by Suruthi Bala
The next morning, Ray left for work and Cindy Hendy was left to keep watch over Cynthia. For a while she did a good job, but as the morning wore on—perhaps getting complacent since Cynthia was chained to the wall—Hendy’s vigilance started to wane. Just after lunchtime, the house phone rang and Hendy wandered off to answer it, leaving the keys to the collar around Cynthia’s neck on a nearby coffee table.
Cynthia could hardly believe it. Trying to make as little noise as possible, she carefully pulled the table toward her using her feet. Once it was close enough, she grabbed the keys and undid the padlock that connected the chain around her neck to the wall. But then Hendy came back into the living room, grabbed a lamp, and smashed it over Cynthia’s head. As Cynthia desperately felt around on the floor, trying to find anything to fight back, her hands found an ice pick; she swung it up and sliced the back of Cindy Hendy’s head. (The fact that there was an ice pick just lying around in the living room tells you a lot about the setup at 513 Bass Road.)
With Hendy now on the ground clutching her head wound, Cynthia made a break for it. And that’s how she ended up running through Elephant Butte totally naked with a collar around her neck and trailing a six-foot metal chain.
Having heard Cynthia’s horror story, Elephant Butte police headed out to find David Parker Ray and Cindy Hendy. Surprisingly, the pair proved pretty easy to track down—not only is Elephant Butte a very small place, but Ray and Hendy weren’t exactly laying low. In fact, they were driving around town looking for their escaped captive.
When police pulled over their RV, Ray tried to tell them that Cynthia was a crazy heroin addict who they had actually been helping. He claimed that he and Cindy Hendy had chained Cynthia up in their house, but it was only to get her through the worst days of drug withdrawal. But the police, seeing the massive gash on Cindy Hendy’s head, weren’t buying their good-Samaritan-chain-you-to-the-wall drug rehab center story, and promptly arrested the pair. Within days both were charged with assault, kidnapping, conspiracy, and unlawful penetration.
Before we go into what happened next and what exactly the police discovered at 513 Bass Road, we need to go back in time to pay David Parker Ray’s childhood a little visit.
Finger-Painting BDSM
David Parker Ray was born in 1939 in Belen (and you have no idea how much we want to add a “d” to the end of that town name! Non-Brits who are confused: “bell end” should definitely be a part of your swears arsenal, look it up!), New Mexico, a small town just south of Albuquerque. His parents divorced when he was young, and he and his sister Peggy ended up living with their paternal grandfather. Granddad Ray wasn’t exactly a kindly old Werther’s Original–type; he was a big fan of extreme physical discipline.
Little David was also regularly visited by his alcoholic father, who would spend their time together savagely beating his son and then “make up for it” by giving him his old BDSM magazines. These hand-me-down porno mags soon became young David’s escape from a homelife filled with abuse, and a school life marred by relentless bullying. Slowly, he started to retreat socially and began spending all his time immersed in a world of glossy pictures depicting bondage, punishment, and sex.
His other hobby was arts and crafts, but it wasn’t exactly stick-it-on-the-fridge material. Ray became obsessed with drawing images of violent sex acts, and he even started a scrapbook that he filled with magazine clippings of the BDSM positions he was particularly drawn to. This early exposure to such extreme sexual content sparked a lifelong fascination in Ray with sadism, and by the age of 14 he discovered that he wasn’t able to get any sexual satisfaction unless he was fantasizing about someone in serious pain. No one in his life seemed to notice or care that he was quite evidently displaying some majorly worrying signs.
Formation of a Sexual Sadist
So what can Ray’s story tell us about how a sexually sadistic killer is created? Well, like with most cases we have discussed so far, there are both genetic and environmental factors involved. According to most studies—including one we looked at in chapter 2 called “The Incidence of Child Abuse in Serial Killers” by Heather Mitchell and Michael Aamodt—the main form of abuse that correlates to the development of sexually sadistic killers is childhood psychological abuse. It is thought that the emotional trauma and anxiety of the abuse interferes with a child’s usual psychosexual development, disturbing the standard pattern of arousal and accidentally linking it with violence, fear, and suffering.
Essentially for these individuals during childhood and adolescence, as their sexuality is developing, violence and sexual pleasure become enmeshed. How exactly this happens is not that well understood, clinically speaking, but there are a few theories. Many of these theories build on an idea posed in 1990 by sexologist John Money, who suggested that sexual sadism is like a disease that destroys the center of the brain relating to sexual arousal—the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus—and that it hijacks the pathways of the brain related to sexual arousal, like the limbic system. This results in the brain sending out messages about sex and violence at the same time, crossing these two wires in a super dangerous way.
There is also evidence to suggest that physical abnormalities in an individual’s brain can be a contributing factor, and numerous studies, such as the 1995 paper “Offender and Offense Characteristics of Sexual Sadists,” by T. Gratzer and J. M. Bradford, have found that most sexual sadists showed damage to their right temporal horn, a part of the brain that contributes to emotional processing.
