CHAPTER 11
I like to read true crime—if it’s true.
—Letter from Glenda Jean “Jesse” Ray, 8/15/1999
Like a lot of the drifters moving in and out of Truth or Consequences, Glenda Jean Ray always seemed to be somewhere else when things got ugly. Right after Marie Parker was killed in the summer of 1997, she and Roy Yancy left town and migrated to their favorite hangout, Galveston, Texas. They lived in a hotel for a year, and after things had cooled down, they came back to Truth or Consequences in the fall of 1998.
Glenda had returned to Galveston when her dad got arrested on the afternoon of March 22, 1999. Her friend “Big Debbie” Fisk called and persuaded her to return to T or C, and the next day, Glenda wrote to another friend that she was going to come back and defend her dad and “separate fact from fiction.” She drove home nonstop and moved into her dad’s trailer on Bass Road the next day.
It wasn’t long until the FBI subjected her to two intensive interrogations about her past history with her father.
Jim Yontz wanted to find out what her connection was to her father, so he asked Special Agent Wesley Weller of the FBI to interview Glenda right after she returned from Galveston.
Weller sat down with an extremely nervous Jesse, who stumbled over her words again and again during the three-hour interview.
“I grew up in Temple, Texas,” she told him. “My dad worked as a mechanic on the Santa Fe Railroad for about three years between 1977 and 1980. He was gone a lot when I was growing up. Everybody in the family knew about my dad’s fetish. They always have, you know. I learned right away to keep my mouth shut. It’s just something you don’t talk about. He’s always had this stuff, like padded leather straps, you know—and it’s hard to hide stuff like that from kids—they’re so curious, you know.
“Dad’s always been the golden boy, Grandma’s favorite.”
Weller had read all the notes from Special Agent Schum’s nine-hour interview with David Parker Ray. While Jesse was telling him how her father was the smartest guy in the family, he chuckled to himself, remembering what David had said about growing up with his granny outside of Mountainair, New Mexico, known in the 1940s and 1950s as “the Pinto Bean Capital of America.” Weller recalled there was no one watching the bored little David while he spent his free time toying around with explosives. Asked to describe how he was raised as a small boy, Ray only had one opinion of his grandmother: “She was a real fruitcake.”
On Monday morning, April 26, Jim Yontz issued orders and the long arm of the law finally caught up with Glenda Jean “Jesse” Ray. Police came and arrested thirty-one-year-old Jesse Ray, charging her alongside her father with teaming up to kidnap and torture Kelli Van Cleave back in the summer of 1996.
Jesse was a good pool player and a popular local drug dealer. She usually could be found hanging out with her friends at Raymond’s Lounge, a rock-and-roll biker bar on the main drag running through T or C. She dealt coke, marijuana and the cheap drug that was sweeping the nation, “meth”—known to people on the streets as “the poor man’s cocaine.” Jesse was the mother of a seven-year-old daughter, Kayla, who was growing up in Louisiana and living with her granny. Kayla was being raised by Jesse’s mother, the former Glenda Lois Ray, who was now remarried and going by the name of Glenda Blood.
According to long-standing rumors in town, Jesse’s daughter was fathered by David Parker Ray shortly after Jesse moved up from Texas in 1992 to live with him. “The kid is his,” states ex-druggie Gail Astbury, Jesse’s pal. “That’s the reason Jesse’s so sick all the time,” added Astbury. According to another friend, Jo McClean, Jesse was always there for her father when he reached out to her. “It seemed like whenever she went away, he’d get sick and ask her to come back to him. And whenever she came back, she’d get a bleeding ulcer and get real sick herself.” It was a well-known fact that Jesse had serious ulcer problems ever since she moved to T or C when she was twenty-four years old. Twice, she had to be airlifted out of town to get treatment.
“I have ten to eleven ulcer attacks a year,” she once told Astbury.
Prosecutor Yontz had Jesse charged with a dozen felony counts, and during the arraignment, bail was set at $1,000,000—cash. She was charged with the same identical twelve counts as her father: kidnapping, six counts of criminal sexual penetration, criminal sexual contact, assault and three counts of conspiracy. Yontz was also having Jesse investigated in the September 1995 disappearance of Jill Troia, twenty-two, who was last seen the night she vanished chugging beers with Jesse Ray in a gay bar along a Central Avenue sleazy motel strip in Albuquerque. Although the locals in T or C also heard rumors that Roy Yancy had implicated her in the death of Marie Parker, she was not charged in the Parker case.
