Stalkers

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[00:01:26] The fact that they don't even have to do anything to completely destroy your sense of well-being and safety. As an article in Scientific American puts it,

[00:01:29] even after the stalking stops, a targeted person can lose the feeling of being safe forever.

[00:01:35] So Ed, you ready to get this started? You ready for season two?

[00:01:38] I'm real ready.

[00:01:39] We're back, baby!

[00:01:40] What are we?

[00:01:41] Scared.

[00:01:42] When are we?

[00:01:43] All the time.

[00:01:44] Turn us, turn us.

[00:01:45] Turn us.

[00:01:46] Turn us.

[00:01:47] Now it is time for... But we've been busy. Ed, what do we have for him? We have a great super long, very mega-sized episode. So whatever you do to build your stamina to listen to podcasts, I would do it. And then also everyone's been asking for Patreon. They've been asking for merch and we've been putting it off because we've been really trying to make sure that it's something that is not prohibitively expensive for you or us

[00:03:03] and that it would provide value for you and us.

[00:03:06] And I think we've figured out a lot of that. feels a little bit more bespoke and a little bit more, you know, of the show and not just some factories somewhere in the world cranking out crap. But yeah, we're really excited. We're glad to be back. Season two scared all the time and we are diving in today with our Valentine's Day themed episode about stalkers.

[00:04:22] So I have never been stalked.

[00:04:24] I hope to never be stalked, but I will he covered me for the rest of the episode. So till next time. Okay. Bye. So no, I'm probably not going to get into it here, but yeah, I've had some shit over the years and don't love it, but I'm definitely not someone you want

[00:05:40] to stalk.

[00:05:41] Yeah.

[00:05:41] Well, it's an uncomfortably common phenomenon.

[00:05:43] I was going to ask you about that.

[00:06:41] like we've had to contact the police. We've had to go through the court system,

[00:06:44] like not just, oh, somebody would text me

[00:06:47] or I turned down their advances

[00:06:49] and they bothered me a few more times.

[00:06:51] Like it was shocking to see how many people

[00:06:53] sharing a dinner table with us were like,

[00:06:56] yep, I'm either actively going through it now

[00:06:58] or here's two or three stories of me going through it

[00:07:00] in the past.

[00:07:01] Yeah, so I don't know,

[00:07:02] maybe it is overrepresented in our friend group.

[00:07:04] I mean, it's certainly possible.

[00:07:06] We work with them.

[00:07:07] We spend time with a lot of ladies intrusive and intimidating behaviors towards a specific person that causes the target to feel harassed, threatened, and fearful, or that a reasonable person would regard as being so. I would agree with that. It's a pretty broad definition in terms of if you're trying to study it though. Oh yes, yeah. And you'd probably want both parties. It's probably really easy to get

[00:08:20] people to tell you how, you know, being stalked felt. Maybe it's too late, you know what I mean? So by the time anyone shows up or what have you so it's difficult to get even more difficult to enforce and it's all bullshit And I think people just need to get better about signing the social contract Don't be a fucking creep stop staring at people from a hundred yards away. You fucking creeps Yeah, and don't stare at them from a hundred and one yards away either. Just don't stare that thing and you don't feel comfortable answering them, you're probably doing something bad or wrong. Yeah. If someone was like, hey, are you just fucking breaking into people's houses and leaving little clues that you were there and then texting them 6,000 times and then threatening people they know

[00:11:02] and family members and shit like that?

[00:11:05] If I asked you that direct question are in their 30s and 40s. Most stalkers are intelligent, many are well educated. Research has specifically pointed out that stalkers who are convicted and who end up in the prison system have higher IQs than most other inmates. And most stalkers meet the diagnostic criteria for at least one mental illness, even if they've

[00:12:21] never been diagnosed.

