True Crime Campfire - Halloween Special: The Baffling Case of Cindy James

Episode Date: October 31, 2019

For our first Halloween special episode, we tackle one of the creepiest, most confounding, most fascinating cases we've ever encountered. For six and a half years, Vancouver nurse Cindy James was the victim of stalking, threats, vandalism, physical attacks and terrifying phone calls. Several times she was discovered unconscious and bruised with a black nylon stocking tied tightly around her neck. Her tormenter left notes that said things like BEHEAD; CINDY, SOON; and WE ARE WATCHING. Her house was set ablaze. Dead animals were left hanging in her front yard. And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police couldn't find out who was doing any of it. Eventually, they came to a shocking conclusion--Cindy was doing it herself, possibly without realizing it. This stunned and infuriated Cindy's family, friends, private investigator and psychiatrist, but the police were convinced. The investigation stalled. And then, one afternoon in May 1989, Cindy went missing. Her car was found in a shopping center parking lot, blood on the driver's side door, signs of a struggle strewn about. Two weeks later, her body was found in the yard of an abandoned house, hog tied and barefoot with a stocking tied around her neck. Was Cindy the victim of murder? Was it a suicide staged to look like a murder? Or was something else going on? This case is bizarre from start to finish; this description barely scratches the surface! We can't wait to hear your theories. Follow us, campers!Patreon: https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireSources (also available on social media): http://www.melaniehack.com/http://thetroublewithjustice.com/2014/07/05/who-killed-nurse-cindy-james/https://unsolved.com/gallery/cindy-james/https://49thshelf.com/Books/C/Canada-s-Greatest-Unsolved-Mysteries?fbclid=IwAR0H8RxwRWMJhyysjUwEmTLkRz1CrR1gxO5g1bqQMYpsNZUZheUoTSbNO68Unsolved Mysteries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yJUBUF0s0UNews report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbrAggQE2EA&t=7sNews report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljymSSBqflUA Current Affair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPZ-G5bFEekBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Hello campers and welcome to the very first true crime campfire's special Halloween episode. Dim your lights and grab your candy because tonight we're going to tell you a a true story that is way scarier than fiction. So, Campers, tonight we're going to lay a doozy on you, and we have to apologize in advance, because it's probably going to hurt a little bit. Not everybody's a fan of unsolved cases, and that's what this one is. In fact, Katie, you're not a fan most of the time yourself, right? No, because I have a burning need to know everything, and the fact that I can't know everything

about an unsolved case makes me want to scream. It just deeply offends you to your soul. It's upsetting. That you can't know. Like, this case that we've been discussing has turned me into the Pepe Sylvia meme. Just I have, like, red yarn on my wall. I am going crazy. She's got a full-on conspiracy theorist wall going.

You know, to me, it's kind of fun because I like puzzling out all the options, but I can completely get how it can be frustrating. and all, but it is worth it to learn about this case because it is hands down one of the most baffling, most frustrating, most fascinating cases that we've ever looked at. And that is the case of Cindy James. And before we get into this, we have to share something rather exciting with you, which is that this is the first time that we have ever recorded an episode in the same room. In the same state. In the same zip code. Yes. We are together at last. I know. We're sitting right next to each other. Yeah. And that's very cool.

So exciting. Yay. Okay. So Cindy James. In some ways Cindy looked exactly like the kind of woman who would be involved in a mystery like this. She was blonde and beautiful. We'll put pictures of her up on our social media. And I think she looked a lot like one of Hitchcock's cool blondes, as he called them. So sort of like a tippy hedron or a Grace Kelly vibe. Yeah, absolutely. So in a way, it's appropriate that she would be at the center of this kind of a dark mystery

because there is something kind of Hitchcockian about it. I never thought about it that way, but you're totally right. This is absolutely a Hitchcock film. Yeah, I think Hitchcock would have been really fascinated by this case, actually. So we're in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada. It's our first Canadian case, right? And this is in the 1980s. And Cindy was the eldest of six children in a really close-knit Vancouver family,

and she trained as a pediatric nurse. And when our story began in 1982, she was. was 36 years old. She was working as the administrator of a preschool for children with like behavioral and emotional difficulties and maybe, you know, children who weren't neurotypical. She worked with children with autism. She was great at it. Four months earlier when our story starts in 1982, Cindy had separated from her husband of 17 years a guy named Dr. Roy Makepeace, which I think is a really interesting name. Very interesting name. Yeah. And he was a psychiatrist. He was 18 years older than Cindy. And yeah, and, you know, I mean, to each their own and

everything, it was legal, but he married her when she was 19. Yeah. And that by itself isn't like a bad thing, but it is certainly a red flag. To me, it's interesting because, you know, I'm sure for some couples it would work out great, but an age difference that big at that time of your life, when you're still in your teens and the dude is almost 40, there's a power differential, right? Absolutely. And when I was 19. I didn't know how to pay taxes. Lord, no. I didn't know. I didn't know how to cook for myself. No, me neither. Like, and you have a 37-year-old chasing after you. Gross. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a little bit like, I'm side-eye in that. I'm going to be honest with you. But, you know, if you disagree with me, I'm not mad at you about that. Nope. So Cindy left Dr. Makepeace after 17 years of marriage.

She moved out on her own. And it was, according to most people who knew them, a pretty amicable divorce. But then four months later, Cindy's nightmare began, and whatever side you're going to come down on in this case, because there are two very distinct sides of this, as you will soon see, it was a nightmare for everybody involved for Cindy, for her family, for her friends, I think to some extent for investigators. For everybody. It's just a nightmare. So it began with threatening phone calls, just like a Hitchcock movie again, where it would say stuff like, Indy, dead meat soon. Just yikes. And so police started investigating, but the calls were always too short to trace.

Because back in the day, you had to really keep people on the phone for a while to get a trace on the line. Whereas now it's like instantaneous. Yeah, it's much, much quicker now. And then in the next few months, it escalated from calls to she would report prowlers outside her house at night. Her windows and porch lights were smashed multiple times. Her phone lines were cut several times, which that, holy shit, that's terrifying. Can you imagine?

Can you imagine just for a second, okay? You see a prowler outside your house creeping around. You can see them in the bushes or the trees or whatever. You pick up the phone and the line is dead. Yeah. And then later on you go outside and you can see somebody's cut the phone line. That's just horrifying. So that's bad enough.

And then she started getting these bizarre, threatening notes. And we have posted pictures on our social media of a few of these terrifying things. So they were like, some of them were stenciled. Some of them were made of cut up letters from, like, newspapers and magazines. Just like something out of a movie. It's crazy. And they said stuff like, I see you, Cindy soon, behead, die, bitch, dead by Christmas, things like that. Terrifying.

She found raw meat left on her porch, just, random, just raw meat, like from a butcher shop. She found several dead animals hanging from trees in her yard, which is horrifying. And then her own dog, who by all accounts, she absolutely adored. And I want to say, content warning here, nobody dies. There's going to be no, you know, graphic detail. And the dog does survive and does fine after this, because I know a lot of us are very sensitive about animal stuff.

Yeah. So, you know, if you need to fast forward about third. 30 seconds or whatever, we should be done by then. But her own dog, Heidi, was found shaking with fear, sitting in her own feces with a nylon cord tied around her neck, which is horrifying, obviously. And, I mean, the dog was fine eventually and was not permanently injured or anything. But obviously, that's heavy stuff to find your pet like that. So that all went on for a while. And then the physical attacks began.

Then it actually got real, real. So Cindy had this friend named Agnes Woodcock, and one evening, Agnes dropped by for a visit. And I wish we knew if it was a planned visit, because we don't know that information, unfortunately. It would be really helpful. It would change a lot. It wouldn't change anything, but it would inform a couple things. Yeah, and you're going to see what we're talking about here in a minute. I know we're being very mysterious, but there's a trajectory here.

