Willingham had written to Kuykendall, asking her to come visit. He wanted her help in his appeal for clemency and also to say goodbye. In his letter, Willingham insisted that he was innocent: “I hope that after I am gone that some day, some how the truth will be known and my name cleared.”
Around two weeks before the execution, Kuykendall went to see Willingham. Not long after their encounter, a leading fire investigator, Dr. Gerald Hurst, completed his review of the original investigation and concluded, as other leading fire investigators would in the years to come, that there was no scientific basis to determine that Willingham had set the fire, and that the original fire investigators had based their theories on discredited methods. His report was sent to authorities asking to postpone the execution. In a legal brief responding to Hurst’s report, the prosecution argued that the execution should go ahead, and included an affidavit from Willingham’s former brother-in-law Ronnie Kuykendall. According to the affidavit, he said that Stacy Kuykendall had told him and other family members that Willingham had confessed to her during her prison visit.
When I recently spoke to Tina Church, a private investigator who worked on Willingham’s behalf, she told me that she had spoken to Kuykendall right after their meeting in prison. Church recalls, “I point-blank asked Kuykendall, ‘Did he confess his guilt?’ And she said, ‘No.’”
In the fall of 2004, just months after Willingham’s execution, the Chicago Tribune reporters Steve Mills and Maurice Possley visited Kuykendall at her house and asked her if Willingham had, in fact, confessed to her. She said, firmly, that Willingham had never done so. Here is what Mills and Possley wrote:
The response from local prosecutors included a two-paragraph affidavit from Ronnie Kuykendall, the brother of Willingham’s former wife. He said that Kuykendall, who had divorced Willingham while he was on Death Row, had recently visited him, then gathered the family to say that he had confessed.
But she said in an interview that was untrue. At the time of the trial, she said she had believed in her husband’s innocence, but over the years, after studying the evidence and the trial testimony, she became convinced he was guilty. In their final meeting, however, he did not confess, she told the Tribune.
Yesterday, Possley, who is now an investigative researcher for the Northern California Innocence Project, at Santa Clara University School of Law, told me that he had “no doubt” that what he and Mills reported is accurate. As he recalled it, their conversation with Kuykendall centered directly on the question of Willingham’s alleged confession. “We asked her, ‘Did he confess in that conversation?’ She said, ‘No. He did not.’” Mills, who is still at the Tribune, confirms Possley’s account. Mills told me, “We accurately reported our encounter with her in 2004.”
On February 8, 2004—the very day that Ronnie Kuykendall claimed his sister had told him that Willingham had confessed—the Corsicana Daily Sun published an interview with Stacy Kuykendall. She said that during her visit with Willingham in prison, he maintained that the fire was accidental and that their daughter Amber had likely caused it:
Willingham laid out the same theory to Kuykendall that he suggested during the Daily Sun interview—that Amber had accidentally set the fire. He said that he woke up to her cry of “Daddy, Daddy.” Willingham said he woke up and saw smoke hovering a few feet above him, then jumped up from the bed where Amber’s body would later be found, put on his pants and ran to the kids’ room where all he could see was fire. Willingham said that he never encountered Amber in those initial moments and theorized that Amber had left the kids’ room via a hall that led both to the front door and to another entrance to his bedroom and that’s how he missed her.
In that article, Kuykendall made it clear that she did not believe Willingham’s version of events. But she never mentioned a confession. While I was reporting my New Yorker article, I tried to talk to Stacy Kuykendall, but she said that she no longer wanted to discuss the case. I did ask her if she stood by her statements to the Tribune and to the Daily Sun. She said, “If I said it, then it’s true.”
In the course of reporting my story, I also spoke to John Jackson, who prosecuted Willingham. He spoke about the contradictions between Kuykendall’s public statements and her brother’s affidavit. “She’s given very different stories about what happened on this particular day right up to the date of his execution,” Jackson said. “It’s hard for me to make heads or tails of anything she said or didn’t say.”
