CHAPTER 10

In all my years working as a reporter in downtown Los Angeles, I never saw anything this frightening.
—Betsy Phillips, reporter for the the Herald, in T or C, 8/08/1999

Jim Yontz took over as lead prosecutor the day after his forty-seventh birthday, and from the beginning the big, burly cop-turned-prosecutor felt he had a lot to prove. He was always the strong guy who tried to go out and save the weak people of the world, and in one moment his whole world had come crumbling down all around him.
In the summer of 1998, Yontz was head of the Narcotics Bureau operating out of Albuquerque. He was struggling to come to grips with his mother slowly dying from cancer. He was a married man, and just after midnight on August 15, undercover police picked him up with a prostitute on Central Avenue, on the eastern outskirts of Albuquerque. The cops spotted his pickup truck parked in an alley just west of Wyoming Boulevard and Highway 66, and when they pulled up behind and asked Yontz to get out, he was very upset because he knew the whole situation looked bad. He even started to cry when they asked him what he was doing with “a known hooker.” He claimed he was driving through a high-crime area along Highway 66 when he saw a woman walking alone. He stopped and offered her a ride. He denied he gave her money for sex. The officers found no evidence of money changing hands and let him go, but they reported the incident to their boss.
Word got back to the Albuquerque district attorney and he suspended Yontz, pending an investigation. Five days later, James A. Yontz resigned under pressure, strongly denying that he’d done anything wrong. At the time he told the AP: “I often stop to help people out. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs. I lead a very dull life. I only stopped to help a woman I feared might be a crime victim. I just didn’t do anything wrong. I only tried to help somebody.”
A year later, he found himself assigned to an assistant DA job out in the small town of Socorro, New Mexico; as luck would have it, he was in charge of the biggest crime case in New Mexico history. In his own quiet, straightforward way, he expected to convict David Ray and his cohorts and save his good reputation that he developed over twenty-six years in law enforcement—seventeen years as a prosecutor.
He got his first public chance to corral the bad guys at a preliminary hearing scheduled for David Parker Ray on April 15 and 16 at the Sierra County Courthouse in T or C. Yontz normally worked out of the bigger Socorro Courthouse, but this time he was crammed into a little chamber that barely held sixty spectators behind the two small wooden tables facing the judge’s bench and the witness table only a few feet away.
That Thursday and Friday, Jim Yontz went up against two men with good legal credentials. Men he expected to face over and over during the rest of 1999: Jeff Rein, the soft-spoken, handsome thirty-six-year-old defense attorney for David Ray, and Judge Neil P. Mertz, the chain-smoking fifty-three-year-old father of two grown children who ran his court with a tight fist and was now firmly in charge of all criminal trials in what the press had dubbed the “New Mexico Sex/Torture Case.”
 
