Plague of Strength

The stories about this couple are legendary in a Tara Teid / Robert Downey Jr kind of way, but if the aforementioned actors were enraged, musclebound ex-Marines. As I mentioned in Part 1, Sally and Ray brawled like crackheads over the last crack rock, and whenever the cops had anything to say about the state of it, their house was little better than a flea-ridden traphouse (McGough). Sally generally looked as shitty as their apartment, because court records showed the evidence of a lot of general battery, though omitted medical records regarding the bones she’d broken in the service. According to Sally, he’d broken her toe, her coccyx, her nose, and in 1990 fractured her ribs prior to the US Armed Forces Championship, making ab shots excruciating to hit as the splintered ends of her shattered bones ground against one another and perforated the surrounding muscle every time she flexed.

In Sally’s words,

“My life with Ray was very turbulent. I left him about three times and he followed me to my new address. I was preparing to move back east where I was brought up and to the home I grew up in, but I didn’t make it. Looking back, I should have left him after the 3rd day of our marriage. He beat me up because the Warrant Officer who was in charge of me told Ray he should not have married me because I was ‘used goods’. Ray got mad because I had dated two other guys before I met him. I was beaten up unmercifully. This beating was unprovoked on my side” (Penman).

From Sally’s descriptions, the beatings were going to continue until she ran out of blood to spill or bones to break, and the reasoning behind them ranged from “pretty fucking stupid” to “get that man a helmet and a bib.” None of the accounts I’ve read ever mentioned Ray as being a particularly good guy, and that seems to have been because he was a total piece of shit.

“Over in Okinawa, Japan where we lived off base, Ray beat me over 52 times in that year over there because he was having roid rages. One of those times was because I would not write a list of all the men I had dated…Ray choked me three times, on the third time I had spasms. When I came around I ran out of our apartment in my bra and bike pants. I hid in the bushes, more afraid of Ray than the poisonous snakes that lived there” (Penman).

Not that Sally was calm as a Hindu cow and non-violent enough to be a regular in a Portland tea house. The aforementioned broken rib occurred in the same year in which Sally had been arrested for pulling a gun on her ex-husband, Tony Lowden, and shattering his car windows with a crowbar. Within a week of that, she and Ray knuckled up in their apartment. When he attempted to leave, she threw a VCR at him from the second story window and when that genius plan to convince him to stay failed, she launched a number of dumbbells out the window at him, including a 70 pounder (Krajicek, McNeil v. Middleton). From there it got worse, as later that year cops sprayed her during a welfare check on her kids that ended in her attacking the cops in a fit of rage.

And while brawling with the cops is pretty fucking hardcore, she cranked the insanity up to 11 and broke off the fucking knob at a bodybuilding competition at the end of the year. According to a person who witnessed it,

“Another thing I remember happened at a bodybuilding contest instead of at a gym. It was intermission and a screaming crowd in the lobby had formed a circle around something I couldn’t see. I stood up on my toes and craned my neck and saw a female bodybuilder named Sally McNeil, tight, glittery dress pulled up over her hips, sitting astride another girl in a glittery dress. Sally had the girl’s head in her hands and she was repeatedly slamming it into the floor tiles.

It seems that Sally had found out that the girl was having an affair with her husband, Ray McNeil, an up and coming pro bodybuilder/marine from Oceanside, California whom I’d gotten to know through a couple of interviews I did with him. Seconds later, the fight was broken up, and the victim of the beating walked away with everything but her dress, hair, and dignity intact” (TNation).

1990 was a bit of a rollercoaster for the McNeil family, to say the least. Sally and Ray had quit the Marines to pursue bodybuilding, though Sally supported the two with her wrestling videos as Ray attempted to crack the top six at the Olympia. That sort of abrupt change from the straight-laced, imagination-free Marines to oily, and muscular soft-core sex work combined with incessant dieting on a tight budget undoubtedly contributed no small amount of stress, and that stress seemed to drive this couple directly out of their fucking minds.

