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 stabbed and choking the following January.
In the interim Cindy had endured threatening phone calls and letters from an unknown perpetrator. Those calls and letters continued throughout 1983 and were accompanied by dead cats left around her yard. In October her garden was vandalized and the following month she received dead yellow flowers with a card that read “Are you ready to die”.
Five days later Cindy hired Ozzie Kaban, a former auxiliary RCMP officer now running his own security business, to provide security, in his words at the 1990 inquest, to “a very frightened lady.”
Throughout those seven years of harassment leading to her May 1989 death, Cindy’s fearful withholding of information and evasion of questions and the lack of physical evidence for a third party involvement led the police to an assumption she was orchestrating the acts against herself. But to some family members and friends during those years Cindy mentioned things like, “When it’s all over I’ll explain it to you, but I can’t right now,” insinuating that Cindy knew who was tormenting her but had chosen not to talk about it.
Had Cindy seen something that she shouldn’t have or perhaps had heard something she wasn’t supposed to?
On August 6, 1992, three years after her disappearance and death, a newspaper wrote, “Kaban said the last time James talked to him shortly before she went missing she told him, ‘I am prepared to talk and prepared to fight.’
‘And if the perpetrator heard her say this the next thing they would have done would be to do away with her,’ he said.”
And when peering into the camera for his interview for the TV show A Day in the Life, for a segment that focused on Cindy’s life and death, Ozzie said, “On approximately May 22nd she visited me in my office. At that point she told me that she was prepared to give me information that she had not given me before. She was prepared to talk and prepared to fight. Approximately three to four days later she disappeared.” So I assume she never gave Ozzie the information he was referring to, since he didn’t elaborate.
Did Cindy’s death scenario involve her as some sort of a whistle blower who was silenced just before she could reveal the truth?
Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James