S1: E6 – The Toy Box Killer, Part 1

There was a nine one ball that came in indicating that there was a woman running with no clothes on and had a chain wrapped around her nick.

It was a nine to one one call that made the New Mexico State Police think they were listening to some kind of prank.

The victim had been kidnapped and tortured for several days. They found what essentially was a torture chamber with a placard on it that indicated Satan's Den.

You know right away everything that happened in there was awful.

It was just got awful, and surprisingly it all happened in the tiny tourist town of Elephant Butte, New Mexico.

This is something we never would have expected.

It was something they never would have suspected because it went from a case about sexual assault to something even darker.

The FBI has estimated is responsible for between forty five and sixty hors arms.

It would be the most sick and twisted chase that any of us would be involved in.

My name is Sloaneglass and this is American Homicide, a show where we take you across the country to investigate some of America's deadliest crimes. We'll explore how these murders are shaped by their unique landscapes, and in turn, how these tragedies have shaped the fabric of these American communities forever. Today, We're an Elephant but New Mexico for Part one of The Toy Box Killer. A note for our listeners. This episode includes detailed accounts of sexual violence and contain subject

Elephant Butte is a state park and there is this man made lake that's about twenty three miles long.

Darren White worked for New Mexico's Department of Public Safety.

Well, New Mexico is the desert, and it does get hot, and so people like to cool off, and there's not many places to do that, and Elephant Butte is one of them.

Known as the Diamond in the Desert. The crown jewel of Elephant Butte is Elefantpute Dam. That huge man made lake is a result of the dam's construction in the early nineteen hundreds. Locals one joke that the rock formation in the area resembled an elephant lying down, which led to the name Elephant Butte.

It's the playground for New Mexico in the summer.

Every year, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the sleepy town of Elephant Butte transforms into one of the state's biggest tourist attractions.

This tiny little town, maybe a few thousand people, grows to over one hundred thousand people that come down every year to use the lake, to fish, to camp.

But outside of tours season, the area is fairly desolate. The thousand or so full time residents are mainly for tyres.

They love the area, they love the lake year round, but many of them will tell you too that they just want to be left to themselves and enjoy their quiet little piece of the state.

The state park is part of the city of Elephant Butte, a tiny desert community with one stoplight. It didn't even become an incorporated city until nineteen ninety eight. Part of that it was considered part of the neighboring community of Truth or Consequences. Strange name for a town, truth or Consequences. It conjures up images of the Old West and lawlessness, but that wasn't the case. They came by the name

Mister Senator.

I hereby Christmas City up some eight thousand people.

Truth or Consequences of you like to go.

Le sounds kind of crazy, but I guess in those days that's what you had to do to have a great parade. Outside of that, the town was pretty quiet. One hundred and fifty miles north of Elephant Butte is Albuquerque, and that's where a twenty two year old sex worker named Cynthia V. Hill lived in the nineteen nineties. Here's Cynthia.

I didn't have the best childhood.

Cynthia was abused and molested as a child and later turned to the streets, where she used drugs and sold her body.

When I was out there, the homeless nas, the in and out of hotels, the prostitution, being on drugs. I've been there, and I've done that.

Central Avenue, which is part of the famous Old Root sixty six cuts through downtown Albuquerque. But there's a dangerous stretch of Central Avenue known for high levels of crime, and that's where Cynthia was working on March twentieth, nineteen ninety nine. That day, she learned that a man wanted to meet her in his RV. That was a no no for Cynthia. She made it a rule to never meet customers in their RVs. That day, she'd break that

I just knew something wasn't right at that moment.

The man then flashed a silver badge and told Cynthia she was under arrest for solicitation.

I was a little in shocked. I had never seen a badge like his.

The badge seemed small and didn't look legit.

But then I was like, I've never known the cops to do that kind of undercover work.

The man started to handcuff her, and that's when Cynthia decided to run away.