During her second interview with the FBI, she’d opened up a little bit more to Special Agent Weller and told him that her relationship to David Ray was not good.
“My relationship with my father is strained—very much so,” she told him.
In jail she told a very different story when she was visited by Gail Astbury. During their conversations she told Astbury she “idolized” her dad and angrily denied that he had ever had sex with her and fathered her child. She also denied any involvement in the three-day disappearance of Kelli Van Cleave.
People who knew Jesse Ray had a mixed bag of reactions to her arrest. Her stepbrother, Ron, was surprised and told the press that “it really caught me off guard.” Michael Kitts, who had known Jesse for years, said, “She rarely held a job for long,” adding that “she drove a cab for a while and I think she worked in a pizza joint once.
“She’s quiet and reserved,” he added. “Kind of laid-back, like her dad. She’s not the kind of person to be noticed in a big crowd. She’s off to the side in the corner, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. She can be charming, but I’ve seen her really get angry.”
For ten years Jesse lived in Albuquerque with her lover, a woman named Teri Hafenbrack. At one point they actually got married. Before Jesse got arrested, Teri had nothing but kind words for her ex-girlfriend. “Jesse’s a kind and caring individual. I’ve known her for eighteen years and I don’t think she’s involved with anything that her father may have done—not at all.”
After the police put Jesse behind bars, the Albuquerque Journal did a criminal background check on her and the picture of her domestic life—with and without Hafenbrack—showed a much darker side. Police reported that during that same ten years she’d gone by at least three first-name aliases (Linda, Brenda and Sissy), and in 1992 her partner, Hafenbrack, reported her to the police and filed a domestic-violence complaint against her. Hafenbrack told the cops Ray “pushed her.” In 1993 Hafenbrack filed another complaint, telling investigating officers that Ray “hit her” and “took my car without permission.” In neither case did Teri Hafenbrack file charges against Jesse.
By 1995 Hafenbrack had a new lover, Tammy Younglove. One hot August night, Jesse Ray came by to visit her ex-wife and got into another disturbance with Teri’s new girlfriend. Ray and Younglove got in a heated argument after Younglove asked Jesse to leave the house. Ray became very agitated and pulled a can of pepper spray out of her purse and sprayed Younglove in the face. Again, no charges were filed.
Jim Yontz spent the next two weeks preparing for Jesse’s preliminary hearing on May 11, in front of Judge Pestak in the Sierra County Magistrate’s Court in T or C. Pestak always seemed more reasonable than the hard-ass Mertz, so Yontz looked forward to making a strong case against Glenda Jean Ray. Her felony charges mirrored her father’s first twelve charges and Yontz knew what he had to do. His main job was to show that David and Jesse Ray had true evil intent when they kidnapped Van Cleave on the night of July 25, 1996. He also wanted to establish that Jesse was the likely female partner David mentioned in his kinky introduction-to-torture audiotape. So Yontz planned to play about fifteen minutes of one of the six tapes in court so the judge could get a good feeling for what a sickening duo the state of New Mexico was trying to put behind bars.
On Tuesday, May 11, Kelli Van Cleave was the first to testify. She told how Jesse had drugged her at the Blue Waters Saloon and taken her back to David’s, where the two of them tied her up. She told how David Ray spent three days penetrating her with one particular dildo he called “the devil’s dick.”
“The details have been slipping back into my mind for years,” she told the judge. “I remember him telling me he was in some kind of satanic group, and the people in his group had been watching me—and wanting me as a sex toy, kind of a sex slave.”
Frances Baird sat in the courtroom taking notes for the Sentinel, and when the words “sex slave” came up, she got the chills. Another rumor around town was that Ray and Hendy had targeted the ten-year-old daughter of Pamela Hinkle because they wanted to kidnap a child and keep it as a long-term sex slave. They supposedly put out a “hit” on the girl’s mother and planned to kill her sometime in 1998 or 1999.
On July 27, 1998, Hinkle went to court in T or C to get a restraining order against her husband, Duane Hinkle. They had been married for only two weeks in the summer of 1998 and she claimed that on one occasion he had already tried to kill her. In her court papers filed in the seventh district court, she wrote: “My husband Duane tried to kill me. He picked me up by the neck and slammed me all over the walls. He was on top of me and choked me. I did not touch him or argue with him.”
She got a restraining order, and then on January 7, 1999, she reported to the police that Duane was prowling around her apartment.
