CHAPTER 27

“Old David would never hurt a fly.”

Co-worker John Martinez, August 10th, 1999.

Mertz’s mechanical air-conditioning generators were put into the open windows on Friday morning, July 7, and it wasn’t long before a cool-but-noisy breeze was blowing through the courtroom. In the meantime, things really started to heat up with the lawyers. Yontz, stripped of much of his best evidence by Mertz, still had plenty of ammunition and he got ready to toss everything in the direction of the jury before they had a chance to go out for lunch and digest his evidence. Anticipating the morning onslaught, David Ray came across as a well-dressed man. He wore black cowboy boots, dark brown jeans, a beige shirt and a very classy black cowboy sports coat with little leather arrows on the pockets.

Yontz called State Trooper John Briscoe to the stand right away. He’d been the first man on the scene inside the toy box and he’d taken a number of the initial photographs of some of the most graphic evidence. Briscoe looked at a series of photographs, identifying bloody dildos hanging from the ceiling, an aluminum drawer with a “cot” inside, stainless-steel medicine cabinet and lots of padlocks, chains and straps. The last photograph showed aging pictures of several women in bondage and right next to the naked ladies, there were two lists, one handwritten and the other typed. Yontz remembered his own gut reaction the first time he saw the handwritten list and he asked Briscoe, a short man with a hefty build and a loud voice, to read the first document to the jury. Briscoe stood up and read the handwritten list first. For lack of a formal title, Briscoe called it the “Remember” list:

Yontz sat back in his chair and watched the jurors as Briscoe rattled off the list in a bold voice. Most of the jurors were getting tired and Yontz noticed a couple of men had sort of a bored look covering their faces. Briscoe had a tone of outrage in his voice and Yontz figured the jurors might have the same feeling he had listening to David Ray rattle off his “standard excuses for sob stories.” After all, men in captivity might try to use some of the same tricks to escape—I’m sick; I have to work; I have a sick kid; I have a sick parent; my doctor told me I have a bad heart; I’m missed by a friend; my boss tells me I can’t miss work....

Briscoe completed the “reminders” by emphasizing David Ray’s most telling advice for his followers:

Briscoe finished and sat down. He went on to identify several pictures he’d taken of several miscellaneous items, like wrist clamps, gloves, more big and small dildos. Right after Yontz held up the last photograph for the jury to see, he walked back to the prosecutor’s table and pulled a huge wooden item out of a plastic bag and asked Briscoe to identify it. It looked like a rolling pin used by a pastry chef to make pies. It was about ten inches long and it tapered from 1 of an inch at the narrow end to 2 inches at the wide end. The whole tool was mounted on a T-shaped metal handle. Briscoe got a little embarrassed and stumbled over his words identifying the object.

“It’s a vag-vaginal stretcher,” he said.

Yontz put the rolling pin back in the bag and handed Briscoe another list to read. It was a one-page neatly typed list of eighteen instructions, presumably guidelines for the other members of Ray’s satanic cult. Unlike the first list, which was scrawled in felt tip pen, this one looked like just another corporate document. Briscoe turned to the jury and read it with the same boom in his voice as before—except this time he read it even louder.

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL
PROCEDURES
INITIAL HANDLING OF A CAPTIVE
PERSONAL FETISH

1. The new female captive should be gagged and blindfolded with wrists and ankles chained.

2. Move her into the Recreation Room. Place her body under the suspension chains.

3. Stand her up under the chains and lock her wrists well above her head.

4. Place the neck chain around her neck and lock it in place. IT IS PERMANENT.

5. Clip her leg irons to the floor chains.

6. Use scissors to slowly remove her dress, blouse or sweater. Cut and remove the bra. ??

7. Fondle and abuse her breasts, nipples, and upper part of her body.

8. Keep her blindfolded to increase disorientation. Use verbal abuse. (Dumb Bitch, Slut, etc. )

9. Slowly unzip, open, and remove the lower clothing. Cut or rip the panties off.

10. Fondle and abuse her sex organs. Continue the verbal abuse.

11. Attach the over head suspension straps to her body. Ankles, waist, hips, and upper chest.

12. Remove the leg irons and tighten the ankle straps, pulling her legs upward, until the middle part of her body is horizontal. (THE ANKLE STRAPS WILL FORCE HER LEGS WIDE APART).

