Transcript of 889: There’s Something About Hail Mary

A quick warning: there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Desperate times, my friends, call for desperate measures. Ora was in college when something mysterious happened. She was at her computer editing.

And I was editing, editing, looking at this computer, and my eyesight started to go blurry. And I just, like, couldn't really see the computer that well. And I was like, "I need to stop. I can't really see anymore." And I was walking home and, like, everything's just blurry.

An eye doctor examined her, said there was nothing wrong with her eyes to cause the blurriness.

And then— oh, I remember I had weird heart palpitations. So I went to the doctor to get an EKG, and they were like, "You seem fine. Maybe you're just in love." Pause on that.

That was really a thing that happened to you? You showed up with medical symptoms and they said, "Maybe you're in love"?

Yeah.

She was actually falling in love, but she did not think that explained the heart palpitations. She was starting to get the feeling that people were not taking her seriously. And things were getting worse.

It just feels like everything in my body is breaking in a weird way. Terrible fatigue, horrible brain fog, and this feeling in the left side of my brain, just like— the best way I can describe it is I feel like an ice cream scoop has been taken out of my head.

Symptoms like that come and go for 2 years. Blurry vision. Her legs are weak and tremble. Her throat swells up and it feels like she's being strangled. And then some stuff is constant. She's exhausted but can't sleep. Pressure headaches. It's hard to think. This derails her life. She's always taking time off from work or showing up late in the day. Can't be on the computer for too long, which limits what jobs she can get. She's going to the doctor all the time. She's too tired to go out with friends at night. Remember, she's in her 20s. A tip on Reddit—of course, Reddit—leads her to believe that she may have Lyme disease, even though she'd already been tested for Lyme disease and it came up negative. No Lyme. A different doctor now tests her again, and this time she tests positive for Lyme. So the doctor prescribes the standard treatment for Lyme: doxycycline, this antibiotic. Doesn't work for her. Then she spends 2 years on other antibiotics and other drugs. Those fail too. Maybe— it's possible— this is because she didn't really have Lyme disease. That second test she took for Lyme was not an FDA-approved test.

This is the nightmarish world of Lyme. This whole debate over who really has it and who just has symptoms. From Aura's point of view, the question was moot. She had the symptoms. She wanted them gone. Regular doctors weren't doing it. So she started looking at all the other treatments that people try for these symptoms. And there are a lot of them. She does sessions in a hyperbaric chamber, gets inside an infrared sauna.

I tried this, like, elimination diet where all I could eat was, like, grapefruit and goat cheese and oatmeal. I tried, like, a very intense regimen of Chinese herbs. That a doctor in New York City invented and manufactured himself. But at every turn, you're like, "Am I being preyed upon?

I'm spending so much money." And this drags on for years. She's floating in this unpleasant vortex in interstellar medical space where nobody's got answers. Things get so bad that she leaves her job in the middle of her contract because it was too hard to make it through the day. She moves from New York to the Arizona desert. Thinking that might help. And now it's 5 years since her symptoms first appeared.

I was just looking down this road that looked really bleak. And this was around the time when I was working with a chronic disease life coach who was starting to say things like, "Well, Ora, what would it be like if you never get better? Why don't we start thinking about that?" Like, to have kind of radical acceptance. And I felt very resistant to that. But sort of teetering on the precipice of, like, giving up.

It was at this point that Aura's mom heard about somebody in Aura's situation who supposedly got cured and sent Aura to that doctor. And he suggested a treatment where he was gonna put a common product—this is something you get at any drugstore for cheap—into her veins with an IV. I am not gonna tell you what this product is because this is so unproven. The Centers for Disease Control has said there is no evidence that this works. In fact, this is a toxin. Would do equal damage to healthy and diseased cells. The Infectious Diseases Society of America has warned against trying this because the dangers outweigh these utterly unproven benefits. But this doctor, he thought that would cure it.

But he seems very confident, and his explanation for why I hadn't heard of this before was because it's so accessible and so cheap and so affordable, Big Pharma doesn't want you to have it.

Now, when someone says an argument like that to you, are you the kind of person who's like, yes, I'm in, because I hate Big Pharma, or are you the kind of person who's like, I don't know, that's what crazy people say?

I'm both. It's like, so I'm always open, but I'm also very aware of how crazy it sounds. It did sound crazy to you? Yeah, I think anytime like a medical doctor is telling you something that sounds like a conspiracy theory, it's warrant for concern. Yeah, but at this point I'm like I mean, I can't think clearly. I'm so tired. I'm so eager to move on with my life that I'm really feeling, like, willing to try anything. And I think I didn't do as much research as one might imagine. I did more research than her.

This is Ura's little sister, Aviva, joining the interview. And the way I heard about this story is that Aviva works here at the radio show. Aviva de Kornfeld. She'd watched her sister suffer for years. And worried about her.

This treatment— I was very scared. I mean, I was really fixated on this article that I sent her about this woman who had died, who did the IV and then within 36 hours was dead. And I thought, doesn't seem worth it. It's true.

The danger of this particular treatment is that it might kill you, with again, no solid studies showing that it works. And when you showed that to her, what did she say?

She was freaked out by it, obviously, but was just kind of like, the current state and how I feel also isn't sustainable. I really, my preference would be to have a sister who is sick and alive rather than a dead sister. It's like, you would prefer to have a sister who is sick and alive than one who is dead. And it's, like, not to be overly dramatic, like, I certainly didn't want to die, but I was like, "I don't want to be the sister who's sick and alive. Like, this really sucks." And my current state is just so unpleasant and so confused and exhausted. Like, it was just, like, reaching a point of, like, this is not a way to really live. Yeah. If there was a chance it could work, I wanted to try it. So this is like a Hail Mary pass. Yeah. Total Hail Mary.

So fully knowing that this could kill her, she got the IVs. 4 of them over a few weeks. And this is not really the result I would have predicted. Her symptoms went away. The ice cream scoop on her head, the brain fog, the fatigue, the achiness, all of it. Maybe the IV treatment had something to do with this. Maybe it didn't. I've now spoken with 3 Lyme experts and researchers who could not explain this result. They said this is the kind of thing that you would want to do a proper scientific study on, because the world is filled with things that seem to work in one isolated case and then really don't prove out. I also managed to reach Ora's doctor, and the one thing that he said to me in an email was that he was convinced that it was not the IV that ended her symptoms. But one of the other things that he tried with her, he'd given her other supplements and pills. And then he ghosted me without saying what that thing was that he thought worked. Wouldn't reply to repeated emails and texts. And Aura, when she looks back on it now, she thinks it's kind of nuts.

