CHAPTER 18
“I don’t give sympathy to nobody. I survive in this town, that’s it.”
Gail Astbury, T or C resident, 12/31/1999
Every fall the residents of T or C celebrate Geronimo Days, a two-day celebration of the Wild West history of southern New Mexico. In 1999 bluegrass bands, six-shooter contests, fiddlin’ contests, chili feeds, cowboy poetry and plenty of “palefaces” and Apache Indians managed to take the town’s mind off David Parker Ray.
Meanwhile, the so-called town “white trash” huddled together down on Austin Street, one block off Date, and spent their time dealing drugs and sex in the decaying steam baths that once gave the city its name. The police made one drug sweep in November that rounded up over twenty people, including David Ray’s old flame, Wanda Bickle. She was arrested for trying to sell a “teener,” a sixteenth of an ounce of homemade methamphetamine, to an undercover cop. Her bond was set at $10,000.
The people living on the fringe of life in T or C hadn’t contributed much to the public debate over David Ray and his friends, but in private they had plenty to say. They met at one-night-stand motels like the Dude and the Ace and the Honey-Doo Inn. They gathered in run-down steam baths and sweat houses with names like Geronimo Hot Springs and started to tell their stories. Many of them started life on the wrong side of the tracks, but their point of view wasn’t always so crazy as the establishment liked to think. Some of them had cleaned up their act and just not bothered to tell anybody from the other side of the railroad tracks.
Gail Astbury, thirty-seven, was one of those people.
A tiny woman who always bragged, “I can kick anybody’s butt,” she was also a devoted mother and loyal friend. Her dirty little secret was that she was still a fugitive from justice over an outstanding aggravated assault charge in Florida from 1990. She’d been hanging out in T or C long enough to change gears and straighten out most of her life from the days back in Florida when she was a hooker with a $200-a-day drug habit.
“I’m kind of a bitch,” she told a reporter from Reuters. “I don’t give sympathy to nobody. I survive in this town, that’s it. I don’t do drugs anymore—I only do pain pills. I stay away from heroin—you can tell a junkie, just look at their arms—my arms, they’re virgins. My sister is a heroin addict. I don’t beat my kids—I’d rather cuss at my kids than beat ’em. Sometimes I hurt people with my mouth when I talk too much, but that’s because I’m brutally honest. I tell the truth and other people make up shit.
“I still have a few bad habits. Last year on Valentine’s Day, I popped my husband in the face and broke his nose. He called the cops and they took him to jail. The next day, I bonded him out of jail, but later that day, he told me he still loved me! Right now, my only sin is drinking a little too much. I drink every day, but I wouldn’t say I’m an alcoholic. I only drink cheap beer—like, say, Milwaukee’s Best!
“Some days I live up to my reputation. When the David Ray case first broke, I was having breakfast in the Hill Top Cafe when I heard Debbie Fisk tell a reporter, ‘I saw Hendy hit someone with a frying pan.’ I knew that Hendy had slept with Fisk’s husband, so I cranked up my voice real loud and said what was on my mind.
“ ‘Debbie’s got this ass that’s as big as the front of my car and I know for a fact that she’s a nosy bitch. Her mouth is as big as her ass.’
“I’ve lived in Truth or Consequences for the last five years and I consider it home. There might be people here who dabble in Satanism, but they’re not smart enough to pull it off. We do have dirty cops here and that’s why so many people are so afraid. But none of us is going anywhere—we all plan to stay right here.
“For nine years I’ve been hiding from the law, but I don’t feel like I’m hiding in T or C. This is my town. Anyway, those charges from Florida are all bullshit. They’re as old as dirt. Some girl, she dropped off one rock of cocaine in my car—so I got after her a little. Slugged her right in the face. Anyway, if they come after me, I’m gonna make ’em fuck their asses off in order to get me back to Florida. I hate that place.
“I really want to believe that Jesse is innocent. Jesse is a friend of mine. I used to ride around on the back of Jesse’s motorcycle. A lot of people who saw me whiz by thought I was queer, too, and it always made me mad as hell. I talked to Jesse once about David being the father to her kid and ‘Yes, Yes,’ she told me it was true. She said that was why she was always staying in town rather than out at his house. Another time she denied it. From what I understand now, she lied to me about her father not being the father of her child and sometimes I feel, like, if she’d lie to me, she’d lie to anybody.
