The Mysterious Death of Cindy James Part 1 & 2
In 1989, the body of a woman was found hog tied off the side of a road in Richmond British Columbia.
What followed was one of the longest coroners inquest in Canadian history. An inquest that would say the woman had died by an unknown event.
Although she was found with her hands and feet tied with nylon behind her back, although she had told police that for 7 years she was being harassed by an unknown person, a jury of her peers wasn’t convinced that any crime had taken place…
But how could that be? Well, today we are going to get into the very, very complicated death of Cindy James.
TW: Animal abuse, suicide
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SOURCES
Who Killed Cindy James? by Ian Mulgrew (main source)
Unsolved Mysteries - S3 E18 "Scared to Death"
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-province/90617320/
TRANSCRIPT
In October of 1982, a 38 Year old woman named Cindy James walked into a Vancouver Police station.
Typically, Cindy had a smile on her face. She was a compassionate and energetic woman, a psychiatric nurse who ran a children’s clinic and always managed to remain upbeat.
But today, she looked worse for wear. She had dark circles under her eyes. Her blonde hair which was usually neatly done was a chaotic halo around her head.
See, it started earlier that year, when she started receiving dead flowers and threatening notes at her job. Cindy never saw who was sending her these things, and neither did her coworkers. It seemed weird at first, but as time went on, the letters became more threatening. They were always pieced together from magazines. The text would say things like, I SEE YOU, and SOON, and the images were of knives, rope, and women being choked. Soon, everyone, including Cindy got more concerned. Was there someone out there who wanted to hurt her?
Then came the phone calls . They were creepy and constant. At home, Cindy’s phone would ring multiple times a day, but when she answered, there would just be heavy breathing on the other end
Cindy told all of this to the police that day, including how recently, these threats had escalated. The person on the other end of the line was no longer just breathing, but he would speak to her. The mysterious caller always addressed her by name, so she knew it wasn’t a random dial. They described sexual acts they wanted to perform on her, and how they wanted to mutilate her body. The police looked at Cindy as she described these calls, her voice was quivering and her gaze was on the floor. She was terrified, this was clearly very hard for her to talk about. They took down Cindy’s statement and suggested she get an unlisted number. In the meantime, she should let them know if she got any more calls.
Instead of deterring the harassment, it escalated. There were two more calls the next day. The voice on the line told her, “You think calling the police will keep you safe? You wait.”
Then, that night, someone tried to open Cindy’s back door, rattling the locked doorknob so forcefully, it woke her and her dog up . Terrified, she called 911. A patrol car responded and searched the surrounding area, but there was no sign of the would-be intruder. Still, Cindy and her dog went to stay at a friend’s house for the night.
Over the next week and a half, the harassment escalated. Someone threw a rock through her kitchen window. They smashed out the bulb in her porch light. Cindy found another note made from letters cut out of a magazine: “Us, you, love, want, rotten, love, silence, hot, sex.” While she was at work one day, her house was broken into. The intruder didn’t take anything of value, though. All they did was slash a pillow in Cindy’s bed, leaving it tucked under the blanket for her to find when she went to sleep that night.
This threatening behavior was personal and well…strange. When police asked if Cindy had seen who was doing this, she replied that she hadn’t. She never saw a figure running away, or eyes peering into her window at night.
She worked in Children’s psychiatry, so sometimes she would advocate for children in court, even if it meant arguing that they needed to be separated from their parents. As a result, there were some fathers in the community that definitely did NOT like Cindy, but this felt too, I guess intimate to be a stranger.
And then, A few weeks after the pillow-slashing incident, the police discovered a car sitting in an alleyway behind Cindy’s house. The headlights were off, but as police approached the vehicle, they could see the outline of a rifle sitting in the front passenger seat.
Sitting inside was an older man, tall and lean with white hair. Police asked who he was and he calmly explained that his name was Raymond, and he was Cindy’s ex husband.
Cindy had previously mentioned to officers that she had been married to a man 18 years her senior. Their marriage, which lasted 16 years, had recently ended. And now, he was sitting outside of her home with a gun.
BREAK 1
Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of Horrors, Hauntings and mysteries. I’m Kaelyn, it’s very nice of you all to join me here in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters today.
I kind of want to get right into today’s story. It’s a big one, it’s one I still think about a lot, and it’s one I really hope to hear from you all about. By the end of this episode, I need you in the comments wherever you listen telling me your thoughts. I need to talk to someone about this.
But first, I get so many little creepy stories from you all and I cherish each one. This week, I wanted to shout out our listener Addi who told me that when she was 5, a woman she didn’t recognize walked into her home and told her to get her brother and get out. She grabbed him and went downstairs to see the whole downstairs was on fire. If she had waited even a moment longer, she and her brother might have died in the fire. No one else saw the woman, and to this day she doesn’t know who she was.
I know we share a lot of spooky ghost stories on this show, but I swear, sometimes I feel like they’re really out here protecting us! Isn’t that right, Jinx?
Alright, keep sending me your stories, and let’s jump back in.
Cindy and Raymond had first met in the summer of 1965 while working at Vancouver General Hospital. Cindy, 21 at the time, was in her final year of nursing school, while Raymond was working on a post-doctorate in psychiatry. Raymond was whip smart and had a strong South African accent which Cindy thought was cute. He was also 39 and already married with two kids. Regardless the two quickly started an affair.
His wife, who also worked at the hospital, eventually discovered the affair and filed for divorce. Raymond and Cindy were married the following December.
