Maurice Chamas

Men on death row talk about their faith a lot, as you might imagine.

And I do think David is sincere here.

He was baptized a few years ago and meets regularly with a spiritual advisor.

He spends hours reading the Bible and watching faith-based movies on a prison-issued tablet.

There is, ultimately, only so much you can get to know a person in an hour.

But this version of David, the religious one, was hard to square with the more callous version from earlier in our interview.

I went in looking for signs of remorse, some help thinking about the binary, innocent man or serial killer.

By that standard, I wasn't sure what to make of David.

For me, he landed somewhere more complicated, possibly innocent of the murders, but certainly not sympathetic.

When the jury was deciding David Wood's punishment, they had to decide what they made of him as a person, how much sympathy they could muster for someone like him.

I wanted this interview to kind of approximate that experience, so that you could decide what sympathy you might hold for him, if any.

I suspect that, for many of you, it might not be much.

With just a few minutes left in our hour together, I ran this idea past him directly.

You can imagine somebody listening to all this and saying, well, you know, I'm not sympathetic to this guy.

What would you say to someone like that?

Regardless of my past, meaning regardless of being a convicted rapist.

But actually, for David Wood's lawyers, his past is very much part of the story here.

As counterintuitive as it may sound, they say David Wood's prior crimes strengthened the case for his innocence.

The defense team's theory goes something like this.

The police and prosecutors began their investigation by looking at the least sympathetic characters in El Paso.