Crime Junkie - MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF: Cindy James

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

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You can enjoy hundreds of extra episodes just like this one. Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And the story I have for you today is about a woman whose death in 1989 baffled just about everyone who came into contact with her case.

And that was a lot of people. I mean, we're talking police, private investigators, family, friends, neighbors, psychiatrists, pathologists, a jury in a coroner's inquest, not to mention all the people who followed the investigation in real time. And now, over 30 years later, it's still just as baffling as it was back then. This is the story of the mysterious death of Cindy James. years later, it's still just as baffling as it was back then. It's just after 10 p.m. on May 25, 1989, and 69-year-old Agnes Woodcock and her husband

Tom are just pulling up to the front of their friend's house on a quiet street in Richmond, British Columbia. Agnes had made plans earlier that day to meet up with 44-year-old Cindy James at her place for a late-night game of cards. And listen, Cindy was more than just a good friend to the Woodcocks. She had become like a daughter to them over the years, and they often would come by her place for a game of bridge and to sleep over afterwards. That was like the plan that night too.

So Agnes beeps the horn as she stops the car in Cindy's driveway and looks toward the living room window where she expects at any moment to see Cindy, push aside the drapes, and wave them in. Cindy lives alone, so this was like her low tech version of a camera system that makes her feel safe when people come over. But the problem is, she doesn't come to the window. And interestingly, Cindy's car isn't in the driveway either, and the Woodcocks hadn't seen it parked on the street nearby.

So all of this is making Agnes worry, but she tells Tom, you know what, stay put here in the car, I'm gonna go to the front door. She knocks when she gets there, but there's no answer. Tom gets out of the car at this point, and they walk around to try Cindy's back door. They knock again, but again, no answer. The worry Agnes has been feeling grows a little more. Since they're there, they decide to check with Cindy's downstairs tenant, a man named Richard, to see if he'd seen her or maybe knew where she was. But when they talk to him, he says he hadn't seen her since that afternoon, around like 4 or 4.30, when she left to go deposit her paycheck and do some shopping.

To his knowledge, she hasn't been back since. So you said she had to do some shopping. Is that like, you know, stopping at the grocery store for a carton of milk or like four hours at the mall kind of shopping." Maybe not four hours at the mall, but definitely more than like one stop for a carton of milk. According to Neil Hall's book, The Deaths of Cindy James, Agnes knows Cindy had to pick up a gift that day for her friend's son's birthday. And so the Woodcocks are thinking, you know, she maybe deposits her check at the bank,

she picks up the gift, maybe she swings by the grocery store for a few things since she's already out and hosting that night. It's not like Cindy to be late, but she might just be running a little bit behind schedule. So Agnes and Tom decide to just wait in the car a few more minutes just in case she shows up. But she doesn't. At this point, the Woodcocks are worried enough to want to get home and call the police, and along the way they decide to swing past the Bank of Montreal where Agnes knows Cindy does her banking.

And sure enough, they spot Cindy's blue Chevy right there in the middle of the lot in front of the bank. Agnes stops the car and they both climb out, but looking in Cindy's car, they don't see anything amiss or out of the ordinary at all. There are a few bags of groceries in the front seat, again not unexpected since Cindy said she was shopping, but like nothing strange. Except for the fact that by now the bank is closed and Cindy is nowhere in sight.

And most of all, the car, like I said, it's in the middle of the parking lot, so we're talking like a bit of a distance from the front doors. And Agnes knows that Cindy always prefers to park really close, so even like where it's parked is bizarre to her. Agnes tells Tom, don't touch anything. And they decide right then and there that instead of waiting till they get home to call police, they're just going to go straight to the station. They arrive close to 11 o'clock and they tell the woman at the front desk that they need to report a missing person. But, 1989, surprise surprise, the lady at the desk is super hesitant to open a file. She tells the Woodcocks that

Cindy needs to be missing for at least 24 hours before police can even investigate. But Agnes is not having it. She asks to speak to an officer that she knows by name, and the woman says, okay, well, he's not on duty tonight, sorry. And Agnes is not having it. She asked to speak to an officer that she knows by name. And the woman says, OK, well, he's not on duty tonight. Sorry. And Agnes is like, OK, well, I'll talk to whoever is on duty. The woman says that there's no one there at the moment, that they're all busy with other stuff. But Agnes is like, you know what? I don't care. I am going to wait right here. Oh, my goodness. Everyone needs a friend like Agnes. Right.

