SLOW DEATH-Jim Fielder

No perch is necessary, bel we were premitted by loss he terms and conditions eighteen plus.

have written about them. Beside New Mexico's Elephant but Lake stood a windowless trailer which owner David Parker Ray fifty nine and his girlfriend's girlfriend, Cynthia Hendy thirty nine, called the Toy Box. A one hundred thousand dollars homemade torture chamber. He was equipped with whips, chains, pulleys, straps, clamps, leg

spreader bars, and surgical blades and saws. A camcorder stood next to the leather padded torture table, set up to make snuff videos, while the ceiling mounted video monitor allowed female victims to see every excruciating detail of the agonies inflicted on them by their captors. Never trust a chain captive was one of the rules David Ray kept posted as a reminder to himself and his followers. His truth was proven on March twenty second, nineteen ninety nine, when

after surviving a three day torture orgy. Cindy Vigil twenty two stabbed Hendy with an ice pick and escaped, clad only in a slave collar and padlock change. She told police that she'd been kidnapped, raped, and tortured by Ray and Hendy. A second victim, Angie Montano, twenty seven, came forward to describe how she'd survived a similar ordeal less than a month before. Satanist Ray was the center of a web of Satanism, sex, slavery.

welcome to the program. Jim Fielder.

that didn't turn out to be the case. I got turned in a couple of times and they told me the same thing, and maybe some of the listeners can identify with this. They they'd ask, you know, what was my last book? And I didn't have a last book, and then they'd hire somebody from their stable writers to write about the subject. So anyway, I was just sitting around for a year waiting for things to happen. My

wife and I were pretty anxious. I'd written a magazine article and I'd gone on Good Morning America CHESS a viewership of about ten million people, so I got some exposure on the laterno case, and I have to thank Mary. She was real open and gave me a lot of interesting information about her life, but it didn't go anywhere. So a year later I was plugging away working for the tabloids. I was writing articles for The Globe and the Star to tabloids here in America, and I had

an editor that I really liked. He really was one of the best editors I've ever met in my life. And he called me one day a year later after the Liturno thing fell apart, and he said, Jim, there's a guy in New Mexico, a serial killer who's got a girlfriend from the Seattle area. And he said, I'm going to send you ten grand and I want you to go up to Evertt Monroe and interview Andy's relatives, her ex husbands, husband's, her children, anybody that knew her.

So I took off and bought some great photographs and I think I bought some interviews also, but I ended up meeting some down and out interesting people, and I wrote an article for the Star, but it was just like one bad luck story after another. I know this is kind of a long answer, but I think it's important. The kids at Columbine High School killed their classmates seventeen days after I finished my article about David Parker Ray, so nobody was interested in Ray anymore. All of a sudden,

they were very interested in these high school kids. So I took my information and one day I had lunch. This is kind of critical too. I had lunch with a guy who got the Laturno deal, a terrific local true crime writer named Greg Olsen, and I said, Greg, what do you think I should do with all this material I got on David Parker Ray and Cynthia Handy's girlfriend, And he said, why don't you send it to Kensington

Publishing Jim and pitch a book. And I was anxious to write a book, or at least proved that I could write a book. And so I did, and I was real lucky. I heard Micjagger on TV the other night talk about the role that luck plays in anyone's success, and I think that's very true. He said, everybody works hard, lots of people work hard but don't get lucky, and I've been working pretty hard for a long time, but

finally I got lucky. There was an editor at Kensington who thought my magazine piece on Laturno was excellent and asked me to put a proposal together on David Parker Ray. And I did not understand at the time what a nasty story this is going to be. And I don't regret that. I think David's story is one of the most horrific things you could ever read about in true crime.

