Episode 3: The Mother & The Informant
6/18/202644 min
In the final weeks before the execution date, the defense team has to decide just how far it’s willing to push people to save David Wood’s life. The team’s deliberations lead to a key witness on his deathbed … and the mother of one of the Desert Killer’s victims.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAlvin Melathe· Host0:03
There are 42 days left before the execution, and Maurice and I have split up again. I'm heading out to St. Louis to meet Greg's co-counsel, Jeremy. It's very bleak and rainy, and we're setting off on a little road trip to go look for yet another alternate suspect.
Speaker 20:16
What we are going to do is we are going to interview, hopefully at least, a man named Eddie Barton. Uh, he came up in the files- Eddie Barton is on Jeremy's list because back in 1989, Barton confessed to killing young women and burying them in the desert in El Paso.
Alvin Melathe· Host0:31
He actually confessed to the murders while also confessing to another completely unrelated crime. All this confessing happened to FBI agents in Las Vegas. Unfortunately for Barton, and please forgive me, this was not the kind of thing that would just stay in Vegas. In their interview with Barton, the FBI recorded details about why he chose the desert to bury his victims. Barton claimed he picked victims who were, quote, "small, petite, young, with features similar to that of his wife." According to court records, the FBI decided to alert the El Paso Police Department. But by the time anyone in El Paso got around to talking to Eddie Barton, David Wood's trial for the murders was already ramping up. Three years had passed since Barton's original confession, and by now he denied everything, said he didn't even remember confessing at all, given that he was really strung out on dope and booze at the time. So Jeremy's dream scenario is to see if he can jog Barton's memory and get him to come clean on a series of grisly murders that he once confessed to more than three