CHAPTER 32
They’ll “get” him {David} in Estancia.
—Chief Justice Gene E. Franchini, New Mexico
State Supreme Court
11/06/2000
State Supreme Court
11/06/2000
On Sunday night, April 1, 2001, huge firestorms on the surface of the sun turned the New Mexico northern night sky a deep, crimson red. It seemed like the gods were getting ready for the second trial of David Parker Ray. Jim Yontz felt confident going into jury selection the next morning, April 2. This time there would be no mistakes.
Driving into Estancia, New Mexico, is a throwback Western experience. Cattle ranches cover the flat landscape and there is a gentle quality of life that only gets disrupted by the extreme spring windstorms. On Main Street, the Old Wind Mill Cafe serves killer coffee and has a display of 1878 barbwire—strands of split arrow, half hitch and prickly pear—that reminds visitors that out here in the wide-open spaces people mind their own business. During the week of jury selection, the locals were excited about the new Copenhagen Black snuff for sale at the Mustang Gas Station—bourbon-flavored chewing tobacco for people who probably never bothered to think of themselves as rugged individualists.
Yontz and McMillian managed to select a fifteen-member jury (only three alternates this time) in record time. It took Judge Mertz and the boys nearly five weeks in June 2000, and this time—with the help of the new judge, Kevin Sweazea—it only took five days. On the Sunday night before the trial was set to begin, Yontz took his wife out to dinner and told her he felt fairly confident he’d be able to get a conviction.
“I feel like I’ve got all my ducks lined up this time.”
“Good.”
“The jury is very much older—compared to last summer, it’s like night and day. There are no kids on the jury—the youngest person on the jury is over thirty years old. There are eight men and four women. We have two younger girls, but they’re both alternates and they’re both married to law enforcement officers.”
“Sounds solid,” his wife said.
“I like our jury pool in Torrance County. I like ’em very much. It’s the way it should have gone before—no hitches. Plus, this time I’ve got Claire—she’s my ace in the hole.”
Yontz and Harwell had dreamed up a new approach to presenting their case, and the next morning they called Kelli Garrett to testify first, rather than waiting until the jury got bored with all the other testimony. She was dressed in blue denim and it wasn’t long before her eyes turned red. This time Claire Harwell questioned the victim and handled the twenty-seven-year-old woman with kid gloves. During the emotional testimony, Garrett told Harwell, “I was tied to the table naked. I was kind of in a position a woman is in when she has a baby—my feet were in stirrups.” For the first time Kelli Garrett had agreed to identify herself from a brief clip of the videotape, and when she saw herself being pawed over by David Ray, she looked at the ceiling and started to sob. Harwell asked her if she was the woman tied down to the weight lifter’s bench in the video. Kelli Garrett wiped away a steady stream of tears before she answered.
“Yes, that’s me,” she said.
Jim Yontz had more ammo this time and on the second day he had Claire Harwell play the full six-minutes of videotape for the jury in the morning and in the afternoon he stood up and introduced his lone silver bullet—the forty-minute audiotape that had been condensed down to twenty-five. All day the jurors watched and listened, showing very little emotion, except for one woman in the back row who covered her face and a man in the front row who seemed so shocked by the audiotape that he let his jaw hang wide open the whole time the tape was playing. His eyes never blinked as David Ray rattled off nasty comments recorded back in 1993.
“You’re going to be kept in a hidden slave room. You are going to be kept like an animal. Your only value to us is that you have an attractive body.”
Outside, powerful sixty-miles-per-hour winds were ripping off the roofs of houses on nearby farms and ranches. As usual, New Mexicans took the brutal daytime spring winds in stride, knowing that by nightfall the winds would die down and everything would be calm again. Same with the air temperatures—if it was 90 degrees Fahrenheit by day, they knew it would drop to 50 degrees by nightfall. Everyone involved in the trial stayed inside, except one sixty-one-year-old man who suffered through the trial just so he could step outside and puff on his friendly smokes.
During a late-morning break on Tuesday, April 10, David Ray was standing outside smoking a cigarette and he was overheard telling a guard, “Losing Mertz was a definite blow to my case.”
