Man Convicted In Serial Killer Case Gets Stay Of Execution As Court Considers Innocence Claim

Yahoo

11-03-2025

In the late 1980s, the bodies of six missing girls and young women were found buried in shallow graves in the desert of El Paso, Texas. Most of the bodies were too decomposed to determine a cause of death, but there were signs that some of the victims had been sexually assaulted. As the death count rose, the El Paso Police Department faced increasing pressure to find and arrest the so-called 'Desert Killer.'
'There are girls being killed out there. The public wants to know what we are doing,' the deputy chief of police told the El Paso Herald-Post in November 1987. 'The department is feeling an impact never felt before because of the notoriety of the case, the serial killer aspect.'
It wasn't long until the police zeroed in on David Wood, a man with a history of sexual assault convictions. The evidence against Wood was purely circumstantial, the state would later admit.Prosecutors centered their case around testimony from jailhouse informants who had incentives to lie, and on acrylic fibers from a vacuum cleaner bag in Wood's apartment that were similar to fibers found on one of the victim's bodies.
Despite the inconclusiveness of the evidence, in 1992, Wood was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.
Wood has steadfastly maintained his innocence. 'I've been trying for 30 years to tell people I didn't do this,' he recently told The Texas Observer.
For decades, Wood has been unable to get relief in court — until now, just two days before he was to die by lethal injection in the Texas death chamber. Earlier this month, Wood's longtime lawyer filed a nearly 400-page petition laying out the case for his innocence and asking a judge to halt the execution.
On Tuesday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted Wood a rare stay of execution to allow time to review some of his claims.
Wood was born in 1957 in San Angelo, Texas. He failed multiple grades and eventually dropped out of school when he was 17. He was arrested two years later for indecency with a child. He pleaded guilty and spent two and a half years in prison. Shortly after he was released, he pleaded guilty to raping an adult woman and a 13-year-old girl. After about seven years in prison, he was released on parole in January 1987, shortly before police would find the first body in the desert.
Two weeks after Wood's release, a woman was blindfolded and sexually assaulted in El Paso. The victim never saw her attacker, but the mother of the girl Wood had previously pleaded guilty to assaulting called Crime Stoppers and said that the woman's assailant matched Wood's 'modus operandi.'
The assault victim spoke with the girl, contacted the police, and identified Wood's voice in an audio lineup as the man who had attacked her.
In October 1987, Wood was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a second woman. Prosecutors announced they intended to introduce the assault of the first woman as evidence of a pattern of behavior if the lab results from the first woman's rape kit implicated Wood. But the rape kit excluded Wood, and prosecutors declined to raise that case at the second woman's trial.
The second woman, who struggled with heroin addiction and had previous convictions related to drugs and sex work, gave inconsistent accounts about her assault, according to court records. Richard Jewkes, assistant district attorney at the time, said in a recent declaration that he felt the odds of convicting Wood of the assault were a 'coin flip' because the evidence was 'pretty slim.' But the district attorney's office felt pressure to secure a conviction against Wood, Jewkes wrote, because 'a decision was made to take him off the streets.'
Wood was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison. Early on in his sentence, he shared a cell with a man named Randy Wells and lived a few cells down from two men named George Hall and James Sweeney. Wood confided in the other three men about feeling harassed by the El Paso police, who were trying to build their case against Wood in the desert killings.
Sweeney, a jailhouse lawyer, agreed to help Wood file a civil lawsuit accusing El Paso officials of harassment and consulted with Hall, his cellmate who worked in the law library. The case was ultimately dismissed, but in the process of filing the suit, Wood gave Sweeney more than 100 newspaper articles about the killings, according to Wood's petition.
The four men were eventually split up by transfers and releases. But in 1990, Hall was abruptly sent to the El Paso County jail, as the Marshall Project previously reported. Soon, Sweeney and Wells showed up, too. Sweeney was still completing his sentence, but Wells had been released and rearrested on a murder charge.
Wells said that after he learned he was facing a life sentence, he told his attorney he knew something about the bodies buried in the desert, Hall wrote in a declaration last year.
According to Hall, Wells concocted a story about Wood, his former cellmate, being the killer, based on information he had gleaned from listening to Wood work on his civil suit with Sweeney. Wells also encouraged the police to speak with Hall and Sweeney, Hall wrote.
