Just after 7:30 p.m. on January 23, 2017, firefighters were dispatched to a trailer fire at the Mohawk Mobile Home Park in Westland, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.
At the time of the fire, the trailer had been vacant for about a month. While firefighters put out the blaze and secured the site, Sergeant Brian Humphrey of the Westland Police Department interviewed people in the crowd. He spoke with Sharon Mitchell, who also lived at the park. Mitchell said she did not know the woman who owned the trailer but that the woman’s daughter also lived at the park and had told Mitchell that the woman was in the process of moving out because of problems with her former boyfriend. According to a request for a search warrant Humphrey later filed, Mitchell said she had heard that the former boyfriend had threatened to burn the trailer down.
Humphrey spoke with the daughter, Heather Woodward, and then with her mother, Elisa Maldonado. They said that Maldonado’s former boyfriend, 51-year-old William Whateley, had been harassing them.
Maldonado and Whateley dated for two years but ended their relationship in November 2016. Maldonado and Woodward said he constantly called and texted them. Woodward told Humphrey that Whateley had sent her a message through Facebook Messenger threatening to burn down the trailer. She couldn’t find the message and then said Whateley might have made the threat in a phone call.
Also on January 23, prior to the fire, Maldonado had filed a police report about items missing from her trailer. Humphrey later executed a search warrant at Whateley’s home in Detroit and found several items belonging to Maldonado, including her Social Security card, but none of the items listed on the police report.
Battalion Chief Joseph Wojtowicz, the assistant fire marshal in Westland, visited the trailer park on the night of the fire and then returned the next day. In his report, he said that he didn’t enter the trailer because of “structure instability.” Instead, Wojtowicz relied on photographs of the interior. He wrote that the fire was caused by arson. “The fire patterns and location indicate [a] pour pattern on the living room floor,” he wrote. In addition, he said that an arson dog from the Michigan State Police, named Riki, alerted on the front porch of the trailer, signaling the presence of an accelerant.
Police arrested Whateley on January 31, 2017, and charged him with second-degree arson. He was also separately charged with aggravated stalking, based in part on the hundreds of text messages he sent Maldonado.
Officers searched Whateley’s green minivan and found a cigarette lighter and small, empty gas can.
During an interview with Humphrey, Whateley admitted sending inappropriate texts to Maldonado but denied setting her trailer on fire.
Humphrey suggested to Whateley that the fire was an accident, perhaps caused by his carelessness.
“Here’s what I think, okay, cause I’m not saying that you, uh, intentionally started the fire but I am, I am thinking that maybe that you were there and, uh, who knows, maybe you were drinking in the trailer, waiting, just waiting to talk to [Elisa] and I think maybe you fell asleep with a cigarette, because I know you smoke, and maybe the fire got started and you just took off,” Humphrey said.
Whateley continued to deny any role in the fire. “If I knew who did it or why they did … I don’t know. If I knew I would tell you,” Whateley said.
Whateley pled guilty to aggravated stalking on May 10, 2017, and received a sentence of 3 years and 10 months in prison.
The arson trial began on June 1, 2017, in Wayne County Circuit Court. Attorney Wendy Barnwell represented Whateley. Prior to the start, Judge Michael Hathaway appeared to urge Whateley to accept a plea, which had the possibility of parole after seven years in prison, and not risk a guilty verdict, which could mean a sentence of up to 50 years in prison. “You’re 51 years old,” Judge Hathaway said. “If you’re convicted … you’ll never see the light of day … the arson sentence could be very, very catastrophic.”
Whateley held firm. “No, sir,” he said. “I didn’t burn the trailer down.”
Mitchell testified that she knew Whateley from seeing him around the mobile home park. She said that the day of the fire she saw a green van she had seen before, driven by “Heather’s Mom’s boyfriend.” Mitchell said she saw the van drive past while the fire was burning, and that the driver was smiling and laughing. Mitchell was unable to make a courtroom identification of Whateley because she said she was legally blind and had no peripheral vision.
Maldonado testified that Whateley sent her nearly 600 text messages after she ended their relationship. She also read 20 of these text messages to the jury. Barnwell had objected to the introduction of these messages, but Judge Hathaway allowed them as “evidence of the relationship between the parties.” Woodward also testified about Whateley sending her messages, including one where Whateley threatened to set the trailer on fire. (She could not produce that message.)
