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Speaker 4: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, VCK every week,
Speaker 4: another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 4: journalist and author Dan Zupansky. Good evening, This is your
Speaker 4: host Dan Zupanski for the program True Murder, the most
Speaker 4: shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that
Speaker 4: have written about them. Beside New Mexico's Elephant but Lake
Speaker 4: stood a windowless trailer which owner David Parker Ray fifty
Speaker 4: nine and his girlfriend's girlfriend, Cynthia Hendy thirty nine, called
Speaker 4: the Toy Box. A one hundred thousand dollars homemade torture chamber.
Speaker 4: He was equipped with whips, chains, pulleys, straps, clamps, leg
Speaker 4: spreader bars, and surgical blades and saws. A camcorder stood
Speaker 4: next to the leather padded torture table, set up to
Speaker 4: make snuff videos, while the ceiling mounted video monitor allowed
Speaker 4: female victims to see every excruciating detail of the agonies
Speaker 4: inflicted on them by their captors. Never trust a chain
Speaker 4: captive was one of the rules David Ray kept posted
Speaker 4: as a reminder to himself and his followers. His truth
Speaker 4: was proven on March twenty second, nineteen ninety nine, when
Speaker 4: after surviving a three day torture orgy. Cindy Vigil twenty
Speaker 4: two stabbed Hendy with an ice pick and escaped, clad
Speaker 4: only in a slave collar and padlock change. She told
Speaker 4: police that she'd been kidnapped, raped, and tortured by Ray
Speaker 4: and Hendy. A second victim, Angie Montano, twenty seven, came
Speaker 4: forward to describe how she'd survived a similar ordeal less
Speaker 4: than a month before. Satanist Ray was the center of
Speaker 4: a web of Satanism, sex, slavery.
Speaker 5: And murder.
Speaker 4: His disciple, drifter Roy Yancey, confessed to strangling to death
Speaker 4: Marie Parker twenty two while Ray took photos. Ray's daughter
Speaker 4: Jesse thirty one, was convicted of helping her father kidnap
Speaker 4: and torture Kelly van Cleeve twenty two. Cynthia Hendy told
Speaker 4: authorities that Ray had killed fourteen women. Police believed that
Speaker 4: he may have slain more than sixty. My special guest
Speaker 4: this evening is the author of Slow Death, author Jim Fielder.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview, and
Speaker 4: welcome to the program. Jim Fielder.
Speaker 5: It's good to be here.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much, Jim for agreeing to this interview. Now.
Speaker 4: First off, I'm very interested what made you want to write?
Speaker 4: This is your very first true crime book. So what
Speaker 4: made you want to write a book about this case?
Speaker 4: How did you come to write Slow Death?
Speaker 5: Well, I've been plugging away as a writer for seventeen years,
Speaker 5: and about a year and a half before this happened,
Speaker 5: I UH interviewed Mary Lauturna, the child rapist UH teacher
Speaker 5: from the Seattle area. Some wouldn't call her a rapist,
Speaker 5: but anyway, I spent six months interviewing her in jail,
Speaker 5: and I was a little overconfident. Maybe after seventeen years
Speaker 5: I deserve to be, but I thought i'd get a
Speaker 5: book deal to write about her, and she was pretty
Speaker 5: infamous back in ninety seven and ninety eight. Well that
Speaker 5: that didn't turn out to be the case. I got
Speaker 5: turned in a couple of times and they told me
Speaker 5: the same thing, and maybe some of the listeners can
Speaker 5: identify with this. They they'd ask, you know, what was
Speaker 5: my last book? And I didn't have a last book,
Speaker 5: and then they'd hire somebody from their stable writers to
Speaker 5: write about the subject. So anyway, I was just sitting
Speaker 5: around for a year waiting for things to happen. My
Speaker 5: wife and I were pretty anxious. I'd written a magazine
Speaker 5: article and I'd gone on Good Morning America CHESS a
Speaker 5: viewership of about ten million people, so I got some
Speaker 5: exposure on the laterno case, and I have to thank Mary.
Speaker 5: She was real open and gave me a lot of
Speaker 5: interesting information about her life, but it didn't go anywhere.
Speaker 5: So a year later I was plugging away working for
Speaker 5: the tabloids. I was writing articles for The Globe and
Speaker 5: the Star to tabloids here in America, and I had
Speaker 5: an editor that I really liked. He really was one
Speaker 5: of the best editors I've ever met in my life.
Speaker 5: And he called me one day a year later after
Speaker 5: the Liturno thing fell apart, and he said, Jim, there's
Speaker 5: a guy in New Mexico, a serial killer who's got
Speaker 5: a girlfriend from the Seattle area. And he said, I'm
Speaker 5: going to send you ten grand and I want you
Speaker 5: to go up to Evertt Monroe and interview Andy's relatives,
Speaker 5: her ex husbands, husband's, her children, anybody that knew her.
Speaker 5: So I took off and bought some great photographs and
Speaker 5: I think I bought some interviews also, but I ended
Speaker 5: up meeting some down and out interesting people, and I
Speaker 5: wrote an article for the Star, but it was just
Speaker 5: like one bad luck story after another. I know this
Speaker 5: is kind of a long answer, but I think it's important.
Speaker 5: The kids at Columbine High School killed their classmates seventeen
Speaker 5: days after I finished my article about David Parker Ray,
Speaker 5: so nobody was interested in Ray anymore. All of a sudden,
Speaker 5: they were very interested in these high school kids. So
Speaker 5: I took my information and one day I had lunch.
Speaker 5: This is kind of critical too. I had lunch with
Speaker 5: a guy who got the Laturno deal, a terrific local
Speaker 5: true crime writer named Greg Olsen, and I said, Greg,
Speaker 5: what do you think I should do with all this
Speaker 5: material I got on David Parker Ray and Cynthia Handy's girlfriend,
Speaker 5: And he said, why don't you send it to Kensington
Speaker 5: Publishing Jim and pitch a book. And I was anxious
Speaker 5: to write a book, or at least proved that I
Speaker 5: could write a book. And so I did, and I
Speaker 5: was real lucky. I heard Micjagger on TV the other
Speaker 5: night talk about the role that luck plays in anyone's success,
Speaker 5: and I think that's very true. He said, everybody works hard,
Speaker 5: lots of people work hard but don't get lucky, and
Speaker 5: I've been working pretty hard for a long time, but
Speaker 5: finally I got lucky. There was an editor at Kensington
Speaker 5: who thought my magazine piece on Laturno was excellent and
Speaker 5: asked me to put a proposal together on David Parker Ray.
Speaker 5: And I did not understand at the time what a
Speaker 5: nasty story this is going to be. And I don't
Speaker 5: regret that. I think David's story is one of the
Speaker 5: most horrific things you could ever read about in true crime.
Speaker 5: It's definitely kept people up at night. And we just
Speaker 5: got published in England under a different title, the Chamber
Speaker 5: of Horrors, and on the cover of the English book
Speaker 5: book it says America's worst serial killer. And I'm not
Speaker 5: an expert on serial killers, but I can't imagine anything
Speaker 5: being more horrible than what David did to people by
Speaker 5: torturing them for days and weeks at a time before
Speaker 5: he probably killed them. In any case, I got a
Speaker 5: book deal to give you a very long answer to
Speaker 5: a very interesting question. And in the editor at the
Speaker 5: time this is my last little comment about my change
Speaker 5: of luck. He said this won't take more than six
Speaker 5: months to finish this book, and I didn't care how
Speaker 5: long it took. I wanted to go to New Mexico.
Speaker 5: I'm kind of an outdoor guy. I wanted to fish
Speaker 5: and I can do some other things, and I knew
Speaker 5: New Mexico is a beautiful place. By the way, in
Speaker 5: case anybody's listening from that area, they pronounced the name
Speaker 5: of the lake elephant, Butte Lake, the one right next
Speaker 5: to Truth or Consequences, that's where David lived. But anyway,
Speaker 5: as it turned out, the book took almost four years
Speaker 5: to finish, but I don't regreat a minute of it.