“Basically, though, I think she’s a good, intelligent person. I talk like a sailor—she doesn’t even cuss. I want her to be Jesse again, not a scumbag—her father is a scumbag. Jesse is a pushover for animals. One time she got mad at me for hittin’ a rattlesnake with a rake—it was in my front yard. She told me I should have trapped and relocated it.
“Lately she’s been telling everyone that her father has never been anything other than an inspiration for her. I’d say that right now she’s got him on a pedestal. She told me she had nothing but respect for him.
“Last month my sister, Jeannie, was in jail with David. Everyone has respect for him in jail. When his sister, Peggy, brought him a bag of serial-killer books, he would read ’em, write his name on ’em and send ’em down to the girls. When he gets money, he buys all the girls candy bars. Three Musketeers. Jeannie says the girls wait a couple of days and then moan out through their bars, ‘Daaaaavid—I need chocolate.’
“He’s got the guards all won over—they call him ‘Mr. Ray’ or ‘Big Dave.’ I don’t know, though. Half the guards who work there are always high on meth. When the jailers come flying through there, the inmates can tell who the ‘tweekers’ are.
“David is so frail—I could kick his butt. I can’t imagine him ever overpowering anyone, but I do remember Jesse telling me strange stories about Fence Lake. Shit, I think some of this stuff has been going on for years. Jesse told me there was a dungeon in his basement up at the pot farm.
“I also remember when Jesse used to work on my car, there were places on David’s property where my kids couldn’t go. I also remember being inside his bedroom one time and I noticed big hooks up on the wall. At the time I didn’t pay very much attention because people always told me he was a fisherman. Plus, I was probably stoned that night. I know that sounds stupid. Now that I think back on it, this whole thing pisses me off.
“I remember another time when a guy I knew real well went to Ray’s property to deliver a boat late at night. He heard a girl cryin’ for help inside the cargo trailer and he got real scared and turned around and drove home. He didn’t tell anybody until the story broke, and when he told me, I got real mad at him. I told him I only weighed a hundred pounds, but I would have helped her. Then I told him to get out of my house.
“ ‘I don’t know you!’ I yelled at him. ‘Go away!’
“I know the guy who sold the gynecological table to David. His name is Peter Douglas—we used to call him ‘Peter Pan.’ He’s an asshole. One time I seen him let his dog start screwin’ his own left leg, right in front of my kids. They were little tykes then. Later that night, I told my son he was a pervert. I don’t have any doubts that he’d try to hump my kid himself if he could get away with it.
“When Cindy Hendy first moved to town, she got to me. She made me feel sorry for her. She showed up with that big motherfucker John Youngblood, and the next time I saw her, her face was beat to shit. It didn’t take me long to change my opinion of her, though. One night Mike, my ex-husband, was in town. He’d just got out of prison in Florida after serving nine years on a grand-theft auto charge. We hooked up with Cindy Hendy and went over and scored some pain pills from John Branaugh. That night I listened to Hendy talk and I knew she was a liar. She told some bullshit story about how she and Youngblood went to a party up in Everett, Washington, and there was some kind of orgy going on. She claimed the people there were passing around some dead guy’s bloody intestine and everyone was hanging this big sausage around their necks—it was a dumb story.
“Plus, she’s a no-good mother.
“I heard the other day that now she wants to change her plea from guilty to innocent. That makes me want to laugh my ass off. She outfoxed herself, that dumb bitch.
“Dennis Roy Yancy—I don’t know about that guy. Most of the time he just seemed like a happy-go-lucky kid. He’s so small—only about five foot eight inches tall—I don’t know how he could hurt anyone. But a lot of my friends think he’s a real mean guy. There’s a nasty rumor around town that really scares the shit out of me. A few years ago, a local guy, a guy named Lee, was murdered. Someone shoved a doorknob up his ass and then crammed nuts and bolts down his throat. I hear the last person they seen at his house on the night he disappeared was Roy Yancy.