Yeah. We're waiting to drop a little bit of a bomb on you here later on. So Agnes dropped by. She heard a weird noise from the side yard. and she went around and she found Cindy crumpled on the ground with a nylon stocking tied tightly around her neck and I mean really seriously tightly around her neck so Cindy when she kind of came to

she said she'd gone to the garage to get something and she was attacked from behind and she said all I saw was a flash of white sneakers and then I don't remember anything after that so that was the first attack everything that was going on before with the letters and phone calls and vandalism that went on, it would stop sometimes for a while, and I imagine she would just start to feel like

everything was getting back to normal and thank God it stopped. Then it would start up again, which I think is a special kind of psychological torture. Absolutely. Yeah, it's horrifying. Because you'd never be able to relax, you know. So Cindy told Family and Frenzic kept her constantly on guard and destabilized. And after all this began, she actually took quite a few steps to try to thwart her tormentor she moved she changed her last name she painted her car a different color but it didn't matter eventually it would start up again no matter what she did so police obviously this is Canada so this is the the Royal Canadian Mounted Police they responded to all the incidents there would eventually be a hundred of these including six physical attacks some of which involved

sexual elements yeah but the thing was the police soon realized that Cindy didn't behave like your average victim would behave. So like when they would talk to her, she would seem evasive. She would withhold details. And it was kind of like, they didn't one of them say it was like pulling teeth to get information out of her. She told her mom that she couldn't tell them everything. She said, mom, I need help so badly, but I just can't tell you everything that's going on. And when her mom said, Cindy, why? She said it was because she was afraid for her mom and her sister. And she and her sister, Melanie, were really close.

So she said the attacker had told her that her mom and sister Melanie would be next if she told. Wow. So she was under threat, obviously, and, you know, everybody's thinking, okay, so that's why she's not being fully forthcoming. But police began to wonder if there was something strange going on. They gave her a polygraph test at one point. And it was, and it's interesting, actually, in my original notes I have that this was inconclusive. Then I saw an excerpt from one of the books that's been written about this case, and it said that she failed it. But on every other source I've ever seen, including a lengthy article in a Canadian magazine, including Unsolved Mysteries, a current affair, it said that it was inconclusive.

So I don't know who's got the facts right in that. Well, it might be, it might be that she failed it due to, like she showed showing deception, due to her stressed out state. Right. It might just be kind of semantics. And yeah, somebody might have just seen the report and it said deceptive and they didn't get the full story. Right. But whatever we want to call it, it was unusable, basically. And that was because of how stressed out and emotional she was.

And they questioned her for hours and, you know, they weren't really getting anywhere with their investigation. So Cindy hired a private investigator on her own. Now, this was a guy named Ozzy Caban. You can see him in the Unsolved Mysteries and an... a couple of little news segments you can find on YouTube. And he seems like a character, don't you think? Yeah, oh, totally.

I'd like to know more about Ozzy. But it should be said that he was, he always was a strong, strong supporter of Cindy's. I think they became friends through Ozzy working on her case. He gave her two-way radio because of the fact that her phone lines had been cut several times. So he wanted to be able to, you know, get hold of her and vice versa. And one night, he was at home and he heard strange noises coming through that two-way radio. So he rushed over to Cindy's house And you guys buckle up

He found her lying on the floor of her living room She was unconscious And she had a pairing knife Stuck all the way through her hand into the floor With a note through it that said Cindy you're going to die bitch Oh Jesus A pairing knife all the way through her hand

Sticking it pinning it to the floor Ugh. Gross. Yeah. So she'd also been hit in the head. She was unconscious, as I said. At the hospital, she said she remembered that she had seen a man coming through her gate, and she remembered a needle going into her arm, and that's all she could recall. Now, Cindy voluntarily underwent hypnosis several times, and she asked, and I think this is interesting,

that she requested to take another polygraph. But each time she was deemed too emotional, too stressed out to be a good candidate for these methods. And, you know, if you have an act, you know, I don't put a whole lot of stock in polygraphs. But I do believe that it can be one investigative tool if you have a trained polygrapher, if you have somebody who knows what they're doing. Right. The problem, I think, is that very often they don't know what they're doing. They ask too many questions. They ask the wrong kinds of questions.

and they'll polygraph people who are in no state to be polygraphed. So this actually makes me feel like they probably did know what they were doing and that they said, okay, we're going to stop this, you're not polygraphable. Right. Anyway, but they didn't get anything useful out of that frustratingly. And all throughout the time that this went on, and guys, it's going to go on for six and a half years. I can't even imagine. It's just stunning, isn't it?

Imagine six and a half years of your life just constantly on edge. And if you look at pictures of her from this time, you can really see it. And we'll post a sort of a range of pictures of her on our social media. So you can see her before and after. Yeah. They're just heartbreaking. You know that one picture of her where she's got the dark circles under her eyes? She looks like a corpse.

She really does. Yeah. She looks like a terminally ill, like cancer patient or something. It's really, really heartbreaking. So you can see it's taking its toll on her. Right. So police finally said, okay, we're going to set up surveillance on her house. So they did that.

They put up to 14 officers at a time watching the house. But the thing was, nothing ever happened while the surveillance was there. And then as soon as they left, the incidents would resume. Right. So the police started to get suspicious at this point. Was it possible that Cindy was doing this to herself? Staging the harassment and the attacks, either for attention or for some unknown motive? They weren't sure, but they were starting to lean towards that theory.

Which is understandable, honestly. I mean, I can see why. And then there was another attack. One evening, in the dead of Canadian winter, Cindy was found six miles from her home in a ditch by the side of the road. She was unconscious and suffering from hypothermia. She had a black nylon stocking tied around her neck. This, by the way, as you probably noticed, was a constant every attack,

a black nylon stocking around her neck. Yeah, including the one against her dog. Like every single time there was always that black nylon stocking, which is interesting because we know that, you know, killers and creeps can have a signature. Yes. Right. So it does kind of make you wonder if this is perhaps this person's signature. Right.

And she was wearing a single man's work boot and glove, like a work glove. She was covered in bruises and scrapes and she told the doctor she remembered nothing. After this, she asked her friends Agnes and Tom Woodcock to stay with her for a while. One night while they were there, Cindy knocked on the door. she'd come in from walking her dog and heard a noise downstairs. Tom had actually heard it too. Yeah, like woke, it woke Tom up and he and Agnes were sitting there like, did you hear that? And then Cindy's at their bedroom door like, hey, I heard her noise. Yeah. So they went downstairs to investigate and found the basement engulfed in flames. They tried to call 911, but the phone lines had been cut. Oh my God. So scary. Yikes on bikes. Yeah. So they grabbed the dog and ran outside and Tom went to find a neighbor to call the fire department. And he said,

saw a man standing at the curb in front of the house, so he ran over to ask the guy to go call the fire department, but instead of offering to help, the man took off running. Now, that's interesting, is it not? Yeah, I would say that's very interesting, because seriously, who does that? Right. I mean, you could, you could say that maybe he was like another kind of criminal, like casing the neighborhood or something. It just happened to be out, you know, wrong place, wrong time. It's possible, sure, anything's possible. The police determined that the fire was started from inside the house. The call was coming from inside the house. But there was a wrinkle. They found no signs of forced entry into the house. Also, the window that the perpetrator would have most

likely come in through to get to the basement was devoid of fingerprints. And plus there was undisturbed dust, like on the sill. Yeah. So this was more evidence to them that Cindy was staging the stuff. They also wondered why she'd be walking her dog alone at night if she was living in fear of the stalker slash attacker. And this is interesting because, you know, we talked about this the other day. Like, my reaction to that was, because see, we have cats. I adore dogs, but we don't have any dogs, much to my sorrow because our cats would, you know, eat them.