[00:12:22] And among those mental illnesses that are sounds like a misogynistic stereotype, but is apparently true. These female stalkers will often target people they've met and who have helped them, sometimes psychologists or teachers. I will say I know a couple people and you do too, because we have some shared friends

[00:13:41] who do get fucking, you know, hey,'s just as likely that they've never met. Often in those cases, the victim is a public figure. This is also sometimes defined as the quote, love score in stalker, and is the type of stalker, again, most likely to be a woman.

[00:15:03] The second motivation is a desire to replace him or her. This is what's most often seen in stalkers who target public figures. And in these cases, the stalkers are sometimes the same sex as the victim. Yeah, you see that a lot in Japanese animation. I want to say, is that like the premise of- Wait, do you really-

[00:16:20] I don't know anime that one.

[00:16:21] Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.

[00:16:23] It's a very weirdly popular storyline, almost a trope at this point of like, most dangerous stalkers are people who we already know. Most people are still the most afraid of being targeted by stalkers who are unknown to them, even though that's statistically really unlikely. And I get it. I think those make headlines more though. Like after they killed the person, we went back to their house and there was like photos of them all over their walls and they had made like a skin suit, you know what I mean?

[00:17:42] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:17:43] I think those are the most publicized forms of stalking.

[00:17:45] It's not as often maybe ex-boyfriends and girlfriend's into the motivational categories that we just went over. Kind of have one for each. So one of the most unique stalker stories I found in my research is the story of Rufus Griswold and his target, a guy that you've probably heard of, Ed Garrell and Poe.

[00:19:03] Wow, I will say Rufus Griswold's depictions of Poe in his famous Ludwig article or his memoirs of the author. Wow, so he's like he's intrinsically entwined with Poe for the foreseeable future. Yeah, even Griswold's edition of Poe's writings, which were the first posthumous collection of Poe's writings, remains at the heart of nearly every modern compilation of Poe's

[00:20:25] works. until January 28th, 1843, when the Philadelphia Saturday Museum carried an anonymous review of the poets and poetry of America, and it was fucking brutal. This is a quote from the review. Quote, did anyone read such a nonsense? We never did. And shall hereafter issue everything that bears Rufus Wilmot Griswold's name.

[00:21:43] Mr. G belongs to the class called Todi.

[00:21:47] So he went hard. I mean, overheard in New York, overheard and whatever. But it's just the Algonquin Hotel. Also, where was this storyline in Little Women? Where she's like, I can't sell my shit because it's just a fucking gossip factory. Also, do you think, do you either fuck made the fucking printing press the fucking Gutenberg?

[00:23:00] Do you think Gutenberg was like, this is not

[00:23:02] how I thought this would be used for just diss tracks? after Poe died as Poe went on him in life. Don't write some shit after he died. Grizzly Griswold. Then Grizzly Griswold makes another move. I'm sure it's equally as beta as the first one. It kind of is. It's sneaky though. It's sneaky. He then secures the rights to publish

[00:24:20] a posthumous collection of Poe's works.

[00:24:23] I believe the first posthumous collection of Poe's works. I guess I shouldn't say aw because I don't know for sure, but he kept all of the manuscript stuff that Mrs. Clem sent to him. So that alone was worth more than even 100 or 200 or 500 sets of this book would have been. That's fucking shitty. This guy sucks. And then it gets worse. In October of 1850, Griswold publishes an expanded

[00:25:43] and even nastier account of Poe's life

[00:25:46] in International Monthly Magazine. not including himself in the end to be like, I was also thanked. He also thanked me, acknowledged me in his original works as like, oh, as a muse and a benefactor. Yes, yes. He basically positioned himself as a sincere admirer of Poe's work to make it seem like his approach to Poe was so even-handed because they were friends in life is how he tried

[00:27:02] to present it.

[00:27:03] Yeah, we knew each other.