So after one handcuff was on my wrist, I tried getting away.

Cynthia spun around and used her free hand to reach for the door.

And I was almost at the door when he yelled Cindy, and I stopped.

And then out of nowhere, another woman named Cindy emerged from a door in the back of the RV.

She came out of the closet and shocked me at the cattle product. It knocked me over and they pulled me back and hand cucked me to the cabinets.

That's right, he used a cattle pod. Literally shocked and stunned. Cynthia's handcuffed to a cabinet in the back of the RV that's now headed to god knows where. The man with the band drove while he's a compless Cindy sat in the passenger seat. Cindy appeared much younger than the man. She was thin, with long blonde hair and blue eyes. What did these two want from Cynthia? And where were they taking her?

I never had a chance to date like what was going to happen long term?

And Cynthia decided she was not going to stick around to find out. She knew if she could free herself from the cabinet, she had a chance to escape. After ten minutes of trying, Cynthia managed to unscroll bolt on the cabinet and get her hands free. They were still handcuffed, but she was no longer bounced to the.

Cabinet and I knew I had to get away now.

She waited for the RV to slow down so she could jump out, but things didn't go as planned.

At one point, he had to slam on the brakes and I tumbled forward.

The driver and his accomplice noticed that Cynthia was loose. They jumped to the back of the RV. Cindy point did a gun at Cynthia while the driver removed her clothes, placed a leather mask over her head, and tied her up.

And I couldn't seem that thing.

Desperate and afraid, Cynthia tried her luck with Cindy.

I was begging her to let me go. I was using every excuse that I could think of.

She was trying to talk to her, woman to woman. So she was shocked by Cindy's response.

All she told me was that they were going to take me and rap me and let me go.

I should warn you that things from here get more graphic. Naked and tied up in the back of an RV, Cynthia had nothing but time to think about what awaited her.

The drive seemed like forever.

Two hours would pass before the RV pulled into an unpaved road and came to a stop. Seconds later, the door to the RV opened. That's when panic rushed over her body.

When they finally took me out of the RV, I had no clothes on, I had had cuff and shackled.

It was eerily quiet, but.

Didn't they put duct tape around my face?

Cynthia couldn't see a thing as the two led her to a twenty two foot cargo trailer that sat beside a small white house in the middle of the desert.

And I couldn't figure out why nobody was seeing me naked. Walking from the RV into the trailer.

A handful of prefabricated homes dotted the area, surrounded by Elephant Butte Lake in the distance.

They took me inside and they sat me on the bed, and they put a metal collar around my neck that head locked and shackled my feet to the bed and my hands to the bed.

Cynthia didn't know it at the time, but she sat inside a room that the man with the badge called the toy box. But don't let that innocent name f The toy box was actually a torture chamber that belonged to the man who kidnapped her, David Parker Ray. During the day, the fifty nine year old was a maintenance man with the New Mexico Parks Department. At night, he lived out his dark sexual fantasies in an old, white metal storage container that he converted into a sound proof

They went about their business like it was a normal life.

Incredibly, the two watched movies and carried on as though there wasn't a naked woman strapped to a chair in their house. At some point, Cynthia believed she was drugged and and when she woke up there was a cassette tape player next to her playing a tape. It was the voice of the man from the RV explaining what would happen in his toy box.

It started off saying, hello, bitch.

Okay, bitch, we both know what You've been brought here far a.

Lot of telling me why I was there.

I'm in the bondage and S and M. It's kind of hard to find a bullet and partners. It goes to that SEP. So when I get urged, I go out proby some good looking little It turns me on, kidnapp her and keep her in my playroom for a while, and this time it's your turn.

That's really hard to listen to. In the recordings, David calmly and matter of factly outlined all the disturbing things he intended to do to Cynthia.

I'm going to experiment on you have dinner to a lot of women over the years.

The voice said that once he got tired of his victims. He drugged them and they wouldn't remember a thing about what happened.