It's definitely kept people up at night. And we just got published in England under a different title, the Chamber of Horrors, and on the cover of the English book book it says America's worst serial killer. And I'm not an expert on serial killers, but I can't imagine anything being more horrible than what David did to people by torturing them for days and weeks at a time before he probably killed them. In any case, I got a book deal to give you a very long answer to

a very interesting question. And in the editor at the time this is my last little comment about my change of luck. He said this won't take more than six months to finish this book, and I didn't care how long it took. I wanted to go to New Mexico. I'm kind of an outdoor guy. I wanted to fish and I can do some other things, and I knew

New Mexico is a beautiful place. By the way, in case anybody's listening from that area, they pronounced the name of the lake elephant, Butte Lake, the one right next to Truth or Consequences, that's where David lived. But anyway, as it turned out, the book took almost four years to finish, but I don't regreat a minute of it.

It's still alive and well, ten years after I got the book deal, which was in ninety nine, longer than that actually, And because of the Internet, there seems to be a heightened interest in this story.

as a religious place, is a blue collar place? What is what is the truth or goings and consequences like? Describe that for us before we started.

suppose people who take drugs. I don't think it's a problem, but there are a lot of people who don't work there. And I think that's all changed a lot in the last ten years. And I'll tell you more about that later. But back in about nineteen fifty, there was a radio show called Truth or Consequences run by a guy named Ralph Edwards. And I'm old enough to remember that show

being on the radio when as a little kid. And apparently he offered any time in America a special deal that he'd come and broadcasts in their town if they changed their name to Truth their Consequences, which was the name of his radio show, and the people in Hot Springs voted to go ahead and do that. They were probably looking for a little promotion. The area where the

town is located is stunningly beautiful. It's out in the desert, next to the Black Range Mountains on one side and the Valley of Death as the Mexican people once called it on the east side. It's full of beautiful sunsets. They get about three hundred sent days a year. I wouldn't mind living there. Actually, if I hadn't written this book,

maybe i'd move there. But it's at the time this broke there were some pretty nasty things going on in town, nothing to compare with what David was doing, But he'd been there for several years, torturing people in this eight x twenty five foot trailer out in front of his house. And it's still hard for me to imagine that a lot of people in town didn't have some idea of what was going on.

in the very beginning of your book. Now I wanted to ask you what is included in the prologue and why did you feel it best to put it where you did? Why are you introducing that information?

the hard copy from the police. Listen to this. The black mask and the storage shed, David's storage shed that they were searching appears from the description given to be the mask or similar mask which David Ray has been observed wearing in videotapes which were seized from his residents and which were viewed by officers pursuing to previous search warrants. Well, I've always felt that there were videos that nobody's ever seen.

I'm not even sure if Jim Yon's the prosecutor, saw this video, but I've always felt that the FBI had more material that they didn't really So a lot of law enforcement people were worried that if the public got too much information about David Ray, it would incite a

lot of violent behavior. So that's one thing that search warrant which remains mysterious to me because there's only one video of David that anybody has ever seen anybody from the outside world like me or people who went to the two trials, And that's a six minute videotape, and David's definitely not wearing a black mask. The second part of the prologue deals with FBI agent and the decision by the FBI, which I personally thought was really a bad one. A woman named well, I won't really describe

her by name. Her family's probably suffered nothing. If people read the book, they'll get it anyway. But a thirty six year old woman was hired by the FBI one of their agents, to go into David's torture chamber, which had one hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment, and it had a chinological table that he strapped women down to. It had television sets that forced them to watch their bodies being tortured by David. There was an eighteen inch of dildo with a motor with a high and low

and medium speed. Indescribable stuff. You know. Some of it he made, some of it he bought in legal stores. But the FBI decided to send a woman in to make drawings of what this place looked like and maybe I'm just an old fashioned, macho guy, but I wouldn't send a woman in to view this stuff at all, even though a lot of women read this book. There's a big difference between reading about this stuff and seeing it.

And I've seen a lot of the pictures of what it looked like inside, so I know quite a bit about that. I've also seen David's drawings, which are really monstrous torture drawings. But what happened was Russ went in and uh, she did her job for several days, and then she drove to Albuquerque. I guess I did mention her by name, but she drove to Albuquerque and reported to her boss and then went back to al Paso and shot and killed herself.

