Transcript of Episode 4: David Wood

I'm David Sanger. I cover the White House and national security at The New York Times, and I try to explain what decisions made in Washington mean for you wherever you live. This is why The Times sends me to the Oval Office when the president is making a major decision or has me ride along on Air Force One on critical trips. And I talk to foreign leaders, exploring why they're so often at odds with the United States. We live in a world of misinformation and disinformation. It's never been more important to have reliable sources of on-the-ground reporting. If you want firsthand reporting on how U.S. policy affects the world, consider subscribing to The New York Times.

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. What kind of person is he? 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. And in 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 surefire way 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 3 rape convictions, another conviction of indecency with a 12-year-old girl. And then on top of that, 3 more women and girls had made accusations against him too, ranging from attempted kidnapping to rape. The story 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 3 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'm Maurice Schama.

Hi, this is Andy. I've been a New York Times subscriber for years and years, and I'm trying to get my teenagers interested in reading it. If they were to have their own logins and we could share articles, I think that would help get them interested.

It would also then allow us to discuss over the dinner table or wherever.

Thank you very much. Andy, we heard you.

It's why we created the New York Times Family Subscription. One subscription, up to 4 separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more at nytimes.com/family. Do you wanna introduce yourself and how we should identify you?

What I told him is I just wanna use my first name.

Okay.

I don't wanna use Christy at 13. That's how I want you to identify me.

Christy was 13 when David Wood raped 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. When Kristi was in middle school, she was hanging out at her friend's house one night and realized she had to get home to make curfew. 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. At 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 streetlights 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.

Kristi says they started scuffling and she fell to the ground. She kept fighting, kicking up at him.

I was a gymnast. I was kind of jockey, you know what I'm saying? So I threw my feet up into his chest, and then he said, "Knock it off, stop, you know, quit doing that." And I said, "What are you doing? What are you doing? You know, get away." And I remember looking over at the house like—

To Kristi, David Woods seemed upset. As she remembers it, he claimed she'd thrown a rock at his truck and hit the windshield. And now he was gonna 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, "Ugh, you know, we're gonna go to my house and my dad's gonna tell you you're full of shit and we're gonna be fine, or Henry's gonna catch up and you're gonna get your butt kicked." I was in that mindset at that point in time.

But Henry never showed up, and David Wood didn't take her to her house. Instead, Kristi says, he led her to a drainage ditch and raped her. After it was over, Kristi says, he disappeared. She walked home and, still in a daze, 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, eye set, nose, lips, mouth, chin.

Kristi spent several days with these puzzle pieces. She talked to detectives repeatedly, rehashing what happened to her over and over again. When Kristi 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 10 pictures. And he laid them out. And he said, "Does anybody look familiar?" And I picked him out.

And you— and it was David Wood?

I picked him out.

David Wood, it turned out, had just been accused of another rape less than 2 weeks earlier. The rest happened pretty quickly. He pled guilty to both rapes and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. But in the end, he only served 7. A few years later, he went on trial for the desert murders and was found guilty. At that point, prosecutors went back to Kristi for help. They wanted her to testify about her rape to help ensure David Wood got the death penalty. Kristi 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 don't want to go to Dallas.

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 6 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 But Kristi also saw this as an opportunity.

For the first time in years, she'd be face to face with David Wood. 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 at me. I think he looked up at me once. But I would not take my gaze off of him, 'cause I wanted him to know that I was in control. It was very much about me having the power back.

Power, control, safety. This is what Kristi says David Wood took from her. When I first arrived at Kristi's house, I noticed a sort of decoy entrance, a front door that leads to a long courtyard before the real front door. Kristi designed this setup herself so that she can suss out any visitors before they get too close. She has 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 'em walk to school. I don't let 'em 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 turned 13, I told 'em what happened. And it connected the dots of why I was such an overbearing mother. Growing up.

It's almost like he robbed you of a lot of things, including the ability to, like, have some chill—

To relax.

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 with us, she says, mostly because she wants to get to you.

My purpose is so there's not a doubt in the listener's mind. And I'm gonna take away that doubt from your mind.

Any doubt that 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.

So we'll trace my tracks, and then I'll tell you where the other tracks were. Okay. 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 Kristi'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. That's much closer.

Yes.

It's compelling being driven around like this, seeing landmarks of the case pass by the car window in rapid succession.

So do you see how close?

Yeah, very close.

Everything is? 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 the defense lawyers have identified, including the lack of DNA testing. But Christy bats it all away.

I know the neighborhood, I know the area, and I know where the abductions took place. And all of that fits his mantra. So I call BS. At what point do we start saying that the justice system served their duty, and why does he still have a voice when the victims don't? There's no ounce of me that feels he's innocent. I'm 100% convinced that it's him.

People are gonna hear about me. They're gonna hate me. I get it. I'm just a convict in prison saying, "I'm innocent," and they're going, "Yeah, right, you lying piece of crap." After the break, David Wood.

This week on The Wirecutter Show. The cost of consumer tech products, laptops, phones, gaming consoles is climbing. We have built a world that makes people need this stuff, and increasingly it's going to be very difficult for a broad category of people to afford. What's driving it, and what can we do about it? Find out wherever you get your podcasts. 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 arrive, there are nearly 3,000 men held inside the prison. 171 of them are on death row. We walk through a metal detector and 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.

Modern tech. I've been locked up so long, I don't even know what modern technology is.

