The episode opens with a BetterHelp sponsorship read, anchored by a striking statistic from the company's own 2026 State of Stigma Report: 74% of Americans believe society still discourages asking for help. The ad frames therapy as a way to 'close a few tabs' in an overwhelmed mind, and directs listeners to betterhelp.com/NewYorkTimes to connect with a licensed therapist online.

Rachel Abrams, filling in as host of The Daily, explains that today's episode is something different: the first installment of a 5-part podcast series called The Last 12 Weeks, produced by Serial Productions in collaboration with The Marshall Project and The New York Times. What makes the series remarkable, she says, is that the team convinced a group of death penalty lawyers to let them follow them during an actual, live case — with microphones in the room as the lawyers pitched witnesses, the media, and a victim's mother. She directs listeners to search for The Last 12 Weeks wherever they get podcasts.

The episode proper begins with reporter Maurice Chammas setting the scene: in fall 2024, David Wood's defense lawyer received a life-changing phone call from a man named George Hall. Hall had been incarcerated with Wood decades earlier and had watched two other prisoners get transported to El Paso, wined and dined by detectives, and shown case files before agreeing to testify that Wood had confessed to murder. Hall knew these men had no real knowledge of Wood's guilt — he would have heard about any confession himself. He wrote to an El Paso prosecutor warning about the fabrication, but the letter went unanswered. Hall said nothing publicly for 30 years, terrified that speaking out would jeopardize his parole. The moment his parole ended in 2024, with Wood's execution looming, he finally came forward. His reason, delivered with quiet power: he couldn't live with himself knowing two people lied to get a man executed and he said nothing. The detective who led the original investigation called Hall's account 'preposterous,' and while the bus trip and interview room visit are documented in court records, the detective couldn't imagine his colleagues orchestrating the kind of joyride Hall described.

Maurice Chammas describes himself as The Marshall Project's death penalty reporter — a gloomy beat, as he puts it — and explains why he was initially skeptical when Greg Werchuk reached out with a panicky email about David Wood. Chammas did the minimal due diligence of reading the Wikipedia page and was immediately struck by the horror of the case: 6 women and girls murdered, one as young as 14, their bodies buried in the El Paso desert. Even if George Hall's informant story was compelling, Chammas notes, that alone doesn't prove Wood is innocent. He also acknowledges the criticism of capital defense lawyers: prosecutors, judges, and victims' families often say people like Werchuk are ideological zealots using every procedural trick to delay justice. But Chammas was captivated by the real-time drama of the thing — a lawyer trying to prove innocence, not just unfairness, in a matter of months. So instead of a traditional feature, he proposed something more ambitious: follow Werchuk around with a microphone as he strategizes, hunts witnesses, and tries to change minds. Werchuk had a million reasons to say no. Chammas is still amazed he said yes.

A brief mid-episode sponsor block features two ads. Capital One's Savor card offers unlimited 3% cash back on dining, entertainment, and groceries, with a tagline of 'What's in your wallet?' NetSuite Next follows with a pitch aimed at businesses earning seven figures or more, promising AI agents, conversational queries, and automatic insight surfacing — available free at netsuite.ai/nyt.

This extended chapter serves as the evidentiary foundation of the series, told largely through the voice of retired Detective John Guerrero. It begins in 1987 when county employees stumbled upon a leg protruding from desert sand — the first of what would become six victims, ranging in age from middle school girls to young women in their twenties. As Guerrero investigated, clues emerged from an unlikely source: middle school kids who described a white man in a beige truck known as 'Skeeter,' who had been hanging around and giving them marijuana and beer. That nickname eventually led police to David Wood, recently released from prison and carrying a long criminal record including sexual crimes against girls as young as 12. The case accelerated when rape survivor Judith Kelling came forward, describing how a man drove her to the desert, tied her up, raped her while ordering her to claim she was 14, and then fled when he heard nearby voices. She identified Wood in a lineup; the attack site was 50 yards from the murder victims' graves. Physical evidence included orange fibers found near a victim's body and in Wood's apartment vacuum. Two jailhouse informants swore Wood confessed to them. The jury took less than 90 minutes. One informant later received $13,000 in reward money; the other had a capital murder charge dropped.

In mid-December 2024, Maurice Chammas and his producer meet Greg Werchuk — who he describes as a younger Dick Van Dyke with nervous energy — at the El Paso County Courthouse with 87 days before Wood's scheduled execution. Werchuk lays out a multi-step strategy that sounds almost impossible: convince incoming Democrat DA James Montoya to reclaim the case from the pro-death-penalty Texas Attorney General, convince the courts to halt the execution, then test the DNA. The DNA issue is particularly urgent — a piece of a victim's clothing retested with modern technology came back with male DNA that wasn't Wood's, yet Texas has refused to allow testing of more than 100 other pieces of physical evidence. Werchuk hasn't even managed to get a meeting with Montoya, who apparently doesn't know who he is.