I've spent a lot of time talking to her. But she made some bad decisions about her life, and she was working as a hooker out on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, and she got lured by David's girlfriend one day into the back of their little mobile home trailer, and all of a sudden, v Hill the girlfriend pulled a gun on her, and they blindfolded her and gagged her and chained her to the wall and drove her south one hundred and twenty miles south to treat her consequences, and

kept her for three days and tortured her. So you know that she's a prostitute. And that made the book challenging the right because a lot of people don't think prostitutes are sympathetic. But in my opinion, if everybody in life was honest about what they did sexually between the ages of twenty and thirty, there might be a lot of scandalous stories out there, and I've seen how she's

turned her life around since this happened. She's married and has three kids, she's doing a beautiful job raising and she's turned into a wonderful person. It could be that this experience really altered her in some positive ways, even though her three days was pretty monstrous.

But the subject of this book, David Parker Ray. Tell us a little bit about him.

the way he got his name is pretty interesting. He had two uncles, one whose name was David, and long before he was born, his uncle David was shot and killed by his brother in an accidental shooting, and his grandma decided that's where his name would come from. And he wasn't real fond of his grandma. He's not from what he told me anyway, And he said, by the time I was twelve thirteen years old, I had explosive

as I was blowing up stumps. And he claims in his journals, in his own writings that by the time he was fifteen or sixteen, he had broken beer bottles that he was using to torture girls with. So he was into this stuff for a long time. Most criminals get caught after ten or fifteen years. David was a criminal for at least forty years. He opened up to the FBI. He did a three hundred page interview with the FBI, But I don't know if they forgot to tell him that he had the right to an attorney

or not. But unfortunately that terrific interview, which I've read about half of, was not allowed in court because he wasn't told what his rights were. But I think they were trying to get him to open up and tell them as much as possible, and he basically manipulated almost everybody he ever came in contact with, which means that he was highly intelligent. One FBI agent told me that they considered David Ray one of the five most intelligent criminals they had studied in ninety two years of being

in the business. But he hung out with his friends. He had a little satanic group of about four or five people that we know of in town who helped him torture people. One of the fascinating parts of this story is that they've never found a body. And if you ever go to southern New Mexico, it's covered with old minds, it's covered with caves. There are thousands of

places where you could lower dead bodies underground. Jimmy Jnsen I used to talk about how there must have been at last supper scene like the one in the Bible underground with women's bodies propped up around a table. David was a splunker, and a lot of people may not know that word, but he had a license from California that where they had taught him how to crawl down in the caves, repelled down in the caves with ropes, so he could have easily lowered some of those bodies

in the caves. But so far, as of twenty ten, they haven't found a body. I think someday down the road, long after many of us are gonde, they'll find some bodies. But he was convicted on several other atrocities other than murder.

But boy, I'll tell you after the research that I did, you know, the whole book could be a testament to the evils that child abuse visits on those individual people and on society in general. V Hill grew up in a pretty horrendous home. Just to give you an example, one little example. When she was eleven, she told her mom that her stepfather was sexually molesting her, and her mom didn't believe her and kicked her out of the house. And you know, I could tell you stories about a

lot of the people in this case. You know, good guys and bad guys who grew up in real difficult homes. But v Hill was married several times and was real sexually active. She was small, but really strong. One of her friends said that at one hundred and ten pounds, she could beat up a two hundred and twenty pound woman in a bar. So she was a tough cookie. And she and her boyfriend got involved in some theft problems and some drug problems out by Monroe, and they

escaped Washington State, escaped the authorities. I think it was about nineteen ninety seven, two years before David was arrested, and he met her one day he was working for the Park Service and he met her out of work release, I think, and they struck up a relationship right away. He'd been living there a long time. He'd been married three times, and he'd been by himself for quite a while, and he'd been doing a lot of kidnapping during that period.

