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It's me again. I showed up. How are you? I hope you're doing well, as good as you can right now. Today's Monday, which means it's Murder, Mystery, and Makeup Monday. Sha-na-sha, sha-na-sha, sha-na-cha-cha-cha-na-sha.
Every Monday I sit down and I talk about a true crime story that's been heavy on my
Noggin. And I do my makeup at the same time. If you're interested in true crime and you like makeup, I would highly suggest you hit that subscribe button because I'm here for you like most Mondays. So today we're going to be talking about a very strange story about Cindy James. Have you heard of it? Forgot to mention that there is a light mention of animal cruelty, animal abuse. Just a little heads up. So let's get into it. Cindy James. Have you heard of this story? Oh, it's a weird one, baby. Cindy was the oldest of six kids.
The family lived in Richmond, Canada. It's a suburb of Vancouver. You tell me. Never been there, can't confirm or deny, but that's what I was told. Not much information was said about her upbringing, but at the age of 19, Cindy did end up getting married to a doctor. His name was Dr. Roy Makepeace.
- Make peace, yeah. And Mr. Make Peace, he was 18 years older than her. So there was like quite an age gap. So Cindy worked as a nurse and she actually really enjoyed working with kids, especially kids who had maybe a troubled upbringing
emotionally were struggling or had emotional problems. She just enjoyed working with kids. In 1982, Cindy and her husband, Dr. Makepeace, they decided it would be best to end their marriage. It was said that Cindy was really happy just to get out of the marriage and end things and just move on with her life. Start new, start fresh, move on, new chapter. Yeah, you know, no idea how Mr. Makepeace thought about it, but
Unfortunately for Cindy, things just would go downhill from here. So Cindy moves out and she's living on her own and she's just ready to start this new chapter. So as time's going on, she's just getting settled, kind of adjusting to her new life on her own. And as time is going on, she starts just getting some, I don't know, some weird phone calls. Her phone would ring, she'd pick it up, "Hello?" As one does, you know.
And someone on the other line would just start harassing her, threatening to kill her, or like wishing harm on her, or saying that they were going to harm her. But she didn't know who it was. They would hang up, it would only be a couple seconds long, hang up, click, okay? And then...
Cindy would go out and get her mail from the mailbox. And she would start seeing these just really strange arts and crafts type letters that someone, you know, someone is cutting out the letters and gluing them on a piece of paper and saying like, quote, "I see you" on the letter. On the letter would be like a photo of a woman with hands around her neck or a photo of like a hand holding a knife.
So she was getting these collages, little crafty collages that someone was putting together in her mailbox. So for good reason, this is kind of freaking her out. So at first, I guess from my understanding, she didn't really say anything. And then eventually, 'cause the letters just kept coming, the phone calls wouldn't stop. She finally goes to her parents' house and she tells them what's been going on, that somebody has been harassing her, leaving these weird phone calls.
that someone's been leaving these paper collages. Cindy's parents would suggest that she go to the police. So Cindy does go to the police and she files a report, but there's really not much that they can do unless they physically, like, you know how that goes, you could file a report but,
"Good luck, bye." Cindy goes back home and she says that the letters and the phone calls were just continuing, but they were getting more graphic and more disturbing. So Cindy was said to be beautiful, that she just loved life, she was a very vibrant lady. You just wanted to be around her, she was just lovely to be around. Friends and family started to notice that she was kind of like,
I don't know, losing that light a little bit. She appeared physically to be just more tired, frazzled,
A little frayed. When Cindy would go to work, she just kind of wasn't fully there. She seemed to just be, I don't know, like she was just going through something. And as time was continuing, the threats were just escalating. Heads up, cats. I'm gonna mention, Cindy found three dead cats hanging in her garden. Yeah, what kind of, see?
Sicko. So also that same night she finds the three cats. She also sees that like her porch lights had been smashed and she tried to call the police, but that's when she discovers that like her phone lines had been cut. I would just burn the house down and move on, you know? Now.
So Cindy does like keep all the letters and stuff she's getting. I couldn't figure out if she called the police this night when this went down. I would think she did, but I also didn't, I couldn't find if she did or not, but we move forward. So first the letters would be sitting in her mailbox. Some of them seem to be mailed to the house.
And then soon it was like they didn't have a stamp and then she was just finding the letter itself in her mailbox. And then the note started appearing on her doorstep instead of being in her mailbox or being mailed. So whoever it was, was coming out to her front door. Terrifying. Cindy's friend, her name was Agnes. I love that. Agnes, that's a great, I love that.