You knew enough to cause serious problems. You would not be turned loose. You would simply disappear.

Just before the forty five minute long, terrifying tape ended, David Parker Ray presented an offer.

As soon as I turned this tape off, you will have an excellent opportunity to try to bag for me to turn you loose. I may or may not be able to understand you see the gag, but if you want to feel free to try. I love to listen to a bag and plead. And this is the end of the tape.

But not surprisingly, Cynthia was unable to persuade her captors to free her. Instead, she was subjected to three days of unthinkable abuse.

Hey shocked me, but the device he made, he connected it to my breast and shocked me for hours, and then he watched a movie, went to bed. The next morning, they ate breakfast, and then they took me into another room and they put me on massage table and she shocked me.

The pain was excruciating.

That went on for about an hour, hour and a half.

Eventually the pain became too much and Cynthia passed out.

I kind of realized I might not go home.

I might die.

Cynthia woke up shackled to a chair, and across from her was a long, wooden coffin. Can you imagine waking up and seeing a coffin. The top was open and a pillow and white sheet sat inside. And on the walls of his toy box were graphic pictures of women being tortured, along with some rules, rules like never trust a chain captive.

When they had me laying on the bed and they were going about their business, they were talking about a little girl that they were going to make their sex slave, and they already knew who she was, They already had it climbed out.

For Cynthia, that was confirmation of the enormity of the crimes that took place in that trailer.

I never thought for one minute that I was the only girl that that ever happened to.

By this point, Cynthia's body was covered with bruises and burns. Cynthia was smarted. She had a strategy she tried her best to play by. David Parker raised rules in the hopes that he'd eventually get tired of her and let her go.

The next day he comes and he sits on the bed and he takes the hair cuffs and shackles off me, and he went to work.

It was now Monday morning, and David left the trailer wearing his Green Parks Department uniform. Before he returned from work that day, everything would change. In March nineteen ninety nine, Cynthia v. Hill was abducted by a man soliciting sex from her. David Parker Ray and his girlfriend Cindy Hendy took Cynthia to their sound proof trailer in the desert town of Elephant Butte, New Mexico. There they sexually assaulted and tortured her.

It was something totally different than any other situation I had been in.

Cynthia had lost track of time, but it was now Monday, March twenty second, nineteen ninety nine, the third day she was held captive. That morning, David Parker Ray chained Cynthia to a pole and then he went to work. This meant his girlfriend Cindy Hendy was in charge.

She got left with me during the day.

That afternoon, Cynthia noticed her key to freedom, sat on a coffee table just a few feet away where David Parker Ray left his key ring. She'd seen her ab doctor use one of those keys to unlock the padlock that currently connected the chain around her neck to the pole. Cynthia was determined to get those keys, but with Cindy Hendy's standing guard, she couldn't make her move. Instead, she waited as Cindy spent the day cooking and watching soap

She went to the back of the trailer and I had the opportunity to get the keys.

The collar around Cynthia's neck had her chain to a pole, but her hands and feet were free, so she stretched her legs as far as they would go, and then wrapped her feet around the base of the table. She slowly and carefully pulled the coffee table closer to her while trying to not make any noise. With the keys within reach, Cynthia scooped them up with her right hand. She tried the first key, it didn't fit. By the time she put the second key in, Cindy Hendy was standing in front of her.

When she came back in the living room, and seeing I had the keys, she started beating me with a glass lamp.

The glass broke into a million tiny pieces. As Cynthia defensively curled her body into a.

Ball, I finally got the lock open.

In a fight for her life. Cynthia ran towards a nearby ice pick.

And I got the ice pick and I stabbed her with him.

The ice pick slashed Cindy Hendy's face, causing her to fall back in pain, and that's when Cynthia grabbed the landline phone.

I dialed nine one one.