We have records that he kept from those three years prior to ninety seven, and he was real, real active at that time. But Handy she said something that I'll never forget. One of her friends indicated that she had come over and talked to him about some of the girls they were kidnapping, and Handy told the sky in town one time she said, I'd like to take the breath out of one. And I thought that was a very chilling thing to say about murder. But she was

definitely part of it. She was sentenced to thirty six years in New Mexico. You only do half the time, so she's done about ten so far. She has eight more ago and she wrote me a letter last year. She apparently is interested in writing a book and asked me if i'd be willing to help her, which I'm not willing to do, but if she would ever tell the truth, the whole truth, instead it is part of

the truth. Her story would be very interesting. She claims that David told her that he killed at least fourteen people, and that he described to her how he sank some of them in the lake and buried some of them out in the desert.

pit bull dog collar around her neck. She's a small woman maybe five one five to two, and they had about a five foot chain chaining her naked body to the wall in the living room. And on that afternoon, David was at work his girlfriend. There are two Cindy's here, so it does get a little confusing. They'll just call them v Hill and Handy. V Hill being the victim, the girl from Albuquerque that they kidnapped, and Handy being

the girlfriend. Hendy was in the kitchen, supposedly making sandwiches and a potato salad for a picnic that they were going to have that afternoon. During that period of time, the victim saw a ring of keys, just like you see on a television show, laying on a table about four or five feet away, and she stuck her foot out and pulled the table over next to her, just

like any smart person would do. But there were probably twenty five keys at least on this ring, and she started trying to unlock herself from the wall, and she couldn't find the right key, and she made a little commotion, a little noise, and Hendy heard it from the kitchen and came out to a living room of the double wide trailer, and all of a sudden, these girls got in this big cat fight, and somehow v Hill managed to find the key during the fight and unlock herself

from the wall. And you know, Handy hit her over the head with a green glass lamp. I have pictures of that lamp smashing on the floor. But somehow, you know, I guess when you're fighting for your life. And certainly they were right on the verge of taking her out to the toy box, which is what David called his torture chamber, and probably they were going to murder her. It's hard to say, but she felt like she didn't escape that afternoon, that at that moment, it was all

over for her. And looking back on it now, her act of bravery is unsurpassed. Really, without her, there's a good chance David would still be out there with his friends torturing people. Anyway, the Hill bolted loose from this fight, and as soon as she unlocked herself from the wall, Oh, let me tell you how I forgot one really important element of vital element. In fact, what freed her up more than anything was a small box that fell off a shelf and hit the floor right in front of

her during the fight. And when the box opened, there was an ice pick inside of it. And if people believe in an act of God, this was an active God, because you know, ve Hill grabbed that ice pick and stabbed Handy in the back of the neck just enough to really stop Handy for a moment, just for a couple of seconds, and boom, all of a sudden, veels out the door, running down the dirt road Bass Road, totally naked. She sees a car coming down the road.

She runs up to the car. The woman in the car is terrified, rolls up her windows and drives off. And I think later felt pretty bad about that. But ve Hill kept going down in the corner, took a right down towards the lake Elephant Butte Lake and ran down this paved road and managed the spot just the right white double wide trailer to run in too. And there was a woman sitting in her kitchen having a

smoke and a cup of coffee. Her husband was out in the backyard, and all of a sudden, this girl dashes through the door, and she's covered with blood and mud and feces and screaming help me, help me, at the top of her lungs. And Darlene, who really is another hero. There are a bunch of heroes in this story. Just very coolly grabs her phone and hits nine one one, and probably five six minutes later, the police come out and pick up the hill, you know, and take her

to the hospital and she survives that ordeal. And then probably a half an hour later, two other police are cruising down the road and there's David driving around with his girlfriend, you know, Andy, looking for this naked girl. And of course they got her. It was going to be all over. Well, they didn't get her, They got arrested, and you know, two and a half years later, David got two hundred and twenty four years. About a year and a half later, his girlfriend got thirty six years.

It was a long, sort of convoluted chase to nail him to the wall. But the big advantage for me asn't.