 
On the first day David Ray walked into court with his head down and his shoulders slumped. As soon as Mertz outlawed all cameras in the courtroom, Ray perked up and seemed to manage an occasional “smirk,” at least according to Frances Baird, ace reporter for the Sierra County Sentinel. Frances was a tall, leggy blonde with horn-rimmed glasses and had been born into a newspaper family. According to her mother, Frances always had “ink in her blood.” Myrna Baird, publisher of the Sentinel, did not like the idea of her teenage daughter sitting there right next to David Ray and listening to witnesses talk about an old man with a dirty mind and filthy habits. But there was no way Frances was going to miss the story of the century in the tiny town where she had spent all of her days.
April 15 and 16 brought three of the major players in the Sex/Torture Case together under the watchful eye of an ambitious and experienced-beyond-her-years reporter.
It didn’t take Jim Yontz long to call his first witness on the morning of April 15. Angelique Montano, twenty-seven, looked haggard and confused as she took the witness stand. She didn’t want her one blue eye and one brown eye to be noticed, so she tried not to make eye contact with anyone. Her voice quaking, she told the story of how she ended up spending five days with Ray and Hendy between February 17 and 21, 1999. She told the truth, except for the part about the cake mix. At least Yontz hoped she was telling the truth.
“I’d been livin’ in Elephant Butte for about two and a half years, and the day it happened, I went to David’s to pick up some cake mix. Cindy Hendy gave me the mix so I could make my boyfriend a birthday cake on February seventeenth. Me and Cindy were inside the house when David went outside and came back with a tool box and pulled a dagger out. I thought he was kidding until he punched me in the face.
“They took off my clothes and right away they put on handcuffs, shackles and a metal collar around my neck. They chained me to a bed in the den and Hendy gave me some kind of orange pill.
“I was there two days and nothing happened until the third day when David got off work and finished dinner. He took me out to a trailer he and Hendy called the toy box, tied me down, blindfolded me and then put electrodes on my breasts and vagina and shocked me with a stun gun. Then they brought me back inside the mobile home and chained me to a bed while they watched a Stephen King movie.
“They made me have sex with them on the fourth day, and on the fifth day I tried to be friendly to Ray so he would let me go home. It worked, and they drove me out to I-25 on Saturday and I hitched a ride back to town. I’m surprised I made it out of there. I didn’t know if I was going to see my kid again.”
The next witness was the off-duty cop who just happened to be driving down I-25 when he saw Montano walking next to the freeway.
“I stop for all women. I seen her waving down traffic and ten minutes after she got in my car, she says, ‘If I tell you something, you’re not going to believe it.’ She didn’t know I was a cop when she told me the story. I thought she might have been making something up just to get a ride. If I had thought it was one hundred percent legitimate, I would have taken her to the police right then and there.”
Angie Montano and Cyndy Vigil had never talked until April 15, yet they were bound like twin sisters by the fact that they were both tortured at the lakeside mobile home of David Ray and Cindy Hendy in the first three months of 1999. The big difference was that Montano was taken to the toy box, whereas the younger Vigil managed to escape before David had a chance to take her outside.
After Montano stepped down from the witness stand, Cyndy Vigil, twenty-two, stood up and walked forward and took her seat at the witness stand. She had been kidnapped and kept from March 20 until March 22, but unlike Angie, people did believe her story. Yontz told her right after the escape that she was the true hero of the story—if she hadn’t stabbed Hendy in the neck and run away, David Ray would still be doing business. Clutching a rosary and listening to her grandmother Bertha whisper support from the front row, Cyndy Vigil unloaded her story in front of the steely eyes of Judge Mertz.
“I met Ray and Hendy on the corner of Central and Washington in Albuquerque on Saturday morning, March twentieth. He acted like he was a john and said he wanted to pay me for oral sex, so I got into his RV. All of a sudden, he shows me a badge with a little star and he tells me I’m under arrest for soliciting sex. Then Hendy comes out of the bathroom and tries to handcuff me. I thought something was weird, so I tried to get away—to just run. I screamed. They grabbed me and handcuffed me to some kind of a ‘screw thing’ in the trailer and then David drove away.
“After a while they stopped, took off all my clothes and put a metal collar around my neck and shackles on my feet. At one point they put a leather mask over my head that had a zipper for a mouth and no eyeholes.”
At this point in the hearing, Yontz showed Cyndy Vigil the metal neck collar and asked her if it looked like the one she was wearing when she escaped. Vigil grabbed it with both hands, looked at it for a moment, then dropped it on the wooden witness stand and started to cry. She buried her face in her hands and turned away from the packed courtroom of spectators. She was trying to hide the horror written all over her face. Cathy McClean, the court cerk, gave her a hug and then Vigil turned to David Ray, who was sitting only three feet away. She tried to stare him down; then she shouted at the top of her lungs: “How could you do this to me? You sorry bastard! YOU BASTARD!”
Judge Mertz, looking red in the face, cleared the tiny courtroom, and after Vigil got some minor medical help, everyone was slowly ushered back into the proceedings. Mertz, in the meantime, moved David Ray and his attorney Jeff Rein to the other side of the courtroom, as far away from Vigil as possible. In a calmer voice Vigil continued telling her story.
“When we got to his house, I didn’t know where I was. They took me inside and chained me to a bed. They forced me to have sex with them, and then David poured hot gravy on my belly and had a dog, a German shepherd, come in from outside and lick it off. . . .”
Frances Baird looked around the hushed courtroom and it looked to her like everyone was going to throw up, especially the women. During a brief lull, David Ray caught her watching him and smiled and gave her a big wink. Gulping, she looked down at her notebook and kept trying to take notes on Vigil’s testimony. Her hands were shaking the whole time.
“After they chained me to the bed,” Vigil continued, “I went to sleep to try to forget about where I was. The next day was Sunday and they put clips on my breasts that were connected to wires that went through a pulley system with lead weights at the end. While I was hooked up to the pulley system, Ray shocked me with a cattle prod to make me squirm. When I tried to wiggle free, it pulled my breasts out away from my body. I have small breasts and one time they looked like they had been pulled out at least a foot away from my chest. It hurt so bad.... I was screaming.
“That night they used my neck collar to hang me from this thing in the ceiling and then they would whip me with leather straps and put these big, huge dildos in my body.
“On Monday morning David Ray went to work and I saw my chance to escape. Cindy Hendy was out of the room for a second and I moved my feet to reach a coffee table holding the keys to the padlock. Just after I grabbed the keys, Hendy walked in the room and ran over and started pulling my hair. I unlocked the padlock and pulled the chain out of the I bolt on the wall. Then Hendy grabs this big green glass lamp and hits me over the top of the head, trying to knock me out. So I looked on the floor and there was this ice pick and I grabbed it and stabbed her in the back of the neck. Then I ran out the front door and started to run as fast as I could go. All I was wearing was a dog collar around my neck.”
At this point Cyndy Vigil broke down and wept.
“I ran and ran and ran. It seemed like I ran forever. I seen some door open in some trailer—some lady was in some trailer and I just grabbed her and told her to help me.”
On Friday, April 15, Jim Yontz called one more witness, John Briscoe, a state trooper who had been inside both the house and the toy box. Briscoe read off a long list of David’s sex toys: chairs with stirrups, a coffin with a fan, dildos, rings, clips, chains, eyebolts and hooks, duct tape, dog collars, ankle-and-knee spreaders—the list seemed to go on and on. He added information about the books and drawings and photographs of missing victims and even showed pictures of the “voodoo dolls.” He finished his testimony by reading from a list of “do’s and don’ts” created by Ray for other people who were helping him handle his captives, including little suggestions like “don’t cut her any slack,” “play with her sex organs,” “rape her,” “whip her and use electro shock” and on and on and on.
Judge Mertz bound David Ray over for a jury trial.
 