But Cindy Hendy snatched the phone back from her. Blood was running down her face as Cindy quickly told the nine one one operator that everything was fine and hung up the phone. When she turned around, Cynthia was gone. Cynthia had jumped through a window and was now running as fast as she could to get away from David Parker Ray's house.

I had no clothes on, I had a metal color on my neck, and I was bleeding from head to toe.

Her eyes burned from the sunlight as she tried to find somebody, anybody, but there was no one around. As she ran down the dirt road, all she saw were a handful of prefabricated homes in our v's. The collar was still around her neck and the chain clanked as it dragged on the dirt road. After two blocks of running in a dead sprint, Cynthia got to an intersection. She stopped. The street was paved, and a blue car was headed right towards her. The driver saw her and slowed down.

I tried getting in a car to the lady that was driving by me.

When the driver saw the bloodied and wild eyed Cynthia, they screamed, rolled up their windows, and sped off. Remember this is a small town. There were no other cars in sight. Cynthia continued running down the road. She passed an intersection and noticed a street sign. It read Bass Road. I head was a double wide mobile home and Cynthia ran straight towards the front door. Watched her surprise. It was unlocked, so she went inside and double locked the door behind her.

I ran into some lady's house as she was doing dishes and asked her for how Her husband came in and it was a shock. It's like stopped in his tracks and couldn't talk. He's just looking at me. And she caught nine one one and they put a robe on me.

I was at the Sheriff's office and a one call came into the dispatch center.

Dave Elston was a sergeant with the Sierra County Police Department.

At first I thought it could have been a joke. A short time after that, there was another nine to one one call that came in indicating that there was a woman running down Bass Road with no clothes on and had a chain wrapped around her neck. And then moments later, another nine one one call came and that there was a woman with no clothes on or the chain around her neck inside a woman's living room asking for hilp as.

Two deputies responded to the home where Cynthia Viha was. Sergeant Elston went to the origin of the first nine on one call, David Parker Ray's home. But David Parker Ray wasn't just some ordinary suspect to start in Elston.

I knew David Parker Ray personally. He was a friend of mine.

Imagine knowing this horrible crime had occurred in this small town you were sworn to protect, only to show up to the house and it's someone you know, a person you call a friend. In this small town. David Parker Ray was well known and likable.

He was a mechanic at the New Mexico State Parks at Elephant. But that's how I got to know him. I worked a case once where there was individuals that's broke into their police cards, that stole their police radios and ended up catching that individual and I had David Parker Ray testify in my case, and he testified and he presented himself very well during his testimony on the stand.

Now, Sergeant Elston and two other officers were standing outside Perker Race home in Elephant Butte.

It was a mobile home. I've never been inside of it, but I've been there before and knew where he lived.

When no one answered the door, the three officers came entry through a sliding glass door on the side of the home, and when.

I walked in, I noticed that there was what appeared to be a hospital bed in the center of the room with a system of chains attached to the ceiling.

As Sergeant Elston navigated through the room, he heard charts of glass breaking under his shoes.

There was a nineteen seventies style lamp that had the green glass bulb on the bottom and it was broken all over the ground.

He continued and took inventory of all the bizarre things that surrounded him in his friend's home.

I entered into a room that had a coffee inside of it, and then there was a dresser drawer style with a mirror in there that had various types of tools and had a scalpel, ice pick, small torch. There was also a like a candelabra that was in there that was approximately three feet high maybe which had a sexual device on top, and then it also had spikes sticking out from the bottom of it upwards. And then I also noticed on the walls that there were drawings

Satan's Den was the place that David Parker Ray referred to as the toy Box.

So we determined that we actually had a crime scene, but we didn't know exactly what we had at the time.

Sergeant Alston then got in touch with the deputies who were with Cynthia v.

Hill.

While talking with him on the telephone, he was telling me that the victim there, who was Cynthia Vehle had been kidnapped and had been tortured for several days at David Parker's residence. He took a pair of bolt cutters and remove a metal collar.

