Man's belief in the Texas legal system nearly killed him

San Antonio Express-News November 06, 2004
(First of two parts )

What was it about Ernest Ray Willis' eyes?

The district attorney called them "cold fish eyes." One of the women on the jury thought they looked reptilian.

"They had this emptiness, like an alligator - kind of like something malignant. Mean. Dangerous but empty," Catherine Collins would recall.

The hollow stare lent the silent defendant the air of a stone-cold killer. Otherwise, precious little linked Willis to the fire that on June 11, 1986, consumed 2 women in the West Texas town of Iraan.

Convicted nonetheless and condemned to die, Willis stayed more than 17 years on death row before being exonerated and released last month.

Now those brown eyes appear weary, but focused.

Anger occasionally hardens them when Willis describes the injustice that took nearly two decades to dismantle. The outrage is gentle, though, compared to when he first arrived in a cell 3 paces long and realized what had happened.

The state of Texas had prosecuted him with scant and flawed proof. It had tried him while he was unknowingly drugged - hence the eerie, vacant gaze in court. And, after all that, it wanted him dead.

More than once the state set a date for his execution, offered him help writing a will and asked him to decide who he wanted to hear his last breath. And, more than once, the justice system changed its mind.

Now, out of more than 950 men and women condemned to die in Texas during the modern era of capital punishment, Willis is the eighth one exonerated.

Currently reclaiming a life that almost ended on a Huntsville gurney, the 59-year-old is adjusting even the smallest of daily habits.

Comfort behind the wheel of a car returned immediately to the former truck driver and oilfield worker when he practiced for the drivers' test. Confidence in his legs came more slowly.

Rarely during the years of incarceration did Willis walk farther than the prison yard or the showers. Upon release, he felt wobbly when he exceeded 60 feet. Repeatedly, he would reach out to steady himself during his first strolls in the free world.

His vocabulary also needed fine tuning. The word "here" kept slipping into conversation when he described death row, as if part of him still was back in Cell 32 at the Polunksy Unit.

"I catch myself after I do it, y'know," he says, "but it ... it's still soaking in."

Labor and liquor

Born in New Mexico and raised in California, Willis chopped cotton, picked grapes and pulled potatoes alongside his mother and three brothers during summers as a schoolboy.

As a teenager, he migrated from vegetable rows to oil rigs.

Now living in Mississippi, the man who might have been the 42nd prisoner executed in Texas talks with a slow drawl that suggests more resignation than bitterness.

Mostly, he describes nearly two decades on death row as matter-of-factly as he summarizes the life of labor and liquor that preceded his conviction.

"Really, there weren't no big events," he says. "I mean, I just ... I worked when I was able to."

Roughnecking and oil drilling paid well, but the wages came at a price. When Willis still was a young man, a swinging 300-pound pipe knocked him to the steel floor of a rig.

The fall ruptured 2 spinal discs. Back surgery allowed him to walk again but never cured the pain.

Alcohol helped dull what the painkillers couldn't soothe.

Sometimes, he binged, once turning a trip to buy a loaf of bread into an opportunity to purchase vodka and disappear over the state line for 3 days.

"I was pretty wild," he says. "I liked to party and I liked to dance and I liked to go out and shoot pool and shuffleboard and I wouldn't take my wife with me."

Ultimately, the booze did more to end six marriages than chronic pain. Hospital visits far outpaced the divorces. Complaining alternately of pain and numbness in the back and legs, Willis went 26 times between 1982 and 1986.

Then, in April of 1986, surgeons removed a disc. 2 weeks later, in early May, Willis returned for a second procedure to relieve a nerve pinched by scar tissue.

Still recovering and unable to work, he traveled the following month to Pecos County.

Nightmare begins

In Iraan, Willis was staying with a cousin, Billy Willis, at the home of Billy's friends Michael and Cheryl Robinson. The plan was they'd repair and sell one of Robinson's cars.

They still were trying to find car parts on June 10, when Ernest and Billy returned to the Robinson house and found Cheryl there with Gail Joe Allison, 25, of Sheffield and Elizabeth Grace Belue, 24, from San Antonio.

The group passed the evening drinking beer, even after the Robinsons were arrested for violently quarreling outside the house. The remaining guests ended up staying over.

At about 4 a.m., a crackling sound and a sour stench woke the Robinsons' neighbor, Mary Jane Harris.

Harris dialed 911 and, from her dining room window, she saw 2 figures peering into the Robinsons' house as flames rose over the roof.

One stood wrapped in a blanket. The other was barefoot and in jeans.

Under the blanket, Billy Willis was naked and scraped up. When smoke blocked his way out of a bedroom, he plunged out of a window and found his cousin already outside.

Ernest Willis had woken up on a living-room couch. He told investigators he tried to run through the house until flames forced him to flee outside, where he banged on windows trying to rouse the others in the bedrooms.

The lead investigator, Pecos County Deputy Sheriff Larry Dale Jackson, was immediately skeptical. He had 3 weeks of fire-investigation classes plus two more training with arson investigators in Houston; to him, the fire looked set.

Confirmation came from 2 certified arson investigators, a recent addition to the state fire marshal's office and a former FBI agent who was working as an insurance investigator.

They believed the charred marks on the floor were "pour patterns," burned traces of flammable liquid someone had poured inside the house.

Lab tests could find no trace of any such accelerant, but tangential findings further inflamed suspicions.

A roughly 3-foot-long strip of hose was found in the yard days after the fire; it tested positive for traces of gasoline.

Additionally, Billy Willis reported walking through the house at about 2:45 a.m., getting a whiff of burning plastic and finding both the front and rear doors open for ventilation. However, firefighters had found the rear door locked.