So, but I, my reaction is that's not necessarily proof of anything. Because, like, granted, she's scared, but if you don't walk your dog, my feeling is your dog is going to, like, poop in your house or pee in your house. And the desire to not have poop and pee all over your house, I would say it's not necessarily. as strong as the desire not to get murdered but it would be a close second for me sure so you know maybe you would walk your dog just because you're you have to right but at the same time you were saying you do have a dog and you don't buy it no because i've never i've had several dogs throughout my life i've never had a dog that would need to go on a walk in the middle of the night they usually

sleep with their humans they usually keep the same hours yes yeah i did not know that yeah so whereas like cats will go like all day every day all the time cats are weird schedules. But dogs, you kind of train them to go when they're outside. So I've never had a dog that needed to go out unless it was sick. What if she was old and had like a weak bladder? That's very possible. Yeah. But even then I would, I would hope that she would tell Tom, hey, can you go take my dog out? Like if you've got friends staying with you because you're scared, maybe you would say, you know, but then maybe she doesn't want to wake him up. I don't know. Maybe it had been a while since something happened because it did wind down sometimes. But then she did ask

them to stay, so she was already scared. So I take your point. Absolutely. Campers, this is a of the conversations we've been having for the past three weeks where we just like go crazy every a minute. And then Katie gets grumpy because she hates that we can't know. I hate it so much. All right. It's okay. I love it.

So that's just the energy we have here is I'm really loving it. And Katie's like, I'm grumpy. This is given. This relationship is give and take. We are friends and I will compromise and talk about an unsolved mystery, even though it makes me crazy. But. All right.

I know their required tastes for sure. So yeah. Anyway, soon after the fire, Cindy's psychiatrist committed her to a mental hospital for suicidal ideation and trying to starve herself. Poor thing. Yeah, that's like next level. Like, she was suffering. Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

The doctor felt that her suicidal thoughts were a direct result of, A, the harassment, and B, knowing that the police didn't believe her. Her psychiatrist did believe her, and he wanted to keep her safe from these thoughts of self-harm. So, Cindy was in the hospital for 10 weeks receiving treatment for depression. That's like, I mean, I would say that's a pretty significant stay. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's not, I think, like, the, the mandatory hold in the United States is three days. Right. Typically, for somebody that is suffering seriously is probably, like, four weeks, but 10 weeks is, is no joke. She was very seriously, very seriously suffering.

And so after she got out, she told family and friends that she believed she knew who was harassing her. And if the police couldn't catch him, she would. She couldn't tell them who it was, she said, for their own safety. When it was all over, she'd tell them everything. But she did say, he doesn't want to kill me, she said. He wants me to drive me crazy or scare me to death. Now, Whitney, you have some interesting points of view about this gaslighting perspective. Yeah, so you guys know what gaslighting is, right?

It's the term comes from an old Ingrid Bergman movie from, I believe, the 1930s called Gaslight, the premise of which was that a man wanted to make his wife think that she was losing her sanity so that he could somehow acquire her fortune, I think. Just stow her away in a mental institution and spend all her money, if I remember rightly. It's been a while since I've seen the movie. So we use a term gaslighting to refer to when you're in a relationship with somebody and you both know perfectly well that they are emotionally abusing you, trying to tear you down your self-esteem or cheating on you or something and they act like

what you're being paranoid you're being ridiculous what are you talking about and they make it seem like you're the one that's overreacting that's gaslighting and one of the things that one of the theories that i think is interesting about this case is that you know she said he doesn't want to kill me he wants to drive me crazy or scare me to death and it makes me think about gaslighting because what if somebody did have it in for her and wanted this exact outcome where they would do such a good job of harassing and scaring her, would be so careful about it that no one would end up believing her and it would just slowly drive her to distraction, which is exactly what was going on. I mean, she was getting more and more haggard and more

paranoid and on edge. So it could be really some kind of next level, sadistic gaslighting at work. Yeah, and that's, I think, one of the scariest theories about this case. It really is. The thing about this case, though, is that every theory is terrifying. Whatever you believe about this case, whether she was doing all this to herself or whether somebody else was doing it to her, both options are staggering and horrifying. It's fucking scary. I can't. No question.

So anyway, after all of her mysterious stonewalling, Cindy finally told police she believed it was her ex-husband tormenting her, Dr. Makepeace. Yeah. So she confronted him about it in a taped phone call, which you can listen to online. We'll post a link on our social media so you can hear it. but Dr. Makepeace strongly denied being involved, and you can hear Cindy's frustration in the call. She sounds almost desperate.

Is it you? Are you doing it? Interesting side note. Cindy's sister Melanie Hack, who has a website dedicated to Cindy's case, said that for a long time, Dr. Makepeace claimed to believe the mob was responsible for Cindy's harassment,

which seems bizarre to me. That is just bizarre. Why would you, why in the world would your mind, go there. It's weird. With somebody who had no previous association whatsoever with organized crime. Unless he did. Unless he did. Yeah. But it's apparently what he believed. Or at least that's what he said he believed for part of the time all this was going on. Later, he said he thought Cindy was mentally ill in stating the harassment herself. But interestingly enough, Dr. Makepeace did receive

a threatening phone call himself. And we're going to play it for you now. And I'm going to give you a little warning here. This is probably going to give you goosebumps in places you didn't know you had. I'm going to have me soon. And, holy shit, that's creepy, right? And listen, it really does sound like. a woman trying to disguise her voice to me? What do you think, Wendy? No, I totally think it sounds like a woman. You guys can tell us what you think on our social media. I definitely, the first time I heard it,

I thought that is a woman trying to sound like a man. Yeah. It's definitely like a voice actor. That's what it sounds like to me. Now, certainly some men do have higher voices, so we don't know for sure, but that is what it sounds like to me. Yeah. Which is interesting, right? Yeah. It's worth noting that in the six and a half years, this had all gone on, it had pretty much decimated Cindy's life. Oh, yeah. She lost her job as administrator of the preschool for kids with behavioral issues because the powers that be didn't think she should be around children given the chaos in her life

and her stay at the mental hospital. It's so heartbreaking. She was so good at that job. She was so great with the kids. Yeah. So then she got a job as a pediatric nurse and she'd still manage to keep her nursing license up to date. and she was doing her best to keep her normal life going as much as possible.

But it was taking its toll. As Whitney mentioned earlier, pictures of her from this time show that. She looked like someone on the brink of death. Yeah, for sure. And then six years and seven months after the harassment began, on an afternoon in May 1989, Cindy James went missing. So her car was discovered that same day in a shopping center parking lot. It looked like there'd been a struggle.

there was blood on the door handle of her car and by the way interestingly that blood has still never been DNA tested which is one of the things that her sister is frustrated about that is really frustrating yeah i mean they didn't have that technology then but they sure as hell do now so there was some stuff scattered around like stuff that looked like it had fallen out of her handbag under her car too yeah like under the car and a little bit around the car there was some shopping still in the passenger seat there was a wrapped gift that she had bought for someone police determined that She had gone to the shopping center to buy groceries. She'd deposited her paycheck.

You know, all things that people who are just going about their lives would do. And not, I don't think things that somebody who was planning, for example, suicide would be as likely to do. Although I know, you know, you can't predict that necessarily, but this is the theory anyway, that it's a little less likely because of all that. Now, two weeks later, after her car was found after the day she went missing, in early June, her body was discussed. in the yard of an abandoned house two miles from her home. She was hog-tied, and if you don't know what hog-tying is, you can look it up. It's basically your knees drawn up and your feet tied together, and then your hands kind of tied behind your back.

Are they attached to the feet? Yeah, they're attached together. So you're all kind of trussed up. Yeah, and just warning, don't look it up at work. Yeah, probably not. I mean, the picture isn't, you know, it isn't graphic necessarily in that they're There's no blood or anything, but it's, you know, it's an upsetting picture, for sure. Oh, of Cindy, yes.

It's a picture of a dead body. So warning. Yeah, yeah. And also, if you're going to Google any kind of bondage, you probably shouldn't do that. That's what I was. I just, the penny just dropped. Like, that's what she's talking about. People are going to be accidentally Googling sex things.