13. Tighten and adjust the waist, hip, and chest straps until the middle of her body is straight. Clip the short floor chain to the bottom ring on the waist belt, so she cannot jerk or lift her body upward.

14. At this point, the captive is suspended at a convenient height, immobilized, and fully exposed. She is very uncomfortable, disoriented, and probably terrified. Don’t cut her any slack. Continue a lot of verbal and physical abuse . . . Keep her mentally off balance.

15. Play with her sex organs. (Vagina or anus) . Force large dildos deep into both holes. Use clamps, needles, or other devices on her tits and sex organs. (Clit and cunt lips). Whip her and use Electro-shock.

16. Don’t give her time to collect her thoughts. Use her body aggressively, during the first hour or two. She will sweat, struggle a lot, and exhaust herself. Particularly if the Electroshock machine is used extensively.

17. Intensify her fear. Tell her how she is going to be kept as a Sex Slave. Describe, in detail, how she will be continuously raped and tortured. Work on her mind, as well as her body.

18. Keep her body suspended two or three hours, then roll the Gynocology Bench directly beneath her. Lower her body down on the bench. Release one arm or leg at a time, and secure it to the bench, until she is strapped down. Buckle all the straps on her body, until she is totally immobilized, feet in the stirrups, and knees forced wide apart.

NOTE: THE SHOCK VALUE OF DISORIENTATION, PLUS CONTINUOUS VERBAL AND PHYSICAL ABUSE, DURING THE FIRST FEW HOURS OF CONFINEMENT, WILL HAVE A GREAT INFLUENCE ON HOW DOSCILE AND SUBDUED THE CAPTIVE WILL BE DURING THE REMAINING PERIOD OF CAPTIVITY. IF IT IS DONE PROPERLY SHE WILL BE INTIMIDATED AND MUCH EASIER TO HANDLE.

John Briscoe finished up and when Jeff Rein stood up and got ready to ask the one question that the public defender figured would spell doom for the other side, Briscoe’s face seemed to knot up.

“Do you know if any of these items were there in 1996?”

“I don’t know,” said Briscoe, and the tone of his voice seemed to say it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

Just before the jury came back from lunch, Yontz and Rein approached the bench with a request that upset Mertz so much the judge’s face turned purple. Yontz wanted to use Kelli Garrett’s therapist, David Spencer, as a last-minute witness and Rein knew all about it ahead of time. Mertz chewed out both attorneys for not telling him Garrett’s psychotherapist was a potential witness.

“I am absolutely livid!” he scolded them. “Apparently, this is the kind of trial you want. . . .”

When the jury returned to the courtroom, the judge smiled as he told the jury there was a “development” that made it difficult to continue for the day, while at the same time he frowned at both lawyers. As soon as the jurors had departed, Mertz told Yontz and Rein exactly how he felt about spending the rest of the afternoon fighting over one witness.

“Well, come on, let’s get on with it.”

 

 

Mertz listened to David Spencer, a therapist from Craig, Colorado, give his opinion of Kelli Garrett in order that Mertz might decide if Spencer was qualified to provide expert testimony on the mental state of the victim after the alleged crime. Both lawyers spent the afternoon grilling Spencer and this is what he told Mertz about the mental condition of Kelli Garrett after he started “seeing her” in September 1999.

“She came to see me because she was suffering from anxiety and depression. She was having trouble sleeping. She was losing weight. She couldn’t work. During our first session together, she told me she was ‘in a fog’ over what David had done to her. I tried to make her feel safe and protected. She had isolated herself from the whole world.

“She felt people from Truth or Consequences could harm her—a person she had known for years [Jesse] helped another person abduct her. Kelli was so scared she kept a gun next to her and had a couple of large dogs.

“I came to believe she has post-traumatic stress disorder.

“People with PTSD become hypersensitive. Occasionally paranoid. These people have trouble sleeping soundly, or not at all. Kelli told me once that she often gets only one hour of sleep a night.

“When she was a child, she was Daddy’s girl. By the time she was seventeen, she was no longer Daddy’s girl. She left high school before graduation and moved in with Greg, a boyfriend who was extraordinarily abusive to her—he locked her in the house, threw the phone at her and hit her over the top of the head. She still has a terrible scar on her forehead where he hit her with the phone.

