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CHAPTER 3

I went over there to pick up some cake mix . . . and they kept me against my will.

—Angie Montano, late March 1999

On Saturday night, March 27, Angelique Montano, twenty-seven, sat in front of her small television set and watched the unfolding Cyndy Vigil escape story. Angie and Cyndy never met in person, but the two young women had two things in common. Both had worked as hookers on the most dangerous section of Highway 66 (Central Avenue) in Albuquerque, and both had been kidnapped and tortured by David Ray and Cindy Hendy during the first three months of 1999.

Angelique had moved to Truth or Consequences in 1996 in order to turn her life around. Methamphetamines had almost killed her in the big city and she figured a new chance to start all over might be just what she and her infant son, Abel, needed. Life was hard as nails—living off the monthly welfare checks—and she still had trouble resisting the underground supply of drugs in T or C, but at least she was off the street. She desperately wanted to be a good person, like everybody else.

On Sunday, March 28, after watching television all weekend, she walked over to talk to her friend John Branaugh. She told him about how David had kidnapped her on Febraury 17 and then how she had talked him into letting her go on February 21. She told him it all happened back in the winter, right about the time the movie 8 MM came out. John had heard the story before, but he hadn’t believed it the first time around. He’d been watching the news all weekend, too, so this time he listened to every word.

Later that day, Angelique let John take her down to the police station, where she poured out the rest of the story about her five-day ordeal with Ray and Hendy. Both Vigil and Montano told of similar experiences, except Ray never got a chance to take Vigil to the toy box because she stabbed his girlfriend and ran away. Angelique Montano wasn’t so lucky,

The next day, the media descended on Angie and made her feel like a celebrity. Locals winced when she went on NBC-TV and told the national audience what the two monsters had done to what she called “my poor little vaginer.” Though many of the so-called respectable people in town lacked sympathy for her lifestyle, a guest editorial in the Sentinel reminded the citizens that “even the worst of us deserves protection under the law.”

Tabloids like the Globe recognized the story’s power, and Joe Mullins, their man on the beat, courted Angie until he got her to agree to sell her story to the tabloid. Mullins called Craig Lewis, his editor in Florida, and told him about the interview.

Angie had one blue eye (a prosthetic device) and one brown eye, and a face covered by small pocklike scars from a lifetime of drug abuse. She wanted an operation to get a new artificial eye, so both of her eyes would be the same color; Lewis gave Mullins the go-ahead to seal the deal with a special offer from the “deep pockets” of the Globe. Joe Mullins was to pay her $700 and promise that the newspaper would pay for her surgery. When Angie heard what they were going to do for her, she was thrilled.

Mullins did an interview and got Angie to give him some old pictures; within a week, the Globe was on sale all over America, sporting a front-page headline that read NEW MEXICO VICTIM’S OWN STORY: “I ESCAPED SEX SADISTS’ TORTURE CHAMBER.”

Angie got a chance to tell her story, with only minor editorial “flourishes” by the touch-up staff of the Globe:

For five days, I was tortured in a chamber of horrors by a monster named David Ray and his evil mistress Cindy Hendy.

The terrible things they did haunt me constantly. It’s a nightmare I know I never will escape.

The horror began the day I decided to bake a cake for my boyfriend Frank Zambrano who lives with me and my five-year-old boy, Abel.

I knew Cindy vaguely through a friend and she had offered to give me a cake-mix packet and ingredients for frosting.

I went with her to a white-and-brown recreational vehicle. David, whom I’d never met, was hiding inside. He put a knife to my throat and said I was being abducted.

They drove to their home, a trailer with a small trailer parked nearby—at Elephant Butte. They sat me on a bed and Cindy told me to just relax and everything would be alright.

David left the room and came back with a big knife. I pleaded with him. “I want to go home, my little boy Abel needs me.”

He slapped me viciously. The blow sent shivers of terror through my whole body. I realized this was not just some weird game. My life was in danger. I am legally blind from a previous injury but I could see the knife at my throat and Cindy pointing a pistol at me. David ripped my clothes off.

They bound me naked to the bed with chains around my ankles. They also padlocked a metal collar around my neck.

They told me: “Welcome to your worst nightmare. If you’ve ever woken up screaming in the night, we are the people you were dreaming about.”

Then they began a sick introduction to what they were going to do to me. On a TV in front of me, they played a video that showed their torture room and things they had done to others. I was so terrified I could hardly watch, but they were getting a kick out of showing it to me. They left me chained to the bed for three days. David went off to work as usual and Cindy stayed to watch me.

On the third day, David told me “We’re going to the Playbox. I want to show you my toys.” The way he said “Playbox” gave me the creeps.