On Wednesday, April 11, Jim Yontz spent the good part of the morning questioning a very nervous Patrick Murphy. Yontz was wearing his big maroon grizzly-bear tie and this time Murphy showed up in person, with his hair cropped short and wearing his dark blue navy uniform. He was a drill sergeant in the military now and looked every bit the part of a real tough guy—except when he sat down in the witness chair and started to talk about Kelli. Yontz talked to him man to man and Murphy admitted his uniform covered “tattoos all over my body,” but there was nothing to protect him from his memory of his ex-wife. He stuttered and stammered as Yontz asked him about his brief two-week marriage to Kelli Garrett. Yontz grilled Murphy about what he did after Kelli vanished and he went out looking for her.
“I ended up passin’ out at the lake,” he told Yontz, “and I woke up the next morning with a killer hangover.”
Yontz followed up by asking Patrick Murphy what Kelli looked like when David Ray brought her back after claiming he’d found her down at the lake on the same beach where Patrick had passed out. Murphy just shook his head.
“I came outside of the house and there she was—real weak, disoriented and babbling to herself. And she was dirty. I used to call her the ‘water fairy’ because she took so many showers during the day—and here she was, filthy—and it wasn’t sand.
“And David—he was wearin’ his park ranger uniform, but it all looked real shady to me.”
Patrick Murphy was nervous under the steady stare of Jim Yontz, but he really got tongue-tied when Lee McMillian stood up and approached him for his cross-examination. McMillian wanted to bear down on the arguments Patrick and Kelli had over sex. McMillian took a folksy tone in his first question.
“Is it fair to say, that in your case, the sap was runnin’?”
“Yeah,” answered Murphy.
“At twenty, you’re kind of new to the game?”
“Yeah,” said Murphy. “I wanted sex all the time and all she wanted to do was clock me—she’d do it real fast on the couch and then tell me, ‘Get the hell off me.’ ”
McMillian then zeroed in on how quickly Patrick broke up with Kelli, suggesting that maybe he didn’t trust her very much around other men. Murphy admitted that after listening to Kelli tell his mother how she couldn’t remember what happened, he walked up to Kelli and gave her an ultimatum.
“Hey, I got your stuff; you gotta sign these divorce papers right now—we need to end this crap.”
“It sounds like you didn’t cut her much slack,” noted McMillian, smiling.
“Yes, that’s right,” answered Murphy, hanging his head.
McMillian went on to ask Patrick about the shady characters that Kelli used to hang out with. Murphy, not noticing there were two men on the jury with scruffy beards and long, scraggly hair, jumped right in where McMillian wanted him to and unloaded on what he called the “riffraff ” of T or C.
“I feel like if a person doesn’t have enough pride—they should take care of their mustache and beard. Over at Becky Smith’s place, there was a real scrubby guy outside the trailer.”
McMillian challenged Patrick Murphy’s memory a couple of times, and after he let Patrick go, Sweazea dismissed everybody for lunch.
An hour and a half later, Jim Yontz decided to call Patrick Murphy back to the witness chair one more time. Sensing the great burden of guilt Patrick felt for dumping Kelli, and then realizing three years later that his wife was really drugged by her friends and unable to remember much of anything, Yontz slowly led Murphy into a discussion of his ex-wife’s sex habits. Patrick explained how Kelli always seemed to be in pain when they had sex, and Yontz asked Murphy if he knew she had a medical condition called a “tilted uterus” as well as a “collapsed vagina.” Murphy shook his head.
“No, I didn’t know,” he said, “and I don’t think she did, either.”
Then Jim Yontz lowered the boom.
“Did Kelli ever ask you to take a ten-inch piece of white PVC pipe and shove it up inside her body?”
Patrick Murphy couldn’t take it anymore.
“No,” he said quietly. “She would never do that. . . .”
Then he broke down completely and began to cry—big tears rolling down his cheeks and onto his neatly pressed navy uniform.
Jim Yontz had made his point. He excused the upset sailor and the jurors watched Patrick Murphy walk toward the exit door, unable to hold back his sorrow any longer. The sounds of his sobbing followed him out of the courtroom.