I love that. Agnes, she shows up one night to visit. So Agnes goes up to the front door and she's knocking, no answer. She knows that Cindy is there, because her car is there. Where else would she be? If she's not at work, she's usually at home. So she's like, okay, she's got to be here somewhere. She's not answering. Now Agnes knew that Cindy loved to take just really long baths in the evening to just relax and de-stress.
So Agnes thought like, "Oh, she must just be in the bath. I don't know. Let me go look." Agnes walks in like in front of Cindy's house, like around the back to see if maybe Cindy is in like the backyard doing something. I don't know, but she walks back there. When she gets to the backyard, that's when she sees Cindy crouch down like she's trying to hide from someone. Agnes said at first it like kind of spooked her because she didn't recognize, she didn't know who it was. She just saw someone like crouching down.
But then she realized, "Oh my God, that's Cindy, like what's going on?" So she kind of calls out to Cindy like, "Hey, Cindy?" That's when Agnes sees that there was a black nylon stocking that was tied around Cindy's neck. She's like, "What the fuck?" Cindy is kind of struggling and Agnes helps her get the nylon stocking off her neck and
For good reason, Cindy's very shaken up and Cindy was just trying her best to tell Agnes what happened. So Cindy tells Agnes that she was in the house and she went to the garage to go look for something in the garage. And while she's in the garage, she's kind of just like looking through different boxes and whatnot. And she said that someone just came up from behind her and grabbed her. They then wrapped the stocking around her neck and started strangling her.
Agnes is like, "Well, did you get a good look at them? Like what they look like? Do you know who it was?" Cindy said that she didn't get a good look at the attackers because it came up from behind and they started strangling her, whatever. But she said that she did get a good look at her attacker's shoes. She said the attacker was wearing white sneakers and that's all she got. So white sneakers, I mean,
That's not telling us much, you know? Cindy then said that while she was being strangled, that they heard like a knock at the door, which they knew was Agnes. She must have been at the front door knocking, and Cindy believed that it must have scared whoever the attacker was, and then they just ran off.
That's when Cindy said that she ran into her backyard and hid, and that's why when Agnes came into the backyard, she found her there. And that was really all the information Cindy had. Agnes is, for good reason, worried for her friend. Cindy still stays at the home. I know a lot of people are gonna be like, "Why did she stay?" I don't know why she stayed, but she did, and we can't judge, okay? Like, maybe she didn't have anywhere else to go, I'm not sure. But she still stayed at the home.
So, okay, well, once again, like clockwork, it seems Cindy was receiving notes, but this time the notes were becoming just more dark and more threatening. There was one note that was left on her windshield that showed a corpse being pushed into a morgue. Like, dang.
Gonna frame it. So I guess whoever was doing this was now just doing really random things like having raw meat being delivered to her home. Like, okay. I think it was supposed to scare her, but I would just be like, thanks. So raw meat showing up to her house. One night, Cindy came home from work
once again, animals, and found her dog. She had a dog and her dog was like shaking in fear, sitting in her own feces with a cord tied tight around her neck, the dog's neck. Luckily, her dog was still alive. Cindy said that there would be weeks where she would be receiving threats daily, like every single day, and sometimes a couple times a day.
And then out of nowhere, it would just stop for long periods of time, which would lead Cindy to think that, oh, maybe it's over now, finally. But then it would just start back up again. During this time, Cindy had a personal journal where she would like write down how this was affecting her mentally and how tired she was. After the fact, investigators saw a steady decline in Cindy's mental health.
in her journal, like she started off positive and they just kind of watched her go down with every journal entry. And it just seemed like Cindy was going down a dark, dark hole. I mean, I feel like any of us would at this point, like someone's harassing you. It's kind of hard to stay positive. When Cindy first went to the police, you see, they really didn't seem to believe her stories. Yes, and they openly let her know this. They thought that Cindy was writing these letters to herself
or that she was getting prank calls from kids or something, or just making it all up. And they truly believed that nobody was harassing her. So they really didn't give her much help or offer her much help with her situation. At that point, Cindy said that, or she wrote down in her journal that,
she knew she was gonna have to try and fight this or fight this person herself. She wasn't gonna get help. So once Cindy knew that she wasn't gonna get any help from police, she knew she had to take it into her own hands to get this handled, that's when she decided she needed to move, step one. She needs to get the hell out of that house, right? So Cindy finds a place, a new place to live, a new home, and baby girl Lisa, she
gets that home, she moves. Doesn't tell anybody except for like her parents and stuff. Cindy also thought it would be best if she changed her last name so whoever was doing this hopefully wouldn't be able to find her, right? New last name, great idea, Cindy. Also, Cindy thought it would be a good idea
great idea to hire a private investigator. His name was Ozzy Caban, so she hires a private investigator, tells him everything that's been going on, hopes that he just does his job, right? And gets her some answers that the police aren't gonna do for her. He got started on her case and he had a feeling that Cindy wasn't telling him the whole truth, that she was holding back something. He just felt like,
There's some missing pieces. So when Ozzy, the private investigator talked to Cindy's parents, they agreed. They felt like she was holding something back. Like she wasn't telling the whole truth, but they thought that Cindy might have an idea of who was doing this to her and that perhaps she was too afraid to say anything. So the PI, Ozzy, he was determined to figure out who was doing this, right?
