Today’s episode is going to be a horrific tale of torture and sadism, so if you also happen to be a sadist then now’s the time to grab your popcorn and prepare to revel in Simon’s misery. I of course will be limiting the more explicit details to only what I deem absolutely necessary for the sake of the story, but this is unfortunately another one of those stories that’s impossible to properly tell without at least some level of detail.
It’s a story of a serial killer who was never convicted of murder, yet is believed to have killed at least 60 women. Even worse, it’s a story that might have gone completely undiscovered were it not for one victim’s desperate attempt to free herself from captivity. It’s also a story of missed opportunities by law enforcement, a story of the endless depths of human depravity, and most importantly, a story about towns with funny names.
Police, What Are You Doing?
It was the summer of 1986, and it was just a typical day at the FBI’s field office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jesse, a girl who was 18 or 19 years old at the time, walked into the office to levy some shocking accusations against a man named David Parker Ray. According to Jesse, David was kidnapping, torturing, and sexually assaulting women before trafficking them to Mexico. Those are very serious allegations, but according to the FBI they were very vague and non-specific allegations as well.
Sure, Jesse had said what David was allegedly doing, but who were the women? Who were the buyers in Mexico?
Those are follow-up questions that Jesse didn’t have had the answers to, which was going to be a problem. Search warrants are supposed to be extremely specific both in terms of where they are looking and what they are looking for, and Jesse didn’t give enough information to secure them a search warrant or to arrest David. But they could still bring him in for a friendly little chat.
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what they talked about. The FBI Agent’s handwritten notes are publically available in the FBI vault and you’re certainly welcome to try to decipher them yourselves, but to my eyes everything is either completely illegible or redacted. However, the following February the FBI again spoke with David while he took a lie detector test, and this time the summary report was typed. Of course this report was also heavily redacted, but there are still plenty of extremely disturbing details available.
David was allegedly brought in for another conversation in 1987 because of his side business manufacturing and selling BDSM equipment. Obviously this wouldn’t be a crime by itself, as there’s nothing illegal about consenting adults engaging in BDSM. However, the fact that he made and sold this sort of equipment certainly lent some amount of credence to Jesse’s initial claims of sexual torture. At least potentially.
Maybe David was building bondage gear because he was torturing and selling women, or maybe Jesse was just a prudish busybody that hated the idea of sexual deviants living in her town. Given the title of this episode you already know which of those was the reality of the situation, but the FBI had no way to be sure yet.
However, while it is often alleged that the FBI brought David in, the report seems to indicate that he voluntarily came in to take a lie detector test. I am unclear whether this means he made an unsolicited visit to the FBI’s office or if they brought him in and the polygraph was his idea, but the report makes it sound like the former.
Given how forthcoming David was in this second interview, however, I’m surprised that the FBI didn’t take the situation more seriously. Maybe it’s because there was a polygraph machine involved and it wasn’t well understood what useless bullshit they were at the time. Plus, he went for the old trick of admitting to lesser crimes to avoid getting in trouble for larger crimes.
For example, David admitted that he would commit theft from time to time. He had a moral code and knew that stealing was wrong, but he also felt that giant corporations and insurance companies were fair game. That’s a really common stance to take, especially in America, so it was hardly a red flag worthy of the FBI’s attention. Nor was the fact that David frequented sex workers.
But when David said that he had volunteered for the polygraph because he was concerned about his sexual desires and believed that he was a danger to himself and others, that certainly should have been a bit more concerning. He talked about all the drawings he made of brutally violent abuse, depictions he mistakenly believed counted as BDSM, and how they were only getting more intense.
He also said that he built a dungeon/torture chamber in his basement, complete with iron rings on the floor to secure a captive’s chains in place. Sound a little familiar, Simon? Of course, David also claimed to have never used his dungeon with another person before. The torture chamber was just David’s happy place; it gave him a sense of calm and let him manufacture his electroshock dildos and motorized fuck machines in peace.
Given his intense fantasies, I would personally find it difficult to believe his claim that he never have engaged in even a little bit of BDSM with any of his four wives.
At least I think it was four by this point. He was definitely married and divorced four times in total, but New Mexico doesn’t have those records in a centralized location and to my knowledge they aren’t available online. I don’t think Simon is going to pay for me to fly to New Mexico just to pop into the Sierra County records office for five minutes, so let’s just assume all four marriages had failed by this point.
Anyway, statistically I’d think at least one of his wives would have been into even some light BDSM, but David claimed that not only did he never take part in any of these activities with them but that during at least one of his marriages he didn’t even think about his intense fantasies.
Of course, while he claimed to never use the dungeon to perform bondage activities with another person, he did also admit to hiring sex workers to engage in this behaviour with him. It also sounds like he may have brought a sex worker to his dungeon, though I’m not 100% sure on that because of how much of that part of the report is redacted. But in case he did, let this be your daily reminder that sex workers are in fact people.
Then again, maybe David’s statement that he never used the dungeon with another person wasn’t because he didn’t count sex workers as people, it might have been because they didn’t have sex. The woman was chained up in what sounds like the basement, but after David went two full hours without being able to get an erection he apologized to the woman and let her go.
Honestly, so far none of this is that crazy yet, assuming everything he said was actually true. You’ve got a guy that was into BDSM, had a side hustle, and thought that stealing from Walmart didn’t count. If that doesn’t sound normal to you, then I have some shocking news for you about what 35% of your neighbours are getting up to. The first real red flag in all of this was David’s pathetic, limp dick.
Obviously the fact that he had trouble getting hard wasn’t a red flag, especially since he was damn near 50 years old at this point. But this was 1987, and Viagra wouldn’t be invented until 1989 and not approved for use until 1998. Erectile dysfunction may not have been a red flag, but how David got an erection without the use of Viagra certainly was.
He openly admitted to the FBI, during a polygraph interview that he volunteered to take, that in order to get an erection or ejaculate he had to think about torturing and murdering women. He said this after the FBI had already taken an initial interest in him because of Jesse’s claim that he was kidnapping, torturing, and selling women, but apparently this wasn’t a big enough red flag for the Bureau.
If that isn’t wild enough, David also said that he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t kill a litter of puppies. Unfortunately this is the agent’s report and not a transcript so I can’t see the exact context, because there’s two different ways to take that. Either he wanted to kill a litter of puppies and didn’t know why he wasn’t allowed to, or he wanted to kill a litter of puppies but couldn’t physically bring himself to do it. The report also stated that David was confused because he consciously disliked violence but unconsciously liked it, so it’s possible he wanted to kill puppies but couldn’t bring himself to.
Regardless of which way he meant it, dude just said he can’t get hard unless he thinks about murdering women and that he wants to kill puppies and doesn’t understand why he can’t. I recognize that the FBI aren’t the thought police, but unless David passed the polygraph with flying colours and the agent had unwavering faith in that bullshit pseudoscience, that really sounds like probable cause to investigate David’s house and dungeon thoroughly. Then again, they must have at least already glanced in his house, because the agent showed him what looked like a police uniform and three badges that belonged to David.
This is another area where the report is unclear. In addition to machining sex toys, David’s other side hustle was working as a security guard. It’s possible that the badges belonged to David from different security companies he worked for, but the implication, as well as the statement that David at one time “had a collection of approximately 15 badges”, certainly made it sound like these were actual police badges that had somehow come into his possession.
