TEXAS EXECUTION? The Case of David Leonard Wood.He Murdered and buried 6 women in the desert.3 more

On March 13th, 2025, the state of Texas planned to execute David Leonard Wood by lethal injection at the Huntsville unit.

Two days before the date, the state’s highest criminal court stopped it.

It was the second time they had pulled him back from the chamber.

In 2009, they halted it with a single day to spare.

Wood was condemned for the murders of six girls and young women taken from the streets of El Paso in the summer of 1987.

Three more disappeared in that same stretch of months and were never found.

They lived in northeast El Paso, a working-class run of neighborhoods below the Franklin Mountains where the houses and motels stopped and open desert began.

Several of them attended the same middle school.

They were young, they were slight, and they walked to convenience stores and worked shifts along the through roads in a city that recorded fewer than 50 killings in a year.

Their families let them go out because there had never been a reason not to.

When the first of them failed to come home, police wrote her down as a runaway and left her there.

Over six months, nine of them vanished.

Then, on a September morning, a water utility worker checking wells a mile east of McCombs Street saw something in the ground that did not belong.

The man responsible was known on those streets by a nickname, Skeer.

He drove a beige pickup and a red Harley.

Police arrested a paroled sex offender who drove a beige pickup and a red Harley.

His name was David Leonard Wood, 30 years old, a mechanic, out on parole since January of that year with two prior convictions for sexual assault behind him.

Witnesses picked him from a photo lineup.

Two jailhouse informants said he had confessed.

Fibers from his vacuum bag matched fibers found on a victim’s body, and a woman who had survived an attack in that same desert took the stand and said he was the man who took her there.

A Dallas jury convicted him in 1992 and sentenced him to death.

He has denied it for four decades, but there was no confession in his own words.

No eyewitness to a killing.

And when DNA testing was finally run on a bloodstain from one victim’s clothing, it found male DNA that was not his.

Roughly 150 items from the case have never been tested at all.

And for more than 10 years, the state fought every request to test them.

Then a woman came forward and swore under oath that the surviving witness had originally named a different man.

A man the police had a file on.

A man who drove the same beige pickup and the same red Harley, one nickname, two men.

A federal court reviewed it and found that if the account were true, no reasonable juror would have convicted him.

Today, the case sits in an El Paso courtroom waiting on hearings that keep getting pushed back.

Wood is 68.

The desert where the graves were is a golf course.

Now, this is the complete story of David Leonard Wood and the El Paso desert killings.

From a paroled man’s return to the neighborhoods of his boyhood to the summer nine young women disappeared, the graves in the sand and a fight over the truth that has outlasted almost everyone in it.

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David Leonard Wood was born on June 20th, 1957, in San Angelo, a midsized town in Tom Green County, West Texas.

His father, Leo, described the boy’s early years as unsettled.

The household did not hold together for long at a time.

Money was short, and the family moved from one place to another as circumstances forced them.

Wood’s mother struggled with a mental illness that shaped the home he grew up in.

She spent stretches of time institutionalized, and the treatment she received during those years included electroconvulsive therapy.

She became dependent on prescription medication.

Her absences left gaps in the household that no one filled in a steady way, and the young Wood would pass through a series of living arrangements, including time spent in foster care.

His boyhood had no fixed center.

The adults around him changed often, and attachments formed slowly, if at all.

The picture people painted of him was not one of open aggression.

Those who knew him in those years described a restless, distractible boy.

He was hyperactive, unable to settle, and doctors prescribed Ritalin to manage it.

In the classroom, the same pattern showed.

He fell behind early and stayed behind.

School officials placed him in special education, where he remained.

Testing put his measured IQ in the range of the high 60s, below the average band for children his age.

He did not read or learn at the pace of his peers, and the gap widened as the grades advanced.

Acquaintances remembered him as quiet, even mild in manner.

He drew little attention to himself.

Leo settled in northeast El Paso, a working-class stretch below the Franklin Mountains, where the houses and motels gave way to open desert.

By his early teens, Wood had reached the limit of what school offered him.

He entered Parkland High School, but did not last.

He dropped out around the ninth grade, having never cleared his freshman year.

He left school at 15 or 16 with reading and reasoning skills far behind his grade and without a diploma.

He looked for a way out of that dead end and thought he found one in the military.

He tried to enlist.

The service turned him down.

Whatever combination of test scores, records, and background the recruiters weighed, Wood did not meet it, and the door closed.

For a young man with no diploma, no trade, and no clear direction, the rejection removed one of the few structured paths open to someone in his position.

What filled the space instead was a drift toward trouble.

In the years after leaving school, Wood moved through the kind of low-level offenses that mark a young man with time on his hands and little supervision.

He was not a figure known to the wider city.

He was a school dropout in his late teens, living in and around El Paso without steady footing.

He grew into a recognizable physical type.

Wood was tall and lean with fair hair and tattoos on both arms.

He carried himself with a worn, older-than-his-years manner that some described as a kind of biker’s ease.

He smoked and kept his hair slicked back.

To younger people around him, he was an adult who paid them attention.

That was the whole of what Wood was as he crossed into adulthood.

A rough mobile childhood, an untreated learning deficit, an early exit from school, a closed door at the military, and a slide into petty offending.

He had no anchor of family behind him, and no institution ahead of him willing to take him in.

He entered his 20s in El Paso, carrying all of it, his record thin on accomplishment, and growing on friction with the law.

Friction of a particular kind, because the offenses attaching to his name were not about property or money.

They were about the harm he did to other people.

In 1976, when Wood was 19, El Paso authorities arrested him and charged with a sexual offense involving a young person.

He entered a guilty plea.

The court sentenced him to five years in prison, and he served roughly half of that term before his release.

It was his first felony conviction and his first stretch behind bars.

Prison did not redirect him.

Within a short time of his release, Wood was back in the same pattern, and now it accelerated.

In March 1980, over the span of little more than a week, he committed two separate sexual assaults.

One victim was an adult, the other was a teenager.

He was a stranger to one and an acquaintance of the other.

The assaults happened days apart, close enough together to describe a man moving quickly and without hesitation from one to the next.

The state charged him for both.

Wood pleaded guilty again.

This time, the sentence was heavier, concurrent 20-year terms for the two crimes.

On paper, that meant Wood could remain in prison for two decades.

In practice, the Texas parole system of that era released people well before the end of their nominal sentences, and Wood was no exception.

He served about 7 years of the 20-year exposure.

Those 7 years from 1980 into early 1987 were the longest continuous period for Wood spent removed from the general population of El Paso.

He was in his mid to late 20s for most of it, an age when many men settle into work and family.

Wood spent it in the Texas prison system, a repeat offender with a record built entirely around sexual violence against women and young people.

He had two felony convictions of that kind behind him and a documented history any parole board could read plainly.

The board read it and released him.

The mechanism was routine.

Prison crowding, sentence credit rules, and the standard workings of parole in Texas at the time meant a man with Wood’s record could reach a release date years ahead of schedule.

His conduct inside, his sentence math, and the calendar aligned.

On January 15th, 1987, the state of Texas paroled David Leonard Wood.

He walked out at 29.

He had spent much of his adult life incarcerated, and he had no independent household to return to, so he went to his father.

