Serving time for a twin brother’s crimes

Wednesday, May 7, 2025

Si Dunn

MEMOIR

A Forgiving Fire: An Essential Story for Anyone Who Has Faced Injustice

Olin Fregia

Stone Tower Press

March 3, 2025

979-8-9919831-3-6; 268 pages

Imagine you are nineteen years old and standing trial in your small hometown. The charges against you include injuring a prominent local doctor and robbing him of thirty dollars.

You were not even in town when the doctor was attacked. Yet after your arrest, you were beaten and bullied by three sheriff’s deputies until you confessed to the crimes. Now, in the courtroom, your defense attorney calls no witnesses and says virtually nothing as your half-hour court session unwinds. The victim identifies you as his assailant. The judge finds you guilty and hands down a stunningly harsh sentence: fifty years in a Texas penitentiary.

Your twin brother, you later realize, actually committed the crimes and then lied and helped the prosecutor get you convicted. Your next—and possibly last—stop in life will be the Walls Unit in Huntsville.

In 1946, this horrific miscarriage of justice happened to Johnnie Roy Houston, who had grown up poor on the south side of Bastrop, Texas, about thirty miles southeast of Austin.

A Forgiving Fire describes Johnnie Roy’s early life, his decades of wrongful imprisonment, and its aftermath. This eye-opening, absorbing, as-told-to memoir also presents a disturbing portrait of incarceration, Texas-style, in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s. It explores questions about guilt, innocence, revenge, and forgiveness.

To craft this engrossing book, East Texas author and theologian Olin Fregia deftly guided Johnnie Roy Houston (before his death in 2016) through the process of recounting his life story, his years of incarceration, and finally regaining his freedom after twenty-six years—and coming face-to-face with his twin, Johnnie Ray Houston. (Both brothers had been named “Johnnie,” with just an “a” and an “o” distinguishing their middle names.)

As Texas prisoner 109051, Johnnie Roy struggled with picking cotton in the blistering sun and being beaten and abused by prison guards. He coped with violence in the cell blocks, rode mean bulls in prison rodeos, cleaned inmates’ toilets, and helped prepare Death Row prisoners for electrocution. And each day, one question flared in his mind: Would he kill or forgive his twin brother for doing this to him?

“With my head down, doing that long row of years,” Johnnie Roy told Fregia, “I missed what the free world was going through: civil rights marches, Vietnam War, Malcolm [X] killed in ’65, Dr. King in April ’68. My eyes were fixed on my feet, one step at a time, one day to the next.”

Johnnie Roy had served nearly half of his half-century sentence when he began hearing other prisoners talking about “writs of habeas corpus”—words he did not understand at first. His prison had recently opened a library, and its law books showed how a prisoner could prepare and submit a writ of habeas corpus to a judge and possibly get a retrial or a shorter sentence. “It took me two months to write my first writ,” he told Fregia. “It took one month for it to come back stamped ‘Return to Sender.’ I had sent it to a bad address. I resent it to a good address. It was returned with a big stamp on the first page: DENIED.”

Johnnie Roy described to Fregia how he kept sending out new writs and did not stop, even when each one was denied. It took him many tries over several years, but he finally achieved his goal of getting a new trial. He found good people willing to help him try to prove his innocence. And even the law enforcement officers who transported him back to Bastrop for his hearing treated him with fairness and dignity—unlike decades earlier. Would he soon be confronting the twin brother who had framed him and taken away so many years of his life?

A Forgiving Fire burns with spirit, and it is rich in examples of perseverance, faith, and the willingness to learn and change, even in difficult circumstances.

Olin Fregia, Th. M., is a seminary-trained (Dallas Theological Seminary) ordained minister, blogger, and speaker. A former television reporter, advertising agency copywriter and video producer, he has served as a church communications specialist, commercial on-air and voice-over talent, and college chaplain. He currently lives in East Texas.

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Lone Star Review: A FORGIVING FIRE