David said that the uniform, which was two small for him, had come from a car wreck. He claimed he would scavenge in junkyards and whatnot to find metal to build his contraptions, as well as to find photos and IDs of women to fantasize about murdering. It’s certainly plausible that he could have found a police uniform or badges as well. Shockingly, that’s not actually illegal.
I assumed that it would be since it’s illegal to impersonate a police officer, but apparently it’s totally cool to buy and collect official police badges.
His explanation for owning these badges was that he was a big fan of law enforcement. That’s why he did security work, because he was rejected from the New Mexico State Police on account of being underweight. That’s certainly possible, seeing as he was 6’3 and 155 pounds during this interrogation. I’m 6’2 and looked like a walking corpse when I was briefly 165 lbs, so someone who was both taller and lighter would almost certainly not have been deemed fit for duty.
Of course, I’d personally have considered that a red flag as well, even if it wasn’t illegal. Guy was rejected by the police department and now collects official police uniforms and badges? Maybe it’s just a modern day movie trope, but to me that has “serial killer” written all over it. Honestly, a lot of this report has serial killer written all over it. I know I’m working with the gift of hindsight, but it’s hard to imagine that David didn’t wind up on a dozen FBI watch lists following this interview.
But he didn’t. Jesse first contacted the FBI in summer of 1986, and six months later this report was written and filed away for safe keeping. It was the last time the FBI would hear the name David Parker Ray until 13 years later. That’s 13 years with multiple victims every year.
The One That Got Away
Fast forward to February 21, 1999. An off duty police officer was driving down the New Mexico highway when he saw Angelica Montano walking down the side of the road bleeding. When he picked her up, she explained that she had just been released after being kidnapped. Angelica lived near and was friendly with David and his live-in girlfriend Cindy Hendy.
She had gone to their house on the night of the 17th to ask if she could borrow some cake mix, but instead David pulled out a knife, Cindy pulled out a gun, and they informed her that she was being kidnapped.
What followed was a story of three days of sexual abuse and torture, all while she pleaded with them to let her go. Maybe it was because they were friendly enough that Cindy and Angelica sometimes partied together (aka: did drugs), but they eventually acquiesced to her pleas for freedom. Then again, maybe they weren’t planning on setting her free and thought she’d die on the side of the road. Given David’s normal modus operandi it’s hard to believe he would have agreed to either scenario, so your guess is as good as mine.
The off duty officer carefully listened to Angelica’s entire story, and then he dropped her off at a bus stop. She was a known drug addict, so he assumed the entire outlandish story was bullshit. Angelica called the police to file a report, and they did only the most cursory follow up investigation.
Police went to interview some of David’s neighbours, and the stories were mostly similar. He was a nice guy, quiet, kept to himself, good neighbour, blah blah blah. All the typical stuff serial killer’s neighbours say about them. Oh, they did say something else, but it’s probably not worth mentioning.
One of the neighbours said that Cindy had gotten drunk and told her that she and David like to kill people just for the fun of it, and that they disposed of the bodies in the nearby lake. Like I said it was barely worth mentioning, and the police agreed.
Sure, you might think that the neighbour’s story was potential corroboration for Angelica’s account of what happened to her. I mean what are the odds two different people would tell the police such horrible lies about the same couple? Apparently they’re pretty high, because the cops wrote this off as being entirely too far-fetched to be real. That’s some great work, boys.
Technically the police department made the most half-assed attempt possible to dredge the lake, but there was no chance they would have found anything without putting their whole ass into it.
It was a quick investigation just so they could say they did it, but the police weren’t actually taking any of this seriously yet. There was a very real possibility that David could have continued to get away with murder for the rest of his life, but instead it was all going to come crashing down exactly one month later.
March 22nd seemed like just another quiet day in the small town of Elephant Butte. Stop giggling, Simon, it’s pronounced “byoot”. A man was driving down Bass Road when he suddenly saw 22 year old Cynthia Vigil running down the street. Cynthia banged on his car window begging for help, but the man got scared and drove away. Dick move, but at least he called 911 as soon as he got to a phone.
Cynthia continued running down the street, with another motorist seeing and ignoring her. There were a lot of houses on the road, but they all had their doors closed and lights off. She couldn’t risk being slowed down by stopping at a locked door, as that would give her pursuer the opportunity to catch her. Eventually she saw a house with the lights on and the front door open, so Cynthia ran inside and locked the door behind her, startling the kind elderly couple that lived in the house.
She had been so busy running for her life, that until she was inside the house she hadn’t even considered the current state of her appearance. Cynthia was completely naked, save for the large steel collar around her neck and the six foot metal chain that the collar had been dragging behind her. There was blood pouring out of a fresh head wound, and sprinting down the pavement had caused her to tear the skin off one of her heels. While the first driver had been frightened off by the naked, bloody mess banging against his car, this couple could see that she was absolutely terrified for her life.
The husband tried to put Cynthia at ease while the wife called 911. It was clear to first responders that something was happening on Bass Road, because this was the second phone call to 911 within just a few minutes. Shortly after this, the frightened motorist would make the third phone call.
While many people would have finally felt safe in this situation, Cynthia did not. As she and the compassionate couple awaited the arrival of the police, Cynthia remained terrified of who exactly was going to arrive at the house. The man who had spent the past three days torturing her owned a police uniform and badge, so she couldn’t just trust them by default. But when a police officer arrived on the scene, Cynthia took one look at him and knew she was safe.
She described it as basically just being a gut instinct, but she felt that this officer would protect her.
Cynthia was taken to the hospital to have her wounds treated, and it was there that the steel collar was finally cut off by the hospital’s maintenance man. A pair of bolt cutters easily removed the collar, and the moment the metal snapped Cynthia flung it off her neck, feeling free for the first time since this ordeal began. All that was left now was for her to tell the story of how she came to be running naked down the quiet streets of Elephant Butte. I mean, realistically she probably told the cop most of the story on their way to the hospital, but that would have broken up my dramatic narrative.
So how did Cynthia wind up in this condition? It had started three nights earlier in Albuquerque. Cynthia was a sex worker, and David had approached her in his Toyota RV. He offered her $20 for a hummer, so she got into the cab of the vehicle. David’s girlfriend Cindy was in the RV as well which made Cynthia immediately realize something was wrong, but David flashed one his many badges at her and said she was under arrest for solicitation. She was taken to the back of the RV and handcuffed to a piece of furniture.
It was a two hour drive back to Elephant Butte from Albuquerque, and Cynthia spent a lot of that time screaming for help, though to no avail. However, she kept pulling on the handcuffs and managed to break them loose. She decided it would be best to lie there quietly while she figured out how best to escape, but the RV made a sharp turn and braked hard, which sent her tumbling across the floor.
The noise it made wouldn’t have been possible if she was still restrained, so David and Cindy pulled over, came to the back of the RV, and stripped Cynthia’s clothes off before restraining her again. This time she was gagged and her mouth was covered with duct tape to muffle her futile screams.
At the end of the long drive, Cynthia expected to be taken out of the RV in the middle of nowhere and led to a shack or something. Instead, she was being led to a doublewide trailer. While that’s technically a mobile home, which themselves are only technically mobile, in terms of size a doublewide trailer is comparable to a typical single family house. And it wasn’t the middle of nowhere; there were plenty of similar homes all around them.
