Obscure Occurrences : The Mysterious Case of Cindy James

 On a warm day in June of 1989, a road worker wandered over to an abandoned house to relieve himself. Inside the house, he discovered the corpse of a blonde woman, hog-tied with her hands and feet bound behind her back. A black-nylon stocking was tightly wrapped around her neck and it had begun to dig into her skin. The body belonged to Cindy James, a 38-year-old localite who had disappeared two weeks beforehand.

Cindy James (Source: Unsolved Mysteries Wiki)

Initial Life

 Born in 1944, Cindy lived the early days of her life in Ontario, a province in which her father, Otto, was posted as an army doctor during the Second World War. Shortly after the war had ended, the family moved to Vancouver in order to allow Otto to attend a medical university. However, his plans of advancing his medical career proved to be unsuccessful and when presented with an opportunity in 1949, he re-joined the military. Due to the nature of his job, he had to often from one part of the country to another and his family had to move along with him. Thus, during the entirety of her childhood, Cindy never stayed long enough in a place to establish connections that are important for the psychological growth of children of her age.

 Despite the constant inevitable changes in her surroundings, Cindy was a bright child who considered books as her best friend and she aspired to become a nurse. However, as her parents actively discouraged her from making friends, she never developed a social life as a child. To add to her dismay, Otto was a strict disciplinarian who treated her as a live-in housemaid rather than a daughter and this pushed her away from her parents as well. In 1962, Otto’s request to work overseas was granted and thus, he decided to relocate to France with his family. Cindy, a now 18-year-old independent woman, refused to accompany her family and took a nursing course at the Vancouver General Hospital instead. 

 Three years later, Cindy wrote a letter to her parents detailing the apparent suicide of her fiancé. This was nothing but a shock to them as they didn’t even know she was engaged. Even her brother, Doug, who visited her often in Vancouver had never seen or heard anything about this mysterious man.

A Failed Marriage

 A couple of months later, Cindy met a 39-year-old man named Roy Makepeace at work. Despite being in wedlock, Roy had taken interest in the much younger woman. He began tutoring Cindy and the unconventional pair soon developed a sexual relationship. Roy ended up divorcing his wife in 1966 after which he married Cindy. When Cindy wrote to her parents about her marriage, they were understandably outraged. Soon afterwards, she read Roy a note, apparently from her mother’s response letter, claiming that he was taking advantage of her. Roy eventually discovered that the letter had been written by Cindy herself but, despite finding it strange, he simply brushed it off as melodrama.

 Over the years that followed, Cindy became more blinkered, often screaming at Roy to leave her alone. She had apparently even claimed to her friends that he abused her. Roy admitted to slapping her in frustration only twice during their long relationship but he outright denied the level of abuse that Cindy was accusing him of. After 16 years of marriage, the couple divorced in 1982 and Cindy moved into a new house in Vancouver, Canada in June of the same year. This newly found breeze of relief did not last long as just 4 months after her divorce, she started living her worst nightmare.

Threatening Calls Commence

 On the 7^th of October, 1982, Cindy received an eerie call from an anonymous stranger. The angry voice on the call addressed her by name and the very next moment, it told her that she was soon going to be badly hurt. Before she could respond to it, the call hung up and she was left in a state of distress. Over the next few days, she received more calls from the stranger and every time, it started with this anonymous caller calling her by name and then threatening to harm her. Thinking that it was one of her friends trying to play a terrible prank on her, she stopped giving much attention to the strange calls but what happened a few nights later proved her initial assumptions to be wrong.

 On a chilly night in the November of 1982, Cindy was all alone in her house when she had a strange feeling of being watched. Being a person who kept the windows of her house covered with curtains during the night, an open window in her living room caught her attention. She slowly walked towards the open window, peeked out of it to see if anyone was around and pulled the curtain before the phone rang again. This time, the anonymous caller said, “don't think pulling the drapes means I don't know you're in there”.

 Cindy immediately hung up the call and called the police but, despite the police completely checking her house they were not able to find any signs of intrusion. After making sure that Cindy was safe, the police suggested she get an unlisted phone number to stop getting these mysterious calls and left the house. Cindy followed their advice but the calls just became a lot more frequent instead of stopping.

An Intruder in the House

 On October 15^th, 1982, when Cindy returned home with her friend Agnes after dinner, she noticed that one of the house’s front windows was broken. When the duo walked towards the house to give a closer look, they noticed that the house door was Ajar. The ground floor of the house was completely dark and had no signs of intrusion but when they walked upstairs, they found feathers thrown all over the place. These feathers led them to Cindy’s room where they found the pillows in her room completely torn apart. They found the keys to the house door on the bedside table and it appeared as if the intruder had intentionally placed it there.