It’s been suggested that, for Cindy, Raymond was a stand-in father figure. Her own father, a retired Air Force colonel, had been a controlling force in her life. Both Cindy and her siblings described his outrageous temper and strict discipline. Now she was tasting adult independence, living on her own, away from his influence. It’s possible that she romanticized Raymond as a warmer, more loving stand-in -- he was almost as old as her father and had a similar background. That might be pathologizing after the fact, but it reinforced the police’s notion that Raymond was some kind of predator. That he’d preyed on Cindy’s youth and naivete.
Cindy’s family first noticed a rift in the 16 year long relationship during a family reunion trip in the summer of 1981. A distinct coldness between them. Cindy didn’t confide any specifics about the state of her marriage, but it wasn’t exactly a surprise to her parents when, about a month later, she told them she planned to separate from Raymond. She formally moved out in the spring of 1982. A few months later, the harassment started.
To the officers working Cindy’s case, Raymond was the obvious and natural suspect for the harassment. He was clearly still emotionally attached to her.
But as he was sitting in his car in the alley behind Cindy’s house with His headlights off and a rifle in the front passenger seat, they couldn’t help but notice how concerned he looked. When they asked what he was doing there, Raymond nonchalantly explained that he was waiting for the prowler; he was going to catch them by surprise and take care of them. Cindy had called him recently and told him she feared for her life, and even though they weren’t together anymore he wanted to help her.
To the officers, his demeanor went beyond a concerned husband; he seemed possessive. They sent Raymond on his way, urging him to leave the matter to the professionals.
<<>>
Instead, a few nights later, Cindy woke up to someone tapping on her bedroom window . She had already picked up the phone to call the police when she realized it was Raymond, armed with his rifle and a hunting knife. He whispered through the window that she could sleep soundly that night because he was going to “stand guard” for her.
Police asked Cindy if this seemed like a red flag to her. But she swore up and down that Raymond wasn’t involved and it had to be someone else doing this to her. In fact, he was the one who had insisted she report the harassment to the police.
The more pressing issue was that Cindy was still being harassed. More phone calls, more threatening notes that included cut out photos of hands holding a knife, women being choked, and dead bodies covered by a sheet. For months, it continued, and Cindy was terrified by how it might escalate. And to police officers' credit, they responded to every incident, but once again, this person was never seen. No trace of them. It was like chasing a ghost, and there just wasn’t much for them to do about it without some kind of clue or lead.
On top of that, their investigation was, well… somewhat flawed.
Constable Pat McBride was the responding officer on the night that Cindy’s pillows were slashed. He immediately took a personal interest in her case. Some would say, really personal. He had also recently separated from his wife, so he understood the emotions Cindy might be experiencing. He stayed in contact with her, frequently dropping by her house to check on her during his shifts. Then, two weeks after they met, he moved in with her. Which is definitely not protocol, some thought it was because 24/7 surveillance made Cindy feel safer, but others believed it was because the two had begun a romantic relationship.
Regardless, it meant McBride’s objectivity went completely out the window. And that made it easier to overlook some of the stranger details of Cindy’s case.
For instance, After McBride moved in, the stalker seemed to respond to the investigation - making adjustments as necessary like they were really paying attention. For example, the phone company installed a tap on Cindy’s phone, to try to trace the source of the vulgar calls. Miraculously, as soon as the tap was in place, the phone calls stopped and the threatening notes increased instead. One said, “Get rid of cops.”
Another night, Cindy reported a prowler in the back yard. Again, the police came out to search, but didn’t find anything. Literally… nothing. No signs of an attempted break in, nothing disturbed in the yard, no shoe prints. McBride pressed Cindy - was she sure she saw someone? About a week later, she reported seeing the prowler again. And this time the phone line had been cut in five places; “proof” someone was there. Though that was the only physical evidence they found.
If McBride picked up on the pattern, it doesn’t seem like he confronted Cindy about it. Instead, In December, he asked her to marry him. Cindy declined the proposal and asked him to move out. But, similar to her arrangement with Raymond, Cindy and McBride continued to date, all while he continued to investigate her stalker.
Until the escalation that Cindy feared finally arrived.
On January 27th, 1983, one of Cindy’s friends, Agnes Woodcock, stopped by for a visit. They worked together at the children’s home and Agnes was one of the few people Cindy had confided in about the harassment. Agnes knocked on the front door , but there was no answer. It was odd; she told Cindy to expect her and there were lights on inside. Agnes went around the side of the house to look through the kitchen window. She found Cindy sprawled out on the driveway outside the garage, bleeding and unconscious.
At the hospital, Cindy’s injuries were assessed by doctors and documented by the police. Her hand had a large slash wound, from a knife. A black nylon stocking had been tied tightly around her neck, cutting off her circulation. Thankfully, there was no evidence of sexual assault.
Disturbed by the acceleration in violence, the Vancouver police department transferred Cindy’s case to someone more experienced: Detective David Bowyer-Smith.
As he took Cindy’s statement from her hospital bedside, he saw the fear deep in her eyes; heard the tremors of panic in her voice. She had clearly been through an ordeal and hesitated to relive it for him. But he reassured her: he would do everything he could to catch the person responsible.
Cindy took a shaky breath and swallowed hard. But she nodded at the detective and tried to remember as many details as possible. She’d gotten home from work at the same time as always. She hadn’t been home long before someone knocked on the back door. She thought it was McBride - sometimes he stopped by during his shift and left his patrol car parked in the alley, instead of in front of the house. But when Cindy opened the door there was a man there, one she didn’t recognize.
He grabbed her and dragged her to the garage where there was another man waiting. That one was holding a knife. She tried to fight back, stop them from tying the stocking around her neck; that was how her hand had been cut. She could feel herself starting to pass out, and her vision was hazy. But she heard one of them threaten to slice her open if she talked to the police. They also Threatened to kill her baby sister, Melanie. And that was the last thing she remembered. She’d gone in and out of consciousness until Agnes found her.
