===TRANSCRIPT START===

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And we're kicking off season two with a Valentine's Day celebration. We made a list of every love and heart-related fear we could think of. Getting broken up with, having a heart attack, being alone forever. But none of them had that scared all the time juice. Stalkers though, Stalkers have the juice. To be clear, that's not a compliment to Stalkers. Anything that has juice on this show is detestable in ways that most humans can barely imagine. And Stalkers are some of the lowest of the low. Creeps with no moral compass or code outside of a pursuit of their obsessive desires. Which is why they're so scary. They can be anyone, anywhere, at any time. And once they've got in their head that you're their target, they can be impossible to shake. I actually think that's one of the most insidious things about stalking. The fact that they don't even have to do anything to completely destroy your sense of wellbeing and safety. As an article in Scientific American puts it, even after the stalking stops, a targeted person can lose the feeling of being safe forever. So Ed, you ready to get this started? You ready for season two?

I'm real ready. We're back, baby. What are we? Scared. When are we?

Now it is time for. Scan all the time. Hey, holy shit, we're back.

Season two.

Season two. Ed, oh my God, how have you been?

I am just as terrible as always. Yourself?

Pretty much the same as you know. Well, as Ed knows, the listener doesn't know this, but it is Valentine's Day night and I am cooking a wonderful dinner for my wife, but my bathtub just filled up with poop, with hot poop and pee, as we would say in the fear tier. And Plumber is on the way. So this is a nightmare, but I'm very, very, very excited to be back on the mic and back with all of you guys. It's only been like a month and a half and I feel like we've been gone a year and we've missed you a lot. I feel like you've missed us, but we've been busy. Ed, what do we have for him?

We have a great, super long, very like 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 in 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, and that it would provide value for you and us. And I think we figured out a lot of that. So very soon we'll be showing off some new designs for merch, which is pretty cool. We just need to figure out exactly how to make it. So keep your eyes out for very cool designs that we're excited to share for the merch stuff. And in the Patreon at all, I mean, honestly, it might be around by the time you hear this. So that's happening pretty quickly as well. We're just trying to put the finishing touches on what we think would be cool to do.

Yes. And in keeping with the sort of homemade nature of this show, all of the designs for the merch have been done by Ed himself. I am trying to get him to let me do one. I have an idea for one, but I haven't flexed my graphic design muscles yet, but they're all really great designs. And I think we're going to be offering probably a limited amount of merch, not in terms of numbers, but in terms of things you can get so that it all feels a little bit more bespoke and a little bit more of the show and not just some factory 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. So I have never been stalked. I hope to never be stalked, but I will tell you right now, if anyone out there is thinking about it, I'm probably a great target. I'd be fucked because I think I'm usually pretty aware of my surroundings, but I've never felt that sensation that some people talk about where they feel like they're being watched. Like whatever that sixth sense is, I do not have it. Do you, Ed?

Yeah, I have it. As we've established in the show, I'm not like a blinds open guy. I just assume I'm being watched all the time. Although as a person who might very well be being watched all the time, I think I'm a terrible person to stalk.

Well, that's what I was gonna ask. I feel like you have some personal experience. I don't know how much you wanna talk about it on the show. We could put a call out, we could put a out, because we have a lot of fans.

I don't know if we can say on the show.

We can't say we could put a bulletin out.

Oh geez, first disclaimer of the season. Okay, what do we got here? Hello. What's all this talk about? I thought you would get at least 10 minutes into season two without needing me, but here we are. Anyway, welcome back. I have some errands to run, but Chris said he'd cover me for the rest of the episode.

So till next time.

So no, I'm probably not gonna 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 wanna stalk.

Yeah, well, it's an uncomfortably common phenomenon.

I was gonna ask you about that. It is uncomfortably common, but I do wonder if we are around it a bit more because of our professions outside of podcasting and our friend groups. We're friends with a lot of people in the public eye, public space, and we do hear about it a lot and have had to help out in legal ways and stuff with them. And I wonder if it's maybe more pronounced around us than it is maybe someone else.

Yeah, well, if we stopped stalking all of our friends, there'd probably be a lot less of it.

But we're not implicating ourselves that way.

No, it's purely anecdotal. That's what I was just gonna say. When I started researching this episode, you and I were both with a group of other writers. And out of the eight of us writers, five of them had at least one stalker at some point in the past, and two of them had more than one.

And when we say stalker, we mean-

Stalker.

