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CHAPTER 10

In all my years working as a reporter in downtown Los Angeles, I never saw anything this frightening.

—Betsy Phillips, reporter for the the Herald, in T or C, 8/08/1999

Jim Yontz took over as lead prosecutor the day after his forty-seventh birthday, and from the beginning the big, burly cop-turned-prosecutor felt he had a lot to prove. He was always the strong guy who tried to go out and save the weak people of the world, and in one moment his whole world had come crumbling down all around him.

In the summer of 1998, Yontz was head of the Narcotics Bureau operating out of Albuquerque. He was struggling to come to grips with his mother slowly dying from cancer. He was a married man, and just after midnight on August 15, undercover police picked him up with a prostitute on Central Avenue, on the eastern outskirts of Albuquerque. The cops spotted his pickup truck parked in an alley just west of Wyoming Boulevard and Highway 66, and when they pulled up behind and asked Yontz to get out, he was very upset because he knew the whole situation looked bad. He even started to cry when they asked him what he was doing with “a known hooker.” He claimed he was driving through a high-crime area along Highway 66 when he saw a woman walking alone. He stopped and offered her a ride. He denied he gave her money for sex. The officers found no evidence of money changing hands and let him go, but they reported the incident to their boss.

Word got back to the Albuquerque district attorney and he suspended Yontz, pending an investigation. Five days later, James A. Yontz resigned under pressure, strongly denying that he’d done anything wrong. At the time he told the AP: “I often stop to help people out. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs. I lead a very dull life. I only stopped to help a woman I feared might be a crime victim. I just didn’t do anything wrong. I only tried to help somebody.”

A year later, he found himself assigned to an assistant DA job out in the small town of Socorro, New Mexico; as luck would have it, he was in charge of the biggest crime case in New Mexico history. In his own quiet, straightforward way, he expected to convict David Ray and his cohorts and save his good reputation that he developed over twenty-six years in law enforcement—seventeen years as a prosecutor.

He got his first public chance to corral the bad guys at a preliminary hearing scheduled for David Parker Ray on April 15 and 16 at the Sierra County Courthouse in T or C. Yontz normally worked out of the bigger Socorro Courthouse, but this time he was crammed into a little chamber that barely held sixty spectators behind the two small wooden tables facing the judge’s bench and the witness table only a few feet away.

That Thursday and Friday, Jim Yontz went up against two men with good legal credentials. Men he expected to face over and over during the rest of 1999: Jeff Rein, the soft-spoken, handsome thirty-six-year-old defense attorney for David Ray, and Judge Neil P. Mertz, the chain-smoking fifty-three-year-old father of two grown children who ran his court with a tight fist and was now firmly in charge of all criminal trials in what the press had dubbed the “New Mexico Sex/Torture Case.”

On the first day David Ray walked into court with his head down and his shoulders slumped. As soon as Mertz outlawed all cameras in the courtroom, Ray perked up and seemed to manage an occasional “smirk,” at least according to Frances Baird, ace reporter for the Sierra County Sentinel. Frances was a tall, leggy blonde with horn-rimmed glasses and had been born into a newspaper family. According to her mother, Frances always had “ink in her blood.” Myrna Baird, publisher of the Sentinel, did not like the idea of her teenage daughter sitting there right next to David Ray and listening to witnesses talk about an old man with a dirty mind and filthy habits. But there was no way Frances was going to miss the story of the century in the tiny town where she had spent all of her days.

April 15 and 16 brought three of the major players in the Sex/Torture Case together under the watchful eye of an ambitious and experienced-beyond-her-years reporter.

It didn’t take Jim Yontz long to call his first witness on the morning of April 15. Angelique Montano, twenty-seven, looked haggard and confused as she took the witness stand. She didn’t want her one blue eye and one brown eye to be noticed, so she tried not to make eye contact with anyone. Her voice quaking, she told the story of how she ended up spending five days with Ray and Hendy between February 17 and 21, 1999. She told the truth, except for the part about the cake mix. At least Yontz hoped she was telling the truth.