Episode 4: David Wood

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If you already subscribe, thanks. If you'd like to go to mytimes.com/subscribe. Most prisoners on death row are not pursuing innocence claims. David Wood is rare in that sense. His lawyers aren't arguing about whether he should die for his crimes, but about whether

he committed them at all. An argument that big, that fundamental, tends to lock people into their corners. He's either a serial killer or an innocent man.

“It makes it tougher to honestly assess some of the more basic questions I have about David”

Wood. Kind of personacy. And more to the point, what exactly is he capable of? The last time anyone seriously took up those questions was 33 years ago at his capital murder trial during what's called the penalty phase.

After a jury found David Wood guilty, they had to come back to court to decide his punishment. In Texas, juries have to consider whether or not the defendant poses a future threat to society. In this phase of the trial, the jury isn't just judging the crime anymore, they're judging the person. In a David's case, they had to do a risk assessment.

Back then, life in prison without parole wasn't an option in Texas. So if the jury thought David Wood might kill again, the only sure fireway to prevent it was to execute him. Prosecutors made the argument for the death penalty by bringing up David Wood's past crimes. They had a lot to work with.

Before the desert murders, he had three rape convictions, another conviction of indecency with a 12-year-old girl, and then on top of that, three more women and girls had made accusations against him too, ranging from attempted kidnapping to rape. The story of the prosecution told the jury was clear, David Wood escalated his crimes. He went from being a serial rapist to a serial killer.

Is there any reason to think he'd stop? It was a convincing argument, one that's held for more than three decades, and yet, David Wood has insisted all along that it isn't true. We're going to death row to hear him tell us why. But before we head there, we're going to talk to somebody with a very different feeling

about the kind of person David Wood is. One of the victims, who testified against him. From serial productions, the Marshall Project, and the New York Times, this is the last 12 weeks I am Maurice Sharra. Hey, it's Noah Chestnut from The Athletic.

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“Do you want to introduce yourself and how we should identify you?”

What I told them is I just want to use my first name. I don't want to use Christy at 13. That's how I want you to identify me. Christy was 13 when David would rape her. She's in her late 50s now and says very few people in her life know the story she's about

to tell us about her connection to El Paso's most notorious serial killer case. From Christy was in middle school, she was hanging out at her friend's house one night

Her house was in walking distance and she figured she could shave a few minutes off by cutting through a park. But it was getting dark out so she called her boyfriend Henry and asked him to meet her along the way.

As she made her way into the park, she felt footsteps behind her and first she figured

it was Henry trying to catch up. But Henry wasn't saying anything, which she thought was odd. And so I turned around but it was dark and back then you didn't have street lights because it was on a park so I was like straining.

“I remember straining my eyes like, you know, doesn't really look like Henry.”

And when I realized it wasn't Henry, he jolted forward and took his arm and like wrapped it around my neck. Christy says they started scuffling and she fell to the ground. She kept fighting, kicking up at him. I was a gym most I was kind of jockey, you know I'm saying, so I threw my feet up into

his chest and then he said knock it off, stop, you know, put doing the knife, say what you're doing, what are you doing, you know, get away. And I remember looking over at the house like. Her Christy David would seem to have sat as she remembers that he claimed she'd thrown a rocket as truck and hit the windshield.

And now he was going to walk her home to explain this to her parents. Christy had no idea what he was talking about with the windshield, but he was insistent. She figured maybe this was just a misunderstanding. And I really, I stupidly probably believed the windshield story at that point. It was like, you know, you're going to get in my house and my dad's going to tell you

you're full of shit.

“And we're going to be fine or Henry's going to catch up and you're going to get your”

butt kicked. I was in that mindset at that point in time.

But Henry never showed up and David would didn't take her to our house.

Instead, Christy says he led her to a drainage ditch and raped her. After it was over, Christy says he disappeared. She walked home and still in a days took a bath to clean off the blood and gravel. She eventually reported the rape to the police, an officer asked her to identify the man and set her up at a table with pictures.

Each one had a part of a face, a kind of DIY forensic art puzzle. Like you were piecing the face together, so you did hairline, forehead, eyeset, nose, lips, mouth-chimp. Christy spent several days with these puzzle pieces. She talked to detectives repeatedly, rehashing what happened over and over again.

When Christy says one of the detectives suddenly had an epiphany as to who her attacker might be. He said, son of a bitch and he slammed the desk and he walked out and he came back in and he had about ten pictures and he laid them out and he said, does anybody look familiar?