While the three of them sat in the El Paso jail, Wells asked if Hall or Sweeney could give him specific information about the case, but both declined. Eventually, the three of them were placed in a car with no shackles or handcuffs, contrary to usual practice. The cops gave the three men 'the red carpet treatment,' Hall told HuffPost. They went to a hamburger joint and, once at the police station, were given coffee, snacks, cigarettes and phone access.
'David Wood is our suspect,' the detectives told them, according to Hall. 'It'd be best if you tell us something because we can't let this guy walk,' the detectives said, mentioning there was reward money available.
According to Hall, the detectives handed the men the case files about the murders and asked if Wood had ever said anything about the killings. Wells and Sweeney each said that Wood had confessed to the killings described in the files, Hall said.
'They're just fabricating everything,' Hall told HuffPost. 'I was really upset.'
The lead detective from Wood's case, who has since retired, told The Marshall Project that the idea anyone gave the informants case files to review was 'preposterous' and 'insane.'
When Hall declined to corroborate their theory of the case, the detectives told him, 'We can help you, if you can help us,' Hall wrote, adding that they said they might be able to 'do something' about his parole.
'I said I wasn't going to lie about David Wood,' Hall wrote.
Hall was eventually returned to prison. Months later, he was approved for parole, but shortly before he expected to go home, someone submitted a letter to the parole board protesting his release, and he was required to serve the final years of his sentence. He suspects it was retaliation for refusing to implicate Wood.
In March 1991, Hall wrote a letter to Assistant District Attorney Debra Morgan stating he would not testify for the state against Wood. 'If the State subpoenas me for the trial, I will have no choice but to be a witness for the defense!' Hall wrote in neat cursive in a letter affixed as an exhibit to Wood's recent petition.
Wells and Sweeney testified at trial that Wood had confessed to the killings and described how he would lure women into his truck by offering them drugs. Some of their testimony was inconsistent with the facts of the case. For example, Wells testified that Wood had said he always used his pickup truck during the murders — but his truck was damaged and sat in an auto salvage yard for about a month during the time that three of the victims disappeared.
Wells' murder charge was dismissed after he testified against Wood. Sweeney sought $25,000 in reward money and eventually received $13,000 after suing the city. Both men have since died.
The only piece of forensic evidence the state presented at trial were orange acrylic fibers found on and near the body of one of the victims. After Wood moved out of his apartment, police obtained a vacuum cleaner bag from the garage and found similar fibers inside. A chemist with the Texas Department of Public Safety testified that the fibers from the crime scene 'matched' those from the bag, citing their size, shape, color, polymer composition and dye composition.
Wood's post-conviction legal team later hired trace evidence expert Christopher Palenik, who wrote in a report that the testimony at trial describing a 'match' was 'problematic and misleading.'
Although Wood was accused of killing six women and girls — Karen Baker, Rosa Maria Casio, Ivy Williams, Desiree Wheatley, Angelica Frausto, and Dawn Smith — the jury instructions only required members to find that Wood had killed Williams and one or more of the other five victims. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1992.
Since then, Wood has maintained his innocence and fought his case in court. In 2010, at his request, a court ordered DNA testing on three items that had been tested before his trial but came back inconclusive. Testing of a bloodstain on a piece of clothing worn by one of the victims contained a partial male DNA profile that excluded Wood as the contributor. Wood requested testing of more than 100 additional pieces of evidence and for the state to investigate an alternative suspect, but the state successfully fought further testing.
Hall was released from prison in 1994 and went on to serve 30 years on parole. He believes in the death penalty, but he also thinks Wood was unfairly convicted. He followed Wood's case over the years, and in 2009, when Texas first set Wood's execution date, Hall came close to calling Wood's legal team and sharing what he knew about Wells and Sweeney.
But he believed that if he spoke up while still on parole, he would end up back in prison.
Last year, when Hall was finally 'off paper,' he tracked down Wood's lawyer and left a voicemail. He said he had information about fabricated testimony and invited Wood's lawyers to come visit him to discuss. In October, Hall wrote a detailed seven-page declaration, describing why he believed Wells' and Sweeney's testimony was false.
'Every person's gotta meet their maker, and I don't wanna meet mine thinking I should've said something,' Hall said in a phone interview.
'That's no different than me killing David Wood.'
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