The Toy-Box Killer, David Parker Ray was an American kidnapper who was known to torture and rape many young women. He was also suspected to have murdered the women as many of his accomplices accused him of the act and the police suspected the count to be as many as sixty women from Arizona and New Mexico.
During his childhood, Ray and his younger sister, lived with their disciplinarian grandfather. He was visited by his violent, alcoholic father every now and then and would get supplied with magazines depicting sadomasochistic pornography. This fueled his sexual fantasies of raping, torturing and even murdering women during his teenage years. At school he was bullied for his shyness around girls and these insecurities and bullying led him to start abusing drugs and drinking. He later served in the US Army, receiving an honorable discharge at the end of his service. He was married and divorced four times in his life.
Ray had purchased a semi-trailer and sound-proofed it and filled it with various torturing devices such as sex toys and surgical instruments. There was also a gynecology table that the victims would be tied to and a mirror placed on the ceiling so that the victims could see themselves be raped and tortured, in addition to another device for electric torture. This self-made torture chamber was known as the Toy Box.
His MO was targeting women in their early 20s and kidnapping them by means of soliciting or by pretending to be a police officer. He would then bring them to his Toy Box and sexually torture and rape the victims using whips, chains, surgical blades, and saws. He also put his victim in wooden contraptions that bent them over and immobilized them while he had his dogs and other accomplices rape them. He also reportedly treated his victims like dogs, forcing them to eat from the floor while bound to a leash. Ray was also known to record audio tapes which introduced his victims to a general “advisory” intended to intimidate and psychologically disarm them. After he was done with everything, he would then drug the victims with barbiturates in an attempt to erase their memories and then abandon them on the side of the road. His girlfriend and accomplice, Cynthia Lee Hendy said that the fatal victims were dismembered and buried to then be dumped in the Elephant Buttle Lake or in the ravines.
His known accomplices were his girlfriend Cynthia Lee Hendy, his daughter Glenda Jean Ray who had aided Ray in the murder of Marie Parker and several kidnappings and Dennis Roy Yancy who was also an aid in the murder. Ray was known to have killed many of his accomplices on several occasions for various reasons.
On March 22, 1999 a women wearing nothing but an iron slave and padlocked chains ran through the streets of New Mexico begging for help. 22 year old Cynthia Vigil had been abducted several days prior, she was hooking up in a parking lot in Albuquerque when a man pretending to be an undercover cop arrested her for solicitation of sex work, threw her in the back of his car and drove her to his “Toy Box”. She only managed to escape after she obtained the key to her chains and used an ice pick to ward off one of her kidnappers. Running down a dirt road vigil sought help from two passing by cars before eventually she was rescued by a homeowner who brought her in, comforted her and called the police, unfolding a series of abduction, sexual assault and murders run by a possible suspect David Parker Ray.
The crimes committed by Ray went unnoticed by law enforcement for several years unless the gallant act of vigil unravelled the series of ray’s operation accompanied by his girlfriend Cynthia Hendy who willingly participated in all his crimes. Vigil’s escape led the officials to the trailer and hence they detained both Ray and Hendy. According to Vigil they chained her to a gynecologist-type table in the center of the trailer inflicting pain , and over the next three days, raped and tortured her but not limiting to sending electrical currents through her body the eclipse attached to her breasts and vagina whilst she was hung up in the living room and wipped. Before these heinous acts of evil begins Ray used to play cassette tape with recordings of how exactly he’ll torture her, how she has to obey his orders and refer to him as “master” and never speak unless asked to. According to an interview Vigil stated, “The way he talked, I didn’t feel like this was his first time. It was like he knew what he was doing. He told me I was never going to see my family again. He told me he would kill me like the others.”
A few days after Vigil’s escape a new victim, Angelica Montano, came forward with a very similar story of rape and torture. Claiming that she had been held captive by Ray for four days in February 1999, after she went in the trailer to borrow some cake mix. According to an affidavit a metal collar was placed on her neck after striping the clothes off of her body. She was then repeatedly raped and tortured for four consecutive days. In her testimony she stated that she had to befriend the pair in order to convince them to let her go. Ray then dropped her off along the highway. Later she was discovered by a police officer who did not believe her story and left her at the bus stop, according to the FBI there had been no follow ups in the case of Montano in spite of her official complaint for the same. The reports also state that Ray used to videotape the assault of his victims and hence another victim was identified as Kelli Garrett, a former friend of Ray’s daughter Jesse hence making Jesse an accomplice in the crimes too. On July 24th 1996 Garrett after getting into a fight with her then husband decided to spend the night with her friends playing pool however she ended up with Jesse. Jesse might have spiked Garrett’s drink and as planned she went missing from Blu-Water Saloon in Truth and Consequences in New Mexico, Jesse offered her a ride home but instead drove her to her father’s house .After days of torture and having the advantage of drugging his victims in order to erase their memories, Ray drove Garrett back to her home and pretended that he discovered the women incoherent on a beach. No one not even her husband believed her story and further filed for a divorce which made Garrett move to Colorado. The future jurors would watch a six minute video of this assault, she was later interviewed on Cold Case Files about her ordeal.
The Federal Bureau of investigation pulled out all the stops for a fine piece of evidence in order to prove human remains in Ray’s trailer, they sent over a hundred agents to examine his property but found no solid proof.
During on of his encounters with the FBI Ray confessed how fascinated he was with the kidnapping of colleen stan and sexually driven crimes later it turns out that Ray have had previous encounters with the FBI due to his business in manufacturing and selling bondage-related sexual devices.
Despite the fact that numerous evidence were pointing towards several other killings including a diary describing fifty other murders, Ray’s first trial turned out to be a mistrial as two of the jury members found Garrett’s story a little less convincing. The judge also ruled out much of the evidence found during the 1999 raid however the defense attorney claimed that the “Toy Box” was just a part of accused’s fantasies and everything happened in that trailer was consensual. On April of 16th 1999 Ray went to stand trail when sufficient evidence was provided to prove that he might be guilty of 25 counts he was charged with, after a retrial Ray was convicted on all 12 counts. In exchange for leniency for his daughter, Ray agreed to a plea deal and was sentenced to 224 years in prison in 2001, Prosecutors claim that the deal was acceptable to the surviving victims.
Ray’s daughter Jesse was found guilty on all charges and was sentenced with time served also five years of probation, she had served two and a half years.
In 2000 Cindy Hendy was found guilty on all charges faced 36 years of prison, served about 20 before she was released on July 15th 2019.