“I never know who to trust in this town. Take those crazy assholes over at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church. Those people are nuts. They’re known as the Demon Church. They cast spells on people and they speak in tongues. One time I was in Raymond’s Lounge when I saw one of the preachers from the church sitting around with a group of drunks. It was last summer and there was this reporter in town trying to dig up dirt on the case. Cynthia Culpepper got up from the table and staggered over to the bar to talk to the reporter. A couple of minutes later, this Pastor Leroy walks up, looking real worried, and takes Cynthia by the arm and leads her back to the table of drunks.
“And that guy Leroy is in charge of the video production for the whole church. When you want videotapes, he’s the guy you talk to. That Pastor Leroy—he’s no good.
“And that girl Vigil—I heard she was into black-tar heroin. Someone told me she was paid eight hundred dollars to come down here, and when the drugs ran out—she ran away.
“Angie Montano—I know her. She’s a real cuckoo bird. She’s a total piece of shit—worth nothing. Nothing.
“Her son, Abel, comes over here to my house to visit my kids and I always check his pockets—when he walks in and when he walks out. Abel is a nice little boy, but I don’t trust him. You should see his face. He’s got a nasty scar on his cheek where a German shepherd bit him one time when his mother was high on meth and not payin’ any attention to him. I hear he’s livin’ with Montano’s boyfriend now that she’s back on Central Avenue shootin’ up.
“Everybody in this town does drugs. You don’t get anywhere in this town for working. I collect welfare—so does everybody else. People have too much time on their hands—there are a lot of people screwing around, too—mostly threesomes. But drugs are what make Truth or Consequences tick. Most people run their drug business out of their houses. That’s all this town is . . . drugs, and more drugs.
“This is the worst meth town I’ve ever been in.... Methamphetamines are so easy to brew. Any idiot can make meth. You can whip it up in a kitchen blender. All you need is a little drain cleaner, lighter fluid and a lithium battery. People here call it the poor man’s cocaine. It hits you faster and lasts much longer. I used to use it—that’s why my face is all scratched up. I hear Angie clawed her eye out—dumb bitch. She should have kicked the habit like I did. I don’t have any sympathy for people who don’t get straight. T or C has a lot of tweekers. Me, I got a bumper sticker that tells everyone where I’m coming from. It doesn’t beat around the bush.
“It says ‘TWEEKERS really suck!’
“My younger sister, Jeannie, shoots needles. She’s been a heroin user since she was thirteen. She’s thirty-three years old now. She’s in a lot of trouble right now. She just got out of jail for forgery and the other day we got in a big argument. David Ray gave her dominoes in jail and she stole them. I told her to give them back. We got in another big argument last week and she threatened to come out here and burn my trailer down. So I whacked her with one of those little T or C phone books and she hit me in the knee and hurt her left hand. Served her right!”
On November 12, 1999, the Desert Journal ran an interview with Jeannie Astbury in which she claimed that Roy Yancy raped her at David Ray’s mobile home. The masthead for the Journal read IN HOT PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH, but Jim Yontz always called it “the Deserted Journal” because it had the smallest number of readers of the three weeklies in T or C. In the lengthy article, Jeannie claimed that the rape took place in a room with bright white lights everywhere. She said she couldn’t remember too many details, but she did remember looking into Yancy’s face as he lay on top of her.
I never expected anything like this to happen from Roy. I could expect this kind of thing from others. Roy was always so polite and didn’t do drugs. I knew he was married but I didn’t know his wife. I just never saw eyes like that. It was the eyes that freaked me out more than anything else.
His eyes were very bright, bright, bright—very green, green, green—like evil.
I was really, really scared, but I’m a tough chick. I felt like I died a little bit that night. I don’t feel right mentally, now. I was pretty strong for quite a few weeks, but I didn’t beat it. My sister said she had never seen me like that in my entire life. I couldn’t function for a while. I want to remember everything that happened to me but I can’t. I want to remember where the room was and why I was gone for seven whole hours, but I can’t. I just feel like something terrible happened. I know it deep in my soul.
I think Roy was an evil person that night.