The attempt to ambush DA Montoya unfolds with painful awkwardness. Chammas and his producer Alvin watch from the waiting room — a flat-screen TV playing Cake Wars — as Werchuk leaps from his seat the moment Montoya sweeps through with an aide. The conversation deteriorates almost immediately: Montoya says his office doesn't have the bandwidth, Werchuk begs for five minutes, Montoya cites another meeting. Werchuk escalates, mentioning the non-matching DNA and the approaching execution date; Montoya, now blunt, says 'I'm telling you, it's not happening.' When Werchuk asks if he can come back in a few weeks, Montoya says yes — but his answer will still be no. Chammas and Alvin stare at their wedding rings. The whole exchange lasts less than two minutes but feels, Chammas writes, like a hole in the space-time continuum.

Following the demoralizing hallway rejection, Werchuk decompresses with Chammas and reflects on the mindset required for capital defense work. He invokes Charlie Brown: if you approach each attempt cynically, you won't be ready for the one time Lucy doesn't pull the football away. He's an optimist, he insists — not a naive one, but an optimist. He notes that Montoya even said he could come back after January 1st, and interprets that as a window of opportunity. Chammas, gently, suggests it might have been Montoya's polite way of ending the conversation. Werchuk grins: 'I'm going to come back after January 1st. That's right. Charlie Brown.'

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The next morning, the team expands with the arrival of Jeremy Shepers — described by Chammas as the photo-negative of Werchuk: sarcastic where Greg is earnest, a millennial in flannel where Greg opts for jacket and tie. Shepers runs a capital habeas unit at a federal public defender office and arrived fresh off the Dallas Marathon, barely able to walk. The plan for the day is to try a different angle: get the local press interested in the DNA testing story. If El Paso TV stations start asking pointed questions, maybe that creates public pressure on Montoya. The team heads to KVIA, the local ABC affiliate, where nightly news anchor Stephanie Valle — who already covered the Desert Killer case in her own podcast, Borderland Crimes — greets them with a big camera-ready smile.

Werchuk wants Valle to do a TV story in which she confronts Montoya on camera: why won't he get involved? Why won't he test the DNA? Werchuk himself doesn't want to appear on camera, worried about antagonizing Montoya. But Valle pushes back, saying that if Werchuk is the one raising the questions, they'd land better coming from his mouth than hers. There's also a complication: Valle reveals she is leaving KVIA in about two weeks. There's no guarantee a new anchor would pick up the story. As the meeting wraps, Werchuk suddenly pivots and asks if she could get him a direct meeting with Montoya. Valle pauses, then says — to everyone's shock — that she probably could. She's been working in this town a long time. She'll try. Werchuk practically levitates. 'We're pulling at any string we can,' he says. 'We'll change our flights. Whatever.'

The morning after the KVIA meeting, Valle texts Werchuk with cautious good news: she spoke with Montoya and 'he seemed open to listening.' Werchuk wants to text Montoya immediately; Shepers counsels patience. Werchuk wins and fires off a careful message offering to meet for five to ten minutes. Montoya never replies. The holidays arrive. Greg goes ahead with a Zoom interview with Valle two days after Christmas, hoping to at least get something useful on the record. But a week later, during a team video call, Greg reports that something went wrong: the recording file was corrupted. Valle's office is wiping her computer as part of her offboarding process. She's sorry, she says, but she can't help further. Shepers immediately suspects the story is false. Werchuk, per Chammas's assessment, is 20% disappointed and 80% baffled.

A few days after Stephanie Valle's final newscast, an Instagram post lands. In it, Valle cheerfully announces that starting January 6th, she will be working with newly elected DA James Montoya to bring 'trust, integrity, and transparency' back to the DA's office. Shepers' instinct — that the corrupted file story was manufactured — suddenly looks prescient. Chammas reaches out to Valle directly, running by her Jeremy's version of events: that the excuse was a cover story. She declines to comment. DA Montoya's office sends an emailed statement saying his office has not been involved in the Wood case in more than 30 years and that it would be 'ill-advised' to insert themselves now. It is now January. The execution is 67 days away. The DNA strategy is dead. The media strategy is dead. The lawyers have to start over.

With the DA avenue closed and the clock ticking toward Wood's execution, the legal team has no choice but to pivot. They will track down new witnesses, pursue other suspects, and try to make the courts take seriously what the courts have ignored for three decades — the possibility that David Wood did not commit these murders. Chammas teases dramatic scenes to come: a potential other suspect claiming he doesn't know anything, Werchuk saying 'I need a lawyer,' and someone anticipating that people will hate them. The episode closes on the title card: 'The Last 12 Weeks.'

The episode closes with a full credits sequence. Maurice Chammas credits himself and Alvin Melith as writers and reporters; Alvin as producer; Jen Guerra and Anita Bhattijo as editors; Julie Snyder as executive editor of Serial Productions; and Sarah Koenig as an additional editor. Fact-checking is credited to Ben Phelan. Music is composed by Adam Dorn (Motion Worker), Matthias Bassi, and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonette. Chammas directs listeners to nytimes.com/newsletter/serialnewsletter for the companion newsletter and to themarshallproject.org to learn more about the nonprofit newsroom.

The final seconds of the episode belong to Bank of America Private Bank, which pitches its tailored wealth and business strategies to high-ambition clients, and touts its status as the official bank of the FIFA World Cup 2026. The ad closes with the familiar 'What would you like the power to do?' tagline.