The Cutprice Guignol

On June 8th, 1989, Gordon Starchuck, a municipal worker of British Columbia, Canada, discovered a body.

The scene was shocking. In the back yard of an abandoned house in Richmond, a woman in her mid-forties had been hogtied with rope, with a black nylon stocking wrapped tightly around her neck. In the crook of her elbow, a small prick in the skin seemed to hint at a recent needle injection. The fuel tank of the house was emblazoned with cold, brutal graffiti that seemed to announce the discovery: some bitch died here.

The body belonged to Cindy James, a forty-four year old Canadian nurse who had been missing for nearly two weeks. For seven years before her death, James had been tormented by a stalker, who had physically assaulted her, invaded her home, and left threatening messages warning her of their murderous intent towards her. She had reported more than ninety instances of harassment from her stalker to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police force, who had spent more than a million dollars trying to get to capture the perpetrator. The discovery her body seemed to point to an obvious conclusion: after evading authorities for the better part of a decade, her stalker had finally escalated to the point of killing his victim.

But her death was, instead, assumed by the RCMP to be an accident or suicide. Because, for the past several years, authorities had begun to suspect James was faking her own stalking – and that her death was actually at her own hand, whether intentional or accidental.

Cindy James was born Cynthia Elizabeth Hack in Oliver, British Columbia, on June 12th, 1944. One of six children, James spent her teenage years studying in Ottawa, and went on to pursue a nursing career in Vancouver when she turned eighteen in 1962; in her private diaries, she made reference to her father’s physical punishment and strictness, and the oppressive atmosphere she felt in her home growing up.

Three years later, James met Roy Makepeace, a psychiatrist originally from South Africa, and the two married shortly afterwards in 1966. Her family had doubts about their relationship, due to the eighteen-year age gap between the two – Makepeace was forty at the time of their marriage, while Cindy was just twenty-two – and the marriage was marked by emotional distance and intermittent physical abuse from Makepeace to James. During this time, James worked at a variety of institutions, starting as a paediatric nurse in Vancouver General Hospital, and eventually taking on a position as team leader at a facility that provided care for children with behavioural issues. Her marriage lasted till the summer of 1982, when the couple separated after a strained and unhappy union – James would later claim Makepeace had thrown a candy dish at her head during an argument, and that he frequently spoke of murdering people with crossbows, which Makepeace denied (though he did admit to slapping James several times over the course of their marriage). Within four months of their separation, James had reported the first instance of harassment.

Initially, the harassment took the form of frequent phone calls from the unknown stalker, beginning on October 7th, 1982. James didn’t go into great detail about the content of these calls, except to say that they were often violent or sexual in nature – sometimes, the caller would simply sit in silence at the other end of the line, the only thing audible being their breathing. Barely a week later, things had escalated – James reported that someone had thrown a rock through the window of her back door and entered her house, though nothing seemed to have been stolen or disturbed.

Pat McBride was the investigating constable for these initial instances of harassment, and James and McBride soon began a romantic relationship – like James, McBride had recently separated from his spouse, and he moved into James’ apartment soon after they began seeing one another. McBride suspected James’ ex-husband, Makepeace, to be the perpetrator, though he denied any involvement in the harassment. Not long after McBride moved in, he discovered Makepeace parked in the alley behind James’ home – when confronted, Makepeace claimed he was trying to catch the perpetrator in the act, and left quickly. Later, McBride and Makepeace would spend evenings together at James’ house, trying to discover the identity of the perpetrator.

In these initial months, the preponderance of evidence was on James’ side when it came to the veracity of her claims. McBride, while he was living with James, claimed to have picked up one of the no-talk calls himself while Cindy was in the room with him – a trace was applied to James’ phone shortly afterwards, and, though the calls did not last long enough for a full trace, they were identified as coming through the Richmond telephone exchange. Downstairs neighbours claimed to have heard strange noises coming from James’ apartment after she had left for work one day, and another neighbour claimed to have witnessed a strange man (who she identified as not being Makepeace) standing outside the house on several occasions. Just before Christmas that year, James found a note outside her house with an undeniably threatening message – MERRY CHRISTMAS, along with a photo of a woman’s corpse laying under a medical sheet.

The first physical attack came less than a month later – on 27th January, 1983, Agnes Woodcock, a colleague of James, came by James’ house to find her unconscious in her freezing backyard with a stocking wrapped around her neck. When she came to, James told Woodcock she had been attacked by a man with a knife when she had been approaching her garage; the man, she claimed, had taken her to the garage, where another man had been waiting. Threatening to kill her sister if she reported the attack, the men then strangled James and sexually assaulted her with a knife.