The state introduced a recorded telephone call from the Wayne County Jail between Whateley and a friend. On the call, Whateley expressed concern about being forced to take a guilty plea and said that if he did plead guilty, he would say that Maldonado asked him to set the fire. On the call, Whateley also said that at the time of the fire, he was at a pool hall across the street from the trailer park.
Wojtowicz testified as an expert about the investigation. He said that he spent a year attending the Michigan State Police Fire Investigation School.
He said that he took photographs of the trailer on the night of the fire and returned the next day. He said the investigators saw a “considerable pour pattern in the living room floor.”
He said, “We would usually go in and take samples to send out to Michigan State Police for verification but due to the roof collapse and the instability of the building, we weren’t able to actually go inside and do a complete process of taking samples out and testing them.”
He said he concluded the fire was “ignited by somebody” because there was no furniture, electronics, or other material to ignite a fire in the living room. (Woodward would testify that there were couches in the living room at the time of the fire.) He also said there was no indication that the fire was caused by a gas or electrical problem, because “there was nothing that showed that any power consumption was being used.”
Wojtowicz testified that a fire with a pour pattern burned down instead of up, and that the pour pattern in the trailer led from the living room toward the main door.
“Where there was liquid poured on in that exact spot it was completely burned down to the floor joists,” he said. “No plywood, no carpet, no anything.”
Wojtowicz also testified about the arson dog’s visit to the trailer. He said that after Riki arrived, the dog sat down by the front porch of the trailer and the driveway, which Wojtowicz said indicated that the dog smelled an accelerant. The dog’s handler did not testify.
Early in the investigation, the police had seized Whateley’s cellphone, which was sent to the state police for analysis. The state police downloaded the data, including GPS coordinates for the phone’s location, and sent the data to the Westland police. An officer testified that the coordinates showed that Whateley’s cellphone had been near the fire’s location, but he was unable to determine when that occurred.
In his closing argument, the prosecutor said, “The pour patterns and the accelerants and the canine dog led the investigator to believe that gasoline was poured into the living room floor, and lit.” He also said that Wojtowicz had been “doing this for years” and was “good at it.”
Barnwell said in her closing argument that the state had not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the fire was arson. She said Woodward was a smoker, there were no photographs introduced of the pour pattern, the dog never entered the trailer, and Wojtowicz was not a trained dog handler. She said he “ might be a good man but he didn’t do a thorough investigation.”
The jury convicted Whateley of second-degree arson on June 6, 2017, and he later received a sentence of 18-30 years in prison.
Whateley appealed, arguing that Judge Hathaway erred in allowing the jury to hear the jail recordings, in allowing the use of his text messages, and in letting the officer testify about the phone records, because the GPS analysis was done by another person. He also said there had been insufficient evidence to sustain the conviction.
The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction on December 11, 2018. It did say that the judge erred in allowing the officer to testify about the cellphone records, because the testimony violated Whateley’s right under the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, but that the error was harmless.
On April 13, 2021, Whateley moved for a new trial. He said that Barnwell had provided ineffective representation because she failed to object to the introduction of “uncorroborated canine alert evidence.” His argument was based on the 2017 version of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Guide, which was in use at the time of the trial, and said, “Any canine alert not confirmed by laboratory analysis should not be considered validated.” Whateley also said his appellate attorney had been ineffective for not litigating this claim on appeal.
A trial court judge denied his motion, and the Court of Appeals declined to hear his appeal.
On August 17, 2023, Whateley filed a pro se petition for a writ of habeas corpus in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The petition asserted many of the claims he had made in his previous appeals. Whateley later sought to hold the petition in abeyance, but a judge denied the request.
While in prison, Whateley shared a cell with Larry Smith Jr., who was exonerated in 2021. After Smith’s release, he brought Whateley’s case to the attention of Life After Justice, which then partnered with the Exoneration Project.
