While the family was considered well off, their private life was troublesome, as Wood's mother Betty, who had started showing signs of mental illness, began to frequently argue with his father.
With his charismatic personality, long hair, and many tattoos, Wood proved popular amongst teenage girls and young adult women, allowing him to have many admirers and multiple girlfriends, one of whom even became his permanent roommate.
Alaniz's parents told police that in the months prior to her disappearance, their daughter had been going through puberty and had become acquainted with a group of young men with criminal records.
[7] On June 28, 19-year-old Cheryl Lynn Vasquez-Dismukes, an employee at a local Whataburger, went missing in El Paso, after going to buy cigarettes at a Circle K. According to witnesses, she was last seen talking to a man in a pickup truck.
Casio worked as a topless dancer in a bar in El Paso, but according to her parents, she was not involved in prostitution and planned to enroll in Dallas College Brookhaven Campus to complete her education.
[6] On September 4, El Paso Water Utilities workers found Casio's remains in a shallow grave in the desert northwest of the city.
Casio's cause of death was tentatively ruled as strangulation because her jaw had been broken in two places, but Baker's could not be determined due to her body's advanced state of decomposition.
[8] After finishing her testimony, Kelling indicated on a map the alleged location of the attack and was asked to look at five photographs of criminals convicted of similar crimes in the past.
[10] On March 14, 1988, a couple searching for aluminum cans in the desert stumbled upon the partially buried remains of a woman, located only a few hundred meters away from where the other victims had been found.
[11] Based on a comparison of X-rays and jaws, the woman was identified as 23-year-old Ivy Susanna Williams, a Colorado native who had moved to El Paso after getting married.
As she was found in an area that had previously been searched, the El Paso Police Department resumed an operation to locate more potential burial sites, which turned up nothing new.
On June 16, 1988, Wood was found guilty of kidnapping and raping Kelling, as this violated the conditions of his parole, it was considered an aggravating factor which resulted in a total of 50 years imprisonment.
[8] After Wood's conviction, police obtained a search warrant for his car, personal items, and apartment based on testimony from friends and acquaintances of the murdered girls and women, all of whom claimed that they had last seen him in each of the victim's company.
[11] Eventually, based on highly circumstantial evidence and not entirely reliable information, the El Paso County District Attorney's Office charged Wood with the murders of Williams, Wheatley, Baker, Frausto, Casio, and Smith.
[11] Throughout the proceedings, Wood insisted on his innocence and stated that he knew many girls in the northeastern El Paso area, many of whom continued to communicate with him even after his arrest.
[14] As a convicted criminal, he admitted to analyzing methods of kidnapping and raping women without risking being arrested but claimed that he had not murdered anyone, saying that if he were to do that, he would have buried the bodies in a mountainous area where not even coyotes would find them.
[14] At one court hearing, Wood admitted to being present at the parking lot on the day when Vasquez-Dismukes had disappeared, but denied being the one responsible, claiming that he had been with a 16-year-old girl that night and even gave her name, which was later corroborated.
[14] In November 1992, based on the testimony of Kelling, the inmates at the county jail, and on the results from the examination of the lint found in the vacuum cleaner, Wood was convicted of the six murders by jury verdict and was officially sentenced to death on January 14, 1993.
[15] His original execution date was scheduled for August 20, 2009, but the day prior to that, it was postponed thanks to yet another legal appeal filed by his lawyers, who claimed that their client showed signs of mental disability.
After reviewing the legal document, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the forensic psychiatric findings were questionable and the psychologists' methods for assessing Wood's adaptive functioning were not thorough or reliable.
[8] The El Paso County District Attorney's Office provided a yellow shirt that one of the victims, Dawn Smith, had been wearing at the time of her death and on which biological traces from a male contributor were extracted.
[17] In addition, they demanded that documents concerning two acquaintances of Wood, Salvador Martinez and Edward Dean Barton, be unsealed, as both men had been considered as alternative suspects in the killings.
[18] Following the denial of the post-conviction appeal, a new execution date was scheduled for March 13, 2025 by the 171st District Court of El Paso County; to be carried out in the Huntsville Unit death chamber.