Each of them likely had their own reasons for keeping the relationship going. For Ray, it seems he had a ready-made punching bag and a meal ticket, and Sally seemed to suffer from a combination of low self-esteem and the likely correct belief that no one on Earth other than Ray would put up with her brand of violent shenanigans for long.

“I was in denial that Ray was abusive to me. My self esteem was so low. I didn’t think I could attract another man like Ray. I felt I was lucky to have him.”

Sally continued to earn their rent and food by wrestling oily little men with weak erections and jacked chicks who could likely achieve much more impressive turgidity, and she and Ray scraped by. Had they been born ten years later their lives might not have come to such a blood-soaked nadir as it did Though their brawling seemed to be less public, they would still have their occasional meltdowns. Ray’s philandering was getting to some Charlie Sheen levels, and he had both a live-in boyfriend (whom I presume was considered their roommate, and whom testified against her) and multiple chick side pieces.

“Yes Ray had many affairs. I tried to stick through it, thick or thin, for better or worse. He always came back to me. Once these women realized Ray couldn’t leave me they left him. Some woman (name deleted) had an abortion according to Ray because he couldn’t leave me. I should have left him because one thing I was afraid of was catching HIV, AIDS, Hep C or any kind of STD. I could give you a long list of women Ray had affairs with – one of them even had the nerve to testify against me during my trial. Yes I should have left him but my self esteem was so beaten down by him that I thought he was the best I could get” (Penman).

As titillating as that information is, it pales in comparison to the following bit, which is spicy enough to set even the most staunch Republican housewife to harrumphing and making the sign of the cross, all while being delightfully moist at the exquisite scandal of it all.

“One of Ray’s boyfriends (name deleted) lived with us for almost two years. I asked Ray to please tell him to move out. He was mean to my children. He would lock them out of the house when I was not home. He and Ray must have been in the apartment having sex and didn’t want to get walked in on by my children or caught in the gay act. “Due to the fact that I was the reason Ray’s boyfriend had to move out of the apartment (I refused to take care of two grown men!) he lied when he testified against me. He actually saw Ray beat me on many occasions. One time I begged him for help and he didn’t lift a finger” (Penman).

“With all the steroids Ray was on he created the Frankenstein effect. He was inhuman and he would do whatever it took to stop me from calling the cops. If I would have been able to get to a phone and press charges he would have missed the Florida Pro Invitational. He was four weeks out from that show so he was full of anabolic steroids. “My children witnessed what happened. He would have killed them too. My daughter testified on my behalf, kids don’t lie.

As scandalous as that might seem, it’s not as though Sally was done whylin’ out either. In a 1993 visit to scenic Allentown, PA, home Dorney Park and a lot of heroin addicts,, she repeatedly kicked a bouncer in the face when he tried to pull her drunk ass off the bar. Sally was there to fucking dance, it seemed, and not even the off-duty cop bouncer was prepared to fucking stop that woman when she felt the need to cut a rug (Krajicek).

Thus, the stage had been set for a bevy of blood-soaked brutality the likes of which the bodybuilding world had never seen. When Ray McNeil returned home on Valentine’s Day, 1995, he knew he was late as shit, knew Sally was going to think he’d been out banging another broad or bro, and had apparently drastically overpaid for the chicken breasts he’d left to purchase three hours prior (and purchased them at a store by one of his side piece’s house rather than his own). What he didn’t know is that Valentine’s Day is just a replacement holiday for the Roman fertility holiday, Lupercalia. If you mashed up random Kink.com scenes with your average drunken Italian revelry, you’d have an idea of what the three straight days of drunken revelry and public fucking that comprised Lupercalia was.

Up next, the training methods of this murderous muscle maiden and her bizarrely brief trial. But to tide you over, here’s a Valentine’s Day poem penned by Sally in prison. It’s long, but I honestly couldn’t make this shit up- you’ve got to read it.