About 20 minutes later, Agnes and Tom finally talk to an officer, who agrees to send someone to Cindy's car to take a peek. Now, Neil Hall, whose book I referenced earlier, he actually covered Cindy's story as a reporter for the Vancouver Sun, and he wrote a piece for the paper that said that when the officer gets there, he finds the car locked. As he's taking a closer look around the outside of her car, he notices Cindy's bank card, along with a deposit slip on the ground underneath the car. And again, I'm not talking like dropped next to it or like a little bit under it, but like way underneath the car, which is pretty strange.

Even more troubling though, he finds a trickle of blood on the driver's side door. The officer radios for backup right away, and the Richmond RCMP get to work. They bring in a team to dust the car for prints and scour the area for any other evidence, but they find none. Officers begin a ground search too, tracking dogs included,

and they search all of the areas nearby, but they find no trace of Cindy. RCMP even sends an officer to Cindy's house, where they find no sign of a struggle, nor anything that might help them figure out where Cindy went. There is a deck of cards and a notepad out on the table, like ready to roll for that bridge game that she planned with Agnes and Tom, and Cindy's dog is even there, Heidi.

The dog is perfectly fine, perfectly happy. At about 3 a.m., investigators pay Cindy's ex-husband a visit. A guy named Dr. Roy Makepeace. Roy lives on the top floor of a condo building, like a half hour from Cindy's place, and at first they don't tell him why they're there, they just say, hey, where you been the last 24 hours? And he tells police that he and a friend had cycled to a farmer's market earlier that day, did some shopping, then cycled back. Then they went to dinner, then back to her place where he

helped her install a stereo system. He said that he left around 1130, drove straight back home from there, arrived around midnight maybe, and hasn't gone anywhere since. So it's then that the officers tell Roy, like, hey, the reason we're here at 3 a.m. is because we found your ex-wife's car and she's missing. And I'm not sure what kind of reaction police were expecting to get from Roy, but I can't imagine they were expecting what he said next. Roy responded by saying, oh my God, she's dead. She's dead.

Wait, he responds by saying she's dead? Is he trying to look suspicious or what? Yeah, like who said anything about Cindy being dead? We said missing. We just can't find her, right? Yeah. Now police were able to corroborate Roy's whole story on his whereabouts on the afternoon

and evening that Cindy disappeared. He had made purchases at the market, his friends supported the whole thing. And aside from that weird reaction he gave them, police actually don't find Roy suspicious. They say he's more like a concerned loved one. So were he and Cindy on pretty good terms then? They had actually been on kind of great terms for the most part actually. He and Cindy have been divorced for three years at this point, but they've been separated for three years. They've been divorced for three years. Cindy on pretty good terms then? Well, they had actually been on kind of great terms for the most part actually. He and Cindy have been divorced for three years at this point, but they've been separated

for like twice as long. And they'd stayed in touch. They'd stayed friends even. Like they still dated even for a while during the early days of this separation and even after that they'd get together like on double dates and stuff. Oh wow. Yeah, so really amicable. And Roy insists that he doesn't know anything about Cindy's disappearance,

and the police ultimately believe him. So the next day, they expand their search for Cindy and start canvassing the area. They're knocking on doors, they're talking to store clerks, even checking with cab companies and bus drivers to see if anyone saw Cindy or anything suspicious the night before, but no one had. They even call up local airports as well to see if Cindy maybe left the area to go someplace else, but again, nothing. The deposit slip police found under Cindy's car had a timestamp of 7.58pm, so they asked the bank for records of anyone who was in there for the 15 minutes before that and the

15 minutes after. Now, they are able to track down two witnesses, one who says she saw someone matching Cindy's description just before 8 p.m. that night, and another who thinks Cindy may have walked past his car in the parking lot away from the shopping center. And was she alone in both these sightings? Yeah, as far as I know. The ground search for Cindy continues that day, and police also bring in the Canadian

Coast Guard to focus on the shorelines. At the same time, officers do a full search of Cindy's car, which is now at the RCMP impound lot. And when they have it, they check the exterior and the interior for trace evidence, like hairs and fibers, and they comb through the contents of the vehicle. Inside, they find pretty much what you'd expect, like there's a bunch of bank deposit slips and envelopes on the floor between the seats, there's some cigarette butts in the ashtray, maps, papers in the glove box, stuff like that.

