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Season Six: 9 Girls, 9 Months, 1 Desert
223 Plays18 days ago
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Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:25
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
Podcast Planning Challenges
00:00:57
Speaker
you know I sit down and I have these ideas about how episodes are going to go. And sometimes I feel like I'm putting too much information together because we're going to end up talking for hours. And sometimes I try and combine topics that I think... They like they align in my head and they don't always align when I start speaking.
00:01:17
Speaker
But I wanted to get back to like some of the serial killer stuff that was going on. I'm just curious, going back to what you just said. Have you ever... like Have you ever been editing an episode and been like, where did that come from? Like, have you ever had, like, that stark of a contrast?
00:01:36
Speaker
Yeah, like, things we said or, like, information we put out there? are art and I mean, like, going from, you know, talking about something that might go with something else and it just doesn't at all? It's rare, but it does happen. Like, i've I tend to pick things.
00:01:53
Speaker
You want to know why that is? Well, go ahead. Because you have a great, like, I don't want to say like bullshit game because it's not really bullshit, but you have a great way of tying things together. Yeah. I mean, I think that, yeah, I think that is a I think that's a skill.
00:02:11
Speaker
Well, not to mention all criminal cases that are like, that we're going to be taught, that we talk about, they have different things in common. They really do, but it could take some digging to get there.
Interest in Serial Killers and Digital Evidence
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah, like the way that you get my attention, like with an article or something, is you talk about a serial killer, or you talk about the death penalty, or you talk about a missing persons case that has like movement after many years of no movement.
00:02:37
Speaker
And like, I immediately like want to know more. And so some of the times I will see that like, oh, look, Asia degrees coming out and there's this thing about text messages. And then I'll see this other case that's more current.
00:02:52
Speaker
And like the key evidence is like text messages or something in their digital, you know, footprint that this person has left. And i will tie those things together because I,
00:03:08
Speaker
think that like those two topics are linked in my mind, and I can talk about them with you. And it's very it is pretty rare that like I get to the end of something and I go, no, like I have to cut all this stuff out.
00:03:22
Speaker
But sometimes ah sometimes it happens.
Managing Past Content
00:03:24
Speaker
It seems like that has happened, but I can't really remember what it was. It seems like there's been like one... or it's not very many, but it it feels like, you know, it just didn't take off, but usually we do pretty well. Yeah.
00:03:37
Speaker
You think there's like somewhere like I made too much of a leap or something in the topics? I think that there's been times where we like recorded and then i know a lot of stuff hasn't aired, but I, some of it's just timing, but I think that we've shows that we recorded that at some point, I think when I got off, I was like, yeah, that's not gonna be an episode, and then it never was. I can't remember what it was, though. I will say that, like, um we had this trouble with our archive, where it is kind of difficult for me to go back through and figure out what we didn't use, and I have had a, like, and like an inkling where I should
00:04:19
Speaker
I should hire someone at some point and and I can narrow it down and be like, from this time period, there's a couple of episodes I want from there that are in the unused pile, but we used to, so i think what's made the air is something like 310 or some episodes, like 400 episodes.
Addressing Unanswered Questions in Criminal Cases
00:04:37
Speaker
but we've probably recorded more like four hundred Yeah, probably. I don't know if it's that big a gap, but I think it might be. And then something happens, like something completely changes in the situation.
00:04:49
Speaker
That's one of the reasons I didn't cover Asia Degree early this year, um because I know there was movement there. and we We covered it like when the movement was happening, but then I got really confused by some of the paperwork that come out. and I've listened to other podcasts that have covered it and YouTubers that have covered it, and I've realized they're all getting it wrong. so I just was like, I don't want to be the one to also get that wrong um because of like the hard lines they're taking. Delphi was like that for me. We recorded some um over the years. We've we've talked some.
00:05:21
Speaker
A little bit of his has made the air like when Delphi News happens, but the truth was but That case turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought it would be. and we didn't dig deep into that because in order to dig deep into it, you kind of had to make up a conspiracy. And, you know, Karen Reed is kind of similar that way. The Murdaugh's were that way. Like we covered a lot of the Murdaugh stuff because we had questions that honestly, some of my questions in that case have still not been answered.
00:05:50
Speaker
um But I, I covered that because um that was the whole reason i wanted the podcast was to be able to talk about things that like I had questions about.
00:06:01
Speaker
Even the case today that we have, we were sitting here trying to figure out, like, do we put these two topics together or split them? And I think we ultimately are going to split the topics that we're talking about because they won't seem to be linked if we if we did it all in one.
Underreported Serial Killer Case
00:06:14
Speaker
So we'll end up with two episodes.
00:06:15
Speaker
But there was a serial killer, and, like, he's going to get some... In my opinion, he's going to get some press time. And I don't think he's gotten a lot of press time over the years. um They've kept him low key. It happens in a place where they they kept it kind of dumbed down.
00:06:32
Speaker
Honestly, his name was terrible. Like his serial killer name was terrible. and And like people didn't talk about it, but his case is so fascinating to me. And I think you said ah couple of different true crime, like documentary min series that made him an episode or something.
00:06:48
Speaker
Just like a little episode, yeah. yeah I didn't see anything like... long form on him. Yeah. and like, ah he's one that like, personally, i could probably go through what's happened with him and point out a lot about serial killers over the years.
00:07:05
Speaker
He happens at an ideal time and sort of the history of serial killer profiling. He has a lot of the things that we get wrong related to serial killers. And when i look at his case, ah I,
00:07:20
Speaker
I don't know that I have like innocence or guilt questions, but like looking at this case, I'm like, what is happening here that they're doing
Intelligence and Legal Issues in Serial Killer Cases
00:07:28
Speaker
all of this? And I can't figure out, are these the result of like...
00:07:32
Speaker
minimal press coverage and or minimal records release or like like what's happened but what part of it mean well i think we'll get to you in the episode there's a few legal questions that come up and i look at them and go how are all these things in the same bucket possible like this his intelligence comes up at some point in here and that was one i looked at and i went what is going on there? Because I can't tell if it's like good lawyering or bad police or ah mixture of the two things.
00:08:03
Speaker
Um, and, and that like, he's honestly kind of a prototypical, erotimatic,
00:08:14
Speaker
a serial killer in a lot of ways, because we kind of know his motivations from early in life if he's a serial killer. But again, he gets like lumped into one of those, like he either has this many victims or this many victims.
00:08:29
Speaker
And I look at it and go, well, how is that possible? that they say it that way because, another thing that happens with his case is like, he has other victims that survive early.
00:08:44
Speaker
And like, in my mind, like you put those in the count, but I understand like people want to tag the, the murder victims onto it. And they say, those are
David Leonard Wood's Background
00:08:52
Speaker
the ones that were counting. ah You said you had quite a bit to say about him, which is what ultimately led to us even doing an episode on him by himself.
00:09:02
Speaker
But ah ah the person that we're covering has activity going on because he was actually sentenced to be put to death. If I recall correctly, it was this weekend. Yeah.
00:09:14
Speaker
and And he got to stay. Yeah. March 13th. So I had, i had grabbed his case and I had gone like back through it to to like pull the summaries and stuff and looked at it. And i was like, yeah, that looks like there's enough information there for us to, to put this into an episode.
00:09:36
Speaker
And there, honestly, there's so much that like you can, once we're done with this episode, you can go and read more. I'm going to read more. ah Like, I don't think we're going to spoil anything for you. There's a lot more to to dig into.
00:09:49
Speaker
i will say he kind of leans against where of all the serial killers gone, although he's been in custody for a long time. And he's still alive, by the way, you know, because obviously if he was going to be put to death, he's still alive.
00:10:04
Speaker
I was a little shocked by his age. When I first started reading about him, I thought, this guy's going to be like 80-some years old and and whatever. But he's actually he's only 67 years old.
00:10:15
Speaker
um He was born ah June 20th of 1957. And putting all that math together, I was like, what? This guy's name is David Leonard Wood.
00:10:27
Speaker
He was born down in San Angelo, Texas, which is a place that you and I have covered for various reasons over the years. um Missing persons cases down there. And um we did a series with a family member from a murder down there that actually would have been in the same time frame that this guy was killing.
00:10:49
Speaker
We've had a number of reasons to kind of poke around in Texas. He's the second of four children when he was born June 20th, 1957. In the late 1960s, his father is a man named Leo Wood.
00:11:03
Speaker
He's another Leonard Wood, I believe. He moves the family into a nice neighborhood in El Paso, and he was working for a company that at the time was just called the El Paso Electric Company.