Then I picked him up and it was David would. I picked him up. David would it turned out had just been accused of another rape, less than two weeks earlier. The rest happened pretty quickly. He played guilty to both rapes and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

But in the end, he only served seven. A few years later, he went on trial for the desert murders and was found guilty. At that point, prosecutors went back to Christy for help. They wanted her to testify about her rape, to help ensure David would got the death penalty. Christy was reluctant, she was newly married, had a job, and a new baby.

She didn't want to have to fly to Dallas for the trial. I remember being very mad that they were going to subpoena me and sequester me in Dallas because I had my daughter, and my daughter was like six months old, and nobody in my immediate existence had any idea that I had any connection to this person.

“And it was, honestly, I was angry, I was really angry that you're going to come disrupt”

my adult life. So Christy also saw this as an opportunity. For the first time in years, she'd be face to face that David would, and this time she wouldn't be a scared 13 year old. I stared him down the entire time I testified, and he didn't look up and I think he looked

up every once, but I would not take my gaze off of him because I wanted him to know that I was in control. It was very much about me having the power back. Power. Control.

Safety. What Christy says David would took from her. When I first arrived at Christy's house, I noticed a sort of decoy entrance, a front door that leads to a long courtyard before the real front door. Christy designed this set up herself so that she can sus out any visitors before they

get too close. She's two daughters now, and she acknowledges that her parenting style, when they were small, was a little less than relaxed. I don't let them walk across the street, I don't let them walk to school, I don't let them

walk home from school, I never let my kids ride a bike, I never let my kids leave my side

at any store with both of my daughters when they turn 13.

growing up.

“It's almost like he robbed you of a lot of things including the ability to have some”

chill, some chill with your kids.

100%. Christy says her daughters, who are both grown and out of the house now, cautioned her against doing this interview at all. They didn't see the point of stirring up old trauma, but Christy has a mission here. She's eager to talk to us, she says, "Mostly, because she wants to get to you."

My purpose is so there's not a doubt in the listeners' mind, and I'm going to take away that doubt from your mind. Any doubt the David Wood really is the Desert Killer. That's my purpose of all this. And to make us really understand, she says we need to see where it all went down in her

old neighborhood, in El Paso. We'll trace my trucks, and then I'll tell you where the other tracks were.

And then we'll go to where the bodies were found.

And then you can just kind of see how everything's so interconnected.

“The tour itself is a tight little loop, much shorter than I was expecting.”

In about 10 minutes, we see Christy's childhood home, the park where David Wood raped her, and very close by the middle school that some of the missing girls went to. This is where the bodies were found. Oh, wow, right here. Yes.

So the body. It's compelling being driven around like this, seeing landmarks of the case passed by the car window and rapid succession. So do you see how close? Yeah, very close.

And his house is down one of these side streets. Yep. Okay. Christy's argument is an argument about geography, about proximity. A serial rapist gets out of prison, hangs around the neighborhood where he once raped her,

and then girls start disappearing. How many explanations could there be? How could it be anyone else? After the tour, Alvin and I do offer up a few of the problems that a fencelorists have identified, including the lack of DNA testing.

But Christy bats it all away. I know, on the neighborhood, I know the area, and I know where the abductions took place. And all of that fits his mantra. It's what I call BS.

At what point do we start saying that the justice system served? They're duty on why does he still have a voice when the victims don't? There's no ounce of me that feels he's innocent by 100% convinced that it's him. People who don't hear about me, they're going to hate me. I get it.

I'm just a convict in prison saying, I'm innocent and they're going, yeah, right, you're lying in peace of crap. After the break, David would. I'm Paul Tanorio, I cover soccer for the athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now.

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Free access to the athletics world cup coverage in our app. Download the athletic app and see that. All the men on death row in Texas are housed at the Allen B. Polanski unit, named after a guy who was on a prison oversight board, but also happens to be of all things a real estate attorney in San Antonio.

He actually inherited the honor from an insurance executive in Dallas who asked to have his name taken off the unit. He told a newspaper that it upset his mother. On the day, Alvin and I arrived there in nearly 3,000 men held inside the prison. 171 of them are on death row.

We walk through a metal detector in a series of heavy gates and into the interview room. There's a row of tiny booths with phone receivers wired into them. We're separated from David Wood by Plexiglass. He's on the other end of our booth in a little cell.

We pass a microphone over and watch for a second as he struggles to set it up.

like a roadie for a metal band or the biker at the end of the bar.

“I was aware going into this interview how fraught it was with expectations.”