Right. Sorry, Mom. Anyway, so she was hogtied. She was barefoot. They found a needle mark in her arm. And as always, there was that black. nylon stocking tied tightly around her neck, which made them initially think that she was a victim of strangulation, but it turned out her cause of death was a drug overdose, an overdose

of morphine and other drugs, one of which at least was fluoresapam, and I believe there was some valium in there, so those are both sedatives. Morphine, obviously, is an opioid painkiller that is, you know, similar to heroin. So the medical examiner found 80 partially digested pills of the sedative fluorazepam in her stomach. But the frustrating thing, and this is one of the most frustrating things about the case because it would answer so much,

they weren't able to determine if she had swallowed the morphine, like in pill form or liquid form, or if she had injected it. They didn't find any morphine pills in her stomach. She did have a needle mark. They were never able to be 100% sure how she got that morphine in her

system, but it was a very high dose. It was 10 times the lethal dose. of morphine, which obviously you have to adjust a little bit. We have no reason to think or no proof or evidence or suspicion really that Cindy had a drug problem or that she was a user of morphine. But as, you know, has come up sometimes in, for example, the Kurt Cobain case or something like that, if you are a habitual user opioids, you could tolerate a much higher dose than average.

So that's worth saying. But we have no reason to think she was a drug user. Yeah, and people will point to the fact that she would have had access to those drugs, Although, as a pediatric nurse, I'm not sure how much you would have access to because those are big kid drugs. Well, they do sometimes use, you know, opioids if kids need them after surgery or something. But yeah, fair point. So there were no needles, no syringes, no vials or bottles found at the scene. There was nothing to drink out of.

And I don't think you're dry swallowing 80 pills. No, I just got nauseous. And interestingly enough, her feet were bare and the soles of her feet were clean. And you can see this in the pictures. She has clean, bottoms or feet are clean, and she's outside in a yard in the summer. Her shoes were nowhere to be found. Weird, right? Yeah.

So it's important to note that the yard where her body was found was very close to a busy road. This was not out in the middle of nowhere. It was right by a well-trafficked road. And multiple people involved in the case have said there is no way in hell that somebody is going to miss a body for two weeks. weeks in that location and you can see there's one news story that is hopefully still on YouTube if it is we can post it for you but it's the private investigator actually goes to the scene and points like look how close this is to a busy road like there's no way that she could have lain there for two weeks right so that's interesting right but despite all of that and based

on their feeling that Cindy had been harassing and harming herself for the past six and a half years the Royal Canadian Mounted Police very quickly decided that Cindy had committed suicide and they pretty much called it a day, which stunned her family, her friends, and her private investigator. They were just baffled at how quickly they closed it, and how quickly they ruled it as suicide, at how little investigation there was into the actual death. They were so angry about it.

They said, no way would she kill herself, and especially she wouldn't do it like this. Her mom insisted she was a very proud person. She cared about her physical appearance. If she were going to commit suicide, she would put on her best clothes, she'd put on makeup, she'd lie down in her bed, she wouldn't want to be found.

And as her mother put it, that awful place, hog-tied and barefoot with a nylon stocking around her neck. What a horrible thought to have had to have about your daughter. I know, I can't imagine. How she would prefer to be found after suicide. Yeah, and it's heartbreaking to listen to her parents' talk. You can tell it just completely shattered them, and they're so frustrated and angry that, you know,

the death wasn't investigated more closely. And it is true that when women commit suicide, they are more likely to do it like her mother said with some concern for how their bodies will be found and not the way Cindy was found. And it makes me think a little bit about that Rebecca Zahau case. So that's the case if you guys are unfamiliar where there was a woman, Rebecca Zahau. She was the girlfriend of a very, very wealthy man. I forget what state. Was it California?

It's California, yeah. Okay. So her boyfriend's little boy, who was about six years old, I believe, was playing on the staircase one day and fell over the railing and died, which was really sad. And Rebecca was looking after him at the time that that happened and was devastated by it. And a short time later, after this little boy died, Rebecca Zahal was found hanging from a balcony in this beautiful mansion that her boyfriend owned, completely naked. and dead. And the big question there as well was, was this a suicide or was this a murder? And you guys might have seen that what ended up happening is her family sued the brother of this wealthy boyfriend, whose name is Adam Shacknay, because they believe that he murdered Rebecca and staged it to look like a suicide. And one of their reasons for believing that was that she would never commit suicide naked. There's no way she'd want her body found like that. Especially publicly.

Yeah. And he had actually, like, there was, we can get into this on another episode. But he was, like, searching bondage and rope techniques and stuff previous to her death. So it was very suspicious. And they sued him and they won in a civil. He hasn't been to trial criminally, but they did win a civil judgment against him for her murder. So it'll be interesting to see where that case goes. So anyway, there was debate about Cindy's death.

And then there was an inquest to try to get to the bottom of the whole thing. And this thing was extensive. It went on for months and months and had all kinds of different experts called to testify. So the psychiatric testimony at the inquest became a battle of the experts, basically. And most of the doctors who testified hadn't even treated or examined Cindy, which to me is a little problematic. But, you know, post-mortem diagnoses were thrown around like multiple personality disorder, which is now referred to as dissociative identity disorder, hysterical personality disorder, which I'm not even familiar with that one. I don't know, maybe that's not in use anymore. No, I think that's borderline?

No, they also said she had borderline personality disorder, yeah. So there were all these diagnoses thrown around by people who had never met Cindy, never treated Cindy, which I think is rather, you know, rather problematic, as I said. Some theorized that Cindy could have had one or more alter personalities who were trying to destroy her, and she could have been hurting herself and not even known it, which is a fascinating theory. But interestingly, Cindy's own psychiatrist did not believe that she was mentally ill. He was treating her for depression and anxiety, and he believed it was caused by what she was going through and the fact that nobody believed her. He testified that he'd seen Cindy in all kinds of different states, just normal conversation, emotional conversation, deep hypnosis, and that no alternate personalities ever emerged once. And her family said the same thing, by the way. and multiple personality disorder, as it was called at the time, is a bit of a controversial diagnosis anyway.

Yeah. So, Katie, you did some research on this for us, because you just gave us a thumbnail sketch of dissociative identity disorder or DID and the debate kind of surrounding it. Sure. So, DID is a coping mechanism born out of trauma as a way to separate someone from the traumatic thoughts and feelings. According to WebMD, this is particularly true for people who undergo trauma. trauma in childhood. And here's the quote from the website. As many as 99% of individuals who developed dissociative disorders have recognized personal histories of recurring, overpowering, and often life-threatening disturbances as a sensitive developmental age of childhood,

usually before age six. Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about Cindy James's childhood, so we don't know if that's the case, but I've never seen her parents or sister mention it in an interview or anything like that. No, I haven't either. Now, 1% of the population experienced DID, and its rarity makes it an extremely controversial diagnosis. DID presents as two or more separate, distinct personalities that can take control of the person's behavior. When one of the personalities, quote-unquote, takes over, the person won't have any memory

of what happened while they weren't in control. Now, these other personalities are called altars, and they usually have distinct ages, races, and gender identities. So a person who identifies as a cisgender man might have one or more altars who present as female. That's so interesting. Something to keep in mind is that these aren't fully formed personalities. They usually present with one main emotion or trait. Like you might have an altar who's usually angry or hostile and one who's really playful and childlike. The host or core personality is usually not aware of the presence of the other personalities. Although I've seen documentaries where that's not the case and the host personality was aware of the altars.

Each altar has a role to help the host function and deal with the stress and perceived threats. And according to WebMD, people living with the disorder may lean towards self-persecution, self-sabotage, and even violence, both self-inflicted and outwardly directed. And DID is often diagnosed alongside other issues like depression and auditory and visual hallucinations. Yeah, thank you. So that is all really interesting. And, you know, obviously this is a very basic rundown, keeping in mind we are not mental health practitioners or experts in any way. And don't be silly. Yeah, we could have gotten some of that stuff wrong or rather WebMD could have because that's where Katie found all that. So don't blame us. But, you know, the thing was, Cindy's family insisted they had never seen the slightest evidence of mental illness from her. And they just couldn't imagine in a million years that she would put them through the torture. they had been through for the past seven years on purpose. Nobody who knew her thought that was possible. One of the interesting witnesses at the inquest was a not specialist. I didn't know that was something you should specialize in. Yeah, apparently a not specialist is a thing. And one of the

arguments against Cindy's death being suicide or an accident was, of course, that she was hog-tied. So they wanted to determine, you know, can you hog-tie yourself? And turns out you can. Now, it's not easy. I mean, they brought in a not-specialist to do. it, but presumably with enough practice, most of us could swing it. But it would take, I think, quite a bit of practice. This would not be something you could master in an evening, most likely. And I think it's rather unfair of them to actually bring in a not expert and say, oh, no, no problem. They should have had, they should have had the not expert, like, have somebody else do it. Yeah, exactly. She's not an not expert, you know? So, anyway, here's an interesting point.