[00:27:04] He would write me letters regularly being like, what are the, they call the needs not employed. I've never heard of other. It's another, it's a term for people who are just like sitting in their basement writing angry message board screens. That was this guy. I've never heard of this acronym. Although one of the all time great acronyms when I was in Scotland, they them to go from location to location Voting and they would pay them essentially in booze And then they'd like shave their head and shave their mustache put a hat on them And they'd use these drunks like four or five times to go vote at different polling locations And there's a theory that that's what happened to Poe is that he was drunk

[00:29:43] He was stumbling around because there was an election going on as they Shanghai do or whatever. For when someone tricks you into doing something you don't wanna do. Dude, in the 1800s you could do fucking anything. Well that's why I'm not surprised if this guy was able to position himself in such a way where he's like, no I have this letter from Poe that says that I actually wrote all of this. Yeah, well it took decades to unwind a lot of the lies

[00:31:03] around Poe's life and the fact that Griswold

[00:31:05] spread so many lies about Poe's life I want to cover one of the most headline grabbing cases of that era. Well, before we get into the 80s and 90s, I'm just thinking out loud about the rise of Stalker culture. I know there was a couple movies in the 70s, like Play Misty for me, when a stranger calls. That we're all about stalkers and we're all kind of hits at the time.

[00:32:20] Yeah, I mean, even like when did Peeping Tom come out, like 1969 or something?

[00:32:24] Yeah, I think the 70s and 90s on the heels of mostly some celebrity stalking cases. And one of those that I want to cover here is the case of actress Rebecca Schaeffer and her stalker, a guy named Robert John Bardot. And it gets really interesting. Okay.

[00:33:40] Not as delightful a name by any means.

[00:33:42] No.

[00:33:43] Rebecca was not actually Robert John Bardot's first obsession. He's a man after my own heart. True. The minute it gets hard, he's like, nope. Yeah, that's how I stand on many things. But yeah, I don't agree with his stalking policies. So Bartos focused turned to Rebecca Shafer after he spotted her on a CBS sitcom that I've never heard of called My Sister Sam. At this point, Bartos is 19 years old, almost the same age as his 21-year-old victim.

[00:35:02] And he writes her a whole bunch of letters that go unanswered.

[00:35:06] And he eventually comes out to LA and become quote another Hollywood whore. Rebecca told him to leave, but he came back an hour later. He rang the doorbell. Rebecca opened the door. Bartow said, I forgot to give you something and shot her in the chest and she died. Wow, that guy sucks. Yeah. But also how does anyone know his last words? He's spoken about this in like court interviews.

[00:36:21] Yeah, he came up with that after the fact.

[00:36:23] This guy's a pussy.

[00:36:23] There's no way he had a cool line.

[00:36:25] He just, he just did it, then cried in the bushes for a while police department out here that is, their whole thing is celebrity stalkers. So when you call up and you're like, I got a stalker and then you're like, who the fuck are you? And it's basically, if you have a blue check in life, like you're a known commodity and known celebrity, they give you to your own like section of the LAPD or whatever, which is pretty nuts. Well, they certainly had that for celebrities in 1990.

[00:37:42] I don't think they had it for stalking in the 1990s

[00:37:45] because it wasn't a crime yet.

[00:37:46] No, but I'm are lawyers to be like, hey, this is what's happening Here's what's going on blah blah blah. I know like yeah They totally can't do that or you can grieve this lawyer or you can do whatever But then on the east coast where I was a lot of those laws just simply didn't exist or weren't in place And every one of them had to do with personal privacy and protection. Yeah and crap like that

[00:39:02] So yeah, it really is like a California thing same book when he shot John Lennon nine years earlier in 1980. Now, there's all kinds of conspiratorial lore around the killing of John Lennon, the CIA's involvement, and the idea of whether or not Mark David Chapman was kind of brainwashed into doing it and whether or not the catcher in the rye had some trigger phrases in it that were sort of what set him

[00:40:23] off to finally go complete his mission.

[00:40:25] Like a Manchurian candidate, such a way? Or if Barto wrote those letters because he knew something was going to happen that was going to end up with him going to prison, even though he had very little control over it. I don't know. This is Chris's conspiracy corner. Here's why I say this, and here's why it- Gorbachev? What year did she send it? This would have been 82. So it would have been pre-Gorbachev, maybe. Doesn't matter, he was only leader for two years. His fucking, his name was Igor Russia, there you go. Samantha America wrote a letter to Igor Russia. There you go. In 1982, to ask why relations between our countries

[00:43:03] were so tense, her letter was published

[00:43:05] in the Soviet newspaper, P Thunberg and TikTok. People were really starting to question, who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys?