Like, she's glad she was cured for sure, but to be that desperate that you feel like you have no other choice So you throw everything you have into something that not only seems unlikely to succeed, sometimes is genuinely terrifying. That is not a place anybody ever wants to be. Like this IV treatment. Like, it doesn't—

it doesn't seem like a good idea. You can't look back on it and be like, "Well, given the information we had at the time, we made the best decision we could." It's like, "No, that was a bad idea." And so if it turns out bad, then it's like you have no one to blame but yourself. But if it turns out good, and I guess that's what the Hail Mary is, is like a bad idea that has the potential to work.

Well, today on our program, people in bad situations with no other options going for crazy long shots they hope against hope are gonna fix the impossible situations they've found themselves in. Our entire episode today, my friends, happens in the fourth quarter, seconds left in the game, after coming from 29 points behind, far, far from the basket, throwing a ball that really looks like it's gonna be short. When does that ever work out? From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. This American Life Act One: 12 Weeks Notice. So some jobs, the entire premise of the job is that every day you're going to go up against impossible odds on a mission that is probably not going to succeed. And then you have to go to work, throw yourself into it, try to make it happen day after day. There's a new series by our co-workers at Serial about people like that. It's about defense attorneys who work with death row inmates. In Texas, where this particular story takes place, these kinds of appeals to get people off death row fail 94% of the time. And hearing this series, for all the news stories and movies that I've seen about lawyers and that job, it showed sides of it that really surprised me.

I don't think I really got some things about the people who do that job and what that job is until I heard this series. And so, they allowed us to pull a few scenes from the first 2 episodes to play for you here so you can get a sense of this. We'll start at the top of the show. Here's how they open the series. Maurice Shemagh of The Marshall Project is the host.

In the fall of 2024, a criminal defense lawyer got the kind of phone call that most lawyers can only dream about. It concerned a client of his, a guy named David Wood, one of Texas' most notorious serial killers. He was sitting on death row, months away from his execution.

I would like to discuss with you something about David Wood.

While I don't condone what has happened in that case, the fact is I don't want—

The man on the phone, George Hall, thought something corrupt had gone down in David Wood's trial. It had happened more than 30 years ago, but for 30 years, he'd said nothing, mostly because he was afraid to. For those 30 years, he'd been on parole. He worried if he aggravated the authorities, they might find some way to send him back to prison. But now his parole had ended, and George Hall was ready to tell his story, which he'd eventually put into a sworn declaration. That story goes like this. Back in the late '80s, George Hall and David Wood were locked up together at the Eastham Unit in Texas. George Hall was in for murder. David Wood was in for rape. They weren't particularly close. David Wood was quiet, didn't talk much. But when he did, George says, it was mainly to complain about how the police in his hometown of El Paso were harassing him, investigating him for a series of murders. Basically what he said was El Paso was trying to pin it on him. David Wood insisted he had nothing to do with those murders. George thought maybe he didn't, maybe he did. Either way, he didn't really care.

Eventually, George and David Wood were separated. Moved to different facilities hundreds of miles apart. One day, George says he's in the prison library, ready to go to lunch, when two officers come in and tell him to pack his stuff.

I said, "Well, where am I going?" They wouldn't tell me. So next thing I know, I'm on a bus ride down to El Paso.

A few hours later, George finds himself in a holding cell in the El Paso County Jail. Two other guys join him in there. George recognizes them both. As guys who had celled with David Wood. And one of them says to the group, they have an opportunity. They can all get money, maybe, or less prison time. All they have to do is snitch on David Wood. Soon enough, they're escorted out of the cell and into a car. And George says that's when the cops start rolling out the red carpet.

They give us the tour up Scenic Drive, up the mountainside, look across the Rio Grande, look into Old Mexico and this and that. Whatever, you know? And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, we're not handcuffed. What if we jump out and run? What are they gonna do then, you know?

But he sits tight. George says they're taken to a hamburger joint for lunch and then ultimately to a police station. The guys are offered coffee, snacks, cigarettes, and then they're ushered into a room with detectives. Of course, they got files everywhere.

They got David Woods's name plastered all over the thing. They got arrows and, you know, lines going to this, this, dates wrote down, files are sitting there. They start handing us files. Look at this, we got this on him, we got this on him, he did this, we know this, this, this, this. And going through all facts and stuff, they're this narrative-driven shit, and you're reading what they got. And then they, after that, they goes, you know anything? Well, I don't know a goddamn thing. All they had to do is ask me at the prison unit. I was madder than shit about it. As for the other two guys, they go back, they're talking to each other, but it's in real low tones and they basically don't even want to talk to me about nothing. So I knew to myself right then and there, they're going to say whatever they want them to say.

They're going to tell the police that David Wood confessed to multiple murders. But George is sure these guys don't actually know anything about David Wood. He would have heard about it already. Plus, he knows they're not above lying. George returns to prison. Not long after, he writes to an El Paso prosecutor about, quote, "improprieties that I am aware of." He says he knows the informants are fabricating their stories. The prosecutor never writes back. But the letter does make its way into David Wood's case file. Eventually, David Wood does go on trial for the murders. George is never called to testify, but the two other guys become the star witnesses for the prosecution. The jury convicts David Wood and he's sentenced to death. Court documents show that after the trial, one of the informants received $13,000 in reward money. The other got his own capital murder charge dropped. Identified more than a dozen officers, detectives, and supervisors who were involved in David Wood's case. I wanted to ask them about George Hall. Some were dead, one had dementia, one hung up on me, and others never responded. But the one detective who did speak to me extensively about the case called George's whole story, quote, preposterous.

George and the two others were brought in together and interviewed by the El Paso police. That's documented in court records. But the detective said he couldn't imagine his colleagues taking prisoners out for a joyride and showing them case materials in order to get them to snitch. For more than 30 years after David Wood's trial, George kept tabs on the case, Googled it from time to time, And in 2024, George saw that David Wood was scheduled for execution, and George was finally off parole. So if he was gonna speak up, it was now or never.

