12 Morbid and Terrifying Details About David Parker Ray AKA The Toy Box Killer

There are some serial killers who will go down in history as the greatest monsters who have ever walked the earth, but none of them hold a candle to the scariest man to ever set foot in New Mexico, David Parker Ray. Also know as the Toy Box Killer, Ray kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered as many as 60 women from the mid-80s all the up to 1999, when he was finally captured after his final victim managed to escape and run down the highway in nothing but a dog collar. Together, these shocking facts about the Toy Box Killer form a picture of a man who saw the people around him as pawns in his sick game of manipulation, sex, and murder.

The story of David Parker Ray is a disturbing tale that only grows darker the more you look into it. He was a boogey man walking the earth, who used women as his own personal sex toys - but he also had friends who knew exactly what he was doing in his “toy box,” a 15-by-25-foot room devoted specifically to sexual torture. The amount of depravity and lack of concern for human life in this story is enough to make you lose all hope for humanity. There’s nothing light in this story about David Parker Ray; a man whose entire life was built around rape and torture. After you finish reading about the Toy Box Killer, you're never going to look at a locked shed the same way. 

Imagine waking up groggy and not being able to move. You realize that you're not wearing any clothing and then you hear this [warning: link leads to the full transcript, which is extremely disturbing and graphic]:

Hello there, b*tch. Are you comfortable right now? I doubt it. Wrists and ankles chained. Gagged. Probably blindfolded. You are disoriented and scared, too, I would imagine. Perfectly normal, under the circumstances. For a little while, at least, you need to get your sh*t together and listen to this tape. It is very relevant to your situation. I’m going to tell you, in detail, why you have been kidnapped, what’s going to happen to you, and how long you’ll be here. 

That's the opening of David Parker Ray's monologue to his new victims, where he would explain who he was, that he was playing a "torture game," and that the victims were about to be brutally raped and tortured for the foreseeable future. Full transcripts of the tape exist, but no audio has ever made it onto the web, either because the tapes were destroyed, lost, or simply too horrible to listen to. 

David Parker Ray only had one child from an early marriage, but boy was she a doozy! Glenda Jean "Jesse" Ray was 32 in 1999 when her father was arrested for his gruesome crimes, and it turns out that she had tried to warn the FBI about what he was up to way back in 1986. According to FBI agent Doug Beldon, "She alleged that David Parker Ray was abducting and torturing women and selling them to buyers in Mexico." Unfortunately the allegations were so non-specific that they couldn't act on her claims and stopped looking into Ray. 

By the time 1999 rolled around, Jesse Ray had gone from dropping dime on her dad to helping him kidnap and sexually assault women. After her father was arrested, Jesse was quickly captured and sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison, plus five years of probation in connection with her father's sex torture case. 

It's not just that David Parker Ray lived in New Mexico, a state full of empty space where a vast amount of weird stuff happens - it's that he lived in Elephant Butte, a town of 1,300 people that's backed up against a state park. That means that Ray had access to miles of abandoned land where he could dump bodies, and where there was no one around to witness any of his crimes. And if any of the women he was holding captive managed to escape, all of that land meant that there was nowhere to go. 

As hard as it might be to believe, David Parker Ray didn't work alone. Over the course of his tenure as New Mexico's scariest Parks Department employee, he met Cindy Hendy, a woman who was just as into torturing and raping young woman as he was. In his message to his victims, Ray mentions that they'll be servicing her just as much as they would be servicing him. Aside from Hindy, he also worked with Dennis Roy Yancy, and together they tortured and murdered Yancy's ex girlfriend, Marie Parker.

Something that gets glossed over in most of the reports about David Parker Ray is how much he was into the idea of brainwashing women. In the transcripts of his tapes, he details how he plans to let the women loose after he's finished with them, and it's eerily similar to MK-Ultra mind control techniques: 

I get off on mind games. After we get completely through with you, you’re gonna be drugged up real heavy, with a combination of sodium pentothal and phenobarbital. They are both hypnotic drugs that will make you extremely susceptible to hypnosis, autohypnosis, and hypnotic suggestion. You’re gonna be kept drugged a couple of days, while I play with your mind. By the time I get through brainwashing you, you’re not gonna remember a f*ckin’ thing about this little adventure. 

While there were a couple of women who managed to make it out of Ray's torture chamber alive, one actually believed that her memories of Ray's sexual abuse were no more than bad dreams until she was contacted by the FBI. 

Ray's first foray into sadomasochism came in the mid-50s when he was just a teenager. After his father left him and his sister to live with his elderly grandfather, Ray began to develop a secret fascination with sadomasochism. He even alleged to his first wife that it was around this age when he kidnapped a woman, tied her to a tree, and tortured and murdered her. There's no proof of Ray actually committing this crime, but even if he was just trying to include his first wife in his fantasies, Ray would go on to make that story look like child's play. 

One of Ray's most horrific forms of torture proves that he was so far beyond having basic humanity, he may have never been a normal human being. In his opening monologue to his victims, he would detail a "party" that he would throw every once in a while where a woman would be locked in a steel cage that held her body in position so he and his friends could watch as she was raped by one of his dogs. How his friends were able to justify all of this in their heads is mind-boggling. Maybe they had already seen so much, they were desensitized to even this sickening scenario. 

Charles Bukowski said, "Find what you love and let it kill you," and David Parker Ray took that advice and ran with it. In the torture shed next to his trailer, he spent upwards of $100,000 in order to build his dream space where he could work without ever worrying if his homemade breast electrocuter would work, or if his leg spreaders would rust.

Aside from the implements mentioned above, Ray kept sex toys, syringes, a fur-lined coffin where Ray would place his victims to torture them, and a box with a hole cut out to hold victims' heads. And the centerpiece of the entire toy box was the surgical steel gynecological chair where he would strap his victims before getting down to work. 

Despite not having any bodies to use as evidence against Ray in his trial, the FBI was still able to wrack up a pretty good case against New Mexico's most sadistic killer. Ray was put through three separate trials, one for each of his living victims. The first ended in a mistrial and a retrial where he was convicted of 12 of the acts of which he was accused. Then after the woman in his second trial died before she could take the stand, Ray agreed to a plea deal that would earn him 224 years in prison for numerous offenses involved in the abduction and sexual torture of three young women at his Elephant Butte Lake home.

One of the things that never changes from serial killer to serial killer is that they all work in the same patterns. Jeffrey Dahmer picked up his victims at a specific gay bar in the twin cities, John Wayne Gacy picked up teens at the bus stop, and David Parker Ray picked up women at the Blue Waters Saloon, a dive bar that catered to drifters and the few locals that lived in Elephant Butte. One of Ray's few living victims, Kelli Van Cleave, testified that Ray's daughter Jesse drugged her while she was drinking at the Saloon. And Marie Parker, ex-girlfriend of Ray's accomplice Dennis Roy Yancy, was also last seen at the Saloon.