By the time she was done recounting the story, Cindy had gone pale white. Detective Bowyer-Smith was a veteran officer on the verge of retirement. He’d worked dozens of cases, interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and he knew when someone was feeding him a load of crap. He believed Cindy was terrified by whatever had happened to her; she was completely consumed by it.
But there was something about the story that just didn’t make sense.
To him, Everything about Cindy’s case indicated that this was a personal vendetta - someone who knew her intimately and had an axe to grind. But she hadn’t recognized either of the men who had attacked her. So this was what… a random assault? Unrelated to the stalker? But that didn’t make sense either; what was the motive? They didn’t rob her. There was no evidence of sexual assault. If they’d wanted to kill Cindy they certainly had the opportunity. Instead, it seemed to be about further terrorizing Cindy, but random people didnt do that to each other, at least, he had never seen that happen before. But that brought him back to the first issue; why hadn’t she recognized her attackers?
Detective Bowyer-Smith was convinced there was something else going on here; Cindy was withholding something. A missing puzzle piece. He asked her to sit for a polygraph, to try to get to the bottom of it. But when he asked her basic questions about the assault, She failed the test; she took a second but it was inconclusive.
And Detective Bowyer Smith had no qualms confronting Cindy with his suspicions. was she lying to him? And if so, How much had she lied about?
Cindy immediately broke into tears and confessed: she had recognized one of the men, the one who had been waiting in the garage. But she’d been too scared to admit it because of what he’d said to her about her younger sister, Melanie. He’d known her name; what if he really tried to hurt her? Besides, she didn’t know who the man was, she just recognized his face. She’d seen him before, but she didn’t know his name.
Even after this confession, she refused to sit for a third polygraph or answer any more questions out of fear of retaliation against her family. And Constable McBride came to her defense. He’d been at the house when some of the threatening calls had come in, he watched Cindy take these phone calls, he’d even been the one to pick up the phone a few times. He’d also personally discovered some of the threatening notes. He assured Bowyer-Smith: the threat was real. After what she’d been through the last few months, it made sense that Cindy had tried to shield her family.
McBride’s endorsement was enough to pull the detective to Cindy’s side, though it got them no closer to catching her tormentor. Who continued to run rampant throughout 1983.
After Cindy was released from the hospital, she refused to go back to her house. She packed up and moved across town. In less than a week, more threatening notes were delivered. One said, “Run, rabbit, run. I’ll show you how good I am.” Soon after, the phone calls resumed. One night while McBride was visiting, there were three calls in a row. He overhead a man shout through the receiver: “Are you scared yet??”
After only two months at the new address, Cindy moved again. And this time, it actually brought a reprieve. She enjoyed a quiet, harassment-free summer. Until, on August 22nd, another note arrived. This time, it was delivered to the children’s home where she worked. Five more arrived in as many weeks. Cindy ripped them all up without opening them.
But she couldn’t ignore the next delivery. The stalker had escalated their crimes to animal cruelty. On October 15th, Cindy came home from work to find a dead cat on her front porch, a rope still tied around its neck. There was also a note: “You’re next.” Her sanctuary was broken; the stalker once again knew where she lived.
And it all started up again in earnest. More phone calls, to both her home and to her work. More notes. Someone vandalized her backyard garden, ripping out the flowers she’d planted and trampling the seedlings in her vegetable patch. Her phone lines were cut repeatedly. After a second strangled cat was left at her back door, Cindy decided to hire a private investigator, Ozzie Kaban, both for her own protection and to increase the chances of catching the perpetrator.
Ozzie had 15 years of experience and had provided security services to several high profile clients. He consulted with both Constable McBride and Detective Bowyer-Smith any time there was a fresh incident, but the story was the same: no physical evidence. No leads to follow. So instead, Ozzie focused on keeping Cindy safe. He armed her with a can of pepper spray, instructing her to carry it at all times, and gave her a panic button. It would alert Ozzie directly, even if the phone lines were cut again.
<<>>
Around 6PM on January 30th, 1984, Ozzie got the alert – Cindy had activated her panic button. Even speeding through traffic, it took nearly 15 minutes for him to arrive at the house; an eternity. Adrenaline pumping, Ozzie charged toward the back door, his gun drawn. What he saw through the window made his heart drop. Cindy was motionless on the kitchen floor, a pool of blood surrounding her head. If she wasn’t dead already, she was definitely balancing on its doorstep.
Refusing to waste another second, Ozzie kicked in the back door, which splintered the wooden frame. He quickly cleared the house for any sign of the intruder, then tended to Cindy. Her skin was ashen and he couldn’t find a pulse. God, he was too late; she was already gone.
<<>>
But when the ambulance arrived a few minutes later, the EMTs realized there was another nylon stocking tied around her neck; it was so tight, it was barely visible between the folds of skin. Once they cut it off and administered oxygen, Cindy regained consciousness.
As for the rest of her injuries, she’d been struck in the head by something, hard enough that it left a visible lump on her skull. Her left hand had been stabbed with a paring knife. The blade had gone all the way through, until the handle was flush with her skin. Pinned beneath the handle, soaked in blood, was yet another note that read “now you must die”. Finally, there was a needle puncture mark in the crook of her right arm, like she’d been injected with something.
Cindy had zero recollection of her attacker, what had happened to her, or the moments leading up to it. She couldn’t even remember what had prompted her to activate the panic button. On top of that, police were never able to lift any fingerprints off of anything. Once again, it was like they were chasing a ghost.
Unlike the first attack, though, no one doubted the credibility of this attack.