[00:44:20] Why were we in this Cold War?

[00:44:22] What was the point of it?

[00:44:24] And from what I could tell, most of the chance to try to meet Samantha that's not a diagnosis though. To me, that sounds a lot like a lot of words to say the

[00:47:01] plane got flown directly into the ground. Well yeah, I mean, usually you're not going to run and Martin Luther King dead and RFK dead. She wasn't on their level yet, but she was having a really outsized impact for her age. And I think if you wanna look at it from a conspiracy angle, they tried to use Bardo to stop it early. If you believe that MKUltra is real, that they were working on brainwashing people, you could look at this as he was sent

[00:48:21] from one of those programs, sent to kill Samantha,

[00:48:23] and after he failed, he just sort of wandered So I don't know, it's weird. It's very weird. It's very weird that a guy who exhibited a lot of the same behavior as another guy who was thought to be involved the CIA. Carrying the same book. Carrying the same book got obsessed with someone who was a political enemy of the United States in many ways

[00:49:42] who then that person died in another mysterious way.

[00:49:46] Because if he had succeeded, it would have just been, to listen. He should have listened and that should have been a deterrent just like the nukes that Sam Anthesmith was so worried about are used for. True, true. So we covered now two male stalkers, one of whom may have been a secret CIA agent. But of course there have been female stalkers too. Now this case that I want to cover for the third case on this

[00:51:01] episode is a little bit lighter, a little bit shorter. So this is a little one. So she went on a date with a millionaire CEO. Ed Vekola. We got to put it out there. We got to put it out there in the world. That's true. Millionaire CEO, either Ed or Chris. Ed Vekola is CEO of Scared All the Time Enterprises and we are worth $40 million each.

[00:52:21] Yeah, you hear that universe?

[00:52:22] I can't wait to quit my job at broke all the time incorporated. Well, actually, I guess according to both of them, without a kiss, and AIDS becomes obsessed with this CEO. Over the course of a year, she sends. Ed, do you wanna guess how many texts this woman sends this guy over the course of a year? 20,000. 159,000 text messages. I was way off.

[00:53:40] You're so...

[00:53:42] You're way off.

[00:53:43] Sometimes she would send him more than 500 messages

[00:53:47] in one day. decided he wanted to have the receipts. Or maybe he just was, I don't know, I mean, if he's a millionaire CEO, maybe he gets gazillion texts and just doesn't give a shit. Or isn't paying attention. But some of these, oh boy, some of these would make me sit up and pay attention. The one that made headlines, the text that made headlines, is she sent him a text that said,

[00:55:01] "'I'd make sushi out of your kidneys

[00:55:04] in chopsticks out of your hand bones."

[00:55:06] That's some arty fucking army hammer shit. and maybe put screenshots in the notes, but she said, quote, If I removed your skin from your fascia, new text, and then your fascia from your muscles, new text, in your muscles from the fat in organs, new text, and then removed your circulatory system, new text,

[00:56:21] in your muscles from the fat in organs, new'm throwing my phone away and calling the police, right? You know what? I'll say this. Before I got married, I will say modern dating. It's a dance, it's a game. A lot of people don't say what they mean. If nothing else, Jackie Aids was saying exactly what she meant.

[00:57:40] She doesn't beat her on the bush.

[00:57:42] She doesn't beat her on the bush.

[00:57:43] In a way that's kind of nice.

[00:57:44] You know, you don't have to guess.

[00:57:45] She's not waiting three days to text you

[00:57:47] as part of a meal to cook and a bottle of wine to drink. When she got there, the CEO was out of the country, which is probably the only reason she left the eight inch kitchen knife sitting on her front seat instead of using it to make

[00:59:00] her skin suit.

