RedHanded - Episode 199 - Cindy James: Invisible Torment

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

When Cindy James' decomposing body was found bound and dumped outside an abandoned house, those who knew her best were horrified - but not entirely shocked. Cindy had been harassed and attacked by a seemingly all-knowing and malevolent stalker for almost a decade. But, in all those years, despite the thousands of hours of police work spent trying to find Cindy's tormentor, detectives had nothing more than a bizarre phone message to show for it... Sources: redhandedpodcast.com Cast your Listeners' Choice Awards vote here: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/vote Become a patron: Patreon Subscribe to our new YouTube Channel: YouTube - Subscribe Pre-order a copy of the book here (US & Canada): Signed copies - US & Canada Pre-order on Wellesley Books Pre-order on Amazon.com Pre-order a copy of the book here (UK, Ireland, Europe, NZ, Aus): Signed copies - UK, Ireland, Europe, NZ, Aus Pre-order on Amazon.co.uk Pre-order on Foyles Follow us on social media: Instagram Twitter Facebook Contact us: Contact   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you her profile. Check out her place in the Hamptons. Huh, fancy. She's a big carbon tax supporter, yeah? Oh yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here.

She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah, higher taxes, carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made.

A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, lovely listener. If you follow us on social media, you may already have seen the news that Red Handed was once again not nominated for the true crime category at the British Podcast Awards. It's okay.

We're completely over it by this point. And so we just want to focus on the only category that really actually matters to us anymore, which is the listener's choice category at the British Podcast Awards. Last year, we got silver plays thanks to all of you. I think something like 200,000 votes were cast and we came second. That is unbelievable. And we just can't tell you how much of a difference that made to the show.

So many more people took notice of our show as an independent, just two people recording in their bedrooms kind of podcast. So please, please, please once again help us out by heading on over to britishpodcastawards.com slash vote. That is britishpodcastawards.com slash vote. We're going to leave the link in the episode description. Head on over and vote for Red Handed, please please it would mean the world to us and just a quick reminder you do not have to be british to vote we always get that question you can be from anywhere in the world it only matters that we are british and once you vote please please remember to verify the vote in your email so that they know it's real thank you again

for all of your support you guys always come through for us. We can't wait to hopefully hold on to silver. Don't think we can get gold, but if we can hold on to silver, it will mean so much. So please, please vote for us and enjoy the episode. Bye. I'm Saruti. I'm Hannah. I forgot whose turn it was then. Me too. It doesn't matter anymore. Hello, everyone. Hi, and welcome to Red Handed. Yeah, you can take that bit, the easy bit. Welcome to episode 199. I know. Can you believe? Can you imagine? Can you stand it? No, I can't. I cannot cope. Like, you know, we are living precariously on an iPhone. We could be cancelled tomorrow.

And then who's going to pay my mortgage? Not me. I know. Don't cancel us, please. We'll try very hard not to let that happen. But yes, hopefully not. If that does happen and the podcast gets cancelled, maybe we can become authors. Because I don't know if you've all heard, but we wrote a book.

We wrote a little book. Queen of the Seg segue strikes again i'm just just always on that segue but hopefully unlike the man who invented the segue i won't fall to my death off a segue of my own making i don't know but we have written a book the book is called red-handed and the link is in the episode description below it is anywhere you turn your head on social media. There are still, I believe, I might be lying by this point, I don't know, there might still be some signed copies available. If you would like to get your hands on one, please, please do so now because

we have said this is the absolute max number. The number that are out there now are the max number of signed copies we're going to do because I'm already worried about how we're going to sign that many. So if you want one, get it. I think it might be physically dangerous to do more signed copies. So they're limited a dish. Get your hands on them. If there are some left, we don't know. So now it is time for our newest segment, the Red Handed Red Hot Minute on the Red Handed Book. And I'm going to be taking you through chapter three, which is on insanity. And Saru, are you going to count me in for my minute? Yes, I am.

Let me just get my stopwatch out. Okay, I'll count you in. Three, two, one, let's go. Okay, chapter three, insanity. Loads of people think that the insanity plea or the insanity defence is an easy way out of a murder conviction. Psych, they are wrong.

And that is my favourite joke of today. In this chapter chapter we compare and contrast the cases of andrea yates and susan smith both killed their children and pled insanity but only andrea was granted the plea eventually after appeals and stuff susan smith was convicted as a sound-minded person but she will eventually get out of prison andrea yates probably never will so who really got the better deal also what does the insanity defense actually mean people throw it around a lot but don't actually know. Halfway. In America, like open container laws and drive-through Long Island iced tea outlets,

it varies from state to state. There are two versions of it. In this chapter, you'll learn about both of them. And also, this one guy who really, really, really, really, really wanted to fuck a horse. And also, there's a lake named after a KKK guy and no one seems to care. In North and or South Carolina, I can't remember which one it was. Someone told us on Twitter the other day and I can't remember. And now, fuck, I've got gappy time.

Oh no. Five seconds. And also Jesus and electronic dance music. And this was a very difficult legal chapter because someone might sue us. Amazing. Well done. That is a perfect summation of the insanity defence. Yeah.

I mean, if you're like, why is the horse fucking in there? It is. It is. It is in there. And I think Hannah put it very nicely when she talked about a guy who really wanted to fuck a horse.

The guy actually did. Well, I guess the guy got the horse to fuck him. Right, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you are not familiar, we're talking about the Emmon Claw horse incident. Which sounds like a terrible thing to call it. As if the horse was fucking,

had any choice in what was going on. Yeah, right, the incident. Spoilers. It doesn't turn out well for him. But if you want to know what happened, I mean, you could just Google it, but be nice and buy the book instead. Yes. So with that, we'll draw a line under the book chat. Go do it. Go get the book. And now let's proceed with what is possibly one of the most mind-bending cases we've covered on this show. Yes, I think it is the most mind-bending. I've really had to concentrate. It seems so totally and utterly bizarre, but also kind of listen to your gut feeling when you're listening to it. That's what I did and I ended up right.

Yes. But, you know, also don't make your mind up until the end, but just listen to what your gut feeling when you're listening to it. That's what I did. And I ended up right. Yes. But, you know, also don't make your mind up until the end. But just listen to what your gut's saying. Because as Tommy Fury says, you should listen to your gut. That's why it's there. Oh, is that a top tip? Well, we'll take that on board then. For this bizarre case, to put it mildly,

most of you may already be aware of this case. I know it is like quite a popular one in true crime circles. And we don't generally tend to cover the super, super popular ones. But we got so many requests for this case that I felt like it just had to eventually emerge. Maybe I'm outing myself here, which I feel like I say every week, particularly talking about like sex and stuff. This isn't about sex. I had never heard of it. Oh, okay. Ever. Let's do it then. Let's do it. Maybe it's because I fenced myself off from true crime things. Whereas I actively just seek to constantly immerse myself in it like some sort of absolute maniac.

But let's give it a shot, shall we? On the 8th of June 1989, in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, a group of construction workers were filling in potholes when at around 1pm, one of them wandered into the overgrown garden of a nearby abandoned house to take a leak. a group of construction workers were filling in potholes when, at around 1pm, one of them wandered into the overgrown garden of a nearby abandoned house to take a leak. As he waded through the waist-high grass, this man noticed someone lying under a bush. Initially, he thought it was probably just a homeless man taking a nap out of the midday sun. But stepping closer, he spotted painted fingernails and red trousers,

and a large swarm of flies. It was no homeless man. It was a woman. A dead woman. And although her face was almost completely black from exposure, the man recognized her instantly. It was Cindy James. She had been missing for the past two weeks, and her face had been plastered on every newspaper in the area, along with her dark and tragic life story. When the police arrived at the scene, Constable Gerry Anderson took charge. He had actually known Cindy for quite some time. They had first met back in October the previous year, when she'd been attacked outside of her own home. Anderson hadn't managed to catch the culprits. To see Cindy James now dead was his worst fear come true. And to make it even worse, Cindy's body was in a quite advanced state of decomposition when it was discovered, even skeletonising in some places.

So it had clearly been kicking around for quite some time. Her body was found lying on top of her coat and her hands and feet were tied up behind her with black nylon stockings. There was also another pair of tights tied around her neck. She was fully clothed in maroon trousers, a frilly pink blouse and one burgundy shoe on her right foot. There were also numerous cuts on the front and back of Cindy's blouse, but strangely, there were no underlying wounds on her skin. I don't know what's wrong with me this morning, but I feel like I'm very Phoebe Judge. I'm Phoebe Judge. And this is criminal.

I'm going to try and be myself again. In fact, only one bloodstain was found near her collarbone. There was, however, a puncture wound on the inside of one of Cindy's arms, which seemed like it was from a hypodermic needle. But no such needle was found at the scene. Anderson carefully collected the stockings, which were wrapped around Cindy's neck, legs and arms. He really wanted to have them inspected by a knot expert, so he actually reconstructed the knots with pins on a plyboard.

But one thing Anderson had noticed when he had removed the stockings from Cindy's body was just how strangely loose they'd been tied. How does one get to be a knot expert? Do you have to go to knot school next to the clown college? I mean, I presume it's one of those things you could possibly teach yourself, I feel like. Just YouTube. Just a deep passion. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Be a scout and then love knots and then go from there. Maybe scouts is actually vocational training, not only for being Bear Grylls and staying in hotels, but knot expertory. Absolutely.

Did you tie any knots in all of your girl guiding? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We learned to tie a lot of knots. I can't remember any of them right now. So if you showed me a plywood board with a knot pinned to it and asked me to identify it, I would not be able to do that. Strip you of your badge, taking it off you.