The puncture mark was in her right arm, which means she would have held the needle with her left hand. Except, she had been stabbed in that hand, so that means she would have had to have injected herself first, which would have sent the sedatives coursing through her blood, and then stabbed herself. But, stranger still, the police didn’t find any needles at the scene, so it would have actually been, injection, needle disposal, then stab. And that’s assuming that the injection wasn’t some kind of sedative that made her pass out.
Did she give herself the head injury before all this, too? There weren’t any heavy blunt objects lying around.
There was no part of Ozzie that thought she could have done this to herself.
<<>>
This second attack really ramped up the pressure on the Vancouver police to solve the case. Cindy’s gruesome injuries made McBride and Bowyer-Smith feel guilty that they’d ever doubted her reports. So they clung to the one tangible lead they could identify: the man Cindy recognized from the first attack. Even without a name, they could create a composite and follow that trail. They had to plead with Cindy to give them the details they needed; the best way to protect her family was to catch this guy.
In a strange twist of events, she eventually admitted that she knew who had attacked her. Who had been behind all the attacks. The police were immediately skeptical of this, you mean you’ve known who this was the entire time and you never once told us? Who is it.
Well, she explained, It was her ex-husband, Raymond. She had been too scared to tell them the truth, because she was afraid of what he might do to her. He had been abusive throughout their marriage and it had taken her years to muster the courage to leave, because he’d repeatedly threatened to kill her if she did. That was why she was still on friendly terms with him – to keep him from hurting her.
The police had suspected Raymond from the start, but they never had any good evidence that it was him behind the attacks. Regardless, they picked him up for questioning the next day. They interrogated him for six hours, trying to draw out a confession. But Raymond resolutely maintained his innocence. He was actually shocked by the accusations; six weeks ago they had spent Christmas with her parents, it was pleasant, they had a great time. This accusation was a complete 180 and he refused to give an inch – he was not Cindy’s attacker, and they could interrogate him for a month or a year, they still weren’t going to find any evidence to the contrary, because it was simply not true.
The police were eventually forced to let Raymond go free. He was right; they had nothing concrete against him. For now. But if Raymond wasn’t behind it, then who was?
BREAK 2
By July of 1984, Cindy’s entire world had been consumed by the harassment. A constant barrage of threatening phone calls. Except on the days when her phone line had been cut. But then they could always call her at work instead.
She still managed to show up at the children’s home every day, but she could no longer leave her personal concerns at the door. Colleagues noticed she was constantly on edge, sometimes spending the entire day holed up in her office. She was rapidly losing weight from stress and lack of sleep.
One afternoon, after spending a few hours working in her garden, Cindy realized her dog was no longer in the yard and the back door was standing wide open. She was positive she had left it closed. Rather than risk it, she summoned Ozzie with the panic button. Inside, there was a threatening note wishing her happy birthday. There was also a recently stubbed cigarette butt that didn’t match the brand she smoked. Ozzie found Cindy’s dog cowering under a chair, injured and bloody but very much alive. He had been tied up with the same rope that had been used on the strangled cats. A rope that was never found inside of Cindy’s home
Then, on July 23rd, Cindy was attacked again. Around 8:30PM, she drove to a local park to walk her dog. About an hour later, as she was heading back to her car, a green van pulled up beside her. There was a man and a woman inside; the driver called out through the open window, asking her for directions.
We don’t know what happened after that; Cindy had no memory of the event. Her neighbor found her at his front door hours later, a little after midnight. When the neighbor came downstairs, Cindy was glassy-eyed and incoherent, trying to squeeze through the gap in the door. When he unhooked the chain, she collapsed. Then he realized: her face was blue. There was another stocking tied around her neck, so tight he could barely manage to get a knife blade underneath to cut it free. And there were two more needle puncture wounds on her arm.
When the police checked the park, they found Cindy’s dog wandering near the abduction site, her leash trailing behind her. They found drag marks in the dirt, as well as one of Cindy’s shoes, and her can of pepper spray. But nothing left behind by the kidnappers.
While Cindy recovered in the hospital, a man called the reception desk to ask about any security measures in place. He refused to give a name and quickly hung up. Officers played the receptionist a recording of Raymond’s voice, to see if it was the same man. They said he sounded “familiar” but couldn’t be 100% certain.
There was no doubt that the police were motivated to catch Cindy’s attacker; especially after the third attack was reported on by the local paper. Still certain that Raymond was involved in some way, they combed through every piece of his life, interviewing his employer, his ex-wife before Cindy, and colleagues from South Africa. Nothing came of it. They profiled the children at Cindy’s work, anyone who had been under her care in the last ten years, plenty of whom were adults now. They ran background checks on the parents. Nothing.
Ozzie installed security cameras, alarm systems, and a panic button in every room of the house. He gave Cindy a two-way handheld radio so they could be in constant communication. But nothing helped. The harassment continued but there was nothing to chase. No fingerprints on the notes. No trace on the calls. He still hadn’t even seen the figure that had been doing this.
The police went so far as to assign a surveillance team, parking a van outside her house 24/7 for weeks at a time and keeping a direct tap on the phone line. But they never saw or heard anything useful. The harassment stopped completely as long as they were watching.
The day after the second stakeout ended, Cindy reported a phone call. It was a silent hang up, but she knew it was the stalker. Except… while the van was no longer watching, the phone company tap was still in place. And when they saw who had made the call, they had to double check because they were so in shock. It was Cindy…. She had called herself.
But maybe this was some sort of weird fluke, so officers got in contact with the utility workers in the area, the ones that would come and repair Cindy’s phone line when it was cut. Well, it turned out they all knew Cindy’s house well. She had become a bit of a running joke – they thought she must be incredibly lonely and desperate for company. Otherwise, why didn’t she just pay for the wires to be encased by protective tubing? There was a simple solution for her problem, but she never took them up on it. Instead she seemed to enjoy having the workers stop by.