[00:59:01] Instead, she took a bath and was still relaxing in it when the CEO saw her on his security

[00:59:07] cameras and called the highlights. So Ed, we are now halfway through this episode.

[01:00:22] That's so fucking crazy. And second, this segment is going to be long, but only because so many of the details are creepy, fascinating, or just outright insane. So buckle up. So this is the story of a woman named Cindy James. And it starts in a small town named Richmond outside of Vancouver. Cindy graduated from nursing school in 1966 and became the administrator for Blenheim House,

[01:01:45] a preschool for children with behavioral and emotional issues. call and in a menacing whisper someone says I'll get you one night Cindy. At this point she reports the stalkers calls to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This is pre like caller ID and stuff. So it really is just like I have no idea who's breathing. I have no idea who wants to get me. Yeah, correct. 1982. So truly I don't even know if you could star 69 at this point.

[01:03:03] I doubt it.

[01:03:04] I doubt it because it seems like she would Mr. Roy Makepeace, responsible for the stalking. Cindy wasn't so sure. She told some people that Roy wasn't capable of doing something as extreme, but at other times throughout this case, did tell people that he was violently abusive

[01:04:21] during their marriage.

[01:04:22] So the truth of that is a little hazy.

[01:04:24] Roy Make Piacche, do something like that?

[01:04:27] Roy Make P. Oh geez. Here's twist number one. Constable McBride had recently separated from his own wife. Oh shit. So he was like, listen, your, your wife's to get out of here before I fuck two people with a long tick of the law. Like that's basically the, yeah, that's how he was swinging that around shit. So while McBride is living there, now this is fast forward a few weeks.

[01:07:00] So it's still 1982 mid November, 1982.

[01:07:03] McBride later stated he received a the phone lines outside the house had been cut in five different places. And at the same time, Cindy, who had remained friendly enough with Roy McPietche, despite their breakup, would invite him over with McBride present because both men were fascinated

[01:08:25] with what was happening to her and well fascinated to be the only one who can help fix it? Yeah, it's a really dangerous environment for the truth. Yeah. Like things get fuzzy real quick. But just as you're thinking that, it turns out Patrick McBride moved out of Cindy's home

[01:09:40] on December 1st, 1982.

[01:09:43] They didn't break it off completely.

[01:09:44] They continued to date casually and get dinners

[01:09:47] to talk about the Jedi coming out. Yeah, there's a vibe in the air. We're going to find out what happened to Luke Skywalker. Yeah. In January 1983, one of Cindy's work friends from the Blindheim House, this woman, here we go with the names, Agnes Woodcock. That doesn't sound as bad as, that's not bad.

[01:11:00] That sounds like a real name.

[01:11:02] Yes.

[01:11:02] Sounds like a real name more than Make Piece.

[01:11:04] Well, if it's Make Priache in Voodkook, so weird is that the doctors who examined Cindy after this attack found no physical evidence of the sexual assault occurring. But the event was scary enough that on February 1st 1983, Cindy left her home that she'd been in since the beginning of this and moved to a house in West Vancouver, British Columbia.

[01:12:21] Less than a week after moving into this new house, she, whatever. I mean, you could have might as well have just written, you get it. You get it. You get it. What are we doing at this point? You get it. The scariest part of all that is the speed at which she received it. I don't even know how in 1980, whatever, like, are you just sitting outside that house every day until she arrives?

[01:13:40] Like, that's what's crazy.

[01:13:41] It's like, she was into fucking, Nia.

[01:13:43] Yeah.

[01:13:44] So, at this point, Cindy's freaked out enough.