According to Neal Hall's book, police also find several shopping bags in the car, a couple from Safeway with groceries and a couple more from Sears. The trunk is completely empty, and despite searching every square inch of the car, they don't find any fingerprints or trace evidence to point them to a possible suspect. Okay, but what about the blood on the door? Yeah, weirdly enough, none of the source material loops back to that, so I don't know if they didn't test it, or maybe they did test it, but they're not saying anything publicly about it.

I'm honestly not sure. With little to go on from the car, police start trying to piece together a timeline of Cindy's movements before she was seen at the bank. There are two receipts from Sears in those bags police found in the car. One is from 12 33 p.m. and the other 12 43. They learn that Cindy had also gone to a department store that afternoon and had what the source material calls a makeover, but to me it's more like one of those consultations with a makeup skincare person.

Oh, like where you go to the counter and they recommend products and stuff like that. Yeah, and they did her makeup as part of that. Just before four, she arrived at Richmond General Hospital to pick up her paycheck. She's a nurse, by the way, and she stayed long enough to have coffee with a friend. Police speak to that friend, who says Cindy looked great and was in a great mood. She had the next five days off,

and they made plans to meet the next night for dinner. So nothing at all was out of the ordinary. But it's like dead end after dead end in those first 24 hours. The first piece of media coverage on Cindy's disappearance comes out on May 30th, five days into the search. Police are asking for the public's help, which generates quite a few tips and possible sightings, but none that lead police to Cindy. And that's how things remain. Her family is absolutely beside themselves with worry, and they feel confident something

is terribly wrong. Her dad actually says he thinks Cindy may have been kidnapped and is being held somewhere, but police aren't so sure. A Richmond RCMP officer tells the Vancouver Sun on June 6th that their investigation so far gives them no reason to believe she'd been kidnapped, or that there was any foul play involved at all. Okay, except people don't just vanish into thin air for almost two weeks, especially when they had plans to meet up with friends that night and, what, with her nurse friend the next night, right?

You're right, they don't. But police expect Cindy is just gonna resurface alive and well. They think it's just a question of where and when and with what story to tell. Well, the where and the when questions get answered on the morning of June 8th, when a member of a road crew ducked into the yard of a vacant property to relieve himself and found what he thought was someone just lying in the bushes, maybe passed out or sleeping. And listen, in any other place I think maybe that would be a red flag, but this is a vacant house which is vandalized and had been gutted over the years and people used it all the

time for parties and stuff, so a passed out person was actually not that out of the ordinary there. Except, when he got close enough, he realized, yet this isn't a passed out person, this is 100% a dead body. Police arrive on the scene that morning and they know right away, this is Cindy James. They actually have a picture of the crime scene online and it's super grainy, but it's important to this case and I want you to see it and tell people what you're seeing. Oh my god.

Yeah, so it is a little bit grainy, but you can definitely tell it's a person. It's in color. She's lying on her right side, kind of almost in like the fetal position, and her hands are positioned behind her back. And it's in a way that looks so unnatural that I assume that her wrists are tied together there, but I can't really see like a ligature or anything and she looks well dressed, dark kind of maroon dress pants, a nice white shirt. There's I think a jacket next to her too, but she isn't

wearing any shoes or socks. She definitely has bare feet, right? Yeah. And because of that, I mean, we also can see what looks like a black rope around at least one of her ankles. Yeah, so you're right. So her wrists and her ankles are both tied behind her back, but not with rope.

They're actually tied with black nylon stocking, like pantyhose. Oh. And there's another black stocking you can't see in this picture, but it's wrapped around her neck. When the pathologist arrives, he doesn't see any obvious injuries to the body apart from one puncture wound on the inside of Cindy's right arm, like maybe from a hypodermic needle.

Now she wouldn't know for sure until the autopsy, but she thinks the likeliest cause of death is strangulation. Except, the autopsy shows that Cindy didn't die of strangulation. What? Yeah, in fact, the pathologist can't figure out how Cindy died. She's able to be more definitive about how Cindy didn't die. She knows that she actually wasn't strangled, she wasn't stabbed, she wasn't shot. There's no sign of sexual assault, no blood force trauma, no internal injuries, no injuries

at all really. Which is weird because when her body had been found, Cindy's shirt had tons of small cuts and slashes in it, like on the back, on the arms, on the chest. As if she maybe had been stabbed. Yeah, but the pathologist found no corresponding injuries on her actual skin. There's just that puncture mark on her arm, but investigators won't know if that's significant until the toxicology results come back in.

