Maurice Shema

For one, there were other suspects the police could have spent more time investigating.

Greg has the list from the original police file.

There were 36 names on this list.

Arguably the most important one, though, was a guy named Salvador Martinez.

He was a friend of David Woods, who also admitted to police that he knew some of the victims.

According to court documents, one woman claimed to the lawyers that Martinez once put her in a headlock and said, quote, Do you know how easy it would be for me to snap your neck in two right now?

She later told the police that they should be investigating him rather than David Wood.

The police did give Martinez a polygraph test about the desert murders, which I know unreliable, but he failed it.

Police went ahead and collected his saliva and blood, but for reasons that aren't totally clear, they never tested whether his DNA appeared at any of the crime scenes.

Both Greg's team and I have talked to Martinez.

I tried to reach him for months and finally just went to his house.

He wouldn't let me record him, but he denied having anything to do with the murders.

When I followed up later about the allegation that he'd threatened to snap a woman's neck, I got an email from his wife.

She said he couldn't talk to us anymore because of his dementia, but the story, quote, does not sound like anything Sal would do.

So, alternate suspects.

That's one part of Greg's tunnel vision theory.

And then there's David Wood's pickup truck.

A key piece of the state's narrative was that he used this truck to take the victims out to the desert.

But Greg has since figured out that the truck was in a wreck and sitting in a salvage yard for all of August 1987, which is when three of the victims disappeared.

Plus, El Paso police were actually surveilling David Wood for part of that August, and they didn't see any evidence of him killing anyone.