Leo Wood was living in northeast El Paso, and Wood moved in with him, back into the same desert edge neighborhoods he knew as a boy.

Wood needed to occupy his time and account for himself to a parole officer, so he took work.

He had mechanical ability, and he found employment that kept him around vehicles.

He drove a small pickup, a tan, or let’s say beige Nissan, and he had access to a red Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

In a neighborhood built around cars, motels, and roadside businesses, a lean, tattooed man with a truck and a bike moved through it without drawing notice.

The El Paso he returned to in the winter of 1987 was, by the standards of American cities, not a violent place.

It recorded fewer than 50 killings in a typical year.

Families let their teenagers walk to school, to the convenience store, to a friend’s house or the bus stop, along ordinary streets in ordinary daylight and evening hours.

People trusted the distance between their front door and the corner.

Wood settled in through the late winter and into the spring.

He worked and he moved around the neighborhood.

He became a face people half recognized at the motels, the car washes, and the street corners of the northeast section.

Among the younger residents who saw him around, he had a nickname, Skeer, and a manner that let him strike up talk with people much younger than himself.

For the first weeks of his freedom, nothing about Wood’s presence registered as a public matter.

He was one more parolee among many, absorbed back into the city that produced him.

The calendar turned from January into February.

Life in northeast El Paso went on as it always had, and the young women of the neighborhood went about their days until one of them did not come home.

Her name was Marjorie Knox, and she left home on February 14th, 1987, and did not return.

She lived in Chaparral, New Mexico, a small community just across the state line from El Paso’s northeast edge, close enough that the two places shared roads, stores, and daily traffic.

She simply stopped being where she was supposed to be.

Her family raised the alarm, but there was nothing to follow.

No scene, no witness, no clear last sighting to build on.

She was there, and then she was not.

A little over three weeks later, on March 7th, it happened again.

Melissa Alanis, a student at H. Charles Middle School on the northeast side, disappeared from her neighborhood near Orpheus.

She was young, she was local, and she vanished as completely as Knox had.

Two families now faced the same silence, separated by a matter of days and a few miles of the same terrain.

At this stage, the disappearances did not register to the authorities as a single story.

El Paso was a city where reports of missing teenagers came in with some regularity, especially of young people from difficult home situations who were assumed to have left on their own.

Each case landed on its own desk, treated as a separate matter.

There was no body, no crime scene, and no obvious thread tying one name to another.

The default assumption applied case by case was that these were runaways who would surface.

That assumption carried real consequences.

It meant that when a family insisted something was wrong, the machinery of the police department did not move quickly.

A missing teenager in the framework the officers were using was a low-priority matter until proven otherwise.

The burden fell on the families to argue that their daughter was not the kind to run, and those arguments met a wall of routine.

Spring settled over the city.

The desert warmed.

The disappearances of Knox and Alanis receded into the stack of open, unresolved reports unconnected to anything larger.

For a stretch of weeks, the pattern paused, or at least went unmarked, and the northeast side carried on with no public sense that anything unusual was underway.

The people most affected did not have that luxury.

The families of the two missing teenagers lived inside the gap the police had left.

They made calls, pressed for updates, and got little back.

Their daughters were gone, and the official view that the girls had chosen to go offered them nothing to act on and no reason for the department to search.

Meanwhile, life in the neighborhoods went on in the ordinary way.

Teenagers gathered at parks and convenience stores in the evenings.

Young women worked shifts at the motels and clubs along the through roads and made their own way home afterward.

People accepted rides from acquaintances and sometimes from strangers because that was normal in a city that had not learned to be afraid.

The margin of open desert sat at the end of the paved streets, empty and unwatched the way it always had.

The calendar moved into late spring.

School years were winding toward their close.

Families were making plans for graduations in summer, the ordinary business of a city in June.

The two disappearances of the winter sat unresolved, but isolated, filed, and largely set aside, two separate question marks that the department did not treat as urgent and did not connect.

The quiet did not hold.

As the spring gave way to the first days of June, the northeast side was about to lose another of its young people, and this time the circumstances would be specific, witnessed, and hard for anyone to dismiss as a girl simply choosing to walk away.

On June 2nd, 1987, Desiree Wheatley finished her last day of eighth grade at H. Charles Middle School.

She was known to her family as Desi.

She wore an oversized white shirt she had brought so friends could sign it, the kind of end-of-year keepsake students collected on the final day.

Her mother, Marcia Wheatley, watched her head off, and the ordinary warmth of that moment, a daughter closing out a school year, was the last unclouded memory Marsha would keep of her.

The Wheatley household ran on careful rules.

Marsha had been through two marriages that ended, and she had raised her two daughters to avoid the mistakes she felt she had made.

The family lived with Marsha’s parents, Helen and Roy, who watched the girls while Marsha worked late shifts.

Desi was not permitted to date until 16, and she kept a curfew.

She was, by every account, a rule-following teenager from a watchful home, not a girl who wandered off.

That evening, she wanted to celebrate the end of school with her regular group of friends.

She got permission to go with strict instructions about when to be home.

A friend did her makeup first, and the two set out to meet the others at Veterans Park in the northeast neighborhoods.

As the evening ran on, Desi phoned her grandmother to ask whether her curfew could stretch a little later.

Because it was the last day of school, Helen agreed.

After the gathering broke up, Desi and her friend walked to the Circle K convenience store on Rushing Drive, just up the street and around the corner from her home.

It was a little before 10:00 in the evening.

Inside, the two girls waited in line.

Standing behind them was a man, tall, fair-haired with tattoos.

He was noticeably older than they were, an adult positioned directly at their backs.

As they paid, the girls finished and left the store to make the short walk home.

The man came out after them, following them into the night.

Around a quarter to 10, Desi’s friend turned around.

In that moment, she saw Desi getting into a tan-colored pickup truck.

The friend kept walking and went the rest of the way alone.

Desi did not.

She had been steps from her own street on the last night of the school year, and then she was in the truck and gone.

Marsha came home from her shift at 2:00 in the morning to find her mother still awake and alarmed.

Desiree had never missed a curfew and she was not home.

Marsha called the police at once.

She told them her daughter had no history of running, no trouble at home, no reason to disappear.

The response she got matched the framework the department was already using.

It was the last night of school and calls about teenagers were coming in all evening.

An officer took the report and classified Desiree as a runaway.

When Marsha pressed him on why, he laid out the logic plainly.

The girl was 15, it was the last day of school, and she was away from home without permission.

Marsha argued back.

What if her daughter did not want to be away?

What if something had happened?

She was told the status would change if and when the circumstances warranted it.

Days passed, then weeks.

The department did not move Desiree’s case from runaway to missing.

For Marsha, every day carried the same wall, a daughter gone under specific witnessed circumstances and an official position that she had chosen to leave.

The witness detail, a strange man following the girls from a convenience store, Desi climbing into a truck she had no reason to enter, did not on its own shift the classification.

And Desiree was not the only one.

As June opened, the disappearances that had seemed isolated in the winter were beginning to cluster in a way that would grow harder to explain as coincidence.

Young women connected to the same neighborhoods, some of them tied to the same middle school, were going missing within days and weeks of one another.

The families found themselves in the same position Marsha occupied, certain that something was wrong, unable to make the department treat it as urgent.