“Years later, after she got divorced from Patrick and Clay, she was engaged to a man named Jim who drowned in a boating accident on the Colorado River in 1998. After the boat sank, other people on the river didn’t do anything to help save him. Kelli dove underwater three times herself trying to save him and at that point a friend grabbed her and kept her from drowning. Right before she came to the surface, she saw Jim go under . . . for the last time.”

When Rein questioned Spencer, he reminded the psychotherapist that it was imperative to prove that Kelli Garrett had undergone “great mental anguish” in order to show that she was a victim of David Parker Ray’s—and not her past bad luck. Yontz took the next opportunity to point out to Mertz that this was an unfair criteria to use against Kelli Garrett. Sarcasm wasn’t his suit, but he pointed out to the judge that Rein’s standard couldn’t be met.

“The only people who haven’t suffered anguish are newborn infants, who haven’t had any life experiences at all.”

At this point, Mertz injected a question for the witness. He wanted to know if there could be “multiple causes” of PTSD. Spencer said yes and went on to explain that in some cases there is an “immediate onset” condition and in other cases patients suffer a “delayed onset.” The judge was satisfied that David Spencer knew what he was talking about and gave the “green light” for the therapist to testify as soon as court resumed on Tuesday, July 11.

“The court finds that by education and training and experience, the witness, David Spencer, is suited to render expert opinion on this, case.”

 

 

Over the weekend of July 8 and 9, there was an attempted jailbreak across the street from the Rio Arriba Courthouse. It was the same facility that housed David Ray.

On Saturday night, July 8, a riot broke out about eight o’clock, after guards tried to break up a fight between two inmates. Inmates from all three “pods” rampaged through the detention areas, destroying plumbing and shower fixtures, beds and mattresses, television sets, video cameras and the Rio Arriba jail electronic monitoring devices. They also ripped up welded steel tables from the lunchroom and used rebar from concrete pilings to smash all the security glass within reach.

Shortly after midnight on July 8, the fifty-nine inmates were surrounded outside the jail by over a hundred NMSP officers who had circled the facility. Just before 2:00 A.M. on July 9, the riot was brought to an orderly conclusion. The only reason the inmates couldn’t break out and terrorize the community was because the last of the three sets of steel doors was under the control of a command-center computer they couldn’t get their hands on.

Cost of damages from the six-hour uprising was estimated to be over a quarter of a million dollars and the next day County Commissioner Hector Morales suggested that in the future violent prisoners such as murderers should be kept in another facility.

“We should not have these tough guys here—they don’t care about anything anymore,” he told the local paper, the Rio Grande Sun. “They’ve given up on life.”

One inmate who had not given up on life was David Ray. Many in the community thought Ray was behind the jailbreak, but jail boss Valdez tried to reassure the neighborhood by stating that “Ray was being held in isolation inside the jail and this didn’t affect him at all.” In fact, David Ray was the first inmate to be sent away—driven to Santa Fe in the middle of the night. He returned after things had calmed down and was back in his cell by Tuesday morning, July 11.

 

 

Both Yontz and Rein knew there was going to be a battle brewing in the minds of the jurors over Kelli Garrett’s “state of mind,” and on Tuesday morning, at 9:01, Yontz put David Spencer on the witness stand. Spencer elaborated on the mental health of the victim.

“She moved up to the Vermillion Cliffs in Colorado to get away from people she once thought were her ‘friends’ in T or C. She is still suffering from her contact with Jesse and David. She will sometimes fly off the handle and sometimes she takes out her anger on her pets. She is hypersensitive. If she sees a program on television about sexual abuse, she has to turn off her television set.

“She has a great fear she could be kidnapped again. She can’t take a shower unless her husband is home. At one time in her life, she regarded herself as being ‘street-smart.’ After all that has happened to her, she doesn’t feel like she can go out on the street and be safe.

“She fights going to sleep in order to prevent the nightmares. Victims quite often do that. If you are in a deep sleep, you might not be able to protect yourself. That’s the way she thinks.”

