Cindy James
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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, check us out at patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. In October 1982, Cindy picked up her house phone in Vancouver, Canada. All 38-year-old Cindy heard was deep, disturbing breathing.

Probably some teenage prankster, Cindy thought. But the harassing phone calls continued on and on. Cindy was terrified, so she called the police. As Cindy lay in bed, her heart raced when she heard the phone ring yet again. Cindy slowly placed the cold phone next to her ear. The same voice spoke. Cindy, you're dead.

This is Forensic Tales, episode number 123, The Mysterious Death of Cindy James. ♪

Thank you.

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

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In early October 1982, 38-year-old Cindy James started receiving disturbing prank calls to her landline inside her Vancouver, Canada home. The first few phone calls were relatively innocent. Sometimes it was just a man breathing heavily into the phone. Other times, they didn't say anything at all. It was something that a group of young teenagers might do at a slumber party.

But then the phone calls progressed. Instead of simply breathing or not saying anything at all, the caller started threatening Cindy, telling her in one particular call, you're dead, Cindy. After receiving her eighth threatening phone call in only five days, Cindy decided to call the police. She was getting scared that the caller might follow through on his threats.

This call set in motion a string of over 100 calls to the police where she reported incidents of violence and harassment. At first, the police told her there wasn't much that they could do. She could try changing her number or unlist her phone number from the phone book. Then they told her to give it a day or two and the calls would probably stop because, like most teenagers, they'll get bored and move on to something else.

But the caller didn't move on, and the calls didn't stop. They got worse. One night, while Cindy walked through her house, closing the blinds and getting ready for bed, her phone rang again. The man said, quote, End quote.

Cindy immediately called back the police. The police agreed to send an officer out to Cindy's home and see if maybe they could spot someone prowling around the house. But when the officer got there, he didn't see anyone. The neighborhood was dead quiet. Whoever was looking into Cindy's house was long gone. Over the next couple of days, the harassment intensified, and the Vancouver police had no choice but to get involved and start investigating.

Cindy complained to the police that she would hear prowlers outside her bedroom window at night. She would go outside in the morning to see that someone had smashed her porch lights. One time, she said someone had intentionally cut her phone lines so she couldn't call for help. Over the next three months, the Vancouver police followed up on every single one of Cindy's complaints.

She expressed to them how scared she was and that she didn't think the harassment was going to stop anytime soon. The harassment continued to get worse. One day, she found three dead cats hanging in her backyard. Someone had strangled the cats to death. Then, letters appeared. Threatening letters would pop up on her doorstep. Some of the letters said, "'I see you' or "'You're gonna die, Cindy.'"

As the police began their investigation into who was doing this to Cindy, they wondered if she had any enemies. Was there anyone out there who would want her dead? Cindy James was born in Ontario, Canada in 1944 to parents Otto and Matilda Hack. She grew up in a military household and was one of six children. Her dad, Otto, was an officer in the army, so the family moved around a lot.

People who knew her described her as quiet and reserved. Cindy had trouble making friends and keeping them at school. Cindy's diaries suggested that her father Otto may have been strict. Maybe it was the military background or simply just how Otto wanted to raise his children. When Cindy turned 19 years old, she became a nurse and started working in a facility for children with emotional troubles.

This job seemed to be perfect for Cindy. She loved taking care of children and she was good at it too. The kids just connected with her. Around the same time Cindy got the nursing job, she married Dr. Roy Makepeace. At the time, Roy was 18 years older than Cindy and was married when they first started seeing each other.

But fairly quickly after meeting each other, Roy divorced his first wife and married Cindy. Cindy and Roy had been married for 16 years, and everything about their relationship seemed normal and happy. They decided not to have any children. They were just happy being with each other.

But in 1982, the marriage fell apart and Cindy filed for divorce. Then only a few months after filing for divorce, the threatening phone calls started. Shortly after Cindy contacted the police about the threatening phone calls, Detective Pat McBride moved into Cindy's house.

He told his superiors that he was moving in with her for just a few weeks in order to protect her as well as to find out what was happening. But quickly after moving in, rumors swirled that Cindy and Detective Pat McBride were involved in a romantic relationship.