Judge Sweazea then excused the jury for the rest of the afternoon, explaining that the prosecutors and the defense attorney had “private matters” they needed to discuss. It was 2:07 P.M. on April 11 and for the rest of the afternoon Judge Kevin Sweazea listened to an Albuquerque “dominatrix” whom the defense team was trying to bring on board one more time as an expert witness for David Ray. Sweazea had turned her away once before, but he was trying to be fair to McMillian and let the defense take another crack at it.
In the next three hours, stress began to show on the face of the young judge as he was asked to enter into a world that defense attorney Lee McMillian had once said dealt with “photos of things that most of us have never done before” and “sexual practices that none of us ever thought of before.”
“All of us have taken a step into the twilight zone,” said McMillian as he got ready to introduce the dominatrix.
After a short break McMillian called up the thirty-five-year-old woman and asked her to introduce herself. The attractive redhead cut right to the chase.
“My name is Michelle Marie—and, in quotes, ‘Diva’—Eytcheson,” she informed the judge. “I’ve been exploring this world for fifteen years and I’ve been practicing it in the public eye for the last nine years.”
Hoping to nudge the judge into letting her testify that David Ray wasn’t the only pervert in America, McMillian asked the “Diva” several loaded questions that he hoped would expand the judge’s appreciation of sadomasochism, bondage and domination, all areas where the “Diva” considered herself an expert.
“Have you taken professional classes?” asked McMillian.
Eytcheson went on to explain that she’d taken classes in corsetry (shrinking a partner’s waist to fifteen inches), body modification (pierced nipples, belly buttons and vaginal lips) and “the most popular class of all,” good old-fashioned S-M 101. She explained that she had just created an Internet Web site to encourage others to enjoy the pleasures of the S-M/B-D world, but she didn’t want young people peeking into her dark world. So she had a great idea—just insert a special message for people nosing around on the Internet in places where they didn’t belong. The message on the screen was simple, she said: “Don’t click here unless you’re twenty-one or older.”
“Can you explain the ‘fear fantasy’?” McMillian asked.
“I like to scare them!” she blurted out. “It’s fun.”
Eytcheson explained that in her world there is always someone “on top” and someone “on the bottom.” A dominatrix, she said, naturally likes to be on top. She struggled to find a name for the person on the bottom.
“The bottom is . . . I can’t think of a better word than ‘victim.’ ”
She went on to explain to the judge that provoking fear in the person on the bottom greatly increased her own levels of sexual arousal. Her voice trembled as she tried to capture the thrill of it all in a language “straight” people might be able to understand.
“I get a highly aroused sexual charge—sometimes it increases two hundred fold,” she told the stone-faced judge.
She went on to explain that people in her circles use a “safe” word when the person on the bottom is experiencing too much pain and wants the person on the top to stop. Once the person on the bottom blurts out the secret password, the person on top eases up.
“The minute the ‘safe’ word is used, the fantasy stops,” she added.
“What is the ‘mummification’ ritual?” asked McMillian.
“That’s when you wrap someone from head to toe in duct tape. They need a straw to breathe with and we found out you can get them at a Home Depot store for only nineteen cents!”
McMillian felt like the “Diva” was in a groove now and he asked her if she’d listened to the 1993 audiotape. She nodded. Then McMillian asked the “Diva” how she knew the tape was a fantasy and not a threat to someone’s life.
“It says right at the beginning, ‘This tape is to be used for entertainment purposes.’ My good friend Spencer holds seminars up in Seattle, Washington, and he always tells us, ‘Always put a disclaimer in there.’ ”
Next McMillian asked her to hold up several magazines from local Albuquerque bookstores that specifically dealt with the kind of fetishes she assumed David Ray was “into.” She showed the judge the following glossy best-sellers: Capture, Reluctant Captive, Pirate, Bondage, Hush!, and The Love Gallery.
“All six magazines sell videos like David made—and one even sells audiotapes,” she added.
There is currently no college-studies program for the kinds of things that the “Diva” knows all about, but McMillian wanted to establish her solid credibility, so he asked her about the little-known International Mister Leather and International Miss Leather contests apparently held all over the world. Proudly Eytcheson pointed out that she herself had actually participated in some of those very contests during her prime.
“I was personally Miss New Mexico Leather in 1997,” she acknowledged, smiling at the judge.
