This Case May Be Closed, But Questions Remain
Her family believes she was murdered, the police believe that she was mentally unwell.
One summer evening, a suburb in Vancouver would be exposed to tragedy. On June 8th, 1989, a body was found lying in the yard of an abandoned house in Richmond. Police were able to identify the body as 44-year-old Cindy James. James had been drugged, strangled, and tied up with her hands and feet behind her. It turns out that she had previously been a victim of an assault (and harassment) in the past. With that fact established, you would think that the investigation would start with that case and whomever the perpetrator was. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police took a different approach. They believed that her death was the result of either an accident or suicide.
Her Story
Cindy James finished 1966 as a recent nursing school graduate. She would turn that passion and degree into a career as an administrator for a preschool. At the school, she was helping children with behavioral and emotional difficulties. Although she was married, she would later go through a separation from her husband in 1982. Mysteriously, she began receiving ominous phone calls just four months later. Cindy endured this for seven (SEVEN!) years. Throughout that time, she went to the police and reported close to a hundred instances of her being harassed. While the majority of those instances were threatening phone calls or someone heavily breathing into the phone, five of them involved her being physically attacked.
Surprisingly, the attacks got worse once the police were involved. Cindy began having her home vandalized. Her porch lights were smashed, her telephone lines were cut, and dead cats were left in her yard. Cindy’s dog was even attacked and nearly strangled to death. Agnes Woodcock, a friend of Cindy’s told investigators that she had been receiving strange notes on her doorstep. The notes contained letters cut out from magazines and were threatening in nature. Since the attacker seemed to ramp up their threats every time she involved the police, Cindy began to grow more reluctant to share information with them. The police began to question the validity of her claims as a result.
It Gets Worse
In January of 1983, there was a very concerning incident. Agnes went to visit Cindy at her house, but there was no answer when she knocked on the door. As she continued to walk around the house, she found Cindy outside in a disturbingly dangerous position. Cindy was crouched down with a stocking tied very tightly around her neck. When Cindy came to, she told Agnes that she was attacked while getting something from the garage. She hadn’t seen who the attacker was since they grabbed her from behind while her back was turned. This attack was the last straw for Cindy. Soon after, she moved to a new house, painted her car, and even changed her surname. She also enlisted the help of private investigator Ozzie Kaban.
Despite their skepticism, the police still went on with their investigation. According to Ozzie, Cindy wasn’t really giving them the full truth. She withheld information, was a little evasive of their questions, and was just overall suspicious during their questioning. A polygraph test also showed that she was holding back information when talking to the investigators. Why would Cindy hold back information from the people trying to help? Her mother — Tilli Hack — has a theory. She believed that whoever was attacking Cindy also threatened to kill her family if she spoke to the police.
A year later, there was another concerning incident involving Cindy. While Ozzie was listening to a two-way radio that he had given to Cindy, he began hearing strange sounds coming from her end. Fearing the worst, he drove to her house to check on her. He couldn’t get through the door because it was locked. He then began walking around and was able to see her through a window. Cindy was laying on the ground while holding a knife. After being taken to the hospital, Cindy told investigators that she was attacked and jabbed in the arm with a needle. This time, Cindy saw her attacker and described him to the police. The police, however, were not able to find a suspect that could be in any way tied to the attacks on Cindy. To add to their skepticism, Cindy’s attacks never seemed to happen when the police were in a position to catch the person. All of the phone calls were too short to trace, and the attacks never happened while they were doing surveillance on her house. But, once they stopped, she would get attacked.
I’m sure you can see where this is going. The police were growing suspicious that Cindy was staging her own attacks and phone calls. Her parents, however, believe that her attacker is doing this intentionally; that whoever this person is must have been planning their attacks out with the intention of ruining her credibility. Her credibility would seem to rebound after yet another mysterious attack. On December 11th, 1985, Cindy was found lying in a ditch around six miles from her home. She was suffering from hypothermia, had cuts all over her body, and had another stocking tied around her neck. This time, she had a needle mark on her arm. Cindy had absolutely no memory of what happened and how she got there.
Luckily for Cindy, she had plenty of people who were concerned for her wellbeing. Her neighbor Agnes stayed with Cindy to help her stay safe (her husband Tom joined as well). Then, in April 1986, Cindy was attacked again. While they were sleeping, someone set the basement on fire and cut the phone lines. Tom immediately went running outside to see if a neighbor could call the fire department. He saw a man sitting outside and he asked him he could call. The man said nothing and began running down the street. The police eventually made their way to Cindy’s house and were skeptical of the story. The most damning evidence to suggest that fire was staged is that the point of origin was inside the house, but there were zero signs of someone entering the house from outside. The police also learned that Cindy was still walking her dog alone throughout all of these attacks she was enduring.
The police weren’t the only ones skeptical of Cindy. Her own doctor had her committed to a psychiatric hospital. The doctor believed that she was suicidal (it is unclear if this was because of the harassment or because the doctor believed Cindy was staging these attacks as some elaborate way of killing herself). Cindy left the hospital just 10 weeks later and made a confession to her family. According to her father — Otto Hack — Cindy confessed that she knew the identity of her attacker and was going to confront them.
Roy Makepeace — Cindy’s estranged husband — got an eerie message on his answering machine in October of 1988. Someone with a raspy voice coldly relayed the message “Cindy…dead meat…soon.” On the 26th of that same month, Cindy was attacked again. She was found hogtied, naked from the waist down, and with her mouth duct-taped shut. That incident put her in a coma that she would later come out of. Nearly two years later, in the Spring of 1989, Cindy told her family that the attacks were starting to lessen. At the time, it would seem that things were looking up.
Then she was found dead.
The Status
Two weeks before her body was discovered, Cindy had vanished. On the same day that she had disappeared, her car was found in the parking lot of a shopping center. There was blood on the door of the diver’s side and items from her wallet under the vehicle. When the examiners completed Cindy’s autopsy, they found that the cause of her death was an overdose of an assortment of drugs. With this ruling, the police closed her case in July of 1989.
Cindy’s sister, Melanie Hack, has a website devoted to the case that you can find here.