I don't know if it's gonna make a difference whether he gets executed or not. That's not the question. That's not what I gotta live with. What I have to live with is, can I live with myself Knowing that I know two people fabricated testimony to get a guy executed, and I don't say anything about it.

Not long after George Hall called David Woods' lawyer, David Woods' lawyer emailed me asking me to write about the case. I wasn't surprised. I'm a journalist at a nonprofit called The Marshall Project, where we cover the criminal justice system. I'm the death penalty guy on staff, as gloomy as that sounds. But I was surprised by who was asking— Greg Worchuk. I know Greg Worchuk as a big deal in capital defense work. He's been defending people on death row for decades and even stopped one execution by winning at the Supreme Court. I'd asked him for an interview years ago. For a book I was writing on the death penalty. He said no, he rarely spoke to reporters. But now here he was in my inbox. His email was polite and panicky. David Wood's execution date was only 17 weeks away. He wanted me to write about the case and all the problems he saw with it. I was pretty skeptical. I did the hard-hitting research of reading the Wikipedia page about David Wood, and woof, 6 women and girls, one as young as 14, killed and buried in the desert outside of El Paso. David Wood even got one of those spooky serial killer nicknames, the Desert Killer.

Greg wrote to me that David Wood was innocent, that he didn't commit any of these murders. And sure, I did find George Hall's story compelling, but even if those informants were lying at the trial, that doesn't mean David Wood didn't do it. Plus, in order to do the story Greg was pitching, I'd have to reinvestigate it from scratch. All 6 murders in a matter of weeks. That sounded impossible. But I was curious about what Greg was up to, his overall project, trying to sow enough doubt at the last minute in order to save his client's life. I'd seen executions get stayed for procedural claims about execution methods or a defendant's mental fitness. But this wasn't just a claim about an unfair trial. Greg was saying David Wood didn't do it at all. And now, somehow, he's supposed to prove that in a few months. So I told Greg, "I'm not going to do the big feature story on David Wood you're imagining. But what if I follow you around, be there with a microphone as you strategize with your team, hunt for witnesses, and try to persuade people of David Wood's innocence with the clock ticking?" Greg had a million reasons to say no.

I'm still kind of shocked. That he said yes.

So that's the premise. Maurice is gonna follow this defense team. And before we get to some of what he witnesses doing that, we should run through the evidence against David Wood in this murder conviction. Maurice, uh, thank you for talking me through this right now.

Yeah, thanks for having me here.

Just a quick heads up for listeners that these crimes are pretty awful and might not be right for every listener or for children to listen to. Um, Maurice, let's just run through it. How solid was the evidence that got David Wood the death penalty?

So the person who really walked us through the evidence was a detective who worked on the case. His name is John Guerrero. He was with the El Paso Police Department, and he's retired now, and he invited my Serial producer Alvin Melith and I to his house in El Paso. He introduced himself as Johnny. It's one of the biggest cases of his career, and he seemed to like talking about it.

You can ask me, "Is there any doubt in your mind that this is the man that committed these heinous crimes against these little girls?" None whatsoever.

None. None. So this begins in the summer of 1987, and there are two county employees working in the desert outside of El Paso. And Johnny says they saw a leg sticking out of the sand. The police checked it out, and they found out that it was a woman named Rosa Maria Casio. She was in her 20s. And then they searched the area around her, and pretty quickly, they find a second body about 50 feet away. It's a woman named Karen Baker. She's 20, and she's a mother of three young children. And then over the next few months, they find a total of 6 bodies in this area of the desert. 2 of the victims are girls in middle school, and then their ages run up into their early 20s. Ugh, middle school kids. I know, it's really— It's awful. The detail that really stuck out to me was that they could identify the girl who'd been in 8th grade in part because they found her t-shirt where all the other kids had signed their names on the last day of school. And it turns out that that girl's mother becomes a real leading force in this case, and she pushes Johnny to see all of these murders as connected.

Affected, first of all, and then to go talk to other middle school kids to try to get clues or tips from them about, you know, who might have done it.

And in fact, they do get clues. Let's play a little bit from the podcast where you get into that.

We started getting information from several people about this white guy that was going around in a beige truck and also in a motorcycle.

El Paso is majority Hispanic, so this detail— a white guy, stood out to Johnny. The kids say this guy was always around.

Giving weeds to them and buying them beer and that kind of stuff. And then also we were told that he was real focused on these young girls, you know, real young girls, 15, 16-year-old little girls. And I don't remember who it was, but somebody gave us this nickname Skeeter.

In old tapes from this investigation, you hear this name come up a lot: Skeeter. Did you ever hear any of the kids mention a guy by the name of Skeeter that had offered them some marijuana or something like that? You knew him by a nickname? By Skeeter. Okay, how long had you known him?

And then we started asking people about this guy Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter.

Skeeter or Scooter? Skeeter. That was that guy in the truck. That was the guy in the truck?

Yeah. Somebody said, well, Skeeter is a guy that just got out of prison. Skeeter is who? And his name is— David Wood, I guess. David Wood.

Of course, we run his name. The mechanics of how Skeeter and David Wood get linked are hazy. In the recordings I listened to, most of the kids had no idea who Skeeter was. And the ones who say Skeeter was David Wood, it's not clear if they put that together themselves or if they were repeating the connection that the cops made. In any case, when Johnny learns more about David Wood's criminal record, he discovers a rap sheet that's long and egregious. Multiple sexual crimes against girls, one as young as 12. And the timeline tracks. David Wood had been released from prison less than a month before the first of these victims disappeared.

So, you know, I mean, right away the antennas go up, you know, the red lights start blinking and what have you, you know.

Okay, so that is what makes David Wood Johnny's prime suspect. Um, but Maurice, as you say in the show, just having a nickname and a history of crimes, even very disturbing crimes, that is actually not enough to put him away for 6 murders. Um, they also get the 2 jailhouse witnesses that you talked about in the show's opening. And then there's one bit of physical evidence that connects David Wood to the crime.

Yeah, it was surprising to me that there was only one bit of physical evidence. It's a set of orange fibers, probably from a blanket, And these are threads that came from David Wood's vacuum cleaner, like the bag in his vacuum cleaner. And then they were also found with one of the victims' bodies in the desert.