00:11:16
Speaker
And they were considered to be well off, but something was going on with mom. And dad did not have the best relationship with the children, according to like sort of the public side of all of this.
00:11:30
Speaker
ah Mom's name was Betty. And Betty, at some point in the 60s, had started showing signs of mental illness. And she argued a lot with Leo, with dad.
00:11:44
Speaker
And the bottom line is dad's way of dealing with his children was to take a paddle to them.
00:11:56
Speaker
So paddle, big piece of wood, ah something that sort of meant, it's you know it's it's really meant to be a tool. ah In this case, it was a tool for discipline that it was probably long into abusive.
00:12:11
Speaker
in In the mid-1960s, Betty Wood ends up being committed to multiple types of therapy. One of those types of therapy is she is put in a psychiatric hospital for six months, and she's treated with what is known as ECT,
00:12:26
Speaker
um which... is I don't know if it's still considered to be like a... It's like electric shock, right? Yeah,
Controversy of Electroconvulsive Therapy
00:12:37
Speaker
yeah. This is shock therapy.
00:12:39
Speaker
um It has been used over the years as like an intervener for... major depressive disorder, mania, autism, catatonia. um Basically, what happens with ECT is you get ah a muscle relaxant or in some places a full anesthetic.
00:13:02
Speaker
They place electrodes on you. And depending on what they're treating you for, ah you get different levels of frequency and electrical waveform, quote, therapy.
00:13:16
Speaker
And I'm going to use that word very loosely because ECT and EST, so electroconvulsive therapy and electroshock therapy, um I think...
00:13:29
Speaker
that may be wrong. Our torture. I think they're a form of torture. I think they have less, uh, therapeutic value than, than we believe. I'm not a doctor. I don't pretend to be one. However, I will say that while I, while I follow the idea that perhaps if you could just give your brain a jolt, it would cure your mental ailment.
00:13:55
Speaker
I don't feel like that's how any of that stuff works. I, you know, i I, I look at things like defibrillators.
00:14:05
Speaker
Okay. We, we live in a world. Exactly. We live in a world where giving the heart a jolt of different, ah depending on what type of like heart problem you have can save your life.
00:14:17
Speaker
Right. um But I have little understanding of giving the brain a jolt in a way that like. I just don't think it works that way.
00:14:28
Speaker
Well, ultimately, it doesn't work for Betty Wood. When she's allowed to return home after being released from the psychiatric hospital ah when the family lives in El Paso, Texas, she's prescribed drugs that she promptly begins abusing.
00:14:45
Speaker
um I don't see a lot of specificity of how she's abusing them. I don't know if she's crushing things and snorting them. But you've got to think 60s, mental health drugs. It's not having a great effect on her.
00:14:57
Speaker
And it's not having a great effect on the family.
Wood's Early Life Challenges
00:15:00
Speaker
Her mental health goes downhill rather than being stabilized and and like her coming back to the family. So the parents are basically dealing with each other. And obviously he's working. She's got other things to do. So theyre not really paying attention to the kids.
00:15:18
Speaker
So at some point in time, David Leonard Wood and his siblings, which there are three of them, they're all sent off to live with relatives.
00:15:29
Speaker
At one point, they end up in New Mexico, and they even are spending time in foster homes, which is the strangest thing to me when you relatives.
00:15:40
Speaker
two parents, one parent is at least capable if abusive. Um, and, and the, the end result is four kids end up going into foster homes. Uh, but it happens here and it does have an effect on, on the entire family ah from an early age.
00:15:57
Speaker
The way that David would is described is basically like he has, i anxiety and an extreme form of ADHD. So, um, so his whatever's going on with him is ah recognized enough by outsiders that he ends up being admitted to a hospital and he ends up having to undergo medical treatment.
00:16:25
Speaker
But what shocked me about that is they're doing this to him in his own very early elementary school years.
00:16:37
Speaker
So he's in the first grade when they put him into a hospital and they give him medical treatment for some level of mental malady. And he has to repeat the first grade of school.
00:16:49
Speaker
And over time, they don't, while they do recognize something's going on with him, they don't ever really get a good balance for him and what type of classes he should be and taking and what should be going on. So he loses interest in school.
00:17:04
Speaker
He has terrible grades and basically doesn't show up in school. So he has to repeat the first grade later repeats the third grade. He also has to repeat the ninth grade. And like he in,
00:17:19
Speaker
pretty well-published interviews, he has admitted that somewhere early he started touching girls and feeling sexual attraction towards girls. He even, by his own claim, lost his virginity at age 12. So that's going to be 1959, before the family even moves to El paso in the early
00:17:42
Speaker
ah david wood is he's an outdoory kit But the reason that he's outdoors appears to be avoiding authority. And he gets pretty deep into alcohol and drugs. Now, they don't specify what drugs he gets into.
00:18:00
Speaker
But in 1974, at the age of 17, he ends up quitting a high school known as Parkland High School. And i think we've we've talked about Parkland High School for a couple of reasons over the years.
00:18:14
Speaker
Um, this is a high school in El Paso among their notable alumni are our two NFL players and David Leonard Wood, who was only there like, uh, for three years while I tried to complete the ninth grade.
00:18:29
Speaker
And then he quits. And in 1974, he's 17 years old. He's still a freshman. So think about that for a second to give you an idea of his timeline. He attempts to get into the army and the army says, no, we're not interested in you.
00:18:43
Speaker
ah Because of that, Wood starts to do odd jobs and and a lot of manual labor over the next three years. So that's sort of David Wood's childhood, in my opinion, because ah ah by the time we pick back up with him, he's going to be 19 years old.
00:19:06
Speaker
Now, this is where he gets interesting to me in terms of serial killers. He... is pretty documented as having been a little bit of a sexual deviant.
00:19:20
Speaker
I'm going to say this because i'm not I'm not being any kind of sympathizer for people or anything like that, but my thinking is if you're 17 and having trouble with a ninth grade, something is going on.
00:19:35
Speaker
And it's either that, you know, you don't like school, you're distracted by things, you strongly probably need a direction.
00:19:46
Speaker
um And that could be that you need some kind of special education or some, and I know they don't call it that anymore. It could be that you needed an individualized education plan, but he doesn't get that.
Wood's Criminal History Begins
00:20:00
Speaker
And on August 30th 1976, he,
00:20:05
Speaker
David Wood is arrested and he's charged with what today would be indecent liberties with a child.
00:20:17
Speaker
The allegations are that he was engaging in ah sexual activity with a 12 year old girl. And how old is he? He's going to be 19 when this is happening.
00:20:29
Speaker
So, you know, I look at that and I don't want to sound like some kind of sympathizer, 19 years old is ah is a weird time to suddenly find yourself on, and I know this is not literally on the registry, but just because of like the age and the time.
00:20:46
Speaker
But when I pulled up ah his crime, so to speak, he's very clearly got something seriously wrong with him.
00:20:58
Speaker
And i i thought it was going to be like, maybe we could misinterpret this. And he was trying to have a relationship. But it clearly was undercharged.
00:21:14
Speaker
Does that make sense when I say the words undercharged? Yeah. Um, I believe he, I believe he violently raped this 12 year old girl and tried to pass it off that he had been having sex with her. And I think everybody looked at it and went, well, he's kind of slow.
00:21:31
Speaker
You know, he did the the first grade twice, the third grade, twice ninth grade, a couple of times. Although I don't know if I completely believe that for some reasons that we'll get to later, uh, in terms of him actually being so like, uh,
00:21:46
Speaker
in a deficit intelligence wise, I think he just wasn't focusing on what he probably should have been focusing on. And he had some early signs that like, I guess it could be at first a sex addiction and then it becomes this power dynamic that he includes the, the sex problem with.
00:22:04
Speaker
ah but he rapes a 12 year old girl and he's given five years in prison at 19 years old, but he doesn't serve very long. He serves two years in prison, and on December 28th of 1978, he's granted parole and released.
00:22:20
Speaker
So if you take into account the time it took for him to get conviction, which is going to be in 1977, he's not really being told, don't that.
00:22:32
Speaker
like really being told don't do that ah by the system. He's only being told if there's a witness, you're only going to get a year and change.
00:22:44
Speaker
So in March of 1980, so we've, you know, we had 19 year old David Wood in August of 1976. We're fast forwarding a couple of years here.
00:22:55
Speaker
um He's released in 1978.
00:22:59
Speaker
like a little more than two years later, but by March of 1980. So from that release date, a year and a half, he commits two rapes eight days apart.
00:23:12
Speaker
The first, uh, rape that he commits is a 19 year old female acquaintance. But the second rape is the interesting one. He rapes a 13 year old girl that he does not know. So he commits both like a kind of a date rape or acquaintance rape, and then a stranger rape in basically a week.
