CHAPTER 14
“He’d watch a bumblebee go after a wasp and he’d describe how the bee hunted.”
Barbara Dickson, talking about her son Dan when he was a curious eight year-old boy.
August 11, 1999
In the spring of 1999, Dan Dickson, thirty-three, was working as the airport manager at the small airfield just outside of Truth or Consequences. He wore jeans and a cowboy hat to work, and he played fiddle in a small country-western band that occasionally did a gig at the local Pine Knot Tavern. He also had his own cattle brand for a small herd of longhorns he owned, and he liked to think that his aim with a gun was as straight as his talk. Dan always told friends he never went into the vast desert surrounding T or C without carrying his six-shooter, just in case he ran into one of the thousands of rattlesnakes hiding under the sagebrush covering the Jordana del Muerto.
Usually, traffic in and out of the Sierra County Airport was light, and as the director of aviation services, he handled a small number of private planes owned by the very rich, who rightfully thought southern New Mexico was God’s gift to splendid scenery—like Ted Turner, owner of Cable News Network (CNN). According to the Sentinel, Turner owned nearly a third of Sierra County. Many of the other superwealthy landowners used to fly in to spend a few days at million-dollar homes perched on a ridge above the lake, a development called Champagne Hills.
By April 1, 1999, Dan Dickson was overwhelmed by the constant noise of helicopters and government planes flying FBI agents in and out of town to investigate David Parker Ray.
“When the FBI first got to town, they were wandering around combing the desert and going on one wild-goose chase after another,” said Dickson. “One night I was in Raymond’s Lounge talking to a friend of mine who is a treasure hunter. His name is Rex and he’s always been convinced there was Aztec gold hidden in some of the thousands of mines and caves in this area. He told me that just the day before he’d been down in a cave looking for treasures when he seen two burlap bags full of animal bones. He thought they might be victims of David. He said he didn’t want the publicity, so he asked me if I’d talk to the FBI. I’d already been hired by the NMSP OMI [Office of Medical Information] to help out in the Ray case, so I pulled a few strings and the next day Rex and me went out to the cave and I crawled three hundred feet down on my belly, and later that night, we met with Greg Spain, from the state police Special Investigations Undercover Unit. He contacted the FBI for us.
“Two days later, I took the FBI out to this cave near the Caballo Mountains, south of town. At the entrance of the cave, right inside, there was this big white quartz cross that looked real spooky. Treasure hunters have pursued gold up in them hills for years. The Feds hired professional spelunkers from Carlsbad Caverns National Park and those guys squeezed seventeen hundred feet down that shaft to a pool of water, an underground lake.
“All they found was a bag of coyote bones—some locals must have killed the coyotes. Out here, you cut the ears off a dead coyote and they pay you a bounty of ten dollars apiece. The FBI figured Ray and his followers must have mutilated the coyotes as part of some satanic ritual, because not five hundred feet from the entrance of the cave, they found a site covered with red and black candles and the names of some of David’s friends etched on the rocks. The place had Dennis Roy Yancy’s name all over it.
“The campsite was marked on a map back at David Ray’s house. It had the specific caves marked and later we found out David had a spelunking certificate from the state of California. Lots of other guys have poked around in these caves up in the Turtleback Mountains. There was one guy named ‘Old Willie’ back in the 1930s—he spent a lot of time crawling around underground. He used to melt down his gold and pour it into the skeletons of cholla cactus to hide it from thieves. His name even appeared in a book titled Seven Tons of Gold. He died a millionaire, with a bullet hole in the back of his head.
“You know, you never heard nuthin’ about David Ray in this town until that girl, Vigil, escaped. Now everybody thinks they knew him. I remember David and all his low-life friends. I can even put Roy Yancy with David Ray back in the early 1990s. I know when they met and when David took young Yancy under his wing. Same thing with Jesse and Cindy Hendy, too. I remember ’em all. A few years ago, they used to hang out at Raymond’s Lounge. I owned that bar between 1990 and 1995, and after I sold it, I worked there as a bartender until 1998. I used to see ’em come in there and pass the time every day.
“David wasn’t a drinker, but he’d sit there and buy drinks for his buddies. He’d sit there with some skanky gal, usually some girl like Cindy Hendy, and later with Hendy herself. I remember one time Cindy Hendy was flirting with both men and women. While she was fooling around with both sexes, David Ray would sit back in the corner and fund the entire operation. I figured maybe she was doin’ the fishin’ and he was payin’ for the trip!
“David never did drink; he’d just sit there and watch the other people. He never really said a whole lot. He didn’t like to talk, but when he did, he was also quite witty. That surprised me. He used to come in just wearing jeans, a T-shirt and that green-type uniform jacket he wore out at Elephant Butte Park, where he worked taking care of the vehicles.
“That’s where he met Hendy. She was in jail and they let her out on a work-release program. I think she got in a big fistfight with a guy named Arrey, one of her many boyfriends she picked up after moving here in 1997. Elephant Butte Park is always full of trash and they’d take prisoners out on free work release to clean up around the grounds and I guess Hendy and old David fell for each other right away.
“I guess goin’ to jail was great for her. . . .
“I never did like Hendy. I hear some photographer in town has pictures of her half naked with David and Yancy. Pictures he wants to sell, pictures taken six months before they all got arrested. Hell—Cindy Hendy is ugly enough with her clothes on! Cindy is real trashy—dirty clothes, filthy mouth. One time she was drunk and she got real mad at me because I wouldn’t give her free cigarettes. She jumped all over me, informin’ me her boyfriend was a cop—hell, he was just a nine-dollar-an-hour mechanic wearin’ a Smokey the Bear uniform, for Christ’s sake!