That was on there.

As deputies transported Cynthia to a local hospital, Sergeant Elston began his hunt for the man. No one in Elephant Bute suspected would have a torture chamber.

David Parker Ray was always friendly with me. It was kind of shocking just knowing that this individual that I'd known for that long was into what he was doing.

Later that afternoon, Sergeant Elston was in a squad car headed back to the police station when he drove past a familiar vehicle.

I noticed David Parker Ray's Harve with him driving it, so I turned around did a traffic stop with him.

Neighbors looked on as police drew their weapons and ordered David Parker Ray and Cindy Hendy to exit. The vehicle.

Is very calm. He was wearing the State Park's uniform.

The two then walked backwards towards the police with their hands in.

The air, and he asked if he could pick the uniform off, and I told him no, that just that was taken him into investigative custody.

With David Parker Ray and Cyndy Hendy now in custody for the kidnapping and torture of Cynthia V.

Hill.

What happened next would shake the quiet town of Elephant Butte to its roots. Police charged David Parker Ray and Cindy Hendy with twenty five counts, including kidnapping, sexual assault, and aggravated battery of Cynthia V.

Hill.

What they didn't know yet was that Cynthia would also be the key in unlocking even more crimes. This was just the beginning, and Cynthia was lucky to make it out alive.

People were shocked.

Darren White was the public safety director for the new Mexico State Police.

The chief who was this very large, very stoic, and very serious man.

I could see the look in his eye before he even uttered a word. What he was about to tell me was dark and disturbing.

And he started to tell me about a woman who escaped in.

Elephant Butte from a trailer.

That the reports were that she was running down the street and that she was naked, and that she had a dog collar around her neck, and that there were two people accustody. It's a hundred times worse when you actually go to the scene of where everything happened, and especially once you open the door to the toy box and you see what's in there, and you know right away that everything that happened in there was awful, was just got off and designed.

With pure evil.

It didn't take much more to realize it would be the most sick and twisted case that any of us would be involved in.

Talking to Cynthia V. Hill, the police admired her heroism.

This was a woman that was.

Unthinkably tortured, terrorized, and obviously incredibly shaken, but she was able to tell them exactly what happened to her and.

Who was responsible for and where where did it happened.

The detectives that were working that case knew right away that that was not the first case.

He didn't wake up two days.

Prior and decide, oh my god, I'm an adoptive torture this woman.

David Parker Ray and Cindy Hendy sat and jail awaiting trial. Did two maintain their innocence and said they weren't torturing Cynthia. They were helping her. Helping her to talks from Heroin, and they maintained any sex between David and Cynthia b Hill was consensual. As she was being transported to jail, TV cameras captured Cindy Hendy.

Were you involved in any way.

Kind of did you just hear that? Cindy Hendy said no, kind of? What does kind of mean?

She was involved in the abductions?

She was involved in the torture.

Police learned that Cindy Hendy had been convicted of theft and drug possession in Washington, but fled to New Mexico. She took up residence near Elephant Butte and landed a job with the State park Department. That's where she met David Parker Ready.

Cindy had said that they both had a preference for this kind of violent sexual activity, and.

So that's what brought them together.

It's hard to imagine that a human being is capable of treating someone like that and inflicting that type of pain on them and doing it for their pleasure.

David Parker Ray was the man known for fixing things. He worked at the New Mexico Parks Department and was well known and well liked by those in town.

There was not an ill word. People didn't say bad things about him.

People described him as quiet, neat, and somebody who would never raise his voice. One co worker said David Parker Ray was the nicest, cleanest, politest person and called his arrest mind boggling. And if you think about it, if that is really how people thought of him, it certainly was mind boggling.

He just seemed like a almost like a grandfatherly figure that you would go fishing with on the weekend.

He even won an award at work for his efforts in a cost savings program. Along with a cash prize, he received a certificate of appreciation for his quote exemplary work and dedication.