00:23:35
Speaker
Uh, at this point in time, he's found guilty and he is given a 20 year sentence, but by all accounts, His behavior as an inmate is sort of exactly what you want for a person who is growing from this 23-year-old kid with like a serious violence power sex problem into you know what's going to be habitable, rehabitable member of society. He goes under ah several programs that they offer in Texas that at the time seemed to be appropriate for him um for sex offender rehabilitation.
00:24:15
Speaker
And how long do you think he serves at this 20-year sentence? Well, not long enough. Yeah, I would agree with that. He serves six years. Yeah. and January 14, 1987. I think these are like all like holiday remorse type paroles. By the way, I meant to mention that to you earlier.
00:24:33
Speaker
Like it's always like Christmas or New Year's. He's getting parole. Yeah. um But January 14, 1987, he is again granted parole. So at this point in time, what we know is he has three violent sexual assaults.
00:24:49
Speaker
But he gets out and he returns to El Paso. And he finds work. um He works doing manual labor. He learns some aspects of being an auto mechanic, although I feel like the description of him as an auto mechanic is a bit of a stretch.
00:25:06
Speaker
Maybe an oil change tech would be a better description of him. He finds a job at a furniture store, but he starts hanging out at different bars and nightclubs. Specifically, he starts hanging out at topless bars.
00:25:20
Speaker
which is probably not the best environment for somebody who's had to go through several sex offender rehabilitation programs.
00:25:31
Speaker
I would say that um they I don't feel like he ever was being rehabilitated, nor did he even pretend to be.
00:25:43
Speaker
but yeah, it wouldn't be a great environment. Uh, but it's exactly the kind of environment. Somebody who gets punished, takes their punishment, goes back out and does the same thing again would do.
00:25:56
Speaker
After he gets out in 1987, Wood starts hanging around with bikers. And by bikers, I mean members of motorcycle clubs.
00:26:09
Speaker
And For some reason, i believe it's like from his time in prison, the way that they describe it. He gets sort of infatuated with the concept of being the bad boy.
00:26:20
Speaker
He has long hair. He's apparently relatively charismatic. um He has a lot of tattoos. And ah not only does he start hanging out with members of motorcycle clubs and and being acquainted with them, he becomes a member of one of those motorcycle clubs.
00:26:37
Speaker
And this makes him relatively popular in 1987 with teenage girls and the young women who were hanging around the motorcycle clubs. he even is ah He is said to during this time have had ah quite a few women who were interested in him and multiple girlfriends and multiple you know teenagers who were sort of fawning over him.
00:27:01
Speaker
And one of his roommates is described as being from this group of people. I find this kind of fascinating because i don't think we see this type of person in a motorcycle club, but I think everyone kind of thinks that David Leonard Wood type people are in motorcycle clubs. Does that make sense?
00:27:22
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and like, you know, like you, we, on television today, like they've definitely played up the criminal elements.
00:27:33
Speaker
They almost make them more like kind of mafioso like, so you don't picture a serial killer running amok. And at this point in time, he's not yet a serial killer. No, but he is a, he is a rapist. Yeah. He's a rapist.
00:27:47
Speaker
So, where we get to ah the next phase of the criminal element in David Leonard Wood's life is he doesn't want to go back to prison. He wants to live his motorcycle lifestyle.
00:28:00
Speaker
And what serial killers learn when they're serial rapists who have been in custody multiple times, and I have said this many times over the years, is that the key, at least in the eighties,
00:28:14
Speaker
to not going to prison for your serial rapist ways is to not have witnesses. So that's what he seems to have learned. And from February of 1987 through August of 1987. I just want to point out, he just got out in January of
Disappearances Linked to Wood
00:28:32
Speaker
1987. Correct.
00:28:33
Speaker
Correct. So while he's developing this lifestyle from his January release... Nine girls between 13 and 24 go missing in the El Paso area.
00:28:49
Speaker
The first one disappears on Valentine's Day, so it's less than a month from when he's released. This is 14-year-old Marjorie Knox. She had been living in New Mexico, which is a suburb of El Paso, and a place where, at different points in time, David Leonard Wood had lived with family when his parents could not take care of him.
00:29:12
Speaker
On the day that she had gone missing, she had went ah to the city, into El Paso, to a vallancing Valentine's Day party that was going to be held in Veterans Park with you know her other 14-year-old friends.
00:29:27
Speaker
Three weeks later, on March the 7th, 13-year-old Melissa Alanes also went missing. The girls' parents knew each other. They all had worked together at a place called the Rockwell Company,
00:29:43
Speaker
Melissa's parents told police that in the months prior to disappearance, their daughter had been going through puberty and had become acquainted with a group of young men who all had criminal records.
00:29:56
Speaker
And the descriptions that they give, in my opinion, kind of match like a motorcycle club, the younger members. Now, at this point in time, David Leonard Wood is 30.
00:30:12
Speaker
Born in 1957, we're in 1987. That's kind of the prime age for a serial rapist to become a serial killer.
00:30:22
Speaker
On June the 7th, the El Paso police receive a report coming in about a 15-year-old girl named Desiree Wheatley. They began to investigate this as a missing persons case.
00:30:36
Speaker
Desiree has vanished. Several witnesses claim that they had last seen her June the 2nd in the company of a man who had a lot of tattoos on his arms.
00:30:49
Speaker
And they track him down to a convenience store where he is seen with Desiree, this man with the tattoos. Now, Desiree had been attending ah junior high school that was very close to David Wood's home.
00:31:05
Speaker
According to the interviews they did with her family and friends, she was not really known as a 15-year-old to consume a lot of alcohol or use drugs. Three days later, on June the 10th, the police get another missing persons report.
00:31:21
Speaker
This is about a 20-year-old girl named Karen Baker. She was last seen alive on June the 5th at a place called the Hawaiian Royale Motel, which, I gotta say, sounds like the setting of...
00:31:35
Speaker
a movie where in the movie the motorcycle club probably hangs out there. But witnesses gave conflicting accounts of her actions prior to her disappearance. Her own mother claimed that she had been kidnapped and taken to Mexico.
00:31:52
Speaker
So at this point, those brilliant drunk old white guys who are profiling serial killers, they get involved. But they're mainly there to investigate whether or not 20-year-old Karen Baker has been kidnapped and taken to Mexico.
00:32:07
Speaker
And I have to say, 20-year-olds being kidnapped and taken to Mexico is much rarer than people think it is. Usually it's younger people and a parent is involved. We've had a number of those cases pop back up where...
00:32:22
Speaker
Recently, we're starting to find people who are in other countries, and it really was a parent parental abduction all along. On June 28th, still 1987, a 19-year-old named Cheryl Lynn Vasquez-Dismukes, who works at a local Whataburger, she goes missing in El Paso.
00:32:44
Speaker
And the last thing, according to witnesses and coworkers, that had happened was she went to a local Circle K to buy some cigarettes. According to witnesses there, she was last seen talking to a man in a pickup truck.
00:32:59
Speaker
On July the 3rd, 17-year-old girl named Angelica Jeanette Frausto was also reported missing. Angelica... ah was a repeat runaway since at least the age of 12.
00:33:14
Speaker
And she would frequently be in a situation where her family and friends expected her to be gone for days. And a few times it had gotten serious and she was missing, quote, for a month or two.
00:33:29
Speaker
By the age of 15, she'd been held back in school, and she ends up dropping out of Henderson Middle School, and she becomes a dancer at a bar called Red Flame, which is a motorcycle bar.
00:33:42
Speaker
During this investigation, police discover that on the day she actually disappeared, Angelica had been given a motorcycle ride by one of the people who frequented Red Flame.
00:33:59
Speaker
A month later, on August 20th, the parents of 24-year-old Rosa Maria Cascio contacted the police. They claimed that she had gone to visit her sister in Ciudad Juarez on August 12th.
00:34:12
Speaker
And in the evening, she went to El Paso by car. She was going to ah ah either a local store or the post office to buy some stamps. And she had gone missing.
00:34:26
Speaker
The following morning, her 1974 Ford Gran Torino was found abandoned ah with all of her belongings inside of it on the street. They interviewed local residents, but they didn't find any information or ah what they considered to be confirmation of her going missing.
00:34:47
Speaker
But Rosa Maria Cascio had been working as a topless dancer at a bar in El Paso. According to her parents, and I think take all of this with a grain grain of salt because it comes from the parents, she did not involve herself in any type of prostitution, and she was, like, dancing to put herself through school.
