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CHAPTER 7

I love reading books about serial killers, and now I’m living with one!

—Cindy Hendy, talking to a close friend,

February 1999

At 4:44 P.M., on the afternoon of April 6, Cindy Hendy cut a deal with Assistant DA Jim Yontz and cut all her ties to David Parker Ray.

She had been charged with twenty-five felony counts and was looking at 197 years in prison if convicted, so she figured it was time to save herself. After accepting the plea bargain in return for valuable testimony against Ray and Dennis Roy Yancy, she was only charged with five felony counts and was facing a sentence ranging from a high of fifty-four years to a low of only twelve years.

She pleaded guilty in the Seventh District Court of New Mexico and the court papers indicated she pleaded guilty to two counts of Kidnapping in the First Degree for helping David Ray kidnap Angie Montano and Cyndy Vigil during February and March 1999. Montano was nabbed on February 17 and held until February 21; Vigil was nabbed on March 20 and held until March 22. The walls came crumbling down around Cindy Hendy on the afternoon of March 22 when Vigil stabbed her in the neck and ran down Bass Road buck naked, blowing the lid off the case once and for all.

Hendy also got nailed for two counts of Sexual Penetration (Rape) in the Second Degree for helping Ray illegally enter the bodies of both victims. The court documents specifically note that Hendy pleaded guilty to helping Ray penetrate the anal opening of Angie Montano and the vaginal opening of Cyndy Vigil.

And, last of all, she pleaded guilty to one count of Conspiracy to Commit Kidnapping in the Second Degree. That was the one that probably proved to be the ultimate undoing of Ray and Hendy. In the springtime of 1999, Cindy Hendy was excited about becoming a grandmother for the first time and made plans to sneak home to Everett, Washington, sometime before April 11, when her daughter Heather was due to give birth. David Ray didn’t want her to go and told her if she wasn’t careful, he’d be “looking for love in all the wrong places,” according to Hendy’s friend John Ashbaugh. Ray demanded that she help him round up a “little play thing” he could torture while Hendy was back home in Washington State. Hendy agreed and the two drove to Albuquerque on March 20 and found a pimp to introduce them to a hooker along Highway 66. Her name was Cyndy Vigil.

The day after Cindy Hendy was arrested on March 22, she was interviewed by two NMSP officers: Sergeant K. C. Rogers and Agent Wesley LaCuesta. Hendy seemed relaxed during her conversations with the two male cops, even telling K. C. Rogers that she was “out in the kitchen—making potato salad” when she heard Vigil fumbling with the padlock keys in the living room. “We were going on a picnic that afternoon,” she told Rogers, “and I wanted everything to be real yummy.” She talked openly with LaCuesta about Ray and his friends. When she was assigned public defender Xavier Edward Acosta two days later, he advised her to plead guilty in hopes of getting a break from the newly assigned seventh district court judge in the case, Neil M. Mertz.

“You might only get fifteen to twenty years,” he told Hendy.

In the sealed documents filed and signed by Assistant DA James A. Yontz, Cindy Hendy pointed out that she had only known David Ray for eight months, adding, “I’ve only been doing this a few months, but David has been kidnapping, torturing and killing people for years.” She told investigators that “David told me he’d killed at least fourteen people, both men and women, and he buried some of them in ravines and arroyos in eastern New Mexico.” The report goes on to state that “one particular location which was pointed out by Hendy was a deserted ravine north of Truth or Consequences.”

The police searched the ravine the next day but could not find a body.

She also told police that Ray sank dead bodies in Elephant Butte Lake, and the report states that he told her he did this “by cutting open the stomach of the victim so the victim would not float to the surface.” Hendy also pointed out that Ray had told her he disposed of bodies between his residence and a prominent rocky island he could see from his kitchen window. When they first used nighttime search warrants to explore Ray’s mobile home, the NMSP found detailed maps of Elephant Butte Lake with several Xs marked offshore from a stony outcrop along the eastern shore called “Kettle Top.” They assumed this was the place where Hendy said he “sank the bodies.”

The police knew that hundreds of people accidentally drowned—or were murdered—since the Rio Grande was dammed in 1916. If the lake were not forty-four miles long and four miles wide, the FBI and the NMSP might have considered draining it and looking for fresh missing-person DNA in the gigantic boneyard at the bottom of the lake. Time and expense made that an impossibility, however.