Before taking her out of the RV, Cindy pulled out a loaded gun and made sure Cynthia knew exactly what would happen to her if she tried to scream. Fearing for her life, Cynthia stayed silent while being led to the trailer.
Once inside, Cynthia was sat on the couch where the steel collar was placed around her neck. David locked a chain to the collar, then locked the other end to a post beside the bed. He then went to the cassette player and pressed “play”. It was time for Cynthia’s orientation, which consisted of a 30-40 minute prerecorded audio take prepared by David. In it he told her exactly what was happening and what he was going to do to her, but we’ll come back to the tape during the investigation.
After the orientation, some really bad stuff happened to Cynthia that we don’t need to get into. The next day she was moved to a second bedroom in the house. That room was fitted to be a torture chamber, and it was filled with David’s homemade bondage paraphernalia. A bunch of even worse stuff happened in that room, then Cynthia was chained back up to the post in the first room. She was given a bowl of water chestnuts to eat, which was the first thing she had eaten since being kidnapped.
It was clear to Cynthia from the tape that had been played that this was not the first time David had done this. Not even close. And as bad as things had been, the tape promised that she’d get to walk away from all of this alive. So long as she was an obedient slave, that is.
Everything that was happening to her was horrible, but if she could endure it then maybe she’d survive. At least that’s what she thought, until bedtime rolled around and Cindy came to retrieve the bowl the chestnuts had been in. Cindy whispered in her ear, “Tomorrow you’re getting moved to the toy-box.”
Cynthia had no idea what the fuck that meant, but she was certain that the toy-box was the room she was going to die in. If she was going to survive, she had to escape before being moved again. And the next day she got her chance.
David went to work, with Cindy left in charge of watching Cynthia. But Cindy wasn’t nearly as meticulous a jailer. At some point the phone rang, and Cindy went to the kitchen to go answer it. What she didn’t realize, or didn’t think was a problem, was that the keys to Cynthia’s locks were only just out of her reach.
Cynthia’s arms and legs were unrestrained, but her collar was still chained to the post next to the bed. The bed was effectively in the corner of the room, but the trailer also had an open floor plan. There was a wall behind the bed, but to her left the wall was only like two feet high. This elevated area beyond that short wall was another room, with only a thin, iron banister separating them. The keys were atop a table in that other room, but that table was dangerously close to the banister.
Cynthia was able to stretch her leg under the banister and make contact with one of the table legs with her foot, but only by extending her body so far that the collar began to choke her. Little by little she inched the table closer until she was able to pull the keys off it. She then tried to push the table back into place in the hopes that Cindy wouldn’t notice it had moved, but the noise of the table’s sudden, large movement caught Cindy’s attention.
When she entered the room, she saw Cynthia struggling with the dozens of keys on the ring, trying each of them one at a time on the bed post’s lock. I’m sure she would have much preferred to undo the lock around her neck, but fine motor skills can be difficult when your adrenaline is pumping that hard. It would be even harder trying to undo a lock that she couldn’t even see.
Anyway, Cindy hung up her phone call, tossed the cordless receiver on the bed for some reason, and tried to restrain Cynthia. Instead, Cynthia grabbed the phone and dialed 911. This was the first of the three phone calls I mentioned earlier, and it was immediately suspicious. It was a short call, maybe 10 or 15 seconds, and nobody tried to speak to the 911 operator. There were sounds that quite possibly could have been a struggle, though to my ear it’s not totally conclusive.
Either way, it wouldn’t have mattered. This wasn’t the 1970s, it was 1999. Unless New Mexico is a particularly backwards state, the days were long since over where you could call 911 back and say, “My bad, bro. I dialed you by mistake, there’s no emergency here”. First responders were going to be dispatched no matter what, but if Cynthia was subdued then Cindy could answer the door and brush the call off as an accident.
Of course, that was all only if Cynthia could be subdued. Cindy had climbed on top of her and was hitting her in the head, but Cynthia had curled up into a protective ball and was ignoring the assault, focusing entirely on the keys. Since her fists weren’t doing the trick, Cindy grabbed a lamp and broke it over Cynthia’s head. It hurt like Hell, but it still wasn’t enough. Finally Cynthia heard the lock click open, but she still had to deal with Cindy.
Cindy wasn’t large by any means, but she was still larger than Cynthia. She also wasn’t being starved, nor was she the one that just had a fucking lamp smashed against her skull. Even with the ridiculous surge of adrenaline she was experiencing as she fought for her life, Cynthia may not have been able to overpower Cindy. Luckily she didn’t have to rely on raw, physical strength.
A wooden box near the bed had been knocked over during the struggle, with its contents spilling across the floor. The box contained various implements that had been used to torture Cynthia in that room, and among them was an ice pick. She grabbed the ice pick and stabbed Cindy in the neck, allowing her to flee from the house.
At about the same time the police showed up to the old couple’s home to answer the 911 call about Cynthia, another cruiser arrived at David’s home. When it got there, David had returned from work and he and Cindy had just gotten in the Toyota RV to go look for Cynthia. Of course, they claimed that she wasn’t their captive, she was just a poor girl they were trying to help detox from her heroin addiction.
And that wasn’t a completely implausible story. Despite having a population of less than 2,000 people, Elephant Butte had a disproportionately high population of sex workers and drug addicts. The police hadn’t even fully believed Cynthia’s story, since she was both a sex worker and drug user (though she wasn’t a resident of Elephant Butte). However, the welts on her back from the whips that had been used and the puncture marks on her breasts certainly made her story plausible as well.
Fortunately, they decided that Cynthia’s story was believable enough to at least be worth investigating. David and Cindy were brought into custody, and a search warrant was issued for their home. The police were still very much treating this as a “he said, she said” sort of scenario, but Cynthia had made a lot of very specific claims. If the things she talked about were in David’s house then they would have no choice but to believe her.
When police searched the home, they found a whole lot more than they had bargained for. There were signs of a struggle, a broken lamp exactly like what Cynthia had described, a gun sitting on a table, and all of the torture devices they had been told would be there. They also found David’s fake police badge, at least one of them anyway. But all of that stuff was inside the house.
There had been incriminating evidence inside the Toyota RV as well, such as the duct tape Cynthia described and supplies that could be used to disguise the RV as a law enforcement vehicle.
But there was still one place they hadn’t looked. Outside on David’s property was another, smaller trailer; the kind used to ship cargo. Despite the fact they had already found all of the evidence needed to corroborate Cynthia’s story, they decided to take a sneaky peek inside the small trailer on David’s property.
It immediately became clear that everything needed to be handled 100% above board and with the most anal retentive attention to detail possible. The trailer was a treasure trove of vile and unsettling evidence, and the police refused to risk a single piece of it becoming inadmissible because of bullshit technicalities.
Inside the Toy-Box
For the most part, this is where the police investigation began and ended. Other than that extremely weird polygraph interview back in 1987, David was completely off of law enforcement’s radar. He had no criminal record, and his neighbours thought he was a nice guy. You know, even if his girlfriend liked to get drunk and confess to murder. If Cynthia hadn’t escaped, David may never have been caught.