During the four weeks that Detective McBride stayed with Cindy, there were zero, there were no threatening phone calls, and all the mysterious letters seemed to have stopped. Initially, the police suspected that Cindy's ex-husband, Dr. Roy Makepeace, was the one behind the phone calls.

It just seemed like too much of a coincidence that the phone call started only four months after Cindy left Roy. So if anyone out there had reason or motive to want to do this to Cindy, the police suspected that it might be the ex-husband. But when they confronted Cindy about Roy being the one responsible, she wasn't exactly convinced.

At first, she thought it could be, but other times, she wasn't so sure that he was capable of torturing her like this. While investigators turned their attention away from Roy, the harassment of Cindy escalated. This time, the harassment turned physical. Cindy's close friend, Agnes Woodcock, dropped by Cindy's place to check in on her on January 7th, 1983.

When she knocked on the front door, no one answered. That's strange, she thought. She knew Cindy was home at the time. So Agnes decided to walk around to the back of Cindy's house. That's where she found Cindy crouched down with a nylon stocking tied around her neck. When Agnes asked her friend what had happened, Cindy told her that a man attacked her from behind while she went to get something from the garage.

She said the man must have run off when he heard the knock on the front door. After the incident, Cindy told the police what happened, but said that she didn't get a good look at her attacker. All she could remember was that he was male and wore white shoes. She had no idea that the violence was only just beginning.

For months, weird messages were found on her car's windshield. One had a picture of a body covered up being wheeled into a morgue. Other notes had letters cut from magazines. Raw meat was delivered to her front doorstep. Her dog, Heidi, was found sitting in her backyard with a cord tied around her neck. Luckily, the dog survived.

The threats scared Cindy so much that she decided she needed to get away. So she moved into a new home in a new neighborhood. She painted her car a different color. And she even changed her last name to try and get away from this person. But no matter how hard she tried, her harasser somehow managed to track her down.

After months of investigating Cindy's claims, the police started doubting her stories. They could never figure out where the phone calls were coming from or the mysterious letters. The phone calls were always too short to trace, and they could never determine where the letters were originally mailed from.

Vancouver police officers conducted 24-7 surveillance at her house for days on end with up to 14 police officers. But they never once saw anyone go near Cindy's home. But when the police stopped their surveillance, another incident would happen within days. It was as if every time the police showed up or investigated something, the violence and harassment went away.

And then when the police went away, they would conveniently start back up again. This led investigators to suspect that maybe no one was really doing this. Could Cindy James be doing this to herself? This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. The Vancouver police slowly started backing away from their investigation into Cindy's claims. Every time the police sat down and spoke with Cindy, they thought she seemed evasive and that she wasn't telling them everything she knew.

It was also strange that every time the police came around, the harassment stopped. And then, when they disappeared, so did her stalker. The police had Cindy participate in two separate polygraph tests. They wanted to find out if she was really telling the truth about her mysterious harasser. The examiner who administered the test reported that the test showed signs of deception about knowing all of the facts.

The test didn't prove that she was doing this to herself. It simply revealed that Cindy was withholding information from the police.

Cindy's mom, Tilly Hack, also suspected that her daughter knew more than what she was telling. Her mom thought that Cindy's reluctance was because her attacker had threatened her family. At one point, Cindy had told her that if she named this person to the police, her entire family would be killed.

Discouraged that the police no longer believed her, Cindy reached out and hired a private investigator named Ozzy Caban in November of 1983. Cindy hired Ozzy just five days after receiving dead yellow flowers with a card that read, Are you ready to die?

Right away, Ozzy installed new security lights at her place and gave her a two-way radio to communicate with him at all hours of the night. He also gave her a panic button. One night while monitoring the radio in January 1984, Ozzy heard a strange noise.

He immediately hopped into his car and drove to Cindy's house. When he got there, he found her on the floor with a large kitchen knife in her hand with a note that read, you are dead, bitch. When Ozzy first got there, he thought Cindy was dead. She was lying on the floor completely unresponsive with a huge kitchen knife cut all the way through her hand.

But to his surprise, she wasn't dead. She was alive. After the incident with the kitchen knife, Cindy was hospitalized. At the hospital, police officers asked her questions about what she remembered from the attack. They wanted to know who did this to her. But all Cindy could recall was that someone had put a needle into her arm. Then after that, she didn't remember anything until she woke up at the hospital.