Steps were taken. We've had to contact the police. We've had to go through the court system. Like not just, oh, somebody would text me or I turned down their advances and they bothered me a few more times. Like it was shocking to see how many people sharing a dinner table with us were like, yup, I'm either actively going through it now or here's two or three stories of me going through it in the past.

Yeah, so I don't know. Maybe it is overrepresented in our friend group. I mean, it's certainly possible.

We work with, we spend time with a lot of ladies who are in the public eye though, so.

True, well, but I mean, and as common as stalking is, part of what's kind of mysterious about it is that it's really only been studied as a social phenomenon. There's a long way to go in any kind of concrete psychological research around the subject. In fact, that Scientific American article I quoted above was published just last summer under the headline, Psychologists Struggle to Explain the Mind of the Stalker. So, some of the reasons that it's a little bit understudied might have to do with the fact that stalking can encompass so many types of insidious behaviors tied to so many different types of motivations. The best definition I could find of stalking broadly was on steadyhealth.com, and they defined it as an intentional pattern of repeated 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 people to tell you how being stalked felt. Maybe it's a little harder to get the other party to agree to that.

Yeah, well, and that definition can include physical stalking, cyberstalking, hacking, make it an unwanted contact, sending gifts to the victim's home or work, burglarizing the victim's home and leaving clues that it was you, all the way up to verbally threatening and or physically assaulting the victim. So that broad spectrum is hard to pin down and study, not to mention the fact that some stalkers, many stalkers, never cross legally punishable lines. That's again, part of what's so insidious about it is like, even our friends we were talking to, it's so hard to get a restraining order. And even if you can get a restraining order, how do you enforce the restraining order?

At the end of the day, it's just a piece of paper. Like it's not creating a real barrier in any way. It's just like, hey, you can't be within a hundred fucking yards of me or whatever. And then there's just the day they decide to do exactly what they shouldn't do. And then a lot of times 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 a social contract. Don't be a fucking creep. Stop staring at people from 100 yards away, you fucking creeps.

Yeah, and don't stare at them from 101 yards away either. Just don't stare. Don't follow people.

Don't bother people, man.

And so not only is it hard to define what exactly you're studying specifically if you're studying stalking. It's also, as you mentioned Ed, it's kind of hard to identify the other side of the equation. The victims are more likely to speak, but it's hard to find perpetrators to study unless those perpetrators have been caught because most stalkers don't self identify as stalkers. If you're trying to do some kind of a psychological study, it's not like you could just put an ad in a college newspaper offering like $200 for three hours of study, stalkers apply at this address.

They're going to think that's a trap. And the reason they're going to think it's a trap, and this goes hand in hand with my social contract, which is if you're doing something, that if someone asks you if you're doing that thing and you don't feel comfortable answering them, you're probably doing something bad or wrong. 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 and family members and shit like that. If I asked you that direct question and you were doing those things, you would not answer me. And by virtue of you not answering me, how do you not know those are the wrong things to do then? You clearly have some issue or else you would just say, yes, I'm doing those. If you were just some sociopath who didn't understand that this was socially unacceptable, you'd be like, oh yeah, I'm doing all those fucking things. It rules. So that's why I do feel like, you know, just like a lot of this would be better if everyone just took a step back and was like, am I doing, am I the bad guy?

Right, which these stalkers are never going to do. Despite the hurdles that psychologists have faced in trying to study the mind of the stalker, what they've determined so far, there's kind of a broad framework of what psychologists have learned about stalkers. None of it is particularly surprising, but so that we have it on the record, here's what we know. Most stalkers 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 never been diagnosed. And among those mental illnesses that are common are psychotic and delusional disorders, but so are cluster B personality disorders, which would include antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder.

I don't even know what half of that shit is.

Well, I mean, half of that shit is the stuff that 99% of the people who live in LA probably have. So both in terms of perpetrators and targets, I think there's a lot of people in LA who suffer from some of those personality disorders. But the last fact psychologists have learned, which will surprise no one, is that male stalkers are four times as common as female stalkers. And male stalkers will have a variety of motivations. The female stalkers that have been studied almost exclusively stalk with the intention of establishing a romantic relationship, which almost 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 who do get fucking, you know, hey, my ex-boyfriend is here with a new girl. I'm going to fucking drive by and see, like I'm going to go to the same restaurant. I'm going to go whatever. Like, yeah, it does seem to always be romance based. It does seem to be like romantic interests, draw them out and to cross lines that they normally wouldn't necessarily. But I don't know if that's just like hell hath no, you know, fury like a scorned woman or something.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Yes, exactly. But anyway, further research into the psychology of stalkers has attempted to break down stalkers' motivations. And I found this presented a few different ways. I think the one that makes the most sense to me is a study called Stalking, Patterns, Motives and Intervention Strategies. According to this study, there's four common motivations to stalk somebody. The first is a delusional belief in romantic destiny. In other words, the stalker believes that they're somehow fated to be in an intimate relationship with their victim. They often believe that the victim is in love with them. The stalker in these cases may know the victim well, but it'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-scorned stalker, and is the type of stalker, again, most likely to be a woman. The second motivation is a desire to reclaim a prior relationship, in which case the stalker believes that they can get their ex-partner back no matter how clear the victim has made it, that they want no contact whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, this is very common in men.