But she escaped, and David was immediately arrested. There was no manhunt, or taunting letters to the police in the newspaper, or anything like that. I feel like about 50% of the cases we cover on this channel are described as “the largest FBI manhunt up until that point”, but in this case the police had no idea they were even supposed to be looking for anyone. It’s admittedly a bit of a weird dynamic, however all that was left to do was to examine the trailer David referred to as his “toy-box” and try to figure out how many other crimes he had committed.
We unfortunately still don’t know, but it was a lot.
One of the first things the officers would have seen upon entering the toy-box was the gynecologist exam table in the middle of the room. More specifically, the homemade gynecologist exam table. As far as red flags, “amateur gynecologist” is right up there with “substitute brain surgeon” or “professional clown”. On the ceiling above the table was a mirror aimed where the victim’s pelvis would be, so she could have the perfect angle to watch what David was doing to her.
There were also posters, signs, and photographs all over the walls. Some were instructions and reminders from David to himself, some were mementos, and others were just to add a fun aesthetic to the room, like the sign that said “Satan’s Den”. A corkboard on the wall was covered with a combination of David’s personal drawings of women being tortured as well as real photographs of some of his victims.
Unfortunately, he would only keep photos of his victims for a limited amount of time before burning them. This most likely wasn’t meant as a way to destroy evidence and evade detection, since hundreds of pieces of jewelry believed to have belonged to countless victims were found in David’s possession. He wasn’t above keeping trophies, he just had no use for the photos of his old victims because he grew bored with them and they couldn’t get him off anymore.
As for the notes David left himself, they certainly seemed to indicate both a level of personal experience and fallibility. We already know that he and Cindy let Angelica go, even though nobody believed her story, and it seems like she wasn’t the only victim whose cries hadn’t fallen on deaf ears. But to try to prevent himself from making these lapses of judgment, David prepared the following reminder to keep himself focused:
“Remember, a woman will do or say anything to get loose. They will: kick, scratch, offer money, bite, yell, beg, scream, run, offer sex, threaten, lie, wait for opportunity. Standard excuses and sob stories: menstruating, pregnant, V.D., AIDS, sick, kids with babysitter, have to work, a sick baby, a sick parent, claustrophobia, missed by husband or friend, bad heart, can’t miss school.
Don’t let her get to you. If she was worth taking she is worth keeping, and she must be subjected to hypnosis before the woman can be safely released. Never trust a chained captive.”
Also on the wall was a clipboard, which was a log of all the women David had kidnapped from 1993 through 1997. None of them had names of course, because he didn’t see them as people. All that was listed was the date each girl was kidnapped, followed by a series of tally marks indicating how many times he sexually assaulted them over the course of their captivity.
According to this log, in 1995 alone he kidnapped one woman in March, another in May, then June, August, September, and November. Each victim was sexually assaulted at least 32 times, with the May victim suffering 53 assaults. While this isn’t a comprehensive list of all of his victims, no woman abducted during that five year span was sexually assaulted by David fewer than 27 times. He had his soundproof toy-box, and he was intent on using his victims until he got bored of them.
And he made sure that they absolutely knew this was going to be the case during their orientation, which we’ll get to in a second.
The rest of the toy-box was filled with a combination of sex toys, bondage gear, surgical tools used for torture, and dolls posed in various BDSM positions. There was also an expensive RCA camcorder in the corner of the room pointed at the homemade exam table. Investigators started to watch the tape, which featured a woman who had a distinctive leg tattoo strapped to the table. The video opened with David pressing play on his orientation tape, or should I say one of his tapes.
David was doing this for so long that not only did he decide to record an orientation for his victims to save himself from giving the same speech over and over again, but he actually made about a dozen of them. I’ve listened to one that was five minutes long and one that was 45 minutes long, and while the presentations change the content across all of these audio cassettes remains similar.
In these tapes, he explained why the victims had been kidnapped. The two victims I’ve mentioned thus far were in their 20s, but that was not David’s preferred target. He described his ideal victims as being young girls in their early teens: old enough to be sexually developed, but still young enough to have tiny bodies. If he couldn’t find a girl like that, the next choice was to find someone leaving a lesbian bar.
According to David, lesbians were as tight as young girls, unless they frequently played with oversized dildos, and they were far less likely to have STDs than straight women their age. In the event he couldn’t find someone in either of those categories, he would just kidnap any reasonably young woman with a tiny frame.
His plan was to keep the victims in captivity for the next two or maybe even three months, as long as it took him to get bored with them. He then went on to describe, in extremely explicit detail, exactly what he was going to spend the following months doing to them. I’ll spare you most of it for your own sanity, but here’s an example of what I promise you is one of the tamer details.
David described how he was going to force his victims to take increasingly larger dildos, all the way up to a homemade one he had constructed using PVC pipe as a base. He said that their vaginas were designed to stretch enough to push out a baby’s head, and that he was basically just going to do the same thing in the other direction. If you’ve ever heard Bob Saget or Gilbert Gottfried tell their versions of the “Aristocrats” joke, the acts being described were a lot like that, up to and including the stuff involving the family dog.
It was also made clear to the victims that David wasn’t the only one that was going to be abusing them. There was of course his girlfriend Cindy, but he claimed they had other friends and neighbours that shared the same interests as them. In one tape he described being a member of a Satanic BDSM club, and that it was the other members that would be taking turns abusing her. We don’t know if such a club actually existed, but he definitely did have accomplices.
During the tapes David also explained how, once he grew tired of his victim, he was going to brainwash them. He stated, “If I killed every bitch that we had kidnapped, there’d be bodies strung all over the country. Besides, I don’t like killing a girl unless it’s absolutely necessary, so I’ve devised a safe alternative method of disposal.”
The plan was to spend a few days drugging his victims with a combination of the hypnotic drugs sodium pentothal and Phenobarbital, allowing him to effectively erase their memories of everything that had happened. After being thoroughly brainwashed, David believed his victims could be abandoned somewhere without posing any risk to his disgusting lifestyle.
He also explained that they weren’t going to be permanently injured in any way. According to David, everything was designed to cause pain, not injury, and nothing would happen to them that their bodies wouldn’t heal from within a week of being let go. Of course, it’s hard to know for sure how true that all was. We don’t know exactly how many people he kidnapped or how many of them he killed. While we do know that some of his victims were released, it is unclear whether that was the rule or the exception.
After the initial investigation by local police, the toy-box was moved to the FBI’s office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I already mentioned that there was a tape in the camera, but if David had made a dozen different audio orientation tapes, you had best believe he had a massive collection of video tapes featuring himself torturing and assaulting his helpless victims. A team of seasoned FBI investigators entered the trailer and pressed play on one of the tapes. Moments later they all ran out of the trailer, with multiple vomiting on the ground…I really should’ve asked for double my normal rate when I pitched this episode, but I had no idea at the time what I was getting into.
The FBI, on the other hand, now knew exactly what they were getting into, which makes the decision that followed all the more baffling and heartbreaking. Even though other experienced agents had been so quickly and thoroughly sickened by the things they saw, 36 year old Special Agent Patty Rust was given the assignment of creating detailed diagrams and drawings of all the torture devices in the toy-box and in the videos.