Finally McMillian showed her some pictures from David Ray’s toy box. She identified most of the objects, all except the large blue saw blade used to keep a girl’s legs spread wide apart. Then McMillian handed her some toys. McMillian handed her the vaginal-stretcher that had been introduced at both trials and she handled it clumsily and said: “It looks like some kind of homemade penetration device.”
McMillian showed her a photograph of the bench press that had been introduced as evidence. She raised her eyebrows, recalling her own days and nights enjoying a little kinky sex with good friends, and pointed out something she thought the judge probably hadn’t thought of yet.
“I had dungeon games in my home two years ago and the use of a tie-down table came in handy.”
McMillian saved the best for last, asking the “Diva” a question that made at least one unidentified middle-aged male spectator mumble out loud, “Ugh!”
“Can you tell the judge what ‘fisting’ is?” asked David Ray’s attorney.
“That’s when you put the fist in the anal or vaginal canal,” replied the “Diva” in kind of a soothing, matter-of-fact voice. “I actually attended a seminar on fisting in Austin, Texas, last year,” she added. “It was a marvelous experience.”
McMillian wasn’t done.
“Is the human fist actually put in the vagina?” he asked.
“I have actually heard of ways you can enlarge the canal so the fist can be put in,” Eytcheson replied.
Jim Yontz had heard enough.
For nearly an hour and a half, he had listened to this woman try to make David Parker Ray sound almost normal, and he wasn’t going to have any more of it. He jumped to his feet and with an angry voice seldom used in public, he lectured Lee McMillian on defense efforts to twist the case.
“David hasn’t said he’s into S and M or B and D and until he does, so what?” Yontz thundered. “Nobody cares what the ‘Diva’ thinks! Until David stands in front of the jury to explain himself, the dominatrix cannot testify. You cannot build prejudice into the record that can be appealed later, and I think that’s what’s going on here.”
Judge Sweazea called all the lawyers up to his bench in an effort to sort it all out. Yontz had a big white dildo with a red tip in one hand and the big brown-and-cream vaginal-stretcher in the other; during the discussion Sweazea could not make himself call the items by name, only pointing and saying “this thing” or “that thing.”
“Some things are left unsaid,” he pointed out to the amused lawyers.
One time Yontz went back to the prosecution table and brought another sex toy up to the bench; Sweazea swallowed hard as he pointed to the object and asked, “What’s this thing?”
Yontz, mild mannered and low-key, simply said: “It’s a nipple piercer, Your Honor.”
During the debate at the bench, McMillian’s redheaded secretary, Amy, leaned over to David Ray at the defense table and whispered a question on the minds of everyone in the courtroom.
“Do you think you could hold up in cross-examination?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” David whispered back.
After listening to Yontz’s arguments, Judge Sweazea ruled on the dominatrix. She could testify as to the identification of items pictured from the toy box, but Sweazea warned her not to talk about her philosophy of alternative recreational sex. Essentially, the judge backed Jim Yontz.
“I’m not going to allow testimony about fetishes unless there is evidence that David was using a fetish,” he ruled.
After the judge decided to call it a day at 5:01 P.M., curious onlookers were congregating in the hall outside of room 22. Lee McMillian and his secretary met next to the watercooler to discuss their defense strategy for David. Amy was blunt and told her boss, “I think we should call David to the stand.” McMillian grinned, looked over his shoulder and, in a low voice, said: “Well, if we do, nobody’s gonna know about it.”
The next day, Thursday, April 12, the jury was back and Lee McMillian got to sink his teeth into the weakest link in the prosecution’s case against Ray. After Claire Harwell finished leading David Spencer, the therapist from Craig, Colorado, through his testimony that Kelli Garrett had nightmares and bouts of sleeplessness because she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Lee McMillian rose for his cross-examination. One sentence at a time, McMillian challenged the witness by pointing out that the only thing Kelli Garrett suffered from was DSNMFD (dire southern New Mexico financial disorder). Then he tried to get Spencer to admit that other traumatic experiences (like the drowning of her boyfriend Jim Hibbard in the fall of 1998) could have played a huge role in her inability to recover. Finally he got the grandfatherly therapist to admit that Garrett might actually have shown PTSD symptoms of trauma that she never experienced.
“Isn’t that the nature of human memory?” asked McMillian. “It’s plastic, right?”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” replied Spencer.
