PROLOGUE
The black mask in the storage shed appears from the description given to be the mask or similar mask which (David) Ray has been observed wearing in video tapes which were seized from his residence and which were viewed by officers pursuant to previous search warrants.
—Police search warrant, 4/13/1999
Smoke was pouring out from between her legs, the sacred place where God had intended for this young woman to give birth to a baby someday.
Eight Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) special agents watched the homemade videotape with a growing sense of horror crossing their somber faces. Their eyes followed the two people torturing the faceless victim—David Parker Ray, fifty-nine, and his girlfriend, Cynthia Lea Hendy, thirty-nine. The criminals hovered over the naked woman and stuck a hot cattle prod inside her vagina, watching her body writhe in pain. The agents kept their eyes on Ray and Hendy.
The federal investigators were sitting inside an eight-by twenty-five-foot white cargo trailer where the crime had taken place. The trailer was parked on the edge of Bass Road, along the shoreline of the largest lake in New Mexico—Elephant Butte Lake. The partners in crime lived on the outskirts of a small town cradled in the high, dry desert country of southern New Mexico—a strange place called Truth or Consequences.
The cops couldn’t take their eyes off the torture unfolding in front of them. The naked woman, spreadeagled on her back, was anchored to a black leather medical table by the red nylon straps on her wrists and her ankles. Her eyes and mouth were covered with silver duct tape. She could barely move.
David Ray was wearing a long black robe and his face was covered by a black leather mask sprinkled with gold glitter. He looked out through two large eyeholes. He laughed as he rammed the cattle prod inside the terrified woman. Cindy Hendy was waving a small handgun, threatening to kill the woman if she didn’t let the couple have their way with her.
Patty Rust and her fellow FBI agents watched the dying girl struggle to get free. It was clear to all of them that she’d been drugged out of her mind and frightened into submission by her dominating captors. The duo took off the duct tape and she screamed for help as the car mechanic and his welfare-cheating girlfriend continued to make her beg for her life.
The two sadists continued to molest the young woman until blood oozed out of her mouth and her ears. A moment later, her head slumped to the side and her body went limp.
The FBI agents turned off the videotape recorder and walked out of the torture chamber, one by one. Several agents threw up in the hot desert sand. Others sat on the steps of David Ray’s white cargo trailer and talked among themselves.
For the next four days, Rust went back in the place David called his “toy box” and did her job, making a series of highly detailed black-and-white drawings of all the whips and chains and gigantic dildos and other devices used by David Parker Ray to hurt women. When she was done, she submitted her work to the Evidence Recovery Team in Albuquerque. On Friday morning, April 2, 1999, she met with her boss to discuss the drawings. He told her she’d done a “fantastic job.” Then he told her to go home and relax and try not to think anymore about what she’d seen in the trailer.
Later that night, Patricia E. Rust, thirty-six, drove home to her family in El Paso, Texas. Just before midnight, she got out of bed and went downstairs to get her personal handgun.
She put the barrel of the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER 1
He put gravy on me and then let a dog lick it off.
—Cyndy Vigil, describing her torture by David Ray, 4/16/1999
Cyndy Vigil, twenty-two, ran down the narrow hall and out the door of the mobile home—fleeing for her life. It was late in the afternoon on March 22, 1999, and she had no idea where she was. She didn’t know she was running down Bass Road in Elephant Butte, New Mexico. She just knew she had to get away from the two people who’d kept her in captivity for the last three horrible days and nights. She was naked from head to toe, except for the padlocked metal collar around her neck attached to a four-foot swinging chain dangling in the wind over her shoulder.
One local motorist saw her “running in circles” in the Hot Springs neighborhood overlooking the giant turquoise blue lake and the woman wanted to help. Doris Mitchell was driving home from afternoon grocery shopping, but the sight of the naked woman made her freeze in fear. She rolled up her windows and locked all her doors. She would not soon forget the frightened woman who ran beside her car and tried desperately to open her locked doors that day.
“She didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything at all,” Mitchell later told Frances Baird, a young reporter for the Sentinel, the local Sierra County newspaper. “She just looked wild.”
By the time Vigil rounded the corner of the dusty dirt road and turned to flee down a patchy asphalt road leading to the lake, she was looking for shelter. The neighborhood was a jumble of mobile homes and looked to her like every yard was empty. As the road started to veer downhill, she got lucky and spotted a double-wide trailer on her left with a small grassy green yard surrounded by a tiny white picket fence. It was the home of Darlene and Donald Breech, who had worked and lived near Elephant Butte Lake for almost twenty-three years.
Without knocking, Vigil barged through the front door and started yelling at the top of her lungs. “Help me! Help me!” she shrieked.
Darlene Breech was standing in her kitchen pouring herself a glass of water when the hysterical girl suddenly appeared in her living room, stark naked and nearly out of her mind with fear.
“She didn’t knock; she just burst in,” Darlene later told Assistant District Attorney James A. Yontz. “As she was walkin’ in the door, she just started screaming, ‘Don’t let them get me! Please help me!’ She grabbed my arms and she didn’t want to let go. I looked at her body and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
“Her wrists looked like hamburger meat. She had beautiful long brown hair and it was all matted with blood. She was dirty all over and it looked like she had pooped in her pants. Her poor little boobs were black and blue and there were bruises all over her arms and legs.
“For some reason I didn’t tell her to get out of the house. Donald and I are both retired, and we have four grown daughters, and to us she didn’t look like she could hurt a flea. She couldn’t have weighed over a hundred pounds, dripping wet.
“She held on to me real tight while she was talking and I had blood all over me. I tried to calm her down and a second later she ran over to the front door and dead-bolted it from the inside so nobody could snatch her. My husband, Don, was outside, watering the back-yard.
“She ran back from the front door and grabbed my arm and started talking—very, very fast. She was terrified. She said some guy named David and his girlfriend, Cindy, had kept her locked up in a trailer for three days and nights, and during this time, they did nothing but torture her.
“She said on the third day David woke up and put on some kind of ranger uniform and went to work, leaving Hendy to watch her. She was chained to a wall while her captor watched a soap opera on television. Cyndy somehow managed to get a key and unlock herself from the wall, but the woman caught her and yelled, ‘Hey, bitch, you’re not going anywhere!’ [She] hit [Cyndy] over the head with a big glass lamp.
“She escaped by stabbing this other woman in the back of the neck with an ice pick.
“Then she jumped through a window and ran for her life.
“Right away I called the nine-one-one operator. The first time I called, I told the operator what was going on, but not where I lived. I’ve lived here a long time and I know there are too many ‘creepholes’ living around Truth or Consequences, so I just hung up.
“Cyndy sat down in the kitchen. I’ve got this wet bar in my trailer and the bar stools are covered with a white Naugahyde