CHAPTER 16
David did excellent repair work: welding, that kind of thing. He was really great with tools.
—Doug Beldon, lead FBI agent, August 1999
Violent crime in New Mexico is a way of life for many people caught in the class warfare between the dirt poor and the filthy rich. One small town in northern New Mexico recently experienced ten homicides in one month—May 1995—right after the snows melted and generations of pent-up family rage exploded in everyone’s face. Many people in New Mexico hate the cops, and Jim Yontz had prosecuted enough cop killers to know that someday he wanted to get away from all the crazies. When he moved to Socorro in 1998, he told his wife he wanted to slow down.
“I just want to prosecute a few burglaries and some good old-fashioned cattle-rustling cases,” he told her. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
Nobody knows what the future holds, and one day after his forty-seventh birthday, Yontz was thrown pell-mell into the flash flood of the David Parker Ray case. Before David Ray, he thought he’d seen it all. By early August 1999, he was getting the feeling that he hadn’t seen anything yet. As he spent seven days a week in his dimly lit office, poring over file after file of David Ray’s lengthy work history, all he could come up with was a big, fat zero. Ray had never even been arrested—not once—in his entire life; he appeared to be a model citizen. Right after the arrest, Glen Parks, a young volunteer at the park, described Ray as the “neatest, cleanest, politest person you could ever want to meet,” and Yontz figured that was part of the cover-up Ray designed to make sure nobody ever nosed around asking questions about the man behind the mask. The FBI said Ray had patterned his entire life after “the fantasy,” so Yontz spent hours trying to figure out how this gentle guy found the time to go out and torture and kill so many women.
While the crime lab up in Albuquerque tried to find out if the bag of flesh was human, Jim Yontz spent night and day trying to figure out what made David Ray less than human. As he fit the fuzzy pieces of the puzzle together, Yontz found himself looking for the little holes in Ray’s seemingly normal life—clues that would show a New Mexico jury how this man hid himself from the outside world for a lifetime. Yontz wanted to be able to show the jurors how Ray organized his private “shadow life” around the three things that turned him on: kidnapping, torture and murder.
The clues unfolded from his jagged work history and his long list of failed relationships with women.
David Ray was born along the shores of the Rio Grande River in 1939, right at the end of the Great Depression and right before the beginning of World War II. He was born on the cusp of history—to the Parker family and the Ray family, the only son of his mother, Opel. He was born between the freeway and the river in Belen, New Mexico, and ten years later his parents divorced and his mother farmed him out to her mother, who lived on a small ranch in the low foothills near Abo Pass, just west of Mountainair.
Ray got his first taste of the world of gunpowder in these hills east of Belen, and it wasn’t long until he was working with his hands, fixing things. This was the time when he started to have fantasies about fucking girls with Coke and beer bottles and those gnarled dreams would define the rest of his life. It was just a matter of time until he had a chance to look into the eyes of a real girl and see what he saw in those dreams of his youth: raw, uncontrollable fear.
After he graduated from Mountainair High School in 1957, Ray joined the army and was sent to Korea. He had a natural-born ability to fix almost anything he got his hands on and it wasn’t long before his skills landed him a job as an expert repairman, mending wristwatches, binoculars and telescopes. He made friends easily and enjoyed being around other young men who were always out prowling for women far away from home. Plus, he learned a valuable lesson that quite often comes back to haunt a country that prepares men for war overseas—he learned that when he got back home, he would always know how to hurt other people.
Jim Yontz read and reread hundreds of pages of notes, looking for something in Ray’s love life that might give a hint of things to come. David Ray was married three times before he was thirty years old, not uncommon for men who married in the 1960s. The first marriage ended after one year and the second marriage ended after three months.
“Not much here, other than bad luck with women,” Yontz grumbled to himself.
Ray left the army in 1963 and came to Albuquerque to work as a truck driver for the Springer Corporation—the same company that employed his own stepfather. His parents were raising his son at the time while the single David Ray was out looking for women.
Yontz noticed Ray named his first son after himself—David Ray Jr. Yontz had tried in Albuquerque to interview the quiet thirty-nine-year-old air force master sergeant, and the son refused to utter a word about his biological father. Jim quickly cross-referenced a comment he heard from Rick Hart in late July, right after Hart did thirty days in the Sierra County Correctional Facility. Rick had been picked up while drinking and driving, and later that night, he found himself in the cell right next to David Ray Senior. Pretty soon, the two men got into a late-night conversation about fathers and sons. Hart asked David if he and his son were close, and David chuckled at the thought.
