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 information.
Last year an American Sheriff in Seattle was quoted as saying, “It’s a very, very small percentage of missing persons cases where it turns out that a crime has been committed. That doesn’t mean we’re not investigating them vigorously, but it has to happen in context.”
These days authorities can use advanced cell technology—something not available in 1989 when Cindy disappeared—(if someone has a mobile phone with a built-in GPS device) to help locate missing persons, but an officer has to assert that the missing person may be in immediate danger before the cell phone provider will release any information that helps officers get a rough location of the customer.
In my sister’s, Cindy James, case, the police stopped searching for her body after May 29, 1989, only four days after she had disappeared. When that bit of news was revealed at the 1990 inquest, I had been stunned—As a grieving sister I had expected they would have searched longer. However, R.C.M.P. had put out a bulletin asking for public assistance to locate her, had checked the nearby airport to see if Cindy left, and had used a hovercraft to search along dikes in case she had drowned or her body had been disposed of there. But unfortunately they did not check in vacant lots and abandoned houses—a place where Cindy’s hog-tied body was eventually found.
Although blood had been found on the driver’s side door handle of her car after she disappeared and she’d had a history of harassment, on June 6, 1989, the Vancouver Sun newspaper stated, “Richmond R.C.M.P. S. Sgt. Ron DeRoon said there has been no trace of the woman since she went missing. He added there is nothing to suggest foul play.” Given Cindy’s history of harassment and wanting to believe Cindy wouldn’t just disappear without saying goodbye, I did not understand how the police could say that. I growled in frustration.
In retrospect, did they think the blood on her car door was normal? Or did they assume she had staged it and gone somewhere to commit suicide?
Later I would learn how ten days before her disappearance and with the help of a friend, Cindy had written a letter to the R.C.M.P. expressing her dissatisfaction with their methods of investigation. (Perhaps I’ll share that letter in an upcoming Blog post.)
Now, if your family member or friend goes missing, there are places you can turn to for help. One Internet site features missing persons in Saskatchewan—but a person has to have been missing for more than six months. Alberta also has a missing persons site—In fact you can find several Canadian missing persons websites. Even Australia has a website for providing information about the ways you can search for a missing person, as does the UK.
Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James
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 a purple clown and a card for Cindy’s upcoming 45th birthday on June 12th and inserted a letter because I wanted her to have something from me when she was found—alive, I hoped:
As I write this letter I am wondering where you are. I so desperately want you to lead a normal life that’s filled with fun and laughter! I’m hoping you will see this card for your birthday and know how very much I love you!!! I don’t know what to write except that my thoughts are with you. I want you to have a pleasant day on your birthday…I’m sending along some hugs so you know how much I care!
I received your letter and I was thrilled. Thanks so much for writing! How I wish whoever is bothering you would stop! You’re a strong woman Cindy and I know you can continue to fight this. It is so frustrating that it makes me want to scream sometimes!
Please take care of yourself! I love you!
I phoned my parents and checked to see everybody was all right. I also wanted to get updates. Each time the news was more depressing, with Dad sounding less hopeful.
Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James
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] were supposed to play bridge with her but she never came home. Her car was found in the parking lot of the shopping centre she frequents. Her purse was inside and her bankbook was underneath the vehicle. I was given the news when I got home from work at 7:30pm. My hubby had to work the night shift so I spent the evening with a coworker, Amy. I’m worried sick about Cindy and I had a hard time sleeping. I can imagine the state of mind Mom is in and I feel I should be there to comfort her. I will fly down at a moments notice. I keep saying to myself… ‘Where are you Cindy? What’s happening?’ Every few minutes I feel like picking up the phone and calling Cindy’s place where I know Mom and the others are. Damn! I wish I knew what was going on! I feel a million miles away. I had a shower and then soaked in the tub, shaved etc. I need to keep busy otherwise the worry consumes me. I missed supper last night but I have had an apple since. Food is no comfort now and it makes me ill to think of eating. I’m wearing a purple T-shirt…Cindy’s favorite color. ‘Where are you Cindy?’
Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James
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 had disappeared or died, and you’d had no clue.
And what if someone else had posted something on my site informing you of what had happened to me.
Now imagine having your beloved disappear…perhaps your sibling, your partner, your parent, a friend or your adult child…and imagine that you don’t hear about it until two days after the fact!
