Gordon held tight to the jackhammer as it pierced another concrete slab, the vibrations of the drill only intensifying his steadily growing urge to pee. With one last chunk dispersed, he eased off on the grip and signaled to a co worker to take over. It was June nineteen eighty nine and another mild summer's day in Richmond, the coastal
city just south of Vancouver in southwest Canada. Gordon and his co workers had spent the best part of the morning breaking up paving stones outside eighty one hundred Blundell Road in preparation for the laying of a new sidewalk. Looking for a suitable place to take a leak, Gordon spotted an old, derelict house just off the main road
and headed off toward it, ducking him behind. He continued on through the tall grass toward a small wooded area to the side, but was startled by the sight of a woman lying fast asleep on the ground, tucked up like a ball. Gordon turned instinctively to head back out, but something told him to stop and turn around. Looking closer, he realized with horror that the woman's handsome feet had been tied up behind her, and then it hid him with the nauseating rush. She wasn't sleeping at all. She
was dead. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived shortly after to investigate, it didn't take them long to identify the body. Though the skin was significantly discolored and desiccated, there was little doubting that this was the woman they'd spent the last two weeks looking for forty four year
old nurse Cindy James. Back in May, Cindy's car had been found abandoned at the Blundell shopping Center over a mile away, with recently packed groceries on the front seat and a present she'd bought for a friend's son on the back. Some of Cindy's blood was found smeared across the door and her bank cards scattered on the ground underneath the vehicle, suggesting that some kind of a struggle
had taken place. Examining Cindy's body, police found that her blouse had been ripped at the neck and there were buttons missing. Both her hands and feet had been tied together, and a black nylon stocking had been tied tightly around her neck at autopsy, a puncture mark was found on her right arm, likely to have been caused by a needle, but no needles or any other drug paraphernalia was found
anywhere near the body. Cindy's last known movements were traced to a Bank of Montreal deposit machine close to where her car was found, where she was believed to have deposited a check at seven fifty nine pm on the evening of May twenty sixth. She was due to take five days leave from work the day she disappeared, As the coroner confirmed Cindy had most likely died soon after depositing her check at the bank two weeks before her
body was discovered. That it had been found only a short walk from a major road suggested, however, that it had been placed there quite recently, meaning this was almost certainly a murder. But then again, nothing about Cindy's bizarre and tragic story had ever been certain. You're listening to
Unexplained and I'm Richard McClain smith. Cynthia Hack, known as Cindy, was born in Oliver, in the Canadian province of British Columbia in the summer of nineteen forty four to homemaker Matilda and her husband Otto, an education officer in the Canadian military. The couple would go on to have six children, with Cindy being a middle child, before eventually relocating to
Vancouver at seventeen. Cindy, intent on pursuing a career dedicated to helping others, enrolled in a nurse training course at Vancouver General Hospital. It was two years into her course that the by then nineteen year old Cindy paid a visit to the office of doctor Roy Makepeace, the hospital's newly appointed resident in psychiatry. Cindy was working on an assignment about the impact of the contraceptive pill and was hoping to speak to doctor Makepeace about the project. When
the pair met that day. Little could they have known just how much their lives were about to change. The thirty nine year old Matepeace, halfway through his residency, had emigrated to can with his wife and children from South Africa two years previously, and would likely have returned there a few years later had he not met Cindy. As it was. The pair embarked on an affair soon after their first meeting, with Makepeace, eventually ending the relationship with
his wife. The following year. In December nineteen sixty six, Cindy and doctor Makepeace were married. By nineteen eighty one, fifteen years later, Cindy had turned her focus to helping children specifically, and was employed as a team coordinator at Blenhem House, a local facility for children deemed to have emotional and behavioral problems. Having been seemingly happily married for fifteen years, cracks were now beginning to show, as she
routinely informed her colleagues about her increasingly difficult marriage. The following year, Cindy and Roy agreed amicably to separate. A few weeks later, after deciding to put their house on the market, Cindy moved with her beloved dog, Heidi, into a one story bungalow on East fortieth Street, a short
walk from Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery. It was the first time in her life that Cindy had ever lived somewhere on her own, and despite the fact that she shared the building with a couple who rented the basement department below, there was no escaping the sudden shock of loneliness. It was only three months later that the phone calls began. It was late one October evening when Cindy's phone rang Hello,
She'd said expectantly. What came back, as Cindy later explained to police, was a sickening, raspy voice, which proceeded to describe in graphic detail all the ways in which the caller was planning to sexually mutilate her. After slamming the phone down, Cindy claimed it rang again almost immediately, answering it again in the vain hope that it might be some one she knew. She was greeted, this time by the sound of some one breathing heavily into the receiver.
