In April 2009 David Leonard Wood, the man convicted of brutally raping and murdering my sister was given an execution date of August 20th. Wood killed my sister, Ivy, and five other women in 1987. I was 13 years old at the time. Because of my age, I was not told much about what happened to her. I just knew she was killed by a serial killer. Once I was given his name on April 26th, 2009, I became obsessed with learning more about Ivy and how she met that end.
This is what I learned from the internet, phone calls, and a book written about the murders: Ivy was ten years older than I was and was raised by her mother, our father’s first wife. Ivy led a tumultuous life after our father’s death, when she was 23 she worked as a topless dance in El Paso, Texas. David Wood, recently released from prison for sexually assaulting two girls, was dating another dancer at the Cabaret Club and had offered her a ride to the Hawaiian Royale Motel, where she was living at the time. She was never seen alive again. David would lure his victims by offering them a ride, he would then tell them he was driving out into the desert by an old oil processing plant to get some drugs that he had stashed there. He would tie these girls to a tree, the only tree in the area, rape them, kill them and bury them in the same area only yards away from each other.
Knowing these facts did not bring me any solace. I decided that what I needed to do for myself and for Ivy was to retrace her steps on her last day. I wanted and needed to see how she lived before she was killed. I thought that this would be an upsetting trip but in the end it wasn’t it was one that brought me closer and hope for the future.
I started my photo essay with a picture of how I always imagined Ivy in her last moments. Hurt, scared, and stripped down alone in the woods with no one to save her. I then just chronicled my trip. I started with the airport and went from there. The place where she lived was a sad dark broken down motel. The Cabaret Club was the same. It was as if neither place had been touched since the 1980’s. It was as if they where in a time capsule waiting for me to find them. The area where the crimes were committed was a different matter though. They built a golf course over some of the burial sites in 1991.
