Alvin Melleth

Legal review from Alameen Sumar and Jackson Bush.

The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcon.

Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of The New York Times.

Special thanks to Michael Ona, Susan C. Beachy, Jillian Campbell, and Justyna Garbachevska-Skalpone.

The last 12 weeks is a production of Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and The New York Times.

In the fall of 2024, a criminal defense lawyer got the kind of phone call that most lawyers can only dream about.

It concerned a client of his, a guy named David Wood, one of Texas' most notorious serial killers.

He was sitting on death row, months away from his execution.

The man on the phone, George Hall, thought something corrupt had gone down in David Woods' trial.

It had happened more than 30 years ago, but for 30 years he'd said nothing, mostly because he was afraid to.

For those 30 years, he'd been on parole.

He worried if he aggravated the authorities, they might find some way to send him back to prison.

But now his parole had ended and George Hall was ready to tell his story, which he'd eventually put into a sworn declaration.

That story goes like this.

Back in the late 80s, George Hall and David Wood were locked up together at the Easton unit in Texas.

George Hall was in for murder.

David Wood was in for rape.

They weren't particularly close.

David Wood was quiet, didn't talk much.

But when he did, George says, it was mainly to complain about how the police in his hometown of El Paso were harassing him, investigating him for a series of murders.