“Isn’t it possible you could have similar results regardless of whether the activities between David and Kelli were consensual or not?” McMillian shot back.
“Yes, I suppose so,” answered Spencer. “If the belief was there, the symptoms could be the same.”
“Thank you,” replied McMillian.
Spencer turned and smiled at the jury and fired back a salvo of his own.
“To Kelli, the most traumatic part of the kidnapping was having her ‘control’ taken away,” he said. “That terrified her.”
McMillian swung around and pointed his finger at Spencer.
“But the simple truth is, Mr. Spencer, her trauma would be the same, regardless of whether anything happened to her or not. It wouldn’t make any difference if she lost control or not. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” conceded Spencer. “If she believed that David had raped her, then the symptoms could be the same.”
“Thank you, sir!” said McMillian.
It was getting late in the afternoon and Judge Sweazea did not want the jurors to miss enjoying their upcoming three-day Easter weekend, so he dismissed the jury and sent them home. Before they left, he reminded everyone that on Monday morning the defense would present its case.
When Monday morning, April 16, rolled around, the jury discovered that David Ray and Lee McMillian had no plans to present a defense.
“At this time, we rest, Your Honor,” McMillian told Sweazea.
Closing arguments took the rest of the day. David, wearing an olive suit loaned to him by McMillian, also sported a bright yellow tie. Lee McMillian looked causal in gray slacks, blue shirt and a gray sports jacket. Jim Yontz finally decided to drop the bear ties and showed up wearing a dark brown suit and black cowboy boots. He wore a boring tie with black-and-white diagonal stripes. Compared to two years ago, his hair showed a lot more salt and a lot less pepper. Kelli Garrett came back to court wearing a light-blue dress and Claire Harwell stood out wearing a white jacket, a white skirt and white shoes. She was also sporting a big gold cross hanging down in front of her open V-necked blue sweater. Just a little reminder to all the good Catholics in New Mexico to do the right thing.
Before letting the lawyers sum up their arguments, Sweazea had to read the jurors the twelve felony charges, including criminal sexual penetration (the term for rape in New Mexico), kidnapping and criminal assault. He also had to read a very detailed description of the female genitalia, right down to the patch of pubic hair surrounding the vagina. He also had to define the vagina as “the area between the vulva and the uterus.” Nervous as hell, he mispronounced “pubic” on two occasions, each time calling it “public hair.”
Nobody laughed.
Claire Harwell approached the jury at 1:14 P.M., and to some observers in the courtroom, she used the power of her huge eyes along with her full-bodied voice to remind the jury that they were dealing with a very serious case against a very evil man.
“David Ray was Kelli Garrett’s worst nightmare,” she began.
“Rather than face the truth, for three years she preferred to think she was going crazy. David Ray doesn’t look very scary today, but remember who he really is and how he made you feel when you first heard the audiotape.
“When David brought Kelli back to Patrick’s mother’s house on July 28, 1996, he was wearing his park ranger uniform. You know now after hearing from his boss that he didn’t need to be in his uniform because he wasn’t working that day, or the day before, either.”
Then Harwell showed the jury a short clip from the videotape. While the jury was looking at a naked Kelli with her legs spread, Claire put an 8½-inch by 11-inch manila folder over Kelli’s open vagina to try and maintain some modesty for the victim. Then, as the jurors again sat transfixed, she told them what they were seeing one more time.
“The woman in the video is sobbing. She is moving her arms slowly. If you look closely, you can see by the movement of her throat that she is gently weeping.”
Harwell shut off the television and walked slowly back to the prosecution table, where she picked up a big (fourteen inches long) white dildo with a red head. She walked over next to the jurors with the dildo in one hand and a can of Copenhagen snuff in the other. She held the can up to the end of the dildo and reminded the jury what Garrett told them a week earlier.
“Kelli recalled that one dildo was the size of a Copenhagen can of chewing tobacco—look at the comparison—it couldn’t get much closer.”
Harwell put down the big “toy” and asked the jury to side with the prosecution.
“You can tell Kelli that her nightmare was real and it has finally come to an end.”