I mean, it's his job. So, okay. He thought it'd be best to install lights on the outside of Cindy's house so she could see who was coming up like to her home, up the driveway and all that stuff.
And Ozzy gave her a two-way radio with a panic button so she could easily reach him if her telephone line was cut again. So late one evening, Ozzy hears some like noises coming from the two-way radio that he left with Cindy. Some crackling, some weird, just some weird shuffling going around. So he hears this and he's just kind of listening, getting worried and he's like, "Crap, what do I do?" Well, he's a PI, so he knows what to do. So he's listening to this and he's kind of like, "Oh no."
I can't just call the radio and be like, "Hello, is anyone there?" And then spook whoever maybe was on the other end. Ozzie rushes over to Cindy's house. When he gets there, he finds Cindy all the way down the hallway. She's like laying on the floor. He goes to her side and he sees that she has a knife through her hand and attached in between the knife and her hand was a note that said, "You are a dead bitch."
End quote. Cindy wasn't moving and Ozzy thought like, damn, she's probably dead. So he's trying to find a pulse. Finds a faint pulse and calls 911 and she ends up being hospitalized, but luckily she's still alive. So while in the hospital, the PI is there waiting for Cindy to wake up. And when she wakes up, he's asking her what happened? Do you remember anything? And Cindy said that the only thing she could remember was a needle being put into her arm
like when she was asleep. So she didn't really see much of anything. She couldn't really see it's nighttime. Remember it's nighttime, you're sleeping, boom, you wake up, she wakes up and she just faintly remembers a needle being put into her arm.
So the PI is asking her like, "Well, did you see anything?" And she's just saying, "No, she doesn't remember anything." Now here's the thing that sucks. And the PI was so upset with this, but the police didn't take any fingerprints at her home or on the knife or even on the damn note. There was a handwritten note that was in between her hand and the knife, remember? It had writing on it and they didn't take fingerprints. They sure didn't. Awesome, great job. Flash makeup.
So when police come back and question Cindy a little bit more, trying to get some answers, they have a moment of honesty with her. And they say, the police, they say that they're growing quite tired of Cindy's whole saga, and they were just really over it. She needed to come clean, tell the truth, that she's the one who's up to this.
because they didn't believe her. But Ozzy, the private investigator, he was adamant that nobody could have done that to themselves. He believed that Cindy would not have been able to inject the needle or stab herself at the angles that both entered her body. He strongly believed that someone had attacked his client. Cindy wanted to try and remember anything
from the attack that night. And also just the previous attacks. It felt like maybe it was buried in her brain somewhere and she couldn't access it. So her and the PI decided it would be best
to just try and go see like, you know, someone who does hypnosis sessions and see if that maybe that could bring some memories to the surface, you know? So she tried several hypnosis sessions. The police also gave her polygraph tests. They say that they wanted to help her, but really they wanted to see if she was lying, you know? So the police give Cindy a polygraph test.
Cindy takes a polygraph test. Now, actually it comes back truthful that she's not lying.
But police considered her to be too traumatized to be able to give useful information. Police would set up a 24 hour surveillance watching Cindy's home and tapping her phone line in hopes to track whoever was doing this. You know, they're like, okay, yeah, we'll do it. But of course, while police are there waiting at her home, outside of her home, I'm sorry, no calls would come in, no notes would be left at her house.
Nothing. So police were using this as proof that Cindy was faking it. Cindy's parents thought that whoever was indeed doing this was probably really smart and knew to stay away at certain times, like when the police are there. But they thought whoever was doing this was trying to make Cindy look like she was the one to blame, like she was crazy or something. So they thought that whoever's doing this was
was smart, real smart. Once the police were gone and some time had passed, the threatening phone calls picked back up, but could never be traced because they were only a couple seconds long. The next attack was horrible and left poor
Poor Cindy hospitalized. Cindy was found near a ditch six miles from her home. She was wearing a man's work boot, just one, and a glove. She was also suffering from hypothermia. She had cuts and bruises all over her body and also had a black nylon stocking around her neck.