00:35:11
Speaker
Okay. So that gets us through August. There is one more case. September 1987, 14-year-old girl named Dawn don Marie Smith, who was a student from Parkland High School, she's reported missing.
00:35:27
Speaker
She had been having issues with her parents, and she was considered a runaway. She had told her parents the last time that they had all gotten into this big argument that she was not coming back.
00:35:41
Speaker
But she did remain in contact with some of her family members and friends. So she has this argument in June. She stays in contact with her family until August 28th. And suddenly she's no longer in contact with anyone. So her parents aren't getting any reports back of what she's doing.
00:35:56
Speaker
According to local police at the time... They run down a lead that Dawn Marie Smith had been shot and killed by a biker out in Chaparral with the suburb of El Paso in New Mexico.
00:36:11
Speaker
But the police say this has never been conclusively verified. All right. That's a lot of people in there, right? is a lot. um I want to point out that.
00:36:24
Speaker
um essentially what you just said is you've got this guy getting out of jail in January 87. And then between the age, between February and August of nineteen eighty seven nine girls between the ages of 13 and 24 went missing in the El Paso area, right?
00:36:46
Speaker
Huge deal. Yes. Okay. And I just want to point out, uh, the numbers aren't, they're kind of scattered and it's kind of hard to find this number, but based on everything I saw, the el Paso area 20 murders a year.
00:37:01
Speaker
averages ah about twenty murders ah year Okay. Like total. Okay.
00:37:12
Speaker
Okay. And so nine young ladies being missing in a, what, so a eight months span would be a huge deal. A six months span. Sorry.
00:37:29
Speaker
Whatever. Between February and August. But you have to keep in mind um everybody sort of had an, well, not everybody, but a lot of them sort of had like an explanation.
00:37:42
Speaker
um These were not girls that were taken. These girls went with this dude. Yeah, there were tracks to follow with what was happening. Yes.
00:37:53
Speaker
Exactly. And so to give you an idea of El Paso, so it's a city in West Texas. It is the county seat of El Paso County. It is the sixth most populous city in Texas. So it's a big city.
00:38:07
Speaker
But according to, i think, the 2023 numbers I looked at, the population never really gets over 700,000 people. And that's not to say that's not a lot of people, but it is a it's a large ah area if you look at El Paso County on a map.
00:38:28
Speaker
It is, yeah and so, you know, resources being spread then, that could account for some of what was happening here.
00:38:40
Speaker
But those numbers being as low as they are, where you're only having 20-ish murders and you suddenly have all of them take place in the same demographic, because these are young girls, um that's a huge deal. Yeah.
00:38:55
Speaker
I thought so too. And I was wondering because, um, now this is all in retrospect, right? Everything we're talking about is looking back on it. And i wondered if at the time,
00:39:09
Speaker
i don't know that it would have been as a parent, like there's nine girls missing from this area. Right. You see what I'm saying? And so I feel like it's something that we can easily say like, Oh, I didn't somebody notice that. Yeah.
00:39:24
Speaker
But at the same time, it may not have been the case like when it was happening. Yeah. And so I will say this. Okay.
00:39:35
Speaker
Everything that we're talking about basically puts us in September of 1987. So for all intents and purposes, David Leonard Wood has only been walking free again for nine months.
00:39:49
Speaker
But we have had these nine disappearances.
Discovery of Victims and Evidence
00:39:52
Speaker
And... they don't remain disappearances forever in terms of being off of police radar.
00:40:01
Speaker
And I will say that like some, I believe some areas with jurisdictional confusion or geographic confusion, like it's like very probable that,
00:40:16
Speaker
half of these murders would never be linked. And like, if he had just gone outside of El Paso County with some of this, he potentially could have kept doing this for a while, but that's not what happens.
00:40:29
Speaker
September 4th. So around the time that Don Marie Smith is being reported missing El Paso water utilities workers, they find the remains of Rosa Casio,
00:40:44
Speaker
She is in a shallow grave that's just northwest of the city out in the desert. Police are called to the scene. They call it a crime scene. And they set up a perimeter. And while they're setting up the perimeter, they discover that there is a shallow grave nearby. So you've got one set of remains.
00:41:05
Speaker
this For this 24-year-old girl that they found, and they're and you know she's been missing since August 20th that they know of. like there's There's some ambivalence in exactly when she went missing, but at some time between 12th and the 20th, she stops contacting her family.
00:41:23
Speaker
Well, this shallow grave... It's going to hold the remains of Karen Baker, who went missing June the 5th. So we have two bodies.
00:41:36
Speaker
ah Based on the crime scene reports and and what the cops are saying, they're found in this area that's you know less than 300 feet apart. Family members are going to identify both of them by their clothing and personal items that are found with the body.
00:41:53
Speaker
They tentatively rule that Rosa Casio has been strangled. ah The reason they go with this is the way that her jaw has been broken. It's been broken in two specific places.
00:42:06
Speaker
But with Ms. Baker, she had been in the ground so long, and it's Texas kind of summertime heat from June to September. ah They can't determine her cause of death because of the body's advanced state of decomposition.
00:42:24
Speaker
I think that her hyoid bone was broken as well, but maybe I could be wrong. I actually had heard that, but I couldn't find it in writing anywhere. I think I must have heard it on a television program. Maybe.
00:42:40
Speaker
Because the implication there was that she had got, you know, it was a physical confrontation. Yeah. Which is, it's a little bit odd that they would say that they couldn't tell how she died. i guess they were saying, yeah, i because I saw it visually too.
00:43:01
Speaker
I guess they were saying that like whatever cracked her jaw didn't kill her, I guess. Gotcha. Because her jaw was broken substantially.
00:43:13
Speaker
yeah um And I saw, i actually saw like a picture or something. I don't know. I remember thinking though, it seemed like that would be enough to say she died from blunt force trauma, but maybe I'm not a doctor. Maybe they realized she wouldn't died from that.
00:43:29
Speaker
But I think her hyoid bone was ah broken as well. Yeah. um That sounds right to me. I don't know like exactly, but the, the,
00:43:40
Speaker
outcome because I don't think I've seen an autopsy report released on the initial one. um I looked for it briefly, couldn't find it, and I kind of went, all right, well, we're going to put these guys over here.
00:43:53
Speaker
um Two weeks later, September 19th, El Paso police get a tip from a woman named Judith Brown. She lives in the area.
00:44:05
Speaker
And ah she's known to police. The way that they talk about her is she's a local sex worker. ah They call her a drug addict. I don't know if, I think all of that stuff is tied together for her.
00:44:16
Speaker
ah But we'll just say she's in some ways tied to the local criminal element. So she says to the El Paso police that between July 26th and August 7th, she narrows it down to this period of time,
00:44:30
Speaker
She had met a young man who lured her into his pickup truck saying he was going to give her a ride. But according to her, when she was describing how to get to her apartment building, ah he misses a turn. He explains he's going to take her back, but he's got to go see his friend.
00:44:48
Speaker
So he stops in an apartment building, goes inside, and when he returns a few minutes later, he has a rope hanging out of one of his pockets. She claims that the man then drove her to another section of town, which is towards the desert, but the opposite direction of where her house was.
00:45:11
Speaker
And he gives her the story. The story is that there's a shipment of cocaine that's been buried out there, and he's got to pick it up. He stops the truck. He gets out, and he tells her to get out.
00:45:22
Speaker
He pulls a blanket and a shovel from the back of the truck, and then he ties her up. And he anchors the rope to the vehicle. He's holding her at gunpoint during this time.
00:45:35
Speaker
He steps away. He digs a hole in the ground. And he then sexually assaults her. He attempts to strangle her, according to her story. But he couldn't finish strangling her because some people came up.
00:45:51
Speaker
So then he drags her deeper into the desert, according to the story. um He holds her at gunpoint again, and he again sexually assaults her.
00:46:04
Speaker
But more people go by, and he ends up leaving her there and running away. So after she finishes telling the police this, she is able to give the police a rough location of where these things took place.
00:46:23
Speaker
She's asked to look at a photographic lineup, And what she's handed is essentially pictures of of multiple criminals who have been convicted of similar crimes over the years.
00:46:37
Speaker
And one of these men in the photos is David Leonard Wood. And she tells the police that that is the person who attacked her.
00:46:48
Speaker
Moving forward from here, so this is September 19th and the days after she's like giving this story and the police are checking it out. On October 20th, hikers find a body that is buried in a shallow grave.
00:47:08
Speaker
And again, police arrive, and they take a look at this shallow grave, and they realize that it's not just one person at this crime scene.
00:47:19
Speaker
They find, again, a second body buried nearby. Now, they're going to identify them eventually as Desiree Wheatley and as Dawn Marie Smith.
00:47:36
Speaker
According to authorities, they're both in shallow graves, they're very close to each other, and they're only about ah three miles away from the bodies that had already been discovered by the utility workers, ah Rosa Cassio and Karen Baker.
00:47:52
Speaker
So now we have four bodies and ah because this location matches up to, they were trying to like verify ah this story um from ah Judith Kelling Brown.
00:48:08
Speaker
And because it matches up with that, and she's identified David Wood, that puts David Wood on their radar on October the 20th. So the police get to re-interviewing people Specifically, they re-interview witnesses in the cases of these four formerly missing, now found murdered yeah young girls.
00:48:35
Speaker
And they are able to ask more witnesses and show more photos And basically say, who was that guy?
00:48:47
Speaker
So more people start to identify David Leonard Wood as having been connected to more disappearances. One of the witnesses they talk to is a man named Charles Lloyd.
00:48:58
Speaker
And he is a witness in the case of Karen Baker. And Charles Lloyd is able to say that David Leonard Wood knew her.
00:49:09
Speaker
which is also unusual for serial killers, but that like knew her well enough that the two of them would take rides on his motorcycle. But the day of her disappearance,
00:49:22
Speaker
he thought Karen Baker had gotten into a beige pickup truck that looked very similar to David Leonard Wood's vehicle. So friends and acquaintances of these women are starting to step forward and say, yes, I've seen David Leonard Wood, including friends of Dawn Marie Smith, who's a 14-year-old girl, just to remind everyone. That's how far apart this kind of is.
00:49:48
Speaker
They said that even though he's 30 years old, David Leonard Wood had been seen with Dawn and that Basically, they described it as either flirting or suggesting that the two of them should go out together.
00:50:07
Speaker
So on October 23rd of 1987, the police decide they're going to arrest David Wood. And they start with the charges of the living victim.
00:50:19
Speaker
So Judith, who had been kidnapped and raped, is the first set of charges. But they're continuing to work these crime scenes where multiple victims have been found.
00:50:32
Speaker
And in the area where he allegedly assaulted Judith, they find another shallow grave. And in this shallow grave, identify Angelica's body.
00:50:46
Speaker
She's the 17-year-old girl who went missing around the 4th of July.
00:50:52
Speaker
On March 14th, 1988, so a few months later, A couple who are out allegedly searching for aluminum cans in the desert, which was a new one for me, um based on, and i I remember this time as being, you could take the aluminum cans in and get cash from them.
00:51:11
Speaker
It's weird how it's allegedly because, like, well i mean and don't feel like they were up to anything else, but whatever, yeah. Well, the people who, I think those words get left in because the people who find bodies are frequently the first suspect to rule out um or the first potential person of interest to rule out.
00:51:31
Speaker
Yeah, I guess so. They are close to about 400 meters from where some of the other victims have been found. And they come across the partially buried remains of a woman.
00:51:46
Speaker
Based on a comparison of x-rays and jaws... like her jawline. The woman is identified as 23-year-old Ivy Susanna Williams.
00:51:58
Speaker
She is a young woman from Colorado who had moved to El Paso after getting married, and she was last seen on May the 30th, but her disappearance was not reported by family or friends.
00:52:09
Speaker
During interviews with acquaintances, police determined that she had been working at a dancer at a local club and had been affiliated with people who were part of the quote, biker subculture.
00:52:22
Speaker
The corridor's report for Ivy Williams indicated that she had been stabbed multiple times, including being stabbed in the face. So since she had been found in an area that had previously been searched, the El Paso Police Department set up a much bigger operation to locate more potential shallow graves.
00:52:45
Speaker
They don't turn up any additional shallow graves around these clusters that they found so far.
00:52:53
Speaker
Well, David Wood goes on trial um in 1988 for his kidnapping and raping of ah Judith Kelly Brown.
Convictions and Sentencing
00:53:03
Speaker
And on June 16th, he's found guilty.
00:53:06
Speaker
This is particularly... ah problematic for him in terms of sentencing because as Meg so eloquently mentioned, he had only been released in January of 1987.
00:53:19
Speaker
So he's still considered to be on parole for that much longer sentence. And he has an especially aggravating factor that is going to relate back to his being a sentence for this ah kidnapping and rape.
00:53:33
Speaker
And he is going to end up with a 50 year sentence. So that's kind of how he's apprehended. And ah ultimately, that's where he sits today. But there's a little more to this.
00:53:45
Speaker
But I wanted to pause and ask you, like, what do you think of all this? This guy's sort of a model for judicial efficiency. He's released in January. He murders a lot of people. And by June of the following year, he goes back to prison for 50 years.
00:54:01
Speaker
Well, that's certainly, um that would be judicial efficiency. He's also an example of why ah violent crimes started being taken so much more seriously because of the recidivism, obviously.
00:54:15
Speaker
um Now, i don't think he would have gotten out. i If he committed the first crimes he committed now, I don't think he would get out.
00:54:27
Speaker
Okay. Do you? Um, and no, I think we've gotten the sentencing on that first indecent liberties with a child. If they had, if they had taken that seriously in like today's judicial age, um, I think he ultimately gets a much longer sentence. at least, I don't think it, I think the timeline shifts.
00:54:51
Speaker
I don't think he would be in prison forever. But if they had called that what it was, I don't think it's going to be an indecent liberties with a child. I think it's going to be the rape of a child in Texas. Right, which would get him a long time. 12 to 15 years minimum.
00:55:04
Speaker
Right. Which shifts all of these timelines around. Because all of this is happening um before 1987, basically. So if you go back and look at him being 19...
00:55:16
Speaker
um I don't know how much it changes that first conviction or the second conviction, but I don't think he's doing two years and in a couple more years. I think he's getting, i think he's probably doing between five and 10 years on both of those, if not more.
00:55:31
Speaker
we would be way later in time. and I think it would be much harder to be a serial rapist in Texas if he were to say, get out in in like 1999.
00:55:41
Speaker
Oh, definitely. For sure. Yeah. But I mean, he also would have done a whole lot more time. I mean, he's not getting a whole lot of time for these crimes yeah um to begin with. And it, I wonder, you know, either he was like, well, I don't want to witness.
00:56:00
Speaker
I don't want to go back to jail. Or he was like, I'd like to just go ahead and kill because it doesn't seem like I'm going to get much of a punishment anyway. Yeah, I've always had the theory that like that's kind of in the background of a lot of these killers. that have the least i think the key is like that they're so close together.
00:56:20
Speaker
But also, and that's like geographically and in in time, but they're close together. But also, I wonder if like it starts out where he gets out, he commits that first sexual assault, and has to decide what to do with the witness.
00:56:37
Speaker
He has made up his mind he's going to go dig a hole and put that witness in that hole. I've wondered if he does not get even more of a thrill since he's clearly committing the the rape for some self-satisfying purpose.
00:56:53
Speaker
Does he then also get this bigger thrill from it escalating into murder? And that's why they you know they they can't get off on the rape anymore. They have to do the murder. With one of the victims...
00:57:07
Speaker
I know that ah she was buried alive. Yeah. And so he didn't actually kill her, Right. right He just buried her, and that killed her. But, of course, he would be responsible for that.
00:57:19
Speaker
i I don't know. i don't know where he's going with this. I'm not so sure about Ivy Susanna Williams. I feel like it's odd that her husband didn't report her missing. Yeah, and then you have a stabbing.
00:57:30
Speaker
Which nobody else was stabbed. Right? I believe so. I mean, some of some of the situation is that we can't tell. We are assuming based on some pretty heavily decomposed remains that the hyoid being broken or the jaw being broken indicates strangulation.
00:57:48
Speaker
But we might miss stabbings in some of those incidents. Because that when they took the investigative ah prompting to expand the search, they found absolutely nothing else, right? Yeah.
00:58:04
Speaker
Which to me is odd Yeah, I do believe that that part is odd. In terms of like the murders. So after this first conviction, police then doubled down on David Leonard Wood.
00:58:18
Speaker
They get search warrants for his car. They get search warrants for all of his personal items. They get search warrants for his apartment. ah They bring a lot of people in who are starting to link all of these different disappeared girls and women together.
00:58:32
Speaker
And the ones that we know now are murder victims. um They're able to tie David Leonard Wood to them in a way that they get these search warrants. And the the damning thing for him is that there are a lot of ah witnesses to him last being seen in these now murdered women's company around the time they were last seen and they then vanished.
00:58:59
Speaker
Even ah david Leonard Wood's roommate tells police that in the fall of 1987, before he's arrested, shortly before he's arrested He had been cleaning his car out in a way that would remove a lot of different debris.
00:59:13
Speaker
Because there was this claim that ah David Leonard would have taken a shovel and a blanket out of the back of his truck, police focused on finding this blanket. So they search his apartment.
00:59:25
Speaker
They seize a vacuum cleaner. They find various yellow and orange colored fibers that they are able to link back to this blanket. um Experts conclude that what's inside the vacuum cleaner's bag matches samples of lint found on some of the victim's clothing.
00:59:45
Speaker
And The roommate testifies that during questioning that David Leonard Wood had had this orange colored blanket um and a number of different shovels that had been kept in the apartment and in the back of his truck ah throughout this year that they had known each other.
01:00:02
Speaker
After his arrest, David Leonard Wood is placed in local county jail in El Paso. A lot of jailhouse inmate slash snitches come, jailhouse snitches come forward afterwards claiming that he boasted of what he was doing.
01:00:20
Speaker
He said that all the victims were topless dancers and sex workers that he had lured into his truck, ah primarily with the offer of sharing drugs with them. But then he would take them out into the desert.
01:00:33
Speaker
He would tie them to this truck's bumper. And he would rape and kill them before burying the bodies in shallow graves that were right off of local roads. Based on highly circumstantial evidence, not 100% reliable information, the El Paso County District Attorney's Office takes David Leonard Wood into consideration and ends up charging him with six murders.
01:01:01
Speaker
So he ah ends up charged with Rosa Cassio, Desiree Wheatley, Angelica Frausto, Karen Baker.
01:01:14
Speaker
He's charged with Ivy Williams, Desiree Wheatley, Karen Baker, Angelica Frausto, Rosa Cassio, and Don Smith's murders.
01:01:25
Speaker
Now, technically, ah There's a couple of people that are are are not found, but he is on the hook for them in terms of, even though he's not charged, he's on the hook for them in terms of their cases not really being worked as much. That's Cheryl Lynn Vasquez-Dismukes.
01:01:44
Speaker
She's the 19-year-old that went to get cigarettes and disappeared. We also think that he's potentially responsible for Marjorie Knox. That's the first victim who goes missing on ah Valentine's Day.
01:01:58
Speaker
And then we have the 13-year-old Melissa Alanez, who her parents knew, the Knox family parents. He's suspected of being responsible for them, but ultimately he's not charged in those three disappearances. And they've never been found, right? They have not been found. And because of the timing of them, there's probably another cluster that's just...
01:02:23
Speaker
like he for whatever reason changed his cluster. um And so when this happens and the police charge, the police put all this evidence together and the El Paso County DA's office charges him.
01:02:35
Speaker
um His attorneys do everything they can to delay the start of this trial. They attempt to have the ah the venue of the trial moved into Dallas, claiming that the local publicity would prejudice the jury against their client.
01:02:50
Speaker
um They have a series of pretrial hearings. That motion is granted. The trial is set to begin in September of 1982. According to David Leonard Wood, throughout all of these proceedings, he states that he knew a lot of these girls and he knew a lot of girls locally, many of whom were still talking to him even after he'd been arrested. He said he was innocent, had nothing to do with their disappearances or murders.
01:03:20
Speaker
So he as a convicted criminal, he admits that he had been looking at like methods of kidnapping and raping women, ah without risking being arrested. But he claimed that he had never murdered anyone.
01:03:35
Speaker
um He said that if you were going to do that he you if you were going to do that, he would have taken the bodies out into the mountainous areas that surrounded the desert where not even coyotes could find them.
01:03:47
Speaker
At one court hearing, ah David Leonard Wood admitted to being present at the parking lot on the day when Cheryl Vasquez-Cismukes disappeared, but he denied being responsible for that disappearance.
01:03:59
Speaker
He had claimed that that evening he was having sex with a 16-year-old girl. He gave a name, which was later corroborated. um He also admitted under some level of pressure that he was acquainted with Karen Baker, but claimed that their relationship had been dating a dating relationship and he had not seen her, ah five months prior to her disappearance.
01:04:22
Speaker
When he was pressed about, ah the murders of Dawn Marie Smith, um, and the Wheatley girl who was found ah near her, he stated that he had no idea Dawn Marie Smith was or Desiree Wheatley.
01:04:38
Speaker
Um, And I will, I'll point out that at this point, you're talking about a 14-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl. I don't know that he had a lot of incentive to admit ah to those relationships.
01:04:51
Speaker
And in November of 1992, based on inmates from the county jail testifying, the results from the examination of the vacuum cleaner, and the testimony of ah her account,
01:05:07
Speaker
the victim that survived, Judith, David Leonard Wood is convicted of these six murders. and on January 14th, 1993, two and a half months later, he is sentenced to death.
01:05:22
Speaker
And that's one of the ways that like he gets on my my radar, too, is now we have the death penalty coming into play. Right. And so, you know, obviously this is the eighties. Um, well, I guess we, did we get into the nineties?
01:05:37
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, we've just moved into the nineties. We've primarily moved into the nineties from the perspective of him being on trial for all these murders and being convicted. Right. So we don't have the DNA evidence that we would want to have today. don't mainly because of the, I think the, it's just that it wasn't there. Circumstances of the bodies. Yeah.
01:06:00
Speaker
um And one of the things that, so earlier I said, you know, the El Paso County, are it's not el Paso County, it's the El Paso area, which included all the places that these girls disappeared from and were found ultimately. Right.
01:06:20
Speaker
Having about 20 murders a year. Okay. Keeping in mind, keeping that in mind, now that's an average over like 60 years, so but it's a very low it's a very low murder rate, okay? Right.
01:06:38
Speaker
All of these girls were found buried about two feet down. Okay. Okay. And there were various pieces of physical evidence that while they didn't forensically tie it, they were able to, like, make identifications, like with the blanket. yeah Right?
01:07:00
Speaker
Okay. And so we also have a witness who... was very close to suffering the exact same fate to the extent that he was digging the hole while she was tied up to the truck.
01:07:15
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Okay. And so based on the statistics being that, you know, we have a very low murder rate here. So you don't have a lot of murderers just randomly running around going going So going along with that and then comparing the the sites where these girls were like, you know, sort of one after the other discovered, right? Right. And then the unhesitating, the non-hesitant identification from the living witness, what several people who last saw the murdered victims.
01:07:57
Speaker
Yeah. They all identified him. Yep. That's pretty substantial in my opinion. yeah it is. If you go hunting in here, you can read a lot of appellate court documents.
01:08:12
Speaker
But I will say this for David Leonard Wood. Over the years, he has continued to insist that he is in a innocent. Multiple appeals have been filed on his behalf, the bulk of which are denied as a whole.
01:08:30
Speaker
I say that and I say it with really specific words because ah there's been some recent movement in this case that we're going to get to. His original execution date is scheduled for August 20th of 2009.
01:08:44
Speaker
So at that point in time, we are 17 years past his sentence of death. He sentenced to death on January 1993. and We're looking at him being executed August 20th of 2009.
Legal Appeals and Mental Disability Claims
01:08:57
Speaker
The day prior to that, it gets postponed. This is his lawyers working on his behalf. They claim that their client shows signs of mental disability.
01:09:08
Speaker
And according to Atkins v. Virginia, are you familiar with this ruling? Yes, we spoke about it on here. Okay, so this is a ruling from the Supreme Court of the United States in 2002 where they rule in favor of the fact that executing people with intellectual disabilities is a violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments.
01:09:37
Speaker
They do leave a little bit of a caveat in there in that states can define... What constitutes an intellectual disability and who qualifies as having And then they just have to apply it equally. Correct.
01:09:53
Speaker
David Leonard Wood's attorneys and two thousand in 2009, they have a lot of evidence of his intellect because they've had to defend him for so long since 1992 and then all the appeals after.
01:10:09
Speaker
So this is the thing that really caught my attention on all of this. They have released evidence of six different IQ tests from 1997 2011 this guy His scores chronologically 54 points,
01:10:24
Speaker
are ah hundred and eleven sixty four seventy one one ah one sixty seven and fifty seven
01:10:35
Speaker
okay that is a wild variation oh fifty four points that makes me go, what is happening?
01:10:48
Speaker
Well, clearly I, I don't know the exact, uh, dates. I have that there were six IQ tests taken from 1977 to 2011. And so if you, the average of all those numbers you just read is 78.5. Okay. Yeah.
01:11:06
Speaker
okay yeah And so that puts him above, you know, 70, Okay.
