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CHAPTER 9

Roy’s not a violent person at all. He can’t even spank my kid, much less murder anybody.

—Christina Yancy, before visiting her husband, Roy, in the Truth or Consequences Jail, 4/11/1999

On April 9, 1999, agents from the FBI and the New Mexico State Police arrested twenty-seven-year-old Dennis Roy Yancy, a close friend of David Ray’s, Jesse Ray’s and Cindy Hendy’s. He was arrested at the Black Range Restaurant in T or C, where he had just started a job as a fry cook only ninety minutes before police hauled him away. Doug Beldon, tight-lipped agent in charge of the FBI investigation, issued a brief press release on the arrest of the third suspect in the David Parker Ray case.

“We arrested Dennis Roy Yancy, charging him with the July ’97 kidnapping and murder of Marie Parker.”

Jackie Williams, owner of the Black Range Restaurant and Motel, was there when the police rushed in and handcuffed Yancy. “He was a clean, good-looking guy,” she said. “I thought he was going to be a good cook. He made real good biscuits. He was staying in room eighteen of the motel and the FBI agents investigating him were staying just three doors down in room fifteen. It was crazy! I think he knew they were hot on his heels. Roy was staying with his wife and her little girl and, I swear, he was constantly on the phone, tying up our only phone line in the office. When they arrested him, he went quietly.”

On Saturday, April 10, Roy Yancy took the police out to an isolated stretch of Highway 195, north of T or C and west of Elephant Butte Lake. They were hoping to dig up the body of Marie Parker. The rolling hills were covered with creosote bushes and stretched for miles in all directions. After digging all day, the authorities came up empty-handed. By this time, Yancy had not pleaded guilty, but he was completely cooperating with the police. On the drive back to town, Roy turned to a police investigator from the NMSP and gave his version of why they didn’t find Marie.

“David must have moved the body,” he said.

State policeman K. C. Rogers questioned Yancy later that afternoon. They talked for hours and finally Rogers asked him to write it all down. For a moment, Yancy balked, but then signed a confession.

Afterward, K.C. Rogers didn’t have too many nice words for Dennis Roy Yancy.

“Poor bastard—he was a loser with women. David Parker Ray was offering him free sex and he just couldn’t turn it down.”

On Sunday, April 11, Yancy was sitting in his cell at the Sierra County Detention Center when he got a visit from his pregnant wife, Christina. Yancy didn’t know she had gotten pregnant by another man and he used her as a sounding board to vent his feelings about what went down back in 1997 on the night he killed Marie Parker. After he talked to his wife, she walked outside and disclosed the conversation to a very surprised reporter for the Associated Press, Chris Roberts.

“Roy said he and another person went to the Blue Waters Saloon on July fifth to conduct a drug deal for Marie. Once outside, the other person held a gun on Marie and told her to get in the back of a pickup truck. They left and went over to David Ray’s place and someone else held a gun on Marie while David took pictures of Roy killing her. He thinks the police have pictures of him killing Marie. He strangled her, I guess.”

Dennis Roy Yancy married Christina in 1997, thereby having the distinction of marrying one woman and killing another, all in the same year. Even though he was a murderer, Christina stood by her man, telling the AP that Roy was manipulated into it. “He didn’t want to kill her is what he said.

“I’m worried he’s going to get the death penalty,” she told the press.

Little chance of that happening in New Mexico. Although the neighboring states of Texas and Oklahoma routinely execute murderers (Texas once executed eight men in one month and a short time later Oklahoma tied that record), New Mexico was more like old Mexico, where nobody dies for killing another human being. Since the U.S. Supreme Court brought back the death penalty in 1976, New Mexico had never executed a single murderer. In fact, the last execution to take place in 1960—not that murder and mayhem take a holiday in the Southwest. The rate of violent crime in New Mexico is notoriously high.

Dennis Roy Yancy was already beginning to feel the pressure of life in a small-town jail, where everyone knows everyone else. David Ray was already making friends and Christina told the AP that after just two days in jail, Roy had already gotten a note passed along by another inmate. It said: “Rats die in jail.”