You know, David's off at work as girlfriend's at home making the data salat, and all of a sudden, the captive escapes, and the girlfriend calls David, and they get together immediately and start driving down the roads looking for this girl. And fortunately she ran into a home where somebody was there. I mean, she could have tried five or six trailers where everybody was gone. It was a beautiful day, but Darlene was there and did all the right things.

into this drama. It's something right out of a fictional movie, you know, running down this in this trailer court with a padlock around a chain and a dog collar, naked, like you say, covered in blood, running into a trailer, screaming for her life while her captors are looking for in this small little trailer Court's incredible anyway, What I wanted to also ask you, there's another important person in the subject in this in this story is Angelique Montago. Who is Shentano?

she appeared to have some emotional problems. She got kicked out of her apartment for non payment of ran at one point before she was kidnapped by David, he loaned her a pup tent, and she was living with her son, who was five or six years old, down the beaches of elfint but Lake in a pup tent. She had some friends there that told me she was just a woman who had never quite been able to put her

emotional life together. But she got kidnapped by David about i'd say a month before the Hill did, and she was in the torture chamber for a while. In fact, the Globe did a big article with her. She had lost she had lost one of her brown eyes in a drug related accident and unfortunately, maybe because she didn't have very much money, and got replaced with a blue eye.

So she had one brown eye and one blue eye, and the tablet of people promised to get her matching eyes as she did this story which which never happened actually, but in my book you can you can read what she says in her Globe article about her time with David. But what she did was she got some sympathy from v Hill, and she talked David into letting her go. And I think the Hill, I think, excuse me, Handy,

I'm sorry, Handy had something to do with that too. Sorry, you think after all these years, I'd have all these names down perfect, but this is not a story you think about every day of your life if you had to think about it for four years. In any case, I think that Handy had a little bit to do with her being released. But David, after several days of torture, took Angie out on a road and let her go

to hitchhack back to town. But he knew that her reputation was so shaky in town that probably nobody would believe her. And in fact, she supposedly, according to what I was able to get, she told the policeman who picked her up hitchhacking the story, and he didn't tell anybody about it because it just didn't seem credible to him.

But after David was rested, all of a sudden everything fell into place and they interviewed Angie and she told them her story, and she would have been the next person up for a trial after the Calivan Cleave trial, But unfortunately she died of a drug overdose and some related problems with pneumonia. I think in Albuquerque about a year later. She was only twenty seven years old, and she had a real tragic life. Also, her brother was

a killer and she turned him in. She turned him into the police for murder, and her mother blamed her instead of her brother, and never really forgave her for doing that. So, like a lot of abused human beings, I think they make a lot of efforts to resurrect their lives. But when you have to start working that hard at it when you're only ten, twelve, fourteen years old, sometimes it's pretty tough to get away from trouble.

going on here. He had this little group and I'm the evil that's contained here that some of the stuff that's in this guy's mind and on these tapes certainly is that tell us a little bit about the Satanism. And if you don't mind, if you can do this, can you read some of this transcribed or describe something what is in these excerpts from this transcribed videotape.

fifteen or twenty minutes to go. Yeah, I'm going to try to get as much information in there as I can. Okay, let me grab the book here. And I mean, Satanism is hard for a lot of people to buy, you know, they just don't They just aren't into it. But David had. He had the capes and the robes and the worship ceremonies that he put people through. You know, he made seven of these. I was told there were six, but

I think there were seven. Seven of these audio tapes where he actually created a tape recording that he could play for victims while they were tied up in the couch, and you know, all of a sudden, instead of him telling you what he was going to do to you, he turned on his tape recorder and you listen to him. And when you hear a guy with an Oklahoma, Texas accident say hello there, bitch in the first tape, those three words alone are really shocking. And then he goes

on to describe what he's going to do. And there's one tape where he talks about how he's going to bring in the German shepherds he's going to rub moscow l on the women's vagina and bring in horny dogs and let the dogs screw the women. Those are his terms, and I'm sure he did that, you know. You know, there are descriptions of that from at least one of the three victims. But he talks about how he's gonna time up and basically torture him in lots of ways.

