gilbert.

“It was purely fate,” she recalls now as she pages through them one by one.

The beginnings of the friendship were formal. The first letter reads, “Dear Ms. Gilbert, I received your name and address in a letter from the Texas Coalition to abolish the death penalty.”

That was in 1999, not long after Gilbert offered her name to the Coalition as a potential pen pal for a death row inmate.

Over the next four years, hundreds of pages of handwritten letters would pass between Liz Gilbert and Cameron Todd Willingham.

Their match was random, Gilbert did not even know who the man writing her was, “I knew that he was on death row. I knew that he had probably done something horrible.”

In 1991 a fire consumed the Willingham home in Corsicana. Todd Willingham made it outside. His three young daughters did not. He was sent to death row, convicted of setting the fire.

Gilbert says she went to the first death row visit fully aware of what she was getting into.

“My sense was, I wasn’t going to be duped. I wasn’t going to be fooled. My thought was lets go in there and see what he has to say. Did he manipulate you? No, I never felt that at all.”

After the first year of letters and visits, Gilbert began to seriously explore the case.

She traveled to Austin to review court transcripts and traveled to Corsicana interviewing everyone she could find. Gilbert talked to people on the jury, attorneys, investigators, even Willingham’s ex-wife, Stacy.

When asked if Texas executed an innocent man her answer comes quickly, and simply, “No, I think they did.”

Governor Rick Perry signed off on the execution, even though the first of many reports questioning the conclusions of the investigators was received by his office 88 minutes before it took place.

Just two weeks ago another report commissioned by the state itself found no evidence of arson, calling the investigators techniques at the time, not accepted by modern fire science.

“This is a very,very heinous crime that was committed by an individual who was described by his own defense attorney as a monster,” Governor Perry told reporters Thursday afternoon in Dallas.

That angers Liz Gilbert, “How could Perry stand up there and say the things that he is saying if he really believed in our criminal justice system. Because he was convicted of setting a fire and the evidence says, no, the fire was not started. He was not a monster. He was a human being. He was enduring a situation that I doubt you or I could endure.”

Endurance is something Liz Gilbert knows something about. She was paralyzed from the neck down in a car accident three months before Willingham’s execution.

“I learned how to survive my experience through knowing him,” Gilbert says.

No matter the ultimate truth, some good, came from the words.

Source: Khou.com, Thursday, October 15, 2009