David wears an all-white jumpsuit. He's got long white hair and lots of tattoos. Looks a little 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, mine and his. My aim was to get to know David beyond the facts of the case, who he is as a person. Was he contrite? Did he have regrets? But I got a heads up from his lead lawyer, Greg, that David mainly wanted to talk about the case. He saw this as his one chance to set the record straight, 3 weeks out from his execution. So we both had some ambitious goals for this conversation. And yet one thing that wasn't gonna help either of us was the prison's extremely strict time limit for this interview. So yeah, since we only have an hour, um—

That's it, is an hour?

Yeah, that's it.

Wow. That's gonna go extremely fast.

It's gonna go fast. Let's run through the basics. David Wood was born in 1957 in San Angelo, Texas. He was one of 4 kids, and his background is familiar for death row, insomuch as it was pretty grim. His mom was institutionalized for mental illness when he was little. His dad would deny him dinner if he misbehaved. 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. Usually it was bad when I would drink, I would get drunk. 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 3 years in the free world since he turned 18. He's now 68 years old.

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. Anytime 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 3 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 suss out 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, I 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 bruises, no injuries, nothing. An incident happened, probably scared the crud outta someone. So really, nothing happened, but No, that's pretty much it.

Yeah, okay. I mean, so—

I don't even really like talking about that. This is the 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.

Met her 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.

We 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 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, the law enforcement will tell you that we can't use alcohol or drugs 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 want to dwell for one more beat on how far apart these accounts are. Christy described David's attack as intentional, predatory. David denies the whole rock thrown at 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-putting, to put it mildly, and it doesn't do wonders for his overall reliability. But I also see where it 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 why he's sitting here on death row. The way he tells it, it started when he got on the wrong side of some detectives in El Paso. After David got out of prison for Kristi'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 run-in 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 in the desert, David became one of the main suspects. He says the 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 a 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 murders got laid at his feet.

I'm the moron that turned out to be the scapegoat.

I see. You're like a patsy.

Well, look, First of all, before you start getting the 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 El Paso law enforcement apparatus converged to make him a patsy for 6 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 to Detective Johnny Guerrero, who denies that the El Paso 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, 2 weeks after David gets out of prison for his rape convictions, a teenager is walking through a park. We're 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 Kristi. 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 a 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 suspects' 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 Bee, a case where there's both positive identification and biological evidence they can test. They figure if they can make a connection between David Wood and Bee's rape, they can start proving a pattern that'll help to put him away for the desert murders. So they get a warrant to collect David Wood's blood, and they test it against the semen in Bee's rape kit. And the test excludes David Wood as the rapist.

Wow.

Prosecutors have to drop the case. To David, this 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 El Paso. 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. It 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 pentobarbital, 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 men groaning in 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.

At the same time, he feels some amount of hope, and that's mainly because of his lawyer, 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 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 in 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 Wood's 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. You can imagine somebody listening to all this and saying, "Well, you know, I'm not sympathetic to this guy." Si. What would you say to someone like that?

I don't really know what to say, 'cause 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 go— I thought this was going to be about the case. But when Greg told me, "No, they're going to try to get you, people, to know you 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 Wood's lawyers, his past is very much part of the story here. As counterintuitive as it may sound, they say David Wood's 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 El Paso, and that's how they came to focus on David Wood. A rapist just out of prison with a tendency to mouth off. There was hardly any physical evidence tying him to the murders, this theory goes, so instead, prosecutors highlighted questionable witnesses and ignored evidence that pointed in other directions. David's lawyers think none of this would've worked if he was an upstanding citizen. So yes, they say, David Wood is a rapist, but he's not a serial killer. It was the El Paso police and prosecutors who turned him into one. 33 years ago, a jury decided David Wood 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 isn't capable 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 wrap up and we start saying our goodbyes, David seems to reconsider, to think more about how he's coming across. He gives it one last shot, for whatever it's worth.

Just— just so everybody knows, I feel whatever happened to them people, it was bad. It was horrible. My deepest hurt that I have and I've tried to deal with is I'm accused of sexually assaulting and killing a female. 15-year-old girl. Now my past is one thing, I, but, I could never kill a child. I could never, that's just never, never, it's just impossible. And I'm just telling y'all two 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. All the crazy stuff I've done, murder's never come part of my life. Y'all take care. I appreciate y'all seeing me. God bless. Oh, y'all keep it up.

For the next 3 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 woken 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 goodbyes 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 stay or if he'll die from lethal injection. They have until 6 o'clock. That's next time on the final episode of The Last 12 Weeks. The Last 12 Weeks is written and reported by me, Maurice Schama, and Alvin Melith. Alvin produced the series. Jenn Guerra edited the series, along with Anita Badejo. Julie Snyder is the executive editor for Serial Productions. Additional editing from Akiba Solomon. Fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan. Music supervision by Jenn Guerra 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 Badejo. Thank you. Additional reporting by Valerie Boye 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 nytimes.com/serialnewsletter. Original music for this series by Adam Dorn, AKA Motion Worker, Matthias Bassi, and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonette. Additional music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. Adam Dorn, AKA Motion Worker, composed our theme song. Video production by Sean Devaney. Our standards editor is Susan Westling. Legal review from Alamin Sumar and Jackson Bush. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcon. Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of The New York Times. Special thanks to Kyle Grandillo, David Dow, Ebony Reed, and Samantha Winter. The Last 12 Weeks is a production of Serial Productions The Marshall Project, and The New York Times. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE]