The Last 12 Weeks

The Daily hands the feed to the first episode of 'The Last 12 Weeks,' a five-part series from Serial Productions and The Marshall Project in which reporter Maurice Chammah embeds with a death penalty defense team during the final countdown to a Texas execution. The client is David Wood, the so-called Desert Killer, convicted of murdering six women and girls found buried outside El Paso in 1987 and now months from execution. The hook is a phone call from George Hall, who was imprisoned with Wood in the late 1980s: newly off parole after 30 years, Hall swears in a declaration that El Paso police bussed him and two other prisoners to town, wined and dined them, spread case files in front of them, and invited them to snitch — and that the two men who became the trial's star witnesses fabricated Wood's confessions. Court records show one later received $13,000 in reward money and the other had a capital murder charge dropped.

Chammah lets retired detective John Guerrero make the case for guilt: six bodies in a few months, middle schoolers describing a white man called Skeeter who bought them beer, Wood's rap sheet of sexual crimes against girls, his release from prison weeks before the first disappearance, a surviving rape victim who identified him near the burial ground, and orange fibers matching ones in his vacuum cleaner. Against that stands defense lawyer Greg Wiercioch's central fact: retesting turned up male DNA on a victim's clothing that is not Wood's, and Texas has refused to test more than 100 other pieces of evidence.

The episode's drama is procedural and painfully human. Wiercioch ambushes incoming DA James Montoya in a courthouse waiting room and is brushed off in under two minutes. A local news anchor, Stephanie Valle, offers to broker a meeting and tapes an interview — then reports the file corrupted, leaves the station, and surfaces days later announcing she works for Montoya. As the episode ends, the team has 67 days left and is starting the investigation over from scratch.