Patty was also an experienced FBI agent and criminologist as well as a former Army captain, but none of that was enough to prepare her for what was on the tapes. She spent five days alone in that trailer reviewing and documenting everything. At the end of the week Patty handed in her report, went back to her home in El Paso, Texas, and shot herself in the head with her service weapon. Even though there was no legal basis by which to charge David for her death, she is unquestionably another one of his victims.
An Accomplice and Another Victim
Before that horrific little interlude, you may recall that I mentioned one of the women in the videos having a distinctive tattoo. It wasn’t going to be possible to identify any of the victims in the videos by their faces, but the tattoo gave them a potential lead for tracking down this victim, assuming she was even still alive. Images of the tattoo were circulated, and a woman came forward claiming that the tattoo belonged to her former daughter-in-law, Kelli Garrett.
Kelli and her husband had been living with his parents, but back in 1996 she vanished for three days. When she finally came home, she couldn’t explain where she had been. Her in-laws assumed that she was on drugs, so they kicked her out of the house. She had since moved to Colorado.
Officials in Colorado were able to track Kelli down and bring her in. She still hadn’t remembered what happened during those days she was missing, but she did have nightmares. Frequent nightmares about being restrained on a table and sexually assaulted repeatedly. Though as far as she knew, these were just disturbing dreams rather than fragmented memories.
I can only imagine how horrified she must have been when the FBI showed her the tape of David torturing her, forcing her to realize that the visions that disturbed her sleep were more than just nightmares.
I know that sounds like a really fucked up thing for them to do, and it is, but I choose to believe there must not have been a better option. And although Kelli hadn’t previously remembered what happened during the days she was missing, she did remember what happened leading up to it.
Kelli had been living in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, which was just a few miles away from Elephant Butte. On the night of her disappearance, she had gotten into a fight with her husband. According to one source they had only been married for a few days when this happened, but like I mentioned earlier New Mexico is a pain in the ass when it comes to those records.
Anyway, Kelli decided to get out of the house and blow off some steam, so she went to a bar to play pool and have a few drinks with her friend, Glenda Jean Ray. Kelli was only able to make it through one beer though, on account of Glenda having roofied her drink. Probably, anyway. It’s not confirmed what, if anything, Glenda used to spike Kelli’s drink, but since she is known to have dealt both cocaine and meth, I’m sure she could have gotten her hands on some roofies.
Instead of driving Kelli home, Glenda thought her father would be proud of her if she brought this pretty girl home to be his new sex slave. They took her into the toy-box, and David pulled a knife on Kelli and forced her to take off her clothes while Glenda put the steel collar around her neck. I honestly don’t know what happened to Glenda that would have caused her attitude to change so much since the last time she appeared in this script.
Oh right, I didn’t tell you: Glenda Jean Ray was her legal name, but for some reason everyone just called her “Jesse”. It was 1996 now, ten years since she had tried to turn her father in to the FBI, and now she was helping to supply him with victims and, by some accounts, taking part in the assaults herself.
Kelli was tortured and sexually assaulted for two days before David released her, though there are too different versions of how that happened. The story that shows up more often is that David slit Kelli’s throat and left her for dead on the side of the road, but I personally don’t find this very believable. We don’t know how many women he killed over the years because their bodies have not been found, so that method seems entirely too sloppy.
The version of events I find to be more credible is that Kelli was drugged with sodium pentothal and Phenobarbital, brainwashed so she wouldn’t remember what happened, then dropped off near her in-laws house. When she returned to the house she was disoriented and couldn’t account for where she had been, but her husband and his parents didn’t believe her. Like I said before, her in-laws thought she was on drugs, and her husband thought she had spent the past few days running around cheating on him.
If her throat had been slit, I find it hard to believe they would have been so uncompassionate. In either case, she was thrown out of the house and her husband divorced her because of her disappearance.
Kelli had been rebuilding her life in Colorado for the past three years, but now that the authorities had tracked her down they had three survivors of David’s abuse that could take him to trial. He wasn’t officially connected to any murders yet, despite it being abundantly clear he had to be killing some of his victims, but the kidnapping, torture, and assault charges would still be enough to put him away for a long time while police tried to find more evidence.
The Monster Behind the Monster
We’ve talked a lot about the things David did to these poor women, but we haven’t really talked about who he actually was or how he got to be this way. That’s mostly because there was nowhere to interject this section without disturbing my narrative flow, but it’s also in part because he’s such a massive piece of shit that I didn’t want to risk writing anything that would cause our listeners to feel sympathy for this monster. Fortunately, I don’t think that’s actually going to happen here. David’s childhood wasn’t great, but it wasn’t exactly a waking nightmare either.
David was born on November 6, 1939 in Belen, New Mexico, the son of Cecil Ray and Nettie Parker. His parents were too poor to support him, so David and his younger sister were both sent to live in a small ranch with Nettie’s parents. Their grandparents were described as strict disciplinarians, but who wasn’t back then? Hell, his grandfather was born in the 1800’s, of course he was going to take off his belt to teach the kid a lesson.
I’m certainly not advocating for that sort of parenting, but it was stock standard at the time. From what I can tell, his grandparents didn’t treat him any worse than the parents of all his classmates who didn’t grow up to be serial killers. Plus, since David was born barely a month after Hitler decided to take his little stroll across Poland, I’m sure a lot of the kids were being raised more by their grandparents than their parents. Their dads would have been off fighting in the war, and their moms would have been working in factories.
But obviously there had to be more to the story than that. Monsters like David tend to be raised, not born, and his father was a violent alcoholic. Then again, he barely saw his father. Since he was living with his grandparents, there was very minimal contact with either of his parents.
From what I gather his father would visit the little ranch more often than his mother, with these visits involving a combination of physical abuse and free pornography. And of course, the magazines that David’s father gave him when he was far too young to be looking at it all featured extreme acts of BDSM.
So that’s it then, right? David’s abusive and deviant father turned him into the monster he became? Well, not necessarily, at least not directly. Again, a lot of people have parents that hit them, and most of them don’t turn to murder.
As far as I can tell, the physical abuse against David was also extremely infrequent, since his father rarely ever came to visit. As for the pornography, giving those magazines to a young child was a terrible idea for sure, but we can’t immediately say that it pushed David to his sadistic fantasies.
While it is possible that it might have, scientists now believe that many sexual kinks are actually hereditary. In fact, they even believe they’ve recently identified the BDSM gene. If this research is correct, it means that David was likely going to gravitate towards these activities anyway once he got older. It also means that, if you’re anything like me, you now want to vomit wondering exactly what your parents got up to when you were away at summer camp.
But as for the other traditional warning signs of a serial killer, there weren’t any. David didn’t torture animals, set fires, or wet the bed any longer than the rest of us did. The only other issue with his childhood was that he was bullied in school for being shy around girls, which is cited as why he started abusing drugs and alcohol.
Again though, while David didn’t have the perfect, white picket fence upbringing, most of his trauma was remarkably average, especially for the time. Sure, most of our parents didn’t give us porno mags when we were like 10, but there was still plenty of it in the woods for us to find at that age.
And after high school, things only got better for David. He graduated with a D average, but he enlisted in the US Army where he mainly worked as a mechanic. He was quite good at it, and his uneventful service ended with an honourable discharge. After that, he bought his house in Elephant Butte and spent the next 30-something years working as a mechanic for the New Mexico Parks Department in Truth or Consequences.