She had no memory of what happened that night. When Cindy was released to go home, she asked her friend Agnes, remember Agnes? And her husband Tom to stay the night with her at the house because she doesn't want to be there alone. Great idea. So everyone goes to bed that night and it was said that in the middle of the night, they were woken up by noises coming from the basement.
It was a weird like crackling noise, so Tom, he went down there to go look and he sees that there's flames coming from the basement. Tom yells for someone to call 911, but that's when they realized that the phone lines once again had been cut. The line was dead. Sounds like a horror film. Horror, not horror, horror film.
Oh, but it's real life, so it's not Bailey. Sorry. Tom ran outside to go ask a neighbor to call 911, and when he ran out there, he said that he saw a man just staring at the front of the house. Now, because it was dark, he couldn't see who it was, but he yelled to the man to call 911. And he said that this man, this mystery man, went running away down the street without saying a word.
Luckily, Tom made it to the neighbor's house, the neighbor called 911 and the fire department came out. The police determined that the fire had started from within the house because they saw no fingerprints on the window that they thought the perpetrator would have used to gain entry into the house. They looked literally at a couple of windows, saw no fingerprints and was like, meh.
Probably one of you guys. Yeah, some great police work here, you guys. Some great police work. Since they found no fingerprints, they determined that Cindy had staged the incident. This one's great, get ready. Investigators also pointed to the fact that they saw Cindy walk her dog alone at night. Therefore, she must not be scared of an attacker if she's walking her dog alone at night. That's what the investigators said.
Can you believe this? This is a true story, which is awful. Cindy's parents were worrying about her mental state. She was terrified.
Terrified and going downhill quick, they believed that she was becoming suicidal and Cindy's doctor committed her to a local psychiatric ward where she would be for 10 weeks. When Cindy was released, that's when she confessed to her family that she was indeed holding back information about who her attacker may be. Cindy told them that the attacker had threatened to kill her whole family and friends if she told them who it was.
To you and I right now, it sounds, it's like, girl, just say it anyways. Like take that risk. I think when you're in it, it's probably a lot different. She obviously was scared. Do you get what I'm saying? I just feel like the sentence doesn't like translate
the emotion that she was probably feeling of that heavy fear. She probably believed them. Yeah. Anyway, so she didn't want to say anything because she didn't want her family and friends to get killed. After she got out of the psychiatric ward, that's when she decided she had to be truthful.
Cindy was falling into a deeper depression because she felt that her credibility was destroyed and that no one believed anything she was saying. Anything coming out of her mouth, she just felt like no one was believing her. It's like, well, yeah, no wonder she was going downhill. Have you ever been in a situation where no one believes you? Oh my God. It's just like,
I couldn't imagine to this extent. So yeah, she's not doing too well. Cindy wrote in her journal that she did want to kill herself because her life was a living hell. So finally, Cindy goes to police. She's like, "Okay, I'm ready to tell you guys who I think it is." Drum roll, do we even need a drum roll? She believed her ex-husband, Roy Makepeace, was the one doing this to her.
I could have guessed that one, you know? But get this, I can't say Roy for some reason. Mr. Makepeace, he worked as a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist, huh? Interesting. Now some people say that doesn't matter, so. Anywho, so police went out to question Mr. Makepeace.
And of course, he denied all the allegations and then he instead was like, "Hey, you know what? I actually have some evidence on my answering machine." So Mr. Makepeace gave police his answering machine or the tape, I believe, and said that there was a recording of who he suggested was his ex-wife Cindy, leaving him death threats.
Her ex-husband said that he believed that Cindy was suffering from a split personality. This is what he's telling police. But while Cindy was staying at the psychiatric hospital, the medical staff and the doctors who treated her, they never diagnosed her with this disorder. It doesn't necessarily mean that she didn't have it, but it's just something to be noted, you know? She was there for 10 weeks though, so. But he just tells investigators this like, yeah.
I'm a doctor. So one day, Cindy, she had gone to the local shopping center to deposit her work paycheck and also just to pick up a few things at the grocery store. Sadly though, she would never make it home. Cindy's car would be found in the shopping center parking lot
on May 25th, 1989, after she was reported missing. When investigators went over to her car, they found blood on the driver's side door and items from her wallet were just like scattered around the inside of her car on the seats and stuff. So they open up her trunk and they find inside her trunk, the groceries that Cindy had purchased along with a gift that was wrapped that she had gotten for someone for two weeks.