So what does the pathologist say about time of death? Do we know when she died, how long she'd been out here? They don't really have a solid date and time. They try and bring in an entomologist from the local university, but they could only say that her body had been at the death scene since at least June 2nd. But given the state of decomposition that her body was found in, police are actually thinking that she'd been there longer. Like, since around when she went missing?

Yeah, that's kind of what I take from it, yeah. I mean, is there any chance that she was killed somewhere else and then dumped there closer to June 2nd? Actually, the pathologist says that Cindy was probably alive at the scene for at least a little while. Like, even the way her body was positioned, they think she was kneeling on the ground on this blue coat, which you can actually see in the picture, and then fell to her right side, perhaps when she lost consciousness. And then they think she was alive and still in that position for at least a little while. And I don't know if that means minutes or hours or days, but I have to think that it wasn't that long

because actually there's this guy who was living in a van behind this vacant house, like five feet from where Cindy's body was found. What? So you're telling me this dude was five feet away from a decomposing body for potentially two weeks in the summer and didn't know about it? Like, yeah, how is that even possible? I honestly find this completely bananas, but apparently he had like a privacy partition up that blocked his views.

So I don't know. OK, but what about the smell? I mean, five feet away. Yeah, I listen, I guess there wasn't much of a smell, which again, I didn't know was possible, except for like maybe in the dead of winter, but this is spring on the coast, so I can't explain that.

Anyway, he didn't know a body was there. Police questioned this guy though, of course. If nothing else, maybe he saw or heard something that could help their investigation, but he gives them nothing. So much about this case is a mystery, or at least to some people. For others, Cindy's death is anything but mysterious. It's more like the inevitable conclusion to the living hell Cindy had been going through for eight years. Because you see, there is much, much more to the story of Cindy James.

A story with whole chapters that date all the way back to 1982. What happened in 1982? Well, that's when Cindy started calling to report that someone had been stalking her. someone had been stalking her. During those years Cindy was stalked, she reported smashed light bulbs, cut phone lines, broken windows, slashed pillows, even dead cats that were strangled and left in her backyard, not once, not twice, but three times. Her dog had been attacked, her house had been broken into, and even set on fire. And everywhere she went, she got threatening phone calls and letters.

We're talking about at home, at the office. Stuff was even pinned to her cars. It was relentless. And was she reporting this stuff to the police? Oh yeah, she called the police many times. She even hired a PI, she installed an alarm system, she changed her name and her phone number, she even moved from Vancouver to Richmond trying to outrun it all. But she couldn't.

There were stretches here and there where things were quiet, but they never lasted for long. And it wasn't just the harassment. Not that any of this is just harassment by any stretch, but it had actually escalated beyond that too, to physical assault. Just seven months before her death, in October of 1988, police were actually called to Cindy's house. According to a Southam News story from the Edmonton Journal, when police arrived, Sydney

was unconscious, with one nylon stocking tied around her throat, and another binding her hands behind her back. She was half in, half out of her car, with her pants pulled down to her ankles and duct tape over her mouth. The responding officer initially thought she was dead. He found no pulse and her body was cold to the touch. It wasn't until a second officer arrived at the scene that they realized Cindy was still breathing and they called an ambulance.

Now obviously she recovered, but not without injuries. The paramedics who responded noted marks around her wrists, bruises around her neck, a cut above her left eye, and a puncture mark on the inside of her right arm, just like the one found on Cindy's body after her death. Cindy didn't remember much about the attack, just that she'd been attacked by two men as she was getting out of her car that night after work. She says she remembered a knife being held to her back and the tape going over her nose and mouth and being injected with something, but then that

was it. Police suspected Cindy had been sexually assaulted as well, but the sexual assault examination wasn't conclusive, meaning that there were no obvious signs like tearing or bruising, that kind of thing. Did the suspects leave any evidence behind? Actually, yes. So according to Neal Hall's book, that sexual assault exam turned up two gray pubic hairs, not consistent with Cindy's. And in the Death by Unknown Events podcast, they mention finding a brown hair on her that

night too, also not hers. Police also found some weird stuff at Cindy's place near the gate to her backyard, like a few drops of dried blood, four cigarette butts that weren't her brand, and a douche bottle, along with some crumpled up tissues and a few coins.

But there were no fingerprints. And despite a pretty involved investigation, police couldn't link any of the evidence to a possible suspect. And that attack? That was the fifth major attack on Cindy in a span of about four years. What? Yet the first was in January of 1983 when she was found in her garage, cuts all over her body, a nylon stocking around her neck.

