Hi, American Homicide listeners, this is your host's Loan Glass. Thank you for joining us on our first bonus episode. I am joined by the host of the Betrayal podcast, Andrea Gunning. Hi, Andrea high Sloan, and Ben Fetterman. Ben Fetterman is a producer on American Homicide and him and Andrea host Barren Gone South Street Together. Hey, Ben, Hey, This episode is obviously going to be different because it's not our typical American homicide format where we are going
through a case. We are really going to spend some time just on David Parker Ray, the Toy box Killer. So our show's American Homicide. The episodes are called Toy Box Killer, and we don't have any bodies hate same bodies because it feels like a really removed way to talk about these victims. But we're speaking about someone who could be one of the most prolific serial killers in American history, and we only know about a few of
his torture victims. That estimate from Jim Yance, the DA prosecuted this case, is that there could be forty five to sixty victims of David Parker Ray. So it's well established that he was a murderer, even though it is unsolved. I think that both of you covering unsolved cases can speak to just the torment that can leave you just talking about something but not being able to give an audience any clear answers.
Sloan. One of the reasons why this story was important to tell is because there are still families out there that have missing loved ones. These potential forty five to sixty individuals in New Mexico that remain on a missing person's list.
A lot of the serial killers that we talk about, the actions are fast, they're horrific. But to hear about someone who got their pleasure from extended periods of time, torturing victims who, in some cases through a mixture of drugs and electric shock therapy, it's sick. It's sick in a way that there's no one else who has stayed with me the way that he has.
Yeah, I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard those tapes of him like that that welcome greeting that he plays to his victims, and I think I was like washing my dishes and I just stopped immediately. I can't even really think about the emotion that came over me other than just fear and deep empathy for the person that was actually in that hearing that.
I mean, what is on those tapes that he played for these women is horrific, and yet I think we as a production felt it was important to play those to really show how evil this man was. It was this is what it was, and what's your opinion of it? Because our opinion was, this is some of the most horrific evidence we've come across in this show.
It's been a really long time since I listened to something and it's kind of stopped me in my tracks, and I felt the emotions and the fear, and I was legitimate. I left feeling terrified of David Parker Ray.
Yeah, Dre. I think one of the things that is most terrifying about David Parker Ray is that he is the epitome of a wolf in sheep's clothing. This is a man that was able to go and operate throughout the community because of his standing in it.
I think it's hard to imagine that there's a human being like him who has existed, and to see someone who is willing to make that audio tape and then also make videos of what he was doing for his own Pleasureugh, it's just such an awful one. And you can go onto the FBI's website today and you can see images of more things that they have found from inside the toy box, and it's, Oh, it's just so much that they're trying to use to identify more victims, and a lot of it is clothing, so much jewelry.
And what I was thinking about when I first saw all of that was how often, Drey, you can probably speak to this as women. So much of our jewelry has meaning behind it that's often about protection or sentimental reasons.
And I look at these bracelets and I think, how many times did a woman look down see this bracelet that her husband or her boyfriend or her mother had given her with the hope that their daughter could wear it to be safe and happy, and think of them, And it's lying in this toy box, and he's keeping it for his own enjoyment.
I know that a lot of people when they listen to true crime, they really want to understand the motivations of the people that are behind it. But a lot of the work that we do focuses on the people who represent those jewelry items and what they lost and what they went through. And this isn't just like a one off, hyperbolic situation. This is a person that was cloaked himself in as a normal person and was preying on individuals and people were his prey.
So it's really scary, and I.
Just I think the most impactful part of this whole three part series is how much you feel for the victims and understand what they went through. Because to understand this story and to hear it is to feel that fear, and you really are sitting with to some small degree that you can what some of these people went through.
I really like what you said about an artifact of their time before David Parker Ray makes me think Kelly Garrett. Kelly Garrett was the victim who the FBI was able to identify from posting an image of her tattoo, and her former in laws saw that and then reached out. She continued to live after this experience and she had no memory of the specifics. That's how much he can alter a person's mind, not just you know, what he did with the drugs and the torture, but just the
trauma behind this experience. And I think about her life before, and I think about her life after, it's loss after loss after loss.