Obscurities Pile Up

 In the days that followed, Cindy began to find notes made from magazine clippings, detailing violent threats against her. These events led the police into launching a larger investigation and an officer named Pat who had been in the force for over eight years, started checking on Cindy every day to make sure she was alright and nothing unordinary happened around the house. These regular checks made Cindy and Pat fall in love and Pat moved in with Cindy while still investigating the case. Soon after their romantic relationship bloomed, the mysterious calls and threatening notes surprisingly stopped. However, it was later discovered that this pause was due to broken phone lines.

 Over the following weeks, Cindy started hearing someone walk around the house at night but she was too scared to look through the window. Also, she started finding raw meat on her doorstep every morning and occasionally she even found photos of dead bodies under the windshield wiper of her car. These events made her grow extremely paranoid.

First Physical Assault

 Despite Cindy’s continuous reports of strange things happening around her, the police suspected that there was no real stalker and that she was just making things up. With the police not finding anything that held value during their investigation and officer Pat, Cindy’s new boyfriend, confirming that the stalking activity took place only when he was not in the house, the suspicion only grew stronger. Feeling betrayed, Cindy broke up with Pat and decided to move to another city to have a fresh start.

 A couple of days before Cindy was supposed to move out, Agnes visited her house. After she knocked on the front door of the house and received no answer, she walked around to the backside of the house where she found Cindy crouched down behind the staircase with a black stocking tightly tied around her neck. Cindy was still conscious and with her wide-open eyes, she kept staring at the nearby shed. According to her claims, while she was walking towards her shed, a man jumped out of the shadows and started strangling her with the nylon stocking that was tied around her neck. The man apparently warned her that he would hurt her family if she turned around to see his face. Fortunately, the man had fled the scene hearing the sound of Agnes’ car.

 Agnes dragged Cindy back into the house and after undoing the nylon stocking on her neck, called the police. When the police arrived, they concluded that Cindy staged this event as well and left the place without doing any further investigation

Stalking continues in Richmond

 In January 1983, Cindy moved to a small town called Richmond and soon after moving, she changed her last name to James. The threatening calls of her stalker stopped for a few months that followed but in October of the same year, she found a dead cat on her property with a note that read “You’re Next” placed beside it. Completely terrified, Cindy reached out to the Richmond police who set up a surveillance operation on her property. But despite months of surveillance and dozens of officers watching over the house almost all the time, Cindy reported stalker activity only when there was a gap in surveillance. This made even the Richmond police think that Cindy was stagging these events.

Second Physical Assault

 With the police not taking her claims seriously, Cindy hired a private detective named Oozie to help her. After taking up her case, Oozie set up floodlights all around her property and he placed a two-way radio in her house to make sure he knew what was going around. Also, he installed a panic button that would send an alarm signal to him.

 In January 1984, Ozzie heard strange sounds of struggle come from the two-way radio. With Cindy not responding to him on the radio, Ozzie rushed over to her house before finding her immobile body in the hallway. A note that said, “You’re dead lady” was found on her hand and it was held in place by a knife that was stabbed through both the note and her palm. She also had a black nylon stocking tightly wrapped around her neck.

 Oozie initially believed that his client was dead but since he managed to find a pulse, he admitted her to a nearby hospital where she was treated. After regaining consciousness, Cindy claimed that someone sneaked behind her and injected something into her arm which made her fall unconscious. She apparently had no memory of the events that followed.

 The police firmly believed that even this event was one of Cindy’s attention-seeking antics and did not investigate it any further. Oozie however, completely trusted his client and he claimed that it was physically impossible to inject herself in the place where she had needle marks. Despite the police not believing her, they continued their surveillance for one more year during which they did not find any evidence that supported her stalker claims. The situation took a toll on Cindy’s mental health and she started living in constant fear of her violent stalker.

Third Physical Assault

 On 05 December 1985, Cindy was found in a ditch six miles away from her house wearing a single glove and work boot. She had cuts and bruises all over her body and she had a black nylon stocking wrapped around her neck. When Cindy was found, she was suffering from hypothermia and she had no memory of the attack. The police, without doing any investigation into the incident, concluded that Cindy was fabricating the events.

An Intentional Fire in the Basement

 Regardless, her friends Tom and Agnes stood by her and began staying overnight so that she could finally get some sleep, assuming that there would be no incidents whilst others were present. On an April night, however, Cindy woke Agnes and Tom saying that she heard a commotion in the basement, which, incidentally, they had also noticed. When they walked up to the basement door and opened it to see what was causing the sound, they noticed that there was a fire building up in the basement.

