Maurice Shema

I'd seen executions get staged for procedural claims about execution methods or a defendant's mental fitness.

But this wasn't just a claim about an unfair trial.

Greg was saying David Wood didn't do it at all.

And now, somehow, he's supposed to prove that in a few months.

So I told Greg, I'm not going to do the big feature story on David Wood you're imagining.

But what if I follow you around?

Be there with a microphone as you strategize with your team, hunt for witnesses, and try to persuade people of David Wood's innocence with the clock ticking?

Greg had a million reasons to say no.

I'm still kind of shocked that he said yes.

Yeah, thanks for having me here.

So the person who really walked us through the evidence was a detective who worked on the case.

His name is John Guerrero.

He was with the El Paso Police Department.

And he's retired now, and he invited my serial producer Alvin Melleth and I to his house in El Paso.

He introduced himself as Johnny.

It's one of the biggest cases of his career, and he seemed to like talking about it.

So this begins in the summer of 1987, and there are two county employees working in the desert outside of El Paso, and Johnny says they saw a leg sticking out of the sand.

The police checked it out, and they found out that it was a woman named Rosa Maria Casio.

She was in her 20s.

And then they searched the area around her, and pretty quickly, they find a second body about 50 feet away.