What the cases shared beneath the surface was a physical profile.

The missing were young and slight, petite, slender, easy to overpower.

They came from the northeast side.

Several were last seen at night near stores or motels or on the streets in the ordinary course of getting from one place to another.

And in more than one account, a witness had noticed a tall, thin, tattooed man nearby, sometimes with a truck, sometimes with a motorcycle.

For now, those threads sat in separate files, unconnected by any single investigator.

Marcia Wheatley kept calling.

She kept insisting her daughter had not run.

And in the northeast neighborhoods, even as she pressed, the disappearances continued.

The next of them already unfolding within days of Desiree’s, another young woman about to drop out of the ordinary life of the city without explanation.

Three days after Desiree Wheatley climbed into that truck, on June 5th, 1987, Karen Baker vanished.

She was 20 years old.

She was last seen at the Hawaiian Royale, one of the motels along the northeast corridor where much of this stretch of the city’s nightlife turned.

Witnesses saw her leave in the company of a man, tall, thin, fair-haired with tattoos, and in the account that circulated afterward, getting onto a red motorcycle with him.

Then she too was gone.

The Hawaiian Royale would come up again.

It was a fixed point in the geography of these disappearances.

A place where young women who worked the clubs and streets of the northeast side passed through and where a man looking for company that would not be quickly missed could find it.

Baker’s disappearance drew the case a step further from the runaway theory.

She was an adult, not a schoolgirl skipping out on curfew, and she had left in front of witnesses with a man matching a description that was starting to repeat.

Later that month, on June 28th, another young woman disappeared.

Her name was Cheryl Vasquez Dismukes, and she was 19.

She was connected to the same northeast community as the others.

Like the disappearances before hers, hers left no scene and no immediate explanation.

She was simply there and then absent.

Another name added to a list that no single office had yet assembled into one document.

By the start of July, the families of the missing had reached the limit of their patience with an unresponsive department.

Marcia Wheatley and the relatives and friends of Karen Baker organized.

On July 11th, they staged a public demonstration at the Stanton Street International Bridge, one of the crossings between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, a place guaranteed to draw eyes and traffic.

Their message was direct.

Young women were disappearing from the northeast side.

The police were not treating it seriously, and someone needed to.

The demonstration had an effect.

Among those who took notice was a city detective, Al Marquez, who recognized in the accumulating reports the shape of something larger than a series of runaways.

The pressure the families generated, combined with the sheer number of overlapping cases, began to move the department off its default position.

The idea that a single individual might be responsible for multiple disappearances started for the first time to be taken seriously inside the investigation.

But recognition came at a price already paid in the calendar.

The very day of the bridge demonstration, July 11th, a 17-year-old named Angelica Frausto disappeared.

She worked as a dancer, and like Karen Baker, was last seen at the Hawaiian Royale Motel.

The account of her departure echoed the others closely, a tall tattooed man and a red motorcycle pulling away with her on it.

While the families stood on a bridge demanding action, the pattern they were protesting claimed another of their community.

Frausto’s case tightened the connections.

Two young women, Baker and now Frausto, last seen at the same motel, both leaving with a man of the same description, both on a red motorcycle.

The specifics were no longer scattered.

They pointed again and again at a lean, fair-haired, tattooed man with access to both a small pickup and a motorcycle operating in a defined patch of the northeast side.

Still, in the summer of 1987, all of this remained a matter of missing person reports and worried families.

There were no bodies.

There was no crime scene to work, no physical evidence to test, no confirmed crime at all in the eyes of the law, only an alarming number of young women who could not be accounted for.

The desert at the edge of the neighborhoods held whatever answers existed, and no one had yet been led to look in it.

By August, the city’s unease was becoming public knowledge.

Word of missing girls and young women spread through the northeast side.

Parents grew reluctant to let their daughters walk the streets alone.

And even as that fear took hold, the disappearances had not stopped.

The summer still had more names to take, and the streets of northeast El Paso were not yet done losing the young women who lived on them.

August brought more losses.

On August 12th, 1987, Rosa Maria Casio disappeared.

She was 24, older than most of the others, and she was not a fixture of the northeast nightlife the way some of the missing had been.

Casio lived in Addison near Dallas and was in El Paso visiting her mother while home from college.

On the night she vanished, she had gone out with friends to a club.

The circumstances of her disappearance were witnessed more closely than most.

Casio’s friends noticed a fair-haired man with tattoos bothering her at the bar, and they saw her trying to get away from him.

When the group left, the same man followed a few steps behind Casio as she walked toward her car.

A scuffle broke out outside the club, and the friend’s attention turned to the fight.

By the time they looked back, they saw the man getting into a beige truck, and Casio was nowhere in sight.

A visiting college student out for an ordinary night was gone in the space of a distraction.

Casio’s case carried weight because she did not fit the runaway assumption in any way.

She had a home, a family, a college to return to, and a mother expecting her.

She had been seen resisting a specific man, and that man had been seen leaving in a beige truck.

The description, fair hair, tattoos, a beige pickup, now matched across multiple cases, from Desiree Wheatley’s tan truck at the Circle K to the man at Casio’s club.

Later that month, on August 28th, another young woman disappeared.

Her name was Dawn Marie Smith, and she attended H. Charles Middle School, the same school Desiree Wheatley and Melissa Alanis had attended.

Smith was known to leave home on her own at times, and her family did not report her missing.

That gap in reporting meant her disappearance did not immediately enter the record the way the others had.

She was simply absent, unremarked by the system that should have been counting her.

There was one more.

Ivy Susanna Williams, 23, worked as a dancer and spent time around the Hawaiian Royale Motel, the same establishment tied to Baker and Frausto.

Like Smith, she was not reported missing by anyone.

She had no one pressing the police to look for her, no family demonstration, no report filed.

She dropped out of the life of the city entirely unnoticed, her absence registered by no official document at all.

By the end of August 1987, the toll had reached a striking number.

Across roughly six months, from the middle of February through the end of August, nine young women and teenagers connected to the northeast side had disappeared.

Marjorie Knox, Melissa Alanis, Desiree Wheatley, Karen Baker, Cheryl Vasquez Dismukes, Angelica Frausto, Rosa Maria Casio, Dawn Marie Smith, and Ivy Susanna Williams.

They shared a physical type, young, petite, slender, and a geography.

Several shared a middle school.

More than one had last been seen with a tall, tattooed, fair-haired man and a truck or a motorcycle.

The families who had reported their daughters lived in a state of unresolved dread.

The demonstration at the bridge had pushed the department toward taking the cluster seriously, and detectives were beginning to treat it as a connected series rather than a scatter of runaways.

But treating it seriously and solving it were different things.

There was still no confirmed crime.

There was no scene.

Every one of the nine remained officially a missing person, their fates unknown.

What existed was a growing conviction among some detectives, among the terrified families, among residents who had stopped letting their girls walk alone, that these young women had not run away.

That conviction had no proof behind it.

The proof, if it existed, lay somewhere in the miles of open desert past the last paved street in ground no one had yet been directed to disturb.

That was about to change.

On September 4th, 1987, a city water utility worker was checking wells in the desert about a mile east of McCombs Street, out past the edge of the northeast neighborhoods.