And then the other big thing that Johnny's got, and this is probably the most substantial thing that connects Wood to these murders, is this woman named Judith Kelling.

Uh, tell her story. Judith Kelling was a sex worker in El Paso in the '80s. And she's deceased now, but she came forward and did a recorded interview with Johnny. Today's date is Monday, November 16, 1987. She came forward shortly after some of the women were found in the desert. And she said she'd been hitchhiking, and a white guy picked her up with his truck. And he wouldn't take her to where she wanted to go, but instead invited her to do cocaine with him out in the desert. So he drives her out there and pulls out a shovel and also some rope.

So this is from her interview.

And he took the shovel and he started digging. And he came back, he got the blanket, and he told me— he took me— he made me get out the truck. I didn't want to. I told him, just take me back. He kept calling me a bitch. He goes, don't turn around, bitch. And I was getting panicky and scared because I thought he was gonna try something with me.

Judith Kelling says that he tied her up and raped her, and there are a lot of creepy details, like he kept telling her to say that she was 14 years old. And then he hears some voices nearby and gets spooked, and he leaves her out in the middle of the desert to find her own way home. The police give Judith a photo lineup, and she identifies David Wood as the guy. And she takes the police to where she was raped. And Johnny tells me that it's about 50 yards from where the murder victims were found.

And then, as you explain in the show, the police arrest Wood for the rape. He denies it, but he's convicted, and he goes to prison. And then, with him in prison, Johnny tries to connect him to the 6 murders.

Yeah, and it takes a long time. But the jury is convinced, and they only deliberate for, like, 90 minutes before sentencing him to death.

And so in your podcast, after you explain all that background, then your series really gets going, and you really get into the meat of it. And we follow the defense attorneys, led by Greg Werchuk, as they try all kinds of different tactics and meet with all sorts of people to try to stop David Wood's execution. They have just 12 weeks. They go to a district attorney, they go to a TV news person, they hear about somebody who thinks their dad may have committed at least some of the 6 murders, and they have to decide if that is worth running down. I have to say, I was really surprised at how many different roads they could go down and had to choose between.

Yeah, he had a lot of them to choose between. Greg actually got the original list of police suspects, and there were 36 of them on it. And some of them did seem promising. So, there was one man who failed a polygraph test about the murders, which I know those are unreliable, but he did fail it. So, Greg's team runs that one down, and Alvin and I had to actually knock on some of these people's doors too, which we describe in the show. Basically, Greg's theory on this case is that the cops had tunnel vision. They were under all this pressure to solve the case. The victims' families were demonstrating in public. And so they took every bit of evidence and massaged it to fit David Wood, or discarded it if it fit someone else.

And so with all that in mind, let's just pick up with your show at this scene that happens in your second episode. Greg has just been to the courthouse to reexamine some of the physical evidence in the trial, the orange fibers. It is 50 days before David Wood's execution is scheduled to take place.

On the way out of the courthouse, Greg says he wants to grab one more thing from a clerk. He asked for any and all criminal records related to a guy named Michael Plyler. This is a new name to me. It wasn't on the El Paso PD's list of 36 suspects. But the other night, Greg came across Plyler's name in old state records, along with a picture of a truck. Which looked a lot like David Wood's truck. So Greg wondered, could this all be a case of mistaken identity? He wants to look through Plyler's criminal files to see if there's anything in there that might tie him to the case beyond the truck. Like if he went by the nickname Skeeter. Because Skeeter is this nickname that keeps popping up throughout the case as David Wood, but David Wood's never used that as a nickname. So it seems a bit odd that that would be a name he would be giving to people. This depends on believing David Wood about the nickname, which Greg does. But either way, this Plyler deep dive seems to me like a real long shot. And it reminds me of a criticism I've heard a lot, mostly from prosecutors and judges.

They say lawyers like Greg have years to do this stuff. But they wait until the last minute so they can maximize the drama. I ask him about this. So these are files that you've had for a long time and you're just now— I guess I wondered if this name had emerged in something you just got. No, yeah, but it's— I've had it for a long time in the sense that it's buried in 12,000 pages of records. Gotcha. Buried in 12,000 pages of records. His point being that yes, he's technically had Michael Plyler's name for years, but he's been working solo for much of that time. So he's had to pick and choose what to focus on. But it's also true that Greg is incentivized to stretch this out as much as possible, to show up at court with new information right before the execution. That way, the judges will be so overwhelmed, they'll have to hit the pause button, and Greg's client gets to live another day. In fact, Gregg's already been accused, pretty harshly, of delaying David Wood's execution in all kinds of ways. In 2009, Wood was about to be put to death, and a day before it, Gregg got them to delay by arguing that David Wood has an intellectual disability.

The courts ultimately reject this appeal, but it takes 5 years for them to rule on it. Then they spend years arguing over evidence that was never DNA tested. Last year, a judge summarizing the last 15 years of this case accused David's defense of a, quote, "pattern of piecemeal litigation and delay." Over those years, Greg has filed motions to replace prosecutors, to claim a judge had a conflict of interest, to test this or that bit of evidence. He lost all these arguments, but the judge's point was, "This guy just throws spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, and he does it one noodle at a time." Other lawyers get accused of the same things. There's a perception on the part of prosecutors and also lots of judges that lawyers like Gregg are such extreme anti-death penalty zealots that they're willing to bend the rules, if not outright break them. Gregg and I finish up at the courthouse around lunchtime. Before we head back to the hotel, he proposes we swing by someone's house first, a woman he's been trying to talk to for some time now. Ramona Dismukes. Her importance as a witness is kind of questionable.

She was best friends with a girl who disappeared back in 1987. A lot of people in El Paso assumed David Wood was responsible, but police never found evidence, and he wasn't convicted of it. It's the kind of witness I could imagine skipping, but Greg decides it's worth a try. We pull off the highway and drive up to this small house where a guy with a mohawk is hauling stuff out to a dumpster. Greg hops out of the car and talks to him. He comes back looking defeated. But as we're pulling away, I see a woman in the rearview mirror. Here, let me see. Hi. How are you? Greg leads the woman towards the car, and I roll down my window. What's your name? I'm sorry. I'm Ramona Desmuses. Everyone is half interrupting each other. Ramona tells us the Mohawk guy is actually her husband. She moved out of state and is just back to do renovations. She seems excited to talk to Greg, but says the house is too much of a mess to invite him in. She suggests another spot.