Doubts about Cindy’s credibility resurfaced. Was she making this up?
In the summer of 1985, there were a series of small fires at Cindy’s home. On three occasions, someone forced open the basement window, lit some sheets of newspaper on fire, and tossed them inside. None of the fires caused any real damage, as the arsonist hadn’t used any accelerant. The newspaper burned quickly, before anything else in the room could catch.
Because of what they had learned about the calls Cindy had received, the responding officers were suspicious of the fire patterns. They examined the scene with a more critical eye. The grass in front of the basement window was overgrown. If someone had crouched down to force the window open, they would have had to trample the grass, at least a little. But the long blades were seemingly untouched.
Some with the basement window. There were no prymarks on the frame, no scratches – something you’d expect if it had been forced open. There weren’t any finger marks in the dust on the glass. The cobwebs in the corners of the sill were intact.
There was only one conclusion: the window had been opened from the inside. The responding officer believed that Cindy had started the fire herself. But when confronted with the inconsistency, Cindy had a breakdown, crying hysterically. “You don’t believe me. You don’t believe me.” She was so upset, the officer backed off, though he made a note in the casefile.
This new development put the police in an uncomfortable position. They had already invested huge amounts of money and man hours into Cindy’s case. If it turned out the whole thing was a hoax, they would look ridiculous. On the other hand, if Cindy actually was in danger, and they failed to prevent something from happening to her after three years of looking for the culprit, they would look incompetent. Negligent.
While senior officials weighed their options on how to proceed, Cindy was attacked again, in public, in broad daylight. On December 11th, Cindy vanished while out on her lunch break. She reappeared around 6PM in a local park, stumbling and disoriented. She wasn’t wearing shoes or a coat, even though it was freezing outside. She had scrapes and bruises on her legs and a swollen black eye. As always, a nylon stocking had been tied tightly around her neck and there was a needle puncture mark in the crook of her arm.
But beyond her injuries, there was no evidence of the attack; no witnesses to her abduction, and Cindy had no memory of what had happened to her, presumably because she had been drugged. However, a tox screen didn’t show anything in her system that would account for her confusion and memory loss.
The police officer who took Cindy’s statement in the hospital was familiar with her case history and the suspicions that had been raised after the latest arson incident. So they consulted with the hospital doctors to evaluate Cindy’s mental state. She was less than cooperative with the psychologist, giving only clipped, guarded responses to his questions. I mean probably because she was catching wind that they thought she was the one doing this to herself. And then, At the end of their conversation, the psychologist blurted out that Cindy’s injuries might have been “of her own making,” but he couldn’t say definitively without further evaluation.
The people working on Cindy’s case were getting exhausted. This had been going on for four years at this point, and still, they had never once communicated with the person doing this, or even seen them. No one had, not Cindys family, not her coworkers. They were really starting to believe that this may be some delusion Cindy was having.
Especially after the next attack that happened.
In April of 1986, there was another fire at Cindy’s house – and this one was big, destroying her downstairs sewing room and causing major smoke damage in the rest of the house. Cindy told the responding officers that she’d woken up in the middle of the night when the dog started barking, alerting her to someone outside. According to Cindy, she’d heard a window shatter and a loud thunk. When she tried to call the police, the line had been cut; her panic button wasn’t responding either. Then she smelled smoke, and realized the house was on fire, so she ran out and called 911 from the neighbors house.
Initially, arson investigators agreed with Cindy’s version of events. It seemed like someone had tossed an incendiary device through the downstairs window, which had then spread to some stacks of books, newspapers, and photos that were stored in the room. For a moment, Cindy felt vindicated.
But further analysis revealed the fire had actually started in three different places around the sewing room, which indicated it was likely deliberate. They also found more broken window glass outside the room than inside, suggesting whoever broke it was standing in the sewing room.
After years of chasing their tails, there it was in black and white, the first conclusive evidence in the Cindy James case. And it proved that the whole thing was a hoax.
When confronted with the evidence, Cindy had a complete breakdown, crying hysterically. She told the police that they were abandoning her; that Raymond was surely going to kill her now. She knew he was the mastermind behind everything. But the police had already checked to see if Cindy’s ex-husband had an alibi – he wasn’t even in the country at the time.
<<>>
From that point forward, Cindy was viewed as a pariah to the Vancouver police department. The woman who cried wolf. It sent her spiraling into a deep depression, a near catatonic state. She stopped eating and threatened suicide.
Fearing for her safety, Ozzie reached out to Cindy’s family for help. They had her admitted to a mental health facility for treatment.
Initially, Cindy was adamantly opposed to treatment; she wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t making this up, and she refused to be labeled as delusional. From Cindy’s perspective, this was literally a life-or-death decision. She knew that if she accepted treatment, it was a tacit admission that her stalker was a hoax. No one would ever take her attacks seriously ever again – meaning they would never stop. She felt her fate hanging in the balance.
Unfortunately, her response to this also made her seem crazy – she kept trying to run away from the facility. They eventually had to keep her in restraints, which she then managed to slip out of, so Cindy was strapped to her bed with netting. It got so bad, at one point she was relocated to the maximum security hospital. Where they kept convicted criminals.
Perhaps realizing that the only way out of the hospital was to submit to treatment, Cindy eventually started to cooperate with the doctors. She was prescribed antidepressants and mild sedatives, which seemed to help her overall mental state. She started to engage in her talk-therapy sessions, though even there, her therapist felt that Cindy often “held back” the full truth. Still, she showed enough improvement to be released after 56 days, as long as she continued to take her medication and meet for biweekly therapy appointments.