Something in the ground caught his attention.

An object protruding from the dirt where nothing should have been.

He walked over to look.

It was a human hand.

He called the police, and the response transformed the northeast disappearances from a stack of missing person reports into something the law could act on.

Officers roped off the site.

In a shallow grave, perhaps two feet deep, lay the remains of a young woman.

The desert heat and the time she had spent in the ground had done their work.

Identification would not be simple, but there was no longer any question about whether a crime had occurred.

As investigators began to process the first grave, someone at the scene noticed another disturbance in the ground nearby.

Within about 50 feet of the first, a second young woman lay buried the same way in the same manner, her clothing beside her.

The condition of the second set of remains told the officer she had been in the ground considerably longer than the first.

That single observation carried a heavy implication.

Whoever had done this had returned to the same patch of desert on more than one occasion to bury the people he killed.

This was not one act.

It was a practice in one location over time.

The medical examiner worked to establish how the two had died.

The findings pointed to violence at the throat and neck.

One had suffered a broken jaw and a broken hyoid bone, injuries consistent with asphyxiation.

The other had been strangled.

These were deaths by force at close range by someone’s hands.

With causes established and clothing recovered, detectives turned to the open missing person files to put names to the remains.

Personal effects and garments found at the graves were matched against the reports the families had filed.

The first two victims were identified as Rosa Maria Casio and Karen Baker.

The visiting college student pulled away from her club and the 20-year-old last seen leaving the Hawaiian Royale on a red motorcycle.

Their parents confirmed the clothing.

Two of the nine now had a terrible answer.

Word that bodies had been found in the desert reached the families who had spent the summer being told their daughters were runaways.

Marcia Wheatley heard, and she called the detective handling missing persons to repeat her account of the night Desiree disappeared.

The department’s posture had changed completely.

What had been a set of low-priority reports was now a homicide investigation of the most serious kind, and the resources followed.

The El Paso police brought in help to search the surrounding desert on a scale the case now demanded.

The National Guard and Border Patrol joined the effort.

Helicopters flew the area.

Cadaver dogs and heat-sensing equipment were deployed across the one-and-a-half-mile stretch of ground where the first graves had been found.

The search treated the desert as what it had become, a burial ground, and worked it methodically.

The effort produced more graves.

Not far from where the first two had been recovered, searchers located another.

This young woman had been buried in the same way as the others.

As detectives worked to uncover her, they found still another grave close by, its occupant badly affected by long exposure to the elements.

Detectives moved to identify the newly recovered victims while the examinations proceeded.

From one of the graves came a garment that stopped the investigation cold, an oversized white t-shirt covered in signatures.

It matched the description Marcia Wheatley had given of what her daughter wore on the last day of school.

Detectives called Marcia in.

Before they could fully bring the shirt out, she recognized it and confirmed it was Desi’s.

The autographed keepsake from an eighth-grade last day had become the means of identifying her daughter’s remains.

Near her body, examiners noted orange fibers, a small detail set aside for later, its meaning not yet clear.

Through dental records, another of the recovered victims was identified as Dawn Marie Smith, the middle school student whose family had not reported her missing.

A fifth grave was matched to Angelica Frausto, the 17-year-old dancer last seen leaving the Hawaiian Royale.

One by one, the missing of the northeast side were being accounted for in the worst possible way, drawn out of the same square mile of desert into which they had all vanished.

By the time the September search wound down, five young women had been recovered from that ground, buried within a compact area in a consistent manner over what the evidence showed to be a span of months.

The El Paso Police Department now knew beyond any doubt what it was facing.

A single person had been using the desert northeast of the city as a private graveyard.

The hunt was no longer for missing girls.

It was for the man who had put them there.

With five victims recovered and identified, the El Paso Police Department assembled a homicide task force built specifically for the desert killings.

The scale of the crime, multiple victims, a shared burial ground, a span of months, required coordination beyond what individual detectives working separate files could provide.

The task force pulled the cases together into a single investigation and set out to answer the question the graves had posed, who was doing this and how to find him.

The investigators brought in a profiler to help interpret what the crime scenes revealed about the person responsible.

The analysis drew on the specifics the desert had yielded.

The victims had been buried close together, some in pairs, in a defined patch of ground the killer returned to repeatedly.

The profiler read the burials as meaningful to the offender.

A deliberate gathering of the victims in one place rather than a scattering of them across the desert.

The manner of the killings and evidence that the victims had been sexually assaulted pointed to a sexual motive driving the crimes.

That reading gave the task force a direction.

A sexual motive, a local hunting ground, and repeated offenses over months suggested a man with a history, someone whose past conduct matched the present crimes.

The logical step was to examine men in the area with prior convictions for sexual offenses against women and young people.

The killer was not likely to be a first-time offender who had suddenly begun burying victims in the desert.

He was far more likely to be someone who had done violence of this kind before and had a record to show it.

As detectives worked the victim connections, a geographic and institutional pattern sharpened.

Several of the missing, Desiree Wheatley, Dawn Marie Smith, Melissa Alanis, had ties to the same school, H. Charles Middle School on the northeast side.

That overlap gave investigators a concrete place to look for witnesses.

If the killer had been operating in and around that neighborhood, drawing victims from that community, then the students who lived and moved through the same streets might have seen the man, noticed his vehicle, or known him by sight or name.

The task force went to the school.

With the cooperation of the administration, detectives set up and began interviewing students, working through them to gather whatever the young people had observed in their neighborhood.

It was patient, methodical work, many short conversations, most yielding nothing, in search of the few that might carry weight.

The interviews began to produce something.

Students described a man who had recently come to the area, someone recently out of prison, marked by tattoos on both arms.

He went by a nickname, Skeer.

He was known to drive a small beige pickup truck, or alternately a red motorcycle.

To the detectives listening, the description landed hard.

A tattooed man with a beige truck and a red motorcycle was exactly the figure that had surfaced again and again at the edges of the disappearances.

The man at Desiree’s convenience store.

The man on the motorcycle at the Hawaiian Royale.

The man following Rosa Maria Casio to her car.

The name Skeer and the matching vehicles gave the investigation a live lead for the first time.

It was no longer an abstract profile.

It was a specific man known to the neighborhood, tied to the same descriptions witnesses had been giving all summer.

The task force now had someone to find and identify.

As detectives pursued the Skeer lead, they connected it to an earlier report that took on new meaning.

Back on September 22nd, a woman named Judith Brown Kelling had come forward with an account of an attack she said she had survived.

She told police that some weeks earlier in late July, she had been outside a convenience store in the northeast part of the city when a man matching the now-familiar description offered her a ride.

She accepted.

Instead of taking her home, she stated, he stopped at an apartment complex, went inside, and returned with a piece of rope visible in his pocket.

Kelling described what followed.

The man drove her out toward the desert northeast of town to open ground.

He got a shovel and a brownish-red blanket from his vehicle.

He tied her to the front of his truck with the rope and dug a hole behind some bushes.

He assaulted her.

Then she said he abruptly stopped, saying he heard voices, gathered his belongings, and drove off, leaving her alive in the desert.

His parting words to her, she recalled, were that she should always remember he was free.

Kelling’s account was extraordinary for one reason above all others, she had lived.

