New Mexico Torture Development
CBS News has learned that investigators in the New Mexico torture-kidnapping case have found 100 videotapes that an alleged victim says will show torture taking place, CBS News Correspondent Jim Axelrod reports.
The videotapes were seized from the home of David Parker Ray. Ray, 59, and Cindy Hendy, 39, were arrested after a woman claimed the couple had kidnapped and tortured her.
Ray and Hendy have been charged with 25 counts, including kidnapping, aggravated battery and conspiracy.
An FBI spokesman said the agency had not ruled out homicides in its investigation, which has spilled over into Arizona and Texas.
A trailer on the property where Ray lived is still drawing the most attention. Inside the so-called "toy box," Ray and Cindy Hendy conducted torture sessions, according to a woman who police say was also a victim.
"They stripped me. They put a metal collar around my neck. They had handcuffs," the woman said. "I was moving. I was trying to scream. They had tape around my mouth, and they shocked me with a stun gun."
Of the more than 100 tapes investigators have collected from Ray's home, so far they've viewed just one. Their focus over the next few days will be on the rest of them.
CBS News has also learned that Cindy Hendy has turned on Ray, giving authorities information about torture and possible murder.
Eight days ago, a woman was found running down a nearby road, naked and bleeding, with a collar and chain around her neck. She said she'd been kidnapped, beaten, whipped, and sexually assaulted. Police said the woman escaped after being held for three days.
A search of Ray's home disgusted investigators, although at this point they won't say why. "What we are seeing in the crime scene is that there is clearly evidence that people have been tortured," said Dave Kitchen of the FBI.
Bones found at the scene and tested are not human. But police say they're preparing for this soon to become a multiple-murder investigation. The FBI said that other victims might have come from Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., and El Paso and Victoria, Texas.
A woman from nearby Truth or Consequences, N.M., who apparently knew Ray and Hendy, entered the couple's house a few weeks ago, looking for cake mix. She told police she was bound to a table, molested with a sexual device, jolted with electrodes attached to her breasts, and forced to perform oral sex on Ray. She said she persuaded her captors to release her Feb. 21 along a rural highway.
John Branaugh, an acquaintance of Hendy, says she told him she joined her boyfriend in the tortures for the adrenaline rush. He also says Hendy told him that four to six people had been killed, mutilated, and dumped in Elephant Butte Lake, 150 miles south of Albuquerque and that more bodies were buried in the desert.
Branaugh says he initially didn't believe Hendy because she made the remarks while drunk. He contacted police after seeing a teevision report about the case.
Hendy, who has three children in the Seattle area, moved to New Mexico in 1997 to avoid arrest reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "I'm still shocked. I can't really believe it. She ain't the person who would do this kind of thing," her 22 year-old son, Shane Larson, told the paper.
Hendy was a suspect in a Seattle-area equipment theft in 1995 and reportedly had been charged with forgery, drug possession, and possession of stolen property since 1979.
Ray and Hendy are being held in the Sierra County jail in lieu of a $1 million bond each.