He had four failed marriages, during which he conceived his daughter Jesse and another daughter we can leave out of this because she didn’t help kidnap people.
You’re welcome to disagree with me on this, Simon, but in my opinion there’s really not enough there to account for what a completely unnecessary waste of oxygen David became. As far as I’m concerned, David was the monster behind David Parker Ray, and he was one of those rare individuals that was just born as a straight-up evil psychopath. He was never diagnosed as such, since “psychopath” is not an official diagnosis, but from what I’ve seen it’s a pretty universal opinion among experts.
So while the actions of David’s father likely pushed him to become a sadistic monster at a younger age then he would have otherwise, it is my opinion that it was going to happen anyway. But he did start at a very young age. When he was 14, his younger sister found all of the hardcore BDSM drawings he had made. Her statement is the only proof that David’s violent fantasies started that young, but he has made numerous and consistent claims on that topic.
In one of his orientation tapes he said, “I’ve been raping bitches ever since I was old enough to jerk off and tie little girls’ hands behind their backs.” Elsewhere he claimed to have killed at least one girl each year since he was 14 years old. He even told his first wife that when he was 17 back in 1959 that he had tied a girl to a tree and tortured and murdered her. His wife unsurprisingly left him, but police have never been able to verify that claim.
If he was so open with his wives about his murderous rampage, it’s no surprise that all of his marriages were short lived.
That just leaves his live-in girlfriend, Cindy. They didn’t meet until 1997 when Cindy was 37 and David was 57. Cindy had previously lived in Washington, but she fled the state to avoid going to prison for drug charges and grand theft. She moved to New Mexico where she also got a job at the state park in Truth or Consequences.
While other women had run away when they found out what David was into, he and Cindy bonded over their shared violent fantasies. Her sexual assaults weren’t as brutal as his, which isn’t saying much, but she really seemed to enjoy the killing portion of things.
If the stories they told are true, David had developed an efficient way to dispose of the bodies of their victims. He would cut open their chests, replace their organs with cement weights, then sew them back up and dump them in Elephant Butte Lake. This would ensure there was no way the bodies would float to the surface, allowing the bodies to decompose and be eaten by marine scavengers. All that would remain were bones that could wind up getting buried in the lake bed over time.
But even without those bodies, there was finally going to be a trial against David. More specifically, and much to the prosecution’s disappointment, there were going to be three trials, one for each of the victims. By separating the trials like this it meant that the victims wouldn’t be able to corroborate one another’s stories. It was an inconvenience and a less than ideal situation, but there was far too much evidence for David to avoid prison. And of course, he wasn’t the only one going on trial.
A Lack of Justice
While David was bearing the brunt of the charges, Cindy was also being tried for her part in the kidnappings, as was Jesse. There was also another accomplice going to trial as well, Dennis Roy Yancy. David had stated in his audio recordings to his victims that other men would be abusing them as well, and Roy was one of those men. Not only that, but there was the possibility that Roy would be able to link David to a murder.
After David and Cindy were arrested, and given what a prolific shitbag all of the evidence showed David to be, police starting combing through unsolved cases to see if there were any that they believed he may have been involved in. Although David had the courtesy to write down his crimes in great detail and all his journals were in the possession of the authorities, he rarely if ever included any of the victims’ names. This is probably because he didn’t know their names and didn’t care since he viewed them as pieces of meat rather than as people, something he explicitly told them during their orientation. He did include detailed physical descriptions, but this has only led to the identification of five additional suspected victims; no cases besides the three we’ve already discussed have ever been officially linked to David.
One of his suspected victims was 22 year old Sylvia Marie Parker, a homeless mother of two living in Elephant Butte. She had disappeared two years earlier in 1997, but because she was a homeless drug addict the police didn’t see her as a person any more than David did. However, since these people the police ignored were David’s victims of choice, they finally decided to look more into Sylvia’s disappearance. This is what led them to Roy Yancy, the man Sylvia was dating when she disappeared.
Roy had just started his first day at his new job working as a cook in a motel, when police and FBI agents showed up to bring him in. He then immediately confessed to Sylvia’s murder while also completely rolling on his cohorts. According to Roy, she and Jesse arranged to lure Sylvia to the toy-box. Jesse was her drug dealer, and Sylvia believed she was going to the trailer to pick up some coke and meth.
Instead, she was tortured and abused for two days before Roy strangled her to death with a rope. He claimed that he had done this under David’s direct orders, and he even took officials out to the desert where he and David had buried Sylvia’s body.
But her body wasn’t there. It’s believed that David returned to the burial site and moved Sylvia’s body out of an abundance of caution, in case Roy ever lost his stomach for what they were doing and tried to turn on him. Of course, David and Jesse’s lawyers had a different opinion on the matter.
There was absolutely no physical evidence tying them to Sylvia, so their lawyers simply argued that Roy, a confessed murderer, was an unreliable witness. The toy-box case was one of the biggest news stories in New Mexico at the time, so with no evidence beyond Roy’s word, it wouldn’t be difficult for even a bad lawyer to argue that he was lying about his connection to the high profile case in an attempt to exchange his testimony for a lighter sentence.
Roy pled guilty to Sylvia’s murder, but no charges were ever brought against David or Jesse in connection with the case. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, and was paroled in 2010 after serving 11 years. Then like a month later he violated his parole and was locked back up to finish the remainder of his sentence. Roy completed his sentence in 2021.
Unless numbers work differently in New Mexico that is well short of 30 years, but maybe his sentence got reduced for good behaviour or something. According to the official records I could find, Roy is not currently on parole but rather is a free man after having completed his sentence.
But there was still the matter of David’s trials. As I mentioned earlier, Judge Neil Mertz had decided to separate the three women’s cases into different trials. The first trial that was supposed to take place was Cynthia Vigil’s, set for March of 2000. But just before jury selection could begin, David had a heart attack. There were allegations that he was faking it to delay the trial, but he did have a history of heart problems and a doctor signed off on it, so it was probably real.
Of course, regardless of whether or not the heart attack was faked as a delay tactic, it still did delay the trial. That delay then resulted in numerous other delays with Cynthia’s trial, so instead Judge Mertz decided to move forward with Kelli Garrett’s trial instead. This decision was another blow to the prosecution, as Kelli’s case had the weakest evidence. While the video tape of Kelli being tortured and sexually abused was allowed to be entered into evidence, pretty much nothing else from the toy-box was.
Sure, all of that stuff was in the trailer now, but there was no proof the same devices were there back in 1996 when Kelli was kidnapped. I get that the defense was doing their job and that the legal system is based on the sort of pedantic bullshit the lawyers were arguing, but it’s really hard to agree with the judge’s decision here. Let’s say that Kelli was able to claim, without seeing the contents of the toy-box, that David attached electrified clamps to her vulva.
If electrified clamps were in fact found and taken into evidence, does it really matter if they’re the exact same ones from 1996 or if David had bought some new ones? Apparently it does, even if I personally disagree with that decision.
That’s not to say that the prosecution didn’t still have a case, but it was going to be a lot harder. David wasn’t attempting to deny that he was the one on the video tape doing all of those horrible things to Kelli, his defense was just that everything was consensual. While the things that David did are unspeakable in the context of sexual assault, the majority of it (but definitely not all of it) were activities that it would have been possible to find a willing partner to engage in.