So we don't know for sure How the morphine got into Cindy's body She had a massive amount in her system So obviously she would have been at some point incapacitated by that And by the sedatives in her system So the key question is how long would it have taken for the drugs To grab hold and make Cindy unable to tie herself up If she ingested the morphine

So if she took pills She'd have about 15 minutes Before it kicked in and made intricate not tying pretty much impossible. Right. But on the other hand, if she injected it with a needle and they did find a needle mark in her arm, it's a different story entirely. That morphine would have hit her like a freight train real fast and ain't no way she'd have had a chance to tie herself up first. So it completely sucks that we cannot determine that because that one detail would go a long way towards solving the mystery of Cindy's death.

Now the Emmy did find a needle mark on her arm, as I said, but there's no evidence of a syringe at the scene. On the other hand, there's a also no evidence of a pill bottle or a drinking implement either, like we said. But there's just no way to be sure when that needle mark got there. So we just don't know. And it is infuriating that we don't. But some interesting forensic stuff did emerge at the inquest. But I'm going to wait on some of it for now because in a moment, we're going to dive into theories. And we've decided to set this up as a bit of a point counterpoint. It's torn our friendship apart. You're tearing me apart, Katie. So I'm going to take the probably a little bit less

popular Cindy was murdered point and Katie's going to take Cindy did this to herself and we're each going to sort of make the best case that we can make. So I'm saving some of my evidence for that. But I will tell you this and it is infuriating. The result of this months-long inquest into the death of Cindy James was that Cindy had died of an unknown event. Great job, guys. I mean, that's just, oh, Lord, have mercy. This bank was robbed due to an unknown event. An unknown event. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.

I could have told you that. Yeah, that's the judicial equivalent of, uh-huh. Yeah, pretty much it was an, uh-uh. So, was Cindy doing this to herself? Did she commit suicide or overdose by accident during the staging of one of these attacks? Or was she the victim of real harassment and murder? So let's talk theories, campers. Let's do it.

So, as I said, I'm taking the Cindy was harassed and murdered side of the argument. So let's look at the evidence that seems to point us in that direction. Exhibit A has Cindy's own actions and character. So first, I point to Cindy's attempts to avoid her stalker. She moved multiple times. She painted her car. She changed her name. She hired a private investigator, which her sister says she struggled hard to afford.

She and the PI put up security. measures around the house. So, you know, if you were doing this to yourself, would you really want, like, security measures up that would hamper you, you know? She requested the polygraphs. She requested to be hypnotized. You can't know what you're going to say under hypnosis, right? She was naked from the waist down in one of the incidents.

And back to Rebecca Zahau, would a woman, would a woman do that? I mean, maybe some would. I sure as hell would. No, no. But I think that's pretty heavy. as is stabbing yourself through the hand with a pairing knife to stage an attack. Would somebody do that? Now, it's certainly not impossible.

People have been known to do some intense stuff. I mean, people have set themselves on fire. It happens. But again, I sure as hell wouldn't. Yeah. Would you? No. I would not.

And I would think that somebody who would be that far gone mentally, there'd be more obvious signs of it to me than what would mean, her friends and family said, except for this harassment and being frustrated that no one believed her, she wasn't showing obvious signs of mental illness. So then we have the attack on her dog, Heidi, who by all accounts she adored. We have three dead cats found in her yard with your next notes nearby. And Cindy was an animal lover. Everybody said that.

Would she hurt her own dog? Would she kill neighborhood animals? Her family says absolutely no way in hell. She was very close with her family She knew how much this was hurting them Would she put her family through this Her sister, her mom, her dad And most people, if they were staging something like this

Would probably be doing it because they enjoy the attention Like a Montausen syndrome type of thing But the thing is it seems clear to me That Cindy was not enjoying this It was very clear from her stays in mental hospitals The fact that she tried to starve herself the loss of her beloved job at the preschool, her appearance and pictures which is just

gaunts and dark circles under her eyes. She also kept a journal, and this I think is really compelling. This was her private diary. Her sister Melanie quotes it here and there on her website, and Cindy wrote about the harassment with what certainly seems to me like real anguish and never once mentioned faking it, or, hey, I've really got all these people fooled

or anything like that she just writes about why is this happening to me at one point she says it seems like God has forgotten me you know I mean she was definitely either this was some kind of next level fake out where she somehow knew somebody would read her journal

or it was genuine and I think this is important she held down full-time employment for almost the whole time this was going on and how would she have the time and energy to stage over 100 incidents and number one never get caught doing it for almost seven years. And by the way, seven years seems like a long

time to keep a ruse going. On the other hand, stalkers can have unbelievable staying power. I've heard of stalking cases that have gone on for actual decades. Decades. But would she keep this up on her own and would she be able to hold down full-time employment for most of the time this was going on and nobody notices anything? She never gets caught. I mean, it's just really, to me, that's interesting, and Ozzy Caban, her private investigator, actually at the beginning, tried because he knew how the police were framing it, that she was doing it herself. He actually tried to catch her at it. He went through her trash, unbeknownst to her, looking for cut-up newspapers and evidence of drafts of those threatening letters. He never found anything. So he thinks

that's significant. So Cindy's own behavior to me is Exhibit A. Now, Exhibit B, and this is even stronger evidence, in my opinion, is that there were actually several witnesses to the harassing phone calls. One had a woman's voice speaking on what sounded like a loud speaker in the background, interestingly enough, like somebody over a loudspeaker at a mall or an

airport or something like that. And then there were two hangups. And the witnesses were her sister, Melanie, and then two of the police officers involved in the investigation. Yeah. One night, Agnes and Tom were at Cindy's place. These are her friends, and they witnessed her

burglar alarm going off. They were all playing cards they were all together at the time Cindy was sitting right there and the burglar alarm went off so they all went down to the basement and they found that a glass window on the basement door had been removed like just just taken out of the door

super creepy right we also have two instances where suspicious people were seen near Cindy's house so we've got the night of the fire which Katie told us about earlier when the guy on the sidewalk just took off running when Tom Woodcock tried to talk to him and then another time when

Cindy's neighbor saw a man standing in his yard and just staring at Cindy's house. Creepy as hell, right? And when he asked him what he was doing, the guys ran off, just like the first guy, ran off. But the problem is we don't know for sure when this neighbor incident happened in any of the reports. It's not clear when it was. Did they get a description of either? I'm sure they did.

I don't. I wish we knew more details. The fact that they didn't tell us, though, is what's making me crazy. Yeah. It's an old case and it, there are a couple of books that have been written about it, but they are not easy to come by. They're very, very expensive. And you can buy them used from Amazon. I think the cheapest one was like $80. And yeah, they're very hard to come by. And like some of them are like exclusively Canadian books that we couldn't get access to. There's something online that you can, that's like region protected that you can't read. So we, you know, I wish we had more detail. So I don't know the answer to that, unfortunately. Answer me. I wish I could. So, anyway, Ozzy Caban, he believed her 100%, the whole time, you know, defended her after her death and everything. I think that's kind of important as well.

Because, you know, he's experienced, and I imagine private eyes are good at reading people and stuff. It doesn't mean they can't be fooled, but, you know, he believed her. Exhibit C is a fellow by the name of Constable Patrick McBride. Oh, boy, you guys. So Constable Patrick McBride was the first cop to investigate the harassing phone calls. This guy is a peach. First of all, he was investigating Cindy's case, and he got romantically involved with her in the midst of that. Oh, my gosh.