And I'm gonna give you a couple of specific examples. There's one tape where you can hear a woman crying in the background, and you can hear other people talking in the other room. So I imagine they were torturing a young woman, and he goes in to quiet him down, to quiet his followers down. You know, he tells the tape recorder the next audience, I got to go in there and shut these guys up. And then he comes back, and he laughed, and he describes what they're doing to

this woman. And what they're doing is they're putting out their cigarette butts on her breast. So, you know, the when I got my hands on the tapes, I read all one hundred and seventy five pages of the FBI audio tapes single space. You know, incredible stuff. And I didn't want the book to just be a study in horror. You know, it operates on a lot of different levels. But I felt like the tapes really got people in David's head so they'd know a little bit more about

what he was all about. And so I picked out five of them, and probably out of one hundred and seventy five pages, I interspersed the tapes in five different places and probably didn't cover more than maybe fifteen or sixteen pages out of one hundred and seventy five. But let me just see if I can. I don't have my book open to an exact spot, but I think I can probably find one quick enough. I'll hang on for a second. Sure, Oh, here we go. I used to have all these pages memorized a long time ago.

of just a second. Oh yeah, oh gosh, I'm sorry, that's the part about handy. Uh just a second, let me thumb back. All right, here we go. He's talking about a hooker that he kidnapped and tortured. She was a hooker because she had one hundred dollars, because she had one hundred dollars a day drughab. She had already told me that that was why she agreed to let me spank her for a hundred bucks. That's how he first got her. And then I think he used the

gun and tied her up and took over. She'd go get her drugs so she didn't have to work for the rest of the night. I didn't tell her then that she wasn't going to be working again for quite a while. She also didn't get the hundred dollar bill. I had already taken it out of her sock. Excuse me, hang on, I just have to sit up a little straighter here. By that time, I was horny as hell. I climbed on the table and put just a little bit of vasoline right around the head of my dick

and stuck it in her asshole. Apparently she didn't get that too much. It was nice and tight. After that, I gave her a damn good ass fucking. And what he's done. She was a big breasted hooker. And he goes into great detail here to describe her body. You know, he talks about her being tied down. The little horror was bouncing her ass all over the table. When I finished trapping her down, I buckled table straps around her reports house or ribbed cage in her belly. Anyway, it just goes on and on.

the audio tapes in nineteen ninety three. You know, I think that the blood. The pictures on his wall inside of the torture chamber were pictures of women bound and gagged in incredible distress. And you know, in his drawings, I can't describe the drawings. I've got about seventy of them, I think, but he was really artistic and he drew all these torture devices that he built, and drew how

women would be strapped down. I think it was to not give you too long of an answer, and I feel like maybe some of my answers have been a little lengthy. But if you add up all the stuff, the audio tapes, the drawings, what David told the FBI in a three hundred page interview, he told him he was real worried he was going to start torturing ten year old girls. And I don't think he was worried

about it at all. I think they had plans. We know they had plans to kidnap one little girl in town, and her mother, when she found out about it, moved out of town immediately left with their consequences in twenty four hours. You know, his daughter was also very involved with him. There's a young woman who disappeared from a tavern in Albuquerque, and the last person she was seen with was Jesse Ray. Well, we know that Jesse basically kidnapped Kelly Van Cleave at a bar one night and

took her over to dad's house for torture. The only reason that David's daughter didn't do more time was because I think the prosecutors were getting tired of dealing with the case and they wanted David to plead guilty, and he said, I'll do that if you let my daughter off, and they let her out after three years. She probably should have gotten a hell of a lot more time than that for what she did. But this woman in Albuquerque disappeared. I mean, the last person they saw her

was was Jesse Ray. It was a gay bar. Jesse used to ride her big gold wing around and there's a fair amount of evidence that she helped her dad a number of times. But I think it's just the overwhelming just you get staggered. Well, he doesn't when you inhale all this information.

sometime when we get together, I'll bring my drawings. And I said, the minute you see those drums, you'll be terrified, terrified of this guy, and you won't feel like it was just a kinky thing that he was into because the women that he drew were definitely being tortured.

and so we're not going to introduce him. Well, what happened, without giving too much of the book away, is that right before the second trial, Mertz was pretty stressed out that he had to do this all over again. And he, at the age of about fifty three fifty four years old, he's taking a shower at home during jury's selection and he dies of a heart attack and had brought in a thirty seven year old judge, the youngest judge in

New Mexico. History to do a trial like this, and Swasey allowed Yance to play one of those audio tapes, and that probably sealed the deal in the second trial.

