David Parker Ray: The Toy Box Killer
The Accomplice
It turned out that Cindy Hendy was from Seattle, where her three children lived. She had moved to New Mexico to avoid arrest for forgery, theft, and possession of drugs. Reporters dug up a court report from the previous year in which Hendy had charged a former boyfriend with abuse, but then had told the court to disregard her complaint. "I am so sorry that I lied," she had stated. "I have been in counseling for manic depression."
It also came to light that Hendy had told a friend, under the influence of alcohol, that she'd participated in Ray's attacks because it gave her an "adrenaline rush." She confided to this person that there were four to six people who had been killed, dismembered, and tossed into Elephant Butte Lake. He didn't quite believe her, but he later told the police and also gave statements to several reporters.
Hendy, it turned out, was willing to deal. In exchange for a considerably reduced sentence, she provided details of Ray's alleged murders, which totaled 14 (not 40, as some accounts have it). According to what she said he told her, he had once killed a business partner from Phoenix, Billy Bowers, but when he dumped the body into the lake, it had come back up (a murder that was unsolved at the time of his arrest). Thus, he had learned to open the stomachs of people he killed so they would submerge easily in a lake and stay down.
Hendy claimed that Ray had disposed of many of the bodies in the lake and in ravines around south-central New Mexico. He'd been questioned by the FBI in some of the cases, but had always been clever enough to fool them (according to Hendy). Authorities followed leads in ten different states, using ground-penetrating radar and cadaver sniffing dogs, but found no bodies.
Hendy also revealed that Ray's daughter, Glenda "Jesse" Ray, had participated with Ray and a man from T or C named Dennis Roy Yancy in the murder of a young woman. The victim's name was Marie B. Parker and when she went missing she was 22. She was also the mother of two young children. Investigators soon located Yancy, 27, and brought him in for questioning.