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David Parker Ray, November 6, 1939 - May 28, 2002, was an American serial killer and torturer of women suspected by police to have murdered as many as 60 people in the city of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He tortured and killed his victims in a $100,000 home made torture chamber he called his "toy box, that was equipped with what he referred to as his "friends": whips, chains, pulleys, straps, clamps, leg spreader bars..

And surgical blades and saws, with these tools he terrorized Truth or Consequences for years aided by multiple accomplices. Ray was thought to be the center of a web of sadism, sex slavery and murder, his accused disciple, drifter Dennis Roy Yancy, confessed to strangling to death Marie Parker, 22, while Ray took photos, Ray's daughter Glenda Jean "Jesse" Ray, was convicted of kidnapping Kelly Van Cleve.

Cyndy Hendy Ray's live in girlfriend known to the victims as "mistress," later told authorities that Ray had killed fourteen women," she confessed and supplied testimony against Ray for a lighter sentence and only got probation. From Slow Death by Jim Fielder. Inside the torture room, along with numerous sex toys, torture implements, and detailed diagrams, made by Ray himself..

Showing different methods and techniques for inflicting pain, there was an electronic generating device that was used in torture, as well as a 12-volt motorized breast stretcher. Ray would often have a recorded audio tape of himself be played for his victims whenever they regained consciousness, it has been said that Ray had been recorded as saying he killed at least one person a year for forty years. Wikipedia.

Agents seek closure on David Ray’s case, no bodies found in Elephant Butte Lake after two day intensive search, by Bill Johnson of the Desert Journal. David Parker Ray at his sentencing in 2001, he died at age 62 on May 28 2002 at the prison in Hobbs, NM, apparently of a heart attack after serving only three years of his 224 year prison sentence.

After two days of intensive searching for bodies believed to have been dumped in Elephant Butte Lake during deceased convict David Parker Ray’s reign of sexual torture, multiple kidnappings and rapes in which he held his victims captive torturing them for days on end. His former boss Billy Ray Bowers at Canal Motors in Phoenix, AZ, rose to the surface of the lake in 1989,

It was in the Kettle Top area of the east side of the lake where Bowers’ body emerged while wrapped in blue tarp with a boat anchor attached. Investigators then knew him only as the anonymously slain “John Doe” and had determined that he had been executed – shot in the back of the head – before being disposed of in the lake a year prior in 1988.

And then it took another 10 years or the week after David Ray was arrested before they actually knew Bowers’ identity, the location of Bower’s body when it was found, combined with witnesses’ statements and evidence collected from Ray’s “Toy Box." the sound-proofed travel trailer chambers in which he held his young female victims captive, also led Criminal Agent Norman Rhoades and the team of 14 New Mexico State Police divers to the Kettle Top area to conduct their search.

Rhoades said Ray kept pictures and illustrations of Kettle Top – a mesa shaped like a kettle - including one that ran in the Desert Journal, Ray was no stranger to the lake. Having worked as a mechanic in the Elephant Butte Lake State Park’s shop for several years. Being a boating enthusiast, he often took his daughter, Jessy Ray, and her female friends on boating excursions on Elephant Butte Lake.

One of his daughter’s friends, Becky recalled friendly conversations she had with David Ray while on the lake, she asked, “I wonder if there are any bodies in there,” and Ray would respond, “lots of them,” or how Ray would comment as they passed over certain spots, “these are the deepest parts.”

One statement Ray made on a boating trip in particular came to Becky’s mind after Ray’s arrest. She recalled telling him about boyfriend troubles she was having at the time and Ray explained what to do in such a case.. after killing him, you cut him open, fill up his body with rocks and wrap it with chicken wire, to hold the rocks in place, then dump him in the lake.

And there was also the time when David Ray told his latest flame and accomplice Cindy Hendy - now serving 35 years in prison for her role in the kidnaps and rapes of two women in February and March 1999 - that he had put 18 bodies to rest in the lake, according to investigators.

