Tag: Walter Harris

This is the seventh installment in “Exploring Integrity: Reviewing Wrongful Conviction Remedies,” a series examining the impact of conviction integrity units on the American judicial system’s rate of wrongful conviction. Presented by the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism, the investigation is supported by Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Detroit’s top man at the Fire Department still hasn’t broken public silence about one of his career’s most high-profile cases — but he came closer to it than ever on Thursday.

Commissioner Charles “Chuck” Simms avoided a subpoena to testify in a hearing for Mario Willis, who’s widely believed to have been wrongfully convicted in a firefighter’s 2008 murder, after a prosecutor said Simms acknowledged conducting an interview that supports Willis’s innocence claim.

Willis, wearing Wayne County Jail clothing, attentively listened as Amanda Smith said the city official who Willis and his supporters have repeatedly asked to come forward about the 2009 interview finally confirmed the authenticity of a video recording of the interview. Simms was an arson investigator in the death of Walter Harris, a well-regarded first responder, who died after Willis’s employee Darian Dove admitted to accidentally setting 7418 East Kirby ablaze while entertaining a woman. Dove later changed his account, saying Detroit Police detectives threatened him into claiming Willis paid him to set the fire.

During Willis’s second-degree murder trial in 2010 Detective Scott Shea testified that neither Willis nor his wife Megan had offered an alibi for their activities on Nov. 15, 2008, the night of the blaze, but Willis and his defense team say the Simms video proves otherwise.

“That was not revealed or played for the jury at any time, and that’s the difference,” Willis’s co-counsel Craig Daly told Third Judicial Court Judge Margaret Van Houten on Thursday.

In the video, Simms identifies himself to Willis before saying, “You remember what you told me, right? … I remember you told me y’all went out that night. Y’all went out to dinner or something.”

A clip of the exchange can be viewed at the website justiceformariowillis.com.

At root of the discussion between Daly, with co-counsel Wolf Mueller and Smith, the assistant Wayne County prosecutor who said Simms acknowledges conducting the interview, is a possible Brady violation, which occurs when prosecutors hide evidence that could help a defendant. The Simms interview was saved to a police department disc labeled “Megan,” Daly told the court, after detectives recorded a conversation with Willis’s wife. The video camera, aimed over Simms’s shoulder, had not been turned off before Willis sat with Simms in an empty interrogation room that neither man knew Megan Willis had occupied.

Simms ignored repeated requests to discuss the video in 2022 when Metro Times began investigating Willis’s claims of innocence. Through an assistant, Simms asked Metro Times for details about the footage, but never agreed to be interviewed after learning that his conversation with Willis was recorded.

Several months later, when WDIV Channel 4’s Devin Scillian reported on Willis’s possible innocence, Simms was silent again. City of Detroit spokesman John Roach instead deflected questions about the video, saying the fire department wasn’t responsible for Willis’s fate.

Willis disagrees.

“The prosecution rested on that,” he told Metro Times in an earlier phone interview from Saginaw Correctional Facility. “One of the last things they said was that I tried to deceive the court by telling Megan to lie on the witness stand and say we were together that night.”

He added, “That hurt me even more than Dove.”

Willis says he hadn’t remembered what he and Megan had done Nov. 15, 2008, since the interview with Simms took place eight months after the fire, but Simms validated what the couple had already told police. Despite the charge that he’d only paid Dove to start the fire, Judge Michael Callahan even cited “perjury” when sentencing Willis to prison.

Maxine Willis, Mario’s mother, shared with Metro Times a 2023 letter to Commissioner Simms, directly appealing for his help, in which she wrote: “Post conviction, a withheld interrogation video was discovered between you and my son that shows you were made aware of the exact alibi information provided at trial… In our efforts to have the complete truth established on record, we are calling upon you NOW, to please confirm the information my son provided you. As a fire commissioner, I’m sure you took an oath which includes to accept responsibility for your actions and for the consequences of your actions.”

Simms never replied, she said.

Thursday’s stipulation that Simms, 15 years later, has verified Willis’s statement of an alibi followed three days of cross-examination of fire expert Marc Fennell that began in December. The prosecution spent hours of the hearing, questioning dozens of details in Fennell’s testimony that science supports Dove’s confession: An accident, not an arson, killed Walter Harris.

Mueller, who initially called on Fennell to testify, followed the cross-examination by asking the Grand Rapids-based consultant and ex-firefighter if he found credible Detroit Fire Department Captain Rance Dixon’s statements that he’d never heard the name Darian Dove before last month. Fennell described firefighters as “family,” saying their bond compels interest in details of what led to a loss or tragedy within their ranks.