Speaker 5: It's still alive and well, ten years after I got
Speaker 5: the book deal, which was in ninety nine, longer than
Speaker 5: that actually, And because of the Internet, there seems to
Speaker 5: be a heightened interest in this story.
Speaker 4: Yes, And I think as this a true crime reader's appetite,
Speaker 4: it gets more and more sensationalistic, or they're looking for
Speaker 4: something more out of the ordinary. Despite all the famous
Speaker 4: and infamous serial killers and their ghastly crimes, they're always
Speaker 4: looking for something else. And this is something that I
Speaker 4: hadn't known about. And I'm sure a lot of other
Speaker 4: people are catching up to this story and That's why
Speaker 4: I think this is destined to be a real true
Speaker 4: crime classic.
Speaker 5: It delivers. This story really delivers.
Speaker 4: Absolutely so well, let's get to that delivering the goods here.
Speaker 4: First thing I wanted to do is that really set
Speaker 4: up the story takes place that you had mentioned in
Speaker 4: a place called truth or Consequence, and I thought that
Speaker 4: the background story on this wasn't the story. The city
Speaker 4: was originally called Hot Springs. Give us a little bit
Speaker 4: description of how big an area we're talking about? How
Speaker 4: big is this town? Why did it change its name?
Speaker 4: And what was it like? What's the makeup like it
Speaker 4: as a religious place, is a blue collar place? What
Speaker 4: is what is the truth or goings and consequences like?
Speaker 4: Describe that for us before we started.
Speaker 5: I think it's probably changed over the years. At the
Speaker 5: post time, at the time David was arrested, it was
Speaker 5: a It was a drug town. In my opinion. One
Speaker 5: of the local reporters told me that half of the
Speaker 5: six thousand people were taking math amphetamins. And I don't
Speaker 5: know how you proved something like that, but I think
Speaker 5: that that gives you an idea of what was going
Speaker 5: on there. It had a huge drug problem. Well, I
Speaker 5: suppose people who take drugs. I don't think it's a problem,
Speaker 5: but there are a lot of people who don't work there.
Speaker 5: And I think that's all changed a lot in the
Speaker 5: last ten years. And I'll tell you more about that later.
Speaker 5: But back in about nineteen fifty, there was a radio
Speaker 5: show called Truth or Consequences run by a guy named
Speaker 5: Ralph Edwards. And I'm old enough to remember that show
Speaker 5: being on the radio when as a little kid. And
Speaker 5: apparently he offered any time in America a special deal
Speaker 5: that he'd come and broadcasts in their town if they
Speaker 5: changed their name to Truth their Consequences, which was the
Speaker 5: name of his radio show, and the people in Hot
Speaker 5: Springs voted to go ahead and do that. They were
Speaker 5: probably looking for a little promotion. The area where the
Speaker 5: town is located is stunningly beautiful. It's out in the desert,
Speaker 5: next to the Black Range Mountains on one side and
Speaker 5: the Valley of Death as the Mexican people once called
Speaker 5: it on the east side. It's full of beautiful sunsets.
Speaker 5: They get about three hundred sent days a year. I
Speaker 5: wouldn't mind living there. Actually, if I hadn't written this book,
Speaker 5: maybe i'd move there. But it's at the time this
Speaker 5: broke there were some pretty nasty things going on in town,
Speaker 5: nothing to compare with what David was doing, But he'd
Speaker 5: been there for several years, torturing people in this eight
Speaker 5: x twenty five foot trailer out in front of his house.
Speaker 5: And it's still hard for me to imagine that a
Speaker 5: lot of people in town didn't have some idea of
Speaker 5: what was going on.
Speaker 4: Okay, let's start with the way you've laid out your
Speaker 4: book is very, very interesting, and again, if you're going
Speaker 4: to have a book that really compels people to read
Speaker 4: the story, this is I think the way to do it.
Speaker 4: So a lot of of course, you don't have to
Speaker 4: put in chronological order, And I wanted to ask you
Speaker 4: why many you start with a prologue to your book,
Speaker 4: which isn't unusual in itself, but you include certain information
Speaker 4: in the very beginning of your book. Now I wanted
Speaker 4: to ask you what is included in the prologue and
Speaker 4: why did you feel it best to put it where
Speaker 4: you did? Why are you introducing that information?
Speaker 5: So there's one other a couple of really interesting facts
Speaker 5: that come out in the prologue. Let me just read
Speaker 5: when little section this is the first thing you read
Speaker 5: in the book. This is a police search warrant from
Speaker 5: April thirteenth, nineteen ninety nine. And you have to remember
Speaker 5: that the description of this video that you're going to
Speaker 5: hear from this police warrant. I never saw a video
Speaker 5: showing any of this at all, but I did see
Speaker 5: the hard copy from the police. Listen to this. The
Speaker 5: black mask and the storage shed, David's storage shed that
Speaker 5: they were searching appears from the description given to be
Speaker 5: the mask or similar mask which David Ray has been
Speaker 5: observed wearing in videotapes which were seized from his residents
Speaker 5: and which were viewed by officers pursuing to previous search warrants. Well,
Speaker 5: I've always felt that there were videos that nobody's ever seen.
Speaker 5: I'm not even sure if Jim Yon's the prosecutor, saw
Speaker 5: this video, but I've always felt that the FBI had
Speaker 5: more material that they didn't really So a lot of
Speaker 5: law enforcement people were worried that if the public got
Speaker 5: too much information about David Ray, it would incite a
Speaker 5: lot of violent behavior. So that's one thing that search
Speaker 5: warrant which remains mysterious to me because there's only one
Speaker 5: video of David that anybody has ever seen anybody from
Speaker 5: the outside world like me or people who went to
Speaker 5: the two trials, And that's a six minute videotape, and
Speaker 5: David's definitely not wearing a black mask. The second part
Speaker 5: of the prologue deals with FBI agent and the decision
Speaker 5: by the FBI, which I personally thought was really a
Speaker 5: bad one. A woman named well, I won't really describe
Speaker 5: her by name. Her family's probably suffered nothing. If people
Speaker 5: read the book, they'll get it anyway. But a thirty
Speaker 5: six year old woman was hired by the FBI one
Speaker 5: of their agents, to go into David's torture chamber, which
Speaker 5: had one hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment, and it
Speaker 5: had a chinological table that he strapped women down to.
Speaker 5: It had television sets that forced them to watch their
Speaker 5: bodies being tortured by David. There was an eighteen inch
Speaker 5: of dildo with a motor with a high and low
Speaker 5: and medium speed. Indescribable stuff. You know. Some of it
Speaker 5: he made, some of it he bought in legal stores.
Speaker 5: But the FBI decided to send a woman in to
Speaker 5: make drawings of what this place looked like and maybe
Speaker 5: I'm just an old fashioned, macho guy, but I wouldn't
Speaker 5: send a woman in to view this stuff at all,
Speaker 5: even though a lot of women read this book. There's
Speaker 5: a big difference between reading about this stuff and seeing it.
Speaker 5: And I've seen a lot of the pictures of what
Speaker 5: it looked like inside, so I know quite a bit
Speaker 5: about that. I've also seen David's drawings, which are really
Speaker 5: monstrous torture drawings. But what happened was Russ went in
Speaker 5: and uh, she did her job for several days, and
Speaker 5: then she drove to Albuquerque. I guess I did mention
Speaker 5: her by name, but she drove to Albuquerque and reported
Speaker 5: to her boss and then went back to al Paso
Speaker 5: and shot and killed herself.
Speaker 4: It's incredible, struck me.
Speaker 5: Is really interesting when the story was all over, that
Speaker 5: if David hadn't been captured, she might have still been alive.
Speaker 5: True Crime has a lot.
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Speaker 5: Strange twist, and that might not not have been one
Speaker 5: that people would have thought about it before. And I
Speaker 5: didn't think about it for a long time either, But
Speaker 5: I always felt real bad that that happened.