The second happened a year later. That time, Cindy was found lying face down on her kitchen floor, stocking around her neck, puncture marks in her arm, surrounded by blood, with a blood-soaked paper note pinned to her hand with a paring knife. And the note said, Now you must die, c***. The third and fourth major attacks both happened in public. One in the park while she was walking Heidi, and another near the local university. In both times, Cindy had a nylon stocking around her neck

and puncture marks in her arm. So this person tried to kill her in pretty much the same manner four times? How is that even possible to like let it happen? Did she get any kind of protection? Like what? Oh no, she totally did. Like I said, she called police, she hired a PI who acted like a bodyguard. Remember, I said she installed a security system.

It had cameras, she had the alarm, she had neighbors watching all the time. Okay, but it still kept happening? In one way or another, yeah. It wasn't like attack after attack. I mean, there was like a cycle to it. Gerard Young wrote for the Vancouver Sun that things would kind of start with the threatening notes and phone calls, and then would come broken windows and stuff like that. And it would just kind of build and build over a period of weeks or months until it

finally would culminate in a physical attack. And after that, there would be a period of weeks or months until it finally would culminate in a physical attack. And after that, there would be a period of quiet. And then the whole thing would just start again. Honestly, you know what it sounds like to me? Domestic violence. I mean, it's not exactly the same thing, obviously. But it doesn't feel super different either, like the tension building phase followed by a violent incident or outburst, and then that kind of honeymoon period again where things are quiet, only to start right

back up again in the cycle. Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting comparison. And police definitely considered the possibility that Cindy's ex-husband Roy might have been behind the harassment and the physical attacks. I mean, he actually was pretty much the prime suspect for a good while. Because even though their relationship had actually seemed pretty healthy, like I said before,

the further Cindy got from her divorce, and I guess the more independent from Roy she got, the more she opened up about several instances of violence in their marriage. She made allegations that Roy vehemently denied, though he did admit to slapping her two or three times with an open hand in the heat of the moment, like in a fight. Oh, but with an open hand. Okay, that's that's fine then, right? Just carry on.

Yeah, I don't think that things were very healthy, like we might be led to believe. And either way, she felt like her relationship had been controlling and at times abusive. And even she began to suspect Roy when the person was terrorizing her. And this is interesting. At one point, police actually found Roy parked in the alley behind Cindy's house, just like sitting there in the dark, headlights off, engine off. When police asked him, like, hey, what's up Roy, what are you doing? He told them that he was there to protect Cindy, to catch the person who was stalking her, which, okay. But police

found a handgun, a rifle, a knife in his car, which seemed kind of dodgy. Again, you could say that you were using it for protection, but still strange. So yeah, they looked at Roy hard several times over the years. But one, they could never find the evidence to connect him to the harassment. And two, he had really solid alibis for a lot of the times these things were happening, like in another country kind of solid. And was he the only suspect they ever had? No, there were others. Like police even investigated one of their own, a Vancouver PD officer who actually worked Cindy's case when this first started happening.

And this guy ended up actually falling hard for Cindy. He even lived with her for a while. Ultimately, she ended things, and police wondered if maybe that officer had somehow been involved. But he didn't pan out as a suspect. They tried looking into colleagues and former colleagues, patients Cindy had treated in her healthcare career. They looked at friends and family members, neighbors, you name it, police gave it a look. I guess she has, you know, security systems, she has this PI bodyguard, but is there a

reason they didn't just put Cindy or even just like her house under surveillance? Like whoever is doing this has to be coming and going a lot to be cutting the phone lines and breaking the windows and leaving dead cats around and everything. No, but that's the thing. They had done tons of police surveillance on and off over the years. Everything from like the super obvious like cop car on the street outside of her house to the clandestine including at least one surveillance camera that police installed and told no one about, not even Cindy. Cindy's neighbors were on high alert all the time too, not just from Cindy's alarm, which would go off all the freaking time, but for anything remotely suspicious.

Cindy would even get friends and family to come stay with her for weeks at a time. And at one point, Cindy's PI had her calling into him every time she left her house to report where she was going and how long she'd be gone. And somehow, despite all of that, no one saw anything. Cameras didn't catch anything. And not once did her neighbors hear or see anything. It was like the minute there were eyes on Cindy, the harassment would stop. And the minute surveillance efforts were pulled back, it would start back up again.

