“To a more beautiful girl I could not say, Merry Christmas! Ray.”
While it isn’t altogether clear whether the signature says Roy or Ray, the awkward sentence structure best could be explained by it being a clumsy rhyme, which would lead one to believe that it was signed by a Ray (which rhymes with “say”) and not by a Roy. I think that this is why whoever forged this added not just “Moore,” but also “DA” at the end; the intent was to make the signature rhyme with the dedication. This is a tell-tale sign of a forgery, since not only are there no contemporaneous examples (at least that I have seen reported) of Moore adding “DA” to his signature, and Moore wasn’t even the D.A. in December 1977 (he was the Assistant District Attorney), but the handwriting expert that Allred was claiming had vouched for the signature not being a forgery now is admitting that the “DA” does not match the handwriting of the first part of the message.
As for who “Ray” was, I would be surprised if a classmate would write something as dorky as that rhyme (plus why would a classmate wait until late December to sign it?); looks to me more like something that an older family friend would write when visiting their home during Christmas.
I thought it was pretty obvious that it was a rhyme, and the signer was “Ray.”