Speaker 4: To her and her family, certainly, and it really is
Speaker 4: a testament that you know, we see all kinds of
Speaker 4: programs where these police are are eager, they love their job,
Speaker 4: where you know it affects them. But this is the
Speaker 4: real story where somebody so affected they kill themselves. Those
Speaker 4: memories are haunting them. They can't handle this job that
Speaker 4: they certainly took, knowing what possibly could they could see
Speaker 4: on the job, but what they could experience.
Speaker 5: And yet well, and they always say that true crime
Speaker 5: is like throwing a rock in a lake. The ripples
Speaker 5: cisco off forever in all directions, and it affects so
Speaker 5: many people's lives. This story is still having negative impact
Speaker 5: on a lot of people.
Speaker 4: Oh, certainly, now we have one of the main characters
Speaker 4: in this harrowing story is Cindy Vigil twenty two. You
Speaker 4: introduced your fancy vehil thankish word, So yeah, v hill Ville, Okay, yeah, thanks.
Speaker 4: Now you introduced her in chapter one. What are the
Speaker 4: circumstances in which we the reader get to meet Cindy V. Hill.
Speaker 5: Well, Cindy V. Hill when she was in her early twenties.
Speaker 5: I think it's fair for me to say this because
Speaker 5: I've spent a lot of time talking to her. But
Speaker 5: she made some bad decisions about her life, and she
Speaker 5: was working as a hooker out on Central Avenue in Albuquerque,
Speaker 5: and she got lured by David's girlfriend one day into
Speaker 5: the back of their little mobile home trailer, and all
Speaker 5: of a sudden, v Hill the girlfriend pulled a gun
Speaker 5: on her, and they blindfolded her and gagged her and
Speaker 5: chained her to the wall and drove her south one
Speaker 5: hundred and twenty miles south to treat her consequences, and
Speaker 5: kept her for three days and tortured her. So you
Speaker 5: know that she's a prostitute. And that made the book
Speaker 5: challenging the right because a lot of people don't think
Speaker 5: prostitutes are sympathetic. But in my opinion, if everybody in
Speaker 5: life was honest about what they did sexually between the
Speaker 5: ages of twenty and thirty, there might be a lot
Speaker 5: of scandalous stories out there, and I've seen how she's
Speaker 5: turned her life around since this happened. She's married and
Speaker 5: has three kids, she's doing a beautiful job raising and
Speaker 5: she's turned into a wonderful person. It could be that
Speaker 5: this experience really altered her in some positive ways, even
Speaker 5: though her three days was pretty monstrous.
Speaker 4: Right now, let's get to you know, you've described somewhat
Speaker 4: the torture chamber, but we'd have not met David Parker Ray,
Speaker 4: and we have not met his partner. Let's go back,
Speaker 4: give us a little bit of background on David Parker Ray,
Speaker 4: and then we can go on and talk about his
Speaker 4: partner in crime, and then we can go on to
Speaker 4: the whole group and satan Is and talk about so
Speaker 4: many of these other things. Tell us about the main
Speaker 4: subject of this book, the very charismatic, I would say,
Speaker 4: But the subject of this book, David Parker Ray. Tell
Speaker 4: us a little bit about him.
Speaker 5: Well, I think a lot of us have met people
Speaker 5: like David. He was tall and shy and kept himself
Speaker 5: a lot. He was an ace mechanic. Some people that
Speaker 5: worked with him said he was the best car mechanic
Speaker 5: they'd ever met. So he was good with his hands
Speaker 5: and he was good with details. He grew up way
Speaker 5: out in the country, far away from every major city,
Speaker 5: a pretty lonely kid in a lot of respects. In fact,
Speaker 5: the way he got his name is pretty interesting. He
Speaker 5: had two uncles, one whose name was David, and long
Speaker 5: before he was born, his uncle David was shot and
Speaker 5: killed by his brother in an accidental shooting, and his
Speaker 5: grandma decided that's where his name would come from. And
Speaker 5: he wasn't real fond of his grandma. He's not from
Speaker 5: what he told me anyway, And he said, by the
Speaker 5: time I was twelve thirteen years old, I had explosive
Speaker 5: as I was blowing up stumps. And he claims in
Speaker 5: his journals, in his own writings that by the time
Speaker 5: he was fifteen or sixteen, he had broken beer bottles
Speaker 5: that he was using to torture girls with. So he
Speaker 5: was into this stuff for a long time. Most criminals
Speaker 5: get caught after ten or fifteen years. David was a
Speaker 5: criminal for at least forty years. He opened up to
Speaker 5: the FBI. He did a three hundred page interview with
Speaker 5: the FBI, But I don't know if they forgot to
Speaker 5: tell him that he had the right to an attorney
Speaker 5: or not. But unfortunately that terrific interview, which I've read
Speaker 5: about half of, was not allowed in court because he
Speaker 5: wasn't told what his rights were. But I think they
Speaker 5: were trying to get him to open up and tell
Speaker 5: them as much as possible, and he basically manipulated almost
Speaker 5: everybody he ever came in contact with, which means that
Speaker 5: he was highly intelligent. One FBI agent told me that
Speaker 5: they considered David Ray one of the five most intelligent
Speaker 5: criminals they had studied in ninety two years of being
Speaker 5: in the business. But he hung out with his friends.
Speaker 5: He had a little satanic group of about four or
Speaker 5: five people that we know of in town who helped
Speaker 5: him torture people. One of the fascinating parts of this
Speaker 5: story is that they've never found a body. And if
Speaker 5: you ever go to southern New Mexico, it's covered with
Speaker 5: old minds, it's covered with caves. There are thousands of
Speaker 5: places where you could lower dead bodies underground. Jimmy Jnsen
Speaker 5: I used to talk about how there must have been
Speaker 5: at last supper scene like the one in the Bible
Speaker 5: underground with women's bodies propped up around a table. David
Speaker 5: was a splunker, and a lot of people may not
Speaker 5: know that word, but he had a license from California
Speaker 5: that where they had taught him how to crawl down
Speaker 5: in the caves, repelled down in the caves with ropes,
Speaker 5: so he could have easily lowered some of those bodies
Speaker 5: in the caves. But so far, as of twenty ten,
Speaker 5: they haven't found a body. I think someday down the road,
Speaker 5: long after many of us are gonde, they'll find some bodies.
Speaker 5: But he was convicted on several other atrocities other than murder.
Speaker 4: Now, his partner it was Cynthia Hendy. Now tell us
Speaker 4: a little bit about her background, and tell us about
Speaker 4: how David Ray and Cynthia Hendy actually met before we
Speaker 4: get into the rest of it.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, a lot of people in the
Speaker 5: story were abused real badly as children, sexually abused, physically abused,
Speaker 5: and mostly abused. And that's not an excuse because a
Speaker 5: lot of people who grow up with that kind of environment.
Speaker 5: Louis Armstrong is a good example. I think his mother
Speaker 5: was a streetwalker. But a lot of people who grew
Speaker 5: up in difficult situations managed to make good choices for themselves.
Speaker 5: But boy, I'll tell you after the research that I did,
Speaker 5: you know, the whole book could be a testament to
Speaker 5: the evils that child abuse visits on those individual people
Speaker 5: and on society in general. V Hill grew up in
Speaker 5: a pretty horrendous home. Just to give you an example,
Speaker 5: one little example. When she was eleven, she told her
Speaker 5: mom that her stepfather was sexually molesting her, and her
Speaker 5: mom didn't believe her and kicked her out of the house.
Speaker 5: And you know, I could tell you stories about a
Speaker 5: lot of the people in this case. You know, good
Speaker 5: guys and bad guys who grew up in real difficult homes.
Speaker 5: But v Hill was married several times and was real
Speaker 5: sexually active. She was small, but really strong. One of
Speaker 5: her friends said that at one hundred and ten pounds,
Speaker 5: she could beat up a two hundred and twenty pound
Speaker 5: woman in a bar. So she was a tough cookie.