It was this assault that first began to sew the seeds of doubt in the minds of those investigating her case. Doctors were unable to find injuries concurrent with the sexual assault she claimed to have suffered. David Bowyer-Smith, the lead detective on James’ case, later testified that he believed James was not telling the whole truth, “in fear of herself and her family”. Shortly afterwards, James moved to a new residence in West Vancouver, and then to another in April 1983 when she continued to receive threatening notes at her new address.

James went to great lengths to try and throw her harasser off the scent, and hired the services of private investigator Ozzie Kaban to help keep her safe. She re-painted her car, consistently carried pepper spray, and even began wearing a portable panic button. These developments did little to deter her alleged harasser, though, as the calls continued to James’ home and workplace, and, by the end of the year, James discovered three strangled cats dumped in her yard, bound with rope.

Nearly a year after the first attack, Ozzie Kaban received an urgent call from James in the evening of January 30th, 1984. Arriving at her home, he found the doors locked, and had to kick one in to access her residence – inside, he found her unconscious on her floor, with a paring knife stabbed through her hand, pinning a note reading “NOW YOU MUST DIE CUNT” to her body.

This violent scene was explained by James as the result of an attack from a man who had entered through her front gate and then incapacitated her with a blow to the head. She also reported having a needle inserted into her arm by her attacker; while a needle mark was discovered, no drugs could be identified in James’ body.

Over the following few months, the attacks on James, her property, and her pet dog Heidi increased dramatically. Over the summer of 1984, James reported a number of terrifying incidences to Kaban – a man infiltrating the house and assaulting her dog, notes with sexually explicit photos left in her basement, men posing as police officers turning up on her doorstep, more dead cats dumped in her stairwell, and continued calls to her home and workplace. In July, James claimed to have been attacked while walking her dog one evening by a man in a green van, and was discovered around midnight that evening wandering dazed around her neighbourhood with a stocking tied around her neck, Heidi still wandering the park James said she’d been attacked in.

During this time, James herself suspected Makepeace of being behind the harassment, as did several officers working on the case. He was questioned repeatedly over the course of 1984, and James herself wrote in a private diary that she believed he had deliberately ruined her garden by dumping the dead cats there – her investment in gardening had, at one point, been a point of contention in their marriage, as Makepeace felt it drew attention away from him. While James was in hospital after the July attack, a mysterious man called the front desk to ask about the hospital’s security policies – later, the receptionist confirmed they believed the voice could belong to Makepeace, after hearing a recording of James’ ex-husband.

In October of 1984, James made a shocking confession while under the care of a hypnotherapist – she claimed that she had witnessed a double murder years earlier, the memory seemingly repressed until her hypnosis sessions. Over the next few months, she would reveal more details about this alleged crime – that her ex-husband, Roy Makepeace, had murdered a couple and dismembered them with an axe while the couple were on holiday off the coast of British Columbia.

Authorities launched an investigation into this double murder, and swiftly found holes littered all over James’ story. Her sister, who had been on the trip with her, had noticed nothing unusual during the time of the alleged murder. The cabin where James had located the killings was never discovered, despite extensive exploration by boat around the area, and no missing persons cases were reported in the area that matched with James’ account. During this investigation, James attempted suicide, and was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward.

By the time James returned home, the harassment had, once again, begun in earnest. She received packages containing rotting meat and nylon stockings similar to those found wrapped around James’ neck in the various attacks she had reported. Several fires were started in the basement of James’ property, and detective Gary Foster later testified that he believed they were started by James herself, referring to undisturbed dust and soot on a windowsill that the perpetrator would have had to climb through to access the basement. During this period, James complained of another no-talk call – investigators were able to trace the call, with BC Telephone discovering she had, in this instance, at least, dialled her own number.

Anthony Marcus, a psychologist, was assigned to interview Cindy James about her harassment, and he shared his belief that she had invented the campaign of violence and intimidation carried out against her. He posited the idea that she might have Dissociative Identity Disorder, a disorder characterized by periods of amnesia, and could be unaware that she was the one physically carrying out her own harassment – he stated that “this woman was under siege from whatever source—inside or out”.

It’s worth noting here, though, that Allan Connelly, a psychiatrist who had been treating James since 1983, believed her claims of harassment, though he did believe James was also suffering from mental health issues at the time.

James moved once more at the end of 1985, and, on December 11th, suffered another apparent attack. She was discovered more than five kilometres from her new home, semi-conscious in a ditch at the side of the road, by passing motorists. Once again, her neck was bound with nylon stockings, and she was covered in cuts and bruises and suffering from hypothermia due to the frigid conditions. She claimed to have no memory of what brought her to this state, her last recollection going to a local pharmacy on her lunch break at work. With the new theory put forward by Anthony Marcus, James begun to suspect that police did not believe her.

