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CHAPTER 8

One pair of black cowboy boots

Green T-shirt

Blue shirt

Green pants

Brown wallet with seven credit cards

White watch

Chap Stick

Two yellow fuses

Brown necklace

Black knife case, no knife

Property taken from David Ray upon his arrest and booking into the Sierra County Detention Center, 3/22/1999

FBI Agent John Schum had been assigned to conduct a lengthy interview with Ray shortly after his arrest. Before talking to Ray in person, Special Agent Schum wanted to take one more walk through the mobile home where David had lived between 1989 and 1999. Schum knew all about the toy box, but he felt like he might get a better feel for the man behind the crimes if he just strolled through the kitchen, living room, study, bedroom and bath where David Ray spent his time eating, sleeping and relaxing like any other normal person.

Schum knew that to David Ray, everything the man did in his everyday life was “normal.”

Walking in the front door, the first thing Schum noticed was a copper crucifix hanging on the living-room wall—upside down—with the head of Jesus Christ pointing at the floor. On the opposite wall, there was a large framed painting of two black wolves running through the snow, chasing a white rabbit. On a mantel overlooking the fireplace, there was a picture of Cindy Hendy and her youngest daughter, Muffy, both smiling and looking happy.

Schum walked into the study and picked up a gray metal toolbox on the floor and opened it. Inside, he found a pearl-handled .38 Colt handgun, a small bottle of Hot Damn! Schnapps, a large hunting knife, a tube of Vaseline and a leather whip coiled around a small “fake” New Mexico State Police badge. Schum opened the closet and found a neatly pressed dark green park ranger uniform hanging from a hook right above a small collection of Remington hunting rifles.

He closed the closet door and walked over to Ray’s desk, which was piled high with a large assortment of videotapes. There must have been at least a hundred movies stacked on top of, under and beside the desk. In the middle of the desk was the statue of a small white devil’s skull with tiny horns protruding from the top of the head and a long tongue sticking out of the twisted, unhappy mouth. It looked like Ray had used the skull as a paperweight. Schum picked it up and fingered through some paperwork on the desk, noticing a list of torture recommendations typed up by Ray. Two tips stuck out in his mind: one that said “use a warm soldering iron up inside her vagina” and another that advised Ray’s followers to “pluck pubic hairs out, one at a time, using a small pair of tweezers.”

Schum leaned over next to a small bookcase of true-crime books and picked up a maroon binder full of Ray’s “fantasy” sketches and drawings. He thumbed through the sixty pages of pencil drawings of David Ray chasing young girls and doing what was probably just run-of-the-mill acts of sadistic pleasure to Ray’s way of thinking: kidnapping, bondage, torture and killings. Schum was a religious man and the drawings nearly made him sick to his stomach. He feared that if these drawings were ever released to the public at large, America would spawn an epidemic of sexual sadists.

When he walked into the bedroom, Schum looked at the head of the bed and noticed a large olive green “dreamcatcher” hanging from a hook in the ceiling over the pillows. There was a small card attached to the web of interlacing threads and two long leather thongs with green plumes attached to the ends. Schum read the card:

All the bad dreams are

held in the web and all

good dreams spiral back

out to the dreamer. In

the morning when the

rays of the Sun fall

on the Dreamcatcher,

the bad dreams are

released to burn up

in the Sun.

Schum looked down on the floor and spotted a white plastic bucket with the same blue sweatshirt that Cyndy Vigil had been wearing the morning when she met Ray and Hendy on Central Avenue. The white letters on the front of the sweatshirt spelled out B.U.M. The broken green lamp was on the bed and the bloody ice pick was on the floor.

He walked around the end of the bed and into the bathroom and noticed another white bucket turned over on the floor—it had human feces smeared inside. Schum knew Cyndy Vigil was addicted to heroin and he wondered if she had been going through withdrawal during her three days in captivity.

He’d seen enough inside the house, so he took a stroll out to the front yard, where David had parked his white Dodge Ram Charger. He opened the driver’s door and saw an emergency red beacon on the floor—the kind of flashing light the police put on the roof of their patrol cars when they’re running down a suspect. Schum glanced up on the dash next to the steering wheel and saw a police scanner. David Ray had the perfect setup to play highway patrolman, Schum thought. Spot the victim, pull her car over late at night, and the rest was history.