“I guess as long as she was drunk, she was happy.
“Jesse used to come to Raymond’s all the time. She’d ride her bike up to the bar and come in to hang out with other women. Quite often she’d come in with threesomes—all women. I think she’s a tomboy. I know even now, in jail, she’s got this attitude that everything will blow over—that she and her dad will get off scot-free.
“Yancy, though, I knew him the best. He and his buddies used to come into Raymond’s way back in 1991, back before he was old enough to be in a bar. Yancy, Frank Jackson, Sidd Dodds and Jesse Ray—the whole group was into doin’ poetry. They were all into writing poems. Kinda silly, like they was trying to be flower children from the 1960s. They’d say, ‘Let me read you a poem’—and then try to hustle me for a few free beers. If Roy was walkin’ into a bar and he saw a rip in the bar stool, he’d write a poem about it. If he saw a bug, he’d write a poem about it. If he saw a girl he wanted, he’d write a poem about how to ‘get’ her.
“Roy wore baggy clothes and always smelled like he needed a bath. He was always bummin’ around trying to pick up free cigarettes. Roy Yancy never had anything of his own. He’d sleep on your couch until you threw him out; then he’d go home to his mom and dad—until they kicked him out. Then he’d stay on someone else’s couch. He’d be in town for a few months; then you wouldn’t see him for quite a while. I don’t think he ever had a vehicle, except for his old broken-down bicycle.
“Roy wanted to be everybody’s sweetheart. He’d talk real nice when I was tending the bar, but if I wouldn’t give him a free beer, he’d get real angry.
“That’s what happens when you live in a town with a lot of nuts—they’re all strange. People come to T or C and nobody asks about their past. People were saying how surprised they were that all these terrible things happened here. I can’t think of a better place for this to happen—nobody in Truth or Consequences asks questions when new people show up.
“There’s a mental hospital up north in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and I hear when they let out the nuts they give ’em a one-way bus ticket to T or C. Even the nuts living here swear that’s the goddamn truth. One night I was in Raymond’s and I heard this one gal named Judy, a strawberry blonde, talking to five different people—and she was the only one in the bar. The next morning, I saw her out on the street corner, hollerin’ at cars driving by.
“And the police, they aren’t much better. The police department has always been kind of a joke to the people who live here—they’re a chickenshit police department. They’re corrupt. They go out and corral people and then say, ‘This one’s my friend, so I’ll let him go, and this one’s not, so I won’t let him go.’ The city pays ’em about six dollars an hour, so I guess you get what you pay for. Terry Byers, the police chief, is paranoid as hell. When Byers took over the police department, he locked the doors—that’s right, from the inside—twenty-four hours a day. I guess he’s afraid of the crooks.
“Of course, after the Kelly Clark case, I don’t blame him. She was a local cop who got killed in the line of duty. Byers sent this convicted murderer up to the prison in Gallup with just one policewoman driving the patrol car, and the killer jumped her while she was driving, shot her in the head with her own gun, killed her and got away for a few hours before he was caught. If Byers had put another man or woman in the patrol car, Kelly Clark would be alive today. People in T or C are never going to forgive Terry Byers for that fuckup.
“Some local newspaper reporter asked him how many people in the police department supported him and he got tears in his eyes and said, ‘Only about one out of eleven.’ ”
Dan Dickson worked at the airport full-time and moonlighted as a cop for the NMSP Criminal Investigation Unit. During the Ray case, he was involved in several special operations.
“It was the third week in April and there I was down in this cave in the middle of the night, looking for a body bag. I get a call on my cell phone from the airport. I had to leave right away because this plane wants to take off in the middle of the night. Not any plane, mind you. A twelve-million-dollar Citation Two, owned by the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church. It was real fancy, even had little solid-gold statues of Jesus hidden away in secret cubbyholes in the passenger section. They had just flown some preacher into town for a three-day conference on sin and redemption. (Actually, he was evangelist Ed Rimer, author of several books, including the ever-popular The Reverend Lucifer D. Satan, and Doctrines of Devils.) Now, all of a sudden, they want to leave—a few minutes after midnight! They flew in the same day, telling me they were going to stay for three days. They had limousines there to pick up the dignitaries and, all of a sudden, eleven hours later they’re cruising down the runway, heading back to Nashville, Tennessee.
The most outrageous story Dickson had to tell about the Ray case concerned something he overheard at the airport right after the FBI arrived in town. He was sitting there at his desk and Doug Beldon, in charge of the whole federal DPR operation in New Mexico, was talking on the phone to another special agent back in Washington, D.C. Dickson couldn’t help but overhear what Beldon was saying about one particularly gruesome videotape. He swears to this day about what he heard.
“I overheard the head FBI agent, Beldon, talking on the phone to his boss back in Washington, D.C. It was about one of the videos they found in the toy box and it was a real bad scene. Beldon said Ray and Hendy were using a cattle prod on a naked woman, all tied down. You could see smoke coming out of her vagina, Beldon said. She goes limp and then you see blood comin’ out of her mouth—they have alligator clips attached to her nipples. She is screamin’ and jerkin’ around and there are burn marks on her thighs. Ray and Hendy are taking turns with this gal. At the end, she dies. The last thing I heard Beldon say to the other operative was something about the FBI agents on the scene.
“These guys all said you could see the girl die—it just blew their minds.”
Then, in the next breath, Dan Dickson offers up his explanation as to why the so-called “snuff” video may never see the light of day.
“They can’t use it in court,” he points out, “because it might be a fake.”