CHAPTER 17
I thought Satan lived in this town for a while.
—Jean Branaugh, August 1999
By August 1 many women in Truth or Consequences wondered if they, too, had been kidnapped, raped and drugged by David Ray and his followers. To be single and female was to be cursed in T or C, and some women wondered if they were the “walking wounded” who couldn’t even remember what had been done to their bodies. Frances Baird had talked to many women who had unsettling stories to tell. Some were still afraid for their lives. Most were making plans to leave T or C.
Linda, thirty-eight, was working as a maid in a local motel when David Ray got arrested. Years before she moved to T or C, she’d worked as a firefighter in another state and she knew how to deal with men who tried to talk their way into her underpants. Right after she showed up in town, she got a job working as a groundskeeper at Elephant Butte State Park. One day David Ray stopped her out by the lake at a remote spot and suggested maybe they could try some kinky sex. Nothing too rough, nothing she couldn’t handle, he told her. She kept looking at the ground and shook her head. He persisted, saying, “Give me a couple of days and I’ll turn you around.” Linda gave him a dirty look and didn’t waste any more time, telling him to “fuck off.” She never spoke to him again, and he never bothered her anymore.
Roberta, thirty-four, was working as a bartender at the Dam Site Tavern when Jesse Ray was arrested. She told Frances she knew a woman—she would not give out a name—who had been close friends with Jesse for a short period of time. “After her and Jesse became friends,” she told Frances, “Jess asked her if she wanted to try whips and chains and stuff like that and my friend just said no—so Jess left her alone.”
Betty, thirty-three, was out of work in April and May 1998. She had recently divorced her husband in order to live as a lesbian, something she’d wanted to do for quite a long time. In June she started to hang out at Raymond’s Lounge. She met Jesse there and the two women quickly became a cozy item. For a short while Betty thought they might be in love. She spent several nights with her new lover out at David Ray’s trailer, where she and Jesse would sometimes stay up all night making love on the carpet of Ray’s living-room floor. It wasn’t until after the mass arrests in 1999 that Betty discovered that David Ray had a secret camera mounted behind a hole in the wall of the living room so he could watch his daughter having sex while he sat in front of his television screen back in his bedroom. Betty quivered all over at the thought.
“I still can’t believe how close I probably came to getting killed,” she told Frances.
Wanda, forty-two, used to date David Ray for a short time. She wouldn’t talk to the media, but Frances was able to get a few comments out of her former employer Jackie Williams, owner of the Black Range Restaurant and Motel.
“Wanda Bickle worked for me as a waitress for a short time. Poor thing, she wasn’t in her right mind most of the time. Her nineteen-year-old daughter got stoned on something or the other and strangled Wanda’s three-year-old granddaughter to death with an electrical cord. Wanda hasn’t been right since then. She did tell me, however, that during the brief time she and David dated, he was nothing but a complete gentleman.”
On August 11, 1999, prowlers broke into Jackie’s Black Range Restaurant by throwing a rock through a large plate-glass window in front of the cash resgister. There was no money in the till, so they overturned the cash register and poured sugar over all the tabletops. Jackie Williams came to work that morning and after she filed a report with the slow-moving T or C police department, she gave one hungry customer standing outside a piece of her mind.
“This is a dirty little town,” she lamented. “My husband and I moved to this town two years ago in order to find a quiet little place where we could enjoy our last few years together. We had no idea there were going to be methamphetamine addicts running all over town. I just opened up my restaurant and motel and started hiring the locals.
“I’ve hired some real ‘doozies.’ It’s hard to hire someone here who doesn’t have something criminal in their background.
“Before all the drug dealers took over America, you used to be able to buy a cheap little place, cook up some bacon and eggs and put out a welcome sign—now I don’t know. I’ve had crack heads and coke heads refuse to pay for their room rent at the Black Range Motel, and we had to evict them by using force. After we kicked them out, all hell would break loose. I’ve had people break the windows of my car, throw eggs at me, try to light my car on fire. Boy, oh boy, what a town....
“When this place takes a dislike to you, watch out.”
Two weeks later, Jackie Williams, sixty-three, had a massive heart attack and closed down the Black Range Restaurant and Motel for good. She and her husband made immediate plans to leave T or C.
The week after Labor Day weekend, Frances Baird was in the Los Arcos Steak House having a salad and a Coke when she ran into J.J., twenty-three, a local waitress. They struck up a conversation.
“You knew Jesse Ray and David Ray, didn’t you?” Baird asked.
“I think Jess was rounding up victims for her dad,” J.J. speculated. “Jesse was like a man. She’d dress like a man in those blue jeans and that black leather vest. I heard that when she shot pool, she tried to put all the men in the dirt. The first time I saw her driving that big Honda Gold Wing motorcycle, I just thought she was an ugly guy.”
“Did you ever go out to David’s house?” asked Baird.
“No, but you know how people like to party here. Their idea of a good time is to get a couple of hundred people together and break out a few cheap kegs of beer. I can’t prove it by my own experience, but I think group sex is pretty common in Truth or Consequences. I’ve heard stories about people who like to have five to ten naked couples in a room—and then anything goes. I think people were going over to David’s and having some kind of a weekly sex orgy.”
“I agree with you,” Baird said. “Just before he first published the Sentinel, my dad still preached at his own church. The first month he was in T or C, people at church told him unless he agreed to wife swapping, people might not buy his newspaper. That was twenty-five years ago.”