But this wasn't the only incident involving needle marks. In a separate incident in December 1985, Cindy was found unconscious in a ditch six miles away from her house with pantyhose tied around her neck. She had a black eye and her body was completely covered in cuts and bruises.

When the police found her in the ditch, she was wearing one men's work boot on one of her feet and she had a rubber glove on one of her hands and that's it.

When she was taken to the hospital, she was once again interviewed by the police, this time by a female officer. When the officer was interviewing her, Cindy pointed to a needle mark on one of her arms. She implies that someone had injected her with something, and that's why she doesn't remember what happened to her.

But who did this? In both of these incidents, the police couldn't find any evidence of a sexual assault. Following the latest attack involving the work boot and the rubber glove, Cindy asked her friend Agnes and her husband Tom to come stay with her. She told them that she felt safer if someone was around.

One night in April 1986, they heard strange noises coming from the basement while staying there. When Tom went down to investigate where the noise was coming from, he saw that the basement was on fire. He tried calling 911, but the phone lines had been cut. Tom then ran out of Cindy's house, yelling at neighbors to call for help.

He said he saw a man on the sidewalk just in front of Cindy's place. He asked the guy if he could call 911, but instead of offering to help them, the man turned around and ran down the street in the opposite direction. This was the very first time that anyone else reported seeing someone around Cindy's house at the time of an attack.

When the police arrived that night, they quickly determined that the fire had been started inside of Cindy's basement. There was only one window in the basement. And when the forensics team looked at the window, they didn't find any fingerprints on it. In fact, the window didn't look like it had been opened or touched in months, if not years. It was covered in dust and was completely undisturbed.

So if someone started the fire inside of the house, they didn't go through the only window in the basement. This led the police to suspect that Cindy was the one who started it. As the attacks progressed, Cindy's physical and mental health rapidly declined.

Once a beautiful, lively woman, she was now becoming someone almost entirely unrecognizable. She lost a ton of weight, her parents worried that she was becoming suicidal, and she lived in constant fear for her life, a fear that no one seemed to believe, not even the police.

Believing that Cindy posed a real threat to herself, a doctor committed her to a local psychiatric hospital for 10 weeks. Cindy's family and friends continue to support her as well as believe in her during this hospital stay. Practically every single person in her life believed her, and they didn't think that she was doing this to herself like the police may have thought.

However, most people, including her parents, thought that she knew who was doing this to her. She just wasn't saying.

In the hospital, Cindy wrote in her journal that she was depressed, that no one seemed to believe her. She also expressed feelings of suicide. In one of those journal entries, she wrote, quote, I still feel as if suicide is my best option in an unbearable situation. As soon as I get out of here, I will carry on my plan, end quote.

Cindy told the hospital psychiatric doctors that she was angry that no one believed she was being harassed and that someone out there wanted her dead. When the doctors pressed her about who she thought was doing this to her, she eventually offered up a name, Dr. Roy Makepeace, her ex-husband.

When Cindy finally told the police that she believed her attacker was her ex-husband, they told her to call and confront him about it so they could tape their conversations. But any time Cindy spoke to Roy, he completely denied having anything to do with it.

The police also learned that Roy received his own threatening messages one night on his voicemail. In a deep, raspy voice, someone left a 10-second message that said, While Cindy was hospitalized for 10 weeks, the attacks stopped.

While in the hospital, she didn't receive a single phone call and no one showed up at the hospital to attack her. But as soon as she was released, the attacks resumed. After the hospital discharged her, the police found her unresponsive in a car. She was naked from the waist down and had a nylon stocking tied around her neck, something seen in many of the previous attacks.

But besides the stalking around her neck, her arms and legs were also hogtied with a second piece of nylon. The police also found duct tape over her mouth like someone was trying to suffocate her. She spent the next several weeks in a coma following the attack. And once again, there were no signs of sexual assault despite being found naked from the waist down.

Investigators also didn't find any fingerprints or forensic evidence in the car to make them suspect that anyone else was involved. The only fingerprints they found all belonged to Cindy.

In the spring of 1989, Cindy told her parents that the threats and attacks seemed to be decreasing. She told her parents that she thought her attacker was gone for the first time in over six years. And for the first time in a long time, she was starting to feel safe again. But that safe feeling wouldn't last.