David may have turned writing down his crimes into an art form with his list of victims, detailed journals about each person he kidnapped, and written reminders everywhere with instructions on how to kidnap and torture women fully against their will, but the jury didn’t get to see any of that. It was David’s word against Kelli’s poorly remembered word, which meant there was a real risk that the jury could find the consent defense plausible. Of course, that would ignore the fact that if Kelli had been too intoxicated to remember what happened, then she wouldn’t have been able to give consent anyway.
Unfortunately, guys in their 20s are rather notorious for ignoring that fact, and there happened to be two of them on the jury. Even though Kelli insisted she would never have consented to the acts committed on tape, and even though she fairly clearly appeared to have been drugged in the video, her incomplete memory damaged her credibility as a witness. There was also no proof she had been drugged, even though it seemed obvious.
After only eight hours of deliberation, the jury announced that they couldn’t come to an agreement. Ten members of the jury wanted to convict David, while the two 20something dude bros weren’t convinced that Kelli was there against her will; they instead assumed she just liked it rough. A mistrial was declared, but the prosecution was determined to retry the case.
So far, all David had done was evade justice. They couldn’t connect him to Sylvia’s case, and after months of delays Kelli’s case resulted in a mistrial. Sure there would be a retrial, but unfortunately there was only one other case left on the docket. In the weeks just before Kelli’s trial began, Angelica Montano died of an overdose.
It is assumed that it was an accidental overdose, but some sources state that her drug use had increased significantly as a way to cope with the trauma of her torture. Regardless, Angelica’s death meant that the trial would not continue to go forward on her behalf.
By this point, however, Cindy had already worked out a deal. She agreed to plead guilty to kidnapping and criminal sexual penetration and to testify against David in exchange for a sentence of 36 years for her part in the crimes. In November of 2000, jury selection began for Kelli’s retrial. But a few days into jury selection, Judge Mertz died of a heart attack at the age of 55.
This caused more delays in the trial as multiple judges were assigned and then disqualified, until newly appointed District Judge Kevin Sweazea was given the honour of making this one of his first cases as a judge, possibly his very first.
Sadly, he upheld Judge Mertz’s ruling about excluding all of that evidence, and it again looked like an uphill battle for the prosecution. The jury was reported as seeming completely unfazed while they watched the video tape of Kelli, despite her sobbing in the courtroom throughout the entire ordeal. Based on the emotionless reaction from the jurors, it appeared that another hung jury and mistrial was going to be the best possible outcome. Instead, the verdict came back guilty on all 12 counts.
David was outraged over having been correctly found guilty, so he gave an interview to TV reporters who were waiting outside the courthouse to hear the verdict. In the absolute most disgusting choice of words possible, David said to a news camera, “I feel raped. I got pleasure out of a woman getting pleasure. I did what they wanted me to do.” He insisted on his innocence, and promised that he was going to appeal the case.
Of course before he could have the chance to appeal, there was still Cynthia Vigil’s case, set to begin in June of 2001. This trial wasn’t going to be nearly as difficult for the prosecution as the first one. Cynthia remembered everything that happened clearly, the entire toy-box was eligible to be used as evidence, and David and Cindy had been caught about as red-handed as would have been possible.
The trial commenced with David again pleading not guilty, but there was another trial that perhaps he had forgotten about up until this point because of all his own legal troubles. His daughter, Jesse, was still awaiting her trial on kidnapping charges. Rather than go through the charade of proclaiming innocence any longer, David decided to cut a deal. More specifically, he was going to cut a deal for Jesse.
David agreed to plead guilty to everything and to give the FBI information about his other victims and the locations of their bodies if she could be let off with a slap on the wrist.
David would plead guilty to all charges and receive 224 years in prison, and Jesse would plead no contest to kidnapping and receive 30 months in prison with 5 years probation. Both Cynthia and Kelli approved of the deal, so with the judge’s approval it was finalized. While Jesse unquestionably got off far lighter than she deserved, I certainly understand the decision.
David had carefully documented the kidnapping, torture, assault, and in some cases murder of scores of girls, and nobody even knew their names. The information David could provide would be able to bring closure to countless people, many of whom may still have been actively searching for their missing loved ones.
But in case you haven’t been paying attention, David was a psychopathic piece of shit, so of course that wouldn’t happen. He immediately tried to appeal his sentence, claiming that he had been illegally coerced into agreeing to the deal by his lawyer. This appeal was promptly denied on the grounds of being nonsense, and the deal remained in effect.
On May 28, 2002, David was transferred to Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs, New Mexico. He had cut a deal for Jesse’s freedom, and now it was time to hold up his end of the bargain. David was scheduled to be interrogated by New Mexico state police that day, but instead he had a heart attack and died before the interrogation could even begin.
Unfortunately, dying of natural causes doesn’t count as refusing to fulfill his end of the agreement, so Jesse’s lenient sentence was unchanged. I mean, even if he did refuse I don’t think they could have changed her sentence anyway, only his, but I might be wrong on that.
Jesse was released after 30 months, completed her parole, and is now God knows where. I’ve seen a lot of different claims, but nothing substantiated.
Cindy was scheduled to receive parole in 2017. She remained in prison until 2019, so those extra two years counted as her parole. When she was released, her 36 year sentence was considered complete so she was not subject to any monitoring by law enforcement, other than having to register as a sex offender. But had her conviction come just a couple months later, she would still be in prison.
Prisoners often complete their sentences early by earning credits in a variety of ways, such as for good behaviour or for taking academic or career courses. This is how Cindy would have managed to get out of prison after serving only half of her sentence. However, mere months after she was released, New Mexico passed a law requiring violent offenders to serve at least 85% of their sentence no matter what.
Instead, she is now living a relatively quiet life in Montana where there are frequent news articles published about how the residents would really prefer if she wasn’t there. It’s a lot easier to keep track of Cindy than Jesse since Cindy had to register as a sex offender, but for reasons I couldn’t even guess at, Cindy is registered as the lowest level of self offender; she isn’t even prohibited from living directly across the street from a school.
Wrap Up
David Parker Ray kidnapped, tortured, sexually assaulted, and murdered women potentially for 46 years of his life, and nobody had any idea. Not only did nobody know what sort of monster David was, they didn’t even realize there was a serial killer they were supposed to be looking out for. Were it not for Cynthia Vigil’s determination to fight for her life and escape, we still would have no idea.
David would have spent the last two years of his life claiming more victims until he died from a heart attack, and the world would have been none the wiser. To be clear, I’m sure Cynthia wasn’t the first woman David kidnapped that would have fought so hard to survive; Cindy’s lazy placement of the keyring just presented Cynthia was an opportunity that the other victims never had.
While this case is often depicted as one of the most gruesome, sadistic, and terrifying stories in true crime, which it absolutely is, it’s much more than that. This case is a reminder of the horrible reality in which we live. David committed brutal crimes for decades, and he got away with it without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow. As I said at the beginning of the episode, he is believed to have killed at least 60 women, but we still have no idea.