There are many ways that sexual sadism can develop, and it’s not always caused by abuse or trauma; it could just come down to differences in brain structure. Sadism also exists on a spectrum. While some people can just be into BDSM and manage their sexually sadistic tendencies that way, it seems that the most catastrophic results from sexual sadism arise when the sadist also has an antisocial personality disorder like our old friend all the way from chapter 1—psychopathy.
Although the roots of sexual sadism aren’t yet fully understood, what is known is that such offenders usually start to have violent sexual fantasies as young children and begin to act on these thoughts in early adult life. Once they start there is very little chance of them stopping—and their behavior invariably ends in murder.
Now with that out of the way, let’s get back to David Parker Ray and his next tick on the sexually sadistic killer bingo card: a career in the military. Ray had been in the Army for a few years before he was eventually honorably discharged, and during his time in the service he became quite the mechanic. This skill served him well throughout his life; not only did he land a mechanic job at the state park in Elephant Butte, but it meant that he could also make all manner of the hellish mechanical torture devices to use on his victims.
Not that anyone would have known it. Because again, just as Dr. Meloy’s list of traits predicts, Ray was highly charming and was well liked in Elephant Butte. All his colleagues at the state park had nothing but nice things to say about him, and he was famous for throwing big parties, especially on Halloween.
This is one of the characteristics that make sexually sadistic offenders the ultimate predators—they are often respected within their communities; they hold down steady jobs; they are high functioning with high IQs; and they are much more socially intelligent than other offenders. This makes them able to blend in and operate effectively without suspicion. This all meant that people were initially shocked to discover that Ray had been arrested, and the small-town gossip mill spun into a blur as Cynthia Jaramillo’s story spread like wildfire.
Not all the locals were surprised, however, and the police received a tip from a local couple who were close with Cindy Hendy. They claimed that one night about a month before, Hendy got drunk and told them that she and Ray had abducted and tortured a woman named Angela before pumping her full of drugs and dropping her off on I-25. Hendy had also told her friends that her boyfriend was a serial killer.
Apparently, the couple had just brushed it
all off as a drunken story, which gives us a disturbing glimpse into their social circle, but OK. And while the tip was something, it wasn’t like they would be able to track down this random Angela. Well, as it turned out, she would find them.
On March 27, a woman named Angelica Montano turned up at 513 Bass Road to tell the police every detail of her ordeal at the hands of Ray and Hendy. If anyone suspected Angelica of being an attention seeker, those thoughts were quickly shot down when the deputy sheriff of a nearby town claimed that he had actually picked up a hitchhiking Angelica on I-25 about a month before, and during the two hours she was in his car on their way to Albuquerque she had told the deputy sheriff the same exact story. Long before Cynthia Jaramillo had ever been abducted.
The “Toy Box”: Satan’s Caravan
By this point, the police and the FBI had been searching the house and the trailer in the garden for 10 days, and given what they had found, they knew that there were likely dozens if not hundreds of other victims.
In the house, every single wall had been plastered with images of graphic pornography, and while most of us might have artwork or ornaments we’ve collected hanging up around the place, this house was full of whips, chains, and motorized torture devices. The police even found “sex toys” that seemed to have been made out of old scrap metal.
What was especially odd was that while all of this overtly sexual and morbid paraphernalia was proudly displayed out in the open, some other things were carefully hidden away. Investigators discovered a large collection of jewelry, name badges, watches, and other trinkets concealed in a secret box. There were more than four hundred unique items in this odd menagerie, and given that these items didn’t seem to belong to Ray or Hendy, for investigators this set off major trophy-keeping, serial-killing alarm bells.
Things only got worse when Ray’s diaries were discovered. It appeared that he kept incredibly detailed and ordered accounts of every single assault he had ever committed (meticulous record-keeping bingo). According to these journals, many of the women he abducted had died as a result of what he had done to them. The problem for investigators was that he never included his victims’ names in these torture logs, so tracking them down or matching them to missing persons’ accounts would be difficult if not impossible.
I wish I could say that all of this craziness was the worst of it, but I’m afraid it’s not even close. The time has come for us to finally head into the toy box. The 15-by-25-foot white trailer in the backyard of 513 Bass Road looked pretty innocuous from the outside, and despite all that investigators had found in the house, no one was prepared for what lay inside. On March 17, 1999, the Elephant Butte police and the FBI opened up the trailer.
In the middle of the trailer sat a large gynecological chair complete with stirrups. The walls were covered in steel leg spreaders, a homemade breast stretcher, electric shock machines, pulleys, straps, syringes, clamps, surgical scalpels, saws, and a collection of enormous dildos. There was even a giant sign that said “Satan’s Den” and another that read, “If she’s worth taking, she’s worth keeping.” (Suddenly “Live, Laugh, Love” doesn’t seem so bad.)
As investigators stood there taking it all in, they also noticed to their horror that there was a mirror on the ceiling. It was positioned so that the person in the chair could see absolutely everything that was being done to them. The police soon discovered that the “toy box” was almost totally soundproof and that there were CCTV cameras and motion sensors placed strategically inside and outside this hellish torture caravan.
Vials of sodium pentothal and phenobarbital were also found in the trailer. Just like Ray had stated in his “welcome” tape, these drugs seem to have been used to fog up his victims’ memories. Both drugs can be lethal if a person is given too much, and with Ray not exactly being medically trained—and given how many victims his diaries point to—it seems highly likely to us that he almost certainly killed some of the women he brought into his “toy box.”
