Alvin Melleth

Plus, he knows they're not above lying.

George returns to prison.

Not long after, he writes to an El Paso prosecutor about, quote, improprieties that I am aware of.

He says he knows the informants are fabricating their stories.

The prosecutor never writes back, but the letter does make its way into David Wood's case file.

Eventually, David Wood does go on trial for the murders.

George is never called to testify.

But the two other guys become the star witnesses for the prosecution.

The jury convicts David Wood, and he's sentenced to death.

Court documents show that after the trial, one of the informants received $13,000 in reward money.

The other got his own capital murder charge dropped.

I identified more than a dozen officers, detectives, and supervisors who were involved in David Wood's case.

I wanted to ask them about George Hall.

Some were dead, one had dementia, one hung up on me, and others never responded.

But the one detective who did speak to me extensively about the case called George's whole story, quote, preposterous.

It's pretty well documented in court records and a media account that George and the other two men were brought in together and interviewed by the El Paso police.

But the detective said he couldn't imagine his colleagues taking prisoners out for a joyride and showing them case materials in order to get them to snitch.

For more than 30 years after David Wood's trial, George kept tabs on the case, Googled it from time to time.

In 2009, he read that David Wood's execution was called off.

There'd been a question about his intellectual capacity.