Fucking lame dudes, man. I've met them, I've seen them, I've luckily never been one. Just throw those dudes in a fucking pit.

Here's some dudes you can throw in the pit with them. Motivation number three, a sadistic urge to torment the victim. These are stalkers who victimize former partners and may be motivated by thoughts like you'll never be free of me or if I can't have you, nobody else can either. It is also possible for non-romantically motivated stalkers to fall into this category as well. Again, I think usually with public figures. And then the fourth type of motivation is a psychotic over-identification with the victim and the 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? I don't know anime that well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. It's a very weirdly popular storyline, almost a trope at this point of like, I want to be a J-pop star, and I'm just going to start, basically single white female J-pop stars to take the mantle, or if I remove them, quite literally kill them and replace them type of shit. There's pretty good, pretty harrowing watches in the animated feature world of Japanese animation.

I think my wife is just watching an anime that was about an OBGYN who gets murdered and then comes back to life as a girl he had a crush on or something.

That's the most anime fucking plot I've ever heard.

She was trying to explain it to me and that was kind of my reaction too. I was like, this sounds extremely anime, but I don't really know enough anime to know for sure. But despite all of this study, evidence and categorization that tells us that the 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?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think those are the most publicized forms of stalking. It's not as often maybe ex-boyfriends and girlfriends type of shit.

Well, yeah, I mean the idea of Michael Myers or somebody like that is a lot scarier than like Joe Blow at work who won't leave you alone.

Do you consider Michael Myers a stalker?

Yeah, yeah. In the first movie, he stalks for the first hour of that movie before he actually, well, except for the first couple of minutes that it's the flashback. But in the present day of the movie, he just follows the women around watching them.

That's a stalker for you.

Yeah, and it's very scary, but you're more likely to get put in a trunk by a guy who won't leave you alone at work than a random guy who starts following you around.

Sure.

So with all that in mind, I thought it would be fun for this episode to highlight some of the most unique stalker stories that I came across in my research. And they sort of break down 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, Edgar Allan Poe.

Wow. I will say Rufus Griswold is a name of someone I just... How can you get mad at a Rufus Griswold? It's a very fun name.

I mean, I was going to say to me, he sort of sounds like a Harry Potter villain.

Or a Harry Potter villain. But if he were a Harry Potter's friend, it would be like, oh, Rufus Griswold helped me pass my potions exam or whatever.

Well, Griswold is definitely not the most dangerous stalker in history. But what's crazy about Griswold is that his impact on Poe's legacy is so far beyond what most stalkers could ever dream. And he is a clear case of the motivation of psychotic over-identification with the victim and the desire to replace him or her. And in some ways, Rufus Griswold almost succeeded. He not only gained control of Poe's estate, but according to the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, quote, every biography of Poe written since 1849 has either relied on or been obliged to respond to Griswold's depictions of Poe in his famous Ludwig article or his memoirs of the author.

Wow, so 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 works. So basically, imagine one of your worst enemies, a guy obsessed with every word you write, gets to shape the narrative around your life after you die. That's basically what Rufus Griswold was able to do.

Is that your plan? To re-edit all these episodes to make me look bad in the future?

No, I promise I won't Rufus you. So here's what went down. In 1841, Griswold, who at this point was a failed Baptist minister turned editor, published a poetry anthology called The Poetry and Poets of America. At the time when this was published, Edgar Allan Poe thought of himself as the arbiter of American poetry and basically viewed Griswold as a dilettante. Griswold, for his role in all this, viewed himself as Poe's moral superior. The two crossed paths because of this book that Griswold published, and they did manage to maintain a tenuous professional friendship 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 eschew everything that bears Rufus Wilmot Griswold's name. Mr. G belongs to the class called Toady. So he went hard.

