This eye-opening podcast from Serial Productions follows David Wood’s capital defence lawyers as they “try to save their client’s life” during his last weeks on death row, said The New York Times.
It’s been over three decades since Wood was convicted of murdering six young women and girls and burying their bodies near El Paso – crimes for which he was nicknamed the Desert Killer. The five-part series centres around the “high stakes and at times bizarre work involved in trying to halt an execution”.
Pulitzer Prize-winning death penalty reporter Maurice Chammah is given “extraordinary level of access” to the inner workings of this capital case in its “final stretch”, bringing listeners “into the room with the lawyers” as they attempt to “poke holes in the case” and search for elusive witnesses, all while the “clock ticks down”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Latest Videos From
Made in collaboration with the non-profit news organisation, The Marshall Project, it’s a “spare but thought-provoking” podcast, said The Guardian. As Wood’s execution looms, his lawyer’s final attempt to prove his innocence naturally seems “inconceivable to the victims’ families”.
“More dead women as content! How marvellously unsurprising, I thought”, said Jude Rogers in The Observer. But as I kept listening I realised “this isn’t another mindless excursion into true crime’s murky waters, but a proper immersion in the waves that surround it.” Even sections about the legal process that should be “brain-crushingly dull” are made to “glisten” with fascinating details.
The series begins with an answerphone message from a convicted murderer who shared a prison cell with Wood. In it, he claims police took him and other prisoners on a scenic drive, plied them with hamburgers, and encouraged them to say that Wood had confessed to the El Paso killings.
Like other Serial Productions’ work, the “modus operandi is hardcore”: to introduce a “deeply tangled” court case, “then patiently tease apart the threads, demanding the listener’s full attention”.