Every other victim tied to the desert was dead and buried.

Kelling had been taken to the same kind of ground by a man of the same description with a rope and a shovel and an intent that matched, and she had walked away able to describe him.

When she heard that bodies were being found in the desert, she understood what she had escaped.

And she told detectives she would never forget the man and could identify him.

The task force now had a living witness who claimed she could put a face to Skeer.

Detectives acted on Kelling’s offer.

She told them she could take them to the exact place in the desert where the man had brought her, and they put her in a car and let her lead the way.

The location she guided them to sat close to the graves.

The ground where she said she had been assaulted lay only about 100 to 125 yards from where Karen Baker and Rosa Maria Casio had been buried.

A survivor had just placed her attack within a stone’s throw of the burial site of two confirmed victims, described the same rope and shovel and desert setting, and matched the same physical description.

The pieces were converging on one man.

Back at the middle school, the interviews delivered the final connection.

Among the students detectives spoke with, one identified the man known as Skeer by his real name, David Leonard Wood.

With a name in hand, investigators pulled his file, and the record confirmed exactly what the profile had predicted.

Wood was a recently paroled man with prior convictions for sexual offenses against women and young people, a history that matched the sexual motive the profiler had identified and the pattern the killings showed.

Detectives assembled a photographic lineup that included Wood and presented it to the witnesses who had encountered the man.

They showed it to Judith Kelling, the survivor, and to students at the middle school.

The identifications came back pointing to the same face.

Kelling picked Wood as the man who had taken her to the desert.

The task force had moved from a nickname to a name to a positive identification by the one person who claimed to have survived him.

The identifications gave the police enough to act, though not yet enough to charge Wood with the murders.

What they had firmly was Kelling’s case, a living victim who had identified her attacker.

The assault she described was itself a serious felony, and it gave detectives a lawful basis to arrest Wood and take him into custody while they continued to build toward the larger case.

It was the lever that let them move.

Officers arrested David Leonard Wood in late October 1987.

As they took him in, Wood said something that stayed with the detectives.

He told them they had the wrong man, that he had not killed the girls in the desert.

The remarks stood out because of what the officers had and had not said to him.

At the point Wood spoke, he was being arrested in connection with the assault on Kelling.

No one had told him he was being charged with the desert murders.

He volunteered the denial of the killings before anyone had raised them.

With Wood in custody, investigators obtained warrants and searched his property and his vehicles.

Inside his home, they found a large collection of photographs of young teenage girls, many of them apparently taken at car washes.

It was material that spoke to his focus and his conduct, and it deepened the investigators’ certainty that they had the right man.

His vehicle told a different kind of story, one of preparation.

When detectives examined the truck, they found it meticulously clean.

Wood had scrubbed the interior and exterior with detergent and vacuumed it out thoroughly.

A vehicle used to transport victims to a desert burial ground had been cleaned to a degree that left investigators little to recover directly from its surfaces.

To the detectives, the spotless truck did not read as innocence.

It read as a man who understood that his vehicle could convict him and had worked to make sure it would not.

But the cleaning had a flaw.

In removing the evidence from the truck, Wood had to put the contents of his vacuums somewhere, and detectives recovered the vacuum cleaner bag.

Its contents were sent to a laboratory to be processed for hair and fibers, the microscopic debris that a scrubbed surface leaves behind in the machine that cleaned it.

What looked like a dead end at the truck became a promising thread in the bag.

The laboratory work returned a result that mattered.

Among the fibers recovered from the vacuum bag were orange fibers.

Analysts compared them against fibers found on the body of Desiree Wheatley.

The orange fibers examiners had noted near her remains when they uncovered her autographed shirt.

The comparison found a match.

A microscopic trace tied the contents of Wood’s own vacuum to one of the victims in the desert.

That match changed Wood’s position entirely.

Until then, the murder cases rested on the profile, the descriptions, and the survivor’s account.

Now, there was a physical thread, orange fibers linking Wood’s property to Desiree Wheatley’s body, that gave prosecutors a basis to move beyond the kidnapping assault.

With the fiber evidence in hand, the state could pursue Wood for the killings themselves.

The investigation was not yet finished pulling victims from the desert.

On March 14th, 1988, months after the September search, a couple out in the desert collecting aluminum cans came upon partially buried remains located a few hundred yards from where the earlier victims had been found.

Examiners identified the young woman through comparison of dental records, the jaw, and x-rays, as Ivy Susanna Williams, the 23-year-old dancer tied to the Hawaiian Royale who had never been reported missing by anyone.

Her cause of death set her apart from several of the others.

She had died of a stab wound from a sharp instrument.

Williams’s recovery brought the number of confirmed victims from the desert to six.

Karen Baker, Rosa Maria Casio, Desiree Wheatley, Dawn Marie Smith, Angelica Frausto, and Ivy Susanna Williams.

Five had been found close together within a single square mile patch of ground.

The sixth lay less than a mile away.

All had been buried in shallow graves in the same desert northeast of the city over a period the evidence placed across the summer and into the following months.

Three of the nine young women who had disappeared were never found.

Marjorie Knox, Melissa Alanis, and Cheryl Vasquez Dismukes remained missing, their fates unresolved.

They had vanished in the same window from the same area and fit the same victim profile.

But without remains, there was no case the state could bring for them.

They stayed on the list as disappearances, suspected but unproven parts of the larger pattern.

With six identified victims and Wood in custody, the state moved to formalize the charges.

In December 1987, Wood had already been indicted on charges arising from the assault on Judith Kelling, sexual assault, and aggravated kidnapping.

That case reflected the survivor’s account and the identifications she and others had made.

His parole from the 1980 sentences was revoked, returning him to custody on the basis of the new offenses.

The Kelling case proceeded on its own track.

Prosecutors took it to trial, and a jury found Wood guilty of the kidnapping and rape.

That conviction, layered on top of his revoked parole, resulted in a lengthy prison term measured in decades.

It also did something else.

It established in a court of law that Wood had abducted a woman from the northeast streets, driven her to the desert, and assaulted her, the precise conduct the murders appeared to involve.

The Kelling verdict gave the state a proven instance of the behavior it attributed to the desert killer.

Then in July 1988, the grand jury returned the charge that defined the case.

David Leonard Wood was indicted for the murders of the six young women and teenagers whose bodies had been recovered from the desert.

The man arrested on an assault charge held on a proven kidnapping and rape was now formally accused of being the person who had used the desert northeast of El Paso as a burial ground.

Building the murder case was a different challenge from proving the Kelling assault.

Kelling was alive and could testify to what Wood had done to her.

The six murder victims could not speak.

There was no confession from Wood, no eyewitness to any killing, and the physical evidence, while present, was limited.

The scrubbed truck had yielded little directly.

What the state had was a body of circumstantial evidence, the fiber match tying Wood’s vacuum to Desiree Wheatley, the descriptions placing him and his vehicles with the victims, the survivor’s parallel account, and Wood’s own record and conduct.

To strengthen the murder case, investigators and prosecutors turned to another source, the people who had been in custody with Wood.

Jail is a place where men talk, and prosecutors learned that Wood had spoken about the killings to others held alongside him.

Two fellow inmates in particular came forward to say that Wood had confessed to them, describing not just the fact of the murders, but the method.