Cindy Hendy also acknowledged that she was with Ray when he bragged to friends in T or C that he knew what he would do if he were going to kill someone and dump their body in the big lake. “I’d know how to eliminate evidence,” he told the curious group. “The thing to do is cut them down the belly, scoop out their guts, fill the chest cavity with cement weights and then use bailing wire to wrap them up.” His idea was to turn them into “human achors” so they would sink to the bottom of the lake and not come bobbing to the surface, bubbling over with gases.

The police report did state that “in at least one of these situations police have been able to verify initial similarities to a body which had previously been discovered in Elephant Butte Lake.” The person they were referring to was forty-one-year-old Billy Ray Bowers, a man who had been found wrapped in a blue tarp and floating in the lake back in September 1989. He had been killed by a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Police also found out from Hendy that David Ray and Billy Bowers had worked together at the Canal Motors used-car lot in Phoenix between 1980 and 1988. Bowers was Ray’s boss. Ray had leased his property on the western bluff overlooking Elephant Butte Lake back in 1984 and then quit his job at Canal Motors in 1988 and moved permanently to Hot Springs Landing in 1989, one year after Bowers had been reported missing from his job in Phoenix.

Hendy told the police that Ray killed his former boss because he didn’t like him. She couldn’t remember why.

Hendy lived with Ray and she had been in the toy box plenty of times. Early on, Ray told her he “made special audiotapes to play for the victims as an introduction to what he was going to do to them.” Hendy said she was there when he played one of the tapes for Cyndy Vigil and Angie Montano. Police had found six tapes dealing with everything from Ray telling girls he was going to use “dildos designed for an elephant” to describing how he made sadomasochistic videotapes to sell to collectors for “$1,000 each.” In one of these tapes, Ray tells his victims how he had already kidnapped thirty-seven girls and these “wild urges” had led some psychiatrists to classify him as some sort of “sexual psychopath.” Another tape even described how one night a girl bit down on his sexual organ during oral sex and he had to “cut her nipples off and made her swallow ’em. ” Just like Hendy claimed, all the tapes were designed to instill mortal fear in the mind of the listener.

She also told the police that David would “photograph victims in various stages of bondage and torture,” and she went on to add that in the white cargo trailer “David would use makeup on his victims so they would photograph properly—especially if he felt portions of their bodies would not photograph well without makeup.” Then she went on to verify that “at least two of the women displayed in photographs along walls had been killed.”

Inside Ray’s mobile home, agents had found a coffinlike box 7 feet long and 2½ feet square, lined with ½-inch brown carpet and rigged with D rings and black straps for tying people down. The chamber also had ventilation holes for breathing. Hendy told investigators that “David would store live captives in the coffin until he decided what to do with them.”

During her interrogation, Hendy also “gave up” Dennis Roy Yancy. She said that Yancy was a hard-core satanic follower of David Ray’s and she told them where they could find his name written in red paint on rocks out in the Jordana del Muerto, the sprawling desert east of town. During one lengthy interview, she told K. C. Rogers that “Yancy killed Marie Parker back in 1997 under instructions from David Ray. Roy strangled her to death while David sat nearby taking photographs.”

Over 1,500 pieces of evidence had been gathered in the first 2½ weeks. Soon police were expanding the massive investigation, which was rumored to stretch from California to Florida. FBI agents were particularly interested in David Ray’s work history and they prowled around, knocking on doors, in the neighboring states of Arizona, Texas and Oklahoma.

By the evening of April 6, FBI supervisory special agent Doug Beldon from Albuquerque was telling the dwindling press corps, “I’m very pleased with the progress of this case. The FBI and the state police are continuing to work hand in hand.”

Back in Elephant Butte, overworked prosecutor Jim Yontz was leaning heavily on help from the hordes of FBI agents and the new revelations from his best new eyewitness, Cynthia Lea Hendy. Before he started getting too comfortable with all this new ammunition, Yontz figured he’d better send Hendy up to the Women’s Correctional Facility in Grants, New Mexico, for a standard sixty-day psychiatric evaluation.

Just in case.