Diana Holt took on the case 11 years later.

Her career path had been indirect, to say the least. Born in El Paso, Texas, in 1958, she had endured a harrowing childhood. For years her stepfather, Walter Belshaw, abused her sexually. As best she can remember, it started when she was 3 or 4. Her mother was about 20, Belshaw about twice that age. “If you want some milk,” she remembers him saying, “put your mouth here.”

Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, Holt didn’t do well in school, but nonetheless, in the sixth grade she decided she wanted to be a lawyer. Her stepfather mocked her ambitions. When he began teaching her to drive, he fondled her, saying that was what boys would do. He gave her drugs, entertained her at swanky bars, and took pictures of her naked. At the age of 17 she ran off with strangers and ended up in New Orleans, where an incident took place that she would keep secret for years, even from her closest friends and family. Nearly three years after she ran away from home, Holt returned to Texas, got married, got divorced, got pregnant, and then got married again—this time to an angry Vietnam vet who, Holt told the police, tried to kill her after an argument. (Only a defective firing pin in his revolver saved her life.) Holt divorced him and pressed charges, but the state declined to prosecute, telling her that it boiled down to her word against his, which simply wasn’t good enough. That he wasn’t even charged with a crime outraged Holt. The moment was a turning point for her. She decided to act on her sixth-grade dream and become a lawyer.

In 1986, Holt began taking courses at community college. She quickly revealed herself to be both smart and disciplined. After four semesters of straight A’s, she enrolled at Southwest Texas State University. She had recently married again and was pregnant with her third son, but still she managed to get straight A’s, to make the dean’s list every semester, and to graduate summa cum laude. She applied to law school, without much hope that she’d get in, given her past, but the University of Texas admitted her, in 1991. There, influenced by a couple of her professors, she became committed to representing men and women on death row.

In the world of appellate criminal defenders, “law lawyers” are ardent students of the Constitution, and of the Supreme Court cases interpreting it. In death-penalty cases, they might argue that their clients did not get a fair trial or were denied effective assistance of counsel; that the state failed to hand over exonerating evidence; that jury selection was biased; that constitutional provisions were violated. “Fact lawyers,” on the other hand, are those who search for evidence that either proves their clients did not commit the crime or, if they did, alters the details of the case significantly enough to spare their lives. By 1999, Holt had become a fact lawyer extraordinaire, an investigator’s investigator. No matter how deeply evidence was buried, she could find it. She also had an uncanny ability to get people to open up to her, and even to confess to murder, perhaps because of her diminutive size, which put them off guard, or because of her southern drawl, which would thicken noticeably when she felt it would help her gain somebody’s confidence.