[01:13:47] She's moved three times. coming. But basically, at this point, Cindy James is on the receiving end of a barrage of obscene calls and letters and physical attacks. At least some of those calls are received by Constable Patrick McBride or other various coworkers. But as far as I could tell,

[01:15:01] the only time the caller ever spoke was to Cindy. This goes on for another couple of years. I hope this podcast goes on for a couple of years. I mean, this individual episode, I want people to be like, is this still going? Do they never finish this episode? No, no, this is going to this day. Whenever you're hearing this, it's going to this day. On January 30th, 1984, Aussie Kaban, the private eye Cindy hired,

[01:16:20] overheard some weird noises on a two-way radio

[01:16:23] that he'd given Cindy specifically for,

[01:16:27] you know, call me if you need help.

[01:17:24] find what exactly prompted her change of heart, but the cops interview Roy,

[01:17:27] and he says he's completely innocent.

[01:17:29] But here's the thing that now makes me feel like

[01:17:33] maybe he's hiding something.

[01:17:34] Is it every magazine in his apartment

[01:17:36] had letters cut out of it?

[01:17:38] Ha ha ha.

[01:17:39] No, although Patrick McBride or somebody

[01:17:42] should have looked into that.

[01:17:43] But here's what's so, in Roy Make Peace's head, yes. The first part of what you said is correct. That there are these Canadian mobsters who are committing crimes. They are getting arrested, put in prison. The state is taking their children. Their children are going to Bl don't look over here. Yeah. So it's now the summer of 1984, almost two years into this stalker nightmare. And Cindy's stalker is still just getting started. On July 9th, Cindy's mother, Tilly, stays the night at Cindy's house. And in the middle of the

[01:20:20] night, Tilly wakes up to Cindy's dog, up or harming herself, there's a detail that doesn't make sense. And this time it's that while she is and then someone would hang up. I don't know. What I do know is that in October 1984, Cindy starts to go see a hypnotherapist. Oh no, another hypnotherapist? Yep. No good.

[01:23:00] She starts recounting repressed memories of witnessing a double murder,

[01:23:05] and it takes six months for her to divulge the details.

[01:23:08] It was at a panty hose factory. one time. Yeah. Like that's never once happened. I mean, one of these are so crazy. The stories that, you know, they bring forth from this, this type of therapy. Right. So it probably won't surprise you to know that later in the investigation, it came out that Cindy's sister Melanie was with her on this vacation and had no recollection

[01:24:20] of anything out of the ordinary happening at all.

[01:24:24] Or not to play devil's advocate, my least favorite term in fucking English language. I think there's plenty of evidence in 1981. I only went on one vacation in my entire life with my family, it was to Disney World when I was six. And that was like a fucking four months process of like finding a fucking travel agent and like booking the shit in advance and getting tickets done through a intermediary

[01:25:40] and then like getting a credit card that was, you know,

[01:25:43] big machine, it's like ch-chunk ch-chunk.

[01:25:46] You had to get cashiers, checks to use Okay. August 5th, 1985, Cindy calls the police to report a fire in her home. Authorities found what appeared to be pieces of burnt newspapers scattered across the room in the home where the fire broke out. The next day, Cindy reports another fire and on August 21st, a third fire breaks out in the basement bathroom of her home at about quarter of five in the morning.

[01:27:03] Damn. Now, Cindy claims she had taken her dog out for a walk at 3.15 in the morning

[01:28:06] from her home. She's wearing men's work boots, a single glove, and again a nylon stocking tightly tied around her neck. She's also suffering from hypothermia, and when she was brought to the hospital,

[01:28:12] it was suspected she'd been injected with some sort of tranquilizer. Cindy couldn't remember

[01:28:18] how she got to the ditch where she was found. Her last memory was going to get some lunch, During her stay, a comprehensive psych exam was conducted and this is what the psychologist wrote. Quote, this 41 year old woman on initial assessment was very resistant. She would only answer in one word responses. She refused to discuss a number of topics and would give no eye contact.

[01:29:41] On the second date, her mood was considerably elevated.

[01:29:44] She'd completed the other tests herself and was willing to talk. And for the next two years, all through 87 and 88, the attacks continue, but nothing really new goes down until October 11th, 1988. I don't know, man. This is like, you fucking know who it is. You don't tell doctors for 10 weeks, then you sit through 24 more months of this shit.