Her colleague Agnes Woodcock, who had previously discovered James after the first attack, and her husband Tom began staying with Cindy some nights to try and make her feel more comfortable. On April 16th, they were woken to find James pacing the house, claiming to have heard a commottion – shortly afterwards, Tom discovered a fire in the basement, and the phoneline apparently cut after he tried to call the authorities. Upon fleeing the house, Tom claimed to see a man watching the chaos from the other side of the street, but, when confronted, he quickly ran off.

James fell into a deep depression after this incident, refusing to eat and suffering from doubts about her own sanity. She was committed to hospital after Connelly feared she might attempt suicide, and, during an intensive psychological evaluation, he reported James’ profound distress as she described the instances of harassment over the preceding few years, including her fears that she might be perceived as “crazy”. After ten weeks in hospital, she was discharged, and confided in her father that she was withholding information about the stalking – specifically, that she knew who the perpetrators were, but could not divulge their identities for reasons she did not explain.

James returned to work in 1987, and the harassment soon began again – her back window was broken, her porch lightbulbs loosened, and someone had used a glass cutter to make a hole in her basement window, according to James. In later 1998, her ex-husband recieved a number of strange messages referring to Cindy – one calling her “dead meat”, and the other “another grand after we waste the cunt. No more deal”. Makepeace submitted the tapes to his attorney, and they have since be released to the public – many have speculated they sound like a woman trying to disguise her voice.

Within two weeks, Cindy had been attacked again, bound with nylon stockings and hog-tied. An expert hired by the RCMP concluded that it would have been very difficult for James to have tied the knots herself. Several more break-in attempts would take place over the following months into early 1989, with scent dogs coming to mixed conclusions about the presence of an intruder’s scent – in one case, the dogs found a trail leading out of the house, and in another, turned up nothing unusual. James filed a complaint against the RCMP, accusing them of not taking her case seriously and dismissing her suffering – I think it’s worth noting here that the treatment of women within the RCMP was exceptionally poor during this period, and it’s not unfair to suggest that the misogyny that seemed to pervade the service at this time may have influenced cases involving women.

On the evening of May 25th, 1989, the Woodcocks were due to play bridge and spend the night with James. When they arrived at her house, they found it empty, and her car missing; driving around to search for her, they discovered her car in the parking lot of a nearby shopping centre. They reported her missing to the RCMP, who found blood in her abandoned car, along with the contents of her wallet scattered on the ground.

Two weeks later, Cindy James’ body was discovered, hogtied, neck bound with nylon stockings, mirroring previous attacks by her alleged harasser. An autopsy concluded that James had died of multiple drug intoxication from morphine, flurazepam, and diazepam (Valium); at first, a huge amount of diazepam and flurazepam had been orally injested, enough on their own to cause death, and then morphine had been added to the mix – whether through injection or orally, it was difficult to conclude.

An exhaustive, expensive, and extended inquest began into James’ death in 1990, as authorities tried to establish whether her death had been murder, an accident, or a suicide. At forty days, the inquest was the longest in British Columbia history at the time. Over eighty witnesses, including Roy Makepeace, provided evidence to the jurors. Amongst the most interesting revelation was that Cindy’s parents found a significant amount of sedative medication in their daughter’s house after her death, which they disposed of; her sister also found a glass-cutter, a syringe, and saline solution in Cindy’s possession. Knot expert Robert Chisnall also demonstrated how Cindy could have bound herself with the stockings before the sedative effects of the drugs she’d consumed took effect, though this relied on the assumption they were taken orally and not injected.

After seven years of harassment, contradictory evidence, hospital stays, new addresses, and several violent incidences, jurors were tasked with deciding what actually happened to Cindy. Was her harassment faked? Was her death intentional – either by her own hand or her abuser? How much did Cindy really know about what was happening to her? After over a month of evidence, the conclusion was as frustrating as the rest of the case – unable to agree on the outcome, the cause of her death was eventually marked as an “unknown event”. The investigation into Cindy James’ death was officially closed.

In the following years, the case would go on to be covered by a number of outlets, most famously by the true crime hit show Unresolved Mysteries; a regular in the rotation of true crime podcasts, it’s still a hotly-debated case. Over three decades later, the case is as profoundly confusing as it ever was – and Cindy James’ fate is still officially recognized as nothing more than an unknown event.

Further Writing on True Crime:

Disability, Domestic Abuse, and the Death of Lacey Fletcher

The Sex Slave, the BDSM Blog, and the Murder: A Deep Dive into the Delia Day Case

Autassasinophilia, Fetish Forums, and the Early Internet: The Murder of Sharon Lopatka

“In The End, I Watched Him Go”: The Criminal Case of Suicide-Baiting via Internet

The Impossible Case of the Pimlico Poisoning

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(header image via All Things Interesting)