 Tom immediately ran over to call 911 but since the house’s phone line was dead, he ran out of the house to get some help after which he saw a strange man staring at the house. When he asked this man to call 911, he turned around and ran away only to be never seen again. Eventually, he called the police who, upon investigation, confirmed that the fire was set intentionally. The police concluded that Cindy was the one behind it and did not investigate it further.

 After this event, Cindy was hospitalized due to extreme depression where she was diagnosed with Hysteria, Paranoia, Schizophrenia, Psychopathy and Hypochondriasis. She was under intense psychiatric care for 10 whole weeks following which she was sent back home.

After returning home, Cindy complained that her ex-husband Roy was the anonymous stalker but investigations revealed that even he had been on the receiving end of the anonymous threatening calls. Upon further investigation, the police cleared Roy off the suspect list.

Fourth Physical Assault

On 26 October 1969, Cindy’s panic button was pressed following which she was found hog-tied, naked from the waist down and choked with a stocking, halfway inside her car. Just like in the previous instances, she remembered nothing about the prior events. A knot expert claimed that she could not have restrained herself in such a way. However, the police dismissed this. 

 Her alarm went off multiple times over the coming months but little credence was given to her situation. The apparent harassment continued unabated for the next three and a half years before things finally reached a tragic and horrifying conclusion.

Disappearance and Death

 On the evening of May 25, 1989, Agnes turned up at Cindy’s doorstep for their scheduled game of bridge. With Cindy not responding to her knocks, she walked into the house through the unlocked main door with hopes of finding her friend safe and sound. However, despite doing a thorough check, no traces of Cindy were found and thus, she immediately called the police to inform them about her friend’s disappearance.

 Soon afterwards, a search party led by the police found Cindy’s car in the parking lot of a nearby supermarket. It had blood all over its driver-side door and things kept in her purse had been scattered all around the vehicle. Inside, the investigators found her recently purchased groceries along with the gift for her friend’s child and a receipt from depositing her pay cheque at 7:58 pm that evening. The scene suggested a possible kidnap.

 Two weeks after her disappearance, a roadside worker found her body in an abandoned house one and a half miles away from the supermarket where her car was found. Her hands and feet were bound behind her back and she had a black stocking wrapped around her neck. The autopsy revealed that Cindy died because of a drug overdose. After a knot master successfully tied himself up in the same position as Cindy, the police concluded that Cindy injected herself with an overdose of drugs and tied herself up to make a perfect ending for her stalker story. However, according to the coroner’s report, the official cause of her death is listed as unknown.

Major Theories

Ex-husband turned into Stalker

 Roy was initially accused by Cindy and her family of being her attacker. During a hypnosis session in 1984, Cindy even recalled Roy murdering two people on a boating trip. However, statements taken whilst under hypnosis offer very little credibility in court. Moreover, Roy was found to have solid alibis and thus, was ruled out as a suspect.

Cindy, a homosexual?

 After analysis, it was claimed that the voice heard in all the recorded phone calls belonged to a female, leading some to believe that Cindy had been in a romantic relationship with another woman. This perhaps explains why she was reluctant to open up to her friends and family. She may have secretly been a lesbian struggling to come to terms with her sexuality.

 As the theory goes, shortly after separating from Roy, she could have had a short-lived relationship with a female associate and this associate was the one that went on to stalk her. This explanation falls victim to the fact that the investigation failed to identify a single perpetrator.

Suicide due to Mental Instability

 Some suggest that she suffered from a disorder known as Munchausen Syndrome, a disorder whose sufferers compulsively create situations around themselves, often featuring physical and psychological distress in order to generate sympathy or gain attention. In line with their theory, Cindy was fabricating the harassment all along until it led to her death.

 Also, there is a chilling possibility that Cindy unknowingly stalked and killed herself. It has been suggested that she suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID, a disorder where a person's psyche may contain two or more completely different and independent personalities who take turns in controlling the physical body. During episodes where a recessive personality takes over, the patient may black out completely thus making them unaware of what they are doing.

 In Cindy's case, her recessive personality may have been the product of her loneliness as a child which developed an unnatural detachment and self-loathing of the body it inhabited, ultimately wanting to destroy itself. This could have caused the recessive personality to torment and even attack her dominant personality.

Conclusion

 So, was Cindy the victim of a homicide or was she in fact, her own stalker? Or, is the answer to this mystery completely different? Unfortunately, all one can do is speculate. Despite new theories constantly coming to light, what actually happened to Cindy remains shrouded in obscurity.