It was late morning by the time I parked across the street from the house I would later find out belongs to Webb’s mom. The crumbing bungalow had seen better days. A broken windowpane was haphazardly covered from the inside. A sign on a screen door warned that because of the rise in the price of ammo, there would be no warning shot. Two cats slept on the porch next to a half-eaten bowl of kibble. No one answered the door. As I turned to walk back to the car, I spotted a man across the street smoking a cigarette and watching me. I recognized him. “Are you Johnny Webb?” I called out. “I don’t know,” he said. “Am I?”

Indeed, he was. I introduced myself as a reporter and he recoiled, looking at me suspiciously. “I can’t give any interviews,” he said. I understand, I replied. But then he began talking. I asked him if he was prepared to testify in court; yes, he said, but he planned to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Did that mean that what he’d said about being coerced was untrue, I asked him. He said that talking to the Innocence Project, “trying to fix things,” had cost him. He’s lost work — the contractor he worked with had to let him go, he said, once his boss’s well-connected clients found out Webb was on the crew — and wants nothing more than to get this behind him, get out of Corsicana, and start his life anew. “I thought I could change things,” he lamented about his involvement in the Willingham case. “I’ve learned that one man can’t.”