So yeah, he's very, very like careful, Anderson. He is obviously, he's found a dead woman who's been hogtied, who's got a pair of stockings tied around her neck as well. But like we said, the strange thing he notices when he removes these stockings is that they're not particularly tightly tied onto the body. I mean, we'll come back to this, but I guess one thing is the body has skeletonized in parts, like it's severely decomposed, so it's not quite as fleshy as it would have been when the knots were tied. So it is understandable that they would loosen, but worth remembering. To Anderson, when he noticed that the knots or the stockings weren't particularly tight,

it seemed odd to him, because his original theory at the scene was that Cindy had been strangled to death. I mean, obviously, because there's a pair of stockings wrapped around her neck. But Cindy's autopsy revealed that she hadn't died as a result of strangulation, as there was absolutely no hemorrhaging in the blood vessels of her neck or eyes. In fact, there seemed to be no clear explanation at all for her death. Cindy's brain was normal, as were her internal organs, and the strange blood stain that was on her blouse was actually from oozing body fluid as a result of decomposition, and not actually from an injury. And so so at the end of the

autopsy, the pathologist was unable to give the police any sort of definitive cause of death. Although they couldn't quite nail down how Cindy James had died, for Detective Anderson, the question now was who had killed her. But Anderson was all too aware that the answer was not going to be simple. After all, nothing about Cindy's past had ever been simple. And when Anderson had investigated Cindy's attack the previous October, he had learned all about Cindy's strange and tormented history. Before she'd moved to Richmond, Cindy had lived in Vancouver.

There she had made hundreds of complaints to the police over a seven-year period starting in 1983. It appeared that Cindy James had been terrorised. She was left threatening notes. There were dead cats left in her yard. She'd been attacked, stabbed, strangled and left for dead five times. But the police had never found any of her attackers because of a total lack of physical evidence. And when we say total, we mean total, like no hairs, no spit, no DNA, nothing. And once again, there was very little evidence at the scene

of this crime where Cindy's body was eventually found. And when we say she was attacked and stabbed and left for dead, Cindy is often found in like very odd situations like when her body was found there were slashes on her blouse but never actually any injuries to her body there was no wound underneath where it looked like she'd been slashed at and that's quite a running theme a lot of Cindy's injuries are very superficial whenever she's attacked it's just something to bear in mind so when we say stabbed we don't actually mean like she's been, you know, stabbed to the point that she needs to go to hospital for those particular injuries. And like we said, Cindy had vanished two weeks before her body was discovered,

on the 25th of May, 1989. On the day she disappeared, Cindy had planned for her closest friends, a retired couple named Agnes and Tom Woodcock, to come over. The Woodcocks had been in Cindy's life for quite a long time, and so they'd seen everything that she'd gone through. So when they arrived and realised that Cindy wasn't home, they immediately began to worry. Agnes just couldn't shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.

And so she decided to go looking for Cindy. And eventually, she found Cindy's blue Chevy parked in front of the Bank of Montreal. When Agnes approached the car, she could see bags of groceries on the front seat. But still, there was no sign of Cindy. Something was definitely wrong. So Agnes called the police. And in the car, investigators found a drop of blood on the driver's side door. They also found Cindy's bank card with her deposit slip lying neatly underneath the vehicle. The police now began to suspect that Cindy James had indeed been abducted. And Constable Anderson, on hearing what happened, because remember he's already met Cindy, he met her in October when she was attacked outside her house and this is when she vanishes,

he suggests to the officers to pay Cindy's ex-husband, a man named Roy Makepeace, a visit. What a name. Oh, yes. I love it. Roy Makepeace. I know I always talk about her wherever we have a good name, but still the best name I've ever heard. Betty Mae Sweetlove, the girl I went to uni with.

That is incredible. We used to call her Sweaty Meatlove. Oh, no, poor Betty. I think she lives in Australia. Where are you, Betty May? Great gal as well. Really, really fun person. Also, recently, a friend of mine whose name is Cassius,

which is also amazing, his dad is called Justice. And he works in anti-money laundering. Can you imagine? Love it. Love it. Here's Justice. He's Can you imagine? Love it. Love it. Here's justice who's going to take it from here. Love it.

I mean, he should be a judge. Justice, justice. Justice, justice. So, where were we? Oh, yeah. Roy Makepeace. From the moment the police arrived at Roy Makepeace's door, the large, balding South African man was standoffish.

Once they eventually managed to make their way inside to question him, the officers noted that there were quite a few framed photos of Cindy hanging on the walls. Keithington, remember here, Cindy is his ex-wife. So that is weird. They're not just separated, like they are divorced at this point. Like divorced, divorced. Yeah, and I assume that that takes some doing. It takes a while to get that through the legal situation.

I don't know. You'll go on to see like Roy obviously is still very much in Cindy's life. But to have framed pictures of your ex-wife up, I don't know. If I went to, because we're in our 30s now. Yeah. We're going to have to start dating divorcees at some point. No. The first round of divorces, I'm waiting for it. That's when all the good ones're going to have to start dating divorcees at some point. No. The first round of divorces, I'm waiting for it. That's when all the good ones are going to come

out the woodwork. There you go. You just want to make sure there's no framed pictures up. Well, if I went to someone's house that I was dating and they had framed pictures of their ex-wife, I feel like it's different if they have children. Firstly, I wouldn't be dating them. But secondly, if they have children, it's okay to have framed pictures of your ex-wife if your children are also in the shot. But just like a picture of you and your ex-wife like framed above the fireplace, red flag for me. No, and in this, I think it's just pictures of Cindy.

Oh, yikes. Okay. It's not even pictures of them together. It's just pictures of her. Okay, see, no, what her just like holding a big fish. Like, just like, okay, fine. Okay, that is weird. But we can snark at it all we like it seemed that Roy wasn't the suspect the police thought he might be he told the police what he'd been up to for the last 24 hours and sure enough he had an alibi for absolutely everything receipts included hang on to

them chaps so as far as the police could tell, at this point, he wasn't their man. So as we know, Cindy's apparently brutal murder had come after years of relentless attacks and torment. And so for us to even begin trying to make sense of this, we have to go back to the beginning. Cindy was born Cynthia Elizabeth Hack on the 12th of June 1944, in the town of Oliver, just east of Vancouver, and she was the second eldest of six siblings. Cindy was described as a sweet young girl who had a tendency to be a bit of a people pleaser. Her father, Otto Hack, was a military man who ran the family in the same way that one might run their squadron. He had a strict authoritarian parenting style and would even occasionally spank Cindy with a leather strap when she misbehaved.

And it's also rumoured that he possibly also occasionally forced her to eat dinner in their dark basement as a punishment when she misbehaved. I mean, obviously not ideal, but like this would have been the 50s. I feel like that's kind of just ordinary parenting possibly at the time. Yeah. I don't think it's anything to write home about, to be honest. Cindy's born in 44, so she grew up in like the late 40s and the rest of the 50s. So I just feel like we've all seen Mad Men.

I mean, you know, I feel like everyone was just indifferent to their kids slash just beating the shit out of them. So, I don't know. We will come back to talk about her childhood. But, like, at the moment, from what evidence is out there, like, you know, pretty normal. Cindy's mum, Tilly, was, as one might expect in the 50s, a devoted housewife. And, again, as one might expect in the 50s Cindy being I think the eldest girl she's the second eldest but I think she's the eldest girl became her little helper as the other children were born

Melanie one of Cindy's younger sisters even used to call Cindy mommy I can't say it sounds so weird mommy she used to call her mommy with a no in In the American version of the book, they've changed all of the mums to moms. And it, like, physically hurts me. But we had no choice. Mummy. But, but, but, don't worry, British listeners don't have an aneurysm. In the British version, because there's different publishers, that's how publishing works, it will be the correct spelling.

Exactly. And through all of this, Cindy seems to have resented her parents quite a bit. It seems that she felt they never really gave her enough praise, no matter how hard she worked. And I think it's safe to say that Cindy did work hard, because throughout her childhood, remember her dad is a military man, they just constantly uprooted her from military base to military base, from school to school, all over the country. But all the while, Cindy maintained perfect straight A's.

However, because of this nomadic life, she was never able to form close bonds with other kids at school. She always knew that she'd likely have to leave just a few months after having met them. And this wasn't little Cindy's only issue. She had intense night terrors almost daily as a child. The earliest involved snakes slithering out of a box in the basement, and then these snakes would coil themselves around her, choking her. Soon the dreams changed and the snakes became cloud-like hands that would reach from under the bed and strangle Cindy.

As Cindy grew older, the recurring nightmares grew darker. She would be chased by two Dobermans and fall into a pit, and then the dogs would snap at her as she tried to climb out. And then a large man would appear, wearing all black and laughing at her maniacally. That is scary shit. I've never had like full sleep paralysis, but like I think I've had like partial, and that is enough for me. I quite often having dreams about being chased or like pursued through the woods or something like that. I feel like they just, not just because it's not nice, but like anxiety dreams, right? They're like some deep repressed fear that you are not addressing in your life, which is

probably very accurate for me that I'm just like, nah, forget about it. And then my subconscious is like, we're going to chase you through the woods until you think you're dead. And then you can wake up and have breakfast. Yeah, my anxiety dreams are tidal waves. Like they're sort of like sky high giant waves that you see from a distance and then they crash all over you and separate you from everything you love. Anyway, I have one very particular like, not not place but like almost my dream world is very consistent and I always end up back there and yeah a lot of chasing dreams also a lot of dreams about a lake that I am like convinced must exist because I see the same lake all the time to the point that I've convinced myself that I can't remember if I've actually been to this place I don don't have any photos of it, though, so I think it is just made up.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. We're not here to do fucking dream analysis on me. Can we, though? Start keeping a journal and then we'll take you to a dream whisperer. I will. Excellent. So, another particularly traumatic episode for Cindy when she was a child was when she was just seven years old. And she developed scarlet

fever whilst her parents were out of town on an apple picking holiday. Oh that is cute. That is such white nonsense but it's very cute. It's such like oh let's go and do for fun what migrant workers do for basically no money. Oh my god that's so funny. Because I was like, really? In the 50s is this fucking military man, Otto Hack, going on a fucking apple picking holiday. I feel like him and Tilly are going on some 50s whiskey drinking, fucking, I don't know, badger baiting, fucking dogging holiday. Can you imagine sitting through the slideshow of a fucking apple picking holiday and be like, oh, got a big one that day. That's amazing. That's amazing. And it gets better

because when they went on this quote unquote apple picking holiday, I don't believe them, they left their kids with a babysitter. And when Cindy obviously got scarlet fever, she was placed in quarantine. And her parents apparently said that they didn't want to cut their holiday short. And so they stayed away. Too much whiskey and dogging. They're having too much fun. 100%. That is not two people on a fucking apple picking holiday.

