Latest news with #DavidLeonardWood
Fox News
12-03-2025
- Fox News
Texas execution of 'desert killer,' on death row for 30 years, blocked by court
Texas death row inmate David Leonard Wood's execution, which had been set for this week, was halted by a Texas appeals court on Tuesday. Wood, 67, has spent nearly 33 years on death row and had been set to die by lethal injection this week over the killings of six girls and young women found buried in the desert near El Paso. The court put Wood's execution on pause "until further order," without elaborating in their three-page order. Six of the nine members of the court made that decision, FOX 4 News Dallas-Fort Worth reported. Judges Mary Lou Keel and Gina Parker disagreed with staying Wood's execution and Judge Bert Richardson, who had heard all of Wood's appeals in trial court since 2011, did not participate. This was another delay for Wood, who was previously set for execution in 2009 when it was put on hold about 24 hours beforehand over claims he was intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for execution. Those claims were later rejected by a judge, and Wood had been set to die Thursday. The 1987 murders remained unsolved for several years until authorities say Wood bragged to a cellmate that he was the so-called "Desert Killer." The victims' bodies were found buried in shallow graves in the same desert area northeast of El Paso. Authorities said Wood gave rides to the victims and then drove them into the desert, where he sexually assaulted and killed them. The victims were Rosa Casio and Ivy Williams, both 23; Karen Baker, 21; Angelica Frausto, 17; Desiree Wheatley, 15; and Dawn Smith, 14. Two other girls and a young woman were also reported missing but were never found. Wood, a repeat convicted sex offender who worked as a mechanic, has long maintained his innocence. "I did not do it. I am innocent of this case. I'll fight it," Wood said in recent documents filed in his appeals. Wood's execution was the second halted in the U.S. on Tuesday after a federal judge stopped Louisiana's first death row execution using nitrogen gas, which was to take place next week.
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Yahoo
Court stays execution of Texas man days before he was set to die by lethal injection
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas appeals court on Tuesday halted the execution of a man who has spent more than 30 years on death row and had been set to die by lethal injection this week over the killings of six girls and young women found buried in the desert near El Paso. It was the second scheduled execution in the U.S. halted on Tuesday after a federal judge stopped Louisiana's first death row execution using nitrogen gas, which was to take place next week. In Texas, the order was another reprieve for David Leonard Wood, who in 2009 was about 24 hours away from execution when it was halted over claims he is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for execution. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. Those claims were later rejected by a judge and Wood, 67, had been set to die Thursday. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal court, issued a stay of execution after his latest appeal, which renewed his claims of innocence. The court put Wood's execution on pause 'until further order." It did not elaborate on the decision in a brief three-page order. Had Wood been executed this week, he would have spent 32 years and two months on Texas' death row, the longest time a Texas inmate has waited before being put to death. The 1987 murders remained unsolved for several years until authorities say Wood bragged to a cellmate that he was the so-called 'Desert Killer.' The victims' bodies were found buried in shallow graves in the same desert area northeast of El Paso. Authorities said Wood gave rides to the victims and then drove them into the desert, where he sexually assaulted and killed them. The victims were Rosa Casio and Ivy Williams, both 23; Karen Baker, 21; Angelica Frausto, 17; Desiree Wheatley, 15; and Dawn Smith, 14. Two other girls and a young woman were also reported missing but were never found. Wood, a repeat convicted sex offender who had worked as a mechanic, has long maintained his innocence. 'I did not do it. I am innocent of this case. I'll fight it,' Wood said in recent documents filed in his appeals. On March 4, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined a request to commute his death sentence to a lesser penalty or grant him a 90-day reprieve. His lawyers have for years sought to have hundreds of pieces of evidence tested for DNA after testing in 2011 of bloodstains on the clothing Smith wore found a male DNA profile that was not Wood. The Texas Attorney General's Office has fought against new DNA tests and various courts have denied Wood's request for it. Prior to the court's decision Tuesday, Gregory Wiercioch, one of Wood's attorneys, said that when authorities identified Wood as a suspect, they focused on him and not on the evidence they had. 'We've tried to make it clear to the courts that he's innocent, and we'll see if anyone listens,' Wiercioch said.
