Slow Death:. James Fielder
nightmare” that threatened the peace and quiet of her beloved desert home. White looked back at her, shaken.
“ The nightmare is behind bars,” he told her. “This is a safe community.”
The next day, Wednesday, March 24, David Ray and Cindy Hendy were brought to the magistrate court in T or C to face separate arraignment hearings in front of Magistrate Judge Thomas Pestak. They were both in chains and shackles. Hendy walked into the courtroom in her orange jail jumpsuit; the dour dishwater blonde told the swarming media in a hushed voice, “I’m innocent.... I’m afraid to talk.” David Ray, his face rough and wrinkled from years of working in the sun, shook his head and spoke softly after a reporter asked him if he “did it.”
“It didn’t happen that way,” he said.
Inside the courtroom, both suspects told Pestak they were too poor to pay for an attorney and each one asked for a public defender. Ray worked, but Hendy told the judge she was trying to get by on only $331 a month from her welfare check. Pestak listened to Socorro, New Mexico, prosecutor Jim Yontz present a list of twenty-five felony charges against each defendant. The charges included kidnapping, criminal sexual penetration (rape with dildos), aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy. If convicted of all charges, Ray and Hendy would each be sentenced to 197 years behind bars. Judge Pestak was concerned that Ray and Hendy might flee, so he set their bail high enough so that neither would try to make a run for it.
“One million dollars each,” he told them. “Cash.”
There was a true media feeding frenzy when the case broke. The New York Times and People magazine were on the scene. The Albuquerque Journal sent down several reporters. The supermarket tabloid the Globe had a reporter up in Everett, Washington, digging up the dirt on Cindy Hendy, and a reporter in T or C looking into David Ray’s past. CBS, NBC and ABC all had lead stories on the evening news that week. Television stations from all over New Mexico filled the twenty-two town motels. The Associated Press reporter and cameraman were everywhere, as were the three local T or C weeklies, the Sentinel, the Herald and the Desert Journal.
Local county sheriff Terry Byers watched the media mobs take over the two neighboring towns during those first few days of the investigation: “The first night we only had one television news truck and after Wednesday we had ten trucks here within hours.”
Major Bob Barnes of Elephant Butte complained that noisy helicopters were disrupting his traditional afternoon nap. He told a news conference that most of the people in town didn’t even lock their doors at night and now Elephant Butte was becoming famous as a haven for white-trash sadists.
“We feel violated,” he said.
When the Rio Grande was dammed in 1916 to create Elephant Butte Lake and more irrigation water for the farmers and ranchers of southern New Mexico, thousands of rattlesnakes congregated on an island that later became known as Rattlesnake Island. The island is right across the lake from where David Ray lived on his lease lot property at Hot Springs Landing.
Frances Baird was only seventeen years old when Ray was arrested, and she didn’t have any idea how nasty the story would be, but she was the only crime reporter for the Sentinel. When the story broke, she already had an inside scoop on what was going on “with that snake in the grass, David Ray.”
Her boyfriend, Byron Wilson, twenty-seven, was the park cop who arrested Ray and Hendy on the first afternoon.
During the first week of the investigation, the New Mexico State Police spearheaded the effort to collect evidence from Ray’s property, including—what Frances heard described as—shocking videotapes, possible “snuff” videos, and a bunch of audiotapes David had made to try to “freak out” the victims. She also heard that David used to call the cargo trailer his “play box”; that is, until Cindy Hendy talked him into renaming it the “toy box.”
It wasn’t long before the FBI started snooping around, sensing a blockbuster case. Frances nicknamed the New Mexico State Police “the Indians” and the man in charge of the FBI special agents “the Chief.” When Doug Beldon moved down from Albuquerque and set up a field office in T or C to supposedly help the NMSP gather more evidence, Frances used her connections to find out about the expanding case.
One afternoon Frances asked Beldon what was going to happen next.
“Are there any more suspects?” she asked him.
“I do expect more arrests,” he told her.
“What about victims?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “We think there might be many more.”
CHAPTER 3
I went over there to pick up some cake mix . . . and they kept me against my will.
—Angie Montano, late March 1999
On Saturday night, March 27, Angelique Montano, twenty-seven, sat in front of her small television set and watched the unfolding Cyndy Vigil escape story. Angie and Cyndy never met in person, but the two young women had two things in common. Both had worked as hookers on the most dangerous section of Highway 66 (Central Avenue) in Albuquerque, and both had been kidnapped and tortured by David Ray and Cindy Hendy during the first three months of 1999.
Angelique had moved to Truth or Consequences in 1996 in order to turn her life around. Methamphetamines had almost killed her in the big city and she figured a new chance to start all over might be just what she and her infant son, Abel, needed. Life was hard as nails—living off the monthly welfare checks—and she still had trouble resisting the underground supply of drugs in T or C, but at least she was off the street. She desperately wanted to be a good person, like everybody else.
On Sunday, March 28, after watching television all weekend, she walked over to talk to her friend John Branaugh. She told him about how David had kidnapped her on Febraury 17 and then how she had talked him into letting her go on February 21. She told him it all happened back in the winter, right about the time the movie 8 MM came out. John had heard the story before, but he hadn’t believed it the first time around. He’d been watching the news all weekend, too, so this time he listened to every word.
Later that day, Angelique let John take her down to the police station, where she poured out the rest of the story about her five-day ordeal with Ray and Hendy. Both Vigil and Montano told of similar experiences, except Ray never got a chance to take Vigil to the toy box because she stabbed his girlfriend and ran away. Angelique Montano wasn’t so lucky,
The next day, the media descended on Angie and made her feel like a celebrity. Locals winced when she went on NBC-TV and told the national audience what the two monsters had done to what she called “my poor little vaginer.” Though many of the so-called respectable people in town lacked sympathy for her lifestyle, a guest editorial in the Sentinel reminded the citizens that “even the worst of us deserves protection under the law.”
Tabloids like the Globe recognized the story’s power, and Joe Mullins, their man on the beat, courted Angie until he got her to agree to sell her story to the tabloid. Mullins called Craig Lewis, his editor in Florida, and told him about the interview.
Angie had one blue eye (a prosthetic device) and one brown eye, and a face covered by small pocklike scars from a lifetime of drug abuse. She wanted an operation to get a new artificial eye, so both of her eyes would be the same color; Lewis gave Mullins the go-ahead to seal the deal with a special offer from the “deep pockets” of the Globe. Joe Mullins was to pay her $700 and promise that the newspaper would pay for her surgery. When Angie heard what they were going to do for her, she was thrilled.
Mullins did an interview and got Angie to give him some old pictures; within a week, the Globe was on sale all over America, sporting a front-page headline that read NEW MEXICO VICTIM’S OWN STORY: “I ESCAPED SEX SADISTS’ TORTURE CHAMBER.”
Angie got a chance to tell her story, with only minor editorial “flourishes” by the touch-up staff of the Globe:
For five days,