Rather than getting one hundred and fifty years, she turned state's evidence and she told them that about the fourteen dead people that David had talked about, and she described in detail how David used to sink him in the lake,

and she gave him a lot of other information. I don't think she gave him everything she had, but she opened some doors for the prosecutors and when they walked in, they were able to nail David more effectively because of that, And so in return they gave her a letter sentence.

beaten her up before. I'm sure he'd probably done that too, But she you know, I've got one letter she wrote to the judge about her boyfriend before David, saying, please let him go. He's a well meaning guy. We've been trying to get work. I mean, she had a history of flip flopping back and forth on what she said, which makes it hard to believe that she'll ever get a book deal, because I don't think anybody's ever going to believe the story that she tells him, even if it is the whole truth.

turned out, even though it's all true. But yeah, the daughter Jesse in nineteen eighty six, David was cheating her out of drug money. They were growing marijuana up in northwestern New Mexico, and he wasn't paying his daughter off. That's what she claimed later, And so she says that she turned him in and accused him of torture and kidnapping in Mexico and all this other stuff. And later she told the FBI that was all big lie. It

was really about her not getting paid her drug money. So, like Handy, it's easy to get the two of them confused too. But Jesse Ray, like Handy, didn't always tell the truth, and so it makes it difficult sometimes to know when they do talk to somebody what they are saying,

whether it's true or not. And obviously, by the way, the FBI investigated David for a whole year on those charges, those kidnapping and torture charges in nineteen eighty six, and they couldn't find anything to support what his daughter had said.

broke her grandma put her on the case. She was only seventeen years old, Francis was and she followed the case religiously for about a year and a half and wrote three award winning stories that they won AP awards. Actually, she's a great researcher. And then just before the first trial, one of the prosecutors, not Yan, it's one of the other prosecutors, said Francis, I don't think he should come up. I think this is going to be a little bit

gross for you what we're introducing as evidence. And so she kind of started to slide back from the story. But she did her brilliant journalistic damage before she left. And now's she must be twenty eight or twenty nine, and I've only talked to her a couple of times recently, but she's more horrified by the case as a grown up than she was as a teenager. She was a fearless,

fearless reporter. And the two heroes in my book are the forty seven year old prosecutor Jim Yance, who's resurrecting his career after being pushed out in Albuquerque, and that's a whole great story too. And then a seventeen year old reporter who takes on one of the nastiest cases you could ever imagine, and Francis wasn't abused as a child.

A lot of women who read books like this are women who are trying to still untangle their own personal lives with their parents and what happened to them as kids, and they read a lot of these books. I've met a lot of them at book signings. I met a woman at one book signing who actually murdered her husband and got away with it because he beat her up and did her so much harm. And she asked me how charming David was, because her husband was real charming too.

I think the story is about evil. I mean, and I'm not a religious person, but I remember growing up in a first Free Methodist church where they talked about this kind of stuff, and I didn't buy into it growing up throughout my life, and I don't know if I'm buying into it now, but I think David was way more than just a psychopath. He was pure evil in the sense of having a large dose of the devil in his personality.

But now I'm working on a novel about a guy from Tennessee who gets his wife gets kidnapped and in forty nine, and he comes to Texas to hunt down the killer and he ends up shooting the wrong man. He shoots the twin brother of the real killer.

I'm reading a book on a little big horn right now. I love to read, and I keep a journal all the time, so I have kept up as a writer, but I haven't produced anything since then. Maybe David took it all out of me. I have friends who think that's true, but I don't think the book damaged me in any ways. I think I was very fortunate to have a great editor, Michael Hamilton, my last editor, Kensington, give me a lot of support in the book, and it's sold nearly one hundred and fifty thousand copies. So

I know that I wrote it. I wrote it pure, I wrote it the way I wanted to write it, and I think it'll be around long after I am.

going wrap up the show now. Thank you very much, and have yourself a good evening, all right, take care, Darre, thank you, thank you. You've been listening to the program True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Join me next time.