The horror began the day I decided to bake a cake for my boyfriend Frank Zambrano who lives with me and my five-year-old boy, Abel.
I knew Cindy vaguely through a friend and she had offered to give me a cake-mix packet and ingredients for frosting.
I went with her to a white-and-brown recreational vehicle. David, whom I’d never met, was hiding inside. He put a knife to my throat and said I was being abducted.
They drove to their home, a trailer with a small trailer parked nearby—at Elephant Butte. They sat me on a bed and Cindy told me to just relax and everything would be alright.
David left the room and came back with a big knife. I pleaded with him. “I want to go home, my little boy Abel needs me.”
He slapped me viciously. The blow sent shivers of terror through my whole body. I realized this was not just some weird game. My life was in danger. I am legally blind from a previous injury but I could see the knife at my throat and Cindy pointing a pistol at me. David ripped my clothes off.
They bound me naked to the bed with chains around my ankles. They also padlocked a metal collar around my neck.
They told me: “Welcome to your worst nightmare. If you’ve ever woken up screaming in the night, we are the people you were dreaming about.”
Then they began a sick introduction to what they were going to do to me. On a TV in front of me, they played a video that showed their torture room and things they had done to others. I was so terrified I could hardly watch, but they were getting a kick out of showing it to me. They left me chained to the bed for three days. David went off to work as usual and Cindy stayed to watch me.
On the third day, David told me “We’re going to the Playbox. I want to show you my toys.” The way he said “Playbox” gave me the creeps.
They took me to the other trailer where David put me on a table and tied me down, hand and foot.
Looking around, I could see things that looked like medical instruments—pliers, clamps, saws and scalpels. There were also whips and chains and padlocks and other scary-looking restraints.
It looked like some kind of torture chamber that you see in movies.
The sight of all those things for pinching, twisting and cutting flesh paralyzed me with fear. David called those horrible instruments his “friends.”
I realized that I had to stay cool or never get out alive. If I tried to fight them, I was sure they’d kill me and dump my body. David had stripped to the waist. Looking into his cold eyes was like seeing the Devil himself.
I was gagged and blindfolded. Suddenly, I felt a terrible pain as they jammed something into me from behind. The pain paralyzed me. I prayed, “Dear God, please help me survive this, I don’t want to die.”
I could hear David breathing heavily and he and Cindy began inflicting as much pain on me as they could.
Later, they led me back to the bedroom where I was again chained to the bed.
The next day David said to Cindy, “I think Angie would like to pleasure me, wouldn’t you little girl?” He made me perform a sex act on him.
They took me back to The Playbox and strapped me to the table, telling me I was going to have electrotherapy. David clipped wires to my breasts and lower body. Cindy watched as he switched on the power. It was like scorching fire surging through my body.
I thought, “Dear God, he’s going to kill me. I’ll never see Frank and my little darling Abel again.”
Through my agony I could hear David and Cindy “ooing and aahing” as they watched my torment. “Look at how she moves,” he said. “Watch as the current hits her.” I tried to scream in my agony, but the gag kept me from making a sound. The torture went on for at least an hour. I thought it would never end.
I was shaking like a leaf by the time they took me back and chained me like a dog to the bed. These evil people had taken my pride and my morals. I was outraged. I knew I had to beat them.
I began saying prayers I remembered from my childhood. “Hail, Mary, full of grace, pray for us sinners, now and at our hour of death.”
“Dear God, Blessed Mother, especially deliver us from evil. Oh yes, Dear Lord, especially from that. Save me from these two torturers.”
The prayers made me feel stronger.
On the fifth day, Cindy Hendy went out to do shopping. Left alone, I began thinking about how practiced these two devils were at what they were doing. They had probably done this many times before to countless other women, I thought.
I knew I had to work my street-smarts to survive.
I figured to work on David Ray. While I was chained to the couch naked and weeping, I said to him, “David, come over here and sit by me. I’m feeling so down. Come hold me, please.”
Sitting next to me, David told me that he liked me and thought I was a nice person. He said: “If I had known how nice you were beforehand, I wouldn’t have started all this. Cindy didn’t tell me you were so sweet. I think we could have been friends.”
I could hardly believe my plan was working. In a sincere tone, I told him it wasn’t too late. We could still be friends. And I would never tell anybody about what he’d done.
Somehow, I convinced him to let me go. When Cindy came back, she wasn’t happy about it.
She finally went along with him, but I was terrified that they were teasing and at the last minute would take me back into their hell-hole.
I promised to hitch a ride to Albuquerque, over 100 miles away, and not come back. They took me in their car and dropped me off on I-25.
On February 21, 1999, Angelique Montano, wearing the same clothes she was wearing five days earlier, put out her thumb and tried to hitch a ride back to her home in Truth or Consequences. After a couple of hours and without much luck, she managed to flag down an off-duty sheriff from Los Lunas County. She told her whole story to the officer as he drove her back to her boyfriend and young son in T or C. He doubted that she was telling him the truth, and her account went unreported to the Sierra County Sheriff’s Office. A month later, after the officer saw the unfolding Ray investigation on TV, he regretted his mistake.
“If I had thought it was one hundred percent legitimate,” he told authorities, “I would have taken her to the police station right then and there.”
Not everyone between T or C and Elephant Butte believed that Ray and Hendy were guilty. They did have friends. Debbie Fisk collected her weekly disability checks and liked to hang out with Hendy. She’d been over to Ray’s trailer on many occasions and knew his daughter, Glenda “Jesse” Ray, and his best buddy, Dennis Roy Yancy. Right after Hendy got arrested, Fisk went over and cleaned out Hendy’s trailer. Fisk knew almost everyone from the wrong side of the tracks, as the conservatives in town used to call all the places where the party animals liked to party.
She even knew Angie Montano.
When she read that Angie had fooled the Globe into thinking that she was borrowing “cake mix” to bake a cake, Fisk giggled.
“You know—you go over and get seven hundred dollars’ worth of cake mix, and something’s bound to happen,” she told anyone who would listen.
“That’s a lot of cocaine.”
CHAPTER 4
We found a videotape of another naked woman with a swan tattoo on her right ankle.
—FBI Agent Tony Maxwell, 3/31/1999
By April 1, the mainstream-media types were beginning to lose interest in the “next big story.” Both victims were girls who turned tricks to support their drug habits—not exactly the kind