Maurice Chammah has had a unique vantage point of the U.S. capital punishment system for the past decade, reporting multiple stories for news outlets and writing a highly regarded book in 2022.
He has learned that decisions of life and death don’t turn on a sober look at the complete case.
“I was surprised by how often it felt like the evidence that was being brought to court turned on these individual moments in the field that could have gone in a number of different directions, and the fact that it went where it did suggests just kind of the chaos of the world, the arbitrariness of these sorts of events,” said Chammah, an Austin-based journalist now reporting for The Marshall Project, which investigates the criminal justice system.
For the past year and a half, Chammah and producer Alvin Methe have focused on the case of David Leonard Wood, who has been on Texas’ death row for more than 30 years after being convicted in the serial killings of six girls and young women in Northeast El Paso in 1987.
Their five-episode podcast, “The Last 12 Weeks,” will be available starting Thursday. It is a production of The Marshall Project, Serial Productions and The New York Times.
The podcast focuses on Wood’s defense team, led by attorney Gregory Wiercioch, as they maneuver the Texas and federal court systems in an effort to stop his scheduled execution March 13, 2025.
“There’s an execution date set, and the lawyers are trying to make their last-ditch arguments to save a life,” said Methe, a senior producer at Serial Productions. “We thought that was a place that we hadn’t seen a story set before, and we also knew there were all sorts of reasons for that. Lawyers don’t tend to give access because it’s very sensitive in those last moments.”
Wierscioch, a Wisconsin-based attorney who has represented Wood in appeals since 2009, and his defense team agreed to give extensive access to Chammah and Methe in the 12 weeks leading to Wood’s scheduled execution.
The journalists also interviewed other key figures in the case, including Wood and Marcia Fulton, whose 15-year-old daughter Desiree Wheatley was among the victims of the 1987 serial killing spree that shocked El Paso. Lawyers for the Texas Attorney General’s Office, who were arguing in appellate courts for Wood’s execution, didn’t agree to interviews, Chammah said.
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The podcast focuses on a single death penalty case, but also broadly illustrates the death penalty system, especially in Texas, Methe and Chammah said.
“I have found that every time you like really get in there and learn about the details of a case, you are kind of shocked and troubled by – even if you support the death penalty – the course that these cases take, and how they fail everyone involved to some extent at some point along the way,” Chammah said.
The 1987 desert deaths case was El Paso’s first experience with a serial killing, and shocked the community the way no other crime would until the 2019 mass shooting at the Cielo Vista Walmart.
Wood, who had recently been paroled from the state prison system after serving seven years of a 20-year sentence for sexual assault, quickly became the focus of investigators. But because the evidence was largely circumstantial, he wasn’t charged with capital murder until 1990.
He was convicted in November 1992 by a jury in Dallas, where the case was moved because of extensive pretrial publicity in El Paso, and was placed on Texas’ death row in January 1993.
Wood has maintained his innocence and fought a string of mostly unsuccessful appeals, but did win a stay the day before his scheduled execution in 2009 so his lawyers could pursue a claim that a mental disability prohibited his execution.
That appeal was eventually denied, but his lawyers continued to pursue other issues, arguing that evidence in the case pointed to his innocence.
Aimed at a national audience largely unfamiliar with the 1987 El Paso killings, the podcast is built on suspense about what would happen with Wood’s appeal to stave off his scheduled execution in the waning days of winter in 2025.
But many El Pasoans are aware of the outcome. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay two days before Wood was to be put to death. In an unusual unsigned ruling, the appeals court listed no reasons for their decision.
EL PASO MATTERS PODCAST: Execution of El Paso serial killer David Leonard Wood halted
Retired Judge Dick Alcalá, who is reviewing Wood’s conviction at the direction of the Court of Criminal Appeals, has expressed frustration in hearings about the lack of specificity from the appellate court. He has said he likely can’t begin formal evidentiary hearings on the appeal until September at the earliest.
Methe and Chammah said that while the podcast raises significant questions about Wood’s guilt, it also explores the impact on the families of the victims, with Fulton playing a prominent role.
“Anytime you talk to somebody who has a vested interest in a story, you are influenced in a way by their emotions, their feelings, their thoughts on the whole thing,” Methe said. “So, after Maurice and I talked to Marcia for the first time, we were like, ‘I get it, I get where she’s coming from, I get the anger, I get the desire for this to be over, for the feeling that how could this possibly be taking this long, and how could there possibly still be questions about this.’”
The podcast is an exploration of complexity in a criminal justice system where many people go looking for simple answers.
“I hope people take away from this podcast how fragile the system is, and that the death penalty is not an abstraction of sort of a moral debate,” Chammah said, “It’s a living, breathing human system populated by human beings, most of whom are probably operating in good faith. And even then it is full of arbitrariness and trauma, and sort of unnecessary, unforced errors all the way through it that I think lead one to just have a more kind of sober view of whether we should be doing it.”
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