I mean, there's like a Whataburger up the street, right around the corner. Okay. And I can go there.

Your husband said you might have like files and records still.

I still have all of the old articles. I have everything.

Naomi and Alvin meet us at the Whataburger. As the only Native Texan in this group, I feel obligated to say Whataburger is a state institution, but it is not a great place to do an interview. There's loud music, soda fountains and fryers going, people coming in and out. Ramona blazes in, big expressive face. Her hair is wild and curly, some of the layers dyed cherry red. She slaps down this giant binder, very dusty, that says Mona's Articles. She also goes by Mona in cursive letters next to what looks like a cigarette burn. It's full of old newspaper clippings that leave flakes on the table. Apparently, all those years Greg was developing his theories of what really happened in 1987, Ramona was nursing her own. El Paso is a pretty big city, but Ramona talks about it like a small town. David Wood, the police, the victims, their parents. Everybody knows everybody, as if somehow they all went to high school together. Even this Whataburger is relevant in a way. Ramona tells us she got involved in this case because of her best friend, Cheryl Vásquez. When they were still teenagers, Cheryl married Ramona's brother, which made them best friends and sisters-in-law.

And Cheryl—

She worked right here at this Whataburger. This is where she worked. When she went missing, she was working here. And she never even got her last check from this place 'cause she was gone. But—

Cheryl was 19 when she disappeared, the same summer as all the Desert Killer victims. When bodies started turning up in the desert, Ramona was worried that Cheryl was gonna be one of them. She felt the cops weren't looking hard enough for her friend. So she enlisted her mom, and they decided to figure out what happened to Cheryl themselves. They knew Cheryl was last seen at this one Circle K convenience store.. And so they came up with, frankly, a totally bonkers plan.

We started hanging out at that Circle K. And my mom was literally tricking me. She was like, "Go sit on that wall and somebody's gonna come and try to kidnap you, and I'll call the cops and we'll get them and we'll know who it was." And I'm like, "Okay." Your mom sounds like a real character from what I've— Oh yeah, she was feisty until the moment she died. She had me sitting on that wall in little shorts, 17 years —waiting to get me kidnapped. I'm like, "Thanks, Mom." But—

By way of explanation, Ramona says that her mom was, quote, "German." The lawyers don't ask her to explain more. But as strange as the plan was, there was some logic to it. Ramona and Cheryl were about the same age, and according to Ramona, looked so alike that they got mistaken for sisters. Ramona's mom thought she could use her daughter's looks to lure out the Desert Killer. Ramona says that she and her mom did this Circle K routine over a few days with no luck. Then one afternoon, she was sitting on a wall outside the store in her shorts when she saw a truck approach. Word around town was that the Desert Killer drove a beige or a brown truck.

One day, this brown truck came rolling in and went to the store and came out and looked over at me and was like, "Oh shit." Threw a quarter at me.

"Go home." He's like, "Huh? Go home.

Your family's looking for you. They said I stole you. The cops are asking me questions. You need to take your ass home." And I'm like, "Who are you talking to?" This was how Ramona first met David Wood.

At this point, the cops were starting to zero in on him for the disappearances, including Cheryl's, and he knew it. He mistakenly thought Ramona was Cheryl because, again, they looked alike. So that part of the plan actually worked. Ramona says he tossed a quarter at her, as in, "You are the girl the cops think I abducted. Please use this quarter to call home on the payphone. Tell everyone you're safe." Ramona goes on to tell us about the surprising relationship that developed between her, her mom, and David Wood, something between a friendship and a covert op. David Wood himself remembers spending time with the two of them, but what he didn't know is that they were also spying on him. Ramona says her mom started inviting David Wood to their house.

He'd come over, she'd give him coffee, they'd hang out, they'd talk. My mom thought she was slick, and she was. My mom was like, you know, I'm gonna sit here and talk to him, you go search his truck, you know.

She says she stole David Woods' keys and rifled through his truck trying to find something incriminating, but she never did. She also saw him get nauseous around blood. She cut her hand in front of him once, which, while not exactly exonerating, didn't scream serial killer either. For Ramona and her mom, it all added up to one thing: David Wood could not be the Desert Killer. Ramona says her mom was eager to help clear his name.

My mom immediately called the detectives. He's the wrong guy. You got the wrong guy because he didn't kidnap my daughter, and she looks just like Cheryl, and he threw a quarter at her and told her to go home. And you know, my mom's German, very feisty, very loud. She's like, da da da da da.

So they're like, They're like, "Oh, we want to come and talk to you." The police came to the house and asked Ramona to come down to the station to give a statement to detectives. She was sketched out.

And I said, "No, I'm not gonna give you a statement." And they said, "Well, we want to show you something." So they put me in the car and took me out to the desert. And they're like, "You know, there's bodies out here, and it'd be really easy for you to be out here." And they wanted me to write a statement. They told me out there in the desert. They said, "We need you to go back and write a statement. We need you to tell us that David Wood tried to take you." I said, "But he didn't try to take me. He threw a quarter at me and told me to go home." They said, "Well, that's not what we need you to say." I said, "But that's not the truth." And they said, "You know, you look just like all the other girls that are gone. This could be you." And I was like, "Are you threatening me?" And they're like, "Well, no, we're just telling you that if you don't put him away, he might take you." Ramona says the detectives who drove her out to the desert were Johnny Guerrero and his partner Alfonso Marquez.

She eventually put all of this in a sworn statement to the court. Ramona is not the first person to accuse these guys of abusing their power. There's George Hall, the guy who called Greg with the whole story of the jailhouse informants and the red carpet treatment, and later laid out his claims in a sworn declaration. According to trial transcripts, at least one other witness claimed the police tried to add falsehoods to her statement. In a different case from around this time, a suspect told a reporter that Detective Guerrero bullied him into a false confession. We asked Detective Guerrero about that interrogation, and he said he didn't remember it. He also denied ever taking Ramona out to the desert. Actually, what he said was, quote, "She's full of shit." Moreover, he told us in his 15 years in homicide, quote, "I was never accused of any wrongdoing or coercion by anyone I talked to." or any case I worked, unquote. Detective Marquez, for his part, died a couple of years ago, but it is worth noting that he had a reputation for lying and using force. In a different case, he allegedly bullied a 16-year-old kid to make him confess to 2 murders.