The week after Dennis Roy Yancy was arrested, prosecutor Jim Yontz charged Yancy with five felony counts: kidnapping, first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit kidnapping, conspiracy to commit murder and, finally, tampering with evidence—which explained why he was on the phone twenty-four hours a day at the Black Range Motel. Yontz asked that Yancy be held without bail and the Sierra County Magistrate Court agreed with the assistant DA. If convicted, Yancy was facing life in prison plus 46½ years. Jim Yontz made it clear to Roy Yancy that if he was going to get a reduced sentence, he had to cooperate in the continuing investigation of his “violent coach,” David Ray.

Two years before he met Ray, Dennis Roy Yancy had already been a well-known fixture on the scene in Truth or Consequences. He’d gone to Hot Springs High School and by the time he was sixteen he’d been arrested for the first time on a burglary charge. In the fall of 1987, he and two other men broke into the house of a local schoolteacher and stole a stereo and a computer, dumping the computer in Mud Canyon, south of town. He was arrested just a few days before Halloween, 1987, and many residents of T or C didn’t think it was any big surprise that he was in big trouble with the law.

Dennis—as he was known to the locals at the time—and a small group of friends were in a satanic cult and that very fall they’d been terrorizing the community. They had been turning over gravestones and then spray-painting them with satanic graffiti, killing small pets, even going so far as threatening to kill small children. In 1987 city officials in T or C actually canceled all Halloween festivities in town and parents locked their doors and kept their children at home, some fearing for their children’s lives.

The Sentinel went so far as to hire an undercover reporter to infiltrate the gang and report on their evil ways. The reporter got sucked into the group and refused to expose his new friends. One of those friends was Dennis Yancy. The reporter was fired by the Sentinel, but not before five-year-old Frances Baird’s grandfather wrote a blistering editorial condeming the activities of Dennis Roy Yancy and his ilk. Mr. Baird’s column from October 21, 1987, takes dead aim at Yancy and his buddies—without ever mentioning them by name:

I know that by revealing what I am about to write about it will probably result in vandalism to our property. It is time that the local school leaders know that there is a SATANIC MOVEMENT in our local system that is attempting to enroll followers. The recent vandalism of the high school was painted over quickly, but not before students could see that SOME OF THOSE CHARACTERS WERE SYMBOLS OF THE SATANIC CULT.

We must get rid of this social vermin and prevent the conversion of any more of our young people.

It should not be allowed to grow.

While Yancy was flirting with the devil, David Parker was in Phoenix, arguing daily with his boss, Billy Ray Bowers. The two men did not like each other, but they were forced to work side by side every day trying to repair and sell used cars. In the fall of 1988, a year after Yancy had his brush with the law, Bowers disappeared from work one day. It was September 22, 1988, and his family immediately offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to his safe return.

A year later, on September 28, 1989, a fisherman found the body of a dead man floating off McCrea Canyon, along the eastern shore of Elephant Butte Lake. The unidentified body had been wrapped in a blue tarp and roped to two heavy boat anchors—weighing eleven pounds apiece. He had a single bullet hole in his head and $49.47 in his pockets, but no identification. Police put out an all points bulletin to neighboring states, but they were unable to identify the five-foot ten-inch white male in his late thirties or early forties.

For ten years the body remained unidentified. It wasn’t until Cindy Hendy told the police that David Ray had told her he killed Billy Ray Bowers that the authorities checked dental records and ID’d the “other” man from Canal Motors.

On April 16, they called his oldest son and Michael Bowers traveled over a thousand miles from his home in Kansas City to come to T or C to retrieve the body of his long-lost father. On April 17, he was taken out to the town cemetery and police led him to his father’s grave site, the last resting place of Billy Ray Bowers for the previous ten years. Michael looked down at the undisturbed headstone and read the simple inscription: “MR. JOHN DOE” SEPTEMBER 28, 1989.

Ten long years later, in the spring of 1999, twenty-two-year-old Marie Parker was probably in the ground, too, but nobody knew where she was buried. She’d been missing since July 5, 1997.