Mind and his. My aim was to get to know David beyond the facts of the case, who he is as a person. Was he can trite, did he ever breath? But I got a heads up from his lead lawyer, Greg, that David mainly wanted to talk about the case.

We saw this as his one chance to set the record straight, three weeks out from his execution. So he both had some ambitious goals for this conversation, and yet one thing that wasn't going to help either of us was the president's extremely strict time limit for this interview. So yeah, since we only have an hour, you know, it is an hour. Yeah, it's a...

Wow. That's going to go extremely fast. It's going to go fast. Let's run through the basics. David Wood was born in 1957 in San Angelot, Texas.

He was one of four kids, and his background is familiar for Death Row, and so much as it was pretty grim.

“His mom was institutionalized for mental illness when he was little.”

His dad would deny him dinner if he was behaved. He struggled at school, hyperactive, couldn't concentrate.

As a first grader one time, he just stood up in the middle of class and started walking

home. By his teens, he was getting into all kinds of trouble. I can tell you some stories, you use it was bad, but I would drink, I would get dropped. You just absolutely could not tell me what I could and could not do. I mean, I...

You really can't go much further in David's life story without getting into his time in prison. And I mean that in a literal sense. He's been incarcerated for the overwhelming majority of his adult life. By my count, he spent a total of three years in the free world since he turned 18.

He's now 68 years old. As soon as I got to prison, violence started, I mean, it was violent from the time I got there. It was violent. The whole time I was there.

Any time I came out of prison, I came out worse than I went in. I came out very hostile. We didn't get very far in our conversation before I could feel David's frustration. He wanted to talk about all the problems Greg has identified in his death penalty case. But I kept asking him about his prior crimes.

The three sexual assault cases he did plead guilty to. I wanted to see how David's versions of events lined up with what I'd read in court documents. I figured it'd help me suspect his reliability as a narrator. But David didn't like that line of questioning. He was eager to speedrun through all of his priors.

For example, here he is talking about a rape conviction where the victim was 19. It's a long story, and I'll make it short. I really didn't do that case. And here he is on another conviction. This one, for indecency with a minor, the victim was 12.

There was no scratches, no bruising, no injuries, nothing. And the incident happened probably scared to crud out of someone. So really, nothing happened, but that's pretty much it. Yeah, okay. I mean, so I don't really really like talking about that.

This is type of stuff I didn't want to talk about. Although David did plead guilty to these crimes, his versions of events were wildly different from what I'd read in court records. He downplayed what he did in one assault, and the other assault he tried to deny entirely.

I wasn't able to talk to those women, but Christy's story was fresh in my mind. I asked him to take me back to that night and describe what happened.

At first, his account roughly lined up with Christy's.

Matter at a park, I was drinking with a friend of mine. She was there, started walking back towards her house, but then it veered sharply. He started making out by a bridge by a ditch, by then I was kind of loaded. And we were making out kind of heavy, things just got out of hand. I mean, she described it later at the trial as like a kind of a nightmare for her.

“Do you have a, yeah, I mean, do you have sort of, how do you feel about it?”

It was a bad thing. I mean, I did a bad thing. And what can I say, it was a bad thing, I was under the influence. Now, there's a law enforcement will tell you that we can't use alcohol or jugs as an excuse. And everybody who has goes, are you crazy?

Are we really in our right minds when we are drunk or high? I wanted well for one more beat on how far apart these accounts are. Christy described David's attack as intentional, predatory.

David denies the whole rock through the windshield story and says what happened was basically

a drunken mistake that got out of hand. I find his way of talking about it, off put in, to put it mildly. And it doesn't do wonders for his overall reliability. But I also see where a kind of cross purposes. David has 22 days before the state is scheduled to execute him for murders he's adamant

he didn't commit. And here I am with all these questions about crimes he already served his time for. His frustration while unpleasant and self-serving was not totally surprising. Given the time crunch, we move on to what he really wants to talk about, the crux of

The way he tells it, it started when he got on the wrong side of some detectives in

the pass-o.

“After David got out of prison for Christy's rape in 1987, he was on parole.”

In his telling, it was a more stable time for him, relatively speaking. He got a job, moved in with a girlfriend. Everything was pretty good except every time I had a running with police. It didn't go well, it didn't go well. Women and girls in El Paso started disappearing just weeks after he got out of prison.