And then moved in with her during part of the investigation. Oh, my God. So, so unprofessional and, like, not cool on every level. So anyway, he was living with her for part of the investigation. So this means that he would certainly have known when police surveillance was happening. And granted, he didn't get involved. involved romantically with Cindy until after the harassment started, but he could have been stalking her all along and maneuvered himself into the investigation. Stranger things have

happened. And criminals often insert themselves into their own investigation. And the reason why I say this is because police investigated McBride after Cindy's death, and they supposedly cleared him, but I have not been super impressed with the quality of the RCMP's investigation in this case. So forgive me if that doesn't, you know, close the case for me. Especially since, Four years after Cindy's death, McBride was arrested for, guess what? Stalking and assaulting two women. Wow. One in 1989, the year Cindy died and won in 1991.

He spent a year in prison and a year on probation for it, and of course it ended his career with the RCMP, and he told one of his victims that she reminded him of Cindy James. Great, good. Now that's creepy. Yeah. So that was Patrick McBride. Exhibit D, the way her body was found.

we've got clean feet I mean she was outside if she'd walk there wouldn't she have had some dirt on her feet the fact that her body was so close to a busy road in full view of traffic the fact that teenagers threw a party in the abandoned house during the two weeks she was missing and none of them saw her body either

the fact that a forensic entomologist testified at the inquest that her body had been decomposing at the scene for about a week she'd been missing for two it was June why wasn't she more decomposed and where was she for that first week. And here's Exhibit E. And this is a bit of a weird one, but in a compelling way, and y'all seriously buckle the F up. This is bananas. So according to a post she made on one of

the Unsolved Mysteries sites about this case online, Cindy's sister, Melanie Hack, talked about an email that she received from somebody who claimed that shortly before their separation, Cindy and her psychiatrist husband, Dr. Makepeace, had gone on a trip to the Gulf Islands to visit a friend and former colleague of Dr. MakePieces, a guy called Dr. James Tyhurst. Now, y'all, Dr. Tyhurst is the worst. Simply the worst, yeah. The worst.

He was arrested in November of 1989, months after Cindy's death, for guess what? Sexual Abuse of Patients. Specifically, he made them strip to the waist. He hit them with whips, and he coerced some of them into signing master slave contracts with him. Now, no judgment here about the BDSM community.

The problem here is that that ain't what was going on here. No. We have a coercive nature of a relationship here. We've got a huge power imbalance of a psychiatrist doing this to vulnerable patients. Some of them who had suicidal thoughts. This was a serious abuse of power. And, you know, it was not only unethical, it was criminal. Yeah.

And I bet he knew how to hog type. somebody, by the way, which I think is worth noting. So Tyhurst was convicted in 1991 on multiple accounts of sexual and indecent assault, and he was sentenced to four years in prison. Unfortunately, he appealed and got a new trial in which he was acquitted, but in 2001 he was sued in civil court and he had to pay over half a million dollars in damages to patients. That's a chunk of change. So the theory is that Cindy may have witnessed something bad during her and Makepeace's Gulf Islands trip to visit this guy. There are a few claims to this effect online that Cindy told somebody she saw her husband and Dr. Tyhur's cutting up dead bodies. Now, this does not pop up in any of the published accounts of the case, and the posters online have never offered any proof or any sources to back it up, so it could be completely made up out of whole cloth.

I'm dubious about that, but we know Dr. Tyhurst was definitely a creep. And he had also, this is completely bananas, in the 1950s worked as an assistant resident at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada. Apparently, this place is notorious because the CIA was involved in some brainwashing and mind control experiments there, like M.K. Ultra type of stuff, I assume. Oh, boy. right like this is just this case is just bananas from start to finish it has earmarks of every single type of case it is it is this is why it's making me crazy it's a wild wild and i haven't even gotten to talk yet and why i'm about to lose my mind yeah oh yeah she's probably going to convince you but i'm trying real hard with dr ty her's here great so he's a complete creep we know that he you know had to pay half a million dollars to patients for sexual abuse of them and You know, we know he was involved with mind control experiments. So some people speculate that Tyhurst, either alone or in conjunction with Dr. Makepeace,

was running some kind of sadistic mind control experiment on Cindy. Now, obviously, this is only speculation, and honestly, it's pretty far-fetched speculation. I would need a heck of a lot more than what we've got to subscribe to that theory. But to be perfectly honest, every option in this case is far-fetched. like find me one that's not It absolutely is yes So I you know And Tyhurst was undoubtedly a creep

And it seems like he was definitely I mean we know he was acquainted with Dr. Makepeace They taught for a while at the same college In British Columbia in the 60s You know we don't have proof that they were good buddies But we know they were colleagues in the 60s But you know Dr. Makepeace has been dead since 2013 So unfortunately we can't ask him

But we have a few suspects And some pieces of evidence that in my opinion shed some doubt on the police's Cindy faked it all and killed herself theory. And also I want to say about Dr. Makepeace that his supposed theory that the mob was involved makes me suspicious of him. And campers, if you haven't listened to our first 10 episodes of season one of true crime campfire, this is not the first time a perpetrator has blamed the mob. Has tried to blame it on the mob. Because you've got this, and especially in this time period where the mob was the boogeyman.

Yeah, absolutely. Like, they were, they were the, they were the shadow outside your door. Yeah. And so, and so. Why would it be the mob? And why would you even suggest such a crazy thing? No. Like, that's absurd.

And he supposedly came to believe later on that she had multiple personalities. But again, that makes me suspicious of him, too. Yeah. He was a psychiatrist. He lived with her for 17 years. Yeah. Why would you not have noticed something? You're not a very good psychiatrist, are you?

Supposedly, he was cleared. But again, RCMP. I'm not super impressed with the job they did on this. The Mounties usually do a good job. Yeah. I'm, I'm baffled on this one. Yeah. So, all right. So that's, that's my case. Katie, prove me wrong, girl. Okay. Okay. So I like to call this segment, why I think Cindy James did it to herself a treatise. It's a very succinct title. So number one is Cindy's behavior. Why would she withhold information after the police were already investigating. That doesn't make much sense to me because the guy was obviously, or girl, I suppose, the perpetrator was obviously monitoring her and would know that the police were

watching. Why wouldn't he hit the panic button and do whatever he was threatening to do? That doesn't make any sense to me. And after she was, you know, reassured by the police, why wouldn't she just tell them, hey, it's so-and-so? Yeah, fair point. I mean, her argument obviously was that, oh, they'll be threatened my family. But yeah, I mean, at some point over six and a half years, you would think surely she'd break, right? Yeah. Number two is one of the points that Whitney made is the phone calls. When people were present for these calls, they were just hang-ups.

This says to me that the caller either knew they were people in the house or was afraid a witness would recognize their voice. Both of those suggests that either somebody was watching the house or Cindy was working with somebody. This is one of my weaker points. I know. But I'm just saying that it doesn't make any sense to me that every time somebody witnessed a phone call, it was a hang-up. Yeah.

Well, and a lot of the calls were hang-ups. But yeah, every now and again, you'd get one of those terrifying. Cindy, you're going to be dead meat. Right. No, thank you. Number three is the fire. Yeah, this is definitely a point in your favor. I'm going to give you this one.

Thank you. It started inside the house and there was no sign of forced entry. And she was out and about that night. admittedly. And the dust on the window was untouched. Yeah, that's a big one. And it also is a strong indicator that this was all her doing is that Cindy was the one that woke Agnes and her husband up. And she claimed that she discovered the fire after walking her dog in the middle of the night. Now, we heard it kind of talked about this. I'm not being stalked. And I hardly ever do that.

And, you know, even when I'm not being socked, I'm carrying pepper spray when I take my dog out. So it doesn't. Yeah, I wouldn't do it either, probably. It just doesn't make sense that why would Cindy, who was supposedly afraid for her life, walking her dog at 2A? To the point where she's asked friends over to stay the night with her she's that scared. Yeah. Yeah. Then we've got the voicemail.