That is two people on a fucking swingers holiday somewhere. Whatever they were doing, though, clearly it's not very fucking nice to abandon your small child when she's got bloody scarlet fever. And one of Cindy's sisters has since suggested that this incident likely contributed to Cindy's abandonment issues, which went on to have a huge effect on her later in life. If I had scarlet fever and my mum was on holiday and didn't come back, that's going to leave a pretty indelible stain on you, I think. Yeah, it's not going to be great for your developing brain to cope with that, that's for sure. And Cindy's siblings also point out another thing about her. They said that one of her biggest problems as a child was her reluctance to speak up for herself. Remember, we said she's kind of a

people pleaser. But apparently, if Cindy was unhappy about something, she would never kind of come out and say it. She would bottle it up. She would internalize the anger. I guess when people do that, it can often come spilling out in other unpredictable ways. And one particular example of this that we did dig out when we were doing the research was that when Cindy was 17, the family were living in Ottawa. And Cindy actually got engaged to a secret boyfriend that she had. Then Cindy's told by her father, Otto, that the family are moving to Europe thanks to a promotion. Of course, she's completely distraught by this news. And she begs her dad to let her stay in Ottawa and study nursing.

Remember, she's 17 by this point and in the like early 60s 17 is like 25 oh yeah yeah definitely like why don't you already have three kids exactly so she's like leave me here i'll stay with my boyfriend and i'm gonna just study nursing but when otto found out about this boyfriend-fiancé, he not only made Cindy break up with him, but he also decided that Cindy would go to nursing school in Vancouver, where they had relatives who would, quote, keep an eye on her. Christ. Really filling all of the, like, overbearing military dad stereotypes. Yeah. Cindy was furious, understandably, but she did as she was told. And for a while, things started to look up.

In 1963, during her first year on the ward at Vancouver General Hospital, Cindy fell in love with a young resident doctor. But then he died in a car crash. Oh! I know, I know. I'm not saying this in a, like, oh, gutted kind of way, but that is gutting. Like that is in the most visceral sense of the word. Gutting and also may have triggered more feelings of abandonment for young Cindy.

I mean, imagine thinking you finally figured it all out and then they just die. And also, I think if you deal with someone very, very close to you dying, like a parent or a partner or whatever, when you're reasonably young, death, in my experience, death becomes this like permanent presence in your life, like you're not scared of it. It's not an unknown entity. It's just always there. And I think that like, I can kind of see that in Cindy, I think. In her third year, she started an affair with a senior resident physician at the hospital who was Dr Roy Makepeace. Dr Roy was not only married with two children, he was also only six years younger than Cindy's overbearing dad.

Yeah. Yeah. After Ezra and McCandless, we all know our feelings. But nothing was about to stop this couple. And in 1969, Roy finally divorced his wife and he and Cindy set a date for their wedding. Safe to say, Cindy's parents were not happy about this at all, so Cindy and Roy quietly got married without her family there.

And Roy received a very angry letter from Tilly Hack, that's Cindy's mum, saying how pissed off she was about the age gap and the way that they had got married without her blessing. But Roy noticed that something was off about the letter. And the offness was that the handwriting was Cindy's. Yeah. Does anyone have the same handwriting as their mum? I certainly don't. No, I certainly don't. He was sure it was Cindy's. Yeah. Does anyone have the same handwriting as their mum?

I certainly don't. No, I certainly don't. He was sure it was Cindy's writing. And when he confronted his new wife, Cindy admitted that she had written the letter herself and then she grabbed it, tore it up and threw it away. Although he obviously knew that this was strange behaviour, for whatever reason,

Roy just shrugged this little incident off and didn't think about it again for a very long time. That's such a weird... Oh, yeah, you know what? She did, actually. She did pretend to be her angry mum and write a letter immediately after we got married. I wouldn't forget that, I don't think.

I'd be quite concerned that the person I just married was clearly having some real issues. Oh yes I feel like there's a lot of denial in this episode. A lot of people just burying their heads in the sand and I don't know this is just my two cents on the matter. Cindy is obviously very young. She's also if you care to go and google her very attractive. She's beautiful. She's a very attractive woman. She's like blonde. She's like the typical sort of like 60s, 70s kind of woman that people, I assume, would have been like, wow.

Roy is obviously considerably older than her. I think there is an element of just like, well, you know, she's so hot though and I'll just ignore it. And also, I do think there is an element throughout this episode of a bit of the halo effect we've talked about this before with people like I mean I hate bringing up Ted Bundy in this because like I do not think he's attractive but that idea of like people who are very attractive getting a lot of the benefit of the doubt but also just like people thinking there's no way that they could be involved in something.

You know, I feel like I'm giving a lot of the spoilers away, but you know what I'm saying. I think it's worth mentioning that Cindy is a very attractive young white woman. Worth pointing out. So meanwhile, while Roy is pretending that this incredibly bizarre letter didn't happen, the two of them got on with their lives. Roy finished his residency and got a job teaching. Cindy, who was by this point a registered nurse, discovered an interest in child psychiatry and actually became the founding director of Blenheim House,

a facility in Vancouver for children with behavioural problems. Enjoying their increasing disposable income, Roy even decided to buy a boat, which he named the Peacemaker. Nice. If you've got a surname like that, use it, I say. Sure. It's a little bit narcissistic, but he's a doctor, so what do you expect? Yeah, I know. I was like, didn't men back in the day, like, buy boats and then name them after their wives, not after themselves? But apparently not. Possibly the reason he didn't name it after his wife was because Cindy had a massive phobia of the water.

Thanks to her father Otto throwing her in a lake as a child to teach her to swim. Jesus Christ. So much childhood trauma. Like so many specific events that you're like, oh, yeah, that is why you're like that. Exactly. So, of course, Cindy absolutely fucking hated the boat. But Roy still dragged her on many a sailing trip with him. And on most of these trips, Cindy would spend the entirety of the time locked below deck, absolutely hating being on the water. And this, of course,

led to a lot of arguments between the couple. But one very notable trip took place on the Gulf Islands in 1981. The boat's motor broke that day and there was a storm coming. Cindy panicked. She refused to go any further and called her brother Doug, who lived nearby, to come pick her up by water taxi. Have you seen on the Uber app that there's now a boat option? Where am I going by boat? Oh, that's cute.

I guess like in some places it's kind of normal. Like I think when I was like in Boston, people were just getting water taxis across the way. I don't know. That is crazy town. I think there's maybe there's one place over the Thames where you can get, I think it's near Charing Cross. Also, I'm talking completely out of my asshole.

There's probably loads of places on the Thames you can get a water taxi. I just don't go there. Cindy was extremely distressed by this trip, but years later she would tell a completely different story of what had taken place that day. And it was a much more sinister story than a shaky boat on rough seas. But hold on to it for now. Stick a big fat pin in it because we'll come back to it later on. For now, let's focus on the fact that it wasn't just the boat that was rocky. In July of 1982 after 16

years of marriage Roy and Cindy decided to have a trial separation. They amicably divided up their possessions and Cindy moved into a flat in a working-class neighborhood in East Vancouver. The two even continued going on occasional dates with each other however the stress of the separation had triggered the return of Cindy's childhood nightmares. It really strikes me as like a couple who's really trying to sort it out. They're really trying to do the work, you know. But Cindy having a terrible time with these nightmares. Every night she began to have the same nightmare that she had as a child of the two Dobermans chasing her into a pit and the large, dark, shadowy man standing over her laughing.

Only now the man had a face. Roy's face. And also, Cindy had never lived on her own before. To make it worse, the neighbourhood she lived in had a very high burglary rate. She'd felt safe in the big house with Roy, but now, with a couple living on the floor beneath her, she couldn't shake the feeling that something bad was coming. Three months after their split in October 1972, Cindy answered her phone to a man making obscene sexual threats towards her. This marked the

beginning of a seven-year tirade of horror that would eventually end in Cindy's death. This man, who had phoned her up in 1972, even used Cindy's first name, and he described how he wanted to sexually mutilate her. The following evening, the calls began again, and the mysterious caller even told her, you're dead, Cindy. Another silent call came the following afternoon, and Cindy, scared that somebody was watching her, closed the curtains. As soon as she did, however, the phone rang again. And this time the caller said, Don't think pulling your drapes means I don't know you're in there, Cindy.

Cindy was of course terrified, but all the police could do was advise her to keep a record of the calls and to get an unlisted phone number. Later that same month, Cindy returned home to find her door wide open. She made her neighbour come inside with her, and she screamed in terror when she found her pillowcase had been slashed with what seemed like a razor blade. Her house keys were also lying on the floor next to her bed, definitely not where she'd left them.

That's how you know you've had a night out, hey, when you find your house keys just like flung on the floor next to your bed. Definitely not where she'd left them. That's how you know you've had a night out, hey? When you find your house keys just like flung on the floor next to your tights. And your pillowcase slashed with a razor. Not that bit. I used to, when I worked in bars and as a waitress and stuff, I used to keep a pen in my bun so I could quickly like write down orders and stuff.