Following her release, Cindy slowly eased back into the real world. The next year and a half was one of quiet, incremental improvements. She took a leave of absence from her job at the children’s home. She moved again; it was the sixth time in four years, since the attacks began. But this one would be permanent, a small testament to her new outlook. With some financial help from her parents, Cindy bought a house. It had a downstairs apartment that could be rented out to help cover the cost of the mortgage. . By the summer of 1987, she was ready to go back to work. She started a new job as a nurse at a local hospital.
To Cindy’s family and friends, it seemed like this horrible chapter was finally behind her. She did report a few scattered hang-up calls at the end of the year, and a few months later someone broke a window at her house, but the constant, targeted harassment had finally stopped. Cindy’s life seemed to be her own again.
Until October 26th, 1988. Around midnight, Cindy activated her panic button, summoning both Ozzie Kaban and the police. They found Cindy in her garage, semi-conscious, naked from the waist down, sprawled out on the driver’s seat of her car. She had a black nylon stocking around her neck; her hands and feet had been bound with a second nylon.
According to Cindy, she’d gotten home from work that night around 8:30PM. After she parked in the garage, Cindy waited a few minutes before getting out of the car, triple-checking her surroundings, looking for signs that anything was off. Even still, as soon as she got out of the car, someone grabbed her from behind; then she lost consciousness. She didn’t have any memory of what happened after that. When she finally came to, hours later, she struggled against her bonds to reach the panic button in her purse, calling Ozzie.
It was a troubling development for everyone involved. After nearly two and a half years of peace, it was an escalated attack, seemingly out of nowhere. However, Cindy claimed it wasn’t out of nowhere; there had been small acts of harassment this whole time. She’d just stopped reporting them, because she knew the police didn’t take her seriously.
Which, some believed was justified on their part. They had caught her directly in a lie after the fire. So that’s the approach they took here, too. Hoping to prove this was another hoax, the police had the nylon stocking used to bind Cindy’s hands and feet examined by a forensic knot expert. They believed the expert would confirm that Cindy had done it to herself.
He said the opposite. The knots in the binding were actually fairly complicated. And, after repeated attempts, the expert wasn’t able to replicate them on himself. The report concluded that Cindy, “could not have tied herself in the manner described above.”
And on top of that, two foreign pubic hairs were found on Cindy, but because DNA evidence was still in its infancy at the time, nothing would ever come of this clue.
After the attack on Cindy James in October of 1988, the police once again found themselves at a crossroads. Had Cindy been telling the truth all along? What did that mean for the arson investigation, which had proved she was lying?
We can’t be totally sure what kind of harassment Cindy faced after the attack, as we know she stopped reporting everything to the police. She did call them when someone tried to pry open a window in her basement, but it didn’t lead anywhere. We also know that a security guard at the hospital where she worked discovered a threatening note on her car, stuck under the wiper blade. And in mid-May, she asked Ozzie Kaban for a gun. She said she was ready to fight back, “blow the guy away” the next time he showed up. He was on his way out of town when Cindy called, but he promised they could discuss it when he got back.
It was the last conversation they had.
On May 25th, 1989, Cindy went out to run some errands around town. She had the next five days off from work, and was excited to celebrate a friend’s daughter’s birthday that weekend. She started the day at Hudson’s Bay department store, where she got a makeover. Later in the afternoon, she dropped by the hospital to pick up her paycheck. A few of her coworkers remembered chatting with her in the breakroom a little before 4PM; they had commented on how well the new look suited her. Then she stopped by the bank and picked up groceries.
Around 10PM, two of Cindy’s friends knocked on her front door. They had planned to play bridge with her that night. But there was no answer, and the lights were off. Cindy’s car was missing from the garage. A sinking feeling in their stomach, they contacted the police.
Cindy’s car was discovered in a nearby Safeway parking lot, both doors still locked. There was a large smear on the driver’s side door that looked like dried blood. Four full bags of groceries had been left on the front passenger seat, along with Cindy’s purse. The keys to both her car and her house were still inside, as well as almost $300 in cash. So it wasn’t a robbery or a car-jacking.
The police checked with local cab companies to see if anyone had picked up a fare in the surrounding area that night. They also checked with the bus drivers of the local routes. Nobody had seen her. Cindy had just vanished.
A few hours after Cindy’s car was discovered, officers paid a visit to her ex-husband Raymond, as he had previously been their top suspect. But he had a solid alibi for the window when Cindy went missing and witnesses to corroborate. However, he was very concerned about his former wife and believed she was in true peril. A few months earlier, someone had left threatening messages on his answering machine. He still had the recording and played it for the officers: a gravely, monotone voice droned: “Cindy. Dead meat. Soon.” (Play Recording: https://www.melaniehack.com/threats)
Raymond hadn’t shared it with anyone before now because he had been trying to stay out of Cindy’s life. Ever since the police had spent six hours trying to compel him to confess, he’d been wary of saying or doing anything that might make him a suspect again. So, he didn’t know that Cindy had been attacked again the previous October – roughly two weeks after he’d gotten the voicemail.
Over the next few days, the authorities launched a massive search effort. Dogs, helicopters, divers. Newspapers seized on the story, especially once they learned that Cindy’s disappearance had been preceded by eight years of harassment. The longer the search dragged on, the more incompetent the Vancouver police seemed.
On June 8th, two weeks after she vanished, some city workers were repairing a stretch of road less than a mile away from the grocery store parking lot. A few hours into the shift, one of the workers went in search of a secluded spot to relieve himself. There was an abandoned house on the corner, the yard behind it overgrown with tall grass and blackberry bushes. The worker followed a dirt path behind the house, toward a particularly thick patch of growth.