That was clearly the female voice. Yeah. That's, it doesn't make any sense to me. There was never any verifiable forensic. There were no fingerprints. There was nothing found that could indicate that there was an outside source coming after her. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Number six, I'm absolutely on a watch list for this one. You totally are. I found a how-to page on how to tie yourself up the way she did, the hog-tie yourself. And it's not easy. And the website does say this isn't easy, but she could have absolutely done it. She would have had to practice a whole bunch because she could have done it. she, number seven, she had access to all of those pills, one way or the other. Number eight, that creepo cop, Pat McBride, wasn't dating her when the stalking started.

They only started dating after the fact. And it seems unlikely to me that he would have been stalking her before the investigation started. It seems more likely that he met Cindy because of the investigation. Yeah, it's very, you know, one of the odds really that her stalker would, managed to maneuver himself to be her investigators. Now, that is a Hitchcock movie where he was like maneuvering himself. Oh, man. If that is the case, that is creepy as hell.

Oh, my God. Yeah, like, but it is. He really is a compelling suspect for me. He is. Yeah, no. You make a really strong point there, though. Nine. At some points during the six and a half years that this was going on,

Cindy reported seeing more than one person stalking her. At one point, she mentioned seeing as many as three people. Yeah. Now, it's hard to imagine multiple people in being involved in this because of the old adage, you know, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Right, right. Yeah. And also just why would more than one person be motivated, unless I guess it was Ty Hurst and her husband. But then who's the third person, our research assistant? Yeah, yeah. Is it their grad student who's writing your dissertation on this? I don't think the Institutional Review Board would approve that. I don't think they would, no. Now, number 10, people do stuff like this sometimes. Case in point, a woman named Ruth Finley. You guys are such, this is so bananas.

Ruth was a housewife in Wichita, Kansas in the 70s. Interestingly enough, this was while BTK was on the loose in that area. In November of 1978, she reported to the police that she'd been receiving disturbing letters and phone calls. Police looked into it, but nothing came of it. Then, on November 21st, Ruth's husband reported her missing. When they found her later, the same day, Ruth said she was abducted by two unknown men and driven around for four hours until she was able to escape somehow. Somehow. And after that, she kept receiving notes.

Some of them included such beautiful poetry as, The River is searched for the perished. Hors will hate me by men, I will be taken. cherished. Viper thoughts coil round my mind. Torture and agony are unkind. PtK. Eat your heart out, right? Right on. The cops immediately put Ruth under constant surveillance for five weeks and nothing happened. So they called it off. Shades of Cindy's case, right? Absolutely. Nothing except letters happened until 1979. And then one day Ruth showed up at the hospital with knife wounds. One wound came very close to puncturing her kidney, which according to doctors would have been fatal. Wow.

The police went into panic mode. A $3,000 reward for information was offered and the stocking seemed to ramp up again. Telephone wires were cut. A knife was left near Ruth's office with a note addressed to her. The health department was called and she was reported for spreading VD. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

A funeral home was called and informed that she wanted to learn more about their offerings. Oh, creepy. Yeah. Urine and an unignited Molotov cocktail were left. on their porch, front and back, respectively. Oh, my God. Their Christmas wreath was set on fire. Oh, wow.

The poet had a trademark, which was a red bandana, and it was left outside the house a few times. And both hair and firecrackers were left at the mailbox. Hair. Yeah. That's so weird. Eggs and feces were also thrown at the house. Oh, charming.

Now, some people theorized that BTK was the culprit, but this wasn't really his MO. No. And also, he's not that good a poet. he wishes he could write a poem like that was i mean yeah that was at least rind he would have killed her by now and yeah cops started secret surveillance on ruth and eventually they caught her putting some of the stalker letters in the mailbox okay so can i interrupt you just for one second yeah this is fascinating but i just want to make a point which irritates the crap out of me which is that the royal canadian mounted police never did this in cindy's case and it would have solved

i think probably solved everything because cindy was always made aware of the police surveillance. They would tell her, okay, we're putting officers on your house. And by the way, there were as many as 14 of these officers in position watching the house, which I think must have been about as subtle as King Kong, lumbering down the street. So I do not imagine that it would have been that hard for a clever stalker to notice that the house was being watched. But if your position is that Cindy is faking all this stuff, then why would you not set up some secret surveillance, don't tell her about it, and Maybe you will catch her in the act like they did with Ruth, but they, for some reason, never thought to do that.

And I genuinely believe it's because they just made up their mind early on that she was faking it, that she was probably mentally ill or trying to get attention. And they really didn't put enough intelligent. And I know people will argue they spent a million dollars over those six and a half years. But it's not about the amount of money. It's about whether you're doing the right things. And that would have been such a simple thing to try. It's a simple solution. And you're completely right.

They really should have done this. And, yeah, if you have 14 officers, if you cut that in half, I'm sure it wouldn't be a million effing dollars. Yeah, seriously. Why do you need 14 people sitting on a house? Right. And, and. Cripes. Ridiculous. Anyway.

And I'll get to this in a second. I'm sorry. Back to Ruth. Yeah, back to Ruth. The police caught her red-handed planting some of the letters. And they uncovered some more evidence as well and some inconsistencies in her story. And eventually, they confronted her. her with all this, and she confessed to staging everything herself. Wow. In the interrogation,

she said, yes, I wish I were dead. I guess I am just crazy. Oh, man. Poor Ruth. They put Ruth into therapy. Good for them. And to her credit, ended up uncovering some pretty hardcore childhood trauma. Yeah. And it turned out she'd also been experiencing some pretty heavy stressors around the time that the stocking started. Her husband was hospitalized for a health scare, the BTK Strangler was prowling around Wichita. That's just not stuff that's going to do well for your psyche. That will get in your head. Absolutely. Yeah.

And so this fake stalking became a bizarre coping mechanism for her kind of as a way to distract herself from the trauma and anxiety and surround herself with law enforcement. Right. With protectors and people who are, you know, saying, oh, we're here for you. Yeah. It kind of makes sense, you know. It does. And it took five years of therapy for Ruth to get to a place of peace.

And she eventually appeared on television. to apologize to the people of Wichita. And that had to take some guts. Oh, totally. And her marriage actually did survive this ordeal. And she was able to keep her job. Damn, people are forgiving in Kansas. Yeah.

And I want to make it clear because I think in any case, I don't believe that Cindy was cognizant of her actions at any point. If, as I believe she did, she did this to herself. Right. So campers, that's my case. I think she either committed suicide or overdosed by accident while staging another attack. Those are my two running theories. Yeah.

And that is all pretty compelling. And, you know, some of it I really can't come up with an argument against. But at the end of the day, I still have a hard time accepting that Cindy did all of this stuff to herself. So I'm starting to think that the real story, as it often does, might lie somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. And so my thinking is, what if Cindy? was actually being harassed, and this is not original to me. Other people have posited this as well. What if she was actually being harassed when all this began? We know there were witnesses to some of the phone calls. We know there were a couple creepy people spotted around

her house. Even if there wasn't anybody talking on the other end of those phone calls, Cindy couldn't call herself because it was the 80s and they didn't have the capacity. She was sitting right there with the cops. She didn't have a cell phone in her hand or anything. Yeah, true. And when the police didn't believe her and the investigation wasn't going anywhere, she could have gotten frustrated and staged some of the harassment attacks. And that phone called to Roy Makepeace that sounds like a woman's voice to get the interest back in the case. That's exactly what I'm thinking.