Her family was worried, wondering what had happened to her. No answers, just nothing, just her car with the blood and ugh. So two weeks go by and they're searching with no luck, finding what happened to her. Cindy's body was found in the front yard of an abandoned house.
in what was said to be a pretty busy area with lots of people walking on foot, which led many to believe that her body may have just been like dumped there because there's no way that like two weeks would pass without anybody seeing her. So at first it seemed like she couldn't have been killed when she was first reported missing. Investigators,
believed that she was taken somewhere, probably killed wherever she was taken and then dropped. But after the autopsy came back, it showed that she had most likely died the day that she disappeared. Her body showed numerous wounds, but there was an injection mark on her arm
and investigators found no needle close to her car or around the crime scene. And it would later be determined that she was injected or injected herself with a high dose of morphine. Her body was found with both of her hands tied behind her back.
her feet were also tied up and around her neck was a black nylon pantyhose that was used to strangle her. So it was hard for a lot of people to believe that Cindy would have walked a mile and a half to the spot where they found her body and then tied her hands, tied her feet, strangled herself, doing all of these after injecting herself with morphine and then
died there and nobody saw her. Like that just didn't make sense to a lot of people. Or it was like, well maybe she injected herself with the morphine, walked a mile and a half to the spot, tied herself up, her hands and her feet, again with the high dosage of morphine and then died there.
And even if she did do all this, someone would have seen her body a lot sooner. The police though, they came up with their own idea of what Cindy did. They believed that Cindy had injected herself elsewhere, threw away the needle somewhere, somewhere that they haven't found yet, then she walked a mile and a half to the abandoned house, where she then tied her feet and hands behind her back, strangled herself, and then yeah, she died there. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
No, because Lord forbid they admit that they might've actually been wrong with this one folks. But on top of this, they found no evidence that proves their theory, I guess, was the case. I mean, when they looked into Cindy's purchase history, they couldn't find any proof that she had purchased black nylons. Family and friends said that she did no drugs. It just, it doesn't make sense. I mean, 'cause it didn't happen.
So the Royal Canadian Mounted Police claimed that Cindy's death was either a suicide or an accident, but the coroner ruled both of those results out, and Cindy's official cause of death was morphine overdose. Police did suspect Cindy's ex-husband, Mr. Makepeace, but they had no concrete evidence against him. Mr. Makepeace believed that Cindy had multiple personalities and was unaware that she was tormenting herself.
The only truth in the whole story is that Cindy suffered immensely in this saga and she paid with her life. Her journals expressed just
Just an awful story of a woman being tortured mentally and physically, either by herself or a mental illness, or because of a sadistic perpetrator who wanted to drive her crazy and eventually kill her. Sadly, Cindy's parents have since passed away, never finding the truth as to what really happened to their daughter, and they believed until their last days that their daughter did not commit suicide, that somebody did this to her.
Cindy's sister Melanie, who was 27 when Cindy died, ended up writing a book titled "Who Killed My Sister, My Friend?" and continues to search for the answers as to what happened to Cindy James. There's a lot of different theories out there saying that Cindy may have been abusing drugs. I mean, she was a nurse, maybe she was able to get access to them, and that they maybe triggered something, or maybe she had a mental illness that was untreated, and the drugs just,
intensified it, this is what some people say. We don't know, but there are a lot of people who think this may have been the case, that Cindy was indeed doing this to herself. Then the other side is, hell no, it was allegedly her ex-husband. He was a psychiatrist, he had access to drugs. We don't know what their relationship was like, but maybe he didn't want
her to move on, maybe he was controlling. I mean, we don't know, but many believed it was the ex-husband all along. My own personal opinion you ask? I believe it was the ex-husband. Yeah, it makes sense. And she said that it was the ex-husband. So in conclusion, nobody really knows what happened to poor Cindy James. Have you seen "Invisible Man"? Is this not "Invisible Man"? If you haven't seen it,
great movie. Sadly though, this is real life. But what I'm getting at is, oh my gosh, let's just say it was her ex-husband doing this or just anybody. Let's say she was telling the truth a hundred percent, which I think she was. But if you don't go with me, could you imagine nobody believing you? Everyone thinking you're making this up. Like that's horrifying. It would drive anybody crazy. It would, it really would. Oh my
Sadly, that is the story about Cindy James. Today was quite the journey. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Please be safe out there, make choices, and I'll be seeing you guys later. Bye.