Jeff Rein calmly tried to focus Spencer on the fact that Kelli Garrett seemed to have what Rein called a “fuzzy memory.” He got Spencer to admit that “you don’t question whether what she tells you is true or false, do you?” He also confronted Spencer with his own take on the counseling sessions, concluding, “It is fair to say you don’t know much about Kelli’s life before Patrick, do you?” And just before Rein finished with David Spencer, he made the pointed comment that Spencer “didn’t know much about Kelli’s life right after Patrick, either.

“Would it surprise you to know that within a few days after her divorce Kelli started dating a guy named Todd Thompson?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” admitted Spencer.

Jim Yontz decided to haul in one more piece of evidence before wrapping up his case against Ray. In the spring of 1999, police investigators had found a rusty weight-lifter’s bench press leaning up against a shed out behind David Ray’s place. It was rigged with D rings and lots of red elastic straps and it looked like the same piece of equipment seen in the six minutes of video that Yontz had shown the jury. The bench press was unfolded and placed on the floor so the jurors could see the similarities. Jeff Rein asked Trent Peterson, the state cop who found the evidence, if there was any proof that the press was on David Ray’s property back in July 1996.

“No,” the officer admitted.

At 1:36 in the afternoon, Judge Neil Mertz turned the proceedings over to Jeff Rein and the defense team for David Ray. Without calling a single witness, Rein stood up and addressed the judge.

“Your Honor, the defense rests. . . .”

 

 

The next morning, July 12, Mertz gave a stern warning to everyone in the courtroom before allowing Yontz and Rein to take one hour each to give closing arguments.

“There are to be no visible reactions to remarks made during closing arguments—no grimacing, no grinning, no shrugs, whatever—if you are unable to do this, leave my courtroom right now.”

Yontz started out strong and was prepared to finish the second half of the summary and give his closing when DA Ron Lopez leaned over and told him he wanted to do the final closing, Yontz figured it was because Lopez was running for reelection in November. Plus, he knew Lopez’s father had called the night before and told his son he was coming up for the last day of the trial, and Yontz figured Lopez wanted to show off a little. Lopez stood up and delivered a hard-driving and emotional attack on David Ray, quite often turning and pointing his finger only inches away from the defendant, who looked tired as he sat slumped in his chair. Lopez saved his best lines for last and hammered home the entire prosecution case near the end of his oration.

“The facts show David’s guilty. He knows he’s guilty. We know he’s guilty. And the worst thing of all is he knows we know he’s guilty!”

Jeff Rein used his entire hour to attack Kelli Garrett one more time, and he tried to sum up the defense case by a couple of well-chosen comments about the woman with loose morals and a notoriously poor memory.

“Let’s take a look at the laundry list of her boyfriends , husbands and lovers—let’s see, there was Lamont, Patrick, Todd, Patrick again, Clay, Jim and now her third husband, Mike. Her track record with men wasn’t very good. And we’ve seen where her memory isn’t very good, either.

“If you’re tellin’ the truth, you don’t have to remember anything,” he said. “Your story makes sense. Kelli Garrett’s story does not make sense.”

Judge Mertz then read off the secret list of the final twelve jurors and excused the six alternates, thanking them for their time. He then outlined the twelve felony charges against Ray, explaining in detail kidnapping, sexual penetration and conspiracy. After he was done, he reminded the jury about the conditions they needed to consider in order to convict David Ray on any or all of the counts.

“You must be convinced that Kelli Garrett suffered great mental anguish, marked by an extreme change in her behavior,” he told them. “Any criminal activity by David Ray must have been an attempt to intrude on the bodily integrity of Kelli Garrett. You are the judges of the facts—your sole job is to get to the truth of the case. Each crime should be considered separately. Your verdict should not be based on conjecture. To convict, you must be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt, but not beyond all possible doubt.”

For the next thirty-six hours, over a period of two days, the jury voted on each of the felony counts. David Ray’s fate was solely in their hands. They had to decide if Ray was going to spend another sixty years in prison for the sixty hours he spent with Kelli Garrett back in the summer of 1996.

Out in the dusty streets of Tierra Amarilla, people waited. Just after noon on the second day, June 13, 2000, Amanda Garcia, an alternate, was talking to a group of court spectators. She had carpooled from Espanola with two other female jurors chosen to be on the jury and she seemed to let the cat out of the bag when she was overheard telling an unidentified woman how she and her two friends felt about the testimony of Kelli Garrett.

“That little blond bitch was lying. . . ,” she told the shocked woman.