The next day, after another breathe a call, Terrified, Cindy closed all the curtains in her apartment, only to receive another call soon after from the man with the raspy voice. Don't think pulling the drapes means I don't know you're in there, he said, followed by you're dead, Cindy. When Cindy came home a few nights later to find her back window had been smashed, she decided finally to call the police and inform them about all that had happened.
With little evidence to go on, however, the best they could offer was to suggest that she keep a record of any similar calls and to contact them again if she heard anything suspicious outside her apartment. Later that week, Cindy arrived home with her good friend Agnes to find her back door wide open. Too afraid to go in, the pair went straight to Cindy's neighbor next door, who in turn offered to check the apartment for her. After finding nothing untoward, the neighbor told them it was safe
to go in. Agnes had just watched Cindy rush into her bedroom to check that nothing had been stolen when she heard a terrible scream coming from inside the room. Agnes rushed in to find Cindy crying and shaking on her bed, pointing toward the pillow. It had been slashed multiple times by a sharp object. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Pat McBride arrived on the scene twenty minutes later.
After conducting a search of the premises, he sat and listened patiently as an understandably traumatized Cindy detailed everything that had been happening over the last few weeks. She had the sense that the police weren't treating the issue seriously enough, But with no Prince or any other clues as to who was harassing her. All McBride could offer was that
she installed better locks and change her phone number. He also offered to put in a request for patrols to be stepped up in the area, and that he would personally check in on her from time to time. A few days later, he stopped by Cindy's house to install a series of dead bolt locks on her doors. It was only a few days after that that Cindy received the first of her threatening notes, made from crudely cut
and pasted words and images taken from magazines. She claimed it had been left for her on her back porch. When Cindy showed it to McBride, he made the extraordinary decision to move in to Cindy's apartment. Though McBride ostensibly moved into Cindy's flat as a stop gap while looking for a new apartment for himself, the pair soon developed a more personal relationship. McBride's presence, however, did little to stem the tide of harassment, and nor did changing the
phone number. A few weeks after he moved in, McBride returned from work to find Cindy distraught after receiving another disturbing call. A week later, she showed him another note that she'd received, this time left on her car windshield. It depicted a blondhaired woman not too dissimilar to Cindy, cut out from a magazine with her eyes scratched out. McBride learned from a neighbor of Cindy's that she too
was receiving nuisance calls. Another neighbor who lived behind Cindy, informed him that he'd recently seen a man wandering about his garden late at night. The man had bolted when he realized he'd been seen, breaking the garden gate in his haste to get away. Another claimed to have seen a man they didn't recognize coming and going from Cindy's property. It wasn't long before suspicion turned to Cindy's husband, doctor
Roy make Peace. However, when mc bride paid him a visit, he found little reason to suspect him of any wrongdoing. In late November, McBride returned from work with a partner to find Cindy in an agitated state. She'd received another nuisance call in the morning, but when she tried to call the police shortly afterwards, her phone line was dead, McBride took a flashlight and headed out to the junction box by the side of the house. Cindy's line had
been slashed in five different places. The line for the apartment downstairs had been left completely untouched. McBride moved out to the apartment a few days later, but the pair continued to see each other, occasionally, even double dating with doctor Makepeace and a woman he was seeing at the time. Cindy would spend Christmas that year with her husband and
her parents in Vancouver. Any normality offered by the holiday season, however, was soon shattered early in the new year with another series of disturbing calls reported to the police by Cindy. McBride decides to step up the investigation and instructs her telephone company to try and trace the calls. One silent call is traced to an exchange box on the southwest side of Vancouver, closest to Richmond, and another to a different exchange close by. In mid January nineteen eighty three,
McBride witnessed Cindy received one such call for himself. Taking the phone from her hand, he listened in. Aside from the sound of someone breathing, he was able to discern a voice coming from a Tannoi system. The corps was traced to an exchange box close to Vancouver Airport, suggesting a possible lead. It also seemed to rule out Doctor Makepeace, since Cindy had only spoken to him on a phone call minutes before, and there was little chance he could
have driven out to the airport in time. Feeling increasingly exposed, after confiding with Roy and her friends, Cindy makes the decision to move house before things escalate any further. Is there something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals? Better Help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist. Sign up today and start communicating in less than forty eight hours.