“My son and I don’t have much in common,” he told Hart. “He’s a fundamentalist Christian and he doesn’t like to ‘party.’ ”
Yontz chuckled to himself at the thought of the man behind the $100,000 handcrafted “Satan’s Den” producing a born-again Christian offspring.
In 1966 Ray married Glenda Burdine and the family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Burdine had a two year-old son, Ron, so now David had two young sons. When Ron was interviewed by the Associated Press after his stepfather was arrested, he told the reporter that he had “a pretty mellow dad” and he’d never seen David Ray lose his temper.
“He never raised his voice or his hand,” Ron said. “Mom always did the discipline.”
In 1968 David and Glenda had a child of their own and Ray became a father to his only daughter—Glenda Jean Ray. At the time David was struggling to make ends meet. He had three young children to feed, so he decided to learn a skilled trade and enrolled in aircraft mechanics school by day. At night he worked at a Tulsa gas station. It was during this time that Glenda apparently stayed home during the day and decided to try to pay some of the bills by becoming a prostitute while her children were napping. More bad luck with women, Yontz noted.
In the early 1970s Ray moved his young family to Victoria, Texas, where he worked as a truck driver by day and moonlighted at night as a volunteer firefighter. Then in 1975 they moved back to rural Oklahoma, where Ray bought a small gas station out in the middle of nowhere and pumped gas for two years. A pattern was emerging, Yontz concluded. The guy could never keep a job for very long and he kept moving again and again. Always looking for the next best thing.
In 1977 Ray moved his family to Temple, Texas, where he worked as a railroad repairman for the Santa Fe Railroad. This job gave him the freedom he’d been looking for for quite some time, Yontz thought. The pattern was beginning to take a definite shape. Ray traveled all across the huge Texas landscape and had ample opportunity to scout women. He kept getting jobs where the female prospects were fresh and untapped, and then all he had to do was cut and run when things got boring. Or the law too close.
After he caught Glenda in bed with another man, for love instead of money, he ran off with his sister-in-law, Joannie Lee. It was 1981 and they drove to Grass Valley, California, and Yontz figured that was where Ray got interested in supplementing his income by growing marijuana. He moved to Phoenix in 1982 and started working as a car mechanic for Canal Motors. On the weekends he would drive up to Fence Lake, New Mexico, where he set up a small marijuana farm run by his children in 1983, 1984 and 1985.
Not far from the little-known Highway 666, running north and south right outside of the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, in northwestern New Mexico. Bad-luck highway, Yontz thought.
He also spent time on the weekends at Elephant Butte Lake, where he moved full-time in 1989. Yontz skipped ahead to the time a few years later when Ray got a job as a truck and heavy-machinery mechanic working out of Elephant Butte State Park, from 1994 to 1999. This gave David the opportunity to travel throughout the five state parks in southern New Mexico, even scouting for victims clear down at Pancho Villa State Park, right on the sparsely populated border with Mexico. During those five years, Yontz figured, he was free to roam a huge slice of desolate, thorny cactus and creosote desert where very few people could keep track of his goings-on.
“No one looking over his shoulder,” Yontz wrote on a small notepad. “Just the way he liked it.”
Jim Yontz had interviewed two men who knew Ray well from his job as resident mechanic at the Elephant Butte State Park garage, and reading over their combined comments on his personality added up to a profile of a real sneaky-type guy, just like Yontz had suspected.
A master manipulator.
The guy with the most inside dope on Ray was Byron Wilson, thirty-seven, who also just happened to be Frances Baird’s boyfriend in the summer of 1999. No wonder her articles were so accurate, Yontz once noted. Byron was a state park cop at Elephant Butte and he had worked with Ray for five years before he and three other cops had to arrest David Ray late in the day on March 22, 1999.
“When I arrested Ray, he was goin’ the other way in a motor home,” Wilson told Yontz. “He was headin’ back to get her, that Cyndy Vigil gal. Couldn’t have been more than two blocks away. I pulled him and Hendy over in David’s big red RV. It was a felony stop, so I told him to drop the keys out the window on the driver’s side. ‘Come out and walk backwards,’ I says to him. He looks out the window, smiles and says, ‘Byron, this is me—David—this isn’t necessary.’ I say, ‘Shut up and put your hands out the window.’ He gets out and he’s wearing his park ranger uniform—green pants, tan shirt and green coat. I put him facedown in the gravel and handcuffed him. Cindy Hendy was bloody on the back of her neck, so I put on my rubber gloves and frisked her—then I told her to get down on her face, too.”