And I would constantly forget to take out my hair before going to sleep. So I would wake up with just like pen, like all over my pillow. And like one of my managers was like what would you do if you woke up one morning and it said something and you'd like written like you're next in your sleep order well I probably would not come into work I would go to a safe house so sorry but shut up Hannah about your pen no one cares no it's good. When the police arrived at the house, Cindy told Constable Pat McBride

all about the threatening calls and break-ins. McBride felt bad for Cindy and he even installed deadbolts on her doors to try and give the terrified woman some peace of mind. In a weird turn of events, and this is really like a pause-taking situation. Do you remember officer ron yes yes yes who had a bit of a relationship with one of those cult members and you're like

officer ron yeah not officer mcbride okay so in a weird turn of events cindy found out that mcbride had just separated from his wife and was looking for a place to stay, so Cindy offered to sublet him one of her bedrooms, saying she'd feel safer having him there. He moved in and pretty soon McBride and Cindy had become romantically involved. It didn't last long, but it is worth putting it in there. But this new romance didn't put off Cindy's tormentor. An obscene note was left on her front porch soon afterwards, but after dusting it for prints, the police still couldn't find anything. Cindy even changed her phone number, but the threatening calls continued. One night in November that year, she found a bizarre note on her car windshield,

which was a picture of a blonde woman cut out from a magazine with the horror movie classic I Scratched Out. Yeah, the classic. There's a lot of it, so strap in, guys. In all of his years as a police officer, McBride had been taught that in these situations, the best person to speak to is the ex-husband. So he paid a visit to Dr Roy Makepeace. But he found Roy to be a reasonable, professional man who didn't seem suspicious at all.

Not the sort of man to mentally torture an ex-wife who he clearly seemed to care for. I mean, enough to have framed pictures of her in his fucking house. And so all McBride could think to do was classify Cindy's neighbourhood as needing special attention, meaning that there'd be increased police patrols in the area. Within the month, McBride was alerted that the phone lines at Cindy's house had been cut. When McBride arrived to check the place out, inside the house he found a pair of wire cutters on top of his toolbox, because remember, he was like living there at the time, and he knew that he had not left those wire cutters out.

And even stranger, when he examined these wire cutters, they had black wire insulation still stuck to them. And they're his tools. He knows that they weren't out and he knows that there wasn't black insulation stuck to them before. And apparently, McBride, for a moment upon seeing this, did consider the possibility that Cindy had cut the phone lines herself. But he quickly dismissed the idea as being too ridiculous. After all, why would she? And besides, McBride told himself that the wire cutters were too small to cut telephone lines. McBride worried that perhaps whoever had done this might be planning on returning that night. So he made his partner keep an eye on the house. But all night, nobody came.

Roy Makepeace also seemed incredibly concerned for Cindy. Remember, by this point, the police have told him what's been going on with her. And one morning, they actually found him circling her house in his car. When he was questioned, he told them that he was there to protect her. But I would say, Roy, if you are a suspect in your wife's stalking, probably don't go and circle her house in your car at night. It's an odd choice. Yeah. But maybe Roy was serious because a few days after this, he actually suggested to Cindy that she move back in with him. But she refused. And it seems that Roy took this quite personally because Cindy says that he stormed

off furious. And for the next few months following this incident, the threatening calls and the notes continued. The police even tapped Cindy's phone lines, but the problem was the calls never lasted the required three minutes to allow them to pinpoint a location. After Christmas that year, Roy again offered Cindy the option to move back into their marital home. It was in a much nicer neighbourhood and he pointed out that she might feel safer there. He also told Cindy that she should move in whilst they were trying to sell the place and that he would actually move out so she could just be there on her own.

And this time, Cindy happily agreed. But on the 27th of January, as Cindy was getting ready to move, something strange happened. That night, Cindy had made plans for Agnes Woodcock to stay over. But when Agnes arrived at Cindy's around 9.30pm, nobody answered the door. Agnes tried again, and it was then that she heard moaning sounds from the yard. She walked around the back of the house and found Cindy lying on the stairwell to the basement. Her arms and legs were bleeding from cuts. She walked around the back of the house and found Cindy lying on the stairwell to the basement. Her arms and legs were bleeding from cuts.

Her blouse had been ripped half off and a pair of black tights had been tied around her neck extremely tightly. Agnes quickly cut the tights off and managed to get Cindy inside. Cindy told them that she had walked into the garage when she noticed that the lights weren't working and then somebody grabbed her from behind and that was all she could remember. Cindy was taken to hospital whilst the police checked out the garage. They found that there was no obvious sign of struggle. The lights were working fine and there was just one smudge of blood found on a box. But absolutely, once again, no prints found anywhere. The police also found that Cindy's back door was unlocked and strangely there were bloodstains on the bathroom counter which were still wet and there

was also a fine spray of blood on the sink and mirror which makes me think of Marjorie Congdon. Oh yes yes and the other thing that seems suspicious about this, or odd about this, was that doctors found no obvious strangulation marks on Cindy's neck, but they found bruises on her forehead, two lacerations on her left arm, and multiple cuts to her back, shoulders and legs, around 14 cuts in all, probably made with a razor. Notably, the doctors said the parallel nature of the cuts on her back suggested that there had not been a struggle. Oddly, the police never did ask Cindy about the

blood they found in the bathroom, and the officer who actually was at the scene wrote in his report that he believed it was an attempted suicide. However, the incident was actually filed and titled as an attempted murder. This is the thing. I just... If somebody's attacking you, would they use a razor or would they use a knife? Correct. Because a razor is something you have in the bathroom. Which is where they found some blood. It's not something you take with you to do a murder, in my humble opinion. It's also not something that if you were to attack someone in their own home and you only have around like what's available, a razor is a very fiddly thing to just pick up in the time. And also like, I know this isn't like the now times, but who has like a

fucking straight blade razor just lying around in their butt? Like you've got to get it out of the thing. Like it's like a process. No one's got one just lying around on the side. I don't know. It's weird. And we'll go on to find out that repeatedly in all of these incidents, like we've said, they never find any other sort of foreign DNA. They never find any other stuff from other people there.

If you are slashing somebody with a razor, it's going to be very difficult to not cut your own hands up. Yeah, especially if it's what I'm imagining, like the square ones that have got both sides. That's what I'm imagining. So this case that was now being called an attempted murder was handled by a Detective Boyer Smith, a man with 26 years of experience, experience that had taught him never to jump

to conclusions. So, Detective Boyer Smith interviewed Cindy while she was in the hospital, and once again she told the same story. But this time, she mentioned that she had felt a pinprick in her arm right after being grabbed, and sure enough, doctors found a needle mark on the inside of her right arm. It seems that at this point, Bower Smith, who'd already learned about all of the previous incidents, was a little suspicious. It is odd that she can remember such a fine detail as a pinprick, but literally nothing else. So he asked Cindy to take a polygraph test, which we all know how we feel about those, but it is pertinent to the story, so we're going to press on with it. Cindy agreed to this, and during this polygraph test,

Cindy was asked whether she had inflicted the wounds on herself. She said that she hadn't, and she failed the test. But, and this is the crucial problem with polygraph tests, it was noted that Cindy was extremely nervous throughout the test and Bowersmith knew that this could have affected the results. Another test was arranged for the following week, but Cindy failed it again. This time she went up to the polygraph operator in tears saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Bowersmith couldn't tell if the reason Cindy was so highly emotional when retelling the story

was because she was lying or withholding information So he confronted Cindy and demanded that she tell him the whole story But she told him that she was scared for her family's safety and begged them to shut the case down Obviously the police were not going to do that And Cindy eventually told the police the full story quotations around that, air quotes, and this full story was that two men had knocked at her front door and punched her

in the face before dragging her through the house, threatening her with a knife. All the while, they were threatening her that if she told the pigs, they'd kill her family. Cindy then quoted obscene sexual threats that they made about raping her with a knife. And then she claimed that the very next thing she remembered was waking up in the hospital. And Cindy says this quite often. She says, you know, she'll report the incident to the police, but then she'll say, I can't tell you anything because they've threatened my life or they've threatened my family. But like, surely the act of just going to the police at all is enough of a red flag for your tormentor like going to the police but being like I can't tell you anything which is what her story

often is seems quite strange to me. So Bower Smith had Cindy look at a photo lineup of local sex offenders to see if she recognized any of them but she said she didn't. The detective even interviewed Cindy's co-workers and friends, and all of them said that Cindy was a reliable, truthful person, and she was an excellent therapist. And remember, she works at Blenheim House, and she's like a child therapist and nurse. The co-workers who were vouching for Cindy, a lot of them were highly regarded psychiatrists. And they're all saying, Cindy is completely great. She's completely normal. She's completely truthful. No concerns from our part. But unfortunately, once again, with all of the incidents that had

happened, there was absolutely no conclusive evidence to point at a suspect. And so Bower Smith marked Cindy's attempted murder file as inactive, with a note saying, quote, the victim may know more than she has revealed, perhaps even the identity of the suspects. By the 30th of April that year, Cindy and Roy's house had been sold, and she used her half of the money

to buy a bungalow on a nice upper-middle-class street. After moving in, she was pleased to find that for a few months there were no obscene messages and no weird phone calls. That is, until the 22nd of August, when a note was sent to her work. And this note is one of those, again, classic horror movie, I feel like we're getting into, like, you know, teen slasher tropes here. Because the note came in the form of cut and

paste letters from a magazine that read, welcome back, death, blood, love, hate. Live, laugh, love. Yeah, exactly. Saying that she was determined not to let this get to her, Cindy tore up the note and threw it away. More letters came over the following months and Cindy threw them all away. But on the 15th of October, so months later, something happened that she couldn't ignore quite as easily. That morning she discovered a dead cat in her garden with a rope around its neck and a note reading, you're next. Then two weeks later, she found that her garden,

which she tended to with obsessive care, had been trampled. And two weeks later, she found yet another strangled cat at her back door. This was all happening around the same time that Cindy's relationship with McBride ended, after she had said no when he proposed to her. Officer McBride, chill out, man. That's screaming rebound to me. Like, oh, I'm going through a separation. I'm going to move in with this woman.

Will you marry me? You know, like in Peep Show, when he just goes into the coffee shop and he's like, will you marry me? It's like that. It's very much like that. And I think that, I know Cindy's the one that says no, but I think that the relationship still ends. And I think it's interesting much like that. And I think that, I know Cindy's the one that says no, but I think that the relationship still ends.