The next week she heard from friends that Ray and Hendy were going to kidnap her youngest child. A few days later, she found out Duane was a good buddy of David Parker Ray’s, and on the 27th, after a divorce hearing in front of Judge Edmund Kase, she was drunk and driving her brown Dodge van when she tried to run Duane down in a parking lot. The next day, she packed up her bags and moved her two children out of town—all in one day.
Frances Baird snapped out of it and listened to Yontz bring on Janet Murphy, who testified that when David Ray brought back Kelli Van Cleave, she was drugged up and dirty and couldn’t remember hardly anything. Yontz pointed out to Pestak that three days earlier, Jesse waited at the Blue Waters Saloon until almost everyone else had left and then offered Kelli a ride home on her motorcycle. Instead of doing her friend a favor, David’s daughter took the new bride to her dad’s trailer so he could use her for his own fun and games. Jesse was just as guilty as her dad, Yontz added.
“She procured the victim for Daddy,” he told Pestak.
Next up was the audiotape. Billy Blackburn was the public defender representing Jesse and he vehemently objected, claiming that there was no proof David Ray played the tape for Kelli. Judge Pestak disagreed and allowed Trooper John Briscoe to play the cassette for the hushed courtroom. Frances Baird got ready to take notes a mile a minute. Right away she recognized David Parker Ray’s gravelly cowboy voice and his first three words out of his mouth shocked Frances more than she was willing to admit:
Hello there, bitch. [David greeted his next unknown victim.] You’re chained, handcuffed, scared and disoriented. Listen to this tape. It was created July 23, 1993, as an advisory tape for female captives based on my several years of experience.
You are here against your will. You probably think you’re going to be raped. You’re right about that—you will be raped thoroughly and repeatedly.. . . My female companion and I are very selective.. . . We’ll snatch anything clean, young and well-built.... We’re basically like predators. We’re always looking. I don’t want to kill unless it’s absolutely necessary.
If I killed every victim I ever kidnapped, there’d be bodies all over the country.
When the tape was over, most reporters present knew they couldn’t file the specifics of such a vile report in a family newspaper. Baird wanted to put every last word in the Sentinel, but she knew her mother would not allow it.
Jim Yontz wrapped up his arguments in favor of binding Glenda “Jesse” Ray over for a jury trial and it didn’t take Judge Pestak long to agree. Pestak said Jesse would go to trial within six months.
On the way out of the courtroom, Baird ran into Yontz and he told her to expect another big bombshell from the FBI in the next few days. Baird kidded him about not announcing news before it happens. Then she giggled and added: “If it hasn’t happened, I don’t want to hear about it.”
Two days later, on May 13, she heard about it.
Federal Bureau of Investigation SSA Doug Beldon of Albuquerque held a press conference and flabbergasted almost everyone within earshot when he confirmed another rumor circulating about Jesse Ray and her dad. Thirteen years earlier, she had turned him in to the FBI.
“In June 1986, Jesse Ray volunteered information to the FBI in New Mexico concerning her father,” Beldon said. “She alleged that David Parker Ray was abducting and torturing women and selling them to buyers in Mexico. For over one year thereafter, the FBI in New Mexico conducted an investigation in an attempt to substantiate the allegations. The investigation was conducted under the jurisdiction in the FBI’s White Slave Traffic Act. No victims were identified, and none came forward,” Beldon said.
Jesse’s friends were dead sure why she turned her dad in to the FBI back in 1986. He’d always told her he was “untouchable,” and by the time she was nineteen years old, she was beginning to believe him. According to one close friend, “That was her last try to get out from under her dad’s influence. It was the last time she said to him, ‘No, Dad, what you’re doing is wrong.’ I blame the FBI,” said the friend. “They did nothing. After that, she didn’t even try.”
What her friends did not know was that Jesse Ray had told the FBI something completely different during a second 1999 interview that was conducted with her prior to the news about the 1986 story going public. Jesse’s version of events was quite at odds from what everyone assumed after hearing that she’d try to hang David high and dry with the Feds back in 1986.
She told the FBI it was all about selling pot, not kidnapped sex slaves.
“We lived up near Fence Lake, New Mexico, and in 1984 to ’85 we were growing marijuana and selling it to the local ‘stoners.’ Us kids did all the physical labor. We had this little greenhouse and we’d let the grass plants get real big before we took ’em outside to plant ’em in our yard. We had to, because the rabbits were so bad out there—they’d eat ’em before we could pick ’em!
“We sold ’em in the fall of 1985, and my dad—he tried to cheat me out of my share of the money and I was real mad at him. So I turned him in to the FBI,” Jesse said.
“Simple as that.”