01:11:12
Speaker
okay um And I think the comment I made to you was, so an IQ isn't like a pass or fail thing, right? Correct. It is a situation where it could range. It's not going to range this much unless you've got some sort of cognitive decline or ah traumatic brain injury, right? Yeah.
01:11:35
Speaker
I don't think. And if you notice 111 and then 64, 71, 101, like you're definitely not going to have that up and down activity, right? right its It's going to go one way or the other. um i would say that, you know, you would have, most people probably have cognitive decline as they age.
01:11:57
Speaker
Some people may not, but The only thing i would I thought about was he told the the witness that survived that he needed to go out into the desert to dig up some cocaine that had been dropped off. Yeah.
01:12:17
Speaker
And I didn't really think much about that because obviously that was a ruse. But I wondered how into drugs he was. and whether or not the substance abuse disorder could... and And how that would affect his IQ, right?
01:12:30
Speaker
i It depends on the timing of it all. I mean, I think... i So I don't think it would be a a real true affect, but if you had been binging on cocaine for a year, and like, I'm not saying you're like literally binging straight through for a year, but if you had been using a drug consistently for a long period of time, then potentially you You could potentially cause like one of the tests to be skewed.
01:12:59
Speaker
But the thing is him having all these tests over 1977 and is largely because he is being convicted and incarcerated during those times.
01:13:12
Speaker
I was going to say, um it seems to me like... He's not out long enough for them to... You know what i mean? Because I don't think he's, like, binging on cocaine in prison, right?
01:13:24
Speaker
I mean, I guess he could be. It depends on... Well, and the other thing, though, would be... yeah And I don't know a whole lot about this. I don't know, like... how much difference, because he wasn't getting like really harsh sentences to begin with, so I don't know how much difference like having a low IQ would have made in those non-capital cases, right?
01:13:45
Speaker
Right. But, and depending on when these tests were taken, he would have no incentive to take the second one and get a 64 on it unless he was specifically trying to um bring down his IQ so he wouldn't be put to death.
01:14:03
Speaker
Right. And so why so why is it low, right? Well, so one of the things that comes up in the course of this going through the Texas courts, there's 2014 review of all of um where but They do look at it and go, okay, maybe. like they've stayed his Essentially, in 2009, they've stayed his execution date. so By 2014, that wraps up because he clearly is not going anywhere. so There's no reason for them to rush through it all. and The Texas Court of Appeals points out that...
01:14:39
Speaker
they have questions about how these tests were administered. they also have like so They also have quite a few questions of how they're being categorized and how they're presented to the court because they end up being categorized by age groups. So they would show a person's development appropriate to his age at the time of the testing, but they did not provide ah documentary details about which versions of the tests that ah the younger David Leonard Wood was taking and Ultimately, they rule that the forensic psychiatric findings, which are brought in kind of en masse for this appeal, are overall questionable. They question the psychologist's methods for examining and assessing David Wood's adaptive functioning.
01:15:28
Speaker
And they they essentially rule that while they do have questions about his intellectual capabilities, they cannot find this wide spectrum where he's averaging, i think you said it was 78 and a half.
01:15:43
Speaker
78.5 over six tests, With low as a 57, which is apparently a 2011 test, and as high as a 111, which is apparently a 1977 test. That's not data you're going to get without hundred and eleven which is apparently a nineteen seventy seven test that's not a data set you're going to get without some sort of ah outside influence. Like I said, a TBI or like onset early onset dementia or something like that. Right, because you're not going to be able to bounce around like that.
01:16:08
Speaker
But the the court essentially rules that the attorneys fail to produce clear and convincing evidence of his alleged intellectual impairment, which it would allow him under Texas law to be qualified as a mentally disabled offender, which would basically say that executing him was cruel and unusual punishment.
01:16:30
Speaker
So the court says, no that's not really happening in 2014. That does not stop David Leonard Wood's attorneys.
01:16:41
Speaker
It just stops them from arguing that he has an intellectual disability, which I have. I have all sorts of questions about like how everyone arrives at this, like the lawyers in the first place and how the court looks at that and doesn't,
01:16:54
Speaker
make a more clear ruling that he's probably feigning something in the test. Like this has got to be some kind of malingering, right? I just can't figure out why he would have started that. If, if the tests are spread kind of equally, right. I think the whole concept is, I think a lot of it is a, it's, it's tactical and it's, it's maybe not made up, but it's, it's not as impressive as they were trying to present it to be right.
01:17:28
Speaker
And that it's, you know, all those bad tests were like all together at once right or whatever. And anyway, it, the other thing is if you were an attorney, a defense attorney who you were dealing with this type of situation where you have a man that's going to go to death row, you would, you would figure out ah an accurate way to argue that. Yeah, i so I tried to dig through like intelligence quotients tests to determine if there was some kind of sort of evolution of the testing that would account for some of this.
01:18:02
Speaker
But the truth is there's so many different like iq tests available during this time period. If we just narrow it down, to the 34 years they're talking about. There's so many different tests available that, and if you really want to go down a rabbit hole on this, it's not as true crime related, but there are wide variations between the, say, 10 or 15 types of tests that are still available today.
01:18:31
Speaker
where sometimes people will score a 90 on one particular test, but 120 on another test, or they'll score 125 on one test and a 90 on another test.
01:18:45
Speaker
there're like There are wide swings. They don't really account for all of this. So I have to think that like somewhere in here, there's a little bit of malingering on the part of David Leonard Wood deliberately skewing the numbers, particularly in the the times when, say if we were to look at this and, and the 1970 to 2011, uh, he was really having a good time and was about to get out of prison. He scores 111, but then he realizes he's going back to prison. He's asked to take the test again. So are he like dumps the test and like,
01:19:18
Speaker
like makes it so he knows he's going to score low on the next couple. And then you know we're back at... He's out of prison for a little bit of time, so he scores that 101. And then the last two tests are really taken in the early 2000s as he's trying to like pad his appeals.
01:19:35
Speaker
I can see something like that happening. I don't like i don't know that somebody... and a one takes that many IQ tests? Well, that's another that's another thing about all of this.
01:19:47
Speaker
This is really... him taking the number of tests that only a criminal trying to appeal his case is going to take. Right. it it doesn't It's not a great launching point.
01:19:58
Speaker
Right. so I don't think. So after this happens in 2014, they pivot and they change their approach. So in 2016, we get a new post-conviction appeal out of attorneys representing David Leonard Wood.
01:20:11
Speaker
This is to have a sentence overturned in a new trial ah schedule. Their basis for this is that they believe DNA testing would change the outcome of his case and that it would prove that David Leonard Wood did not commit some of these crimes.
01:20:29
Speaker
So the El Paso district attorney's office gets dragged into this and they provide a shirt from Dawn Marie Smith. It's a shirt that she had been wearing at the time of her death and testing done much, much later had discovered that there were biological traces from a male contributor on her shirt.
01:20:50
Speaker
And they provide other items. ah They provide ah the pantyhose that Angelica Frasto was married wearing. ah They provide her jacket and pieces of her hair.
01:21:01
Speaker
They provide Desiree Wheatley's hair They provide a bloodstained knife ah that had been found in David Leonard Wood's personal possessions that were seized with those initial search warrants after his conviction for the kidnapping and rape case.
01:21:18
Speaker
And ah prosecutors had flat out stated they believed that that particular knife had been used in the murder of Ivy Williams, which is that's one of the cases that you questioned because it was a stabbing. and And I think it's smart on the part of prosecutors to do that.
01:21:33
Speaker
They're like, why did he switch? Well, he got a new knife. Also, all of this occurred in a period of nine months or less. So, you know, maybe he just switched it up because he wanted to. Well, plus she was older too.
01:21:44
Speaker
Right. And so they are kind of going toe-to-toe, they being the El Paso County District Attorney's Office, they're kind of going toe-to-toe with ah David Leonard Wood's attorneys.
01:21:57
Speaker
And it ends up that the attorneys demand that documents concerning two acquaintances of Wood, a man named Salvador Martinez and a man named Edward Dean Barton,
01:22:07
Speaker
be unsealed, ah because at the time, both men had been considered as potential alternative suspects in the killings. Well, you know, they're acquainted with Wood, fine. Ultimately, in 2022, judge denies this whole appeal, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agrees with it.
01:22:28
Speaker
At this point in time, in the middle of all this, a new execution warrant is issued and a date is set where David Leonard Wood is going to be executed March 13th of 2025. This is to be carried out in the Huntsville unit's death chamber.
01:22:46
Speaker
But on March 11th, that execution is stayed, meaning ah while the courts had ordered his execution,
01:22:57
Speaker
um the A branch of the appellate court says we're not going to do that right now. Right, and it's postponed indefinitely until they make a different decision. Correct. So there's an article in El Paso Matters, which is, ah you can find it at elpasomatters.org.
