How NI reporter Ian Woods forged a friendship with convicted killer on Death Row in USA

Sky News reporter Ian Woods was present three times for Richard Glossip’s scheduled, but aborted, executions. He has written a book on why he believes he’s innocent

THE phone call that Belfast-born Sky News reporter Ian Woods took as he waited for the arrival of Martin McGuinness’ funeral cortege in Derry’s City Cemetery came from another place associated with death thousands of miles away... on Death Row in Oklahoma. And the man who was ringing him last March was a convicted killer who had been served a final pre-execution meal on three different nights, but who had been saved from the death penalty at the last minute on each occasion.

Woods’ conversation with Richard Glossip in Derry was the last one he ever had with him.

Not because the death sentence was carried out, but because Glossip had decided to end all contact with the journalist who’d brought his story to millions of TV viewers around the world and not without personal cost.

To highlight what the newsman saw as the injustices perpetrated on an innocent man, Woods, who’s built a journalistic career on the solid foundations of objectivity, put his impartiality aside as he became part of Glossip’s story rather than just an observer.

Indeed, Woods was so close to the case that at the three scheduled, but aborted, executions, he was waiting to witness Glossip’s death by lethal injection from the viewing gallery of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.

❝ I was caught up by the whole thing — more so than by any other story I have covered during 35 years in the media

And now Woods, who’s from the Oldpark area, has written a book about the campaign for justice for Glossip, whom he once described as a friend before the American fell out with him — apparently because he was planning to write his own memoir.

Glossip had been found guilty of a 1997 murder largely on the evidence of a work colleague, Justin Sneed, who admitted carrying out the actual killing of their boss.

Motel owner, Barry Van Treese, was beaten to death with a baseball bat in room 102 of his Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma.

Nineteen-year-old Sneed, the motel maintenance man, initially said he killed Van Treese during a botched robbery, but he later claimed that G lossip, the manager of the down-market establishment, paid him to carry out the murder.

In return for testifying at the trial against Glossip, Sneed was spared the death penalty and jailed instead for life.

But Glossip rejected a deal to plead guilty in return for a similar life sentence, saying he wasn’t going to admit to a crime he didn’t commit.

But even so, he was convicted of the murder and sentenced to die in a part of the US with a record for more executions than any other.

And it was as Glossip prepared to face an executioner for the first time that Ian Woods got involved.

He says he’d been working on a story about the overall US death penalty policy when he stumbled on Glossip’s case, which he thought would be a perfect illustration of the arguments for and against. What Woods didn’t realise, however, was that Glossip’s death sentence would consume a large part of his life in the months to come.

He says: “I was caught up by the whole thing — more so than by any other story I have covered in 35 years in the media world.”

Woods talked to other journalists who had interviewed Glossip and friends who knew him and who believed he was innocent.

Woods was invited to attend the first planned execution and, after a lot of soul-searching, agreed to go, thinking it would give him a unique perspective on capital punishment.

Yet this was a man who couldn’t bear to watch as his own mother slipped away in a Belfast care home last year.

He says: “I couldn’t witness my own

Deathrow inmate Richard Glossip