Ernest Willis

Ernest Ray Willis (January7, 2021)

On the night of June 10, 1986, Willis and his cousin Billy came home with two women that they had met that day, Betsy Beleu and Gail Allison. Ernest Willis said that he awoke to the smell of smoke around 4:00 a.m. on June 11. The Willis cousins were able to make it out of the burning house, but the flames had pushed Willis back when he tried to rescue Beleu and Allison. Both women died in the fire. Police became suspicious of Ernest, and they arrested him four months later, charging him with murder. That 1983 blaze resulted in the death of Long's former boss.

Willis met his wife, Verilyn Harbin, while he was on death row. Harbin was the sister of death row inmate Ricky McGinn, who in June 2000 had been the first Texas inmate to receive a stay of execution from governor George W. Bush. (Bush declined to halt 131 earlier executions during his tenure.) Willis and Harbin corresponded and later met at McGinn's insistence. McGinn was executed in September 2000, and Willis and Harbin were married a month after the execution.

As his appeals went by, Willis said that he became depressed and stopped exercising. Willis weighed 185 pounds when he went to prison, and his weight eventually reached 300 pounds. In 2004, a U.S. district judge threw out the conviction, ruling that Willis had been unnecessarily drugged during his trial and that the state suppressed testimony from a psychologist who found that Willis was not dangerous to society. The Texas attorney general and the Pecos County district attorney declined to pursue the case further. The DA said that new investigators labeled the fire's cause as undetermined and could not find any evidence to substantiate an arson case. Willis was released from prison in October 2004. Willis was the eighth Texas death row inmate exonerated since the state resumed executions in 1982, and he was thought to have served the longest sentence on death row among that group.

After his release from prison, Willis and his wife moved to Mississippi, where they mostly kept a low profile. He started his own business hauling houses and boats across the United States. Willis considered writing a book about his experiences, but he never did so. Willis and his wife separated in 2007 and he moved to Midland, Texas. In 2012, when the family of executed Texas inmate Cameron Todd Willingham announced that they would attempt to have Willingham posthumously pardoned, Willis attended the press conference in Austin. By that time, he had gotten back together with his wife and was living in Mississippi again.