Let’s look into my crystal ball and take a peek into the past…into a home on the afternoon of May 20^th, 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 take her over to her place for dinner, Cindy James cheerfully sits down at her brown-marbled kitchen table, coffee mug beside her, and quickly writes me, her youngest sister, Melanie Hack, a “wee note on beautiful paper.”

That note, written on the purple stationary I gave her for Christmas the previous year, will become exhibit #99 at the inquest into Cindy’s death the following year. It is the last letter she ever writes:

“I’m still being harassed from time to time by someone trying to break in here,” Cindy writes, “but I think we’ve come up with a solution if it doesn’t cost too much. Gord [the husband of Cindy’s friend, Dorene] is going to wire in a sensor [an infra-red detection system; if the outside light bulb is turned off, an alarm will go off] for me so hopefully we’ll know when someone enters the backyard and we can quietly call the police when he’s busy doing his thing. I’m really hopeful we may actually catch him soon. Wouldn’t that be wonderful! I could actually start living a normal life again. I’ve almost forgotten what that feels like. The police have been pretty useless so it would be wonderful to hand him over on a silver platter, so to speak.”

When I, living two-thousand miles away in Whitehorse, Yukon, up near Alaska, receive that letter six days later, I’ll have a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach—I’ll realize Cindy is still enduring harassment.

And when I open her letter and read it, I’ll have no idea that she has, in fact, already disappeared!

And I’ll have no idea she is probably already dead.

Years later I’ll find myself on a quest…a quest to fill in the facts for the years and days that led up to Cindy’s disappearance and death…a quest to find out what really happened to her…a quest for closure.

And it will all lead to the creation of my book titled, “Who Killed My Sister, My Friend?”

Stay tuned for more facts, related to Cindy’s life and death, in my upcoming Blog posts.

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James