The anonymous review that was definitely written by Poe.

Well, here's the thing. Later on, it turned out that it wasn't really written by Poe, but it was instead written by a friend of his who was more than likely repeating things Poe told him privately. But the damage was already done. Everyone assumed it was Poe. And it's funny. I never knew that much about the publishing world of the mid 1800s, but it seems like basically the entire press apparatus of America was used as a way to like subtweet your enemies basically. You could just print anonymous shit or print stuff under another name and just talk shit about whoever you wanted. And then they would get mad and like skiing with their friends to get back at you.

Yeah, they go to the Algonquin Hotel in New York and like talk shit. It was just the original like overheard at tweet shit. You know what I mean? Overheard in New York, overheard and whatever. But it's just the Algonquin Hotel. Also, where was this like storyline in Little Women? Where she's like, I can't sell my shit because it's just a fucking gossip factory.

Yes.

Also, do you think, who the fuck made the fucking printing press? The fucking Gutenberg?

Yeah.

Do you think Gutenberg was like, this is not how I thought this would be used?

No.

For just diss tracks?

Yeah, basically. Well, the anonymous review caused tension in the relationship between Griswold and Poe. And they began publishing screeds against each other in multiple different papers, sometimes attributed to themselves, sometimes they published these anonymously. And Griswold in particular became obsessed with taking down Poe after he hit a period in his life that was fraught with a bunch of health problems and personal problems and legal problems. And their war of words finally culminated after Poe died when Griswold wrote his obituary under the name Ludwig. It begins, quote, Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. So he went as hard on Poe after Poe died as Poe went on him in life.

Don't write some shit after he died.

Grisly Griswold. Then Grisly 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 a posthumous collection of Poe's works. I believe the first posthumous collection of Poe's works. And he secures these rights by offering Poe's mother-in-law, a woman named Maria Clem, the proceeds of these works. But he never gives her the money.

That sounds right.

Instead, Mrs. Clem received six sets of the two volumes that Griswold published to sell at whatever price she could get for them.

That's so shitty. Hey, hey, eBay these.

Exactly. Yes. That's like somebody coming to you and being like, hey, can I have the rights to your son's entire life's work or whatever? And then, yeah, here, you can go eBay the one that I published of it.

Yeah, you can have the artist proof. That sounds like modern Hollywood.

Truly. And then on top of that, Griswold never gave the manuscript materials back. So he not only made money off of the publication of this book, he also owned all, well, I guess I shouldn't say all 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 and even nastier account of Poe's life in International Monthly Magazine. Almost simultaneously, this article appears as memoir of the author in a third volume of Poe's works. And at this point, Griswold was just making shit up to make Poe seem bad. As the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore notes, no lie was too great for Griswold, no slander too outrageous. In Griswold's version of events, Poe's choice not to return to the University of Virginia became expulsion for wild and reckless behavior. Poe's honorable discharge from the army became desertion. Ed Griswold even went so far as to forge letters from Poe to exaggerate his own role as Poe's benefactor.

Which I will say, if I get a turn out for Poe, but it's funny that you say that, because as soon as you told me this guy had the rights and he was putting out the fucking shit, I was like, there's no version where this guy's not including himself in the end. 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 to present it.

Yes, we knew each other. He would write me letters regularly being like, oh, thank you so much for your notes. I incorporated all of them into whatever in the pendulum. Also, this guy sounds like he could have been the inspiration for The Raven.

Truly.

Knocking on his door, being an asshole, not leaving him alone.

Hovering around, Hark, Griswold at the door, nevermore, nevermore. Yeah, he straight up assassinated Poe's character basically for the first 25 years after Poe was dead.

Quarter century, a quarter century of kicking a dead horse.

At that point in 1875 was when people started taking a second look at a lot of Griswold's accounts.

This dude is just slandering one of America's great poets during the Civil War, is basically what you're saying. In the 1860s, he was presumably... All the other men in town went to fight in the war.

Well, that's probably why it took so long.

Yeah, it seems like what a piece of shit loser.

He really was. He was basically like, what are the... They call the NEETs, not employed something or other. It's a term for people who are just 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 referred to like ship bird people as NEDs, non-educated delinquents.

Okay, NEET stands for not in education, employment or training. So that's basically Griswold was a NEET. He was doing nothing except writing mean letters about Edgar Allan Poe and no one stopped him because we were busy fighting the Civil War.

No, did Edgar Allan Poe die of like mysterious causes?

