“Jesse had the ‘hots’ for Marie, and Marie didn’t want to have sex with her. At the time Jesse rode a big motorcycle and she had a nickname in T or C. They called her ‘the dyke on the bike.’ ”
The next night, Marie Parker was at Raymond’s Lounge at the intersection of North Date and Marie Street in T or C when Roy Yancy walked in. Parker didn’t want to have anything to do with him. After they broke up, she had not remained friends with him. Her friend Julie Lawrence saw the fear in her eyes that night.
“Marie tried to avoid him as much as possible,” said Lawrence. “She was very afraid of Roy and wanted to leave immediately.”
The night she vanished was a hot July 5 and she was in the Blue Waters Saloon with four of her friends. The last person she spoke to was Clay Hein. Just before midnight, Jesse Ray offered to give her a ride somewhere; Marie was hesitant but said yes. She came up to Clay to tell him what was going on. He never forgot what she said: “I’ve got to go home and check on my daughters.”
“That was the last time any of us saw her,” said Hein. “She never came back.”
Drugs had been an off-and-on problem for years for Marie Parker. At one time she was engaged to Larry Brock of Center Point, Texas. He wanted to marry her, but he also wanted her to change friends. “I couldn’t live with the fact that she was running around with druggies,” he said. “I gave her a ring and a few days later she took it to a pawnshop in Truth or Consequences. The ring was nice—it was all I could afford, but it was still a half-carat gold ring. She sold it for two hundred dollars.”
The last night Marie had a warm bed to sleep in was July 1, 1997. She was staying in an apartment with her kids and her half brother, Tom McCauley. They couldn’t afford the rent. Years later, when McCauley read in the Sentinel that Dennis Roy Yancy had admitted to killing his sister, he was visibly shaken. “It angers me to hear about these people in T or C, these so-called friends. I don’t understand how they could do such a thing. My sister was a wonderful person who shared with the poor, often giving food and shelter to homeless people. I want people to know what a good person she was. She never once did anything to deserve this. Nobody deserves anything like this.”
The last morning Marie Parker showed up at work, she was working at the Fast Stop Convenience Store on South Date Street in Truth or Consequences. Her good friend Sonya Hall still works as a cashier at the store and thinks about Marie every week. She still feels sorry for her, and especially for her children.
“She wasn’t ever right in the head,” said Hall. “Things were always happening to her. One time one of her daughters was missing and Marie was just out of her mind. She was going nuts. I said, ‘Marie, have you checked your van?’ She told me no and so I checked it myself and, sure enough, there was the kid—Sierra was playing on the floor in the back. I think the little girl was only three years old at the time.
“If you knew Marie, she wasn’t a degenerate at all—she was just mentally ill, the poor thing. She was frantic all the time. I don’t think most of the time she was in her right mind.”
CHAPTER 10
In all my years working as a reporter in downtown Los Angeles, I never saw anything this frightening.
—Betsy Phillips, reporter for the the Herald, in T or C, 8/08/1999
Jim Yontz took over as lead prosecutor the day after his forty-seventh birthday, and from the beginning the big, burly cop-turned-prosecutor felt he had a lot to prove. He was always the strong guy who tried to go out and save the weak people of the world, and in one moment his whole world had come crumbling down all around him.
In the summer of 1998, Yontz was head of the Narcotics Bureau operating out of Albuquerque. He was struggling to come to grips with his mother slowly dying from cancer. He was a married man, and just after midnight on August 15, undercover police picked him up with a prostitute on Central Avenue, on the eastern outskirts of Albuquerque. The cops spotted his pickup truck parked in an alley just west of Wyoming Boulevard and Highway 66, and when they pulled up behind and asked Yontz to get out, he was very upset because he knew the whole situation looked bad. He even started to cry when they asked him what he was doing with “a known hooker.” He claimed he was driving through a high-crime area along Highway 66 when he saw a woman walking alone. He stopped and offered her a ride. He denied he gave her money for sex. The officers found no evidence of money changing hands and let him go, but they reported the incident to their boss.
Word got back to the Albuquerque district attorney and he suspended Yontz, pending an investigation. Five days later, James A. Yontz resigned under pressure, strongly denying that he’d done anything wrong. At the time he told the AP: “I often stop to help people out. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs. I lead a very dull life. I only stopped to help a woman I feared might be a crime victim. I just didn’t do anything wrong. I only tried to help somebody.”
A year later, he found himself assigned to an assistant DA job out in the small town of Socorro, New Mexico; as luck would have it, he was in charge of the biggest crime case in New Mexico history. In his own quiet, straightforward way, he expected to convict David Ray and his cohorts and save his good reputation that he developed over twenty-six years in law enforcement—seventeen years as a prosecutor.
He got his first public chance to corral the bad guys at a preliminary hearing scheduled for David Parker Ray on April 15 and 16 at the Sierra County Courthouse in T or C. Yontz normally worked out of the bigger Socorro Courthouse, but this time he was crammed into a little chamber that barely held sixty spectators behind the two small wooden tables facing the judge’s bench and the witness table only a few feet away.
That Thursday and Friday, Jim Yontz went up against two men with good legal credentials. Men he expected to face over and over during the rest of 1999: Jeff Rein, the soft-spoken, handsome thirty-six-year-old defense attorney for David Ray, and Judge Neil P. Mertz, the chain-smoking fifty-three-year-old father of two grown children who ran his court with a tight fist and was now firmly in charge of all criminal trials in what the press had dubbed the “New Mexico Sex/Torture Case.”
On the first day David Ray walked into court with his head down and his shoulders slumped. As soon as Mertz outlawed all cameras in the courtroom, Ray perked up and seemed to manage an occasional “smirk,” at least according to Frances Baird, ace reporter for the Sierra County Sentinel. Frances was a tall, leggy blonde with horn-rimmed glasses and had been born into a newspaper family. According to her mother, Frances always had “ink in her blood.” Myrna Baird, publisher of the Sentinel, did not like the idea of her teenage daughter sitting there right next to David Ray and listening to witnesses talk about an old man with a dirty mind and filthy habits. But there was no way Frances was going to miss the story of the century in the tiny town where she had spent all of her days.
April 15 and 16 brought three of the major players in the Sex/Torture Case together under the watchful eye of an ambitious and experienced-beyond-her-years reporter.
It didn’t take Jim Yontz long to call his first witness on the morning of April 15. Angelique Montano, twenty-seven, looked haggard and confused as she took the witness stand. She didn’t want her one blue eye and one brown eye to be noticed, so she tried not to make eye contact with anyone. Her voice quaking, she told the story of how she ended up spending five days with Ray and Hendy between February 17 and 21, 1999. She told the truth, except for the part about the cake mix. At least Yontz hoped she was telling the truth.