How do you tie your own hands behind your back? That question sat at the center of one of the strangest unsolved deaths in Canadian history — and after a three-month inquest, eighty witnesses, and decades of theories, nobody has ever managed to answer it conclusively.
Seven Years of Terror
Cindy James was a 44-year-old nurse and preschool administrator living in Richmond, British Columbia, a Vancouver suburb. In 1982, four months after she separated from her husband, Dr. Roy Makepeace, a psychiatrist, the harassment began. Threatening phone calls at first — a voice that knew her name, that described things it wanted to do to her. Then notes made from cut-out newspaper letters. Then physical attacks.
Over the next seven years, Cindy reported nearly a hundred separate incidents to the RCMP: prowlers outside her windows, disabled phone lines, broken porch lights, dead cats left in her yard. In October 1984, she was attacked in her carport and found unconscious in her car, partially undressed, with a nylon stocking around her neck and a second one binding her arms and legs, duct tape over her mouth. She survived, but slipped into a coma first.
She changed her name, dyed her car, moved homes, and hired a private investigator, Ozzie Kaban. Even Kaban, working directly for her, found her frustratingly difficult to help — she'd withhold details, stay secretive, behave in ways that didn't match how investigators expected a genuine victim to act. Her mother later suggested a reason: Cindy believed that naming her attacker would put her family in danger, and stayed quiet to protect them.
A Pattern Too Strange to Easily Believe
The incidents kept escalating, and kept following an odd pattern — happening only when police surveillance on her home was lifted, never once during the stretches when up to fourteen officers were watching the property around the clock. That detail alone pushed investigators toward real skepticism.
Other incidents added to the confusion. Once, her friend Agnes Woodcock found her crouched in the garage with a stocking tied around her neck; Cindy said someone had grabbed her from behind, though all she'd seen were white sneakers. Another time, her private investigator heard distress over a two-way radio he'd given her and found her on her floor with a paring knife through her hand. On a separate occasion, a fire broke out in the basement of a home she shared with the Woodcocks while the phone line had been cut; investigators determined the fire had been set from inside, in a way that would have required the culprit to climb through a specific window — yet there was no disturbed dust on the windowsill at all.
Cindy was voluntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for ten weeks after her doctor became concerned she might be suicidal. She told her family, after her release, that she knew more than she was saying — and that she intended to confront her tormentor herself.
An Unusual Suspect, and an Unusual Memory
Her ex-husband, Roy Makepeace, became a serious focus of suspicion over the years, partly fueled by Cindy's own private diary entries accusing him of things like deliberately sabotaging her garden out of resentment. In a strange twist, Cindy underwent hypnotherapy in 1984 and emerged with what she described as a repressed memory: that she'd witnessed Makepeace commit a double murder years earlier, dismembering the victims with an axe. The claim was never substantiated, and how much weight to give a memory recovered under hypnosis remains, to put it mildly, contested. Makepeace was never charged with anything related to Cindy's case.
Disappearance
On May 25, 1989 — six and a half years after the harassment first began — Cindy ran errands, got a makeover at a department store, picked up her paycheck, and chatted with coworkers who noted she seemed in good spirits and said she hadn't experienced anything suspicious in weeks. She stopped at a bank and a grocery store that evening.
She never showed up for the bridge night she'd planned with the Woodcocks. They found her house dark and locked, her car gone. Police located the car at a nearby shopping center parking lot — doors locked, blood on the driver's side door, her wallet's contents scattered beneath it, groceries and a wrapped gift still inside.
Found
Two weeks later, on June 8, 1989, a municipal worker discovered her body in the overgrown yard of an abandoned house, not far from where her car had been found. She was hogtied, hands and feet bound behind her back with rope, a black nylon stocking knotted tightly around her neck. Spray-painted graffiti on the property's fuel tank read "Some bitch died here," with a painted line running from the tank to where her body lay. Inside the abandoned house, another word was spray-painted: "Devil."
An autopsy found a fatal combination of morphine, flurazepam, and diazepam in her system — enough of the sedatives alone, ingested orally, to potentially be fatal, with morphine added on top of that, though investigators couldn't determine conclusively whether it had been injected or also taken orally.
A Question Nobody Could Settle
The RCMP's official conclusion was suicide — that Cindy had drugged herself and then somehow bound her own hands and feet before dying. An expert hired by police during an earlier investigation into one of her attacks had previously concluded it would have been very difficult for her to tie those kinds of knots on herself, a finding that sits uneasily next to the suicide theory.
The coroner's inquest that followed remains one of the longest and most exhaustive in Canadian history — more than three months, over eighty witnesses, detailed testimony on drug toxicology and rope-binding techniques. At the end of it, the jury didn't rule suicide, accident, or homicide. They ruled her death the result of an "unknown event" — a verdict that satisfied almost no one and left the case formally unresolved in every sense.
Cindy's family never accepted the suicide theory. Her father, a former Canadian Air Force lieutenant-colonel, served as the family's spokesperson through years of media coverage, consistently maintaining that his daughter had been murdered and that investigators had focused on proving she'd killed herself rather than seriously pursuing the possibility someone else was responsible.
A Case That's Never Stopped Being Discussed
Cindy James's story was profiled on Unsolved Mysteries in 1991 and has continued generating fresh attention for decades since — true crime podcasts, a 2021 Audible series narrated by actress Pamela Adlon, and ongoing debate among writers and researchers who've revisited the case file. Two books were published on her case in 1991 alone.
What's kept the case alive isn't just the mystery of who, if anyone, was responsible. It's the deeper, harder question underneath it: whether Cindy was a genuine victim of a sustained, sadistic campaign that authorities failed to take seriously, or a deeply troubled woman caught in a psychological crisis of her own making — or, as some who've studied the case closely have suggested, something uncomfortably in between, where both things might have been true at once.
More than three decades later, no one has ever been charged, and the official record still doesn't say what actually happened to her.
Sources
Death of Cindy James — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Cindy_James
Cindy James Mysterious Death in Richmond British Columbia Canada — City Towner https://citytowner.com/cindy-james-death-british-columbia-canada/
"Under Siege": The Troubled Life and Debated Death of Cindy James — The Cutprice Guignol https://thethreepennyguignol.com/2023/06/18/under-siege-the-troubled-life-and-debated-death-of-cindy-james/
The Bizarre Case of Cindy James — Eve Lazarus https://evelazarus.com/the-bizarre-case-of-cindy-james/