With Kelly, I think the hardest part is the fact that no one, including herself believed what happened to her that night, to the point that it led to her divorce, to the point that she got gas lit by her family, by herself, by the entire community by saying this isn't happening.
But fundamentally, as we've said, not only did her brain get altered from the trauma that she experienced, but then also how she was drugged, but then just the path that she was on was completely changed when she was dumped on the side of the road, and you just have no idea why. It's really devastating, And part of me.
Is like, oh, thank god, she doesn't remember what she went through, the trauma, the violence that she just went through for X amount of days. But then how he was able to weaponize that too for all of those years. It is astonishing to me, but it's it's one of the things are I'm like it. To have full clarity of that amount of pain for that amount of time also scares me too.
Right, And so much of that has to do with the victims who he picked, women who people didn't look for when they went missing because of their work as sex workers. I think about Cynthia V. Hill and what it took for her to escape, and I think about her running with just feet of chains attached to her.
Running naked with a dog collar around your neck down the street, just trying to find any sort of sanctuary. That's what it took to unravel this case.
Right, and what could have continued to happen if she had not done that. We have an audio clip from Darren White, who worked for New Mexico's Department of Public Safety, and he speaks about what this case, what it did to him.
When you do this work as long as I have, you wish there are certain aspects of it that you could just push a button and you could hit a race and you wouldn't have to see that again. But unfortunately that's not the case. Those are images, horrible images that will live with us for the rest of our lives.
There was an FBI agent, Patty Rust. It was her job to detail everything that was found in the toy box. She's making drawings. She's been five days just going over at the evidence and when she got home after those five days she took her own life. She could be considered another victim of David Parker Rays. It's so sad, so sad to tell the story. It really it breaks my heart. You know, this is a this is an FBI agent. You can imagine what this woman had seen.
You can't discount what it would do to a person in the timing of events that after being so immersed in his toy box, she couldn't go on. I think it has to just change the way that you view the world. And it's just devastating that it ended up the way that it did with Agent Rust and I God, I wish that, you know, she had been able to get some help in some way.
When Ben and I were investigating there and Gone and we didn't know exactly what happened to two people, Richard Patron and Danielle Embo, they went missing and they haven't been found twenty years later, and so we kind of an idea of what happened and who was involved, but we don't know the manner of death. And that was something that you have to play different scenarios when you're doing an investigation. You have to think through you know, did this happen or did that happen? Like was this
how they were killed? You know, I'm not in the FBI. I've just worked on a few cases, but it is extremely difficult, especially when you're tasked to find justice. You can't help but feel bought in, and then this other level of reality can really be jarring, emotionally jarring. I don't know how you felt about it, Ben, but I would often find myself finding it too hard to think too deep on what happened to Danielle and Richard.
I think what comes to mind for me about this part of our conversation and comparing it to There and Gone is FBI agents are just they're humans too, and there's a level of feeling, seeing, experiencing something. You can try to be as detached from the job as you want to be, but at some point you are a
human being and can't completely be devoid of emotion. And for this female agent that took her own life, I obviously can't imagine, but I know as a human being that there are things that impact us that we just can't turn away from, and it affects us in different ways. And that's where my mind went for There and Gone, You and I got very close to Agent Vito Verselling. I mean he is a tenured, you know, decades long
special agent on the force. He did not necessarily see any crime scene photos or results of what happened to them that could have that type of impact. But how it did impact him, Dre is the relationships with the families, that pursuit of wanting to get them answers, and his inability to let go of that case and move on that case will always continue to be with him, just like for the agents in New Mexico around toy Box, this case will always loom over that field office.
I mean, he invested one hundred thousand dollars in create the toy box, this torture tamer one hundred thousand dollars.