So then it had to be someone close enough to Cindy to know her patterns and movements, right? Someone who knew the situation well enough to know not just that police would be watching, but when and even how they were watching watching and when the coast would be clear. Absolutely. But you said they ruled out everyone who would be on that list. Like, I don't know, am I missing something? Well, I'm pretty sure police were asking themselves the same thing.

What are we missing? And by the summer of 1985, three years into this whole thing, they started to wonder if maybe they were thinking about this all wrong. Maybe the person doing all of this was right in front of them this whole time. Lise began to wonder, maybe Cindy was doing this stuff to herself. What do you mean doing it herself? Like she was sending these letters and making the phone calls? She was cutting her own phone lines? She was strangling the cats? All of it? Yet listen, I know this is bonkers, but police felt that they had good reason to think this. For example, the phone calls. Police at one point put a trace on the line unbeknownst to Cindy,

and they found that at least one of the threatening calls she reportedly got actually came from her own phone line. Second, Cindy wasn't the only person to get threatening voice messages. Her ex-husband Roy had gotten some too, one of which I actually found on Cindy's sister Melanie Haack's website, and I'm going to play it for you. Cindy, get me through. Okay, so I'm never sleeping again, thanks. Right? That's creepy. And the police think that's Cindy's voice?

Well, they suspected it enough to send it to the FBI for analysis, along with recordings of Cindy's voice from her own answering machine and from police interview tapes. And their experts thought that it was possible it could be Cindy. They were similar for sure, but they said that the sample was too small to say for 100%. And honestly, it's just another one of those like, many can't rule it in, can't rule it out, can't say for sure elements of this case. Okay, but what about the physical attacks though, where she was found bound and strangled, nearly dead?

Are the police saying that she legit almost killed herself, what, four different times until she, I guess, eventually did? Yeah, that's exactly what they think. Okay, but why? I think overall most officers who worked on Cindy's case over the years attributed it to mental health issues. Something like Munchausen's Fectitious Disorder, where someone initially makes themselves sick as a way to garner the attention of medical staff and sympathy of others. Okay, but like with police instead of doctors?

Yeah, exactly. Salim Ghiwa and Keith Morgan reported for The Province that Cindy had made about 50 police reports from 1982 to 1989, but I found other sources who put that number at more like 100. Either way, it was a lot of reports. And over those years, police spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and who knows how many hours investigating those reports and assaults, not to mention the resources spent by fire departments investigating all the arson attempts and the health care system

treating her injuries every time. And in the end, despite all those opportunities to catch the person responsible, not a single solitary piece of evidence, physical or otherwise, pointed to anyone other than Cindy herself. So you can maybe understand where investigators' heads would have been when Cindy disappeared on May 25th, and then how they may have reacted when they found her dead two weeks later. Because it was the sixth time police had found Cindy with a nylon around her neck, only this time it was the last.

And even after weeks of investigating, following every lead into every rabbit hole over and over again, they had not been able to find any evidence that Cindy had been murdered. Just like they couldn't find any evidence after all those other investigations that Cindy had been stalked. And that is just so wild. So earlier you mentioned toxicology. Did those come back with anything, like those results? Yeah, they do.

According to more of Keith Morgan's reporting for the province, the tests found, quote, a lethal dose of an eight-drug cocktail including the sedative diazepam in Cindy's body, end quote. And remind me again what diazepam is? Valium. Oh, okay. But they also find Ativan, sleeping pills, morphine, and a mix of other drugs. And any one of those, at the levels found in Cindy's blood, would have killed her.

Like, there was ten times the lethal dose of just the morphine in Cindy's system when she died. Plus, lethal amounts of Ativan and sleeping pills and so on. Well, that would also explain the puncture marks on her arm. Maybe, but actually the pathologists can't say for sure whether the drugs had been injected or ingested. But they actually lean towards ingested. For the Ativan, at least, which just furthers the police's suspicions that this wasn't

a homicide. Now, they can't rule out the possibility that some of those drugs had been injected, but police didn't find any evidence of that at the crime scene, like no needles or syringes or vials or anything like that. Okay, but I mean you mentioned she was a nurse. She was even at a hospital the night that she went missing. Would she have had access to that much medication like through her job or something? Yeah, so she would have, like morphine in particular, and police do speak to hospital staff about that. And what they find is that it wouldn't have been impossible

for Cindy to get her hands on that much medication. Like, if you're gonna find it anywhere, it's gonna be in a hospital, but she couldn't have just like opened a cabinet and left with 10 lethal doses. That's not possible. She could have accumulated it a lot over time, but it would have taken a heck of a long time.