At 2:27 P.M., Lee McMillian rose for his last chance to influence the jury. He reminded them that Jim Yontz would follow him and this was his last chance to defend David Ray. He pointed out that most of the prosecution evidence was based on photographs and “weird toys” found in 1999, three years after the crime. He held up picture after picture taken from the toy box and the trailer home and crudely threw each one on the floor, one at a time. He reminded the jury, “There is no way of knowing if this stuff was there in 1996.” And then, apparently unaware that some fundamentalist Christians wear copper bracelets with the letters WWJD (What would Jesus do?) in order to prick their conscience, McMillian asked the jury to listen to Yontz and then let their memory of him prick their conscience.
“What would Lee McMillian say?” he asked.
“The prosecution has invited you to guess,” he told them. “Time after time, Mr. Yontz asks you to guess. Please don’t guess. The law says you’re not allowed to.”
Then McMillian presented what he considered to be the best evidence that Ray was innocent. He picked up the videotape, placed it in the VCR and turned on the television set. A few jurors looked surprised. He played the entire six-minute portion of the videotape for them, offering his interpretations of what they saw. He pointed to David Ray and Kelli and told the jurors that what they were seeing was just a “harmless fantasy.” Soon six out of seven female jurors began chewing gum and another female juror wept. McMillian stood next to the TV and used his left index finger to emphasize the fine points of what he told the jurors was nothing more than two people doing what they both agreed to do ahead of time.
“I want you to look at the manner in which this man touches this woman,” he said, using his softest voice. “This is gentle; this is not torture. Her vulva is extended—you often see that in horses and cattle out on the ranch. Watch what happens here—is Kelli crying, or just laughing?”
When the videotape reached the part where Ray let Kelli free her arms and she folded them over her breasts, McMillian took on a compassionate tone of voice.
“Ahh . . . ,” he said. “That’s got to feel better.”
At 3:27 P.M. McMillian sat down. Both he and David peered over their glasses riding down on the end of their noses as Jim Yontz took the floor and challenged the defense’s case. Yontz played “snippets” of the grisly audiotape and asked the jurors if any of it sounded like what Kelli Garrett claimed happened to her in 1996. After playing each segment, Yontz used his most sarcastic voice to tell the jurors what was obvious to him.
“Gee, sure sounds like what we saw.”
At one point in the audiotape, David Ray told his victim that her memory would be worthless once he let her go: “You’re not going to be able to remember a fuckin’ thing.”
“Does that sound like Kelli Garrett?” Yontz asked. Like most hard-boiled prosecutors, Jim Yontz always liked to save his best zinger for last. Just before his conclusion, he lowered his voice and stared straight into the soul of the whole jury.
“There is no more torturous thing than to be held totally nude and have another person lightly touch your sex organs,” he told them.
“Take your God-given brains and common sense,” he added. “Find the defendant guilty.”
Judge Sweazea released the jury for deliberations at 5:01 P.M. and for the next five hours they debated the case, only taking a short dinner break to order out for pizza. The small group of court onlookers hung out in the parking lot, chatting and drinking beer. As the hours wore on, people talked less and less, wondering if Estancia was going to be a repeat of Tierra Amarilla. Finally, at 9:24 P.M., a court observer came outside with the announcement that everyone was waiting for.
“They have a verdict,” she informed the friends, family and media.
People rushed back inside room 22 and quietly took their seats. The entire audience was only a mere thirteen people. At 9:26 P.M. Judge Sweazea called the proceedings to order and turned to address the jury foreman, Mr. Greg Nevelos.
“Do you have a verdict, Mr. Nevelos?” the judge asked.
“Yes, we do,” replied the man who watched the video and listened to the audio with his lower jaw hanging wide open. Greg Nevelos, fifty-one, a tan and fit local high-school track coach with a blond beard and long blond wavy hair, handed the bailiff the jury checklist covering each of the twelve felony counts.
The bailiff delivered it to the judge and Sweazea spent five minutes looking over the final verdicts.
At 9:31 P.M. Judge Sweazea turned to face David Parker Ray. The tone of his voice was very grave. He looked right at David.
“As to Count Number 1 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 2 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 3 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 4 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 5 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 6 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 7 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 8 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 9 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 10 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 11 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.
“As to Count Number 12 . . . Guilty in the First Degree.”