And Tucked under the hedge, was Cindy’s body. At first, it looked like she might be sleeping. Then the worker realized that her hands and feet were bound; hogtied behind her with a nylon stocking. Her face was black with decay. He immediately ran back to his crew, shouting for them to call the police.
Based on the amount of decomposition, investigators believed Cindy had been dead for a week before she was discovered, at the minimum. But it could have been longer. Unfortunately, the amount of decay clouded several conclusions about the manner of her death – specifically whether she had been murdered or died of suicide.
Cindy was found wearing the same clothing she had last been seen wearing by her coworkers at the hospital: a blue jacket, pink blouse, and maroon pants. One of her shoes was found a few feet away in the grass. There were several slashes in the blouse, but no wounds on her skin underneath, so it was hard to say how the cuts had gotten there. Other than that, there wasn’t an obvious sign of a struggle. And her clothes were relatively clean. That seemed odd to Ozzie Kaban, if she had been lying in the grass exposed to the elements for at least a week. He also noted that two buttons were missing from her blouse but weren’t found anywhere near her body. He believed Cindy had died somewhere else and her body was moved to the lot after the fact. That could also explain why she wasn’t discovered during the initial grid search – and it proved someone else was involved.
Similar to the last attack, Cindy’s arms and legs had been bound and hogtied behind her. She’d scratched one of her own fingers down to the bone with her pinky nail, presumably as she struggled to free herself. Meaning she was still alive when she was tied up. But who had tied her bonds – Cindy or her attacker?
Investigators sent the nylon bindings to the same knot expert who had consulted on the last attack. This time, he concluded that Cindy could have tied her bindings herself, because the wrist loops were so loose, she could have easily slipped her hands in and out. However, that seemed to directly contradict her injuries; if it had been easy to free herself, why did she scratch through her own skin?
Another nylon had been tied around Cindy’s neck and, initially, the coroner presumed that she had died of asphyxiation. The nylon around the throat had been a hallmark throughout Cindy’s harassment, and she’d lost consciousness from lack of blood flow several times. Luckily, someone had always managed to discover her in time and revive her. Those who believed Cindy had done this to herself saw it as the same playbook, she just miscalculated the odds of someone finding her.
When the police initially found Cindy’s car, the night she disappeared, they logged all the items left behind, including her bags of groceries. But they didn’t find a receipt for what she’d purchased, in either the bags or her purse. The grocery store didn’t keep itemized records, only the total amount for each sale. When the police totalled up everything in the bags, it didn’t match any of the sale totals on record that day. The police believed this meant Cindy had paid for some items that were now missing from the bags – perhaps a pair of nylon stockings?
But just then, the coroner came back with a huge twist in the case. Cindy actually hadn’t died from Asphyxiation, she had died from an overdose. She had lethal amounts of morphine, flurazepam, and diazepam in her system – none of which had been prescribed to her.
Flurazepam is a sedative typically used to treat insomnia. Cindy’s stomach contents indicated that she had ingested at least twenty 30 mg doses of flurazepam and possibly as many as 80. Even at the low end, that was enough to be fatal, and the diazepam in her system only sped up that process. Cindy had only taken a small amount of diazepam, better known as Valium, but it accelerated the sedation effects. The coroner estimated that the combination would have caused Cindy to lose consciousness within 15-20 minutes and eventually stopped her heart after a few hours.
But don’t forget, there was also morphine in her system – a HUGE amount of it. The coroner estimated that it was five times the fatal dose. So number one, it’s overkill, because the other drugs would have already done the job on their own. But number two, morphine is a strictly controlled substance, because of its abuse potential. It’s a strong opioid. Hospitals keep track of their supplies, only certain members of staff have access, and if any goes missing they have to report it. In the 18 months Cindy worked at the hospital, all of the morphine was accounted for. So where did it come from?
More importantly, how was it administered?
Morphine can either be injected or taken in pill form. There was a puncture mark on Cindy’s right arm, likely from a needle, so it’s possible that’s how the morphine got into her system. But it was such a huge dose, Cindy would have immediately lost consciousness, and she would have been dead within minutes. If that’s what happened, there’s no way she hogtied herself. And even if she had somehow managed to tie herself up first, then inject the morphine, police didn’t find any needles or vials by her body. Where did they go?
Even with this mystery, given her history, the lead investigator felt strongly that Cindy had done this to herself, just as she had been behind all of the attacks over the last seven years.
At a certain point, the police decided that Cindy had been doing all of this for attention. But, just to play devil’s advocate for a second, let’s go back to the very first incidents in 1982. The first officer on the case, Constable Pat McBride. Almost immediately, he started a romantic relationship with Cindy, which continued for at least a year. She was later accused of seducing McBride and using her “feminine wiles” to make him overlook the discrepancies in the facts at hand. He swore that he was present for some of these threatening calls that took place, that it WASNT Cindy doing it to herself.
And then there’s Ozzie Kaban. he was an experienced investigator and was involved in Cindy’s case for years. He admitted that there had been times when he questioned Cindy’s sincerity – but he had also done his due diligence. He checked her house, her office, and her garbage repeatedly for indications that she was doing this herself. Like the threatening notes; many of them used letters and pictures cut out from magazines. He never found cut up magazines in the trash. The same kind of rope had been used on the strangled cats and to tie up Cindy’s dog. There was nothing like it found in her house. He compared every shoe she owned to any tracks they ever found. None were a match.