Despite intense media coverage in 2010, and a heavy presence of firefighters and Harris supporters in and out of the courtroom at Willis’s trial, Dixon — who investigated the scene at 7418 East Kirby — testified last month that he didn’t learn Dove was in the house until Willis’s current hearing began.

“Did you find that astounding?” Mueller asked Fennell.

“I was shocked, yes,” Fennell replied. 

In 2023 the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit reviewed Willis’s case, but denied his request for exoneration.

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This is the sixth installment in “Exploring Integrity: Reviewing Wrongful Conviction Remedies,” a series examining the impact of conviction integrity units on the American judicial system’s rate of wrongful conviction. Presented by the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism, the investigation is supported by Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The meeting should have happened in 2008.

Detroit Fire Department Capt. Rance Dixon’s findings about a deadly eastside blaze could have potentially saved a man from being sent to prison if Dixon had spoken with a single witness.

But he didn’t know the witness existed.

Dixon, a former arson investigator, testified this week in a Third Judicial Court of Michigan hearing to determine if Mario Willis, convicted in the 2008 homicide of firefighter Walter Harris, will receive a new trial and possible exoneration. Dixon told Willis’s defense attorney Wolf Mueller that he only learned in court Dec. 10 — during Mueller’s questioning — that Darian Dove had confessed to accidentally torching the house, which caused Harris’s death.

After stressing the National Fire Protection Association 921 professional guidelines and method of determining fire cause and origin, which Dixon said he observed, Mueller referenced earlier testimony that Dixon wished he’d known about claims that gasoline was stored in the home.

“Yeah, I wish I would have known about Darian Dove, too,” Dixon said.

Once a handyman hired by Willis, Dove testified earlier in the hearing, disputing initial confessions that he took a woman to 7418 East Kirby Street and accidentally destroyed the house after starting a small fire to keep warm. Dixon acknowledged that he hadn’t been able to adhere to the highest standard of scientific methodology in fire investigation, since he was unaware that Dove had been in the home, and had no way to test Dove’s original story versus an arson theory.

Dixon filed a six-page report Nov. 16, 2008, the day after the fire, and made no supplements to his conclusion that the fire was deliberate. He testified that he didn’t even hear the name Darian Dove until three months after Willis’s trial, during which Dove fulfilled a plea bargain by saying Willis paid him to set the blaze, in order to collect an insurance policy payment.

“An expert’s opinion is only as good as the data to support it. Is that right?” Mueller asked Dixon.

Dixon agreed, saying that he never located any witnesses at the scene of the blaze, nor inquired whether police detectives located witnesses or suspects. Dove had told detectives he fled 7418 East Kirby and called the fire department. He said he “broke out crying” when he learned that Harris died after battling the flames.

Friday morning, Marc Fennell, an internationally renowned, Michigan-based fire investigator and analyst, testified, pro bono, as an expert in support of Willis, further challenging Dixon’s conclusion of arson.

“It’s undetermined,” said Fennell. “Absolutely it is, yes.”

Among several theories, in addition to the lack of Dove’s initial account of the accident, Fennell disputed Dixon’s association with the smell of gasoline at the scene with a deliberate burning. The “mopping up” process that firefighters use, including seeking “hot spots” after a fire is contained, plus other measures, involves gas-powered equipment, Fennell said. Ironically, equipment designed to help rescue Harris, who’d collapsed under the roof, might have even caused the odor, he added.

“It is mass chaos…faster than NASCAR at a pit stop,” said Fennell, an ex-firefighter.

Regarding Dixon’s testimony, Mueller asked Fennell: “He didn’t even do the first basic step of the scientific method — consider an alternative hypothesis. Fair?”

Fennell agreed.

Also discussed was the lack of an expert at Willis’s original trial. Fennell repeatedly testified that a qualified advisor to Willis’s lawyer, Wright Blake, would have been valuable to Willis’s defense in 2010.

“Clearly you would be able to tell a jury, based on common sense and your scientific background, that this fire was not incendiary,” Mueller asked.

“Correct,” Fennell replied.

Lack of follow-up documentation, such as photographs of certain areas of the 2008 scene, he added, also helped hinder proper conclusions about the tragedy that left Harris dead and sent Willis to prison.

“That’s why I don’t understand why, investigating fires, there’s such a rush,” said Fennell. “The fire’s not going anywhere. Do it right.”

Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Amanda Smith began cross-examining Fennell before the hearing was adjourned until Jan. 7, 2026.

Since his conviction, Willis, 44, has served at the Saginaw Correctional Facility, where he remains incarcerated, pending the hearing’s outcome.

In 2023 the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit reviewed Willis’s case, but denied his request for exoneration.

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