Speaker 5: And she and her boyfriend got involved in some theft
Speaker 5: problems and some drug problems out by Monroe, and they
Speaker 5: escaped Washington State, escaped the authorities. I think it was
Speaker 5: about nineteen ninety seven, two years before David was arrested,
Speaker 5: and he met her one day he was working for
Speaker 5: the Park Service and he met her out of work release,
Speaker 5: I think, and they struck up a relationship right away.
Speaker 5: He'd been living there a long time. He'd been married
Speaker 5: three times, and he'd been by himself for quite a while,
Speaker 5: and he'd been doing a lot of kidnapping during that period.
Speaker 5: We have records that he kept from those three years
Speaker 5: prior to ninety seven, and he was real, real active
Speaker 5: at that time. But Handy she said something that I'll
Speaker 5: never forget. One of her friends indicated that she had
Speaker 5: come over and talked to him about some of the
Speaker 5: girls they were kidnapping, and Handy told the sky in
Speaker 5: town one time she said, I'd like to take the
Speaker 5: breath out of one. And I thought that was a
Speaker 5: very chilling thing to say about murder. But she was
Speaker 5: definitely part of it. She was sentenced to thirty six
Speaker 5: years in New Mexico. You only do half the time,
Speaker 5: so she's done about ten so far. She has eight
Speaker 5: more ago and she wrote me a letter last year.
Speaker 5: She apparently is interested in writing a book and asked
Speaker 5: me if i'd be willing to help her, which I'm
Speaker 5: not willing to do, but if she would ever tell
Speaker 5: the truth, the whole truth, instead it is part of
Speaker 5: the truth. Her story would be very interesting. She claims
Speaker 5: that David told her that he killed at least fourteen people,
Speaker 5: and that he described to her how he sank some
Speaker 5: of them in the lake and buried some of them
Speaker 5: out in the desert.
Speaker 4: Now we talk about Cindy Viale twenty two and in
Speaker 4: chapter one, like I asked you, what are the circumstances
Speaker 4: where we do meet her? And so tell us what
Speaker 4: happens on that fateful day and how does it then
Speaker 4: lead to the arrests of David Ray and Cynthia Handy.
Speaker 4: Tell us about this one incredible day that I talked
Speaker 4: about where she was running in the trailer court.
Speaker 5: It was March twenty second, nineteen ninety nine, and David
Speaker 5: went to work that day. He put on his little
Speaker 5: ranger uniform that he had to wear and went to
Speaker 5: work repairing vehicles for Elephant but State Park, which was
Speaker 5: a few miles down the road. And they had had
Speaker 5: the hill in captivity now for almost three days. She'd
Speaker 5: been in the house and they'd been torturing her. They
Speaker 5: had her chain to the wall, that they had a
Speaker 5: pit bull dog collar around her neck. She's a small
Speaker 5: woman maybe five one five to two, and they had
Speaker 5: about a five foot chain chaining her naked body to
Speaker 5: the wall in the living room. And on that afternoon,
Speaker 5: David was at work his girlfriend. There are two Cindy's here,
Speaker 5: so it does get a little confusing. They'll just call
Speaker 5: them v Hill and Handy. V Hill being the victim,
Speaker 5: the girl from Albuquerque that they kidnapped, and Handy being
Speaker 5: the girlfriend. Hendy was in the kitchen, supposedly making sandwiches
Speaker 5: and a potato salad for a picnic that they were
Speaker 5: going to have that afternoon. During that period of time,
Speaker 5: the victim saw a ring of keys, just like you
Speaker 5: see on a television show, laying on a table about
Speaker 5: four or five feet away, and she stuck her foot
Speaker 5: out and pulled the table over next to her, just
Speaker 5: like any smart person would do. But there were probably
Speaker 5: twenty five keys at least on this ring, and she
Speaker 5: started trying to unlock herself from the wall, and she
Speaker 5: couldn't find the right key, and she made a little commotion,
Speaker 5: a little noise, and Hendy heard it from the kitchen
Speaker 5: and came out to a living room of the double
Speaker 5: wide trailer, and all of a sudden, these girls got
Speaker 5: in this big cat fight, and somehow v Hill managed
Speaker 5: to find the key during the fight and unlock herself
Speaker 5: from the wall. And you know, Handy hit her over
Speaker 5: the head with a green glass lamp. I have pictures
Speaker 5: of that lamp smashing on the floor. But somehow, you know,
Speaker 5: I guess when you're fighting for your life. And certainly
Speaker 5: they were right on the verge of taking her out
Speaker 5: to the toy box, which is what David called his
Speaker 5: torture chamber, and probably they were going to murder her.
Speaker 5: It's hard to say, but she felt like she didn't
Speaker 5: escape that afternoon, that at that moment, it was all
Speaker 5: over for her. And looking back on it now, her
Speaker 5: act of bravery is unsurpassed. Really, without her, there's a
Speaker 5: good chance David would still be out there with his
Speaker 5: friends torturing people. Anyway, the Hill bolted loose from this fight,
Speaker 5: and as soon as she unlocked herself from the wall, Oh,
Speaker 5: let me tell you how I forgot one really important
Speaker 5: element of vital element. In fact, what freed her up
Speaker 5: more than anything was a small box that fell off
Speaker 5: a shelf and hit the floor right in front of
Speaker 5: her during the fight. And when the box opened, there
Speaker 5: was an ice pick inside of it. And if people
Speaker 5: believe in an act of God, this was an active God,
Speaker 5: because you know, ve Hill grabbed that ice pick and
Speaker 5: stabbed Handy in the back of the neck just enough
Speaker 5: to really stop Handy for a moment, just for a
Speaker 5: couple of seconds, and boom, all of a sudden, veels
Speaker 5: out the door, running down the dirt road Bass Road,
Speaker 5: totally naked. She sees a car coming down the road.
Speaker 5: She runs up to the car. The woman in the
Speaker 5: car is terrified, rolls up her windows and drives off.
Speaker 5: And I think later felt pretty bad about that. But
Speaker 5: ve Hill kept going down in the corner, took a
Speaker 5: right down towards the lake Elephant Butte Lake and ran
Speaker 5: down this paved road and managed the spot just the
Speaker 5: right white double wide trailer to run in too. And
Speaker 5: there was a woman sitting in her kitchen having a
Speaker 5: smoke and a cup of coffee. Her husband was out
Speaker 5: in the backyard, and all of a sudden, this girl
Speaker 5: dashes through the door, and she's covered with blood and
Speaker 5: mud and feces and screaming help me, help me, at
Speaker 5: the top of her lungs. And Darlene, who really is
Speaker 5: another hero. There are a bunch of heroes in this story.
Speaker 5: Just very coolly grabs her phone and hits nine one one,
Speaker 5: and probably five six minutes later, the police come out
Speaker 5: and pick up the hill, you know, and take her
Speaker 5: to the hospital and she survives that ordeal. And then
Speaker 5: probably a half an hour later, two other police are
Speaker 5: cruising down the road and there's David driving around with
Speaker 5: his girlfriend, you know, Andy, looking for this naked girl.
Speaker 5: And of course they got her. It was going to
Speaker 5: be all over. Well, they didn't get her, They got arrested,
Speaker 5: and you know, two and a half years later, David
Speaker 5: got two hundred and twenty four years. About a year
Speaker 5: and a half later, his girlfriend got thirty six years.
Speaker 5: It was a long, sort of convoluted chase to nail
Speaker 5: him to the wall. But the big advantage for me asn't.
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Speaker 5: Plus eyins author and for the authorities was he wasn't
Speaker 5: able to destroy anything in his house during his toy box.
Speaker 5: And so I had access through this great prosecutor, the
Speaker 5: sort of number one hero of my book, Tim Yance,
Speaker 5: this grizzly bear of a man who was patient enough
Speaker 5: to try this case. I had access to all sorts
Speaker 5: of things that really helped me, especially FBI audio tapes
Speaker 5: that David made. So that was the scene that afternoon.
