Maurice Chamas

We're separated from David Wood by plexiglass.

He's on the other end of our booth in a little cell.

We pass a microphone over and watch for a second as he struggles to set it up.

David wears an all-white jumpsuit.

He's got long white hair and lots of tattoos.

Looks a little like a roadie for a metal band or the biker at the end of the bar.

I was aware going into this interview how fraught it was with expectations, mine and his.

My aim was to get to know David beyond the facts of the case, who he is as a person.

Was he contrite?

Did he have regrets?

But I got a heads up from his lead lawyer, Greg, that David mainly wanted to talk about the case.

He saw this as his one chance to set the record straight, three weeks out from his execution.

So we both had some ambitious goals for this conversation.

And yet one thing that wasn't going to help either of us was the prison's extremely strict time limit for this interview.

So yeah, since we only have an hour... That's it, is an hour?

Yeah, that's it.

It's going to go fast.

Let's run through the basics.

David Wood was born in 1957 in San Angelo, Texas.

He was one of four kids, and his background is familiar for death row in so much as it was pretty grim.