On May 22, 1989, Cindy visited Ozzie, her private investigator at his office. She told him that she was finally ready to tell him information about the attacks that she had never told anyone before. They agreed to set up a meeting to talk about it.

Two days later, on May 24th, Cindy called her friend Agnes and her husband Tom to confirm plans for the next day. Plans to get together to play a game of bridge. But on May 25th, 1989, Cindy disappeared. On May 25th, Cindy woke up and left her house to go grocery shopping and run a few errands.

Then at around 3.30 p.m., she went to work and picked up her paycheck. A few hours later, at 7.58 p.m., she deposited her paycheck at the bank. This deposit would become her last known whereabouts. The police found Cindy's car abandoned at a local shopping mall. Officers quickly noticed blood on the driver's side door but no sign of Cindy.

After looking around the car, they found Cindy's purse still sitting in the front seat with four bags of groceries and a wrapped present next to it. They also found her wallet and ATM deposit slip from depositing her paycheck underneath the car. A little after 10 a.m., Cindy's friend Agnes let police officers into Cindy's home to see if they could find anything to figure out where she was.

What they found inside the house was just as disturbing as what they found in her car. The house looked like Cindy had planned on returning home the previous day. They found a deck of cards on the table, ready for the upcoming game of bridge with Agnes and Tom. The house seemed almost normal, except that the drapes were left open.

Cindy would usually close them before it got dark because she was worried her stalker was looking inside. Police officers then went to Cindy's ex-husband Roy's apartment around 3.30 a.m. They questioned him about where he was the day before and asked him if he knew where Cindy might be. But he told the officers he had no idea because he hadn't seen or spoken to Cindy in days.

As the search to find Cindy intensified, investigators took her car in for forensic testing. They turned the car upside down, looking for any hairs, fibers, or fingerprints. Anything that could help lead them to Cindy. But as far as the forensic evidence went, the investigators didn't find anything significant.

All the prints lifted from the dashboard or the steering wheel all belonged to Cindy. Everything inside the car was Cindy's, including her work parking pass and her usual brand of cigarettes. Over the next several days, Vancouver police executed an exhaustive search for Cindy. They used helicopters to conduct aerial searches. Boats searched every body of water in the area.

They even monitored the Vancouver International Airport to see if she tried boarding a flight. But after days of searching, Cindy was still nowhere to be found.

Two weeks into the search, on June 8th, the police received a phone call that a female victim was found lying in the front yard of an abandoned house. The house was located at 3111 Bloondell Road. 44-year-old Cindy James was found.

When the police arrived at the abandoned house, Cindy was lying on her side with her face facing the ground. A black nylon stocking was tied around her neck, suggesting that she had been strangled to death. Her hands were tied behind her back, and both her feet were tied together. She had one large injection mark on one of her arms, but no needles were found near or on her body.

A forensic pathologist performed Cindy's autopsy two days later. The autopsy revealed that Cindy had been strangled and drugged. The forensic pathologist found what he considered to be a lethal dose of morphine and a handful of other drugs in her system. He also noted that she had a needle mark on her right arm.

Although the police didn't find any needles near her body, she also didn't have a history of drug use. In addition, Cindy was strangled with her hands and feet tied together. So the police believed Cindy committed suicide. Her death was caused by an overdose.

When people questioned the police about how Cindy could have injected herself with drugs without finding the needle nearby, they thought that she could have injected herself somewhere else and then went to the abandoned house where her body was ultimately found. They believed that it would have taken some time for the morphine and the other drugs to take effect fully.

This would have allowed her enough time to inject herself with the drugs and then walk over to the house where she eventually collapsed. And that would explain why there weren't any needles there. As far as the nylon stocking around her neck, as well as the ties around her hands and feet go, the police believed she did this to herself, just like what she had done for six and a half long years.

But not everyone trusted the police's investigation. After the case was officially closed and ruled a suicide in July of 1989, a coroner's inquest was held to determine Cindy's cause of death. Over 80 witnesses testified in what became the longest and most expensive coroner's inquest in British Columbia's history.

During the three-month-long inquest, a forensic etymologist testified that based on his observation, Cindy's body had likely been where it was found since June 2nd. Based on his expertise, this meant that there was a one-week period where her whereabouts were unaccounted for.