Their accounts, if a jury believed them, could supply the direct evidence the physical case lacked.

At the same time, the El Paso Police Department had offered a reward for information leading to the resolution of the desert killings.

That reward hung over the informants’ accounts as both a spur and a complication.

A man who came forward claiming Wood had confessed might be telling the truth, might be seeking the reward money, might be angling for leniency on his own charges, or might be doing all three at once.

The informants’ testimony would become central to the state’s case, and their motives would become central to the defense.

With the indictment secured, the fiber evidence in hand, the informants prepared to testify, and a proven kidnapping and rape already on Wood’s record, the state assembled its case for trial.

Wood, for his part, held to the position he had taken from the moment of his arrest.

He had not killed the young women in the desert.

He said so, and he would keep saying so.

Before the trial could begin, the case confronted a practical obstacle, publicity.

The desert killings had dominated El Paso for months.

The disappearances, the searches, the recovery of six young women from the desert, and the arrest of a paroled sex offender had saturated the city’s news and its conversation.

Finding 12 jurors in El Paso County who had not already formed an opinion about David Leonard Wood was, in the view of his defense, impossible.

His attorney moved to change the venue, and the motion succeeded.

The trial was moved out of El Paso and north to Dallas County, where the killings had not consumed daily life in the same way.

The trial opened in Dallas in October 1992, roughly five years after Wood’s arrest.

The delay reflected the slow machinery of a capital case.

The investigation, the Kelling prosecution, the indictment, the pre-trial motions, and the venue change had all consumed time.

Now, before a Dallas jury, the state set out to prove that the man in the courtroom was the person who had buried six young women in the El Paso desert.

The prosecution’s case rested on four categories of evidence, and the state was candid about their nature.

This was, by the prosecutor’s own description, a circumstantial case.

There was no confession introduced through Wood’s own signed words, no eyewitness who had watched him kill, and no biological evidence of the kind that would later become standard.

Instead, the state built its case from four directions that, taken together, it argued, pointed to one man.

The first category was the testimony of the jailhouse informants.

Two men who had been incarcerated with Wood, James Sweeney and Randy Wells, testified that Wood had confessed to them.

Wells offered detail about the method, an account of Wood tying victims to his pickup truck and to a tree, digging graves, and assaulting them.

Wells also testified that he had covered some of Wood’s tattoos with new ones, saying Wood had told him one victim had seen the tattoos and gotten away, making them a liability.

The informants’ accounts supplied the direct narrative of guilt the physical evidence could not.

Their credibility was contested from the start.

The jury learned that Wells stood to benefit from a reduced sentence in a separate case by testifying.

Sweeney had no formal agreement for his testimony, but both men were aware of the reward money the El Paso police had offered, and both had reason to hope for it.

Wood’s defense attacked the two men with their lengthy criminal histories and pressed the argument that their accounts were the product of dealmaking and self-interest rather than genuine confessions.

The informants were the state’s most direct evidence and its most vulnerable.

The second category was the testimony of Judith Kelling.

The survivor took the stand and described what the man had done to her, the ride that turned into an abduction, the rope, the shovel, the desert, the assault, and her release.

Prosecutors introduced her account not only for itself, but to prove identity and method.

The state argued that the circumstances of Kelling’s assault, the location, the timing, the rope and shovel, the desert grounds near the graves, were so closely aligned with the six murders that they marked the same hand at work.

On direct appeal, the courts would later describe this evidence as extremely important to the state’s case and characterize it in the strongest terms.

The jury heard that Kelling was a sex worker and a heroin user, facts the defense used against her credibility.

What the jury did not hear was any suggestion that Kelling had ever named a different man or that she had received anything in exchange for her testimony.

On cross-examination, she stated she had received no deal.

The third category was the fiber evidence.

Steve Robertson, a chemist with the Texas Department of Public Safety, testified about the orange fibers.

He told the jury that fibers recovered at one of the victim’s graves matched fibers taken from the vacuum cleaner bag Wood had left behind in his old apartment.

Robertson testified that the quantity of fibers found at the grave site and on the victim indicated Wood had been in contact with her within hours of her death.

Wood’s girlfriend testified that he kept a burnt orange blanket and shovels in the back of his truck, tying the household items to the fibers and to the tools Kelling had described.

Wood’s defense called its own expert to challenge the fiber analysis.

The fourth category was eyewitness testimony placing Wood with the victims or near them.

Witnesses described seeing the young women with Wood or with a man matching his description or getting into a beige pickup truck or onto a red motorcycle matching Wood’s vehicles.

These were the same descriptions that had run through the disappearances all summer, now brought into the courtroom to connect Wood to the victims in life shortly before they vanished.

Alongside these four pillars, the state presented evidence of Wood’s prior conduct to establish a pattern.

Prosecutors called witnesses to earlier assaults Wood had committed against women, offered to show identity and method.

The defense objected to this evidence, arguing it was more prejudicial than probative, but the court admitted it, and the jury heard an account of Wood as a man with a documented history of the same kind of violence the murders represented.

The defense fought the state’s case on each of its four fronts.

Against the informants, Wood’s attorneys pressed that Sweeney and Wells had every incentive to lie, a reduced sentence for one, reward money in the air for both, and long criminal records that made their words suspect.

Against Kelling, they raised her drug use and her circumstances.

Against the fiber evidence, they put their own expert before the jury to dispute the match.

And through it all, Wood maintained that he had not buried the young women in the desert and that the police had settled on him under pressure to close the case.

That was the heart of the defense’s theory, that Wood was a convenient suspect.

His attorneys argued that the El Paso Police Department, facing a terrified city and demands for an arrest, had focused on a parrolled sex offender who fit the profile and built a case from unreliable informants and circumstantial threads.

A man with Wood’s record was easy to charge and hard to defend precisely because his past made him look guilty regardless of what the evidence for these specific killings showed.

The jury weighed the two accounts.

On one side stood the state’s convergence, the informants’ confessions, Kelling’s parallel survival, the fiber match, the eyewitness descriptions, and Wood’s history of similar violence.

On the other stood the defense’s insistence that the direct evidence came from compromised witnesses, and the rest was circumstantial.

The jury deliberated over several hours.

The verdict came back in November 1992.

The Dallas jury found David Leonard Wood guilty of capital murder for the deaths of the six young women recovered from the desert.

The trial moved to its penalty phase, where the same jury weighed whether Wood should live or die.

Days after the guilty verdict, it sentenced him to death.

David Leonard Wood, paroled in January 1987, arrested that October, indicted in 1988, tried in 1992, was now a condemned man sent to Texas death row to await execution.

For the families of the six identified victims, the verdict delivered a measure of what they had demanded since the summer of 1987.

Marcia Wheatley, who had spent the earliest days of the case fighting a department that called her daughter a runaway, had lived to see the man convicted of killing Desiree held responsible.

The relatives who had confirmed their loved ones’ clothing at the graves had an answer.

But a death sentence in Texas was not an ending.

It was the opening of a second, longer contest fought in the appellate courts.

Every capital conviction carried an automatic path of review.

And Wood, who had denied the killings from the moment of his arrest, had both the right and the will to use it.

From death row, holding to his innocence, he began challenging the conviction that had put him there.