And as their bodies started surfacing and the desert, David became one of the main suspects. He says that detectives working these murders were constantly harassing him, showing up at random moments to question him. And he didn't take it very well. Every encounter I had with the detectives became extremely hostile, very much so I was very

disrespectful, very confrontational. David says over the long course of this case, these interactions got worse and worse. He tells a story about detectives trying to question him, about one of the girls' disappearances early on, and he responded by telling them to kiss his ass and peeling off on his Harley.

“By the time he was arrested, he said he was shouting at his detective about all the terrible”

things he'd do to his family if he ever got out. David believes all this personal stuff, combined with his record, is a big part of why the desert murder has got laid at his feet. "I'm the more I'm going to turn out to be the scapegoat." I see.

You like a patty?

Well, I look, first of all before you start getting wrong impression, I fully, fully

admit, of putting myself in the position to be a target of these people. I see. It was me. I accept all responsibility for bringing their ill feelings towards me, not because of the case, but because it became personal.

So this is David's explanation, that the might of the Alpasso law enforcement apparatus converged to make him a patty for six murders largely because they didn't like him. Maybe that sounds plausible to you, or maybe the whole thing feels a little far-fetched. It certainly did detective Johnny Guerrero, who denies that the Alpasso PD targeted David in any way.

But there is one story from this era that makes it a little harder to write David off completely. In January of 1987, two weeks after David gets out of prison for his rape convictions,

a teenager is walking through a park, or just using her first initial, B. She was a minor

when this all happened, and she asked not to be named, but we've corroborated the story with police reports and court records. In any case, B is walking through the park, actually the same park where David grabbed Christie, a man grabs B, hits her in the face, and walks her to a ditch, where he rapes her.

B reports it right away, so the police collect her rape kit. B tells the police she didn't get a good look at the man's face, but she remembers his voice. They set her up with an audio lineup, which is what it sounds like. She listens to a series of recordings of Suspect's voices, and she picks one.

It's David Wood's voice. He becomes the lead suspect in her rape. Over the next few months, David Wood becomes the prime suspect for the desert murders. The police get frustrated, given all the suspicion floating around the sky, and the lack of smoking guns.

So they look back at the case of B, a case where they're both positive identification and biological evidence they can test. They figure if they can make a connection between David Wood and B's rape, they can start proving a pattern that will help to put them away for the desert murders. So they get a warrant to collect David Wood's blood, and they tested against the semen in

B's rape kit, and the test excludes David Wood as the rapist. Prosecutors have to drop the case.

“To David, the story is a key exhibit for his argument that he was railroaded.”

It shows the police were willing to blame him for every bad thing that happened in Alpazzo. And if he didn't have biological evidence on his side, maybe he'd have gone to prison for B's rape too. In David's mind, this is all prologue to the desert murder case. Which shows just how easy it was for him to become a target.

Just how easy it was for him to lose the benefit of the doubt. If David's lawyers can't stop the execution, then David will die in 22 days. Specifically, he'll receive a lethal dose of Pinto Barbatol, which will stop his breathing and eventually his heart. That might sound clinical, but past executions have been pretty grisly.

There are times when the drugs don't work, or don't work quickly enough, and you have been groaning and pain, and reportedly feeling like they're drowning, suffocating or burning. David's heard the stories. During his time on death row, more than 400 people have been executed, some of them his best friends in the world.

So all things considered, David is clear-eyed about this and knows the odds are against him.

Greg.

When David was first scheduled to be executed in 2009, he was full of hate and anger.

He felt totally alone, like his death was inevitable. So he says he gave up completely. He gave away his possessions, his typewriter, even his shoes. But then Greg won him a stay of execution. Other guys on the road told David he was lucky to get such a good lawyer.

David says Greg reminded him of Mr. Rogers, someone decent and kind who he could actually open up to. So now, even though David is facing execution again, he doesn't feel like he's fighting it alone.

“What do you expect for it to happen in the next few weeks?”

I don't know, God's will, that's all I know. Yeah. So yeah, it's kind of affecting me now, but if it happens, and I believe in my faith, that's God's will. Men on death row talk about their faith a lot, as you might imagine, and I do think David

is sincere here. He was baptized a few years ago, and meets regularly with a spiritual advisor. He spends hours reading the Bible and watching faith-based movies on a prison-issued tablet.

There is, ultimately, only so much you can get to know a person in an hour.

But this version of David, the religious one, was hard to square with the more callous version from earlier and our interview. I went in looking for signs of remorse, some help thinking about the binary, innocent man or serial killer.

“By that standard, I wasn't sure what to make of David.”