The thing that I remember the most is just people saying is that this is something we never would have expected of David parker Ray.

But his reputation didn't cloud police judgment. It became obvious that David Parker Ray led two very different lives.

The one thing about David Parker Ray kept journals, videos, recordings.

Parker Ray kept meticulous records of what he did to his victims. He even had dozens of videotapes that showed him torturin women, including Cynthia V.

Hill.

With all this new information, police took another look at previous missing persons cases in the area. The FBI sent a pair of psychological profilers to try to get into the mind of David Parker Ray. And then there was the toy box. The FBI towed it to their Albuquerque office, where one FBI agent had the unfortunate task of sketching and making detailed dwellings of its contents.

You're talking about dozens of criminal investigators that were there trying to investigate every aspect of David Parker Right.

All of this was going down weeks before Elephant Butte's high season began. Sleepy hotels suddenly turned on their no vacancy signs, Journalists and law enforcement flooded into town.

Here you have this quiet little town that likes to keep to themselves. That wasn't going to be the case.

Anymore, especially after this news became public. One of Cindy Hendy's friends told a local TV station David Parker Ray was more than a rapist, he was a murderer. This friend claimed he dumped four to six victims in Elephant Butte Lake and that more bodies were bare in the desert, and.

There was immediately rumors that the lake was probably a graveyard to dozens of his victims.

The two were no longer just being looked at as sexual predators, but serial killers. Sergeant Dave Elston was one of the investigators.

When I was inside of the residents, I saw a map of Elephabute Lake that had several red exes on it in the center of the lake.

What could that mean? Xes on a lake. It's an ominous discovery, and you would think that somebody hiding such a huge secret would be more discreet.

Was speculated that David Parker Ray would take them out on a boat and cut their bodies open, remove the internal organs, fill the cavity with rocks, bricks, whatever it may be, wrap them in chicken wire, and dump them into Elophabute Lake and the fish and other creatures would take care of the decomposition of the body. So elfan Bute Lake is approximately forty miles long.

Police and news helicopters took to the sky over Elephant Butte looking for bodies, but none turned up.

I did a town hall meeting with the commune to try to give as much information as I could.

That evening, residents of Elephant Butte filled a local school gymnasium as Darren White of the New Mexico State Police tried to ease their.

Concerns speculation was running whatt in this tiny little community.

Officer White told them that the state was pouring all of its resources into the investigation. He also expressed concern for investigators' mental health given the chilling evidence they encountered, and in the coming weeks, police would learn about two more victims.

Angelica Montano was a victim of David Parker Ray.

Angelica lived in Albuquerque and claimed that David Parker Ray held her in the toy box a few weeks before Cynthia. Then he dropped her off on the interstate.

She was picked up by an off duty deputy sheriff. She explained to him that she had been kidnapped, raped and tortured, and then she didn't even know how she even got out of the interstate.

But at the time the police didn't believe her story and they let her go.

He just dropped her off at a gas station in the middle of the night and continued on with this information.

Police added additional charges to David Parker Ray and Cindy Hendy. That's now two victims that came forward, and Deputy District Attorney Jim Yance would soon locate a third. But there's a problem.

She was able to remember bits and pieces on not the entire experience.

With three victims. Prosecutors worked to make sure they kept these monsters behind bars.

The victims, what they encountered and what they endured is just it's unbelievable and.

So unbelievable that there were so many people when they were first told, didn't believe it was true.

Now it was up to prosecutors to convince a jury.

We had chores that were just shaking their head Snow we actually had yours sobbing.

But would those jurors believe what happened?

Some people like it rough.

It was one of the.

Jurors that said that.

Even with three witnesses, a pile of tapes, detailed recordings, and physical evidence, prosecutors would struggle to keep David Parker Ray behind bars. And we didn't tell you hear why. That's on part two of The Toy Box Killer. Next time on American Homicide, 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.