Would you feel ripped off…wishing you had been told sooner!
That’s what happened to me when Cindy disappeared. She went missing on May 25th and I was informed of the fact on the 27th!
I was stunned. Shocked. Especially since I had received a letter from her on the 26th…only the day before.
How could she be missing for two days already I wondered?
And why hadn’t I been told sooner?
It seemed so unreal. My nightmare had begun. Soon enough the layers of Cindy’s life would be exposed, like a defiant, raw onion that was slowly peeled. I was unaware it would take almost two decades to place together the final pieces of her life and death puzzle.
I was naïve and thought, “She’s O.K. She’s somewhere and we’ll find her.” Because she survived attacks in the past, I had felt this time she would pull through also. She had to. She was my sister. She couldn’t die.
In what would become my journey for the truth, my search for details for understanding what happened to Cindy, I would be enlightened in so many ways. I would realize a healthy person is continually gathering facts in many areas of life, continually obtaining a bigger picture of events and a greater understanding of people, unless he is closed minded and rigid, cloaking himself in the prison of his mind.
Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James
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 every day then suddenly the endless tears for so long.
But we have so many happy memories that now we can smile again.
~By Cindy James
I thought about Cindy’s poetry as I trekked in nature this morning…and I ruminated about the fact it was exactly twenty years ago when she disappeared.
Twenty years…it hardly seems possible that it’s been that long already!
And when I returned home I did some gardening (an activity Cindy adored) and realized I wanted to play with the last poem I found in her handwriting.
So here is ‘our’ creation:
It can’t possibly be twenty years
When you were last so near.
I still feel your soft, warm hands
And hear your kind, gentle voice.
Your smile will be forever etched in my memory.
I will always treasure your time spent with me.
In my heart is the place where you will always be.
~By Cindy James and Melanie Hack
(Hugs and kisses, Cindy! …I miss you!)
Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James
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 noticed she was “very relaxed” and was in a “very good” mood and “looked very good.” He listened as she told him, “Something big is going to happen soon. It has been too long.”
The morning after Cindy disappeared, Richard told Constable Jerry Anderson, “We had a mutual feeling and talked that it was due for something else to happen. We wanted to get the heat sensor hooked up as soon as possible because we felt something [perhaps a break-in] was probably going to happen on the weekend. I tried to emphasize positive thoughts with Cindy and that when these attacks etc. occur we are doing something wrong. We have to act as opposed to react and I stressed that to Cindy. We did brainstorming on several occasions. We came up with the idea of a motion detector so we would have some advance warning. That evolved into the heat sensor idea.”
After speaking with Richard, Cindy called Agnes (a friend) to make sure they (Agnes and her husband Tom) hadn’t forgotten about coming over for cards the next night.
“I told her we would be there at 10pm or shortly thereafter. Cindy said she had a lot of shopping to do and she had to put her paycheque in the bank but she would definitely be home by dark. She commented that it was almost dark at the time and I looked at my watch and it was 8:50pm.”
But when Agnes and Tom show up at Cindy’s house the next evening and toot the horn, Cindy won’t come to the window as she usually does…nor will she answer the front door when they knock on it several times. And her car will not be in the driveway either…but will be found parked in front of the bank where she deposited her paycheque earlier that day.
There will be blood on the driver’s door. And Cindy’s bankcard and transaction record will be lying underneath the car—eighteen inches from the driver’s side.
Cindy will be nowhere to be found.
Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James
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 by her window; less than two weeks later a plant room window was broken and her seedlings were trampled; a week later the laundry window was broken; and on May 10th the kitchen window was forced open) with the build up of pressure from those break-ins indicating something was going to happen soon, with Cindy adding that nothing (no phone calls, notes or attempted B&E’s) had happened since May 10th.
After the inquest, my parents came up to the Yukon to visit me, bringing with them all six or so black binders of information and exhibit evidence our lawyer had possession of during the inquest. But it wasn’t until years later, when I went over all the exhibit evidence with a fine-toothed comb for my book research that I scrutinized Cindy’s calendars…including the one for 1989.
For May 23, 1989 Cindy had written in pencil, “Hang-up call at 10:45pm.”
She never told anyone about that call.
Nor did she tell anyone about the hang-up call she received two days later…on the morning of her disappearance.
Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James
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
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James
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 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
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James
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