Maurice Chamas

Although David did plead guilty to these crimes, his versions of events were wildly different from what I'd read in court records.

He downplayed what he did in one assault and the other assault he tried to deny entirely.

I wasn't able to talk to those women, but Christy's story was fresh in my mind.

I asked him to take me back to that night and describe what happened.

At first, his account roughly lined up with Christy's.

Met her at a park.

I was drinking with a friend of mine.

She was there.

I mean, she described it later at the trial as like a kind of a nightmare for her.

Do you have a... Yeah, I mean, do you have sort of... How do you feel about... It was a bad thing.

I want to dwell for one more beat on how far apart these accounts are.

Christie described David's attack as intentional, predatory.

David denies the whole rock thrown at the windshield story and says what happened was basically a drunken mistake that got out of hand.

I find his way of talking about it off-putting, to put it mildly, and it doesn't do wonders for his overall reliability.

But I also see we're at kind of cross-purposes.

David has 22 days before the state is scheduled to execute him for murders he's adamant he didn't commit.

And here I am with all these questions about crimes he already served his time for.

His frustration, while unpleasant and self-serving, was not totally surprising.

Given the time crunch, we move on to what he really wants to talk about, the crux of why he's sitting here on death row.

The way he tells it, it started when he got on the wrong side of some detectives in El Paso.