Wilson went on to give his general impression of Ray.
“David was always skinny as a rail. He worked in the sun all his life and smoked heavy. Always had a cigarette in his hand. He was a quiet guy—I never did see him pissed-off mad.
“He got along real well with another guy out at the toolshed, a guy named Martinez. He had a lot of respect for John. Always followed him around, trying to learn how John fixed the big ole John Deere tractors. It always seemed like the rest of the time it was hard to get David to work, though. He never came to work early, never was askin’ for extra things to do. He was always messin’ around, doin’ paperwork. It seemed like he was always goofin’ off.
“The year after he started workin’ here, he got some big award from the state parks outfit—someone told me it was for about a thousand dollars for helping out in some kind of a cost-savings program. I guess he got himself cleaned up pretty good for the awards ceremony. He got a certificate of ‘special achievement,’ with his name typed in gold letters and all. It all sounded like bullshit to me.
“A few years later, he got caught for theft here at Elephant Butte Park. He stole a transmission-cooler out of a heavy-duty truck and they punished him by giving him thirty days off without pay. That’s pretty damn serious down here—it was their way of being nice and not firing him.
“He worked at five state parks and was out of town regular. He always made sure he was back in town for the big summer holiday weekends. Around here, the population of Elephant Butte goes up from fifteen hundred to over one hundred thousand on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends. On the big three-day weekends, he was always volunteerin’ to go out and shut down parties. He had this big white Dodge Ram and except for the fact that it didn’t have decals, you wouldn’t know it wasn’t from the park—it looked just like ours. Late at night he was always pretendin’ to be some kind of cop, instead of a plain ole mechanic.
“Around the park he would always talk about his daughter’s girlfriends. He’d always talk about these girls going out with him on his son’s sailboat—don’t know if I ever saw one out there with him or not. To me, he always seemed like the old pervert who was screwin’ his daughter’s friends.
“He thought he was the big stud, but all he was doin’ was just pickin’ up on his daughter’s dyke girlfriends.”
Byron Wilson spent many mornings drinking coffee with David Ray and the guys, in the toolshed or down the road at the Diamond Gas Station coffee shop. There was always one topic that seemed to come up over and over when Ray was just sitting around shooting the breeze with his fellow employees. Byron remembered that Ray would get a certain twisted smile when the conversation turned to sex. When the subject came up, David Ray’s eyes would sparkle.
Jim Yontz flipped back through his notes to find out what John Martinez had told investigators about the older man he worked with side by side for nearly five years. Yontz knew Ray had multiple sides to his personality, so it was no big surprise that Martinez painted an entirely different picture of Ray at work.
“People are either born here or they come here for the sunshine,” Martinez told Jim Yontz. “Me—I was born here. I knew David real well. I seen him all the time. Old David, he’d never hurt a fly. The day before he got arrested, he was driving out near Engle, in the Valley of Death, and he ran over a baby Gambel’s quail. He killed it and it made him real sad. He felt so bad about running over that little chick—heck, he must have mentioned it to me four or five times later that afternoon.”
During the interview, Martinez kept shaking his head.
“Dave—he was the best damn mechanic I ever seen.”
As Yontz shuffled through more paperwork, he realized there was a gap in David Ray’s work history. He got the Elephant Butte job in 1994, the same year his fourth wife left him, but Yontz needed to know what he’d done between 1991 and 1994, during the time Jesse Ray was living with him. The information about those three years was murky, but Yontz finally located one piece of paperwork that answered all his questions.
It was an advertisement in the local T or C Yellow Pages.
David had rented a garage in T or C and was running his own automotive repair service. “For stranded motorists,” the ad said. “Dave’s Emergency Roadside Service.”
Yontz tried to imagine what it must have been like for the old man and his “clients.” All the poor woman had to do was call his number and he’d be there with his van. He’d help her repair her broken-down car somewhere down by the lake or out in the middle of the desert—or on some freeway ramp. Maybe he’d even tow her pile of junk back to town. And if the poor unfortunate woman just happened to call on a night when he had the “urge”—well then, he’d be forced to tow her back to his place.
The listing in the Truth or Consequences phone book looked innocent enough. It was a cheap advertisement, in small letters, designed not to bring too much attention to itself. But its implications were dark.