USA Today
12-03-2025
- USA Today
Texas court issues rare stay of execution for Death Row inmate who fought for DNA testing
Texas court issues rare stay of execution for Death Row inmate who fought for DNA testing The order from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals came just over 48 hours before David Leonard Wood was set to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday in El Paso's Desert Killer murders. Show Caption Hide Caption Death Row inmate convicted of serial murder says he's innocent David Leonard Wood, convicted of murdering six girls and women in Texas, is set to be executed this month. He's always maintained his innocence. The highest court in Texas on Tuesday issued a rare stay of execution for David Leonard Wood, who has always denied being the so-called Desert Killer and reiterated his innocence in a recent hourlong interview with USA TODAY. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued the stay "until further order of this court" without explanation. The order came just over 48 hours before Wood, 67, was set to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday. Wood has been on Texas Death Row for nearly four decades even though no DNA evidence linked him to the murders of six women and girls in El Paso in 1987. 'I'm accused of killing six people when an entire police force couldn't find a single shred of evidence of anything,' Wood told USA TODAY on Feb. 26 during an interview at a Texas state prison north of Houston. 'How can I not be angry at the corruption that put me here? How can you let people just dump cases on you and not be angry?' The incredible move by the Texas court came almost simultaneously as a federal judge in Louisiana temporarily blocked that state's first nitrogen gas execution, scheduled for March 18, ruling that it could cause the inmate "pain and terror" and violate his constitutional rights. Here's what you need to know about Wood's case. Click here to read more about the Louisiana case. What was David Leonard Wood convicted of? A jury convicted Wood of killing six women and girls in 1987 in a case dubbed by local media as the Desert Killer. The victims are: 14-year-old Dawn Marie Smith, 15-year-old Desiree Wheatley, 17-year-old Angelica Frausto, 20-year-old Karen Baker, 23-year-old Ivy Susanna Williams, and 24-year-old Rosa Maria Casio. Their bodies were all found in various states of decomposition in shallow graves in the same desert area in northeastern El Paso. Investigators couldn't determine how many of them were killed, though at least one had been strangled. Police believed three missing girls – 12-year-old Melissa Alaniz, 14-year-old Marjorie Knox and 19-year-old Cheryl Vasquez-Dismukes − were also victims of the Desert Killer, but their bodies were never found. Wood's conviction was based mainly on circumstantial evidence. No DNA evidence has ever connected him to the murders. El Paso Assistant District Attorney Karen Shook told jurors during trial that the 'case in the totality points to David Wood.' 'It's clear that the signature aspect of these murders was the shallow graves in this dark, isolated desert area,' she said. 'It became the private graveyard of the defendant, David Wood.' Jurors heard testimony from two jailhouse informants who said Wood confessed to the killings, and a sex worker who said Wood raped her in the same desert area where the bodies were found and had begun digging her grave when a nearby noise startled him. Wood, who was convicted of the sex worker's rape, told USA TODAY that all three were lying and were only helping prosecutors in exchange for leniency in their own cases. 'I've never confessed anything to anybody about anything,' he said. In a recent court filing, Wood's attorneys said that both jailhouse informants and the sex worker either got many years shaved off of prison sentences or were seeking a financial reward. The filing also details a statement from a man named George Hall, who described how El Paso police tried to get him to lie that Wood had confessed to the murders while they were jailed together. Additional testimony came from a 26-year-old woman who said Wood raped her under an El Paso bridge when she was 13, according to archived coverage by the Associated Press at the time. Another woman testified that she was 12 when Wood lured her by saying he needed help finding a lost dog and then raped her at a nearby construction site, AP reported. The state's remaining evidence included testimony from witnesses saying they had seen some of the women and girls with Wood ahead of their murders and microscopic orange fibers that prosecutors argued connected one of the women's bodies with Wood's vacuum cleaner and a blanket in his truck. Texas court heard recent arguments from Wood's attorney Wood's attorney, Gregory Wiercioch, told USA TODAY last week that the state's evidence connecting him to the murders is weak and criticized prosecutors for failing to test barely any of the items collected from the scene for DNA. Only three pieces of evidence of hundreds were ever tested − fingernail scrapings from one victim and bloodstains on the clothing of two other victims. Tests on the fingernail scraping and one of the bloodstains were inconclusive. The other bloodstain belonged to a man but couldn't have been Wood's, new DNA testing obtained by defense attorneys in 2010 found. 