The next afternoon, March 24, John Schum met with David Parker Ray at the Sierra County Correctional Facility on Date Street in downtown Truth or Consequences. Schum had been “profiling” killers for years and knew they were almost impossible to spot with the “naked eye.” Yet, when he first shook hands with Ray, he was a little surprised that David Ray came off as such a polite and soft-spoken gentleman. It didn’t take long to get down to business and John Schum just settled back in his chair and let David Ray do most of the talking. Their interview spanned three days and took over nine hours to complete. Unfortunately, David already had a court-appointed attorney and the 300 pages of notes were later ruled illegally obtained by the FBI.

Special Agent Schum asked David to start at the beginning.

“My grandmother’s name was Dolly Parker. One afternoon, the year before I was born, her two youngest sons were left at the ranch while my grandpa went to town to get groceries. They lived thirty miles from Mountainair. Alden and David was left there alone. Alden was fifteen and David was thirteen and they was playin’ cowboys and Indians with real guns—there was always guns at the ranch and Alden shot David in the heart and killed him. There was a bullet in the old Winchester and Alden didn’t know it.

“Alden put David’s body in the old pickup and tried to, tried to take him to town and it run out of gas—so Alden run down a horse and rode to the highway and—and flagged a car and—and tried to get help.

“Of course, David was already dead.

“When she found out what had happened, my grandmother flipped out. I wasn’t born yet—it was 1938—but I was born a year later and she decided that I was a reincarnation of her son, of her dead son David, and consequently I’m named David Parker Ray. . . . And that’s why she always wanted to raise me.

“There really wasn’t much affection in my childhood. I was there physically, but nobody paid any attention to me, you know, it was like . . . like I wasn’t really there at all.”

“What about the sexual fantasies?” asked Schum.

“This thing is literally tearing me apart,” David Ray told John Schum. “For forty years my life has been a private hell.”

Special Agent Schum asked David how he got interested in sex.

“When I was a little kid, my mother and father pawned me and my sister Peggy off on Dolly, my mother’s mother, who lived on a farm up in the hills near Mountainair, New Mexico. There wasn’t anything to do up there. My dad was a drunk and a drifter and every six months he would drop by and bring me a big pile of True Detective magazines, and when I was about ten years old, I started to have these fantastic dreams about raping and killing young girls. In the dreams I always used a broken beer bottle.

“I hated my grandmother. She didn’t care about us. By the time I was twelve years old, I was making my own bombs and setting off explosives all over the woods. My granny didn’t have a clue—she was a real fruitcake! I blew up a lot of tree stumps when I was a kid.

“By the time I was fifteen, I had a private dungeon under a big piñon pine tree—I had a hangman’s noose and a collection of broken beer bottles I planned to use on girls someday. When I got lonesome, I used to fuck a hole I dug in the ground.

“I was real shy when I was a child. I still am. I wouldn’t even look at a girl—I always kept my eyes down. I didn’t have my first date until I was eighteen years old. It was kinda funny what happened that night. We were parked by the Rio Grande in her car and she said she wanted me to drive home. I asked her for the keys and she dropped them down the front of her blouse and told me to come and get them.

“The next year I got married for the first time and I swear to God I was almost a virgin when I got married.

“I got married in 1959 and joined the army about a year later and went to Korea. My wife got pregnant in 1960 and we had a son. I came home on an emergency leave in 1961 to get a divorce. My wife was leavin’ the baby alone while she went out to party. By the time I got back to the United States, my son was being cared for by the Department of Public Welfare and I asked them to give me custody. They did, and my mother, Opel, and my stepfather, Cecil, raised my son until I got out of the army.

“I got married again in 1962 when I was only twenty-two years old. Ninety days later, I went back to court and got another divorce. We just didn’t click.

“In 1966 I married a woman named Glenda Burdine. We were married for almost fifteen years. We had a daughter, Glenda Jean, in 1967. Work was hard to find, so we divided our time between New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. I was twenty-six when we got married and I wanted to have a skill so I could make a living. I was going to aircraft mechanics school in Tulsa and we didn’t have much money. One day, out of the clear blue sky, my wife decided she was going to bring home the bacon for us by . . . becoming a whore. I didn’t like it at all, but it sure paid the bills. I still thought about the fantasy sometimes and she let me tie her up a couple of times, but that was it. I had this dungeon downstairs in our house and most of the time she didn’t have the slightest idea what I was up to. By the late 1970s, I was designing custom-made torture equipment and selling the stuff in Screw magazine.

“I left her in 1981 when I found her in my bed with another man. It was her day off, so I knew it didn’t have anything to do with money. I walked out the next day with Joannie Lee, her sister-in-law.