To aid in the identification of any possible victims, state police released photos of jewellery and clothing items, including a couple of purses, that were among the 2,000 pieces of evidence that they and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized from Ray’s lease lot property, on Bass Road in the Hot Springs Landing area of Elephant Butte Lake State Park.

The photographs of these items are being displayed for possible identification of their owners on Albuquerque’s Channel 13 News website at krqe.com. Rhoades said the KRQE website’s special project for David Ray received more than 130,000 hits since it was posted last week. He said that as a result of the project, he has one lead to follow up on when he returns to his command post.

David Parker Ray: The Toy Box Killer by Katherine Ramsland Desert Fantasies - Cynthia was aware that some of the details she related might seem hard to credit, yet she was able to show them the welts on her back, punctures on her breasts, cuts, bruises, and a recent bump on her head. She had met her abductor, she admitted, while working as a prostitute in Albuquerque.

Vernon Geberth offers the details in Sex-Related Homicide and Death Investigation. The man, David Parker Ray, had offered her $20 for oral sex in his Toyota RV. Cynthia climbed into the cab, where she encountered Cindy Hendy, Ray's live in girlfriend. Cynthia sensed a trap, but then Ray flashed a badge and told her she was under arrest for solicitation.

As they bound and gagged her, she realized they were not police at all, but intended to kidnap her. They placed duct tape over her mouth and locked a steel collar around her neck, and drove for several hours with her in the back. There was nothing she could do to resist, when they stopped, they took her into a double wide trailer and chained her to a post next to a bed. Apparently, it was where they lived.

Soon, she said, they had played a twenty minute tape for her that informed her of what was in store: she was now their sex slave and she could expect a great deal of abuse: among other things, she would have sex with animals, the taped voice told her, be forcibly raped with dildos, have her nipples stretched to the fullest extent they would go, and give oral sex to Ray whenever he demanded it. She was also told that other women before her had died.

They applied a series of electrical and medical instruments to different areas of her body, ignoring her muffled moans of pain and the pleas in her eyes to be released, and she was certain they meant to use her as long as possible and then kill her, they suspended her from the ceiling, whipped her, and threatened her with a gun.

Ray had raped her repeatedly as well, and done other things to humiliate her, he had told her that he had a secure room in which he had more extreme implements and that she would soon be taken there, she looked for some possible way to escape before she was ever subjected to this: to her mind, that secure room would be her tomb.

The officers responding to the interrupted 911 call apprehended David Parker Ray, 59, and his girlfriend, Cindy Lea Hendy, 39, in their Toyota RV as they were leaving the trailer. Both were arrested and taken to the police department, where they gave matching statements: they had been trying to help Cynthia kick a terrible heroin habit.

Although the case thus far was now largely a matter of "he said, she said," the officers weren't willing to turn these two potential offenders loose until they sorted out the facts. A background check indicated that Ray was a mechanic with the state parks department, which gave him access to a wide swath of state land. In itself, that was not troubling, unless he had in fact killed people.

The state police quickly secured a warrant to look for the items the victim had told them about, as well as evidence of her being there. If they could find the tapes, whips, and other implements, this would be clearly not a case of a pair of friends helping another kick a drug habit. Yet what Cynthia had described hardly prepared them for what they found.

Just off Interstate-25 midway between the thriving metropolitan cities of El Paso and Albuquerque, is one of the most publicized and unique health resorts in the United States, originally named Hot Springs it is now called Truth or Consequences.

In 1950, NBC television and radio producer Ralph Edwards, wanted some town in the United States to change its name to Truth or Consequences, the Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce saw it as an opportunity to make the town unique, and the town's residents voted for the name change.

Feedback - Gclary says: I ran the local ice plant at Elephant Butte Lake a couple miles away from his trailer, he used to come by with his girlfriend every weekend for ice, he could have stopped at a store closer to him with the same brand of ice but he always came and bought it at the plant, they always seemed weird but then again a lot of people their are weird.

I always think that when he came for ice in his RV he had a victim in the back and that he used the ice to somehow torture them, he might have just been headed to the lake but your mind wanders after something like this happens, it is a small town where everybody knows everybody but you never truly know anybody, he was truly a sick individual.