At this point things were looking bad for David Parker Ray and his girlfriend accomplice Cindy Hendy, but the police needed more—they needed to find more victims, dead or alive. Because once he was confronted with the contents of his torture caravan toy box, Ray simply claimed that any of the women who were ever there had been willing participants. Even if you are happy to ignore Cynthia and Angelica’s stories that they were most definitely not there willingly, you have to ask yourself why he was drugging them all then? If it had all been so consensual, why did he need to try and make the women forget what had happened?
The many questions this case gives rise to are never likely to be answered, though; sexually sadistic offenders are some of the most difficult for law enforcement to interview. Former FBI agent Robert Hazelwood went so far as to call them “worthy adversaries,” stating that they will not cooperate or reveal anything even when faced with overwhelming evidence and that victims would be unlikely to come forward out of shame, so ex-girlfriends would be the best way to discover the truth. (Keep those bingo markers on hand, because we have a full house to get to.)
Cindy Hendy didn’t care about keeping quiet. She knew she was done for; she had been actively involved in the abductions, torture, and sexual assaults of Cynthia Jaramillo and Angelica Montano, so she decided to try and save herself by giving the police everything she had on her boyfriend. She explained that Ray would pick up sex workers, usually ones who had substance abuse issues, bring them back to the house, and torture them for days.
Once he was done, sometimes he would inject them full of drugs and let them go, but sometimes if they caused too much trouble, he would kill them. Hendy claimed that he would either open up the victim’s chest cavity and fill it with rocks before driving out to Elephant Butte Lake to dump the body, or he would just go over to Texas and ditch the remains in the desert.
This was way more information than the police had expected from Hendy, but they were stuck; Elephant Butte Lake is enormous (it can hold 2,065,010 acre-feet of water!) and there was no way they could search it all. As for the vague description of a Texas desert, it was not much use either. But Hendy was adamant that Ray was a killer, and she told police that she believed he had been killing for his entire adult life. Apparently he had revealed to Hendy that his first kill was at age 20, and that after this he had never looked back. Eventually the police tracked down Ray’s four ex-wives, and they too claimed that he had confessed to them about killing women since his early twenties.
According to Hendy, Ray had killed at least 30 people, and his diaries corroborated this. The problem was that Hendy claimed Ray had never shown her a single body dump site, so she couldn’t pinpoint any locations to the authorities. To us this makes sense; we don’t think that Ray would have been dumb enough to reveal to Hendy where he disposed of the bodies. For many power-obsessed sexual serial killers, where they leave their victims becomes a secret they cherish and happily take to their grave.
Hendy also revealed that Ray kept meticulous photo diaries of his conquests, but that he would periodically burn them, just in case. Again, we think all this completely adds up. Ray was incredibly detail-oriented and he took careful steps to avoid detection, like drugging his victims. Although he kept photos and records, he never recorded any of his victims’ names, and destroying evidence as he went shows the classic traits of a highly intelligent and organized offender.
Worse Than Weatherspoons: Blue Water Saloon
Although not much of what Hendy told the police panned out, she did turn the authorities onto another person of interest—a man named Dennis Yancy. Hendy told police that Yancy and Ray had tortured and killed Yancy’s ex-girlfriend, a woman named Marie Parker.
Parker had been a 22-year-old mother of two when she disappeared without a trace in 1997 from a bar in Elephant Butte called the Blue Water Saloon. Her ex, Dennis Yancy, was a real piece of work. At just 27 years old he had already been convicted of numerous counts of domestic violence and rape. Yancy had ended up hanging out with Ray be
cause of their shared interest in Satanism and sadism.
The police brought Yancy in for questioning and he admitted that he and Ray would pick up sex workers and torture them together in the toy box. He also eventually admitted that on the 4th of July weekend in 1997, he had taken Parker from the bar to Ray’s house and handed her over to him. Parker had been kept prisoner by Ray for days before Yancy claimed that he was forced to strangle his ex-girlfriend to death.
Apparently, Ray photographed the whole thing and then the two of them drove Parker’s body out into the desert and left her in a ravine in Monticello Canyon. Parker’s body has never been found. Despite this, Yancy was convicted of murder in the second degree and sentenced to 25 years. No one else has ever been charged with the murder of Marie Parker and there isn’t much the police can do without a body.
Tribal Tattoos Sometimes Aren’t a Terrible Idea
If you thought this story was over, we still have more to come… so buckle up. The FBI was able to pull footage from the CCTV that had been set up inside the toy box, and there was one particular section of film that had been taped in July 1996 that caught their attention. It showed a woman restrained in the gynecological chair with her legs strapped into the stirrups and David Parker Ray doing unspeakable things to her. The footage wasn’t clear enough to identify the woman’s face, but there was one distinguishing feature that was picked up by the cameras.
The woman had a distinctive tattoo on her left calf; it is often described as a “tribal swan.” Even in the nineties—the era of the tribal tattoo—the police thought it was so unusual that surely someone would recognize it. And as it turns out, they were right.