Serial

Days before the execution, the defense team scrambles to respond to an unexpected ruling, while the lead lawyer makes what may be his final visit to David Wood on death row. Everyone waits to find out Wood’s fate.

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To justify sentencing David Wood to death, prosecutors argued that he was a convicted rapist turned serial killer. And yet, Wood has insisted all along that isn’t true. We head to death row to hear him tell us why. But not before a victim of his earlier crimes has her say about the kind of person she believes he is.

To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
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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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The way the state constructed the case, there’s no one big shiny piece of evidence for the defense to knock down. Instead, there are a million little threads to pull at. With less than two months until the execution, the lawyers comb through the evidence one last time, and a new witness offers unexpected revelations.

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In 1992, David Wood became El Paso’s most notorious convicted serial killer. He has been on death row ever since. More than 30 years later, his lawyers have just a few months  to argue his innocence and stop his execution.

To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
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In 1992, David Wood was convicted of murdering young women and girls and burying them in the desert outside El Paso. He has been on death row ever since. “The Last 12 Weeks” takes you behind the scenes as a capital defense team races against the clock to stop an execution 30 years in the making.

To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
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Allen will almost certainly be released in a few years. What should M.’s family do with a guy who refuses to own up to his own crime? Can he be re-integrated into the family? Should he be?

While M. has grown increasingly compassionate toward Allen, they learn their family has been moving in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, Priscilla has been trying to make a life without Allen. But Allen’s mom has other plans.

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Allen finally agrees to talk … and talk and talk, for 35 hours of interviews. M. wants to understand Allen on his own terms, to try and figure out how this scion of bohemian intellectuals ended up hiring someone to kill his ex. It’s hard for M. to believe everything Allen says, but over the course of their conversations, M. comes to feel for their cousin. And they think they understand what drove him to go so far.

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M. attends Allen’s trial in San Francisco. The FBI’s star witness, an agent who went by “David," plays his undercover recordings of Allen. They reveal how Allen’s scheme to deport Priscilla turned into a murder-for-hire plot. 

Allen is his own star witness, but his attempts to defend himself fall flat in court. M. begins to wonder why they loved seeing Allen humiliated on the stand.

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M. seeks out Allen’s ex-wife, Priscilla, who tells her side of the story. It begins with a whirlwind romance but quickly turns to chart Allen’s betrayal: taking her son from Russia and stranding Priscilla and her daughter in Moscow. What follows is Priscilla’s two-year odyssey, a journey that includes surviving a brutal attack and shocking arrests in Zimbabwe, only to reach the U.S. and have Allen take the boy again.

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For decades, M. simply disliked Allen. They saw him as a fool, a pompous “international businessman” who bragged about shady deals and drove fancy cars while living in Eastern Europe and Africa. But one day Allen suddenly shows up at their father’s home in Cape Cod with his mother and 5-year-old son. He says he has separated from his wife, whom he has left behind in Moscow. M. suspects this could be a kidnapping, but their family seems to disagree. 

But finally Allen does something so bad, even M.’s family can’t ignore it.

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The New York Times writer M. Gessen is widely known for their award-winning writing about totalitarianism, terrorism and the erosion of human rights. Now, M. is examining a more personal target: their least favorite cousin, Allen. For decades, they saw Allen as a fool, a pompous ‘international businessman’ who bragged about shady deals. But then Allen is arrested for trying to put a hit out on his ex-wife, and M. cannot wrap their head around the news. He’s just an idiot, right? Not a would-be murderer?

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What’s the harm of “better safe than sorry” in cases where abuse is ambiguous? One mother’s story is our answer to that question.

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One pediatrician’s path to Pennsylvania, and the rise of a powerful new field in child medicine.

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The story of how this extraordinary situation in the Lehigh Valley came to light — because it almost didn’t.

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In the summer of 2023, reporter Dyan Neary received a tip about a problematic doctor in Pennsylvania. Families were claiming that when they sought medical care for their children, this pediatrician falsely accused them of abuse, and their children were taken away from them. The Preventionist traces this doctor’s decades-long career across multiple states, and explores the rise of a new and powerful kind of specialist, the “child abuse pediatrician” — whose decisions can be incredibly difficult to challenge.

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Sometimes you can’t wait for research to tell you what to do — you just have to go ahead and do it. We get back on L&D with Clara, Mindy and Heather. 

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Pain during a cesarean section isn’t a new problem. But for a long time, it’s been a hidden one. In England, a patient named Susanna not only brings the problem to doctors’ attention, but also tries to solve it.

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What went wrong with Clara’s delivery? And can Heather get doctors to talk about it?

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Clara is a labor and delivery nurse, so she has a pretty good idea of what to expect when she delivers her own twins at the same hospital where she works. But she wasn’t prepared for this.

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C-sections are the most frequently performed major surgeries in the world. So why do so many patients feel severe pain during them? Season 2 of the award-winning podcast “The Retrievals” is an investigation into this underreported problem — and the new effort to solve it.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts. 

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After a month at sea, Keiko pops up near a Norwegian fishing village, causing a stir among the residents and his own team of caretakers. They figure that if they wait until spring, maybe Keiko will swim off again with a wild pod. If they can all just make it to spring.

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Keiko disappears in Icelandic waters, swimming east for four weeks. Unobserved, with no human contact. Since nobody knows what happened to Keiko during that mysterious time, we decided to recreate it — as a musical. From Keiko’s perspective, naturally. 

Watch the music video for "The Ballad of Keiko" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1k1TQ2Lh0o

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A fresh training team takes a hard-line approach and doubles down on breaking Keiko’s bond with humans. By summer it seems to be working, until one day Keiko swims away. This is the moment they’ve all been waiting for.

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Keiko finally arrives in Iceland, where years of preparation will be put to the test when Keiko gets his first chance to interact with orcas in the wild — something he hasn’t done since he was a calf. It does not go according to plan.

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Keiko has a new tank in Oregon and a dream team of experts that gets him into shape. But soon they start fighting over what a realistic future looks like for this golden retriever of an orca.

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When the movie “Free Willy” is released, word gets out that the star, a killer whale named Keiko, is sick and living in a tiny pool at a Mexican amusement park. An environmentalist sets out to give the fans what they want: their favorite celebrity orca back in the sea.  

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After the movie “Free Willy” became a hit, word got out that the star of the film, a killer whale named Keiko, was sick and living in a tiny pool at a Mexican amusement park. Fans were outraged and pleaded for his release. “The Good Whale” tells the story of the wildly ambitious science experiment to return Keiko to the ocean — while the world watched. An epic tale that starts in Mexico and ends in Norway, the six-episode series follows Keiko as he’s transported from country to country, each time landing in the hands of well-intentioned people who believe they know what’s best for him – people who still disagree, decades later, about whether they did the right thing.

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The criminal case against the men accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks is the one aspect of Guantánamo that would seem to make sense – until you start watching it.

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Majid Khan spent years locked away in CIA black sites. What would he tell the world when he finally got the chance to speak? 

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