And I think it's interesting to note that the torment, the calls, the notes all seem to spike around particularly turbulent times for Cindy, emotionally speaking. Yes, they most certainly do. Worth putting a pin in that for now. Has any relationship ever survived a declined proposal? I mean, I'm sure, because, you know, everything happens. It's a tough one.

Yeah, a tough hurdle to overcome. But even though they had broken up and they were no longer romantically involved, McBride and Cindy had remained friends. McBride was still concerned for Cindy and he put her in touch with a man called Ozzy Caban, who was a highly regarded private investigator. I do not think and please correct me if you think I'm barking up the wrong

tree with this. I don't think we have this thing in the UK where the police would recommend a private investigator like that's bananas. No no no. I wonder if it kind of comes from a culture in the US of you know when we did all that research for that project that never happened about like how, for how different the criminal justice system is in the US. So in the US, you know, you have discovery. The defence has access to all the information that the prosecution has to be able to build a solid defence for the defendant. In the UK, you don't have that. The defense don't have access to all of the information that the police or prosecution have against you prior to the trial. And in the US, because the defense can actually mount a parallel investigation to the one that the police and the prosecution are doing, I think they often get private investigators involved to

help with that, to dig out leads, to discredit the prosecution. And we don't have that culture in our justice system here in the UK. So I wonder if there's just not as much call for it and so there is less demand and fewer PIs hanging about. Yeah I mean I guess like I literally I don't think I've ever even seen I wouldn't know how to find one. No idea. Apart from just walking up and down Baker Street hoping he shows up. So this private investigator at Caban told Cindy that he could, quote, catch the sucker terrorising her. He gave her a can of mace to carry around and installed a two-way radio link in her home

which would allow her to contact his 24-hour dispatch team in case her phone lines were cut again. This guy is like a one-man fucking police department. Jesus. Because I think he's a PI but he also runs his own security firm. So he's got like all of the infrastructure to like handle this. Okay, got it. But despite Caban's involvement, over the next few months,

the notes and calls continued arriving on a regular basis at both Cindy's home and at her workplace at Blenheim House. After yet another note arrived on her back porch reading blood, love, death, which I'm just like, what is the point of writing these notes with such vague, obscure things? It's like fucking it's not a Red Hot Chili Peppers album. Like, why don't you just write what you want to happen? Very strange. Triangle lamp. Hair hairband just very odd so when this note arrived boa smith found out about all of these incidents that have been going on for months and he was shocked to discover that cindy had actually only been

reporting them to caban and not to the police as well. So basically, Cindy, once McBride introduces her to Caban, she just stops talking to the police and just focuses working with him. And when the police find out, they are obviously not pleased. And when they ask Cindy why, she tells them that she didn't trust the police anymore because she felt that they had stopped taking her seriously. At this point, Cindy also reiterated that she did not suspect her ex-husband Roy make peace. This is very important. She's very clear. Roy has nothing to do with this. She says that they still saw each other platonically at least once a week for dinner or a movie and that Roy just wouldn't do this to her. Would you go out with someone who saw their

ex-wife once a week? No. No. No. I mean, isn't that like one of the reasons that Bill and Melinda Gates got separated because he used to like go on holiday with his ex-wife once a year? Really? I didn't know that. Yeah. So a week later, Cindy was attacked for a second time. And the circumstances of this attack were even more baffling than the first time when Agnes found her out on the stairwell to the basement. At 5.10pm on the 30th of January 1984, Ozzy Caban

was told by his dispatch team that they heard strange noises coming through the two-way radio from Cindy's house. Caban got there at 6pm and knocked on the door but nobody answered. He then peered through a gap in the curtains and could just about make out some and knocked on the door but nobody answered. He then peered through a gap in the curtains and could just about make out some blonde hair on the floor. He phoned the police and then kicked the back door down. Inside, Caban found the kitchen floor covered in blood. Now, it is important to note how exactly this blood was found. When he says covered in blood, the police write down that it looked like there was blood on the floor that had been smeared about. So it wasn't like pools of blood. It's blood

that's been smeared about. Again, just important to be particularly on point about the details, I think. And in the hallway, Caban found Cindy lying in a contorted position, face down, fully clothed, with a knife pinning a note to her hand that read, now you must die, C word. I know it's very odd for me to be particular about that word. I won't say it on the show. I just can't. I can't make myself do it. Oh my gosh, I didn't know. I know. I say it in real life. Oh. Rarely, very, very rarely. I don't know, can't do it. Shall I say it? Now you must die, cunt, is what the note says. Thank you. Once again, there was a black nylon stocking tied around Cindy's neck.

Cindy was taken to hospital and tested for possible brain damage and released a few hours later around midnight. Just like the previous attack, Cindy told the police a hazy version of what happened. She said she'd come home from work at around five and was opening the back door when a man came through her back gate, said hi, then ran up to her, hit her in the head, and that was all she could remember. Even Caban got angry with Cindy at this point

because she kept saying that she was too frightened to tell him or the police what had happened because her attacker had threatened her family. But Caban just wasn't having it, and so eventually Cindy told him a few more details. She revealed that her attacker had a moustache, brown eyes, and was wearing a blue nylon jacket. Non-descript. Yeah.

I always feel like when you give descriptions of people, like they are always going to be non-descript or it's going to sound like you're making up a supervillain. Because if I were to say, like, give a description of you I would be like five two brown brown eyes brown hair bit blonde at the bottom where I've bleached it to death but yeah I just feel like the thing about this that is so strange is that Cindy's attack she says she can't remember anything but then she says she can't tell them because the attacker threatened her. But then she says, oh, but okay, fine, he was wearing a blue jacket,

had a moustache and brown eyes. Like, well, then what was it that you couldn't tell them? Just that vague description. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, the police and Cabana already involved. Like, you've already told them. Like, why are you withholding... This is what I mean.

...details. Like, they've already been them. Like, why are you withholding... This is what I mean....details. Like, they've already been told. They're already involved. And what is this person doing, just randomly breaking and attacking you and then saying, if you tell anybody, I'm going to come back and kill you? Like, I don't know. It logically is, like, quite hard to wrap your head around. It's going to get weirder, so stay with us.

A couple of days later, Cindy suddenly contacted Detective Boa Smith about Roy Makepeace. Remember, Cindy had been very insistent that Roy had absolutely nothing to do with any of this. She's still friends with him, etc, etc. But bizarrely, Cindy now told the detective about Roy's fascination with witch doctors when he had lived in South Africa. Apparently, he was also obsessed with voodoo dolls. And Cindy also told the detective about the time that Roy had become angry with her when she had refused to move back in with him.

It seems very much now that she's suggesting that Roy could be involved after all, which is not what she was saying a little while ago and also like if it is roy make peace then he must be hiring somebody else to do it because otherwise she would obviously just know that it was him and he must be made up of invisible dna this too so now following this lead because the detectives have to follow this lead she's telling them now that she's being stalked she's being attacked and that it might be her ex-husband. So Roy Makepeace was brought in for questioning. Interestingly, when officers asked Roy who he believed was responsible for Cindy's torment, Roy told them that he thought it might be the mafia. Apparently, in Cindy's job as

a child therapist, she was responsible for sometimes removing at-risk children from their families and Roy suggested that maybe one of the families could have been in the mob. I would just say if it is a very specific mission orientated person like that who was doing it to stop you you know they were like go write a nice report about my family so I can get my kids back why would they not say that if that's what they want? Why would they just randomly be trying to? And maybe they would, you know. I don't want to sound like I don't believe stalking happens. Of course it fucking does.

And it's a nightmare where I can't even imagine. But this is weird. The mafia. Why? Why would they do that? They'd just kill you. Yeah. And I just, it's just such a, don't you, throw it in, no problem.

And with that said, Hannah's very casual opinion on the mafia of all things, let's take a very quick break because we're about halfway through. We are, aren't we? Let's take a break and tell you guys a little bit about what's going to be going down on Patreon this month and why you should definitely, definitely think about becoming a patron. So as usual, we have got our weekly episodes of Under the Duvet. They are like a full on fucking hour long now. So you are getting so much content for just $5. If you'd like to see our faces at the same time, you can go up to $10 because we are

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Okay, we're back. We're back in the room. So we left off where Roy Makepeace was spuriously talking about the mafia. And at this point, investigators showed Roy some signed statements from Cindy. And these statements accused him of having hit her with an ashtray and having beaten her brutally during their marriage. Another statement detailed how Roy had once pointed a loaded gun at Cindy. Roy was absolutely dumbfounded by the accusations and denied all of them before saying he'd only ever slapped Cindy twice during their entire marriage. And we're not saying only twice as if that's okay. We're just saying that Roy denied having consistently physically abused

Cindy. And a bit of me is like, in a way, that's a really good lying and manipulation tactic because the immediate response is like, oh, why would you admit to it at all? It makes people feel like you're telling the truth, which is another trick I learned from 48 Laws of Power. At this point, according to officers, Roy also showed genuine remorse and shame for hitting Cindy at all. The police were now completely baffled. Roy and Cindy were telling totally different stories. And despite the sheer number of incidents that had occurred, there was still no solid evidence. That's the thing for me. Like she makes hundreds, hundreds of calls and not once is any evidence found at all. Yeah. And I think, you know, obviously I did bring up DNA before. I understand that some of these incidents are happening before

the advent of DNA for forensic purposes, but there's like very little blood found. When we said about the blood being smeared around, one of the police officers who was there actually said that it looked like there was just a small amount that had been spread about to make it look worse than it was also ozzy caban does a lot of surveillance he has people sat outside the house he has cctv cameras set up and no disturbances are ever caught on camera so there is just a total dearth of any kind of actual solid evidence, which is very strange given the sheer number of incidents that Cindy reports. So understandably, the police started to lose faith in Cindy's stories, and Caban suggested she sit another polygraph test. This time, the examiner spent 10 minutes

beforehand calming Cindy down and explaining not to relive the events, but to answer the questions calmly so that it didn't affect the results. And this time, third time lucky, Cindy passed. Which obviously everyone knows how we feel about polygraph tests. They are just picking up on your unease or your physiological response to, I don't know, stress, not to deception. And if you spend 10 minutes calming the person down before they do the polygraph test, possibly their stress levels have been quietened. Doesn't mean they're not lying. It's literally like, this is how you pass this test. They're giving the techniques to get through it. Try not to think about the things that happened. Just stay calm. Yeah, just remain totally calm.