Now, what about decomposition? If Cindy's body had been exposed to the elements of the abandoned house for two weeks, you'd expect her body to be in some pretty advanced stages of decomposition. But that wasn't the case. Some forensic experts who looked at her autopsy report noted the lividity in Cindy's body.

When they saw where the blood pooled across her body, they thought it looked like her body had been moved sometime after her death. Throughout the investigation, Detective Pat McBride, the detective who briefly moved in with Cindy, was cleared as a possible suspect. So was Dr. Roy Makepeace, Cindy's ex-husband.

After the inquest was complete, authorities concluded that her death was, quote, a result of an unknown event, end quote. A death that forensics can't figure out. In other words, we have no idea what really happened to Cindy James. Despite the fact that Cindy reported over 100 incidents of harassment and violence against her.

Even after the coroner's inquest findings were made public, many people continue to believe that Cindy was murdered, including her own parents. In an interview for the TV show Unsolved Mysteries, Cindy's dad Otto said, "...the police did not investigate the possibility of homicide or someone murdering her, but zeroed in on trying to prove that she committed suicide."

Her parents also don't believe that she was capable of tying herself the way she was found, leading them to believe that she was murdered by the person who had been torturing her for almost seven years. But Cindy's parents aren't the only ones that believe there's been a grave miscarriage of justice in Cindy's case. But if Cindy didn't commit suicide like the police claimed, then what really happened to her?

The most popular theory is, of course, murder. Those who believe that Cindy is a murder victim point to the over 100 incidents of violence and harassment. In six and a half years, she had received almost 100 harassing phone calls and had been the victim of five separate physical attacks. Some of the attacks were so brutal that they almost killed her.

The police argue that Cindy could have committed those acts on herself. She could have been making up the harassing phone calls. She could have been the one writing the weird letters. And she even could have inflicted those injuries and tied herself up.

The police couldn't trace the caller's phone number, and when they had up to 14 officers conducting 24-hour surveillance over Cindy's house, not one single incident occurred. But as soon as the surveillance was gone, the attacks and phone calls started back up again. But is someone capable of doing that to themselves? And if so, why?

Why go through so much trouble to convince the police that you're being harassed for six and a half years? Cindy had a black nylon stocking tied around her neck in every physical attack. She also had her hands and feet bound together, sometimes in a hogtie position. And in most of the physical attacks, she had a needle mark on one of her arms.

She was almost always found naked or half naked. Were the consistencies in her attacks because the same person attacked her? Or were they consistent because she was the one doing it? There's one person in this story that has not been officially cleared. And that's the man seen right outside of Cindy's house the night that the fire started in her basement.

Remember, that particular night, Agnes and her husband Tom stayed over at Cindy's house, something they frequently did at Cindy's request. When Tom went to pick up the phone to call 911, the phone lines had been cut, so he ran outside of the house to try and find a neighbor to call the fire department.

As soon as he got outside the house, he said he saw a man standing on the curb right in front of Cindy's house. He asked the man to call 911 because the house was on fire. But instead of offering to help, Tom said that this man turned around and ran down the street.

To this very day, this man seen outside of Cindy's house has never been identified. And therefore, the police have never been able to question him. If Cindy committed suicide, where did she get the drugs found in her system? The police knew that Cindy worked as a pediatric nurse at a hospital. Was it possible she stole it from her job?

When the police questioned the hospital's supervisors, they didn't report that any morphine was missing and or unaccounted for. Maybe Cindy already had morphine prescribed to her. Because of these serious physical attacks over the years, doctors had prescribed Cindy morphine to deal with these physical injuries.

Is it possible she stored morphine from one of these previous attacks and then ingested it when she died? Vancouver police believe that Cindy could and did tie herself up. During the coroner's inquest, medical professionals as well as knot experts testified that the type of knots found on Cindy's body are the type of knots that someone could tie on themselves.

While some of them would have been rather difficult, they are possible. Although Cindy James died over 30 years ago, people continue to talk about her. They wonder if the police got it right. Did she really make everything up and then in the end commit suicide? Or did the person responsible for torturing her for almost seven years finally fulfill his death promise?

Anyone with information about Cindy James' mysterious death is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477. All tips about the case can be made anonymously. To share your thoughts on the Cindy James story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. Let me know what you think happened to her.

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