'This is a serial murder case, a case with six victims, and in a serial murder case, I would expect the government, the state, to have a mountain of evidence − direct evidence tying David Wood to these victims, and there's not,' Wiercioch said. 'It's incomprehensible to me how little evidence there is.' Wiercioch filed recent actions seeking to stop the execution with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Feb. 21. That court, the same one that issued Tuesday's stay of execution, rejected previous requests for more DNA testing. 'To this day, it is still mind-boggling why (the state) didn't agree to more testing,' Wiercioch said. 'I think they're afraid of what they would find. If they believe David Wood is the desert serial murderer, then why are they afraid of additional testing? We've never tested anything other than those three items out of 135, and one excluded David Wood. That's very troubling.' The Texas Attorney General's Office has not responded to repeated requests for comment from USA TODAY. The El Paso District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment about the strength of the evidence, saying it recused itself from the matter in 1993 over a conflict of interest. How do the victims' families feel about the stay? Jolieen Denise Gonzalez, 17-year-old victim Angelica Frausto's sister, told USA TODAY that Tuesday's development was 'fair.' 'I don't think he should die for my sister's murder,' Gonzalez said. 'I do not believe that I'm going to live to see my sister get justice.' She previously told USA TODAY that she thought Wood helped plan her sister's murder but didn't kill her himself. But Marcia Fulton, mother of 15-year-old victim Desiree Wheatley, told USA TODAY that she was disappointed in the stay but not surprised. Fulton was planning to drive 720 miles from El Paso to Huntsville to witness Wood's execution on Thursday. 'I'm waiting for justice for my daughter because I promised her that at her gravesite. Each time this happens, it breaks my heart again, that I can't follow through,' Fulton said. 'Victims have no justice system. Disappointed yes, but it's not like I am waiting for him to die.' Contributing: Greta Cross, Fernando Cervantes
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Yahoo
Stay granted for Texas death row inmate two days before scheduled execution
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay of execution on Tuesday for a man who was less than two days away from becoming the third inmate to be put to death by the state in 2025. David Leonard Wood was convicted in 1992 of the highly publicized murders of six young women in El Paso. Wood has said that he did not commit the crime and that DNA evidence would prove his innocence. In the years since, Wood filed several appeals, including the latest habeas corpus appeal to the criminal appeals court in which he made eight claims, including that evidence in his trial was destroyed and that his conviction was brought using false testimony. The court's brief order on Tuesday recognized the claims in Wood's appeal and granted an indefinite stay, but did not clarify which, if any, of the eight the court found to be potentially substantiated. The stay is the second reprieve that Wood has been granted in the days before an upcoming execution. In 2009, Wood's execution was halted over concerns about his potential intellectual disability. The six girls and women Wood is accused of killing — Dawn Smith, Angelica Frausto, Rosa Maria Casio, Ivy Williams, Karen Baker and Desiree Wheatley — were between the ages of 14 and 24 and found buried in the desert northwest of El Paso. Media coverage at the time dubbed Wood the 'Desert Killer.' The stay is the second time in less than a week death row inmates in Texas have been granted legal reprieve. On Friday, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of Brittany Marlowe Holberg, who received a death sentence for the 1998 murder of an 80-year-old man. Wood's stay is also the second time Texas' highest criminal court has blocked an execution in under six months. In October 2024, the court halted the execution of Robert Roberson, who has maintained he did not kill his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, in 2002. We can't wait to welcome you to the 15th annual Texas Tribune Festival, Texas' breakout ideas and politics event happening Nov. 13–15 in downtown Austin. Step inside the conversations shaping the future of education, the economy, health care, energy, technology, public safety, culture, the arts and so much more. Hear from our CEO, Sonal Shah, on TribFest 2025. TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.