Do lots of deep breathing. So throughout the month of May 1984, Cindy again received a barrage of obscene phone calls. And once again, her phone lines were cut out. And once again, there were no fingerprints or any trace of any suspect. Caban even set up more surveillance cameras at the back of Cindy's house but again he didn't pick up a thing. Then just after midnight on the 23rd of July Caban heard over his police scanner that there'd been a strangulation near where Cindy lived. Obviously

thinking it's probably Cindy he arrived at the scene before the police and found paramedics examining Cindy on the living room sofa of a nice young couple. The woman said that they had found Cindy attempting to open their front door with one hand whilst clutching her own throat with the other, and looking like she was about to pass out. Cindy also once again had a black nylon stocking wrapped tightly around her neck. At the hospital, they also found twigs and leaves inside of her underwear, for which Cindy could offer no explanation.

She had a puffiness around the edge of her eyes and broken blood vessels on the right side of her neck, consistent this time with the signs of strangulation. All Cindy could remember was having spoken to two people in a van who'd asked her for directions before waking up in hospital. Hospital tests found that benzodiazepine, probably, which is a valium-like sedative, was kicking around in her bloodstream. And after this third attack, Cindy's case was passed on to the major crimes unit, and the case was taken over by Sergeant Chris Bjornarud. Understandably frustrated by Cindy not being

able to remember anything again from the attack, Caban asked her to undergo hypnosis to see if that might help. The first two sessions helped a little bit. Cindy remembered that the van was green and that she had been dragged into the back of it and that there were several masked men involved and that she had also felt a needle prick in her arm, although on this occasion the hospital found no such needle mark. In her third session of hypnosis, however, Cindy recalled something nobody had anticipated. She recalled the events of the boat trip

that she had taken with Roy in July of 1981 to the Gulf Islands. Remember early in the show we told you to put a pin in this and we'd come back to it later? Well, now is the time to pull that pin out. Because, according to Hypnosis Cindy, Roy had moored the boat on an island somewhere while Cindy was asleep below deck. She recalled that Roy had wanted to go and view a property that was for sale

and left her on the boat for about an hour. She then said she heard screaming and decided to see where it was coming from. Cindy followed the noise up a hill where she found a log cabin. When she opened the door, Cindy said she found Roy standing over the bodies of a young couple who he had just stabbed to death. At this point, she became too horrified and upset to continue the hypnosis session. The police and Caban obviously took this allegation very seriously. So seriously that they actually flew over the Gulf Islands with Cindy and even took

her there by boat to try and find this cabin. But once they got there, she insisted that she couldn't recognize which island it had been. And the police also couldn't find any missing person's reports that matched the couple's description or that time frame either. All the while, Cindy's tormentor persisted. In December 1984, her phone lines were cut again, twice. And, you guessed it, absolutely no physical evidence was found. Not a single print, not a single foreign hair. By this point, the stress was visibly taking its toll on Cindy. She wasn't sleeping. She'd almost completely stopped eating and was smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. And in June 1985, Cindy's doctor had her committed after she revealed that

she had been considering suicide. She felt completely betrayed and contacted her brother, Doug, who managed to convince the doctors to release Cindy under his care. After her release, Bjornarud convinced Cindy to phone Roy and confront him about the murders she claimed had taken place on this boating trip, whilst the police recorded the call. Not having heard from Cindy for about two years at this point, Roy was clearly startled by the call, and then even more baffled when Cindy began telling him that she remembered the murders. Roy denied everything and became more and more furious with every accusation Cindy made. The conversation ended with Roy threatening to sue Cindy and the police if they continued harassing him when he hadn't done anything wrong. This would be the last time that Roy Makepeace would ever speak to his

ex-wife. After the call, police began running 24-hour surveillance on both Roy and Cindy's homes, with 14 officers working on the operation around the clock. So I think it's safe to say they're taking it incredibly seriously. Like, they're not just like, oh, she's making it up. Like, we're just going to ignore her. She's crazy. 24-hour surveillance with 14 officers working this case. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, the reason I say that, and I think it's worth mentioning, is because a few places that you will see this case sort of reported, they, and you know, we're happy to slag off the police, obviously, on this show. That is not a line that we're scared to cross.

But a lot of places sort of go after the police and say, they don't take Cindy seriously, they ignore her, they minimize what's happening to her. And I think that absolutely happens to victims of stalking. Absolutely. All day long that happens. Or they're told, you know, there's nothing really we can do about this until he actually fucking attacks you. But I just don't think that's fair to say about this case. I think multiple police officers are involved and I don't get the feeling that they were, like, not taking it seriously. I feel like there were investigations. There just was no evidence.

Right. I think that's the really key thing. There is some narrative surrounding this case of, like, oh, well, like, the police just didn't believe her and didn't do anything. And you can't really say that. Absolutely. Let's save that narrative for the police didn't take this victim of stalking seriously when that actually happens, because it absolutely does. I just don't think that that happened in this case.

So, like I said, they're doing the 24-hour surveillance. They've got all these police officers. And after seven days of not much happening, the expensive operation, because it would have been so expensive to pay all of that overtime, pay all of those officers dedicated to this one case. The operation was called off. And during that week that they had that constant surveillance, only really one strange thing happened.

And it was on the 7th of July when Cindy dialed her own phone number, said hello three times, then hung up before phoning a friend. She told Caban, who questioned her about this, that she had received a strange silent call and accidentally called herself. I don't know. Also, how does one dial their own number and then speak? I don't know. Can that be done?

Possibly on these old-timey phones. I don't know. Oh, on an old-timey phone, definitely. But it comes up as engaged, like the line is busy. OK, OK. Sikaban reported this to the police, and they all believed that it was likely just an honest mistake by Cindy. Four days after the surveillance operation finished,

Cindy suddenly received a book in the post. It was titled, You Can Heal Yourself, and there was a black nylon stocking marking a page which read, Blood Flowing Freely. The envelope used to send the book was the same as the ones used by the company BC Hydro. And guess who worked there? None other than Roy Makepeace. Another package containing a decomposing animal organ arrived shortly after.

But it was just another question mark for the police in an already bizarre and seemingly unsolvable case. I think this is the thing. They're amassing, like, so much stuff, but none of it is really, like, useful evidence. That's the problem. I mean, obviously I'll grant that the envelope coming from that company is weird, but it's not like somebody else couldn't get their hands on that envelope, including Cindy.

No, and it's a very Agatha Christie clue. And if you're going to threaten somebody and you've been so careful that you've been doing this for literally years and got away with it, not leaving one shred of evidence, are you then going to use an envelope stamped with your own company's name on it to send a threatening fucking nylon stocking wrapped book? Not smart. Later that same year, on the 21st of August 1985, at about four o'clock in the morning, someone broke open Cindy's basement window and set fire to her downstairs bathroom.

Interestingly, Caban had rigged almost every window and door in the property with an alarm, except that one. And the motion detectors he's installed in her basement didn't go off either. Stranger still, the dust on the windowsills of the basement hadn't been disturbed, again like Clenching. Go back and listen to it. And a bit like JonBenet as well,

how the cobweb is still in the window of the basement. Oh yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And once again, no more fingerprints. Of course, just like JonBenet Ramsey, the only answer is floating aliens. Police thought maybe somebody had just thrown lit pieces of paper inside the basement, but the arson investigators found that the fire had been started in six different places. The strangest thing was a large sooty smudge on the wall which indicated that somebody had held a candle or a match to it for several minutes attempting to set fire to the wallpaper, suggesting that the fire had been started by somebody who wasn't exactly in a rush. Exactly. So I just think, okay, you've got Caban saying every single window and door in this house is alarmed,

apart from the basement window. The basement window gets broken in, but nobody has disturbed the dust. So how have they got inside without triggering an alarm? And then they must have got inside because the fire was started from inside the basement, not just through the window. So it's just, I don't know. How do you explain that? You can't.

It's somebody inside the house. Or floating aliens. Or that. On the 1st of December, 1985, Cindy decided that she had had enough and she was moving out of Vancouver, for once and for all, and she moved to an apartment in Richmond.

But the tormentor followed her, and on the 11th of December, she was found by a passing cyclist stumbling around in a ditch near a large wooded area in the dark. Who cycles in the dark? That's the real question. Maybe the attacker. I don't know. No, not really. I don't think so. It's the same as, like, flying a kite at night.

Why are you doing that? Maybe they were cycling home from somewhere, very slowly. As those words escaped my mouth, it's like, Hannah, you were cycling at 10 o'clock last night. The thing to remember about this incident is it's now the third attack on Cindy. The first one was the basement stairwell, the second one was the razor blade slashes on the back, and this is the third. So when paramedics arrived at the scene,

they found Cindy standing in icy water in this ditch up to her thighs, rapidly developing hypothermia. She also had a cut above her eye, fingernail scratches on her breasts, and she wasn't wearing any underwear. And the only footwear that she had on was one workman's boot on one foot. And once again, of course, there was a black stocking tied around her neck. Doctors found a fresh needle mark on her arm and tests later showed she had lorazepam, a sedative, in her blood, which can apparently contribute to memory loss. OK, question I have here.

In the other incidents when she's found with the black stocking tied around her neck, she's either sort of semi-conscious or she is like tied up, so her arms and legs are tied up. In this case, she's standing. They don't say anything about her arms or legs being tied up. Why wouldn't you remove the stocking that's around your neck immediately and throw it away? Well, I think we know the answer, but we're going to save it.