Speaker 5: You know, David's off at work as girlfriend's at home
Speaker 5: making the data salat, and all of a sudden, the
Speaker 5: captive escapes, and the girlfriend calls David, and they get
Speaker 5: together immediately and start driving down the roads looking for
Speaker 5: this girl. And fortunately she ran into a home where
Speaker 5: somebody was there. I mean, she could have tried five
Speaker 5: or six trailers where everybody was gone. It was a
Speaker 5: beautiful day, but Darlene was there and did all the
Speaker 5: right things.
Speaker 4: It's an incredible story. This woman you just get sucked
Speaker 4: into this drama. It's something right out of a fictional movie,
Speaker 4: you know, running down this in this trailer court with
Speaker 4: a padlock around a chain and a dog collar, naked,
Speaker 4: like you say, covered in blood, running into a trailer,
Speaker 4: screaming for her life while her captors are looking for
Speaker 4: in this small little trailer Court's incredible anyway, What I
Speaker 4: wanted to also ask you, there's another important person in
Speaker 4: the subject in this in this story is Angelique Montago.
Speaker 4: Who is Shentano?
Speaker 5: I think? Is how you pronounced it? Again?
Speaker 4: Thank you for that.
Speaker 5: I didn't pronounce them all right my first time through either.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And who is she and how is she involved
Speaker 4: in this story?
Speaker 5: Well, she was a woman who used to have a
Speaker 5: lot of problems with drugs up in Albuquerque and moved
Speaker 5: with her son to truth her consequences and still had
Speaker 5: problems with drugs, I think, And she was kind of
Speaker 5: a confused person. As little as I know about her,
Speaker 5: she appeared to have some emotional problems. She got kicked
Speaker 5: out of her apartment for non payment of ran at
Speaker 5: one point before she was kidnapped by David, he loaned
Speaker 5: her a pup tent, and she was living with her son,
Speaker 5: who was five or six years old, down the beaches
Speaker 5: of elfint but Lake in a pup tent. She had
Speaker 5: some friends there that told me she was just a
Speaker 5: woman who had never quite been able to put her
Speaker 5: emotional life together. But she got kidnapped by David about
Speaker 5: i'd say a month before the Hill did, and she
Speaker 5: was in the torture chamber for a while. In fact,
Speaker 5: the Globe did a big article with her. She had
Speaker 5: lost she had lost one of her brown eyes in
Speaker 5: a drug related accident and unfortunately, maybe because she didn't
Speaker 5: have very much money, and got replaced with a blue eye.
Speaker 5: So she had one brown eye and one blue eye,
Speaker 5: and the tablet of people promised to get her matching
Speaker 5: eyes as she did this story which which never happened actually,
Speaker 5: but in my book you can you can read what
Speaker 5: she says in her Globe article about her time with David.
Speaker 5: But what she did was she got some sympathy from
Speaker 5: v Hill, and she talked David into letting her go.
Speaker 5: And I think the Hill, I think, excuse me, Handy,
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, Handy had something to do with that too. Sorry,
Speaker 5: you think after all these years, I'd have all these
Speaker 5: names down perfect, but this is not a story you
Speaker 5: think about every day of your life if you had
Speaker 5: to think about it for four years. In any case,
Speaker 5: I think that Handy had a little bit to do
Speaker 5: with her being released. But David, after several days of torture,
Speaker 5: took Angie out on a road and let her go
Speaker 5: to hitchhack back to town. But he knew that her
Speaker 5: reputation was so shaky in town that probably nobody would
Speaker 5: believe her. And in fact, she supposedly, according to what
Speaker 5: I was able to get, she told the policeman who
Speaker 5: picked her up hitchhacking the story, and he didn't tell
Speaker 5: anybody about it because it just didn't seem credible to him.
Speaker 5: But after David was rested, all of a sudden everything
Speaker 5: fell into place and they interviewed Angie and she told
Speaker 5: them her story, and she would have been the next
Speaker 5: person up for a trial after the Calivan Cleave trial,
Speaker 5: But unfortunately she died of a drug overdose and some
Speaker 5: related problems with pneumonia. I think in Albuquerque about a
Speaker 5: year later. She was only twenty seven years old, and
Speaker 5: she had a real tragic life. Also, her brother was
Speaker 5: a killer and she turned him in. She turned him
Speaker 5: into the police for murder, and her mother blamed her
Speaker 5: instead of her brother, and never really forgave her for
Speaker 5: doing that. So, like a lot of abused human beings,
Speaker 5: I think they make a lot of efforts to resurrect
Speaker 5: their lives. But when you have to start working that
Speaker 5: hard at it when you're only ten, twelve, fourteen years old,
Speaker 5: sometimes it's pretty tough to get away from trouble.
Speaker 4: It's hard to overcome that amount of adversity.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes it is, it really is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a tragic story. Like you say, this is
Speaker 4: a very ripple effect. How many people were fatally affected here?
Speaker 4: You know, there's lucky there's any even bright spots in
Speaker 4: the book here. It's such a devastating story.
Speaker 5: And some people believe. Some people believe that David was
Speaker 5: evil in a biblical kind of scenes and that he
Speaker 5: still has control over our lives. I don't happen to
Speaker 5: believe that. I mean, I can tell you some real
Speaker 5: bad luck stories a lot of us have run into
Speaker 5: since we met David, But I don't think it has
Speaker 5: anything to do with him. I think it's no random.
Speaker 4: Bad luck, it's no curse. Now this book talks about Satanism,
Speaker 4: and a lot of you know, you could see programs
Speaker 4: and you've talked that there's been books where there's talk
Speaker 4: of Satanism, but I think this is one of the
Speaker 4: few books that I've ever read, including the Manson story,
Speaker 4: that there really seems to be some real, credible Satanism
Speaker 4: going on here. He had this little group and I'm
Speaker 4: the evil that's contained here that some of the stuff
Speaker 4: that's in this guy's mind and on these tapes certainly
Speaker 4: is that tell us a little bit about the Satanism.
Speaker 4: And if you don't mind, if you can do this,
Speaker 4: can you read some of this transcribed or describe something
Speaker 4: what is in these excerpts from this transcribed videotape.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'll come through here and find one in a second.
Speaker 5: Just a quick little warning. My phone is pretty old.
Speaker 5: I'm not a big technology person, and I've had my
Speaker 5: phone for about, oh, I don't know, ten twelve years.
Speaker 5: But there's a small beeping sound that I can probably
Speaker 5: hear at my end and you can't hear at your end.
Speaker 5: And I've heard it before and usually there's not a
Speaker 5: problem with that. But if for some reason my phone
Speaker 5: bombs out, on you. That looks like we've got about
Speaker 5: fifteen or twenty minutes to go. Yeah, I'm going to
Speaker 5: try to get as much information in there as I can. Okay,
Speaker 5: let me grab the book here. And I mean, Satanism
Speaker 5: is hard for a lot of people to buy, you know,
Speaker 5: they just don't They just aren't into it. But David had.
Speaker 5: He had the capes and the robes and the worship
Speaker 5: ceremonies that he put people through. You know, he made
Speaker 5: seven of these. I was told there were six, but
Speaker 5: I think there were seven. Seven of these audio tapes
Speaker 5: where he actually created a tape recording that he could
Speaker 5: play for victims while they were tied up in the couch,
Speaker 5: and you know, all of a sudden, instead of him
Speaker 5: telling you what he was going to do to you,
Speaker 5: he turned on his tape recorder and you listen to him.
Speaker 5: And when you hear a guy with an Oklahoma, Texas
Speaker 5: accident say hello there, bitch in the first tape, those
Speaker 5: three words alone are really shocking. And then he goes
Speaker 5: on to describe what he's going to do. And there's
Speaker 5: one tape where he talks about how he's going to
Speaker 5: bring in the German shepherds he's going to rub moscow
Speaker 5: l on the women's vagina and bring in horny dogs
Speaker 5: and let the dogs screw the women. Those are his terms,
Speaker 5: and I'm sure he did that, you know. You know,
Speaker 5: there are descriptions of that from at least one of
Speaker 5: the three victims. But he talks about how he's gonna
Speaker 5: time up and basically torture him in lots of ways.