A week before the police found her abandoned car in the parking lot of the Blue Waters Saloon, she and her two little girls, four and five, had been kicked out of their apartment for not paying the rent. They were living in a pup tent on the western shores of Elephant Butte Lake. She was camping at Hot Springs Cove, just north of David Ray’s trailer. In fact, she had borrowed the tent from Ray, and when her campsite got too messy for him, the fastidious Ray had come down and chewed her out.

“I’ve got a good reputation in the community,” he told her. “I don’t want it ruined.”

By this time in her life, Marie Parker was a junkie, unable to stay away from the easy supply of “meth” and “coke” in Truth or Consequences. Parker had been trying to kick her drug habit for years, but according to her friends, she just wasn’t strong enough to say no. Her main drug dealer was David Ray’s daughter, Glenda Jean “Jesse” Ray.

Two nights before she vanished, Marie Parker had gotten into a loud argument with Jesse Ray at the Kettle Top Cafe, right across the street from the Blue Waters Saloon. According to the former owner of the café, Roy Yancy was there, too. The whole time he was there, Marie was very nervous. She had dated Yancy years before, but now she thought he was sort of “strange” and she always felt uncomfortable around Jesse.

“Jesse had the ‘hots’ for Marie, and Marie didn’t want to have sex with her. At the time Jesse rode a big motorcycle and she had a nickname in T or C. They called her ‘the dyke on the bike.’ ”

The next night, Marie Parker was at Raymond’s Lounge at the intersection of North Date and Marie Street in T or C when Roy Yancy walked in. Parker didn’t want to have anything to do with him. After they broke up, she had not remained friends with him. Her friend Julie Lawrence saw the fear in her eyes that night.

“Marie tried to avoid him as much as possible,” said Lawrence. “She was very afraid of Roy and wanted to leave immediately.”

The night she vanished was a hot July 5 and she was in the Blue Waters Saloon with four of her friends. The last person she spoke to was Clay Hein. Just before midnight, Jesse Ray offered to give her a ride somewhere; Marie was hesitant but said yes. She came up to Clay to tell him what was going on. He never forgot what she said: “I’ve got to go home and check on my daughters.”

“That was the last time any of us saw her,” said Hein. “She never came back.”

Drugs had been an off-and-on problem for years for Marie Parker. At one time she was engaged to Larry Brock of Center Point, Texas. He wanted to marry her, but he also wanted her to change friends. “I couldn’t live with the fact that she was running around with druggies,” he said. “I gave her a ring and a few days later she took it to a pawnshop in Truth or Consequences. The ring was nice—it was all I could afford, but it was still a half-carat gold ring. She sold it for two hundred dollars.”

The last night Marie had a warm bed to sleep in was July 1, 1997. She was staying in an apartment with her kids and her half brother, Tom McCauley. They couldn’t afford the rent. Years later, when McCauley read in the Sentinel that Dennis Roy Yancy had admitted to killing his sister, he was visibly shaken. “It angers me to hear about these people in T or C, these so-called friends. I don’t understand how they could do such a thing. My sister was a wonderful person who shared with the poor, often giving food and shelter to homeless people. I want people to know what a good person she was. She never once did anything to deserve this. Nobody deserves anything like this.”

The last morning Marie Parker showed up at work, she was working at the Fast Stop Convenience Store on South Date Street in Truth or Consequences. Her good friend Sonya Hall still works as a cashier at the store and thinks about Marie every week. She still feels sorry for her, and especially for her children.

“She wasn’t ever right in the head,” said Hall. “Things were always happening to her. One time one of her daughters was missing and Marie was just out of her mind. She was going nuts. I said, ‘Marie, have you checked your van?’ She told me no and so I checked it myself and, sure enough, there was the kid—Sierra was playing on the floor in the back. I think the little girl was only three years old at the time.

“If you knew Marie, she wasn’t a degenerate at all—she was just mentally ill, the poor thing. She was frantic all the time. I don’t think most of the time she was in her right mind.”