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The Last 12 Weeks

    Episode 1 of “The Last 12 Weeks,” a podcast from The Marshall Project, Serial Productions and The New York Times, starts with an unusual email.

    In late 2024, a defense lawyer named Greg Wiercioch wrote to me, asking me to cover the case of his client, David Wood. Wood had been charged with six murders in El Paso and had been on death row for more than 30 years.

    Now, after losing all his appeals, Wood was facing execution. The lawyer had enlisted a team of colleagues to make one final push to save his life. They planned to argue that Wood, one of Texas’ most notorious serial killers, was actually innocent. They had several months.

    I asked the lawyer if I could follow his team around in the run-up to the execution, to watch their frenzied efforts to stop it. He had a million reasons to say no. I’m still a bit shocked that he said yes.

    A photo shows the El Paso County Courthouse, a low brick building, in front of a tall building with a glass facade. A traffic light is in the foreground, as well as a street sign that says “Myrtle.”
    A photo shows a White man with white hair and a beard, wearing a charcoal-colored suit. He is seated in an office facing to the side and looking at the camera.
    A photo shows a White man with brown hair and a beard. He is wearing a brown, yellow and green plaid shirt and is standing between two doorways.
    A photo shows George Hall, a White man in a beige vest and a red-and-black jacket, smoking a cigarette while sitting in the driver's seat of a car.
    From left, The El Paso County Courthouse in El Paso, Texas. David Wood was sentenced to death after prosecutors argued he killed six girls and women in El Paso in 1987. He has maintained his innocence for nearly four decades; Greg Wiercioch, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the lead attorney on Wood’s case; Jeremy Schepers is a supervisor at the Federal Public Defender’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, and is one of Wood’s lawyers; George Hall says that El Paso police encouraged him to falsely claim that Wood, who was incarcerated with him, had confessed to killing six girls and women. From left, Paul Ratje for The New York Times; Caleb Alvarado for The New York Times; Desiree Rios for The New York Times; Arin Yoon for The Marshall Project