VALENTINE’S PLEDGE

I have no one to be my Valentine.
Will you be my Valentine this day from afar?
I send my Valentine this day to you
When you are miles away.
Although the miles separate us
The breathless thoughts I have of you
Envisioned in my mind as I lay alone
In bed brings you miles closer to my heart.
What a big, cold lonely bed it is without you
By my side and as I lay here alone
Each vision of your warm smile brings you closer to my heart.
I thought there was no room left in my heart
But you tore down the walls of armor and steel
To steal my heart forever and wipe away the lifetimes
That seperate us. As you receive my wish, smile a lover’s smile
of lust to think of me in your arms.
Will you love me today like there will be no tomorrow?
Have a Valentine’s thought of me as you envision me.
What is a Valentine?
I have no one to be my Valentine.
Will you be my Valentine this day from afar?
Though thousands of miles away
I send my Valentine’s greetings to you.
Will you love me today
Like there will be no tomorrow?
Remember the thought I send to you from afar.
Each letter you send
Brings you miles closer to my heart.
As you receive my wish
Smile a lover’s lustful smile to think of me.
Envision me laying in bed on satin sheets
In a red satin teddy, flexing
Wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day.
Will you be my Valentine from afar?
Voices of lust breathlessly whispered through the miles
As sweet nothings pile up along the way to your destiny.
Think of me as your Queen of Hearts
As I place you in my heart.
I wish you would be a part
Of my life as we roam like nomads
Though space and time.
Reaching our destiny in time as we parallel our lives
We wrap our feelings around the life line of bedtime dreams
And Lustful whispers in the hazy night.
Clearly envision in your Royal bedroom waiting for your arrival
On a special day such as Valentine’s Day,
Just be mine and I’ll love you forever as my King of Hearts.
I refuse to make partial reservations
In any part of heart.
As a mother’s pledge
I pledge my whole heart to you.
My precious child, my eternal love gushes out of my heart.
As the tears pour out of my eyes
Because we’re miles apart
And your smile could light a fire from thousands of miles away.
I wish you were here
To light the fire in my heart.

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Sources (for the series):

Krajicek, David J.  The tale of Killer Sally: Her 12-gauge & her husband.  NY Daily News.  28 Dec 2009.  Web.  13 Feb 2020.  https://www.nydailynews.com/news/tale-killer-sally-12-gauge-husband-article-1.435829

McGough, Peter.  The Sally-Ray McNeil murder.  Muscular Development.  12 Feb 2015.  Web.  20 Jan 2020.  https://www.musculardevelopment.com/news/the-mcgough-report/13954-the-sally-ray-mcneil-murder.html

McNeil, Sally.  Mail interview.  29 Dec 2019.

McNeil v. Middleton.  No. 01-56565.  United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.  2003.  https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1330589.html

Middleton v. McNeil. 541 U.S. 433. Supreme Court of the United States. 2004. Supreme Court Collection. 3 May 2004.  Web.  14 Feb 2020.  https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/134740/middleton-v-mcneil/

Nack, William.  The muscle murders.  Sports Illustrated.  18 May 1998.  Web.  13 Feb 2020.    https://www.si.com/vault/1998/05/18/8098022/the-muscle-murders-when-bertil-fox-a-former-mr-universe-was-arrested-for-double-homicide-last-year-he-became-only-the-latest-accused-murderer-among-hard-core-bodybuilders-whose-subculture-is-a-volatile-mix-of-fragile-egos-econo

Penman, Leigh.  Sally McNeil… this is my story: part 1.  RX Muscle.  4 Nov 2009.  Web.  20 Jan 2020.  https://www.rxmuscle.com/articles/latest-news/869-sally-mcneil-this-is-my-story-part-1.html

Penman, Leigh.  Sally McNeil… this is my story: part 2.  RX Muscle.  4 Nov 2009.  Web.  20 Jan 2020. https://www.rxmuscle.com/rx-girl-articles/female-bodybuilding/914-sally-mcneil—this-is-my-story-part-2.html

T Nation.  The Craziest thing you’ve seen in the gym.  T-Nation,  22 Nov 2016.  Web.  8 Nov 2019.  https://www.t-nation.com/opinion/the-craziest-thing-youve-seen-in-the-gym

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