The Guardian
11-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
America's next killing spree: 10 days, five states, six death-row prisoners set to die
David Leonard Wood. Jessie Hoffman. Aaron Gunches. Wendell Grissom. Edward Thomas James. Moises Sandoval Mendoza. So many names. So many dead men walking. Ten days, five states, six death row prisoners scheduled for execution. For a decade now, capital punishment in the US has been on the wane. Last year, for the 10th year running, there were fewer than 30 executions in America, and the number of new death sentences is also tracking at historic lows. And yet. Among the rump of death penalty states – 'killing states', as detractors call them – the desire to keep on going seems to burn stronger every year. Some state corrections departments are firing up their death chambers after decades of leaving them mothballed. Others are turning to new experimental execution methods such as nitrogen gas, or reviving long discarded techniques – on Friday, South Carolina carried out the first firing squad execution in the US for 15 years. The result is a landscape of capital punishment that is as riven as is the country as a whole. Across vast swathes, the practice is officially, or in effect, moribund. In pockets of the country, there is a frenzied scramble to get back into the death business. The syndrome was on dramatic display last September, when over six days of horror five different states ended a life in the name of justice. On Thursday, the desolate spectacle begins again with another flurry of scheduled executions packed into 10 short days. Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Oklahoma, Florida, then Texas again. 'These states will go to any length – pass secrecy laws, introduce new execution methods, bypass public scrutiny,' said Samantha Kennedy of the Promise of Justice Initiative, a New Orleans-based group that fights the inequities of the criminal justice system. Louisiana is preparing to carry out its first execution in 15 years. 'By hook or by crook,' she said, 'they are determined to kill people.' The latest killing spree begins, as it ends, in Texas. The Lone Star State has traditionally been the death penalty capital of America, its fondness for judicial killings reaching a peak in 2000 when it put to death 40 people that year alone. By last year that number had fallen to five. But as Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, TCADP, explained, the will is still there. 'Texas stubbornly remains among the handful of states that is still regularly executing, and doing so in cases where grave concerns persist,' she said. Barring last-minute legal challenges, David Leonard Wood will be killed by lethal injection in the Huntsville Unit after 5pm local time on Thursday. The crimes he has been found guilty of are numerous and profoundly shocking. Six teenaged girls and young women were murdered and buried in shallow graves in the desert around El Paso by a serial killer who came to be known as the 'desert killer'. Wood has always insisted he is innocent, claiming the state got the wrong man. Wood's lawyers have pressed for DNA evidence to be tested on more than 100 items of crime-scene evidence, but the Texas attorney general has for over a decade consistently rebuffed the request. As a result, the prisoner will be executed on the basis of circumstantial evidence alone. The Texas Observer has reported evidence that one of the key witnesses at his trial was encouraged to testify against Wood with promises of a $25,000 reward. The witness was, according to a cellmate, fed incriminating details about Wood from detectives' own files. For Cuellar, the questions surrounding Wood's prosecution point to a wider on-going crisis in capital punishment in Texas. Like most of the 178 people on Texas's death row, Wood was put there for crimes committed decades ago at the height of the moral panic around drugs and violent crime. The issues raised in Wood's case, including convictions rammed through despite the lack of forensic evidence, massaging of witnesses, and other dubious prosecutorial actions, were commonplace in the 1980s and 1990s. Elected officials competed with each other to convince voters that they were the toughest on crime. An Innocence Project study of Texas in the early 2000s found 91 cases of prosecutorial misconduct, ranging from hiding evidence to misleading the jury. Not one of the prosecutors involved had been disciplined. 'In that rush to judgment, that rush to fill death row, corners were cut. Fast forward decades later, when people are set for execution, the flaws and failures in their cases are on stark display,' she said. In Wood's case, the murders for which he was convicted occurred in 1987, almost 40 years ago. Should he die on Thursday, it will be more than 32 years after he landed on death row. The other five men facing execution tell a similar story. Their crimes were committed, in order of their execution dates, 29, 23, 20, 30, and 19 years ago. Such an agonisingly prolonged process takes its toll on many people: the death row inmates themselves living under the shadow of execution, the guards who secure and care for them, the American taxpayers who pay for what is by far the most expensive part of the US criminal justice system. And then there are the families of the victims. 'What I hate most is the way that victims' families are used to justify it,' said Sister Helen Prejean. 'I've watched too many families wait all these years, and at the end of it all they are given a front row seat as the state kills the one who killed their loved one. They watch that violence, and it's supposed to give them peace. That's morally bankrupt. It's rotten to the core.' Prejean, a Catholic nun, is the most celebrated face of the death penalty abolitionist movement. Her memoir about being spiritual adviser to two death row inmates, Dead Man Walking, was made into the 1995 movie of the same name. Prejean told the Guardian that in her analysis the upcoming spate of six executions in 10 days could be explained by three pillars of the death penalty. The first was slavery. Of the five states about to carry out executions, all were part of the confederacy (in Arizona's case as a then territory). 