The kid was later exonerated after serving nearly 20 years in prison. Watching the lawyers interview Ramona, watching them jot down notes at every twist and turn. I was struck by how absurd it was that this was where we found ourselves, 50 days out from the execution. All of us huddled around a table in this Whataburger, the lawyers trying to piece together something useful from this zany story. Ramona is entertaining, but since I'm not steeped in the case, it also seems like she mixes theories and stories and gossip and evidence so effortlessly, and at such a rapid clip, —that it's a little hard to keep up, much less to accept it all at face value. I look over at Greg and Naomi to see how they're reacting, to get some clue about how seriously I should take all of this. But they're more or less statues. Very stoic, these two lawyers in a Whataburger. All of which to say, I'm not sure how to assess some of the other claims Ramona makes. The most explosive ones concern a very important person in the case against David Wood. Judith Kelling.

And when I heard her name, I'm like, yeah, that prostitute that's saying David raped her. Yes.

Judith Kelling was the woman who claimed David Wood raped her out in the desert. Ramona says she was out one day looking for her sister-in-law who was still missing when she spotted Kelling and sidled up to her.

So I'm like playing it cool with her, and I'm like, oh yeah, you know, I'm looking for my sister. And she's like, "Oh, the David Wood thing." She's like, "Yeah, you know, that's all bullshit." And I was like, "What do you mean?" And she's like, "He didn't do anything to me." Really?

Really. So she told you this in— after David Wood's arrested in October of 1987?

He was already charged with her rape when he was charged with— before he was convicted.

You can tell in Greg's voice how much he would love to poke holes in Judith Kelling's credibility. It's something he's been trying to do for years. Yeah. For example, he found one source who gave a sworn statement to the court that Judith Kelling had been a police informant, and specifically that she'd been Detective Johnny Guerrero's informant when she reported her rape. Judith also spent long stretches in jail around this time on drug charges. On top of that, Greg has noticed that her story of what exactly happened in the desert kept changing, getting more and more aligned with other things the police believed about David Wood and the murders. Gregg uses these points to make an argument in court filings. Desperate to solve the murders, Detective Guerrero squeezed an equally desperate Judith Kelling to point the finger at David Wood. We asked Detective Guerrero about all of this, and he denies that Kelling was ever his informant. Judith Kelling died a decade ago, so Gregg can't ask her about it. But here, in this Whataburger, Ramona claims Kelling revealed much more to her about what really went down. This is what she's telling me.

They made a deal with me to get me out of jail. And all I gotta do is testify against this guy. I was like, well, were you even raped? She's like, yeah, but not by him. I'm like, who? She said, Mike Plyler. I'm like, who's this guy?

Mike Plyler? What? The same guy Greg asked about at the courthouse a few hours ago? The one I thought was a long shot? I look over at Greg and I can see he's just as surprised. He's barely able to contain himself, nodding so hard it's like he's swaying. Ramona says that after she got Mike Plyler's name from Judith, she and her mom looked for the guy and well, basically stalked him. They staked out his apartment, watched him come and go. They were blown away by the similarities between this man and David Wood. Similar builds, similar tattoos. On top of the similar trucks, they also both drove red motorcycles. I can practically see the gears turning in Greg's mind. And as the Whataburger fills with the sound of someone making the world's loudest milkshake, he tosses out one more question. Do you have any information about this nickname Skeeter? That supposedly is— That's Skeeter.

Michael Plyler's Skeeter.

Well, when you say that, how do you know that he's Skeeter?

Because that's what Judith called him. Is that right? That's what she called him. She called him Skeeter.

So that's Skeeter. Ramona says that she went to the cops back in 1987 and told them everything she learned about David Wood, about Judith Kelling, and about Michael Plyler. And she says the cops did Nothing. They could have, for example, looked more into Plyler, gotten some DNA samples, polygraphed him. Instead, Ramona says they simply told her to stay away. Ramona's whole story is wild, obviously. And as we wrap up at the Whataburger, it's not clear to me how Greg is going to use it all, whether he's going to try to corroborate any of these details. And I'm not sure that's really possible. I can imagine what a prosecutor might say. For example, the Judith Kelling story, that it wasn't David Wood who raped her. Well, the state could point to trial testimony from Kelling's sister, who said Judith identified David Wood as the rapist right after it happened. Greg could go after the sister's credibility, but the question remains, why would Judith Kelling make a grand revelation to Ramona, a teenager she just met? There's also a question about Ramona's motivations. I found an old news story that says she was banned from the El Paso County Jail.

She had allegedly graffitied "I love David Wood" on the wall of a visiting booth. Ramona denies it and says people were just out to tarnish her reputation because she was questioning the police department's version of events. Still, not a great thing to have out there on the internet. But what's most useful to Greg, I think, are all those moments when the cops appeared to have tunnel vision. For example, when Ramona says they tried to get her to falsely accuse David Wood, or when she says they ignored the Plyler story, especially if the state didn't tell Wood's lawyers about this stuff before his trial. I wouldn't call these bombshells, but I would call them good evidence. And you could argue that Greg only found it all because the execution date forced him to knock on every door one more time. I ended up calling Mike Plyler a few weeks later. He confirmed that he did live in El Paso during the time in question. His tone got a little sharp when I asked if he went by the nickname Skeeter. He interrupted me and said, quote, "That's false." When asked about raping anyone or being the Desert Killer, he said, quote, "I haven't done nothing.

I don't have nothing to hide." After we hung up, I sent him Ramona's claims. He ghosted me. I do feel for him. This whole episode made me see just how easy it is for anyone to be accused of pretty egregious stuff in a legal filing. In this case, rape and being a suspect in a serial murder case, all because some stranger mentions your name in a Whataburger. We felt we had to use Plyler's name given how much it showed up in the lawyer's legal filing. But we also felt like this man deserves every possible opportunity to respond. So after I sent a ton of follow-ups that went unanswered, Alvin and I decided we just had to try in person. Plyler lives in a mid-sized city in the South. When we got to his house, there were a couple of warning signs about a pit bull, and then we heard barking. I did see a dog through the window. Pretty cute, actually. Plyler opened up just to tell us, quote, "I'm not interested." I asked if I could give him a folder with Ramona's claims. He suggested I throw it in the garbage. I leaned over to put it on the doormat, and by the time I stood back up, the door was closed.