Execution Stayed and Legal Analysis
01:23:15
Speaker
A guy named Robert Moore wrote it up on March 11th.
01:23:18
Speaker
It just said, Texas's highest criminal court on Tuesday blocked Thursday's scheduled execution of David Leonard Wood, the man sentenced to die for the 1987 deaths of six girls and young women whose bodies were buried in the northeast El Paso, Texas desert.
01:23:34
Speaker
The unsigned order was issued per curiam by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, meaning it was done in agreement with a majority of nine judges. ah Judges Mary Luke Keel and Gina Parker disagreed with the decision.
01:23:49
Speaker
But Judge Burt Richardson, who has handled Wood's appeals at the trial court level since 2011, he abstained from participating. But the judges outlined the issues raised in the latest appeal.
01:24:01
Speaker
They did not list a reason for the ruling. They said the court stay will remain in place until further order. Why did, why, who abstained? ah Judge ah Burt Richardson, he he abstained because he used to be a district court judge and he was in charge of the appeals for David Leonard Wood.
01:24:22
Speaker
It would be perceived as potential bias. Right, right, right. I got you. I thought, i for some reason, I thought you said that he had previously represented him. No, he had previously handled the appeals.
01:24:35
Speaker
I got you. So... My understanding was he was the judge in those cases. I don't believe he was one of the attorneys. Yeah, okay. Based on the paperwork, but I could somebody could easily find a piece of paper and prove me wrong on that.
01:24:48
Speaker
No, that makes sense. I mean, obviously he didn't take part in the decision. There was it's a nine judge panel. So you've got one that recused themselves and then you've got judges.
01:25:01
Speaker
And so two dissents and six agreed, right? Yeah, six becomes the majority. um And he goes on to state here. I don't know why they keep doing this. It's like they're playing a game. This is a quote from Marsha Fulton, who is a northeast El Paso resident whose 15-year-old daughter, Desiree Wheatley, is among those killed in 1987.
01:25:21
Speaker
ah This is the second time that Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has stepped in to block Wood's executions just days before he was to be put to death. This order was issued less than 48 hours before Wood was to be executed by lethal injection in Huntsville.
01:25:35
Speaker
um And they he puts the document in here if people want to read it. It's at El Paso Matters. um Just search David Leonard Woods. There's several articles in here worth reading.
01:25:46
Speaker
um It talks about like the movement of the trial and the first execution date and sort of his history of sex crimes, which we've been over all of this. But the bottom line is they decided that as of right now, they're not going to to execute him.
01:26:04
Speaker
Right. I think it has to do with, um i I saw on some of the requests for DNA testing, something was happening where the defense was dragging their feet.
01:26:16
Speaker
The defense or the district attorney? It was the defense. Okay. Which is, it's, that's bad, right? Yeah. But they had dismissed it ah based on, well, they say it's, you know, the defendant dragging his feet.
01:26:33
Speaker
But there was a lot of nuances to the situation. You have to keep in mind, so it's not actually the defendant, it's people representing him. and it the death penalty, the death date, the execution is something that can't be undone. Correct.
01:26:52
Speaker
And so i after I haven't read all of the information in this case, but I feel like they did the right thing. And I feel like they need to, somebody needs to step in and get this testing done. it I'm not really sure what the issue is, except perhaps...
01:27:14
Speaker
it's not as much, like there's not as much possible evidence as they thought there was or something. Somebody's dragging their feet for some reason though. Yeah.
01:27:25
Speaker
And it's weird. And I don't like that. And it seems sketchy because just do it, right? Either just do it or so are try to do it and say we couldn't do it. So that's that, right? Yeah. whatever's happening there though, it's not, uh,
01:27:42
Speaker
It doesn't even appear to be on the up and up. But you have to get to a point where, you know, the court has to act. I feel like staying the execution was the right move.
01:27:54
Speaker
i they didn't The order was like three pages long, so it they didn't get into a whole lot of details. And the dissenting voices did not write anything.
01:28:06
Speaker
No, there's really, yeah there's really not a lot of details in this stay. Basically what this stay is, in my opinion, is, ah wait, we're going to come back to this one.
01:28:19
Speaker
Right. And I feel like it was the right call. um i i Unless I see some DNA that should otherwise, I would say what I have absorbed from this case, there was some pretty substantial unbiased evidence that this dude was responsible for at least all the ones he's convicted for, possibly ah couple one more, right?
01:28:45
Speaker
i think so. And so ah it the living witness, the crime rate, the the way they were disposed, it's almost like he was um but he was setting himself up like a memorial graveyard. It was freaky. Yeah. So...
01:29:06
Speaker
so I did a number of things on this. If you if you guys really want to dig deep into him, I can tell you that all the appellate documents were online. just That's just kind of the timing of things. We're just able to ah we're able to see quite a bit of this information from the perspective of what the lawyers are saying.
01:29:25
Speaker
And I think I'm on the side of you with this one. i i will say he's an interesting... Perspective serial killer for a number of reasons.
Case Impact and Community Reactions
01:29:38
Speaker
He's convicted. He's been sentenced to death. Everything takes place in really tight ah timelines and geographic areas. If it's not him, it's got to be somebody else from, like, the the local, probably the same gang, if that makes sense. I was going to say, like...
01:29:59
Speaker
and possibly, but like, how do you, how do you, the crime rate is so low, right? Yeah. And he's got a living victim. Yep.
01:30:11
Speaker
So if the crime rate's so low, how many of these guys could possibly be doing this? Right. Well, yeah. And I went, so I went through and I looked for other women who were missing in the same time period.
01:30:25
Speaker
Like basically I took Texas Because we have such a narrow time period. And I don't think he would have strayed very far. I don't find a lot where I think it's going to be he killed other people. Unless he for whatever reason, killed men. There are missing men and unsolved murders of men.
01:30:44
Speaker
he never would have killed a man. i don't like Unless they walked up on him doing something else. I don't think so either. i he looked Because he left his victim alive because somebody interrupted him Correct.
01:30:55
Speaker
Yeah. He's not going to... heat This guy is a... um He is a misogynistic asshole killer. So it's interesting that you said that because that's one of the things that's getting in his way.
01:31:10
Speaker
Like, okay. In the... In the process of, like, trying to get someone... declared innocent or get him the new trial, whatever the lawyers are doing.
01:31:24
Speaker
um They filed a pretty massive petition for Satorian. So that's when you're taking things to the United States Supreme Court. And that would have been after, um in this case, it happens in 2023, but it's really about that ruling that he's not an intellectually disabled person.
01:31:44
Speaker
But they it's a it's a pretty massive document. I think it's about 50 pages and like 30 pages. 30 to 35 pages ah is kind of the meat of the issue. One of the people that talk in that document is a guy named Dr. Thomas Allen.
01:31:57
Speaker
He has presented testimony that the defense seems to be using in their favor, I think, kind of, and this ah in this petition.
01:32:08
Speaker
um Obviously, the Texas court also files like a ah response saying, you don't need to look at the Satoria here. Oh, you mean the state, the prosecution. The state of Texas, yeah. um Sorry.
01:32:22
Speaker
No, that's okay. So it gets to the attorney general level at that point, um which is the prosecutor for the state of Texas, essentially. Dr. Thomas Allen, he describes David Leonard Wood as having antisocial personality dis disorder.
01:32:37
Speaker
Disorder and he says that he's self-motivated and manipulative. He says the fact that he volunteers to be questioned by the police is indicative of arrogance narcissism and ASPD He further states that his interpersonal and social skills are impaired by this Personality disorder and his aggression and I thought that was interesting i Would say that it's probably accurate as
Discussion on Misogyny and Future Case Developments
01:33:03
Speaker
well.
01:33:03
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I found that to be an interesting and odd thing. Anytime you got, ah you know, a 30-year-old man killing 12, 13-year-old little girls?
01:33:15
Speaker
i Yeah. You're going to be looking at a serious issue as far as ah misogyny, all the stuff you just said from the doctor's observation.
01:33:31
Speaker
It's just a given, right? I mean what kind of 30-year-old man kills a little girl, right? Right. It's ridiculous. Well, at this point in time, I'm interested to see if anything further happens with this.
01:33:45
Speaker
i i will i will follow this case from the perspective of what are they going to like issue next, but I don't think I have a lot of questions about what happened to these women in 1987. Do you?
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:34:00
Speaker
No, I don't. So that's really all I have about David Leonard Wood for the moment.
01:34:08
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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01:35:22
Speaker
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