Death Row inmate David Leonard Wood says he’s innocent as execution nears

LIVINGSTON, Texas – David Leonard Wood is angry.

He’s angry that he’s been on Texas Death Row for nearly four decades when no DNA evidence links him to the murders of six women and girls in El Paso.

He’s angry at every cop and prosecutor who put him behind bars, and he’s angry that his community largely believes he is the so-called Desert Killer.

But right now, he’s mostly angry about his execution, scheduled for next week.

In an hour-long interview with USA TODAY at the state’s Death Row just north of Houston, Wood stood behind his longtime claims of innocence, picked apart the state’s case against him and talked about his struggle to find peace as his death nears.

Wood is set to be executed by lethal injection on March 13, which would make him the seventh man put to death in the U.S. this year and the third alone in Texas, by far the nation’s deadliest state for Death Row inmates.

“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. “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?”

Who is David Leonard Wood?

Wood, who grew up in El Paso in the 1960s, said he was “a problem child” who turned into a partier as an adult, hanging out in biker bars and strip clubs.

He said he started running with the wrong crowd as a teen and got kicked out on his very first day of high school for fighting. His family, speaking in court, described him as a hyperactive kid who was placed in foster homes twice.

When Wood was 18, he caught some jail time for siphoning gas from an off-duty cop car.

Less than two years later in 1977, he was convicted of indecency with a 12-year-old girl and served just over three years in prison. In 1980, he was convicted of raping a 13-year-old and 19-year-old in separate crimes, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He served seven years before he was paroled and freed in January 1987 at the age of 29, one month before the Desert Killer’s victims began disappearing.

Wood, now 67, told USA TODAY that he didn’t rape the girls but acknowledged some wrongdoing, and blamed it on alcohol and marijuana. He said, “I’m sorry.”

“Anybody would tell you, my friends or my family, if I hadn’t have been drunk or high, I wouldn’t have did what I did,” he said.

David Leonard Wood was convicted of being the Desert Killer

In 1992, 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.

Dawn was a ninth-grader who may have been pregnant, Desiree was a middle school student who liked to collect plushies, Frausto was a beloved sister with an infectious laugh, Baker was a mother of three who wanted to go to cosmetology school, Williams was a dancer who loved riding her Harley Davidson and Casio was about to start community college.

“She was my partner in crime,” Frausto’s sister, Jolieen Denise Gonzalez, told USA TODAY. “I miss her laugh the most.”

The bodies of the six victims 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.

What was the evidence against Wood?

Wood’s conviction was based mainly on circumstantial evidence. No DNA evidence has ever connected Wood to the murders.

El Paso Assistant District Attorney Karen Shook told jurors during the 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 during his recent interview 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,” Wood 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.

Wood’s attorney, Gregory Wiercioch, told USA TODAY this 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.”

What do the families of the victims say?

Jolieen Denise Gonzalez, whose 17-year-old sister Angelica Frausto, was among the Desert Killer’s victims, told USA TODAY that she believes Wood helped plan her sister’s death but that he didn’t kill her himself.

She said Frausto had been selling drugs on behalf of a bar manager and a police officer, and believes that she was killed for showing off an apartment where bags of marijuana were being stored.

“I believe in my heart that he didn’t do it,” Frausto told USA TODAY last week, adding that her sister was tough and strong, and at 5 feet, 10 inches, Wood isn’t that big. “My sister could have taken him out.”

But she said Wood deserves the death penalty and has had plenty of time to “tell the truth” about her sister’s murder.

“We don’t need a person like that on this planet anyway,” she said.

Marcia Fulton, whose 15-year-old daughter Desiree Wheatley was murdered, told the El Paso Times − part of the USA TODAY Network that she believes Wood is guilty and is planning on attending his execution.

“The last thing he sees when he dies will be me,” she said in 2017. “I don’t care if I gotta crawl, I will be there. I said to Desi at her funeral, I put my hand on her coffin, and I said, ‘I will find out who did this, and I will bring them to justice.’”

Is there a chance Wood’s execution will be stopped?

Wood and his attorney continue to argue for a reprieve, with Wiercioch focused on fighting for more DNA testing, only to be rejected over and over again.

Wiercioch filed actions seeking to stop the execution with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Feb. 21. That court can intervene and if it doesn’t, Wood could plead his case with the U.S. Supreme Court, and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott still has the power to intervene. A Texas district judge and the criminal appeals court rejected previous requests for more DNA testing in 2022 and 2024, respectively.

“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.

“The El Paso County District Attorney’s Office has not worked on or been involved in Mr. Woods’ case for more than 30 years, and it would be ill-advised to insert ourselves into the case now,” El Paso District Attorney James Montoya said in a statement.

About Wiercioch’s calls for his office to push for additional DNA testing, Montoya said that “would require a comprehensive review of the entire case and the state of the evidence, both as it was in 1987 and now in the present day – which is precisely why our office is ill-suited to offer an opinion one way or another; it has not been our case for over 30 years.”

The El Paso Police Department hasn’t responded to USA TODAY’s request for comment about the strength of its evidence and Wood’s claims that officers unfairly targeted him, planted evidence and sought false testimony.

David Leonard Wood, facing death

Back on Texas Death Row, Wood vowed to continue fighting “tooth and nail” as long as possible.

“I’ve done everything I could to prove my innocence … I’ve given enough body specimens from every part of my body on multiple times to create 15 crime scenes. Believe me, there’s nothing I haven’t done to cooperate, to show I had nothing to do with this case.

“So am I angry? Yes, yes, I am,” he continued. “But I believe in God above, and anybody leaves this Earth, if you’re believing Christian, then you’re going home.”

Contributing: Greta Cross, Fernando Cervantes, USA TODAY, and El Paso Times archive reports.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Death Row inmate David Leonard Wood is angry over execution: Interview