'Under the black codes in the deep south states, a Black man could steal an apple and be hanged, and that attitude is still very much present in the death penalty.' Prejean's two other pillars propping up the system are the variety of evangelical religion prevalent in death penalty states – 'deep south Christianity is a John Wayne Jesus who believes in solving things with violence' – and endemic poverty. She believes those three factors – slavery, religion, poverty – have recently all combined to generate a fourth pillar that is coming to capital punishment's rescue. 'They set up a culture in which a strong man, a politician, can come along and say, 'We're going to execute people to show we're really tough on crime'.' Is she saying there is a connection between the rump revival of the death penalty and Donald Trump? 'Absolutely. There's a mood. Look at the mood in the country. Violence solves social problems – that's Trump all the way. And other politicians look at him and realize, hey, he got elected, and they start to ape him. And so far, they're getting away with it.' Kennedy also sees Trump as a player behind the partial resurgence of executions. She points to the 13 federal death-row prisoners killed under Trump at the end of his first administration – the most intense burst of judicial killings under any president in 120 years. 'That killing spree in Trump's first term set a tone for the acceptability of gratuitous violence,' she said. Kennedy and Prejean are both from Louisiana, the state which is scheduled to carry out the second execution in the upcoming 10-day spate. If it goes ahead, it will be Louisiana's first use of the death chamber since 2010. Jessie Hoffman, who is Black, is set to die on 18 March for the rape and murder of Mary Elliott in 1996. The chronology behind the scheduled execution is interesting. On 20 January, on Trump's first day back in the Oval Office, he issued an executive order titled 'Restoring the death penalty'. Three weeks later, Trump attended the Super Bowl in New Orleans where he sat beside Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana. The next day, 10 February, Landry announced his decision to restart executions after a hiatus of 15 years. There are several other striking aspects to Hoffman's pending execution. He was 18 and two months old when he committed his gruesome crime. He was found guilty of first-degree murder at trial and sent to death row. Had he been 60 days younger he would have been shielded from a death sentence as a juvenile. 'He harmed people in ways that are probably everlasting,' Kennedy said. 'And what he did with his time since then is that he grew up. He has spent decades reflecting, has been a devout Buddhist for many years, has expressed deep remorse. He's transformed.' Should the execution go ahead, Hoffman, 47, will be forcibly gassed with nitrogen, an experimental process that has only previously been used four times, all in the state of Alabama. Witnesses to those nitrogen deaths reported distressing scenes of prisoners shaking and convulsing on the gurney. 'These gassing executions are suffocations. The person suffocates, so they struggle, they panic. It is arduous and cruel,' Kennedy said. The Trump-infused wave of renewed activity is not confined to deep red states like Louisiana. The third execution in the upcoming 10-day spree is in the purple state of Arizona, under the auspices of the Democratic governor Katie Hobbs. Aaron Gunches is a 'volunteer', meaning that he is not resisting execution and effectively wants the state to kill him. He was sentenced to death for the 2003 murder of his girlfriend's former husband, Ted Price. Arizona has a pained relationship with the death penalty. In 2011 it was exposed as having procured lethal injection drugs from a pharma company operating out of a driving school in west London; four years later it was revealed to have gone even further, to India where it spent $27,000 on vials of sodium thiopental. In 2023 Hobbs halted all executions and ordered a review of the entire death process following a spate of three horribly botched killings the year before. She commissioned a retired federal magistrate judge, David Duncan, to carry out the probe in a rare instance of a death penalty state allowing an independent outside inspection of its methods. Duncan said that in the course of his investigation he came across some alarming findings. 'I saw things such as, on the eve of an execution, a superior telling a member of the execution team to use Wikipedia to check the dosage of the lethal drugs.' He also looked into the refrigerator where eight vials of pentobarbital were being stored. 'The jars were completely unmarked, not a single letter on any of them. It could have been my mother's minestrone soup. I said to the official, 'Do you think your high-school chemistry teacher would have allowed you back in the chem lab ever again if you left things unlabelled like that?'' Duncan pored over thousands of documents and confirmed the fact, first reported by the Guardian, that in 2021 the state spent $1.5m obtaining supplies of lethal injection drugs. He also discovered that the physician and assistant who had been present at the three botched executions in 2022 were each paid $60,000 in cash for the privilege. With all that under his belt, it might have been assumed that Duncan would have been encouraged to complete his report, so that Arizona's troubled system could be cleaned up. In November, however, Hobbs abruptly dismissed the judge and ended his review before completion, accusing Duncan of having overstepped his remit. 'I could no longer finish my report as I no longer had access to any documents,' the judge said. With the outside investigation terminated, Arizona has slipped back into its old ways of doing the death business – based on internal recommendations from within the department of corrections. Duncan fears it runs the risk of repeating past mistakes. 'Haven't we learned that lesson? It's not good to have people grade their own papers,' he said. Gunches, 53, is set to be killed by lethal injection on 19 March. The next day, Wendell Grissom, 57, and Edward Thomas James, 63, are scheduled to die in Oklahoma and Florida respectively, before the killing spree returns to Texas for the execution of Moises Sandoval Mendoza, 40, on 23 April. Prejean believes that if you boil down the 10-day glut of state violence to its essential, in the end you arrive at the people in whose name six lives are about to be taken. 'It's all about us,' she said. 'Granted, people do these terrible crimes – unspeakable crimes – and we can be outraged over that. But finally, now, how are we going to respond?'
