Missing persons cases present an unusual problem for police—it’s not a crime to disappear. And without concrete evidence of a crime or reasonable indication a person has been abducted or harmed (evidence of foul play), police can’t get a search warrant. And without a search warrant they don’t have the opportunity to gather potentially helpful […]

Despite trying hard to live as I did before I was given the news of Cindy’s disappearance in May 1989, I was constantly thinking about Cindy and kept saying to myself, “Cindy, where are you? Are you O.K? Are you hurt? Where are you?” On this 29th day in May of that year, I purchased […]

Twenty years ago, on the day after first hearing Cindy was missing, I made my first entry in my journal relating to her disappearance and ultimate death: Sunday, May 28/89: Yesterday Dad contacted me to say Cindy has been missing since Thursday. Agnes [Cindy’s friend and bus driver at Blenheim House] and Tom [Agnes’s husband] […]

For those of you who read my Blog posts every day, how did it feel yesterday when you checked my Blog postings…and found nothing new for the day? Disappointing? Frustrating? Sad? Did you wonder if I was simply too busy to write? Did you think I was taking time off? What if, like Cindy, I […]

As I mentioned in a previous Blog post, not so long ago I inherited some things from my parents. And tucked away in what was obviously a special box my mother kept, I found several poems in my now deceased sister’s, Cindy James, handwriting. Here is another of that discovered poetry: You made us smile […]

Shortly after 8pm on May 24th, 1989, Richard Johnston (Cindy James’s downstairs border) spent about an hour talking with Cindy about the heat sensor and the impending nurses’ strike. It was the last conversation he ever had with her. Cindy told him she had five glorious days off with four of those days planned. He […]

Once again, let’s look twenty years into the past: After Cindy’s May 1989 death, one of her now deceased friends, Marion, recounted to my parents that Cindy had told her about attempted break-ins in the month leading up to Cindy’s death (on April 9th 1989 Cindy’s alarm was set off and a note was left […]

In July 1982, my sister, Cindy James, separated from her husband and moved into a smallish two-bedroom gray stucco house in Vancouver’s East End. It was in that home’s concrete stairwell that led into the basement directly below her back door wooden steps, that Cindy endured the first of five major physical assaults—she was found […]

Let’s look into my crystal ball and take a peek into the past…into a home on the afternoon of May 20th, 1989 in Richmond, then a suburb of Vancouver on Canada’s west coast… After her 2pm appointment with Dr. Friesen and before bathing and preparing for the 4:30pm arrival of Marion, a friend who will […]

We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand… and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late. ~Marie Beynon Ray Melanie Hack Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend Read an excerpt now TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James