RedHanded

by Suruthi Bala

  A woman came forward from the nearby town of Truth or Consequences. (Yes, that is the name of the town. Apparently it used to be called Hot Springs, which is a much less terrifyingly ominous name, but the townsfolk decided to change it in 1950 to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of a popular radio quiz show of the same name. Because why the hell not?)

  But anyway, the woman with the tribal swan tattoo was a former local named Kelli Van Cleave, and in July 1996 she had gone missing for three days after a night out at—you guessed it—the Blue Water Saloon. She had been there with a young woman named Jesse Ray, and Jesse was the very own daughter of Mr. David Parker Ray. Kelli had no memory of what had happened to her that night or in the three days following, but since that incident Kelli had been terrified of duct tape and would have recurring nightmares of being strapped to a table.

  The FBI brought Jesse Ray in for questioning; it seemed like too much of a coincidence that the last person to have been with Kelli before she ended up strapped to David Parker Ray’s torture chair was his own daughter. They strongly suspected that Jesse was involved, but unlike everyone else, Jesse Ray kept her mouth shut during her interrogations—not that this helped her much after Cindy Hendy, desperate for a plea deal, outed Jesse as an accomplice. The FBI eventually charged Jesse Ray with kidnapping and criminal sexual penetration. She pleaded no contest and received a 30-month sentence. (No contest means that you still claim you are innocent, but accept that the state has enough evidence to convict you.)

  After an arduous series of legal proceedings, in February 2000 David Parker Ray finally pleaded guilty to all charges associated with Cynthia Vigil Jaramillo, and on September 20, 2001, David Parker Ray was sentenced to 223 years in prison. But he was not a well man, and in 2002, just eight months into his sentence, he died of a massive heart attack. To this day, New Mexico law enforcement and the FBI remain convinced that David Parker Ray’s many victims lie scattered across the desert and at the bottom of Elephant Butte Lake.

  Human remains were even found in the lake in 1999, but with no DNA samples of suspected victims to test, there’s no way of knowing who it was. One of the main questions people ask about the case of David Parker Ray is why he set any of his victims free, but again to us, this fits with the profile of a sexual sadistic offender. Most studies on these killers show that they are not usually motivated directly by the kill—they enjoy the torture—but their constant need for escalation and the way they lose control once they are aroused lead to murder. Unlike with necrophiles, the dead body of their victim is collateral damage to be swiftly disposed of, not the endgame.

  Everything about Ray indicates that he was highly committed to what he was doing; he spent years and over $100,000 building his toy box—and he did not want to get caught. He knew that racking up bodies would attract unwanted attention and also create a load of extra work for him, so he developed his “safe disposal method”; that way he could be confident that his victims wouldn’t remember enough to lead back to him.

  Ray also picked women he knew wouldn’t be believed even if they did remember anything. Angelica Montano had told a deputy sheriff what had happened to her a month before Cynthia Jaramillo was taken, but he didn’t believe her and he did nothing. By attacking the less-dead, Ray didn’t even need to kill them to get what he wanted.

  Finally, we also think that David Parker Ray liked the control of knowing that the women, while they may not remember everything, would know that something horrendous had happened to them. Ray definitely got a thrill out of psychological torture, so we think for him just knowing that those women were out there living with the fear and pain of the unknown was deeply satisfying to his sexually sadistic mind.

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  Conclusion

  AT THE START OF THIS BOOK WE ASKED YOU TO COME ON A journey with us to examine the various factors that can set a person on the path to violence, criminality, and murder. We warned you that despite delving into some of the most reprehensible and aberrant acts imaginable, we wouldn’t be discussing monsters, but people.

  So, what makes a killer tick? The only logical answer then is lots of things. It’s a perfect, or should we say imperfect, storm. There is no definitive reason. A killer can spring from an abusive childhood, a genetic makeup, and a personality disorder all working together at once. There is no pathology unique to a killer; rather, killers are the culmination of genetics, experienced trauma, environmental factors, society, culture—everything that makes us human.

  Where does that leave the rest of us? We’ve talked a lot in this book about what makes a killer tick, but what makes us tick when it comes to our fascination with killers? From serial killers to family annihilators and the seemingly out-of-the-blue murders featured on Snapped, we’re hooked.

  Now of course, a fascination with killers is something that exists on a spectrum—from reading this book and listening to RedHanded the podcast all the way up to buying yourself a John Wayne Gacy clown painting or purchasing a strand of Richard Ramirez’s hair. (Yes, some people do take it that far.)

  There’s a crime fanatic in all of us, and even though people like to say that true crime is just so hot and mainstream right now, there’s nothing new about it. Victorian media moguls realized in 1888 how much better their newspapers sold when Jack the Ripper had been out and about. They churned out weekly illustrated Penny Dreadfuls featuring grisly, sensationalist stories of murder and the macabre, filling up their greedy coffers and satisfying the morbid masses. And the commercial crime consumption never stopped.

  The American true crime writer Harold Schechter calls our collective fascination with murder, and with serial killers in particular, “a kind of cultural hysteria.” But what is it rooted in? To us it feels like the story of killers is the story of our own deepest fears—the fear that something may happen to us, or possibly even a loved one, at the hands of a stranger. And the even more insidious dread that we may be capable of hurting someone else—and what that would really mean for us.

  Humanity has always been obsessed with fear; we’re biologically hardwired for it. If our first ancestors hadn’t known fear in the face of a razor-toothed Smilodon, we as a species certainly wouldn’t have lasted long. We are obsessed with fear and death, and our obsession with true crime is a sort of controlled fear. Perhaps it just gives us a little boost of delicious dopamine or maybe it makes us feel more prepared for if we were ever to find ourselves in a dangerous situation. Or even, as artist and serial killer memorabilia collector Joe Coleman explained in an interview with the BBC in 2016, “It’s a cathartic way of releasing the demons in a way that’s positive rather than destructive.”

  As true crime podcasters and authors, we are asked in almost every interview, ever: Why are people obsessed with true crime? This idea of true crime being a kind of catharsis, although controversial, is probably the best one out there. Perhaps our fascination with killers is actually an outlet for us to play out in our minds our darkest and most disturbing thoughts, and thereby sweep them away afterward without having acted on them. Maybe.

  We also think that cultural historian and author of The Red Barn Murder, Shane McCorristine, explained the timeless nature of true crime fascination best when he said that it is an “opportunity to suffer death from a distance, to get as close to the abyss as you can while not falling in.”

  And serial killer Dennis Nilsen agrees. Many passages from Nilsen’s prison diaries were published in the 1985 book Killing for Company by Brian Masters, and one extract in particular stood out to us:

  Their [meaning, us] fascination with ‘types’ (rare types) like myself plagues them with the mystery of why and how a living person can actually do things which may be only those dark images and acts secretly within them. I believe they can identify with these ‘dark images and acts’ and loathe anything which reminds them of this dark si
de of themselves.

  Killers aren’t mythical monsters we can other-ize and just ignore. They are an amplification of our worst impulses. They are a projection of our darkest fascinations. Killers are—as is the true crime genre itself—the perfect mirror to hold up to society to reveal who we really are. Whatever the reason, true crime allows us to plumb the depths of human depravity, explore our deepest fears, get right up against it, then simply close the book and walk away. After we have read about the very worst things one human can do to another, we can shake off the shivers and go back to our everyday lives lying on the sofa, watching 90 Day Fiancé, and eating peanut butter straight out of the jar.

  But before you close this book, take a second to think about all that we have discussed over the past several pages and ask yourself: If crime is a reflection of our society, what does our obsession with violent killers say about us?

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