And one thing that I find remarkable as well is that the toy box, this physical trailer, still sits in the parking lot of the field office, the FBI field office that investigated this, And I think the only reason it is still there is that hope that these forty five to sixty bodies may eventually turn up, that there may be evidence in the toy box to be able to say, hey, David Parker, Ray was responsible for this and to bring justice for those families to know what
happened to their loved one. There's one piece of this story that is really the open ended piece to it that bothers me outside of everything that we've talked about, which is this map that was recovered on his property that had you know, pins in this lake just randomly scattered about. And we cover the fact that there was this drought that occurs, and everyone expected because of that drought, this is how we're going to find all these missing people.
And yet when that event occurs, that drought occurs, the reservoir runs dry, there are no bodies. And it left me with the question was this just another token that he held onto of where he committed all these crimes or was this another part of his manipulation to lead law enforcement towards an empty search. And I just don't know that bothers me about this case.
I want you to hear something from Darren White, who worked on this case.
I think still at this point, your hope is, with like any case that you are asked about that's unsolved, your hope is that bringing it back there'll be a tension that comes with this airing and you hope that with what Cynthia is doing and others talking about it, that maybe it just sparks something in somebody to do the right thing. And so I see it as an
opportunity to raise awareness about the case. And the only thing that's going to make me feel good about this case, if that's even possible, is solving some of these homicides and finding some.
Of these women. Well can you imagine being the FBI agent who had a meeting set up with David Parker Ray where he says he's going to talk and he dies from a heart attack. It's just so frustrating, and it's particularly frustrating because a heart attack is just so not what he deserved. I mean this, it's such a get out of jail free card really after what he did, for there to be no accountability, for him to get to die suddenly when his victims had been tortured endlessly, it just feels so unjust.
You know, when I was listening to this show that you guys put together, it was just like one thing after another, but it just kind of goes to show just like the wake and how expansive his destruction is and it doesn't stop at just the investigation. I mean, there's like a black cloud that hangs over this whole entire story.
Yeah, I mean the judge who died.
It's just when the judge had the heart attack, I was like, you gotta be kidding.
May you gotta be kidding?
Made Oh no? Yeah. A victim passes away right before one of the trial commences, which put a ton of pressure on the other two women who go into the trial thinking I'm just going to be experiencing what I've experienced all these years, which is no one's going to believe me.
He feels like an extension of the underworld that so many people around him could kind of get that curse.
I mean, you look back, he got pretty damn close to not having to face what he was responsible for.
It really is as if you made a deal with the devil.
In what you guys put together for the Toy Box Killer, you really get the impact of how terrifying and violent and bad of a person David Parker Ray was.
You did a really great job.
And then so you guys are done with New Mexico and then the next up is we're heading to my neck of the woods in New Jersey.
Yeah, now, we're in New Jersey. For people listening who don't know this, which would be anyone listening, We're based out of Philadelphia, so the New Jersey story, we're really familiar with these areas, you know, particularly Cherry Hill. Cherry
Hill's what forty five minutes away, you know. We want to keep those lines open between us and the American Homicide listeners in our email, in our Instagram because a lot of these stories take place in communities that you all know well and have insights, and we want to hear those things. And we also want to hear what you want to hear more of. So if there's questions or anything that comes up, or cases that you believe
deserve more attention, reach out. Let us know. You can email us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. I just love being joined by you guys.
Thank you.
I'm excited for New Jersey. Thanks dre Ben, thank you both so much. You can contact the American Homicide Team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. That's American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. American Homicide is hosted and written by me Sloan Glass and is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive
produced by Nancy Glass and Todd Gams. The series is also written and produced by Todd Gams, with additional writing by Ben Fetterman and Andrea Gunning. Our associate producer is Kristin Melcurrie. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Crimecheck. Audio editing, mixing and mastering by Nico Aaruka. American Homicide's theme song was composed by Oliver Bains of Neiser Music Library provided by my Music. Follow American Homicide on Apple Podcasts,
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