After Cindy’s death, her family cleaned out and packed up her house. Tucked away in various hiding places, they found an IV kit, a catheter, and some syringes. Now, this is definitely weird, but we also have to remember that Cindy was a practicing nurse, so it’s not like this equipment was entirely out of reach for her. But it seems suspicious in the context of the repeated needle marks after her attacks.
Her family also found a huge stockpile of medication, most of which had been prescribed by her therapist over the years. Some of it included strong sedatives and antipsychotics. And, again, it seems suspicious in the context of everything else. Some of those medicines can cause memory loss and disorientation when taken in large doses. But here’s a curious counterpoint: if Cindy already had a stockpile of sedatives at home, why did the coroner only find drugs in her system that she didn’t have a prescription for? If Cindy died of suicide, why did she go out of her way to acquire fatal doses of different drugs? Morphine, especially, which would have been really difficult for her to get her hands on.
Every new detail I read about this case makes me change my mind, to me, this case is like one of those fine line drawings where if you look at it one way, it’s the old woman, and if you look at it another way it's actually a young woman. It seems like whatever answer you hold in your head as you hear about this case is what you end up believing happened. If you believe she did this to herself, you can find all the evidence that’s true, and if you don’t, well, same thing.
If it makes you feel any better, the Canadian RCMP couldn’t make up their minds either. The coroner didn’t feel that he could definitely rule out murder or suicide. Instead, he requested a public inquest to thoroughly examine the Cindy James case from top to bottom. It lasted nearly 40 days and included testimony from 80 days. But, ultimately, it was little more than a recap of the case files; no new revelations came to light. And at the end, the five jurors concluded that Cindy’s cause of death was “undetermined.”
In the years since Cindy’s death, several theories have been offered as to what really happened to her.
The first one actually comes from Cindy’s ex-husband, Raymond. He believed that Cindy’s job working with children with behavioral issues had put her in someone’s crosshairs. Some of her cases involved custody suits, and some children had even been placed in the home after their parents had been convicted of serious crimes. Raymond believed that one of the parents who had lost custody was taking revenge on Cindy. Now, the police did examine this angle at one point, but Cindy worked at the home for 12 years. It’s possible they overlooked a potential suspect, especially if it was early in her career. But other than Raymond’s suspicions, the police never found anything to vindicate this.
The second theory comes from Ozzie Kaban. All throughout the investigation, multiple people said they felt like Cindy was hiding something; holding back the full truth. The police, her therapists, and Ozzie all said something along those lines. They felt like Cindy had a bigger story to tell but for whatever reason never confided in anyone. This suspicion was only made worse by her amnesia after the attacks – did she really not remember, or was she holding something back?
So, trying to break that shell, Ozzie suggested hypnosis. With the okay from her therapist at the time, Cindy sat for a handful of sessions, during which she uncovered a repressed memory of watching Raymond kill two people and dismember their bodies.
It had allegedly occurred while they were on a boat trip in the summer of 1981. Shortly after this trip, Cindy’s family first noticed tensions between the couple, and then Cindy announced her intentions to divorce Raymond. In her journal entries, Cindy claimed that she stayed with Raymond for another year because she was terrified of him; she was certain he was going to kill her. Presumably because she knew too much.
This theory was appealing to the police, who had thought for a while Raymond was behind all of this. They wanted it to be him, but there just wasn’t any evidence. After Cindy remembered the boat trip, investigators went to the alleged dump site, but didn’t find any signs of the murder. And we know that Raymond had solid alibis during some of the attacks on Cindy, including her death. We also know a lot more about hypnosis and recovered memories; they were treated like gospel in the 1980s, but time and again they have been proven unreliable.
The final theory comes from one of the psychiatrists that treated Cindy when she was hospitalized. He believed that Cindy had a form of dissociative identity disorder, which used to be called multiple personality disorder. It could explain how Cindy was able to do these things to herself – some of them truly horrible and gruesome things – but have no memory of it and therefore be living in true fear of an unknown attacker.
There’s one piece of evidence that really puts me in this camp: one of the threatening messages left on Raymond’s machine. He kept the recording and gave it to the police. I played it for you earlier but I want to play it again.
Because remember, Raymond had a thick South African accent. And the voice doesn’t seem to. Some people also feel like it actually sounds like a woman putting on a voice. Listen again https://www.melaniehack.com/threats
But… just because she left this message, does that mean she left all of them? We know that other people witnessed these calls. They picked up the phone when Cindy wasn’t home. People also witnessed strange noises and occurrences while visiting Cindy; what sounded like a prowler outside. How could Cindy have staged that?
Also, Cindy’s therapist credited her recovery to the medication she was taking. He believed they controlled her anxiety and delusions of persecution, which is why the attacks stopped for such a long time after her hospitalization. However, we know now that she wasn’t taking her meds; her family found a stockpile going back years.
So, where does this leave us? Where does it leave Cindy?
In all of the research I did about this case, it seems like there are two things that investigators believe to be true. One, that Cindy did at least some of the harassment to herself, and two, that another person did at least some of the harassment. But how can those things both be true?! To me, they just cant
Is it possible that Cindy was both a victim and her own perpetrator? To me, there’s two answers, and I don’t know which is more terrifying. Either Cindy entered a fugue state and was harassing herself with such planning and precision that police were NEVER able to find firm enough evidence that it was her, or there is someone out there, someone who is essentially Invisible it’s like they're a ghost, who was able to stalk cindy without ever being seen by anyone.
But what do you guys think? Is there something I’m missing?
That’s all I have for you guys today. I’m going to continue to think about this case for the rest of my life, it’s been haunting me for weeks now, and I don’t see that ending anytime soon. Next week we’re going to be back with another Morbid Medicine episode, this time about illnesses that cause people and other animals to behave like Zombies. You wont want to miss that.
And until next time, stay curious…