The appeals moved through the system as the law required.

Wood’s conviction and sentence went first to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for direct review.

In December 1995, that court affirmed both.

It weighed the importance of Judith Kelling’s testimony in particular, describing that evidence as central and compelling to the jury’s finding of identity.

The direct appeal closed with the conviction intact.

Wood pressed on to state habeas corpus review.

Wood’s federal habeas case moved slowly through the Northern District of Texas.

A magistrate judge reviewed his claims and in 2004 issued a report recommending that relief be denied.

The district court adopted that recommendation in 2006, rejecting Wood’s constitutional challenges to his conviction and sentence.

Among the claims Wood raised in that first federal petition was an argument that the jailhouse informants Sweeney and Wells had fabricated their testimony that he confessed, an attack on the most direct evidence the state had used against him.

The federal district court’s denial did not end the matter.

Wood sought to appeal, which in the federal system required him to obtain a certificate of appealability, a threshold showing that his claims were substantial enough to merit review by the appeals court.

His case went to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the federal appellate court covering Texas.

In 2007, the Fifth Circuit ruled Wood had sought to appeal several issues, including a claim that his indictment was defective, a claim that his trial and appellate lawyers had provided ineffective assistance, and a claim that the trial court had wrongly admitted evidence of an extraneous offense during the guilt phase.

The court examined each and concluded that Wood had not made the substantial showing of a constitutional violation the law required.

It denied the certificate of appealability.

The decision issued as Wood versus Quarterman left his conviction and death sentence undisturbed after federal review.

Wood took his case to the final level, the United States Supreme Court, asking it to hear his appeal.

In 2008, the Supreme Court declined, denying his petition for certiorari.

With that denial, Wood exhausted the ordinary path of appeals available to a condemned prisoner.

His direct appeal, his state habeas, his federal habeas, and his bid for Supreme Court review had all ended against him.

The conviction stood on every level.

The exhaustion of appeals cleared the way for the state to set an execution date.

With no active challenge blocking it, Texas scheduled Wood to die.

His execution was set for August 20th, 2009.

After more than 16 years on death row, Wood faced a concrete date on which the state intended to carry out the sentence the Dallas jury had imposed.

As the date approached, Wood’s legal situation shifted.

His habeas counsel had withdrawn, and he obtained new lawyers who took up his case on a pro bono basis.

They moved quickly, examining his history for grounds to stop the execution.

And they found one in his background, the same intellectual limitations that had marked his childhood, his special education placement, and his measured IQ in the high 60s.

The legal foundation for that argument came from a Supreme Court decision, Atkins versus Virginia, which held that the Constitution barred the execution of people with intellectual disability.

If Wood could show that he met the clinical and legal definition, his death sentence could not be carried out.

His new attorneys conducted an expedited investigation into an Atkins claim and prepared to bring it before the courts.

They brought it just in time.

Two days before the scheduled execution, Wood’s lawyers filed a subsequent state habeas application arguing that he was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty.

The filing put the question of Wood’s intellectual functioning squarely before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on the eve of his execution.

The court responded about a day before Wood was to be put to death.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay of execution.

It halted the August 20th, 2009 date and sent the case back to the trial court for a hearing under Atkins to determine whether Wood met the standard for intellectual disability that would spare him.

Though the families of the victims, the stay landed hard.

They had waited more than two decades for the sentence to be carried out, and it had been halted at the last day over a question about the killer’s mind rather than his guilt.

Their frustration was real and public, but the stay held, and the case turned to the Atkins hearing, where the issue would no longer be whether Wood had committed the murders, that was settled, but whether the state could lawfully execute him for them.

The Atkins hearing did not happen quickly.

After the 2009 stay, the case sat while the parties prepared, and it was not until October 2011 that the trial court convened it, reconvening that December.

Judge Bert Richardson presided over the question of whether Wood met the definition that would bar his execution.

The burden lay with Wood to carry it.

His side presented three lay witnesses, but no expert to establish the clinical diagnosis.

His case rested on the accounts of people who knew him rather than a specialist’s evaluation.

The state presented an expert, Dr. Allen, who had interviewed Wood and tested him extensively, his intelligence, his academic achievement, and whether he was putting forth genuine effort.

The court found him credible and gave weight to his conclusions.

The testing produced numbers.

Wood obtained a full-scale score of 75, with verbal comprehension at 80 and perceptual reasoning at 86, with substantial variation across subtests.

The court found the results likely reflected poor effort and that the full-scale score did not meet the threshold for subaverage intellectual functioning.

In October 2013, Richardson concluded Wood was not intellectually disabled, having shown neither subaverage functioning nor the adaptive deficits required with onset before age 18.

He recommended relief be denied.

In November 2014, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals adopted those findings.

The barrier the 2009 stay had raised fell away.

Then the ground shifted.

In 2017, the United States Supreme Court decided Moore versus Texas, holding that the Texas court could no longer rely on an older set of factors for evaluating intellectual disability because they rested on outdated medical standards.

Wood sought reconsideration under the new rule.

The court granted it, but the result held.

Setting aside the rejected factors, the evidence still showed he was not intellectually disabled.

Wood pursued the same question federally, seeking authorization for a successive habeas petition.

In 2016, the Fifth Circuit denied it, finding the claim had been available to him earlier.

The federal door closed alongside the state one.

The claim that had stopped his 2009 execution was exhausted.

It had bought him years, but it had not saved him.

His fight turned to different terrain.

Alongside the Atkins litigation, his attorneys had begun pressing another argument, one that went not to whether Wood could be executed, but to whether he was guilty at all.

It centered on evidence that had barely existed when he was tried and that his lawyers believed could answer the question the 1992 jury had decided on circumstantial proof, DNA.

When Wood was tried in 1992, DNA testing was in its infancy.

The state’s case had rested on informants, fibers, eyewitness descriptions, and Wood’s history, not on genetic evidence because that evidence had not been developed.

Wood’s attorneys came to see the gap as an opening.

If biological material from the crime scene still existed, modern testing might reveal whose it was, and Wood argued it would clear him.

Texas law allowed a convicted person to request forensic DNA testing under Chapter 64 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

Wood invoked it.

In 2010, the trial court granted his first request, agreeing to test three items, blood droplets recovered from three different victims using methods unavailable during the original investigation.

The result came back divided.

Two samples were inconclusive.

The third produced a definite result.

On a bloodstain taken from the clothing of Dawn Marie Smith, the testing found male DNA and excluded David Leonard Wood as its source.

The report stated he was not a possible donor.

It could not identify whose DNA it was.

It established only that it was not his.

Wood’s attorneys seized on it.

Here was male DNA on a murder victim’s clothing, and it was not Wood’s.

His lawyers argued the finding justified testing the remaining evidence, roughly 150 items never examined for DNA at all.

The state opposed further testing.

Its position was that an unidentified male’s DNA on decades-old clothing from a body that had lain in the desert did not establish another killer.

Biological material could reach clothing in various ways, and a single exclusion did not overturn the convergence of evidence the jury had weighed.

The dispute stretched across more than a decade.

Wood filed additional motions, and the proceedings ground on through the 2010s.

The judge assigned to the DNA litigation was Bert Richardson, the same judge who had presided over the intellectual disability hearing.