The whole thing lasted maybe 10 seconds. I haven't been able to reach him since.

Maurice Chama, that is from his brand new podcast, The Last 12 Weeks, which is made by Serial with The New York Times and The Marshall Project. You can hear the rest, the promising leads, the disappointing leads, the far-fetched leads, everything they try in this true-life crime story. When you do, I just wanna give you a heads up. You've now heard about 10 minutes of episode 1 and, like, 15 minutes of episode 2. So most of those 2 episodes, you're gonna wanna go back and hear the stuff we haven't included today. You can hear that the last 12 weeks, wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up, people tossing out a real-life message in a bottle. Every single Sunday, hoping someone will respond. That's In a Minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. This is American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, "There's Something About Hail Mary." As I said earlier, we're spending this entire hour in the last 2 minutes of the fourth quarter with people who are behind and desperate, trying any damn thing they can think of. We have arrived at Act 2 of our program. Act 2, Bottle episode. What is the plural of "Hail Mary"?

Is it "Hail Marys"? It seems like it should be the "hail" part that gets to be the part that's plural, 'cause that's the action, right? That's the thing that's happening. But just "Hails Mary" just sounds weird. I ask this because Mickey Meek has this story where you need the plural.

Ayesha Wallace Palomares came across this thing sort of by accident. She's an immigration reporter for a website called LA Taco, and she heard about a lot of people gathering every week outside a detention center called Otay Mesa in San Diego. It's in a pretty desolate spot surrounded by industrial parks and mountains with off-roading trails.

I think when I actually— when I first walked up, I think KISS was playing. A KISS song was playing. And, um, you know, I just remember very cozy, very friendly, very positive, you know, even though this was, you know, across, you know, you're looking at this detention center that has beige walls and two layers of fence with barbed wire. And it's just like, you know, very stark contrast.

It was a whole group of people, about 150, who brought their dogs and kids. They wanted the people inside to know they were there, which is kind of a puzzle because of the fences. Hence the music, which they played pretty loud. They also flew kites and the kids blew bubbles, hoping to get some of them over the detention center's walls. Aisha watched a pastor walk up to a microphone and speaker that was set up.

And he turned around and faced the detention center and he said, "All right, everyone, I want you guys to, like, yell, 'You are not alone.'" You are not alone.

You are not alone.

Let's say it to the hostages behind us. You are not alone. Two more times. You are not alone.

There are more than 1,300 detainees inside Otay Mesa, and a lot of them don't have a good, reliable way to communicate with the outside world. In theory, they should be able to make phone calls. There are these tablets they can use to text or do video chats. But the reality is that they have to pay to do any of that. And a lot of people land in detention without any money. And sometimes their families have no idea where they've been taken. They can try to look it up online in ICE's detainee locator. But that's not always accurate or up to date. And if you're wondering, don't people have a right to a free phone call?

The answer is no. And then I just kind of start to notice that they're, like, calling over the fence. The organizers ask for A numbers. Can you just explain, like, what's an A number? Yeah, it's called an alien number. It's basically a number that is designated to someone who's a non-citizen. And A numbers are really important for family members to locate their loved ones when they've been detained.

If they can get someone's A number, organizers can put money directly on their books. The organizers then started shushing people. Everyone went silent, which Ayesha thought was kind of strange until—

I heard people yell from inside the detention center. Wow. Someone was saying "Russia." So at first, the organizers thought that they were requesting someone who speaks Russian. Russian, Russian! But then they were realizing that the person inside was telling them that the A-number they were sharing was Russian.

Okay. Russia.

This is the number of Russia.

They had translators on hand for at least 13 languages, including Arabic, Russian, Swahili, and Tagalog. A couple people stood by with notebooks and wrote A-numbers into them. They then immediately tried sending money through these apps, up to $20 for phone calls and text messages. And another 45 for commissary. That was the goal: get as many A numbers as possible. It was hard to hear, even when everyone was quiet.

You know, this is not, like, the easiest way to communicate, right?

Like, have you heard of this kind of thing happening at other detention centers before?

No, I have not. This is the first time that I had heard anything like this before.

Detainees were yelling from different outdoor yards, little patches of concrete with a single basketball hoop. So at some point, someone started bringing a listening device with a parabolic dish. And it's not the only way they communicated.

I guess there's like a drain in one of the yards, or I'm not sure if it's in every yard. And so some of the detainees started like kneeling and like yelling through the hole.

The organizers, who call themselves the Otay Mesa Detention Collective, told Aisha that the first time they realized they could communicate through bullhorns and shouting was shortly after they started gathering outside the detention center last fall. They were giving out tamales and bags of fruit to families coming for visiting hours when they heard a woman yelling from inside the detention center. Center. She was yelling on behalf of another woman who was inside and far from her family. Here's a recording of that.

She's only 19 years old.

What's her name? She's from Oxnard, California. She wants her family to know she's here. What's her name?

Her name was Yulissa, and her family did not know where she was. And so they were asking if the organizers could connect with the family or just get some help so that her family could know that she was in Otay Mesa.

I just want to get divorced because I want to get out of here.

No! One of the organizers posted video of that exchange on Instagram, and it went viral. Someone responded in a comment, "She's my in-law," and then set up a GoFundMe that said Yulissa's family had been looking for her for a week. Until then, all they knew was that she never showed up to pick up her 1-year-old daughter from daycare. When Aisha first saw that video, she thought it was something that had happened once. She didn't realize it was happening all the time until she was there. In the middle of all these "ay numbers" being shouted out, another thing happened.

I was just, like, observing, and I saw, like, people scramble. You know, the organizers sort of, like, scramble and say, like, "There's a bottle! There's a bottle!" And then I see, like, a CoreCivic truck, like, start to, like, kind of drive down.

CoreCivic is the private company that runs this detention center.

It was a game of who was gonna get there first, the CoreCivic security truck or the vigil attendee. And one of the vigil attendees ended up grabbing the bottle and bringing it back. And then like a bottle, I was like, a bottle? Like what?

What kind of bottle was it?