[01:31:00] Like, what do you gain from holding on to this information?

[01:31:05] Well, no one knows.

[01:31:07] I get the story. highly unlikely that Cindy would have been able to secure these knots herself. Although we should note he did not say it was impossible. I don't feel hog-tied. I mean, it's gotta be hard to yourself. Gotta be hard. I mean, if she has receipt after receipt after receipt for Nylons, then yeah, it does something to question here. But like, I don't know how you tie yourself up.

[01:32:22] I don't either.

[01:32:23] Is it good for the brain to pretty constantly be passed out?

[01:33:25] Cindy does not seem to be a person who had a smile monster in her life. I think...

[01:33:25] I gotta say, like a friend like Cindy's, it's a friend to have.

[01:33:29] That's, you know, it's like, fuck, it's Cindy again.

[01:33:33] Well, every time you go over to her house, you're either gonna find her unconscious

[01:33:36] or you're gonna find a fire in her basement.

[01:33:38] Yeah, or you're gonna hear an earful about a, you know, perpetrator of crimes

[01:33:44] that she refuses to name, which is gotta get annoying fast if you're suffering eight straight years of being harassed by an invisible man. Is that the term for that an underwriter? I think so, yeah. So they have an underwriter living under her. Hey. I don't know what that buys us, that level of wordplay, but just came in my head. That's just nothing. We're so deep at this point.

[01:35:00] Yeah, we're seven years into this woman's torture.

[01:35:03] On April 8th, a security guard at Richmond General Hospital where Sydney was now employed, appeared. She had planned for her friends Agnes and Tom the Woodcox to come play bridge and spend the night, but they didn't hear from her. So they go order her house to check on her around 10 at night. They find the house locked and Cindy's car a Chevy citation. I don't know. That can't be right.

[01:36:21] The citation was a compact car offered by Chevy underneath the vehicle, and when the cops check her house, they find an orderly, clean, no sign of a struggle. So any potential struggle happened in the car or that parking lot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Couple days later, the life insurance salesman told police he had received a call at his office from a man claiming to be Cindy's father, asking about her life insurance policy.

[01:37:43] This is auto, potentially auto-called.

[01:37:44] Potentially auto-called. But the names, the names in this story. The names are pretty wild, yeah. So Starchuck had the unfortunate fate of discovering Cindy's body in the backyard of an abandoned house in Richmond. Oh no, so she's no longer with us. She's no longer with us. As she'd been found multiple times before,

[01:39:00] her body was hog-tied with a rope in a fetal position

[01:39:04] and a black nylon stocking was bound tightly around her neck. multiple drug intoxication from substantial amounts of morphine, diasepam, and fluorespann. Her toxicology report shows she had 10 times the lethal dose of morphine in her bloodstream, but the method by which the morphine had been administered could not be determined. Now I don't know why if they found a pinprick consistent with hyphenromic needle that they

[01:40:24] don't think that's where it was administered, how long Cindy could have remained functional. And the coroner then decided to hold an inquest to figure out what happened to Cindy James. And it would become the longest and most expensive inquest in the history of British Columbia. We're going back to Satanic Panic again

[01:41:40] with the longest and most expensive in history situation.

[01:41:43] Yeah.

[01:41:44] On the stand, a lot of weird shit comes out. Her father said that she said that either way I'm getting out if it was the police and they were just tired of her fucking shit Then she'd be found in a car crash, you know, it would look like oh she drove off a bridge or whatever Right. I don't think the cops are hogtying her and leaving her in a yard somewhere Right, so it also came out that when she was younger before she met Roy

[01:43:02] Cindy had written letters to her family that she was engaged to someone

[01:44:02] They could have confirmed that story as I'm getting it. Well, if she would ever have named him, but she never...

[01:44:04] Oh yeah, she didn't name him.

[01:44:05] She didn't name him.

[01:44:06] So shortly after her death, Cindy's parents uncovered a horde of various medications in her home,

[01:44:15] including sedatives and anti-psychotic drugs.