Yeah. So at this point, when this incident happened, because remember it's now the third attack, Cindy's case was transferred to yet another detective, a woman named Caroline Halliday, who was a little bit more no-nonsense than the other detectives who had previously worked on Cindy's case. Halliday believed that the basement fire in Vancouver

had been an inside job and that Cindy was responsible. Halliday visited Cindy in hospital and asked her to see a psychiatrist of the police's choice, something that Cindy apparently begrudgingly agreed to. This psychiatrist interviewed Cindy a number of times concerning the attacks and her early life and the psychiatrist also noted that these weren't easy conversations. In his report, the psychiatrist said although he couldn't exclude the possibility that a suspect may have cleverly eluded the police all of these years,

he personally believed that all of the incidents Cindy had reported were, quote, self-initiated. He also said that Cindy was, again, a quote, casting herself centre stage in her own fantastical plot in order to punish the person whom she felt had rejected and abandoned her. He went on to say that it was a bit more complex than Cindy just faking it and that she may genuinely have gone into a psychogenic fugue, which is now known as disassociative fugue.

The DSM-5 refers to disassociative fugue as a state of bewildered wandering. Happens in Breaking Bad when he's in his pants. Well, he says it's that, but he's actually, of course, cooking meth. It's an incredibly rare condition in which a person loses awareness of their identity or important autobiographical information and also engages in some form of unexpected travel. So they find themselves in places with no memory of how they got there. And I've been talking about horror movie tropes, like this is the number one, and this is the one that might be true

yes yes and this is the thing the doctor the psychiatrist who examined Cindy is very much like he believes that she is doing these things but he also says that he believes that she is actually trapped in a nightmare and in a very distressed state and you know she's not having a great time at all but he doesn't believe that there are outsiders involved in what is happening to Cindy. And so, yes, I know I bring up, like, why wouldn't you take the stocking off your neck? If she is in some sort of disassociative fuse

and she is having some sort of mental break, OK, I can believe that that's why it's still there. I can believe that this is possibly the most clear explanation or clear theory. So, in medical terms, could Cindy have entered into this sort of altered consciousness and done these things to herself and not remembered having done them? Well, kind of, yes. Her psychiatrist suggested that Cindy was suffering with this condition and it likely stemmed from something in her childhood, some form of abuse, probably, and most likely sexual abuse, which is similarly to disassociative identity disorder

that only happens if abuse is sustained by a person between a very short age range window. So like there is a period of your childhood development where the way you solve problems is to disassociate. So I can completely buy into the idea that if Cindy was abused in that sort of way in that time window, because I suppose, well, is it DID though, I suppose, because, and Sina said, it's like she's driving sometimes and she's always aware of what's happened. But also there are some

of her alters where she doesn't know. That's the thing. I think there are, we'll go on to see that Cindy gets a lot of different diagnoses and I'm going to save my theories for when we get to that bit. Okay. Nothing is clear cut in this case. And we're not going to save my theories for when we get to that bit. Okay. Nothing is clear-cut in this case and we're not going to be able to give you a definitive answer but we will discuss our theories. So let's hear the rest of the story and then we'll come back to it. By this point, Roy Makepeace also started receiving strange phone calls. It really starts around March 1985 and they became more and more frequent. So Roy decided to buy, and I love this, it's like, it's described as an expensive answering machine because back in the day, in the 80s, you had to buy a very pricey bit of kit to be able to screen calls and record conversations. So that's what

Roy does. This is a recording of one of those strange calls. Let's listen to it and then have a chat. So just in case it isn't clear like what exactly is being said and I know I'm like implanting this in your mind by telling you what I think is being said but most people believe that what's being said is Cindy dead meat soon that's kind of what it sounds like and a lot of people do believe that this is Cindy actually making the calls I don't know a lot of people say it sounds like a woman disguising her voice possibly I don't know I don't know the other recording because like I said there were many other calls that Roy received and that he recorded, was in the same voice. And it said,

It's just like nonsensical. It's not even threats. It's just bizarre things that are being said. But of course, by this point, Roy had become quite paranoid. And he started keeping a diary of everything he did down to the minute, even recording the times that he used the toilet and he slept next to a loaded gun. Meanwhile, Cindy was living in so much fear that her friends Tom and Agnes Woodcock started spending every night at her place. And one night, the three of them were all woken up by a loud bang

downstairs. They looked outside and they could see flames coming from the downstairs window. Cindy tried calling 911, but the line was dead. So Tom ran outside and found a mysterious man standing outside the house. But when Tom called to him for help to call 911, the man simply ran off down a side street. When firefighters checked the house afterwards, they noticed something strange. Cindy's bed was drawn back, but the sheets were perfectly neat and crisp. So clearly, she hadn't been asleep in bed when the fire had started, like she said she was. There was also no signs of forced entry.

Another odd thing was that a shaft, which was usually fitted to the bracket of the back basement door to ensure nobody could force it open, had been removed and was found leaning against a wall in the hallway. But Tom Woodcock insisted that he checked it was in place before going to bed that night. Again, that's only something that could have been removed from inside the house. Richmond Constable Janet Fisher was assigned to investigate the arson at Cindy's and when she questioned the firefighters at the scene they told her that Cindy had been calm, cool and collected until the police had arrived. Apparently it was only then that she'd gone into hysterics. They also mentioned that they felt it was a bit traumatic that Cindy was barefoot in her

pyjamas whereas Agnes and Tom Woodcock were both fully dressed. Fisher quickly decided that the arson was indeed an inside job and that Cindy had to be the one responsible. Following the fire, Cindy went to stay with the Woodcocks and became increasingly depressed when it became obvious that the police were suspicious of her. She even told Agnes that she would kill herself if people didn't believe her. And soon after this, Cindy's health fell off an absolute cliff. She was smoking almost non-stop and she totally stopped eating.

And soon enough, Cindy was admitted to a secure psychiatric facility where she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, anxiety and depression, all overlaid on a passive, aggressive, compulsive personality. The doctors also noted that Cindy was quote extremely angry and hateful towards her ex-husband, God and the police. And while none of them could conclusively say, the doctors who assessed Cindy felt that quote her experience of harassment might be a part of her underlying psychopathology. After this, Cindy was moved around for treatment. Some doctors disagreed with the paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis and thought Cindy likely had DID,

or as it was known then, MPD, multiple personality disorder. Nothing is really conclusive, and it's also worth mentioning that all the medical diagnoses we're discussing here were made by psychiatrists in the 80s, based on the DSM-3. They're not up to date with today's understandings of these disorders. But every psychiatrist who assessed Cindy at the time noted that she hated her husband intensely. On the 15th of July, after three months in psychiatric care, Cindy was finally released. After six months of sick leave,

it seemed that all she wanted was to go back to work at Blenheim House. However, on her first day back, she was asked to resign. And with that, the final pillar of stability in Cindy's life was gone, and again, everything began to crumble. On the 28th of June 1987, 14 months after her release, the break-in attempts started once more. After this, there were five more incidents in the following eight months. On the 26th of October 1988, Cindy's silent alarm that Caban had given her was triggered. When the police arrived, her blue Chevrolet Citation, which is just the fucking worst name I've ever heard for a car. It is pretty shocking. I mean, I googled that to check if that was real and it wasn't a fucking typo in the book.

It's a blue Chevrolet citation. Why would you name a car after the most boring activity known to man? Like, you know when you're fucking, like, you've finished an essay when you're at uni and you're like, yes, done, and then you're like, I've got to reference it. Fucking nightmare. Do not

understand the logic of what happened in that meeting. But anyway, that's the car. And it was found parked outside Cindy's home with the light still on. As an officer walked closer, he found Cindy lying on the driver's seat, naked from the waist down, and her bare legs hanging out of the car. The officer checked Cindy's pulse and felt nothing. And then he noticed that her hands were tied behind her back and that she was clutching the panic button that had triggered the silent alarm. Okay, I don't want to break the flow of the story but your hands are tied behind your back but the panic alarm button is in your hand? I don't know. Okay, let's continue. And the officer actually thought that he had a murder on his hands

until Cindy let out a gasp of air and this is when he realized that there was a black nylon stocking again wrapped around Cindy's neck. The paramedics found Cindy to be unconscious at what they called the low end of a coma. When she later came to all Cindy could tell the police was that she had started getting out of her car when two men in balaclavas held a knife to her neck and told her not to make a sound. And that was all she remembered. Like before, benzodiazepines were found in Cindy's system. After this incident, the bizarreness was back with a bang. And on the 8th of April, another note was found on Cindy's windshield,

which read, Soon, Cindy. And what's interesting about this particular note is that it happened when she was in the hospital so it's found on her car windshield when she's in the hospital and the note was actually found by a security guard so once Cindy was able to go home her burglar alarm went off four more times between then and the 10th of May 1989 and 15 days later Cindy went missing it's just so sad. It is very sad. So sad. Like, it's just like a complete total documentation

of just a descent into total madness. Yeah, that's exactly it. When Cindy's body was found under that bush by the construction worker, for more than a month after, it was widely reported as a murder. But on the 12th of July 1989, Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced that they had ruled out foul play. Understandably, Cindy's family were outraged and things didn't get much better for the family when the British Columbian coroner's office decided to hold an inquest into

Cindy's cause of death. Preliminary toxicology tests showed that Cindy had overdose levels of both morphine and the prescription drug florazepam in her cistern, ten times that of a fatal dose. It was also revealed that after her death, Cindy's family had discovered a make-up bag full of prescription drugs, including benzodiazepines, at her home, which they flushed down the toilet without showing the police. Fucking imagine being a sewer fish, getting a wall of benzodiazepines in your

fucking face and all the fish died. Sorry I'm just really fueling your childhood snake toilet fear. Oh mate don't. I can't. I'm just like quietly recoiling here. Sorry. I apologize. I didn't think about how triggering that would be for you until I said it. They're going to get addicted to it and then start crawling out of the toilet to come get some more. And that's how I'm going to get bitten. I'll protect you from the toilet snake. One of Cindy's sisters also revealed that they had found a glass cutter, like what was used in several of the break-ins at Cindy's house.