They took me to the other trailer where David put me on a table and tied me down, hand and foot.

Looking around, I could see things that looked like medical instruments—pliers, clamps, saws and scalpels. There were also whips and chains and padlocks and other scary-looking restraints.

It looked like some kind of torture chamber that you see in movies.

The sight of all those things for pinching, twisting and cutting flesh paralyzed me with fear. David called those horrible instruments his “friends.”

I realized that I had to stay cool or never get out alive. If I tried to fight them, I was sure they’d kill me and dump my body. David had stripped to the waist. Looking into his cold eyes was like seeing the Devil himself.

I was gagged and blindfolded. Suddenly, I felt a terrible pain as they jammed something into me from behind. The pain paralyzed me. I prayed, “Dear God, please help me survive this, I don’t want to die.”

I could hear David breathing heavily and he and Cindy began inflicting as much pain on me as they could.

Later, they led me back to the bedroom where I was again chained to the bed.

The next day David said to Cindy, “I think Angie would like to pleasure me, wouldn’t you little girl?” He made me perform a sex act on him.

They took me back to The Playbox and strapped me to the table, telling me I was going to have electrotherapy. David clipped wires to my breasts and lower body. Cindy watched as he switched on the power. It was like scorching fire surging through my body.

I thought, “Dear God, he’s going to kill me. I’ll never see Frank and my little darling Abel again.”

Through my agony I could hear David and Cindy “ooing and aahing” as they watched my torment. “Look at how she moves,” he said. “Watch as the current hits her.” I tried to scream in my agony, but the gag kept me from making a sound. The torture went on for at least an hour. I thought it would never end.

I was shaking like a leaf by the time they took me back and chained me like a dog to the bed. These evil people had taken my pride and my morals. I was outraged. I knew I had to beat them.

I began saying prayers I remembered from my childhood. “Hail, Mary, full of grace, pray for us sinners, now and at our hour of death.”

“Dear God, Blessed Mother, especially deliver us from evil. Oh yes, Dear Lord, especially from that. Save me from these two torturers.”

The prayers made me feel stronger.

On the fifth day, Cindy Hendy went out to do shopping. Left alone, I began thinking about how practiced these two devils were at what they were doing. They had probably done this many times before to countless other women, I thought.

I knew I had to work my street-smarts to survive.

I figured to work on David Ray. While I was chained to the couch naked and weeping, I said to him, “David, come over here and sit by me. I’m feeling so down. Come hold me, please.”

Sitting next to me, David told me that he liked me and thought I was a nice person. He said: “If I had known how nice you were beforehand, I wouldn’t have started all this. Cindy didn’t tell me you were so sweet. I think we could have been friends.”

I could hardly believe my plan was working. In a sincere tone, I told him it wasn’t too late. We could still be friends. And I would never tell anybody about what he’d done.

Somehow, I convinced him to let me go. When Cindy came back, she wasn’t happy about it.

She finally went along with him, but I was terrified that they were teasing and at the last minute would take me back into their hell-hole.

I promised to hitch a ride to Albuquerque, over 100 miles away, and not come back. They took me in their car and dropped me off on I-25.

On February 21, 1999, Angelique Montano, wearing the same clothes she was wearing five days earlier, put out her thumb and tried to hitch a ride back to her home in Truth or Consequences. After a couple of hours and without much luck, she managed to flag down an off-duty sheriff from Los Lunas County. She told her whole story to the officer as he drove her back to her boyfriend and young son in T or C. He doubted that she was telling him the truth, and her account went unreported to the Sierra County Sheriff’s Office. A month later, after the officer saw the unfolding Ray investigation on TV, he regretted his mistake.

“If I had thought it was one hundred percent legitimate,” he told authorities, “I would have taken her to the police station right then and there.”

Not everyone between T or C and Elephant Butte believed that Ray and Hendy were guilty. They did have friends. Debbie Fisk collected her weekly disability checks and liked to hang out with Hendy. She’d been over to Ray’s trailer on many occasions and knew his daughter, Glenda “Jesse” Ray, and his best buddy, Dennis Roy Yancy. Right after Hendy got arrested, Fisk went over and cleaned out Hendy’s trailer. Fisk knew almost everyone from the wrong side of the tracks, as the conservatives in town used to call all the places where the party animals liked to party.

She even knew Angie Montano.

When she read that Angie had fooled the Globe into thinking that she was borrowing “cake mix” to bake a cake, Fisk giggled.

“You know—you go over and get seven hundred dollars’ worth of cake mix, and something’s bound to happen,” she told anyone who would listen.

“That’s a lot of cocaine.”