“We drove to California and for the next year we lived in Grass Valley, up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We grew marijuana up in the hills for a year and lived out of our trailer, and then one day we just decided to leave. We wanted to get regular jobs. We drove down to the turnoff at Death Valley—the spot where the road forks one way to Las Vegas and the other way to Phoenix. We flipped a coin and I won, so we went to Phoenix.

“I got a job as a mechanic at Canal Motors, a used-car dealership in Phoenix. We got married in 1983 and I changed my name back to my mother’s maiden name, Parker. We were David and Joanie Lee Parker. I still had the fantasy, and about every six or eight months, I would get the urge. I can’t tell you what it felt like working around all that temptation—anytime of day you could see them—hookers—four or five of them walking by, night and day. I started hiring girls to help relieve the pressure of my fantasy. I’d hire a hooker to do the dirty deed and pay her three hundred dollars an hour.

“I’d whip them, but I’d never break the skin—never. We had a code word we would use when it got too rough. When it got too painful for one of them, all they had to do was say the code word out loud.”

“And what was that word?” asked Special Agent Schum.

“Raspberry,” answered Ray.

“That’s all?” asked Schum.

“Yeah, raspberry, that’s all.

“There was no way Joannie Lee would take part in the fantasy. She knew what I liked, but she wouldn’t let me use her. She was jealous of the fantasy. We kind of drifted apart. Over the years she just got more and more crazy. She was having epilepsy attacks and she started drinking real heavy, and one time she held a pistol up to my head. I couldn’t take it anymore. Finally I had to send her home to her mother in Pennsylvania. That was 1994, and after she left, I changed my name back to David Ray.

“For the next three years, it was just me and the fantasy.

“I’m past the point where therapists can help me. One year I had six different shrinks. I tried to change, but it didn’t do no good. Anyway, it didn’t seem like some of ’em was too bright in the head. They didn’t understand my problem, I guess you could say.

“By 1994 I was getting the urge every two or three months. After that, it really got worse, especially after I started taking Viagra. I even started taking other pills to suppress my sex drive. Nothing worked. I have this master sketch notebook of drawings—some of them are real frightening. The sketches kind of track the progress of the fantasy. If the FBI would like, I’ll give you the drawings. Maybe you could help other people with the same problem. If I can help other people, I’d be glad to—it’s a curse that destroys your life.”

Agent Schum thanked Ray for the offer.

“I also read a lot of true-crime books,” added David. “They kinda fuel the fantasy. I’ve been collecting books on serial killers for the last fifteen years. I’ve read all twelve of the Ted Bundy books and, of course, I really like Stephen King. I also like Dean Koontz. I read a book by Christine McGuire called Perfect Victim in 1989, and after that, I changed the way I did things. The killer in the book used to put a woman’s head inside a box so she couldn’t see what was going on around her and that really turned me on. I’ve got a library of about seventy-five true-crime books and the FBI can have those, too.”

Again, John Schum thanked David Ray for his generosity.

“I was real lonely before I met Cindy Hendy. She moved here in 1997 and I met her after she got into trouble for fighting with one of her boyfriends—I think his last name was Arrey. Judge Fitch sentenced her to do community service work at Elephant Butte State Park, where I work. The first day I met her, she told me in a real matter-of-fact voice, ‘I don’t like women, and I don’t like men much, either.’

“It didn’t take long until I fell madly in love with her—even right now, I love her dearly.

“I did not discuss this thing from my past with Cindy. . . . I’m a very private person and I’m very ashamed of this hang-up. Slowly I manipulated her to my fantasy. She allowed me to do anything to her body, even though she didn’t like it. I softened my fantasies for her because I didn’t want to alienate her. Once I showed her my album of drawings and it scared her.”

Special Agent Schum and David Ray did their dance for several more hours. Schum used the same mellow, easygoing approach that worked so well for him so many other times when he was facing down a difficult and intelligent criminal. At one point Ray reminded Schum that he knew Schum was a profiler and he realized Schum was just doing his job. Finally, when it looked safe, Ray gave Schum his best shot. And Agent Schum listened with professional respect for what he thought David was trying to say.

“I am potentially dangerous,” said Ray. “I’m like a time bomb—and one way or the other, the problem stops here. I’m fantasizing about ten- and eleven-year-old girls, so if it takes a sterilization, that’s what I’ll do, you know. I’m serious about that. I like to cause pain, but I don’t like to physically, actually hurt a girl. I’m old and I’m tired and there’s not going to be any more incidents.

“I get the urge every two or three months now,” said Ray. “This thing is ruining my life. I’ve been having the fantasy since I was ten years old, and gradually it has gotten worse and worse. The fantasy is a curse for everyone around me, but somehow I’m going to beat it, one way or the other.”