But she said that their mother, Cindy's mother, had made them throw it away. So there's some enabling happening, some post-mortem enablement, it would seem. Oh yes. So the inquest also dug deep into Cindy's family history, because since her death, diaries had been found in which she made a number of allegations about her family, including accusing her brother Doug of having sexually abused her as a child, which is something that the rest of the family have denied extensively and did deny at the inquest on the stand. And I guess a big question for many people by the time the inquiry came around

was could one tie themselves up in the way that Cindy was found? So I think this is a big thing. If you're even going to like question whether Cindy did this to herself, again, we will come on to the theories at the end. Could you do it? Could it be possible? And that not expert that we mentioned at the start of the show makes an appearance here. And he demonstrated in less than three minutes in front of the inquiry that it was very much possible to hogtie one's self. This not-expert also believed that the ligatures found on Cindy's body were consistent with the theory that she had done it herself. But he also, of course, said that he couldn't rule out someone else having tied her up.

Usually, inquests only last a few days, but this one went on for an unbelievable 40 days. The inquest finally ended on the 25th of May which just so happened to be the anniversary of Cindy's disappearance. After just three hours of deliberation the jury concluded that Cindy James had died due to an overdose of morphine and flurazepam but they agreed that there was insufficient evidence to determine whether her death was a homicide, suicide or an accident. And so her death was in effect judged to be caused by an unknown event. And no recommendation was made to reopen the investigation. Right. Let's talk theories, shall we?

We obviously use multiple sources when we are researching this. We've been everywhere from books written on this case to documentaries to podcasts to Reddit. There is so much information on this case. And just so many fucking incidents that take place over the course of almost a decade. But yes, if you listen to this episode somewhere else, there will be incidents that we have left out because it did become quite repetitive. So the main source that we actually used was a book by a man named Neil Hall called The Deaths of Cindy James. And I think when you read the book, it's very clear that Neil thinks that Cindy is responsible for doing all of

this to herself. But I do think he is appropriately sympathetic that I don't think Cindy was in a great place, mentally speaking. And I think that's the vibe you get from the book. There is another book out there that has been written by Melanie Hack, who is Cindy's younger sister. And the book is called Who Killed My Sister, My Friend. So Melanie and Cindy's family are obviously very certain that she was killed by her stalker. And I understand why they feel that way.

Of course, this is like such a mind melting case. Like I, of course, understand that the family believed that there was a third party involved. When you go on Reddit, there are even theories that it's Agnes Woodcock. But can I just remind everybody that Agnes Woodcock was a fucking pensioner. She's like an old woman. She's like in her late 60s. I would put that one to bed immediately it's because Agnes like is there a lot of the time when stuff is happening she discovers Cindy like after the first attack but like I just don't put any weight in it being Agnes and just isn't Agnes kind of only really on the scene once she moves to Richmond like I don't think I believe that

Cindy was doing this in a sort of Sarah Paulson in run kind of way like I don't think I believe that Cindy was doing this in a sort of Sarah Paulson in run kind of way. Like I don't think she was consciously doing it in like a bid for attention. Yeah. So obviously one theory is that she is very, very not well, mentally speaking. And maybe even she's got this incredibly rare condition of having disassociative fuge where she doesn know what she's doing she has no memory of doing it to herself possibly also maybe there was abuse in her childhood that she doesn't reveal apart from in her diaries and maybe she did have DID in which case she may also not have known and a few places do talk about maybe her having a kind of malevolent personality that was doing this to her. Possible. Possible.

I think it's worth mentioning. I don't necessarily feel like I believe this, but it's worth mentioning. Munchausen. So Munchausen, one of the causes for Munchausen is that having indifferent parents in childhood. So having parents that never paid you enough attention, that can be a trigger for people to develop Munchausen. And this is obviously a very different type of it. She's not making herself sick, but she is obviously doing this and getting quite a lot of attention from very important people who are figures of authority, which is ultimately what somebody with that

condition would want. I'm not saying that that's what's happening. I think it's worth mentioning as a theory because of what we do know, like the whole Scarlet Fever incident, the way in which she was brought up, where she herself felt like she wasn't paid enough attention to or given enough credit. It could be a thing.

Yeah, I think that, you know, because the sexual abuse thing is, you know, as far as we know, unfounded, but it doesn't seem like her family are in the business of truth-telling. But we do know for a fact that her parents do seem to have been quite indifferent. To be honest, I don't think I have in-depth enough understanding of Munchausen to say one way or the other, but it's a possibility. I think for me, fundamentally, is whether she was consciously doing it or not, she was extremely unwell. Yes, I think there is definitely something

going on. And when you read about this case in places, there are so many discussions about which particular personality disorder Cindy had or which particular mental condition or disorder she had. Again, that's very difficult. Firstly, we're dealing with it in the 80s. They were using the DSM-3. Obviously, these psychiatrists were doing the best they could with the information they had. But like we know, with most mental disorders or personality disorders, of which there can be a lot of comorbidity, so it doesn't mean that she just had one and that was the reason she was doing it. But a lot of it isn't based on like a blood test

or a brain scan. It's based on interviews with the patient to discover what's going on. And Cindy, she's not always upfront about what's going on. No, I mean, she got through the hypnosis without telling the truth. That's what I mean. So I feel like it doesn't set up the cleanest palette to discover an accurate diagnosis of Cindy. I think that's also worth mentioning. So I wouldn't put too much stock in specifically what's being said, but it could be anything.

Like I said, there's also a lot of comorbidity. I think at points when you're reading it she does sound a little bit like histrionic personality disorder I mean who hasn't got that and you know I could be sold on anything but we're never going to know now obviously because Cindy's dead I think the key thing for me the key sticking point for me is the fact that this went on for so long and there was no evidence there was no sightings on surveillance a lot of the injuries that Cindy suffered were superficial. And there were three abduction and three sort of like attacks where this intruder would have had Cindy to themselves. Why didn't they just kill her then is like a question that I have about that.

Yeah. And also, someone who's stalking you this relentlessly, it's personal. And if it's a woman like this, I just, it's sexual. Of course it's sexual. Like, how is it not going to be sexual? But none of the injuries that Cindy ever sustains are, like, sexual in nature

and not even, like, psychosexual in the sense of, like, stabbing or strangulation. Like, that's ultimately not how Cindy dies. I know she always has a nylon stocking tied around her neck, but that's not how she dies. She dies, and in every case, she's found with loads of drugs in her system, drugs that are also found in her house.

So I don't know. I think, why would somebody abduct you and then just inject you full of drugs and then leave you? That's such an uncertain way to make sure that person's dead and so impersonal yeah and like I said I just wanted to finish off on saying that the police get quite a lot of shit for this case and saying that they didn't really investigate it one article I read even said like the police just decided it was a suicide but I'm like if you look at her death in isolation I think it would be a far stretch to just rule that a suicide. I'd be like, what the fuck?

But there's a lot of backstory. And also, they had a 40-day inquest. That's not, they just decided. Like, come on. I'm not saying that the police shouldn't spend money on investigating cases like this. Of course they should. But they spent about a million dollars investigating Cindy's cases over the decade, almost, that she had been reporting them. So it's not like they turned a blind eye.

And I don't think it's fair to say that. There was just no evidence. So, yeah, was it Roy? I also don't think it was Roy. I just thought, like, why would he do that? It doesn't really make much sense. No. So I guess I would lean towards the fact that cindy was doing

it to herself knowingly on unknowingly i don't know maybe it's an unpopular opinion but i think it could be a bit of munchausen and maybe she did receive a few weird calls because apparently just before cindy started to get the weird calls another woman in the neighborhood had been receiving weird calls maybe she did receive one weird call or maybe she heard that story. Maybe she realized when she first reported it that there was a lot of eyes on her and a lot of attention that she'd maybe been seeking her entire life. And then it spirals and she can't stop because it's like an addiction. I don't know. And then we also do know that she was suicidal. She had been caught in the psychiatric hospital she was in hoarding drugs. And she said openly that she was suicidal.

And she dies eventually of a drug overdose, not of strangulation. I don't know. I don't think anyone else is involved. But as to whether she did it knowingly or unknowingly, I don't know. I can't say definitively. Yeah, I'm with you on that, I think. So yeah, fucking hell, I am knackered. My brain hurts.

That's quite the case. Yeah, there you have it on that, I think. So yeah, fucking hell, I am knackered. My brain hurts. That's quite the case. Yeah, there you have it. There you have it. We can't even go yet because we still have to fulfill our duties and read out these Patreon names that are still from October. End of October now. Yeah, we're rattling through them. Hannah Antelson, happy birthday, Fel.

Looks like you got an annual subscription for your birthday, so happy birthday, which I assume was probably in October. Welcome to June. And on my birthday, October 29th, so if that was your actual birthday, double birthday. Oh, oh yeah. Liz and Carl, Gurren, Ellen, Gisela, daughter, Sarah Humphries, Amber Ward.

Oh, come on. Lizzy Lizay. Skylar Scheich. Marissa Franco. Vanna Bipat. Najma Mohammed. Justine Cairns. Lavinia Corlin.

Claire Shaw. Jill. India Beckinsale. Vihari Motherwell. Erin Nevin. Paris McMullen. Lilith McDonald. Kim Cohen.

Amber D. Tortorelli. Morel Hall. Christine Kagan, Daniel Smith, Stephanie Cratchawill, Savannah Scruggs, Anna Whiten, Susanna Elliott, Jo Clifford, Samantha Dannen, Gemma Yates, Steph, Paige Lewis, Alice, Erica Beamish, Jessica Rowland, Alice Othin, Alex Oth beautiful patrons. Thank you so much, all of you beautiful patrons. Thank you, guys. Quick reminder, if you were a patron before the 25th of March,

you will get your name read out. If you are after the 25th of March, you will not. Also, please buy the book and subscribe to the YouTube channel and we will see you next time for our 200th episode. Oh, my God, yes. Hopefully, I'll have recovered by then. Bye. Bye. Bye.

You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling

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