Alvin Melleth

Meanwhile, Johnny continues trying to prove that David Wood is also the desert killer.

It ends up taking him and the prosecutors more than four years.

Their main piece of physical evidence is a collection of orange fibers, threads, possibly from a blanket.

The police find some near one of the victims' bodies in the desert.

They find similar ones in a vacuum cleaner at David Wood's apartment.

The other big thing that helps Johnny?

Testimony from those two men who had been in prison with David Wood.

When Wood is finally put on trial for the murders, they both swear, under oath, that David Wood confessed to them that he was the desert killer.

Nearly five years after the rape conviction, a jury finds David Wood guilty of murder.

He's sentenced to death.

So yeah, this is the case that Greg Warchuk is trying to fight.

A hideous case in which the jury needed less than 90 minutes to hand down a death sentence.

A case that, over the course of three decades, numerous appeals courts have found no reason to question.

But Greg is adamant that the cops, the prosecutors, the jury, the judges, they all got it wrong.

My producer Alvin Melleth and I meet Greg for the first time in mid-December 2024 at the El Paso County Courthouse.

Greg looks a little like a younger Dick Van Dyke, if you know that reference, which Greg would.

Tall and wiry, white hair, trim beard.

Greg is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he just flew in from.

There's a nervous energy wafting off him.

Can we just start with what's important to you right now?