The journalist David Grann is a meticulous investigator of human extremes. Since 2003, he has contributed nearly thirty pieces to The New Yorker, on topics as varied as a British explorer's solo trek across Antarctica, a French serial imposter who took on hundreds of false identities, and the hunt for a rare giant squid. He's the author of five books—two of which, "The Lost City of Z" and "The Old Man and the Gun," began as New Yorker stories and were later adapted as films. (A third film based on a book by Grann, "Killers of the Flower Moon," directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, is scheduled to be released later this year.) In 2009, The New Yorker published "Trial by Fire," Grann's superb report about Cameron Todd Willingham, a man sent to death row after a jury found him guilty of murdering his three small children. Willingham and his wife, Stacy, were a working-class couple who lived in a modest house in northeast Texas. One morning, according to Willingham, he awoke to the sound of one of his daughters calling for him and saw his home rapidly filling with smoke. He escaped to the front porch, and, when firemen arrived, shouted that his children were still inside. "News of the tragedy, which took place on December 23, 1991, spread through Corsicana," Grann writes. "A small city fifty-five miles northeast of Waco, it had once been the center of Texas's first oil boom, but many of the wells had since dried up, and more than a quarter of the city's twenty thousand inhabitants had fallen into poverty. Several stores along the main street were shuttered, giving the place the feel of an abandoned outpost." Arson specialists, Grann reports, soon became convinced that Willingham had started the fire, and the local prosecutor secured a quick conviction and death sentence. When, years later, a Houston teacher appears on the scene, asking pointed questions about the blaze and Willingham's legal defense, we wonder where Grann is going. What begins as a story about a house fire gradually evolves into an enthralling look at one man's attempts to escape capital punishment for a crime that he swears he didn't commit. Grann writes like a detective, carefully examining each detail as he lays out the intricacies of—and lingering questions about—the case. As he reviews the evidence and legal process, Grann uncovers just how quickly a life can become engulfed in tragedy and despair, not unlike the celerity with which flames can spread across a surface before consuming it.
—Erin Overbey, archive editor
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