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health with the help of an experienced professional. Better Help wants you to start living a happier life today. By late January, with Roy and Cindy's marital home yet to be sold and Cindy struggling to find a suitable apartment, Roy offers to move out of it so Cindy can stay there until she finds a new place. Throughout the misery of the last year, Cindy had often turned to her good friends Agnes and Tom Woodcock for emotional support, even staying with them or having them stay over at
hers whenever she felt especially vulnerable. The Woodcocks, who being a little older than Cindy, thought of her much like a daughter, were only too happy to help and had been devastated by the distress it was clearly causing her. On the evening of January twenty seventh, Cindy called Agnes to ask if she wouldn't mind helping her pack up the apartment in preparation for her move back to forty
first Street. It was shortly after nine thirty p m. When Agnes pulled up to Cindy's apartment and made her way to the front door. When she knocked, however, the place seemed strangely quiet, and there was no sign of Cindy. Thinking her friend might be in the bath, Agnes headed round the back when she heard a pained moan coming
from out of somewhere in the darkness. Racing into the garden, Agnes was horrified to find Cindy slumped in a daze in the stairwell of the basement apartment, with bruises and cuts all over her that were bleeding through her clothes. More shocking still was the black nylon stocking tied so tightly around her neck Agnes couldn't even get her fingers underneath to loosen it. Agnes banged on the basement door where Cindy's neighbor soon appeared similarly shocked by the sight
of it all, running back inside. They returned moments later with a knife and promptly cut the stockings off, and together with Agnes, carried Cindy inside. A severely dazed and confused Cindy fought for breath as Agnes called the emergency services and did her best to calm her friend down. Seeing Cindy more clearly now, Agnes gasped at the sight of her ripped blouse and a tear in her trouser leg,
which was soaked in blood. The police and ambulance services arrived minutes later, just before she is rushed off to hospital, Cindy tells the police that she was attacked while collecting removal boxes from her garage. A Constable val Willicott was left behind to investigate the scene. After getting Agnes and Cindy's neighbor's version of events, Wollicott inspected the garage, having turned on the light. He was surprised to find it full of neatly stacked boxes, with no obvious sign of
a struggle. However, there was a smear of blood on one of the boxes. Walking through the apartment. He also found blood on the bathroom counter still wet, and a chair placed under a cross beam, as if someone had planned to stand on it and hang themselves he thought. Later that evening, Willicott spoke to the doctor who treated Cindy. He confirmed that she had sustained multiple injuries from bruises to cuts on her arms, back and legs, but there is something unusual about the way in which many of
the cuts appear to run parallel to each other. Having taken it all into account, Willicott concludes that Cindy had done it all to herself. His final report marked it up as a suicide attempt. The chair positioned under the cross beam was later revealed to have been put there arbitrarily by an officer who assisted at the scene. After Willicott's assessment, the case is handed over to veteran detective David Bowia Smythe, who is unconvinced that it was an
attempted suicide. The following afternoon, having spent the night in hospital, Cindy arrived at oak Ridge Police Station to give her version of events. As Cindy went on to explain, shortly after speaking to Agnes on the phone, she'd gone out to the garage to collect some removal boxes. Once there, she switched on the light and took as many boxes as she could carry back to the apartment before returning to collect some more. But when she came back, she
noticed the light had gone out. She stepped back in to turn it on, and that was when he grabbed her. Keep quiet, or I'll cut her face, he said, grabbing her from behind. After feeling a series of scratches on her arms, she tried to break away, but he held firm, holding a knife out in front of her, taunting her about how he didn't want to cut her throat because it would be too quick. The next second, he was
tying something around her neck. She tried to kick back, but he pushed her to the floor and cut her leg before he got up, suddenly said something like it will take a long time to die, and then disappeared. Struggling to breathe but unable to remove the ligature around her neck, she stumbled toward the door of her neighbor's basement flat. The next thing she remembered was being revived by Agnes. Cindy added that she'd felt a sting on
her arm when she'd been grabbed. When Boia Smythe examined it, he found what appeared to be a needle punch a wound, suggesting the possibility that she'd also been drugged in the attack. Though it seemed unfathomable that Cindy had done all of that to herself, that a colleague had determined that to be the case certainly gave Detective Boia Smythe food for thought. It seemed odd, too, that despite the raft of harassment incidents, nothing incriminating had been found to help nail the suspect.