It was a lotion bottle, you know, like a travel-sized, like lotion bottle. And I was just in that moment, like someone threw a bottle from inside the detention facility. You know, it's a pretty wide distance to throw something over. They have to throw it from inside of this pod. Yard over the cement wall, and then it has to go across, uh, like, I mean, I'm not sure how tall this fence is, maybe like 14 to 20 feet tall, and it has barbed wire on it. And that's one fence, then it's— there's a little gap and there's another fence, and it's also tall and barbed wire. That is really wild. Yeah, and I was just— I had chills, you know, I was like, that's insane.

I measured it on Google Maps. The shortest distance they would have had to throw the lotion bottle is about 90 feet.

I noticed that everyone kind of got excited. And then I think, I don't know if it was Blue or Holly, walks over to me and says, "You know, there was a note attached to the bottle." And I was like, "What?" Is it attached to it or is it inside of it? It's attached to it. I think they used the sort of like sticker on the bottle to sort of use that adhesive to like somehow attach the note to that, and then that's like what it was wrapped on. So Blue brings it over to you and she says, do you want to hold it? My stomach kind of dropped and I said yes. I'm just holding this note in my hands and I'm reading it.

I was wondering, can you read that message for me?

Yeah, I can. Good afternoon, my wife and I have been at OMDC since April 15th, 2025. It's cold here all the time and the food is poor. For 290 days, we haven't eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can't see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick. There is no internet. My lawyer was not given my phone calls. Many people here have been sitting for 12, 14, 16, 18 months without a final court decision.

Aisha asked the main organizer, a preschool teacher with bright blue hair named Jean Wong, is this the first time someone had thrown a note over to them?

And then Jean tells me that this is not the first note, that there's several notes that they've received, but this is the longest note that they've had. Most of them have had A numbers, but she says that this person from inside was so desperate to have their story told that they had actually thrown another bottle with the same exact note earlier that day.

What kind of other objects have come over?

Lotion bottles, deodorant bottles, and I think even a AA battery.

Most of what they got that day were A numbers. Aisha says about 50, mostly from people shouting and throwing bottles over with multiple numbers scrawled on them. I reached out to CoreCivic about the conditions described in the letter that Ayesha read. They denied all the allegations, called them "flatly false" and inconsistent with their standards. There have been reports for decades about inhumane living conditions and poor medical care at Otay Mesa and other ICE detention facilities. Facilities. But these problems have gotten a lot worse since President Trump returned to office because the number of people in detention has increased so dramatically. Things like overcrowding, not getting enough food or getting food that's spoiled. Also, physical and verbal abuse from guards. One of the biggest issues right now: detainees needing medical treatment and not getting it. Over the past year, the death rate in ICE custody has more than doubled compared to recent years. More than 50 people since President Trump came back to office. One of them was a Haitian man named Emmanuel Damas. He went into septic shock from a toothache. It's worth noting that most people in ICE detention facilities do not have a criminal record.

Crossing the border illegally or overstaying a visa is not a criminal offense. It's a civil violation. And immigration detention is not supposed to be punitive like a prison. Many immigration lawyers believe the administration is trying to wear people down by holding them for long periods in these harsh conditions. So they'll give up on their cases and agree to deportation. While Aisha was there, some of the detainees who'd gotten money put into their accounts sent text messages to the organizers. They requested music they wanted organizers to blast. Others wanted their texts read out loud.

We just got a text from someone inside, and so she's going to read it for everybody here, okay?

I put it into Google Translate and it said, "Are you guys outside? We can hear you.

We can hear you. We can hear you. We love you. Thank you." At the end of the day, the organizers asked Aisha, "Please don't publish anything about how we're communicating with detainees." They worried it would all get shut down. But then they texted the people inside, including the person who threw over the lotion bottle, and asked what they thought. The answer? Publish it. The detainees wanted the story out. They wanted people to know what was happening. Ayesha's story ran. And then, as predicted, there was retaliation, according to detainees. They said that CoreCivic turned down temperatures, took away showers, limited tablet access and commissary time. And shut down the yard on Sunday afternoons, when the organizers are outside. Which means no more messages on bottles thrown over fences. But it doesn't matter. The organizers now have enough A-numbers that they're communicating with hundreds of detainees by text.

Mique is a producer on our show. When we reached out to CoreCivic, they denied that temperatures inside the facility were kept deliberately uncomfortable, and they said they have a zero-tolerance policy for retaliation against detainees. ICE did not respond to our request for comment. You can find more of Ayesha Wallace-Palomares' reporting at the website LATaco.

Coming in on a wing and a prayer. With our one motor gone, we can still carry on.

Coming in on a wing and a prayer.

Our program was produced today by Aviva DeKornfeld. The people who put together today's show include Adrian Lilly, Molly Marcello, Kathryn Ray Mondo, Stone Nelson, Ruthie Tito, Robyn Reed, Nadia Rehman, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rummery, Frances Swanson, Christopher Sotala, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Barry. Serial's new series that we excerpted the last 12 weeks was produced by Alvin Meleth. The series was edited by Jen Guerra, along with Anita Battagio. Additional editing by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig, and Akiba Solomon. Research and fact-checking by Ben Phelan. Scoring by Adam Daughn. Aka Motion Worker, Matthias Bosse, and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonette. Additional music by Dan Powell and Mariam Lozano. Phoebe Wang and Catherine Anderson mixed the show. Special thanks today to Dr. David Scales, Mark Soloski, Dr. Charlotte Mayo, Dr. Ebony Cornish, the San Diego Bike Brigade, the American Bar Association's Immigration Justice Project, the San Diego County Immigrant Legal Defense Program, Mac Miller, Sean Cole, Susan Wessling, Alamin Suleiman, Soomar, Jackson Bush, Ruth Baldwin, Tom Meyer, Rita Radetsdis, and Sean Devaney. Thanks today to This American Life partners Suzanne Hershey, Leslie Fahren, Gabriel Rhode, and Peter James.

I hope that you will consider joining them as a Life Partner. And why? It allows us to keep making the program. A significant part of our budget now comes from our Life Partners. We're hoping that number is going to grow. To thank you, we'll give you dozens of bonus episodes that we've made that have come out so nicely. Try it and you'll see. To join, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torrey Mallettia. You know, people are always walking up to him and asking him, "How do I get into radio?" And he always tells them—

So, you know, I mean, right away the antennas go up.

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.