Jim Willett is a retired Warden with 30 years of experience with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) prison system. He currently serves as the contributing researcher and TDCJ prison system expert at the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville, Texas.. He has co-authored a book of his experiences with the state prison system titled Warden:Prison Life and Death from the Inside Out.
(go to the link below to find his book)
Between the years of 1998 and 2001, Mr. Willett was the senior warden at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas. During that time, he supervised 89 executions. The video link found above provides a short clip, filmed by the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) in 2012, in which he talks about his experiences as a death house warden.
On February 13, 2023, I sat down with Mr. Willett at the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville to interview him about his reflections from his years of not just witnessing, but also supervising the executions of 89 people by the state of Texas during his three year tenure as the senior warden at the Walls Unit in Huntsville.
Click on the links found below to read two of the many articles that have been written about Jim Willett's recollections of serving as a death house warden:
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/in-the-busiest-death-chamber-duty-carries-its-own-burdens