Speaker 5: And I'm gonna give you a couple of specific examples.
Speaker 5: There's one tape where you can hear a woman crying
Speaker 5: in the background, and you can hear other people talking
Speaker 5: in the other room. So I imagine they were torturing a
Speaker 5: young woman, and he goes in to quiet him down,
Speaker 5: to quiet his followers down. You know, he tells the
Speaker 5: tape recorder the next audience, I got to go in
Speaker 5: there and shut these guys up. And then he comes back,
Speaker 5: and he laughed, and he describes what they're doing to
Speaker 5: this woman. And what they're doing is they're putting out
Speaker 5: their cigarette butts on her breast. So, you know, the
Speaker 5: when I got my hands on the tapes, I read
Speaker 5: all one hundred and seventy five pages of the FBI
Speaker 5: audio tapes single space. You know, incredible stuff. And I
Speaker 5: didn't want the book to just be a study in horror.
Speaker 5: You know, it operates on a lot of different levels.
Speaker 5: But I felt like the tapes really got people in
Speaker 5: David's head so they'd know a little bit more about
Speaker 5: what he was all about. And so I picked out
Speaker 5: five of them, and probably out of one hundred and
Speaker 5: seventy five pages, I interspersed the tapes in five different
Speaker 5: places and probably didn't cover more than maybe fifteen or
Speaker 5: sixteen pages out of one hundred and seventy five. But
Speaker 5: let me just see if I can. I don't have
Speaker 5: my book open to an exact spot, but I think
Speaker 5: I can probably find one quick enough. I'll hang on
Speaker 5: for a second. Sure, Oh, here we go. I used
Speaker 5: to have all these pages memorized a long time ago.
Speaker 4: Okay, And this is the videotape that was found. It
Speaker 4: found in the toy box itself.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, there was one six minute videotape and that's
Speaker 5: all they got. But the first thirty minutes of that
Speaker 5: videotape is blanked out, the cameras looking at the ceiling.
Speaker 5: So it makes you feel like David a race the
Speaker 5: hell of a lot of stuff. Wow, Okay, I'm gonna.
Speaker 5: I'm still thumbing through here a little bit. I've gotten
Speaker 5: to the section of the FBI. Okay, I'm just gonna.
Speaker 5: I don't want to read too much, but I'll just
Speaker 5: read you a little bit here. This is the middle
Speaker 5: of just a second. Oh yeah, oh gosh, I'm sorry,
Speaker 5: that's the part about handy. Uh just a second, let
Speaker 5: me thumb back. All right, here we go. He's talking
Speaker 5: about a hooker that he kidnapped and tortured. She was
Speaker 5: a hooker because she had one hundred dollars, because she
Speaker 5: had one hundred dollars a day drughab. She had already
Speaker 5: told me that that was why she agreed to let
Speaker 5: me spank her for a hundred bucks. That's how he
Speaker 5: first got her. And then I think he used the
Speaker 5: gun and tied her up and took over. She'd go
Speaker 5: get her drugs so she didn't have to work for
Speaker 5: the rest of the night. I didn't tell her then
Speaker 5: that she wasn't going to be working again for quite
Speaker 5: a while. She also didn't get the hundred dollar bill.
Speaker 5: I had already taken it out of her sock. Excuse me,
Speaker 5: hang on, I just have to sit up a little
Speaker 5: straighter here. By that time, I was horny as hell.
Speaker 5: I climbed on the table and put just a little
Speaker 5: bit of vasoline right around the head of my dick
Speaker 5: and stuck it in her asshole. Apparently she didn't get
Speaker 5: that too much. It was nice and tight. After that,
Speaker 5: I gave her a damn good ass fucking. And what
Speaker 5: he's done. She was a big breasted hooker. And he
Speaker 5: goes into great detail here to describe her body. You know,
Speaker 5: he talks about her being tied down. The little horror
Speaker 5: was bouncing her ass all over the table. When I
Speaker 5: finished trapping her down, I buckled table straps around her
Speaker 5: reports house or ribbed cage in her belly. Anyway, it
Speaker 5: just goes on and on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So what he would do is he would warn
Speaker 4: them with this audio tape of the imminent torture, his
Speaker 4: lack of regard for these people, this evil persona expressed
Speaker 4: in these audio tapes, and then he would for days
Speaker 4: torture these women.
Speaker 5: What I want to ask to be a sexual stay
Speaker 5: is it's about watching the fear in the girl's eyes.
Speaker 5: That's what he gets off on. That's what he basically
Speaker 5: emotionally and physically and mentally jacks off on is the fear,
Speaker 5: and he builds up that fear with these audio tapes,
Speaker 5: and then of course what he does to them is
Speaker 5: really horrific.
Speaker 4: Now, why why are you so confident before we you know,
Speaker 4: we've got about sixteen minutes, But why are you so confident?
Speaker 4: And why are the authorities so confident that he's just
Speaker 4: not a deviate, that he's just doesn't enjoy saddism and
Speaker 4: s and m and toward you know, bondage and has
Speaker 4: gone too far clearly? But how is the authorities so
Speaker 4: certain that he's a killer.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, the testimony of all three girls
Speaker 5: lined up, you know, the things that they talked about,
Speaker 5: and none of them had heard the audio tape, or
Speaker 5: excuse me, one had heard an audiotape, the other two
Speaker 5: had not. The girl went to court and testibout against him,
Speaker 5: was also a very brave girl, van Cleeve, Kelly van Cleeve.
Speaker 5: You know, her description of what happened to her lined
Speaker 5: up perfectly with what David talked about in the audiotapes.
Speaker 5: And she was kidnapped in nineteen ninety six. He made
Speaker 5: the audio tapes in nineteen ninety three. You know, I
Speaker 5: think that the blood. The pictures on his wall inside
Speaker 5: of the torture chamber were pictures of women bound and
Speaker 5: gagged in incredible distress. And you know, in his drawings,
Speaker 5: I can't describe the drawings. I've got about seventy of them,
Speaker 5: I think, but he was really artistic and he drew
Speaker 5: all these torture devices that he built, and drew how
Speaker 5: women would be strapped down. I think it was to
Speaker 5: not give you too long of an answer, and I
Speaker 5: feel like maybe some of my answers have been a
Speaker 5: little lengthy. But if you add up all the stuff,
Speaker 5: the audio tapes, the drawings, what David told the FBI
Speaker 5: in a three hundred page interview, he told him he
Speaker 5: was real worried he was going to start torturing ten
Speaker 5: year old girls. And I don't think he was worried
Speaker 5: about it at all. I think they had plans. We
Speaker 5: know they had plans to kidnap one little girl in town,
Speaker 5: and her mother, when she found out about it, moved
Speaker 5: out of town immediately left with their consequences in twenty
Speaker 5: four hours. You know, his daughter was also very involved
Speaker 5: with him. There's a young woman who disappeared from a
Speaker 5: tavern in Albuquerque, and the last person she was seen
Speaker 5: with was Jesse Ray. Well, we know that Jesse basically
Speaker 5: kidnapped Kelly Van Cleave at a bar one night and
Speaker 5: took her over to dad's house for torture. The only
Speaker 5: reason that David's daughter didn't do more time was because
Speaker 5: I think the prosecutors were getting tired of dealing with
Speaker 5: the case and they wanted David to plead guilty, and
Speaker 5: he said, I'll do that if you let my daughter off,
Speaker 5: and they let her out after three years. She probably
Speaker 5: should have gotten a hell of a lot more time
Speaker 5: than that for what she did. But this woman in
Speaker 5: Albuquerque disappeared. I mean, the last person they saw her
Speaker 5: was was Jesse Ray. It was a gay bar. Jesse
Speaker 5: used to ride her big gold wing around and there's
Speaker 5: a fair amount of evidence that she helped her dad
Speaker 5: a number of times. But I think it's just the
Speaker 5: overwhelming just you get staggered. Well, he doesn't when you
Speaker 5: inhale all this information.