Megan Richardson, now with the Wisconsin Innocence Project, represented Whateley through the Exoneration Project. Charlotte Whitmore, now with the Boston College Innocence Project, and Sarah Elkin represented Whateley through Life After Justice. Wolf Mueller, a defense attorney in Michigan, also represented Whateley.
On October 1, 2025, the attorneys filed a motion for a new trial.
The motion included reports from two fire experts who said that Wojtowicz’s investigation was incomplete and unreliable.
Michael Higgins, the founder of K-Chem Labs, said that Wojtowicz failed to interview Woodward and her boyfriend, both smokers and the last known people in the trailer, about their activities before they left. He also said that the lack of testing on materials in the trailer made Wojtowicz’s testimony suspect.
“Wojtowicz stated that gasoline was poured on the kitchen floor and ignited, without any evidence to substantiate this conclusion,” Higgins wrote. “Wojtowicz did not examine the scene, which would require the investigator to remove the debris from the floor, document with photos and drawings of what he observed, and collect samples that are sent to the laboratory for analysis … Wojtowicz’s statement to the jury was totally fictitious. He had no factual or scientific evidence that there was any flammable liquid in the fire scene.”
Higgins also said that the presence of a pour pattern was not scientifically valid evidence of the use of an accelerant. Neither was Riki’s alert. “Without laboratory results indicating accelerant, any potential hit by a K-9 is scientifically meaningless,” he wrote.
Robert Trenkle, the founder of Certified Investigations International, wrote in his report that the investigation was tainted by tunnel vision.
He wrote: “The Fire Marshal, in his assessment of the fire scene, formulated a hypothesis regarding the cause of the fire as an arson, partially based on his belief there were no contents in the living room. The daughter of the tenant was moving items from the trailer throughout the day preceding the fire, [and was] last there an hour or two before the alarm. She is a smoker. She clearly stated she had two couches in the living room near the entry door, the area of the burned-through floor. This fire could have been caused by carelessly discarded smoking materials or through an electrical malfunction. There was no scientifically valid evidence of any accelerant use because no samples were taken.”
This motion built on Whateley’s earlier motion that Barnwell provided ineffective representation but added more details and arguments about the harm it had caused to Whateley’s defense.
Barnwell hadn’t consulted with a fire expert, hadn’t challenged the state’s use of Wojtowicz as an expert witness, and hadn’t adequately cross-examined Wojtowicz about his testimony, the motion said. At the time of the trial, the NFPA guide said that neither canine alerts nor burn patterns were indicators of the use of accelerants without a confirmatory laboratory analysis.
Whitmore and Elkins interviewed Barnwell, who said she did not remember many details of the case, but that for her the key question was not whether the fire was set, but rather who set it. While Barnwell’s closing argument pointed out the holes in the state’s case, it fell short because it was not buttressed by expert testimony on the flaws in the investigation, the motion said.
The motion also said Whateley’s initial appellate attorney, Robert Tomak, was ineffective, because he failed to raise questions about Barnwell’s trial performance. Tomak agreed. In an affidavit, he wrote, “I failed to perceive the existence of any appealable issue related to the scientific aspects of the arson investigation that took place in this case.”
The motion said that updated NFPA guides, based on new research, had further restricted the use of pour patterns and canine alerts as proof of arson. “This shift in science since 2017 would create a reasonable probability of a different outcome on retrial because of the prosecution’s reliance on now invalidated science to prove that the fire was intentionally set,” the motion said.
In a response filed on February 27, 2026, the state agreed that Whateley’s conviction should be vacated, based on ineffective assistance of counsel. The response said that the expert reports in Whateley’s motion did not constitute new evidence of innocence, because Barnwell could have discovered most of the information in the reports.
On March 10, 2026, Judge Chandra Baker-Robinson granted Whateley’s motion for a new trial. Whateley was released from prison on March 27, 2026.
The case was dismissed on August 4, 2026.
“William lost nearly a decade of his life because the system failed to apply sound science,” said Jarrett Adams, cofounder of Life After Justice. “This moment is about more than one case—it’s about accountability and ensuring that truth, not flawed assumptions, determines a person’s freedom.”
Also in August, after the dismissal, Whateley filed a lawsuit in the Michigan Court of Claims, seeking state compensation for his wrongful conviction.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 08-28-2026