And there's enough evidence to convince me that her body was very likely dumped in the yard of that abandoned house. Her clean feet, the lack of anything, you know, drug kind of paraphernalia, syringes, pill bottles, anything. Again, I don't think you'd dry. I swallow 80 pills. And then there's that forensic evidence showing that her body hadn't been there the full two weeks. The fact that nobody noticed her body there until the day she was found, despite where it was found right next to a busy Rosa. I think she was put there. So that means there's got to be another person involved. Right. So did Cindy hide out with a sympathetic party for a week or more of the time she was

missing? Did she accidentally overdose there or commit suicide? It's all. It's hard to imagine this was an accidental overdose since there were such huge doses in her system. Yeah. So if this was self-inflicted, it was probably a suicide. Did this person help her do it, help hog-tie her, then deposit her body in the yard of that abandoned house days later? That's the part that just baffles me, because why would somebody do? Like, you've got a friend who you care about and they said, hey, can I hide out at your house for a few days and you say, sure. and then they either ask you, hey, I'm going to commit suicide.

When I'm dead, can you hog tie me and dump my body in the yard of an abandoned house? So that's option one. By the way, I'm not laughing. I'm laughing at the audacity of that. Right. Yeah, not at the situation. If any of my friends came to me, even my closest friends, I'm putting you, I'm getting you sectioned immediately.

Absolutely. You're calling for help. Absolutely. You don't say, yeah, sure, I'll help you with that most likely. And if you were going to do that, I don't think dumping somebody's body and helping them continue this supposed staging of these attacks, what possible, I mean, could it be that she convinced them that this will show everybody and this will show the police that they wronged me or whatever? I mean, maybe she could, if she were a persuasive enough person, convince a friend to do that, but I would just personally have an awfully hard time dumping the body of someone I care about like that, just in the yard of an abandon. And then why wouldn't there have been some kind of pay phone, anonymous call to the police on day one, saying there's a woman's body, instead of letting her just lay out there and decompose.

I have a hard time imagining that. Now, maybe Cindy hogtied herself, took the drugs herself, and her friend just found her and freaked out and didn't know what to do and dumped her. But again, if she were going to commit suicide in her friend's house where she's hiding out, why would she hogtie herself? And why would she be hiding out? Exactly. None of it just, none of it makes sense. This is all. This is all. And if somebody else did it, why have the, it doesn't make any sense to me. None of it makes me sense. So here's the thing. And this may be far-fetched, but again, everything in this story is.

Yes. So I have a theory of my own that I have not seen anywhere else now. That doesn't mean that somebody else hasn't said it. It just means I haven't seen it anywhere else. And again, it's far-fetched. So you can laugh at me what you want to. I'm not saying I necessarily believe that this is what happened. Okay. Not necessarily. But I don't think. gets completely outside the realm of possibility given the fact that everything in this story is five truckloads of bananas. Okay. So what if Cindy was abducted by the person that had been tormenting her for six and a half years? And I completely agree with what you were saying about because the police weren't taking her seriously, she may have faked some of the attacks to try and keep their interest and ramp up the investigation. But she was perhaps actually being harassed and stalked. What if she was abducted? He held her somewhere at an unknown location

for a week. And during that time, could it be that he continued this process of harassment and gaslighting that he had been working on for years? He had broken her down so badly. She was in such bad shape emotionally. Remember, she said she thought her tormentor's goal was to drive her mad or scare her to death, not to kill her himself. Because he could have killed her any time. He'd put a pairing knife through her hand supposedly according to her. So could it be that during this week or so that Cindy's abductor was holding her captive, he

made these drugs available to her and just goaded her into killing herself? Because I can see somebody getting an injection against her will. According to Cindy, her stalker had injected her before during some of these attacks, but I can't see anybody

being force-fed 80 pills. So if this was a murder, I suspect it was a scenario more like the Michelle Carter case where that high school girl, I think she was, basically goaded her boyfriend into committing suicide. She took someone who was emotionally vulnerable and just kind of goaded him into it, which is really sad. Could it be something like that where Cindy was coerced into doing something that she had already been thinking about doing because she was so exhausted with all of this by someone who had been torturing her for years physically and mentally? Could he have said, I will kill your entire family

if you don't do this. I mean, could this have been his endgame all along, I wonder. I just had a thought. This is an as, like, this is a flash news happening right now. Breaking news, bombshell tonight. So, do not, do not. Please, God, don't do the Nancy Grace impression, Whitney. I'm begging you.

You promised. So what if, what's his name? This is where you get to find out campers and I'm horrible with names. What's the ex-boyfriend's name? No, no, the cop boyfriend's name. Pat McBride. Pat McBride. What if Pat McBride accidentally killed her?

Okay. And then... I'm listening. Staged it. Uh-huh. Because he knows all this has been going on, whether it was real or whether it wasn't. Yes, yes, yes. And made it look like...

Wow. Dang. It doesn't explain... It doesn't explain how the pills got into her stomach. Right. But it's a theory. It is. Well, if you had a gun on somebody, you could probably get him to swallow a deals.

And it clearly, like, having a woman in distress, clearly did it for him so it's possible we know for sure he was convicted of assaulting and stalking two other women so it's possible one of whom he said reminded him yeah so it's possible he used the used it to his advantage rather than constructing it beforehand yeah i have never heard anybody suggest that and that is very interesting that definitely could be and two of our other suspects are psychiatrists yeah one of them who worked on mind control experiments with the flippin cia that's that you know I just think anyone that touched M.K. Ultras as a super villain. Yeah.

Immediately. So it sounded maybe just a touch less far-fetched now that somebody might have been gaslighting her and trying to see what she would do if she were harassed and not believed about it for years. I say maybe. I'm not saying I believe it. I'm just saying it's a possibility. It's a theory. Yeah, I think this theory satisfies my fury somewhat.

Like one of those where it was, it was, you know, Pat McBride. Yeah, that's really interesting, actually. Pat McBride using it to his advantage rather than staging it all beforehand. Or, you know, her ex just trying to make her crazy and then it went too far. Right. I still lean towards she did a good chunk of that to herself. Like with the, where the, she was under surveillance and then he found her alone in her house. I can't believe that the guy would have been.

caught with his pants down, you know? Mm-hmm. But this is such a frustrating case. I don't know if you can hear it in my voice campers, but I have been, like, wanting to scream about this for forever. And it's one of those things where you might find yourself flipping back and forth between one theory or another, because when we started talking about this case, I was firmly, she did it herself.

Yeah. And now that actually, just as we have been recording this, I'm now back to, like, I'm now back to, huh, maybe she didn't. So I've been through the same thing I have changed my mind several times Over the years about this case Because I remember seeing it on the old unsolved mysteries Like when it first came out

And just being like, whoa And over the years I've revisited it A number of times I have flipped a number of different times on this case And I'm very much the kind of like Occam's Razor Yes, me too, absolutely Type of like true crime buff

Where I'm like, you know, it's probably The most likely case scenario But it's usually not the you know would play well in a TV movie answer. But sometimes it is. And here's the thing is none of these options are Occam's razor worthy. No, it's all far-fetched. That's what I'm saying.

It's all bizarre. And all of them are fucking terrifying. If she did it to herself, it's terrifying. Yes. It's terrifying. If somebody else did it to her, it's terrifying. Yeah. It's a horrifying, terrifying case.

And Campers, decide for yourselves. Yes. Was Cindy the victim of her own troubled mind? Or has someone gotten away with a brilliant campaign of harassment, gaslighting, and murder? Or a little column A, a little column B. Either way, this story is a real-life nightmare, and I think a perfect Halloween special episode. Please let us know what you think on our social media. We can't wait to hear your theories.

I know you guys are going to have theories about this because everybody does. And we will be starting season two of our show soon. So keep an eye out for that. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. Happy Halloween. And by the way, campers, our sources for this episode will be on our social media, but we'd like to especially thank Robin Warder of the awesome podcast The Trail went cold for turning us on to a Canadian article about the Cindy James case that had a ton of great information in it. He did a great episode on this case a few years ago as well and has some really compelling theories.

I encourage you guys to listen. Absolutely listen. And before we let you go, we want to send a shout out to our Patreon Angel Ashley, who just had a major surgery and is recuperating. Ashley, darling, we hope you feel better really soon. You can follow us on Twitter at TC Campfire, Instagram at True Crime Campfire, and be sure to like our Facebook page. If you want to support the show and get access to extras, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash true crime campfire.