Speaker 4: He does intimate, though, on these tapes, that he's not
Speaker 4: adverse to killing.
Speaker 5: He says, oh tapes, he talks about taking a woman's life.
Speaker 5: He warns or this is you know, you might die
Speaker 5: you know, if you don't behave, and.
Speaker 4: He certainly talks about that. He says a quote incredible
Speaker 4: quote like if I killed all the women that I
Speaker 4: tortured that, you know, they would fill up the you know.
Speaker 4: So he clearly intimates that he's killed before he has
Speaker 4: the capacity to kill. He doesn't mind killing. So that's
Speaker 4: why I ask it. It seems that the authorities and
Speaker 4: everyone self you're including yourself, are very very convinced that
Speaker 4: this person just didn't deal with a couple, two or
Speaker 4: three victims.
Speaker 5: Well, if he was as smart as they say was,
Speaker 5: then he was smart enough to get rid of these
Speaker 5: bodies out in an you know, undeveloped area of the country,
Speaker 5: you know, where really hard to find them. And we're
Speaker 5: talking about thousands and thousands of miles of wide open
Speaker 5: desert country for anybody, for anybody who's an apologist for David.
Speaker 5: And I've told a couple of people that have talked
Speaker 5: to me, I've said, you know, I said, you know,
Speaker 5: sometime when we get together, I'll bring my drawings. And
Speaker 5: I said, the minute you see those drums, you'll be terrified,
Speaker 5: terrified of this guy, and you won't feel like it
Speaker 5: was just a kinky thing that he was into because
Speaker 5: the women that he drew were definitely being tortured.
Speaker 4: Now, was that part of the trial that you just
Speaker 4: you allude to that that somehow or no.
Speaker 5: In fact, there was a hung jury on the first trial,
Speaker 5: which is a whole separate, interesting story, but one of
Speaker 5: the reasons that the jury hung was because Yance was
Speaker 5: not allowed to introduce any of the audio tapes. Mertz
Speaker 5: was the judge and he was running it real straight.
Speaker 5: He was real worried that it was going to be
Speaker 5: appealed if he got anything wrong, and he said the
Speaker 5: tapes were made, you know, in ninety three. There's no
Speaker 5: proof that he played them for Kelly ban Cleveland ninety six,
Speaker 5: and so we're not going to introduce him. Well, what happened,
Speaker 5: without giving too much of the book away, is that
Speaker 5: right before the second trial, Mertz was pretty stressed out
Speaker 5: that he had to do this all over again. And he,
Speaker 5: at the age of about fifty three fifty four years old,
Speaker 5: he's taking a shower at home during jury's selection and
Speaker 5: he dies of a heart attack and had brought in
Speaker 5: a thirty seven year old judge, the youngest judge in
Speaker 5: New Mexico. History to do a trial like this, and
Speaker 5: Swasey allowed Yance to play one of those audio tapes,
Speaker 5: and that probably sealed the deal in the second trial.
Speaker 4: You know, David certainly and his partner, and his partner's
Speaker 4: Cynthia Hendy as well.
Speaker 5: Oh I think so yeah. I mean she, you know,
Speaker 5: she got nailed by v Hill because v Hill, you know,
Speaker 5: really had a lot of raw information about her. And
Speaker 5: finally she turned on David, which is characteristic of a
Speaker 5: lot of women in murder cases. They will turn on
Speaker 5: the men. Not that this is a good or a
Speaker 5: bad thing, but that happens quite often. And she decided to.
Speaker 5: Rather than getting one hundred and fifty years, she turned
Speaker 5: state's evidence and she told them that about the fourteen
Speaker 5: dead people that David had talked about, and she described
Speaker 5: in detail how David used to sink him in the lake,
Speaker 5: and she gave him a lot of other information. I
Speaker 5: don't think she gave him everything she had, but she
Speaker 5: opened some doors for the prosecutors and when they walked in,
Speaker 5: they were able to nail David more effectively because of that,
Speaker 5: And so in return they gave her a letter sentence.
Speaker 4: You do talk about though, that there was some talk
Speaker 4: that Parker David pardon me, David Ray had said to
Speaker 4: her his partner in crime, do whatever it takes to
Speaker 4: help yourself, and that she had originally pleaded guilty and
Speaker 4: then wanted to change her plea.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's that's an interesting part of the story.
Speaker 5: Well, the trouble with Hindy is that she she tells
Speaker 5: different stories about man all the time. I mean, she
Speaker 5: had a boyfriend that she got put in jail down there.
Speaker 5: He moved down there with her, a big, tall guy
Speaker 5: that she was involved with, and she claimed that he
Speaker 5: beat her up and she actually hid herself in the
Speaker 5: face I think with pots and pants to make it
Speaker 5: look like he did, not to say that he hadn't
Speaker 5: beaten her up before. I'm sure he'd probably done that too,
Speaker 5: But she you know, I've got one letter she wrote
Speaker 5: to the judge about her boyfriend before David, saying, please
Speaker 5: let him go. He's a well meaning guy. We've been
Speaker 5: trying to get work. I mean, she had a history
Speaker 5: of flip flopping back and forth on what she said,
Speaker 5: which makes it hard to believe that she'll ever get
Speaker 5: a book deal, because I don't think anybody's ever going
Speaker 5: to believe the story that she tells him, even if
Speaker 5: it is the whole truth.
Speaker 4: There is talk in your book too that she had
Speaker 4: actually called the FBI about her father and then retracted
Speaker 4: a story just to give some credibility to what you
Speaker 4: had just said. Totally.
Speaker 5: Well, the daughter, yeah, in nineteen eighty six. There's so
Speaker 5: many subplots going on in this story, which for me
Speaker 5: as an author, really made it a great book to write.
Speaker 5: It's you know, I'm not comparing myself to Stephen King,
Speaker 5: but if you could imagine Stephen King writing The Spurious
Speaker 5: damn Book on the Face of the Planet, this would
Speaker 5: be the book. This would be the story. It's a
Speaker 5: horror novel, is what it is. That's the way it
Speaker 5: turned out, even though it's all true. But yeah, the
Speaker 5: daughter Jesse in nineteen eighty six, David was cheating her
Speaker 5: out of drug money. They were growing marijuana up in
Speaker 5: northwestern New Mexico, and he wasn't paying his daughter off.
Speaker 5: That's what she claimed later, And so she says that
Speaker 5: she turned him in and accused him of torture and
Speaker 5: kidnapping in Mexico and all this other stuff. And later
Speaker 5: she told the FBI that was all big lie. It
Speaker 5: was really about her not getting paid her drug money. So,
Speaker 5: like Handy, it's easy to get the two of them
Speaker 5: confused too. But Jesse Ray, like Handy, didn't always tell
Speaker 5: the truth, and so it makes it difficult sometimes to
Speaker 5: know when they do talk to somebody what they are saying,
Speaker 5: whether it's true or not. And obviously, by the way,
Speaker 5: the FBI investigated David for a whole year on those charges,
Speaker 5: those kidnapping and torture charges in nineteen eighty six, and
Speaker 5: they couldn't find anything to support what his daughter had said.
Speaker 4: Sure, there's another strong central character in here. We only
Speaker 4: have a few minutes, but I know that you included
Speaker 4: this person in the book because he felt it important.
Speaker 4: And her name is Francis Baird later Francis Baird Sanchez.
Speaker 4: But can you tell us a little bit about why
Speaker 4: she's important to this story.
Speaker 5: Well, she was really a great gal all the way around.
Speaker 5: Her grandma owns one of the local news papers in town.
Speaker 5: There are three newspapers in this town, which makes it
Speaker 5: a pretty well read little community. By the way, even
Speaker 5: though they do have a lot of heavy drug use
Speaker 5: down there, they have a lot of people who love
Speaker 5: to read, and this is the best I think of
Speaker 5: the three newspapers, in my opinion. And when the story
Speaker 5: broke her grandma put her on the case. She was
Speaker 5: only seventeen years old, Francis was and she followed the
Speaker 5: case religiously for about a year and a half and
Speaker 5: wrote three award winning stories that they won AP awards. Actually,
Speaker 5: she's a great researcher. And then just before the first trial,
Speaker 5: one of the prosecutors, not Yan, it's one of the
Speaker 5: other prosecutors, said Francis, I don't think he should come up.
