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The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay of execution on Tuesday for a man who was less than two days away from becoming the third inmate to be put to death by the state in 2025.
David Leonard Wood was convicted in 1992 of the highly publicized murders of six young women in El Paso. Wood has said that he did not commit the crime and that DNA evidence would prove his innocence. In the years since, Wood filed several appeals, including the latest habeas corpus appeal to the criminal appeals court in which he made eight claims, including that evidence in his trial was destroyed and that his conviction was brought using false testimony.
The court’s brief order on Tuesday recognized the claims in Wood’s appeal and granted an indefinite stay, but did not clarify which, if any, of the eight the court found to be potentially substantiated. The stay is the second reprieve that Wood has been granted in the days before an upcoming execution. In 2009, Wood’s execution was halted over concerns about his potential intellectual disability.
The six girls and women Wood is accused of killing — Dawn Smith, Angelica Frausto, Rosa Maria Casio, Ivy Williams, Karen Baker and Desiree Wheatley — were between the ages of 14 and 24 and found buried in the desert northwest of El Paso. Media coverage at the time dubbed Wood the “Desert Killer.”
The stay is the second time in less than a week death row inmates in Texas have been granted legal reprieve. On Friday, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of Brittany Marlowe Holberg, who received a death sentence for the 1998 murder of an 80-year-old man.
Wood’s stay is also the second time Texas’ courts have blocked an execution in under six months. In October 2024, the Texas Supreme Court halted the execution of Robert Roberson, who has maintained he did not kill his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, in 2002.
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Correction, : An earlier version of this story incorrectly cited the Texas court that stayed Robert Roberson’s execution. The court that blocked Roberson’s execution in October 2024 was the Texas Supreme Court.