Slow Death:. James Fielder
happy.
Schum walked into the study and picked up a gray metal toolbox on the floor and opened it. Inside, he found a pearl-handled .38 Colt handgun, a small bottle of Hot Damn! Schnapps, a large hunting knife, a tube of Vaseline and a leather whip coiled around a small “fake” New Mexico State Police badge. Schum opened the closet and found a neatly pressed dark green park ranger uniform hanging from a hook right above a small collection of Remington hunting rifles.
He closed the closet door and walked over to Ray’s desk, which was piled high with a large assortment of videotapes. There must have been at least a hundred movies stacked on top of, under and beside the desk. In the middle of the desk was the statue of a small white devil’s skull with tiny horns protruding from the top of the head and a long tongue sticking out of the twisted, unhappy mouth. It looked like Ray had used the skull as a paperweight. Schum picked it up and fingered through some paperwork on the desk, noticing a list of torture recommendations typed up by Ray. Two tips stuck out in his mind: one that said “use a warm soldering iron up inside her vagina” and another that advised Ray’s followers to “pluck pubic hairs out, one at a time, using a small pair of tweezers.”
Schum leaned over next to a small bookcase of true-crime books and picked up a maroon binder full of Ray’s “fantasy” sketches and drawings. He thumbed through the sixty pages of pencil drawings of David Ray chasing young girls and doing what was probably just run-of-the-mill acts of sadistic pleasure to Ray’s way of thinking: kidnapping, bondage, torture and killings. Schum was a religious man and the drawings nearly made him sick to his stomach. He feared that if these drawings were ever released to the public at large, America would spawn an epidemic of sexual sadists.
When he walked into the bedroom, Schum looked at the head of the bed and noticed a large olive green “dreamcatcher” hanging from a hook in the ceiling over the pillows. There was a small card attached to the web of interlacing threads and two long leather thongs with green plumes attached to the ends. Schum read the card:
All the bad dreams are
held in the web and all
good dreams spiral back
out to the dreamer. In
the morning when the
rays of the Sun fall
on the Dreamcatcher,
the bad dreams are
released to burn up
in the Sun.
Schum looked down on the floor and spotted a white plastic bucket with the same blue sweatshirt that Cyndy Vigil had been wearing the morning when she met Ray and Hendy on Central Avenue. The white letters on the front of the sweatshirt spelled out B.U.M. The broken green lamp was on the bed and the bloody ice pick was on the floor.
He walked around the end of the bed and into the bathroom and noticed another white bucket turned over on the floor—it had human feces smeared inside. Schum knew Cyndy Vigil was addicted to heroin and he wondered if she had been going through withdrawal during her three days in captivity.
He’d seen enough inside the house, so he took a stroll out to the front yard, where David had parked his white Dodge Ram Charger. He opened the driver’s door and saw an emergency red beacon on the floor—the kind of flashing light the police put on the roof of their patrol cars when they’re running down a suspect. Schum glanced up on the dash next to the steering wheel and saw a police scanner. David Ray had the perfect setup to play highway patrolman, Schum thought. Spot the victim, pull her car over late at night, and the rest was history.
The next afternoon, March 24, John Schum met with David Parker Ray at the Sierra County Correctional Facility on Date Street in downtown Truth or Consequences. Schum had been “profiling” killers for years and knew they were almost impossible to spot with the “naked eye.” Yet, when he first shook hands with Ray, he was a little surprised that David Ray came off as such a polite and soft-spoken gentleman. It didn’t take long to get down to business and John Schum just settled back in his chair and let David Ray do most of the talking. Their interview spanned three days and took over nine hours to complete. Unfortunately, David already had a court-appointed attorney and the 300 pages of notes were later ruled illegally obtained by the FBI.
Special Agent Schum asked David to start at the beginning.
“My grandmother’s name was Dolly Parker. One afternoon, the year before I was born, her two youngest sons were left at the ranch while my grandpa went to town to get groceries. They lived thirty miles from Mountainair. Alden and David was left there alone. Alden was fifteen and David was thirteen and they was playin’ cowboys and Indians with real guns—there was always guns at the ranch and Alden shot David in the heart and killed him. There was a bullet in the old Winchester and Alden didn’t know it.
“Alden put David’s body in the old pickup and tried to, tried to take him to town and it run out of gas—so Alden run down a horse and rode to the highway and—and flagged a car and—and tried to get help.
“Of course, David was already dead.
“When she found out what had happened, my grandmother flipped out. I wasn’t born yet—it was 1938—but I was born a year later and she decided that I was a reincarnation of her son, of her dead son David, and consequently I’m named David Parker Ray. . . . And that’s why she always wanted to raise me.
“There really wasn’t much affection in my childhood. I was there physically, but nobody paid any attention to me, you know, it was like . . . like I wasn’t really there at all.”
“What about the sexual fantasies?” asked Schum.
“This thing is literally tearing me apart,” David Ray told John Schum. “For forty years my life has been a private hell.”
Special Agent Schum asked David how he got interested in sex.
“When I was a little kid, my mother and father pawned me and my sister Peggy off on Dolly, my mother’s mother, who lived on a farm up in the hills near Mountainair, New Mexico. There wasn’t anything to do up there. My dad was a drunk and a drifter and every six months he would drop by and bring me a big pile of True Detective magazines, and when I was about ten years old, I started to have these fantastic dreams about raping and killing young girls. In the dreams I always used a broken beer bottle.
“I hated my grandmother. She didn’t care about us. By the time I was twelve years old, I was making my own bombs and setting off explosives all over the woods. My granny didn’t have a clue—she was a real fruitcake! I blew up a lot of tree stumps when I was a kid.
“By the time I was fifteen, I had a private dungeon under a big piñon pine tree—I had a hangman’s noose and a collection of broken beer bottles I planned to use on girls someday. When I got lonesome, I used to fuck a hole I dug in the ground.
“I was real shy when I was a child. I still am. I wouldn’t even look at a girl—I always kept my eyes down. I didn’t have my first date until I was eighteen years old. It was kinda funny what happened that night. We were parked by the Rio Grande in her car and she said she wanted me to drive home. I asked her for the keys and she dropped them down the front of her blouse and told me to come and get them.
“The next year I got married for the first time and I swear to God I was almost a virgin when I got married.
“I got married in 1959 and joined the army about a year later and went to Korea. My wife got pregnant in 1960 and we had a son. I came home on an emergency leave in 1961 to get a divorce. My wife was leavin’ the baby alone while she went out to party. By the time I got back to the United States, my son was being cared for by the Department of Public Welfare and I asked them to give me custody. They did, and my mother, Opel, and my stepfather, Cecil, raised my son until I got out of the army.
“I got married again in 1962 when I was only twenty-two years old. Ninety days later, I went back to court and got another divorce. We just didn’t click.
“In 1966 I married a woman named Glenda Burdine. We were married for almost fifteen years. We had a daughter,