Despite the fact that David has been identified as the perpetrator and we know what type of women were his victims of choice, no other cases have been definitively tied to him. While there were a few additional suspected victims identified before the trial, as far as I can tell not a single potential victim has been identified since then, and any official investigation died along with David.
But the worst part, and a problem I don’t think this show is going to solve, is that situations like this can be prevented, or at the very least mitigated. You probably weren’t surprised when I said that, in addition to his physical preferences, David’s victims of choice were usually drug addicts or sex workers, because that is the case all too often. This keeps happening because law enforcement and others have a hard time viewing them as actual people. Angelica Montano was found bleeding on the side of the road by an off duty cop, and her story wasn’t taken seriously because she was a drug addict.
If police had investigated the case a little more, especially after a neighbour said that Cindy got drunk and claimed that she and David liked to kill people, perhaps all of this could have been stopped sooner. There may even have been other close calls like this that we don’t even know about, because the reports were buried or never filed and the victims either didn’t come forward or had died since being released by David. Again I don’t think this show is suddenly going to adjust how law enforcement operates, especially since it’s not like this information is a shocking revelation to anyone, but I would be remiss if I didn’t address one of the core problems that allows killers like this to evade justice for so long, and sometimes forever.
And with that out of the way, I suppose I should address those of you that may be either a bit curious or disappointed by the lack of graphic details, given this case’s brutal reputation. A big part of that is because I enjoy my job so I’d prefer not to traumatize Simon into a coma, but I think I was still able to convey how awful this all was without going into those details. For anybody that wants to know the full extent of how bad everything was the information is available, but I strongly recommend against seeking it out. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if I can procure enough sodium pentothal and Phenobarbital to erase all of this research from my memory.
Key Takeaways
- David Parker Ray operated undetected for decades, with the FBI failing to act on early warnings from his own daughter in 1986.
- Cynthia Vigil’s dramatic escape in 1999—running naked with a steel collar—finally exposed Ray’s torture chamber, the ‘toy-box.’
- Ray documented his crimes extensively, including victim logs, orientation tapes, and videos that sickened seasoned FBI investigators.
- Law enforcement repeatedly dismissed victims and witnesses due to drug addiction or sex work status, enabling Ray’s continued violence.
- Ray died of a heart attack in 2002 before revealing victim locations, leaving dozens of cases officially unsolved and families without closure.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was David Parker Ray and why was he called the Toy-Box Killer?
David Parker Ray was a serial killer who was never convicted of murder but is believed to have killed at least 60 women. He was called the Toy-Box Killer because he had a soundproof trailer on his property that he referred to as his ‘toy-box,’ which he used as a torture chamber for his victims.
How was David Parker Ray first brought to the attention of law enforcement?
In the summer of 1986, a young woman named Jesse (who was actually David’s daughter Glenda Jean Ray) walked into the FBI’s field office in Albuquerque, New Mexico and accused David of kidnapping, torturing, and sexually assaulting women before trafficking them to Mexico. However, her allegations were considered too vague and non-specific to secure a search warrant or arrest.
What disturbing admissions did David Parker Ray make during his 1987 FBI polygraph interview?
During a voluntary polygraph interview in 1987, David admitted to: having a dungeon/torture chamber in his basement with iron rings to secure chains; needing to think about torturing and murdering women in order to get an erection or ejaculate; being confused because he consciously disliked violence but unconsciously liked it; and wanting to kill a litter of puppies but not understanding why he couldn’t. He also admitted to hiring sex workers and possibly bringing one to his dungeon.
How did Cynthia Vigil escape from David Parker Ray?
On March 22, 1999, Cynthia Vigil escaped after three days of captivity when David went to work and left his girlfriend Cindy Hendy in charge of watching her. When Cindy answered a phone call in the kitchen, Cynthia stretched her leg under a banister to reach a table with keys, inched it closer, and tried multiple keys on the bed post lock. When Cindy discovered her, they struggled, and Cynthia grabbed an ice pick from a spilled box of torture implements and stabbed Cindy in the neck before fleeing naked with a steel collar and chain around her neck.
What was the ‘orientation’ that David Parker Ray gave to his victims?
David Parker Ray prepared prerecorded audio cassette tapes (about a dozen in total) that he played for new victims as an ‘orientation.’ In these 30-40 minute tapes, he explained why they had been kidnapped, what he was going to do to them over the next 2-3 months, and that they would be released alive if they were obedient. He described his preferred victims as young teens or lesbians, detailed the sexual torture he would inflict, mentioned that friends and accomplices would also abuse them, and explained his plan to eventually drug them with sodium pentothal and Phenobarbital to erase their memories before release.
What evidence was found inside the toy-box trailer?
Inside the toy-box trailer, police found: a homemade gynecologist exam table with a mirror on the ceiling aimed at the victim’s pelvis; posters, signs, and photographs including a ‘Satan’s Den’ sign; a corkboard with David’s drawings of tortured women and real photographs of victims; written reminders to himself about not trusting captives; a clipboard log of kidnapped women from 1993-1997 with tally marks of sexual assaults; sex toys, bondage gear, surgical tools for torture, dolls in BDSM positions; and an RCA camcorder with tapes of torture sessions.
Who were David Parker Ray’s known accomplices?
David Parker Ray’s known accomplices included: Cindy Hendy, his live-in girlfriend who participated in kidnappings and torture; Glenda Jean ‘Jesse’ Ray, his daughter who initially reported him to the FBI in 1986 but later helped supply victims (including drugging Kelli Garrett) and allegedly participated in assaults; and Dennis Roy Yancy, who was involved in at least one murder (Sylvia Marie Parker) and participated in abusing victims.
What happened to FBI Special Agent Patty Rust after she was assigned to document the toy-box evidence?
Special Agent Patty Rust, a 36-year-old experienced FBI agent, former Army captain, and criminologist, was assigned to create detailed diagrams and drawings of all torture devices in the toy-box and review the videos. She spent five days alone in the trailer reviewing and documenting everything. After handing in her report, she went home to El Paso, Texas and shot herself in the head with her service weapon. The author considers her another victim of David Parker Ray.
What was the outcome of David Parker Ray’s trials?
David Parker Ray’s first trial (Kelli Garrett’s case) ended in a mistrial when two jurors believed the defense’s consent argument. Before a retrial could proceed, Angelica Montano died of an overdose. David then cut a deal: he pleaded guilty to all charges and received 224 years in prison in exchange for giving the FBI information about other victims and body locations, while his daughter Jesse received only 30 months with probation. However, David died of a heart attack on May 28, 2002 before he could be interrogated, so no victim information was ever obtained.
How did law enforcement failures contribute to David Parker Ray evading capture for so long?
Multiple law enforcement failures allowed David to continue his crimes for decades: the FBI dismissed Jesse’s 1986 allegations as too vague despite David’s disturbing 1987 interview admissions; in 1999, an off-duty officer found Angelica Montano bleeding on the roadside but dropped her at a bus stop because she was a known drug addict; police did only cursory follow-up on Angelica’s report and dismissed a neighbor’s claim that Cindy confessed to killing people and dumping bodies in a lake as ‘too far-fetched’; and David’s victims were primarily drug addicts and sex workers whom law enforcement failed to treat as ‘actual people.‘
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: David Parker Ray: The Toy-Box Killer
- Hero image source by Adbh266 / openverse, by-sa.