4 months later, a Pecos County grand jury in Fort Stockton indicted Ernest Willis, the 1st survivor out of the house and the one least injured.

Surprised, Willis took the bus from Oklahoma to surrender and spent the next 8 months in jail awaiting trial.

"I thought I was going to walk out," he says, "because I thought the system worked."

Secret drugs

The defendant's blank eyes greeted potential jurors when they walked into the Fort Stockton courtroom on July 8, 1987.

At first glance, one woman doubted she could be impartial.

"He scares me," Lucy Gonzales told lawyers. They allowed her to sit on the jury anyway.

During trial, Willis never seemed to look at jurors. And he appeared equally oblivious when prosecutors displayed grim photos of the burned women, their limbs blackened by smoke and flame.

"I just thought he was the type of guy who really didn't care or he was vicious," juror Roy Urias recalls.

Willis' principal attorney had been a lawyer for only about three years when he was appointed to the case. This was his first capital trial, but Steven L. Woolard quickly realized the emptiness in his client's eyes wasn't helping.

Woolard guessed it was the painkillers, told his client to stop taking the pills and advised Willis to take notes or doodle anything so he would appear engaged.

Had anyone checked medical records at the jail where Willis was held during trial, they would have found an odd but scientific explanation for the void in the defendant's eyes.

Along with painkillers for an injured back, the inmate with no diagnosed mental illness was being given medications normally used to soothe hallucinating schizophrenics.

The excessive doses amounted to a chemical conk on the head.

As Willis sat silently, J.W. Johnson, the district attorney in the 112th Judicial District, and his deputy prosecutor piled on suspicion, tidbit by tidbit.

For instance, Willis claimed to have fled the burning house and tried to rouse the others. Yet the neighbor Harris recalled being roused by the crackling of fire, not hollering.

Prosecutors acknowledged the case had holes.

No one saw Willis light the fire. No one found any trace of the flammable liquid that investigators were certain he used to fuel the flames. A

nd no one knew why a disabled oilfield worker recovering from back surgery and with no history of violence would wake before dawn, torch the house where he was staying and kill women he had met only hours earlier.

But Johnson told jurors they didn't need a motive.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is an animal sitting right down here at the end of the table, just like one of them pit bull dogs in the back of the Robinsons' yard. They attack and destroy stuff and you don't know why," Johnson said. "You can't get in their mind."

Different details convinced various jurors and stuck with them over the years.

Several focused on burn marks under a door. Investigators said these marks must have come from burning gasoline that trickled between the door and threshold.

Others would recall how the back door was mysteriously locked sometime after 2:45 a.m. when Willis' cousin Billy saw it open.

Whatever the reasons, the jury was unanimous before it even began deliberations.

Deciding on punishment the next day also proved short work.

Dead man pacing

Prosecutors called two witnesses at the trial's punishment phase, and defense lawyers asked essentially 2 questions.

The main investigators, Deputy Sheriff Larry Jackson and Texas Ranger Joe Coleman, testified that they had traveled to the towns in New Mexico and Oklahoma where Willis once lived.

"His reputation was bad," Coleman reported.

No specifics were mentioned, but it was true that Willis had more than once broken the law. A rap sheet compiled by the FBI listed three arrests for drunken driving, as well as one for indecent exposure and one for placing obscene or harassing phone calls.

But there was no history of violence. And the list of people who would have testified that Willis was peaceful, generous and sometimes even heroic included not only his brothers and a son, but also an ex-wife, a former stepdaughter and a former sister-in-law, each related to him by a different one of his marriages.

Eyewitnesses could have talked about how, during a fishing trip in Haskell County, Willis had suddenly bolted away. Stripping off his boots, he had plunged into the water to pull a boy from a car that had completely submerged after the youth punched the gas instead of the brake while backing down a boat ramp.

Instead, no one was summoned to testify on Willis' behalf.

Johnson filled the void during closing arguments with a dark account of the defendant.

"At some time during the night while he was sleeping, these weird eyes pop open like in some science fiction horror film, and this mind wakes up with kill on its mind, and the tool he used was arson," the prosecutor said.

"And if he did it once, he can do it again.

"I'm here to tell you, our sociologists will tell you, our psychiatrists will tell you, when they snap, they snap, and they are not human beings anymore. They have no utility to us. None."

Inmate No. 000881 arrived four weeks later on death row.

3 paces separated the cell door at one end from the commode at the other. Hours passed as the prisoner retraced the steps, over and over.

Daylight entered when he eventually moved to another cell, through a slit about 3 1/2 inches tall and 4 feet wide near the ceiling.

Weeks would pass without Willis looking outside.

Then, on partly cloudy evenings, a ray of orange would splash across the wall and Willis would stand on his bed and watch until the sun sank behind the trees.

Upon his arrival, the medication stopped and as the first months passed, the inmate realized he had only vague memories of the trial that had put him in this 60-square-foot purgatory.

So when 53 pounds of trial records arrived in the mail, Willis pored over the transcript, reading deep into the night under the 60-watt glow of a lamp clamped to an empty upper bunk.

"It was like reading a novel about myself," he said.

The 30 volumes titled "The State of Texas vs. Ernest Ray Willis" would prove only the opening chapters of a saga.

Their arrival signaled the start of an appeal process that would add extraordinary twists about the trial and the house that burned before dawn.

But no revelations would be apparent under the midnight glow of a reading lamp in a prison cell.

When he first read the testimony with a clear mind, Willis made just one discovery.

Every page made him angrier.

source: San Antonio Express-News