I believe society failed my sister, Cindy James, through a lack of proper support over a span of years.

I believe Cindy was a victim—a victim of society’s ignorance and a victim of abuse, unable to know where to turn for help or who to trust or what to do.

During her seven years of terror (she was kidnapped, slashed, stabbed, injected with drugs, nearly strangled, received obscene phone calls and notes, phone lines were slashed, windows were broken and dead cats left in her yard, etc. … All from an unknown perpetrator), Cindy was a distraught individual genuinely fearful for her life. As evidenced in her journal and other writings, she felt trapped, confused, guilty, alienated, angry, ashamed and alone—some police officers didn’t take her harassment seriously and neither did many of the doctors trying to help her.

She was bathed in doubt and humiliation and fear and loneliness. To her journal she shared how vivid images of some of the more frightening things she could not talk about left her feeling “so alone … no one in the universe will ever understand … like I somehow live on a different planet from everyone else. Like I’m existing alongside them but always separate.”

So how on earth do you help a victim such as Cindy when you do not even know what is really going on (the confusion of whether someone has a self-generated problem to begin with or whether circumstances around her could be from an outside source—or both; was Cindy tormenting herself as many people speculated or was her harassment the work of a sadistic perpetrator outside of herself, or maybe some sort of a combination of both)?

How can a case such as Cindy’s be handled effectively?

I have some ideas.

But what do you suggest?

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My Friend
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