For me, he landed somewhere more complicated, possibly innocent of the murders, but certainly not sympathetic. When the jury was deciding David was punishment, they had to decide what they made of him as a person. How much sympathy they could muster for someone like him.

I wanted this interview to kind of approximate that experience, so that you could decide what sympathy you might hold for him, if any. I suspect that, for many of you, it might not be much. With just a few minutes left in our hour together, I ran this idea past him directly. Do you can imagine somebody listening to all this and saying, well, you know, I'm not sympathetic

to this guy. See, what would you say if someone looked at that? I don't really know what to say, because we don't have time. Our time is already running out, but the first thing I would do is I would not like the character like me.

I wouldn't have too much sympathy for him. Again, from the beginning, I didn't really know this was, I thought this was going to be about the case. Well, when Greg told me, no, they're going to try to get you people as no as a person like who cares what I think people think of me.

I didn't do this case, regardless of my past, let the case speak for itself. Regardless of my past, meaning regardless of being a convicted rapist. But actually, for David with lawyers, his past is very much part of the story here. As counter-intuitive as a may sound, they say David with prior crimes strengthen the case for his innocence.

The defense team's theory goes something like this. The police and prosecutors began their investigation by looking at the least sympathetic

“characters in Al Paso, and that's how they came to focus on David would, a rapist”

just out of prison with a tendency to mouth off. It was hardly any physical evidence tying him to the murders, the theory goes. So instead, prosecutors highlighted questionable witnesses and ignored evidence the pointed in other directions. David's lawyers think none of this would have worked if he was an upstanding citizen.

So yes, they say, David would is a rapist, but he's not a serial killer. It was the Al Paso police and prosecutors who turned him into one. 33 years ago, a jury decided David would was guilty, but also that he was irredeemable, that he would, if given the chance, kill again. David's whole case disputes the very premise of that judgment.

He's saying, "It's not about remorse, or about what he is or is incapable of." He's saying, "Look at the facts, the DNA, the fibers, the timeline, and let that be enough." But just as we get the signal to rap up and we start saying our goodbye, David seems to reconsider, to think more about how he's coming across. He gives it one last shot, or whatever it's worth.

Just so everybody knows, I feel whatever happened to the people, it was bad, it was horrible. My deepest heart that I have and I try to deal with is I'm accused of sexual assaulting a killing a 15-year-old girl.

Now, my past is one thing, but I could never kill a child, I could never, never, never, never,

it's just impossible. And I'm just telling y'all to you for yourselves, I don't care if anybody else hears it. It's bothered me all the time to think, man, I am accused of killing a young girl.

Y'all take care, I appreciate y'all seeing me, God bless, oh, y'all keep it.

“For the next three weeks, David will be on death watch, an area reserved for men with upcoming”

execution dates. On the day of his execution, March 13th, 2025, he'll be welcome up early and driven in a prison van, about an hour west, to the state's execution chamber in Huntsville.

He'll spend the day saying his goodbye is to his family and his lawyers.

All the while, he'll be waiting to hear from the courts.

“To hear if they'll grant him another last minute's day, or if he'll die from lethal injection,”

they haven't till six o'clock. Next time, on the final episode of the last 12 weeks.

The last 12 weeks is written and reported by me Maurice Schema and Alvin Melleth, Alvin

produced the series, Jen Guera edited the series along with Anita Badajo. Julie Snyder is the executive editor for serial productions, additional editing from

“Akiba Solomon, fact checking and research by Ben Falen, music supervision by Jen Guera and”

Phoebe Wang, with mixing by Phoebe Wang, additional mixing by Katherine Anderson, tracking direction from Sean Cole. Our associate producer is Mac Miller, additional production by Anita Badajo, additional reporting by Valerie Boy Ramsey. There's a lot about the death penalty that we couldn't fit into this show, stories from

capital defense lawyers, a fascinating look at the data behind executions. You can find all of that in our newsletter, sign up for it at ny times.com/serialnewsletter. Original music for this series by Adam Dorn, aka Motion Worker, but Tyus Basi and John Evans of Stelwagon Symphinette, additional music by Dan Powell and Marion Lazzano. Adam Dorn aka Motion Worker composed our theme song.

Video production by Sean Devaney, our standards editor is Susan Westling. Legal review from Allemine, Sumar and Jackson Bush. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcon. Sam Dornick is Deputy Managing Editor of the New York Times. Special thanks to Kyle Grandelow, David Dow, Ebony Reed and Samantha Winter.

The last 12 weeks is a production of Zero Productions, the Marshall Project, and the New York Times.