The way Neil Hull puts it in his book, Cindy would have had to shortchange patients, basically like siphon off a little at a time, in order for that to go undetected. But Cindy had personal prescriptions for a lot of these drugs, and she had been taking them a long time. Like, Ativan was a daily thing, the sleeping pills. I'm not sure about the morphine, but the other stuff she had access to personally. Holly Horwood reported for The Province that after her death, Cindy's family found over 900 pills in her house, almost like she'd been stockpiling them.

Also, there was no sign of a struggle at the scene where her body was found, or in the parking lot where she was thought to have been abducted from. The bank card and slip that they found under her car, it was too far under there to have been dropped, someone would have had to have put it there. And remember the groceries in her car? Yeah. Well, there was no receipt with those bags, and so police wonder if maybe that's because in addition to the food she

bought that day, maybe she also purchased black nylon stockings, which if this was a huge elaborate setup, she wouldn't want police to find that. Police also thought it was significant that Cindy arranged for Agnes and Tom to come by to play cards that night. Like in their minds, that would have been a good way to ensure somebody knew she was missing. A. So they could start to look for her. But also B. Someone who would be there for Cindy's dog, Heidi. Okay, but can we go back to that crime scene for a second? I mean, I saw that picture.

Cindy's arms and legs were tied behind her back, like hogtied. Do the police think that she did that to herself? Well, here's the thing about that. Police actually brought in a knot expert, this guy named Robert Chisnell, and he looked at the bindings found on Cindy's wrists and ankles and he tells them that given how loosely they were tied, it is entirely possible that she did it herself. Neil Hall reported on this in the Vancouver Sun and actually I'm going to get you to read a couple of paragraphs from that story.

He writes, quote, Using a black stocking the same length as the one found tied around James, Chisnell recreated the same series of knots and slip loops. He demonstrated how he was able to tie the stocking around his neck before slipping his hands and feet into the stocking and get in the same position James was found. It took about three minutes. The stocking found around James' wrists and ankles was tied loosely enough so it could be slipped off, he said, and the neck ligature was tight enough to make him lightheaded, but it did not cut off his breathing. Chisnell examined the knotted nylons found around James' neck and wrists from previous attacks and found the knots and twists similar

to those found at the death scene." So he's not saying that she for sure tied herself up, he's just saying it's possible to do so. Okay, but why? Like why would she go through the trouble? If she did it, why set up a suicide to look like a homicide? If police are saying this whole thing, all the reports, all the assaults or whatever, were a way for her to get attention, why would she bother if she knew she was going to be dead when she was found? Well, that's the big question. The biggest question, really. Police don't have an answer for that. And in fact, they can't even say for sure that her death was a suicide. It could have easily been an accidental death. Like an accident in the way that you know maybe they thought she planned to be found but wasn't it was too late. Right because she had done

this how many times before. That's what they're saying yeah. I kind of call the S though like her trying to be found doesn't make sense with what you told me like the amount of drugs that were in her system even just one of some of them, were 100% lethal. And as a nurse, she should have or would have known that. And even if her plan was to set up one of these situations where she was rescued in the nick of time, then wouldn't she have done that someplace with a reasonable expectation of being found,

even in the bank parking lot? If she went as far to arrange this bridge game with Agnes and Tom, so they could discover that she was missing, take care of her dog, why not just have them discover her at home or in her car, again, possibly on the brink of death? Yeah, listen, I'm not saying any of this makes sense. None of this is rational.

That's kind of the whole point, right? Like, if the whole thing is the result of mental illness, no amount of rationalizing is going to make it make sense. It doesn't make sense. Or at least not to anyone but Cindy if this is the case. And again, ultimately the pathologist can't say for certain either. But at the time, Cindy's family is pushing back hard against these allegations that Cindy was responsible for her own death.

For them, it's just police dropping the ball once again, like they dropped it so many times in the eight years of Cindy's ordeal. By mid-July of 1989, everyone wants answers. And so the coroner calls an inquest, hoping that might help get them to the bottom of what happened to Cindy. It's originally scheduled for October, but it's pushed back like three times before it finally gets underway in February, 1990.

The plan is for it to last about three weeks, which is already long as far as coroner inquests go, at least at the time when they lasted like a day or two. But it ends up even taking longer than that. It takes 40 days. And once all the witnesses have been questioned and all of the evidence presented, and they're sure, no stone has been left unturned, the jury can't even make a ruling. They say that, yes, Cindy died of a drug overdose.