[01:44:18] They were all prescribed by her psychiatrists, but for whatever reason,

[01:44:22] Cindy's parents decided to flush all this, the jury was unable to determine whether her cause of death was suicide, homicide, or accidental have family be like, she would never do that. Right. So it is probably best just be like, it's what happened happened. It's beyond the scope of reasonable conclusion in any direction. We can all just sit back and hope she's somewhere better now. Yeah, I have to say, I think I lean towards Cindy suffering

[01:47:03] from some sort of like Munch House and Syndrome,

[01:47:06] but instead of faking an illness, writing her own lance on letters. If you're saying it in that sense, then you have to get rid of that evidence. And it's like, why start a fire for warmth? Then you can start a fire for spectacle. Yeah. I also, I go back and forth on whether or not someone was in on this with her because I feel like, and I obviously I'm presenting all this to you and I'm presenting all this to the listener.

[01:48:22] I've been thinking about it a lot more. So there's a lot to keep track of. But I would say

[01:49:24] I have less faith in a coincidence than I do in faith that they had a partner in this.

[01:49:26] I don't know what, I guess ultimately what we don't know

[01:49:29] is who's the beneficiary of that life insurance.

[01:49:32] True.

[01:49:33] If we knew that, that would inform a lot more

[01:49:36] than if it was fucking Dick Underride

[01:49:39] or whatever his name was.

[01:49:41] He, then it's like, okay, well he was in on it then

[01:49:44] and then he finally got paid. some sort of, you know, kind of like a, either a partner who is doing drugs and doing sexual stuff with her that involves all these knots and ropes, or was she having some sort of mental break? Like I know there's, there's a lot of debate around multiple personality disorder and that kind of stuff, but was she having some kind of break where she was doing this to herself

[01:51:03] as some sort of weird, you know. Well, I don't know how far it was, but nowhere did I see it mentioned that this was like right next door to the store or something. Yeah, but it's also somewhere remote enough that her body wasn't found for six days. Right. So if she did this herself, what I'm saying is she would have had to somehow get to that lot

[01:52:21] and then decided this is where I'm going to inject myself

[01:52:25] with 10 times the surviv possibility here is that, let's say she was doing all this to herself. I guess the other possibility is that she was always drugging herself when she did it,

[01:53:43] or she was always doing it when she was high.

[01:53:46] And this time she hadn like trying to get out of that deal at that time. And being like, listen, I'm a drug addict, I'll take those drugs, but I don't wanna,

[01:55:03] whatever the deal was isn't going through.

[01:55:05] Yeah, I don't know what to make of the deal.

[01:55:07] Yeah, because the, I think that's the real nugget of mystery here is who was that stalker? What did they want from her? Why were they ruining her life? I mean, the scarier version of this story is the version

[01:56:20] where she did have a real stalker or stalkers,

[01:56:22] and it's chilling to think that maybe it ended that day fear tier. Yep. Same. I've never been stalked, but definitely in the top two or three, I agree with you Ed. Definitely top two or three. It could happen. It could have really terrible repercussions. And I wouldn't survive the paranoia. I would be one of those people who, after I was stalked, would never feel normal again. And that's the thing is you would be one of 100% of people.

[01:57:42] That's kind of how it works. I don't believe anyone leaves a significant stalking event or

[01:58:43] We need our relatives to attack the poor woman who's in charge of us. Exactly correct.

[01:58:44] So, yeah, super high in the fear tier.

[01:58:47] This topic hits close to home in a lot of ways, which maybe we'll get into in future

[01:58:52] episodes, but yeah, super fucking high.

[01:58:54] What a way to start the year.

[01:58:56] I'm excited.

[01:58:57] We're back, motherfuckers.

[01:58:59] This is Scared All the Time.

[01:59:00] I'm Chris Kalari.

[01:59:02] And I'm Ed Vekola.

[01:59:03] And we'll see you next time.

[01:59:04] But we better not see you outside our fucking window, so help me.