At the very least, he couldn't help but feel that Cindy was holding something back. In discussing potential suspects, focus inevitably turned to those closest to Cindy, in particular doctor Roy Makepeace. Though Cindy was adamant it wasn't him, Bowia Smythe felt obliged to pay him a visit. After meeting with him the following week, Makepeace was found to have a solid alibi for the night in question. He was
then invited to take a lie detector test. However, the test was voided when it was revealed that he was taking medication that could unfairly affect the result. The following day, Cindy also took a lie detector test. She failed it twice, having been asked if she had inflicted the injuries on herself. However, the analyst is unable to determine whether she'd lied or whether the trauma of the event had made it impossible
to read her emotions. Days later, she contacts the police to inform them that she had withheld information after all, hinting that she had some idea who her attacker was, she hadn't said any more because she was afraid they might attack her friends and family in retaliation. She begged Boya's smythe to drop the investigation entirely, but he declined. In the end, Cindy was told to simply contact them again should anything else happen, and in March, the investigation
into the apparent attack was brought to an end. For Cindy. However, it seemed that things were only just beginning. Within a month, she is contacting the police again to report yet more disturbing phone calls. She moved again to West fourteenth Street in Vancouver and took the opportunity to escape it all by visiting her brother in Indonesia, but within days of her return in August, she is on the phone again to the police. She had received another threatening letter, this
time delivered to her place of work. Welcome back, it said, with the words death, blood, love and hate cut and pasted into it from a magazine. A month after that, she called the police again to inform them that she'd found a dead cat strung up in her back garden. There was another note too that said simply You're next. The police again, however, informed her that without finger prints or any other incriminating information, there was nothing they could do.
In her frustration, Cindy turned to Pat McBride, who she continued to date on and off since he moved out of her apartment the previous year. Unable to devote more time himself, he instead put her in touch with his friend, private investigator Ozzy Caban. After learning about Cindy's troubles, the amiable Caban is left utterly bemused by the police's in action. He reass shored Cindy that come what may, they would
find her attacker. He began by installing a burglar alarm at her property and setting her up with a two way radio as well as a panic alarm should she ever need immediate assistance. It wasn't long before she used it. Shortly after the new year, Coban was in his office wrapping up for the evening when the two way radio crackled into life. Through violent bursts of static, he could hear what sounded like some kind of struggle taking place.
Within minutes, he was in his car and racing towards Cindy's home When he pulled up outside her apartment moments later, he saw the lights were on, but when he knocked on the door, there was no reply. He tried the radio again, imploring Cindy to pick up, but there was nothing but dead air in response. Heading into the back garden, he spotted her through a side window, lying completely still, faced down on the kitchen floor. Kaban radioed for the police,
then quickly made his way to the back door. Smashing his way inside, he found Cindy unconscious, with once again a pair of black nylon stockings tied tightly around her neck. Perhaps more shocking, however, was that a pairing knife had been stabbed right through her hand, pinning a bloody note into her palm which read now you must die. Followed by a four letter expletive. After being rushed to hospital, Cindy eventually came round where she was met by detectives
eager to find out exactly what had happened. As Cindy went on to explain, she'd been preparing food in the kitchen when she saw someone approaching the back door. Thinking it was her neighbor, she opened the door to greet them, only to find it was actually a complete stranger. The last thing she remembered was seeing something heavy in their hand, and then finding herself on the ground feeling a needle
going into her arm. Back at Cindy's apartment, Royal, Canadian Mounted Police searched her property for any sign of an intruder, but found nothing to suggest that she'd been anything other
than alone until the band had found her. One officer would later note that a series of circular blood smear patterns found on the kitchen floor suggested that at some point before Cindy was found someone had tried to clean up the blood, as they also noted never in ten years had they ever investigated a crime scene where an assailant had made attempts to clear up the blood. For many in the police department. It was just yet more evidence that Cindy's case might not be all that it seemed.
Due to the severity of the possible crime, however, it was decided to give Cindy another lie detective test. When asked if she was her own stalker, Cindy replied emphatically that she wasn't and was judged to be telling the truth. When asked if she wrote the offensive note to herself and stabbed it into her own hand, she again said no,
and was again judged to be telling the truth. The result was little consolation for Cindy and her family and friends, however, who remained convinced that a violent attacker was still at large. For the experienced private investigator Ozzi Kaban, who had by then become a close confidante of Cindy's, it was simply absurd to think that she could possibly be doing it
all to herself. Kaban was left in no doubt that Cindy's life was still very much in danger, and if they couldn't find the culprit soon, something even more terrible was going to happen. You've been listening to Unexplained Season five, Episode two, Endgame, Part one of three Part two would be released next Friday, October second. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now do
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