Death of Cindy James

Cynthia Elizabeth James (née Hack) was a Vancouver-area pediatric and hospital nurse born June 12, 1944, in Oliver, British Columbia. She married South African psychiatrist Roy Makepeace in 1966; the marriage was later described by her family as troubled, and the couple separated in 1982.

Beginning in September 1982, four months after her separation from Makepeace, James reported the first of approximately 90 incidents to the RCMP over nearly seven years. These included obscene and threatening phone calls, vandalism, break-ins, dead and mutilated animals left at her home, arson, and several violent attacks in which she was found bound, drugged, or injured, often with a nylon stocking around her neck. She hired a private investigator, Ozzie Kaban, and took various self-protective measures, including repainting her car and changing her legal surname from Makepeace to James in 1986. Suspicion at various points fell on her ex-husband Makepeace, who denied involvement and was investigated but never charged. Psychiatric evaluations during this period offered differing diagnoses, including hysterical personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder, and borderline personality disorder, and some detectives came to suspect James was staging the incidents herself.

On May 25, 1989, James picked up her paycheck, shopped at a Safeway, and used a bank ATM in Richmond before she was reported missing that evening by friends Agnes and Tom Woodcock, who found her car abandoned in a shopping center parking lot with blood inside and her belongings scattered nearby. Her home showed no signs of disturbance. On June 8, 1989, a municipal worker discovered her body, hogtied with rope and with a black nylon stocking tied around her neck, in the yard of an abandoned house in Richmond, near graffiti reading "Some bitch died here" and "Devil." An autopsy determined she had died of multiple drug intoxication involving morphine, diazepam, and flurazepam, with roughly ten times a lethal dose of morphine in her bloodstream; the method of morphine administration could not be conclusively determined.

Over the course of the investigation, the RCMP spent an estimated CA$1–1.5 million and were unable to corroborate James's allegations of an outside assailant, leading some investigators to suspect she had fabricated the incidents herself, culminating in a staged suicide. A coroner's inquest held in Burnaby in spring 1990, spanning forty days and more than eighty witnesses, heard testimony from psychiatrists, forensic experts, and family members, including knot expert Robert Chisnall's demonstration that James could have bound herself within the timeframe available before the drugs took effect. The jury was unable to determine whether her death was suicide, homicide, or accident, and the case was formally closed as an "unknown event." James's family has continued to maintain that she was murdered. Her case received extensive media coverage, including a 1991 Unsolved Mysteries segment, two 1991 books, and a 2021 Audible podcast.