“I guess he didn’t listen to them,” joked J.J.
“Nope, and I think we still have the best newspaper in town,” Baird answered, laughing. “Best coverage of crime, that’s for sure.”
By September 28, Jim Yontz was starting to feel like the Lone Ranger. His boss, DA Ron Lopez, didn’t want to have anything to do with prosecuting David Ray and dumped the whole mess in Yontz’s hands. The crime lab in Albuquerque had declared the bag of flesh to be human, but they couldn’t even determine if the tissue was male or female, let alone identify any of the women from the stack of unidentified driver’s licenses found in Ray’s home. Chances for Yontz to make a quick kill were fading and now Judge Mertz had just postponed the October 4 trial for at least another six months. It felt like things were starting to come apart at the seams.
Yontz had already suffered two serious setbacks.
Back on July 2, Judge Mertz had refused to disqualify himself from the case, so Yontz had decided to give him a nudge. He had filed an appeal with the New Mexico Supreme Court to try and have them remove Mertz from trying the case. Yontz feared that Mertz would force him to have two separate trials for David and Jesse Ray. But his deeper fears centered around the possibility that Mertz would crush his speedy prosecution case by forcing the state to prosecute David Ray on three separate occasions—one time for each living victim: Cyndy Vigil, Angie Montano and Kelli Van Cleave. On August 12, the supreme court agreed to hear the appeal concerning Mertz.
On August 25, the supreme court dealt Yontz his first big blow. It declared that Mertz would try all four defendants in the David Ray case.
Then, on September 22, Judge Mertz had dealt Jim Yontz his second big blow. He declared that David Parker Ray and Glenda “Jesse” Ray would be tried separately, thereby creating what Yontz did not want to admit to himself: a nightmare for one man to handle. Yontz was stunned by his predicament and one day when Lopez wandered into his office and asked him how things were going, he shook his head and told the truth in his typical matter-of-fact way.
“It looks like prosecuting David Ray is going to be a lifetime job,” he said.
And now the trial had been put off until at least the spring, making it impossible to try David and Jesse anywhere in Sierra County, in either Socorro or Truth or Consequences. On October 4, Jeff Rein, representing David, and Billy Blackburn, representing Jesse, filed a motion with Mertz to change the venue and move the two trials out of town. For once, Jim Yontz found himself agreeing with the other side and the three men worked together to find a list of small, out-of-the-way towns where they all thought the Rays might get a fair trial. Mertz told them to have their recommendations back on his desk by October 11. He would rule on new locations before Thanksgiving, he told them.
The next setback to Yontz was his mounting frustration over trying to deal with Cindy Hendy. She had fired her old attorney, Xavier Acosta, back in August, and by October 15 she had a new public defender, Carmen Garza, working for her. Yontz did not like the sound of things. Word on the street was that Hendy had been sending love letters to Ray and he had been writing her back on a weekly basis. Looking up her file, Yontz noticed that David Ray had told one investigator that when they got pulled over and arrested in March, the last thing he said to her was “Do whatever you have to do to stay out of jail.” And now it looked like she had taken his advice—and then, as usual, changed her mind.
On November 5, Cindy Hendy filed motions to change her plea from guilty to innocent. She wanted a trial of her own.
Now Jim Yontz had one more major headache to work out. In seventeen years of prosecuting felons, he only knew of two cases where defendants had successfully changed their pleas from guilty to innocent, and he damn sure wasn’t going to let Cindy Hendy add her name to that short list. He immediately filed motions to prevent her from flip-flopping. The bad news was that he could no longer rely on her to testify against her former boyfriend and he also was prevented from entering all the charges she had made against him: specifically, that he had murdered fourteen people. So it was beginning to look like he was going to have to convict Ray without the mention of a single dead body.
He didn’t panic. He knew he could do it, sooner or later.
On November 19, Judge Mertz decided where he was going to move the jury trials for David and Jesse Ray. David Ray would be tried in Tierra Amarilla on March 28, 2000, and Jesse Ray would be tried in Gallup on July 10, 2000. Both locations were fine by Yontz. He could go trout fishing up in the mountains of northern New Mexico in March and bird hunting out in the western plains of New Mexico in July.
Just before Thanksgiving, he got a call from Frances Baird. She told him she’d been interviewing girls around town who narrowly escaped the jaws of David Ray’s trap and she asked him if he had any other witnesses he was still trying to locate.
“Yeah, Candy Frairs,” he told her. “She took off right after David got arrested. I think she went up to the Mescalero Apache Reservation and I think she’s hanging out on the edge of that little town called Riudoso, but I can’t find her.”
“I never heard of her,” said Baird.
“She was in the torture chamber with David and she took everything he had to offer without complaining. She saw the whole operation from the inside out. She even wrote David some little notes telling him how much she liked it. I don’t think he understood what made her tick. He couldn’t fathom a woman liking it that rough.”
“So you think he liked her?” asked Frances.
“No, Ray doesn’t know how to like a woman—but I think he respected her. He couldn’t make her cry, and compared to all the other women who broke down hysterically, I think he felt Candy was some kind of superwoman.”
“Was she?” asked Frances.
“I doubt it,” said Yontz, “but I sure as heck would like to talk to her.”