Woman Accuses Mother of Killing Father : Texas: Tammy Russell has insisted for 15 years that her mother committed murder by setting a fire that swept through their mobile home. Only now have charges been filed.

For 15 years, Tammy Russell has insisted that her father’s death was no accident, that the fire that killed him was set by her mother.

For 15 years, nobody listened. Until now.

Police and fire investigators reopened the case in December after another family member, whom they wouldn’t identify, also raised questions about Jack Edward Russell’s death.

And on Jan. 18, Tammy Russell’s mother, Mildred Laverne Russell, 49, was indicted on charges of murder and arson.

“I never thought I’d get to see it,” Tammy Russell, 25, said in Sunday editions of the Tyler Courier-Times-Telegraph. “Before Mildred was arrested, I kept everything inside. It was like I hid part of my life. Now I’m relieved that I don’t have to hide it anymore.”

Jack Russell was found dead Jan. 22, 1979, in a back bedroom of the family’s mobile home, which had been consumed by fire.

According to the initial investigation, the fire was started by a cigarette that ignited a couch. Russell was the only person home at the time. Mildred Russell said her husband was drunk and asleep when she left the house with her four children.

But a Tyler pathologist who reviewed the original autopsy, and found it incomplete, said it was possible that Russell had been hit on the head before fire swept through the house.

Russell’s body was exhumed in December and a second autopsy was performed. Investigators say the second autopsy supports the initial ruling that smoke inhalation caused Russell’s death. But they could not determine what caused the blunt wound to his forehead.

Tammy Russell, who was 11 at the time, said she remembers leaving the house with her mother that night after her parents fought.

“We rode behind the house, up and down the street, about 100 times, slowly,” she said. “We stayed driving in that area of that house all night long. . . . I told her two times that the house was on fire and she wouldn’t stop. She said it was the neighbor’s chimney.”

Tammy Russell said her mother gave her a fabricated story to provide investigators.

“She said to tell them I was standing in a hallway when my father threw a stereo and that I saw a cigarette butt fall on the couch,” she said. “She said if I didn’t do what she said, my brothers and sisters would be placed in an orphanage.”