So, as stated in a previous Blog:

… How do you help a victim like my sister, Cindy James?

I would think that first of all we would have needed to firmly establish, with documented irrefutable proof, whether Cindy was indeed orchestrating some of her harassment or not. That’s where I believe 24-hour surveillance on Cindy and her premise would have been crucial!

If only the police had bit the bullet and provided intense 24-hr surveillance of Cindy, for as long as necessary, until the perpetrator was caught.

If surveillance had proved Cindy was doing some of those things to herself, maybe she would have been willing to receive the psychiatric help she needed, once confronted with the evidence. And, doctors would have also needed to establish if any of her symptoms were the result of some combination of medication side effects, sleep deprivation or physical illness.

Even if we were, for the sake of argument, to put a clinical label on Cindy (and say maybe she was mentally ill with DID—Dissociative Identity Disorder, or Borderline personality, or PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or whatever), for Cindy, her terror, her amnesia, her confusion and her walling off of feelings were real and she needed help!

And even if surveillance had caught her “in the act”, do you think that means she did all the harassment against herself? (What about when she was in the presence of other people, such as Agnes, when her phone lines were cut? Or how about the fact that a police officer was with Cindy when a harassing call came in?)

It isn’t that cut and dried, is it?

More than anything, it absolutely wrenches at my heart to entertain the thought that someone knew definitively what was going on and didn’t say anything in time to get Cindy the help she deserved but perhaps assisted her in her death instead. (I’ll talk about that theory in another Blog.) That is so distressing to me because beyond any shame, guilt, fear or whatever associated with “the hiding” or “helping” her is the belief Cindy would have been alive today—to hug, to share life’s precious moments with.

But what if the surveillance had proved someone outside of herself was harassing her? …

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