Speaker 5: I think this is going to be a little bit
Speaker 5: gross for you what we're introducing as evidence. And so
Speaker 5: she kind of started to slide back from the story.
Speaker 5: But she did her brilliant journalistic damage before she left.
Speaker 5: And now's she must be twenty eight or twenty nine,
Speaker 5: and I've only talked to her a couple of times recently,
Speaker 5: but she's more horrified by the case as a grown
Speaker 5: up than she was as a teenager. She was a fearless,
Speaker 5: fearless reporter. And the two heroes in my book are
Speaker 5: the forty seven year old prosecutor Jim Yance, who's resurrecting
Speaker 5: his career after being pushed out in Albuquerque, and that's
Speaker 5: a whole great story too. And then a seventeen year
Speaker 5: old reporter who takes on one of the nastiest cases
Speaker 5: you could ever imagine, and Francis wasn't abused as a child.
Speaker 5: A lot of women who read books like this are
Speaker 5: women who are trying to still untangle their own personal
Speaker 5: lives with their parents and what happened to them as kids,
Speaker 5: and they read a lot of these books. I've met
Speaker 5: a lot of them at book signings. I met a
Speaker 5: woman at one book signing who actually murdered her husband
Speaker 5: and got away with it because he beat her up
Speaker 5: and did her so much harm. And she asked me
Speaker 5: how charming David was, because her husband was real charming too.
Speaker 5: I think the story is about evil. I mean, and
Speaker 5: I'm not a religious person, but I remember growing up
Speaker 5: in a first Free Methodist church where they talked about
Speaker 5: this kind of stuff, and I didn't buy into it
Speaker 5: growing up throughout my life, and I don't know if
Speaker 5: I'm buying into it now, but I think David was
Speaker 5: way more than just a psychopath. He was pure evil
Speaker 5: in the sense of having a large dose of the
Speaker 5: devil in his personality.
Speaker 4: Now we've got about three minutes left, so we can
Speaker 4: talk about a few things. Also, just wanted to ask
Speaker 4: you there's another character and the mean named Dennis Roy
Speaker 4: Yancey that got sucked into the Satanism and was also
Speaker 4: charged for murder in this and too. We'll just leave
Speaker 4: that for the reader to discover for themselves in your
Speaker 4: incredible work.
Speaker 5: So Yancy gets out this year. By the way, he
Speaker 5: did his ten years, and he's the only one associated
Speaker 5: with murder. He murdered a woman named Mary Parker under
Speaker 5: David's tutelage, he claimed. But they gave him twenty years
Speaker 5: and he did his ten and he might be out
Speaker 5: right now. I don't know. It'll be really interesting if
Speaker 5: he starts talking again what he has to.
Speaker 4: Say now, David Ray, David Parker Ray will never be
Speaker 4: released from prison.
Speaker 5: No, he died in prison.
Speaker 4: He died in prison.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he was sentenced to two hundred and twenty four
Speaker 5: years about eight days after the nine to eleven explosions.
Speaker 5: I think it was the eighteenth of the nineteenth of September,
Speaker 5: and he died the following May of a massive heart
Speaker 5: attack down in hobbson New Mexico. They just transferred him
Speaker 5: to another prison. And his last attorney, Lee McMillian, thinks
Speaker 5: that David did it to himself and gave him heart attack.
Speaker 4: How would he have done that?
Speaker 5: Well, David put on a display once, he said watch me,
Speaker 5: and he lowered his blood pressure by two thirds, and
Speaker 5: this lawyer watched David turn white all over, which is
Speaker 5: will power. David had a history of congestive heart failure too,
Speaker 5: so you can check it up to magical thinking if
Speaker 5: you want to, or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 5: And he wasn't the young man a combination? Yeah, he
Speaker 5: was like fifty nine years old or sixty one by then.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, we've just got a little bit of time.
Speaker 4: This was your first true crime book. What else have
Speaker 4: you done since then? And just tell us about any
Speaker 4: new protest you're working on and any other books that
Speaker 4: listeners that might be interested would like to go and investigate.
Speaker 5: And well, I got a job as a sixth grade teacher,
Speaker 5: which was a miracle. It was kind of an accident,
Speaker 5: but I ended up teaching math and science to these
Speaker 5: beautiful eleven year old children for six years. And that
Speaker 5: was the flip side of David Parker Ray to be
Speaker 5: around innocence and beauty and laughter and all the things
Speaker 5: that I had not had a chance to enjoy to
Speaker 5: a very large degree. So I did that for six years.
Speaker 5: But now I'm working on a novel about a guy
Speaker 5: from Tennessee who gets his wife gets kidnapped and in
Speaker 5: forty nine, and he comes to Texas to hunt down
Speaker 5: the killer and he ends up shooting the wrong man.
Speaker 5: He shoots the twin brother of the real killer.
Speaker 4: Have you got a working title for that?
Speaker 5: No, I just call it nineteen forty nine. But I
Speaker 5: think it's a good story. I think making a big,
Speaker 5: huge mistake in your life that you can't reverse, and then,
Speaker 5: of course, in this case, being tracked down by the
Speaker 5: evil twin brother and the police. You know, I don't know.
Speaker 5: It'll be fun to.
Speaker 4: Write, you know, Yeah, that sounds interesting. And so how
Speaker 4: did this you've sort of alluded to it. How did
Speaker 4: this in the end, just to wrap up, how did
Speaker 4: this affect you writing this book? What would you say
Speaker 4: in the end? Was it positive? Was it negative?
Speaker 5: Well, you know, my wife and I split up six
Speaker 5: months later, and the book definitely played a role in that.
Speaker 5: I'm not saying it was the big, biggest reason, but
Speaker 5: her therapist told her that only a sick person could
Speaker 5: write a six story like this, which wow bs as
Speaker 5: far as I was concerned. And I lost that relationship
Speaker 5: with my wife and my stepdaughter, which meant a lot
Speaker 5: to me. They were both real supportive. I've spent most
Speaker 5: of my life since then with my gat reading good books.
Speaker 5: I'm reading a book on a little big horn right now.
Speaker 5: I love to read, and I keep a journal all
Speaker 5: the time, so I have kept up as a writer,
Speaker 5: but I haven't produced anything since then. Maybe David took
Speaker 5: it all out of me. I have friends who think
Speaker 5: that's true, but I don't think the book damaged me
Speaker 5: in any ways. I think I was very fortunate to
Speaker 5: have a great editor, Michael Hamilton, my last editor, Kensington,
Speaker 5: give me a lot of support in the book, and
Speaker 5: it's sold nearly one hundred and fifty thousand copies. So
Speaker 5: I know that I wrote it. I wrote it pure,
Speaker 5: I wrote it the way I wanted to write it,
Speaker 5: and I think it'll be around long after I am.
Speaker 4: Yes, I think you did a great job in this book.
Speaker 4: It's an incredible read. Slow Death Jim Fielder the sickest
Speaker 4: serial torture killer ever Man never mind the Southwest. I
Speaker 4: agree that this is one of the sickest serial killers
Speaker 4: ever and an incredible book, incredible story, and thank you
Speaker 4: very much for agreeing to this interview. Jim, and I
Speaker 4: want to thank you again for a coming on the program. Well,
Speaker 4: thank you, Jim, and you have a good evening. I'm
Speaker 4: going wrap up the show now. Thank you very much,
Speaker 4: and have yourself a good evening, all right, take care, Darre,
Speaker 4: thank you, thank you. You've been listening to the program
Speaker 4: True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history
Speaker 4: and the authors that have written about them. Join me
Speaker 4: next time.
Speaker 5: Good night, Dan,