That much is clear. But what precipitated that overdose? The actual manner of death? The thing that we're here to decide? They can't say. And in the end, the jury rules Cindy's death to be caused by an unknown event. There are still people out there who believe wholeheartedly that Cindy was murdered. Others are convinced the police had it right, and that this was an elaborately staged suicide, maybe

even one she hoped wouldn't actually happen. The grand finale to a campaign of terror that never really was. And I find both of those opinions equally terrifying. But there is one other theory about this case, one that falls somewhere between homicide and suicide. What does that even mean? Well, Cindy's ex-husband Roy, who by the way is a trained psychiatrist himself, felt that maybe Cindy was dealing with disassociative identity.

You mean like multiple personalities? Yeah, and in that scenario, Cindy is both the stalker and the stalked, but doesn't necessarily know it. And to me, this is the most terrifying possibility of all. Now I will say, Dissociative Identity is a controversial diagnosis, and it is definitely not a straightforward split personality situation the way pop culture would have us believe. It's way more complex than that, but it is a pretty compelling theory, at least for me.

And it could explain so much about the story of Cindy James. But isn't that something she could have sought treatment for? So yes, again, if this was the case, and if she had known, but I think as far as I can tell, this theory didn't actually come out until the corners in Quest, and by then of course it was too late. Which is not to say that there weren't maybe people out there who suspected it. There may have been, I don't know. But given what I've read and heard about Cindy and her relationships during this time

period, I'm not convinced anyone would have mentioned it to her anyway. She was really fragile a lot of the time. The people who treated Cindy, including the doctors who treated her, they say that there is no doubt that her terror was real. And the impact that that terror had on her life, that was real too. The Cindy James who died tragically in 1989 wasn't the Cindy James everyone had known before. The beautiful woman with a successful healthcare career and the doctor husband.

This woman was someone else. She had become someone else. And you know, I think sometimes it's easy to hear this story and think, police got it right. They found no evidence to point them to a suspect after all. But you have to remember, they also found no concrete evidence to prove she didn't have a stalker, a legit stalker, one who terrorized her right under police's noses for years.

And no one believed or took her seriously. And if that is the case, then no wonder she was driven to madness. Who wouldn't be in that situation? This thought is the one that bothers me the most actually, that she was experiencing all this violence, all this harassment, and doing all of the right things to keep herself safe. But someone at some point decided she was making it up and then no one really took her seriously again after that. Yeah and that's what I'm saying like when you look at this case that to me is like one of the most tragic outcomes is that no one took this woman seriously.

Tragic and terrifying. Yeah, she had to feel so unprotected for so long. Now, there is one other theory that if you look into this case, you'll probably come across so I just want to at least mention it. And it centers around a British Columbia psychiatrist named Dr. James Tyhurst who was charged, tried, and convicted for some truly horrific abuse and sexual assault against his patients. But the crux of this theory is that Cindy somehow witnessed something like assault or

murder or something during a trip she took with her husband, who by the way was faculty at the same university as this Tyhurst guy. And basically in order to keep Cindy quiet about that, he recruited a bunch of other seedy psychiatrists, including one who consulted with the RCMP on Cindy's case to essentially destroy Cindy with this campaign of terror and destroy her credibility at the same time. So some sort of like psychiatrist mafia? Yeah.

So, so again, this is almost like a level on top of it. Not only did no one believe her, but there's this theory that they're almost like trying to make people think that she's crazy. The audible podcast I mentioned, Death by Unknown Event, does a great job actually of summarizing this theory in their final episode. So if you're interested in hearing a really detailed account,

not just of this theory, but the whole case, I highly recommend you go listen. It's a 12 episode series, it covers so much ground, way more than we could in this episode here, so worth it if you want to know more about this case. Ultimately with this case, there's no wrapping it up with a neat little bow, because even all these years later, we are still no closer to knowing the truth about what happened to Cindy James. Police don't know. Her family doesn't know. Even the coroner's inquest didn't give anyone any answers in this case.

And at this point, we might never know the truth. And that, to me, is the most terrifying thing of all. Don't forget, if you want more Crime Junkie episodes like this one, new members can join for the rest of thing of all. content that we put out. I'll be back next Monday and next Thursday and I'll have another vault episode on that Thursday. So I'll see you then. Bye, Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is an AudioChuck production. So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?