 
As Frances Baird left the courthouse, she remembered the first thing that struck her when she heard about the inside of Ray’s house. “He didn’t have a Bible,” she remembered thinking. She’d never heard of anyone who didn’t have a Bible in their house. On her way to her car, she overheard Cyndy Vigil’s grandmother talking to Angie Montano’s mother, comparing notes on what had happened to the two young women they loved. Bertha Vigil told the younger woman how horrible it still was for her granddaughter.
“Even when she’s awake, she’s still having nightmares.”
Baird introduced herself to Jim Yontz in the parking lot and he told her anytime she needed information about the case just to give him a call at home. They discussed Neil Mertz and Baird told Yontz she’d known the judge since she was a little girl. She told the prosecutor she thought Ray was the “ultimate sicko” and she knew Judge Mertz would do a good job of managing the upcoming big trial.
“I love Judge Mertz like a father,” she said, smiling.
She waved good-bye to Yontz and hurried home to the offices of the Sentinel, run by her mother. She had a deadline to meet.
The next week, her story ran on the front page under big headlines: STORIES OF TORTURE TOLD DURING HEARING. Truth or Consequences had three weekly newspapers, selling a combined total of 10,000 copies a week, but there was no doubt in Frances Baird’s mind where most people would go to get the best scoop on true crime: the Sierra County Sentinel.
Down in the left-hand corner of the front page, the Sentinel always printed a little prayer box called “Quiet Moments.” On April 21, 1999, Frances Baird dominated the top of the front page of the newspaper, but to the many senior citizens who made T or C and Elephant Butte Lake their home away from home, the inspirational message at the bottom of the page was the first thing they read when they picked up their Wednesday afternoon paper. It was always uplifting:

Dear Heavenly Father,
How good it is that instead
of treating us as we justly
deserve,
You are there,
waiting to forgive our
wrongs.