At 9:36 P.M. Sweazea finished speaking. Kelli Garrett broke down sobbing. Her small group of supporters gathered around her, hugging one another. David Ray’s sister, Peggy, also cried, her face red and puffy, but nobody gathered around Peggy. David Ray was immediately handcuffed behind his back and led out of the courtroom. His face looked ash white, defeated.
After the judge dismissed the jury, all of Kelli Garrett’s friends gave her a congratulatory hug. One tall Reuters reporter walked up late and Garrett, joyous, jumped up on top of a chair in order to give him a hug.
“You’re so tall, I can’t reach ya.” She laughed.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Now I can get on with my life,” she said. “Finally.”
Kelli Garrett prepared a quick press release and a few minutes later the woman who served as her victim’s advocate read it to the tiny media crowd.
“ ‘I’m glad he’s been found guilty of the crimes against me. I wish I could have remembered all of this five years ago. There is still a lot I do not remember—and I’m glad for that. But what I do remember will affect me for the rest of my life. Still, I do not feel sorry for myself. I consider myself a survivor—not a victim.’ ”
Channel 13 TV News in Albuquerque had covered the conviction and Garrett didn’t want to miss seeing the ten o’clock news, so she and her followers—two state cops, one FBI agent, two prosecutors, three onlookers and her sister, Brenda, headed down to the local watering hole, the Blue Ribbon Bar. Nobody mentioned it, but she’d been kidnapped from the Blue Waters Saloon and maybe it was fitting that she got to celebrate the trial’s end in Estancia, far from the waters of Elephant Butte Lake.
Just before the gathering left the bar, a half hour later, Kelli Garrett told everyone how she felt about the possibility of David Ray spending the rest of his life in prison. She tried to sidestep her real feelings but couldn’t.
“I don’t want him to die,” she said.
“I won’t say exactly what I want.... Let’s just say I want the guards to let him out one morning to take a shower...
“and then I want ‘Big Bubba’ to get him.”
Outside, someone asked her how she felt about Jesse Ray now. Garrett didn’t mention why her attitude had shifted, but she gave Jim Yontz an idea of how she saw the woman who helped kidnap her.
“I feel sorry for Jesse—I think she did it to keep her dad away from her.”
While Kelli Garrett and her crowd were celebrating, David Parker Ray was seated in a back room in the Torrance County Courthouse. He was doing his first television interview in over two years. Mark Horner from Channel 4 in Albuquerque got Ray to comment on the outcome of the second Kelli Garrett trial and the possibility he might be sentenced to over 130 years in prison.
“I feel raped,” he told Horner.
“If you’re innocent, you’re innocent. I’m an innocent man.
“My sexual fantasies are not that unusual. There are approximately two million people in the United States who have the same fantasies. Next time, I’m going to be more selective of my friends.
“When they played the audiotape, I thought it was a violation of my U.S. constitutional rights. It was a source of entertainment for me to create those tapes. I don’t hate women at all. I get my sexual excitement from making women happy.
“I got pleasure out of a woman getting pleasure.
“I did what they wanted me to do.”
Channel 4 also interviewed David’s sister, Peggy, who stood by her brother.
“He was a loner growing up. He spent a lot of time by himself. We grew up out in Mountainair. We were way out in the country, so really, it was just the two of us— not a lot of friends or anything. We was raised real old-fashioned, where truth is just basic—you don’t even think about lying about things.
“I’ve known that David had fantasies and fetishes all his life, nearly. He’s a kind and gentle person, though—he’s always good and kind to animals. The word ‘sex’ is why this case got so much attention. You mix the word ‘sex’ with the word ‘violence’ and everybody’s going to jump on it.”
The reaction to the verdict back in Truth or Consequences was hard to measure. People had been trying to forget about David for a long time—so every time his name came up, people got edgy. They figured that once he finally got sentenced, the whole thing might just go away. Their little town had taken a real beating and everyone just wanted a little peace and quiet.
Rosemary Hoskins, owner of the Rio Grande Motel, seemed to sum up the general opinion best when she told a reporter from Reuters on Friday night, April 20, what she thought of the whole David Parker Ray case.
“It costs seventy-two dollars a day to keep the son of a bitch in jail,” she snorted. “They ought to just throw him off a cliff.”