He remained on the case even after his election to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2014, handling Wood’s DNA requests from his seat on the state’s highest criminal court.

That overlap became a point of contention.

During his 2014 campaign, Richardson had included on his campaign website a link to a news story about his ruling against Wood’s intellectual disability claim, a ruling favorable to the state used as a credential before voters.

Wood’s attorneys argued a judge who had publicized his adverse ruling while seeking election should not continue deciding whether Wood was entitled to testing.

They sought his disqualification.

The request was denied, and Richardson stayed.

In March 2022, Richardson rejected the requests for additional testing.

Wood’s attorneys noted the denial came without explanation.

After more than a decade of litigation over evidence that might identify the source of DNA already shown not to be his, the answer was no.

Wood appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, raising both the substantive testing question and the disqualification issue, putting the fight before the same court on which Richardson now sat.

That court ruled in 2024.

Of the six issues Wood raised, only two went to whether he should have been granted testing.

It found none had merit and affirmed the denial.

The ground mattered.

Under the Texas statute, a convicted person had to show the request was not made to unreasonably delay his sentence.

The court held Wood failed that requirement.

The denial did not turn on a finding that the evidence could not exonerate him.

It turned on timing.

Wood petitioned the United States Supreme Court on whether due process required Richardson’s removal and filed a federal suit challenging the Texas DNA statute as applied to him.

While those were pending, the practical clock resumed.

The Atkins claim was exhausted.

The testing was denied.

In the summer of 2024, the state set an execution date, March 13th, 2025.

The date turned an appellate grind into a countdown.

Gregory Wier of the University of Wisconsin Law School, Wood’s lead attorney through much of the post-conviction fight, moved into the compressed work of a capital case in its final months.

Two arguments carried the filings.

The first was the DNA question, that Wood should be allowed to test the remaining items given the 2010 exclusion.

Wier framed the state’s long opposition as telling in itself, asking what it feared from the most powerful tool available for establishing the truth of a crime.

The second was newer.

Preparing a fresh habeas application, Wood’s team had uncovered what it called newly discovered evidence of actual innocence, irreconcilable with the case the jury heard in 1992, a direct assertion that Wood had not committed the murders.

At its center was a sworn declaration obtained in January 2025 from Ramona Dismukes.

Her sister-in-law Cheryl had disappeared that same summer.

Cheryl Vasquez Dismukes, one of the three never found.

Searching for her, Dismukes went to the area where young women were picked up, and there she met Judith Kelling.

Kelling told her something that cut against the heart of the state’s case.

She identified the man who raped her in the desert, not as David Wood, but as a man she knew as Skeer, and named him as Michael Plyler.

Dismukes showed her a photograph of Wood, and Kelling had never seen him before.

Police, she said, had dropped charges against Kelling in exchange for testimony against Wood.

Dismukes took it to the El Paso police.

The response she described was a warning to stay away.

If accurate, police had been told their key surviving witness had named a different man and proceeded against Wood anyway.

Plyler’s name carried weight because of the record.

A task force folder created on him during the murder investigation showed he drove a beige Nissan pickup and a red Harley-Davidson, the two vehicles that had defined the description of the killer from the beginning.

That reframed the identification at the core of the case.

In 1987, the investigation proceeded on the understanding that Skeer was David Wood, the name a student supplied, the identification Kelling and others made from a photo lineup.

Wood’s evidence advanced a competing account.

Skeer was Plyer.

Kelling had named him first, and Wood was substituted through a deal and a lineup, one nickname, two men.

The first formal claim was a Brady claim that the state suppressed evidence favorable to the defense.

Wood alleged four withheld items, evidence suggesting Plyer assaulted Kelling, memos documenting police surveillance of Wood, a police interview of Kelling, and a failed polygraph and biological samples from another man connected to the case.

The memos had their own force.

A tactical unit had watched Wood during a week when two victims disappeared and recorded no contact between him and either young woman.

The second claim was false testimony grounded in the rule that prosecutors may not knowingly present false evidence.

Wood alleged Kelling falsely testified he assaulted her and falsely denied a deal, that one informant lied about his financial motives, and that the fiber expert’s testimony was false.

He pointed to the informants with new specificity, alleging detectives handed Sweeney and Wells their investigative files so the two could build accounts of his confession from case materials rather than memory.

One informant received a substantial sum in reward money after the trial.

His trial attorney added to the record.

In an affidavit, the lawyer who defended Wood stated he had not been given the surveillance report and acknowledged he had known of some evidence now raised on appeal, but had not used it, saying he had no strategic reason for the omission.

The admission fed both the suppression claim and a claim that his original defense had been ineffective.

With the execution set for March 13th, 2025, Wood’s attorneys filed his state habeas application in February, raising eight claims built on the Dismukes evidence.

In parallel, they asked the Fifth Circuit to authorize a successive federal petition, the strict gateway for new claims after a first petition failed.

Wood had to show each claim’s factual basis could not have been found earlier and that the new facts, if proven, would establish by clear and convincing proof that no reasonable juror would have convicted him.

On March 11th, two days out, the court ruled, it declined the freestanding innocence claim, its precedent not recognizing such claims, and denied the ineffective assistance claim as available earlier.

On the Brady claim and part of the false testimony claim, it found Wood had met the threshold.

Its reasoning went to the heart of the case.

Taking the Dismukes declaration as true for that analysis, the court found that testimony showing Kelling had identified Plyer and falsely framed Wood for a deal would have destroyed the state’s case so thoroughly that every reasonable juror would have had a reasonable doubt.

It quoted the earlier description of her testimony as extremely important and unassailable.

Undermining Kelling undermined the foundation of the whole circumstantial case.

The grant was tentative, the first step of two.

The court decided no merits and found no actual suppression.

It denied the stay motion, and the March 13th date stood.

The decisive action came from the state court.

That same day, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals halted the execution until further order without specifying which claims it found substantiated.

On March 14th, the Supreme Court Justice handling the matter denied Wood’s federal stay application as moot.

Wood had been pulled back again, this time not over a question about his mind, but over evidence that raised a question about his guilt.

When Wier told him in person, he was briefly unable to speak, and family members visiting him began to cry.

The stay recognized Wood’s claims without resolving them.

At the end of July 2025, the court remanded the case to the trial court to develop them, to gather evidence and testimony so the questions could be examined.

The convictions stayed in place.

Wood remained on death row at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston in his late 60s.

More than three decades into that custody, he held the position he had taken at his arrest in 1987, that he had not committed the murders and that the case was built on unreliable evidence and public pressure.

His words had been consistent.

In a 1988 interview before his trial, he told a reporter he would not confess to something he had not done.

In early 2025, as the execution approached, he described a system that had marked him from the moment of his arrest, that with his record, once he was taken in, he had no chance.

The families occupied the other side of that weight.

Marcia Wheatley, who by now went by Marcia Fulton, had become the most public of the relatives, the mother who fought the runaway classification in 1987 and followed the case through every stage since.

She spoke of her fear that Wood would outlive her and her resolve not to let the case fade.

David Leonard Wood waits at Polunsky without a date, without an exoneration in his 40th year inside this case.

Whichever way the court rules, it moves him toward one of two outcomes and closes off the other.

There is no third answer.