Yes, he did. I don't know that much about it. He was found basically like in a gutter one morning. And I think he the official cause of death was like alcohol poisoning or possibly he got sick and like died outside.

So there's no evidence to support that his arch nemesis assassinated anything more than his career?

No, but I did hear one really great theory once that Poe was essentially, there was a term for it, but back in the 1800s, during elections, the different parties would sometimes hire guys to go find drunks and get them to go from location to location voting. And they would pay them essentially in booze. And then they'd like shave their head, 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. He was stumbling around because there was an election going on. I don't know if it was local or national, but there was an election going on right at this time. And the theory is that somebody just took him to go do all this. They had no idea who he was. And they just gave him whatever drugs or whatever booze he wanted for like 24 hours. And then just left him outside the way they leave any other bum. And he just died on a bench because some guy was like, you need to go vote for William Rogers Smith 15 times or whatever.

Well, now we could just use the roll call of the dead in towns to do that. Don't you give me that face. So he basically got domestic Shanghied. Do you know the origin of the word Shanghai? To be Shanghied, it's like when they would find guys who were drunk or knocked out from bar fights and stuff and just toss them on a boat, and they would come to on a boat to Shanghai where they were sold into some sort of indentured servitude. So when someone says they Shanghied you or whatever, for when someone tricks you into doing something you don't want to 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 around Poe's life. And the fact that Griswold spread so many lies about Poe's life, even makes modern scholarship on Poe's life complicated and more confusing than it needs to be, because there's always this specter of the fact that there was someone actively trying to like, you know, Poe was not a great guy by all accounts, but it's very hard to kind of separate the wheat from the chaff because he had a guy who spent half of his own life trying to sell his reputation.

He had a J. Jonah Jameson who was like, fuck you, Spider-Man, I'm gonna print whatever I want about you. You're a villain.

Yeah, truly.

Oh, Spider-Man wasn't saving those kids. He was throwing them into the fire. Like, yeah, that's no good.

So of course, Edgar Allan Poe is far from the only celebrity to have a stalker. Actually, the rise of awareness in stalking began in the 80s and 90s, and it centered around a couple cases of celebrity stalkers. 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 were all about stalkers and were all kind of hits at the time.

Yeah, I mean, even like, when did Peeping Tom come out, like 1969 or something?

Yeah, I think the 70s really brought that shit in big time.

Yeah, it's not like people didn't know what stalkers were, but I think there was a kind of mystique around it, and there weren't a lot of laws. It was just sort of like a thing that could happen.

But also it's like you said, I mean, really, like we said it about the 1800s, but you could change your identity with a fucking piece of tape and an X-Acto knife until pretty much the 70s.

Yeah.

Like your driver's license looked about as good as the bookmarks I made for people.

Yeah, I'm just trying to think in popular culture, even going back to like, I'm sure there were movies before this, but Night of the Hunter is 100% a stalker movie. But I don't know if it was considered that at the time. I think what really, in the 70s, you were dealing with a lot of serial killers in the public mind. That's true. I think that probably gave rise to some of it. But the idea of like defining stalking or harassment of that kind as a crime really came in the 80s 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 Schafer and her stalker, a guy named Robert John Bardo. And it gets really interesting.

Not his delightful name by any means.

No. Rebecca was not actually Robert John Bardo's first obsession. His first obsession was a child peace activist named Samantha Smith, who I want you to pin that name because we're going to come back to her later.

The Greta Thunberg of her time?

Literally, you read my mind. I say that later on. He never got to meet Samantha Smith, and he moved on to obsessions with the pop star Tiffany and with Debbie Gibson. He didn't stalk either of them because according to Bardo, he couldn't figure out a feasible way to follow them through New York City. So thank you, dangerous New York City of the early 80s.

But also weird that you can't follow someone on one of the true great grid based cities. It should actually be the easiest city to follow someone.

Well, as we'll see a little bit later on, Bardo also would turn away at the slightest sign of difficulty. He was in some ways not a great stalker.

In those ways, he's a man after my own heart.

The minute it gets hard, he's like, nope.

That's how I stand on many things, but I don't agree with his stalking policies.

So Bardo's focus turned to Rebecca Schafer after he spotted her on a CBS sitcom that I've never heard of called My Sister Sam. At this point, Bardo is 19 years old, almost the same age as his 21-year-old victim, and he writes her a whole bunch of letters that go unanswered. And he eventually comes out to LA to try to get on set on the Warner Brothers lot to meet Rebecca, but security turned him away. And since security turned him away without a fuss, no one ever notified Rebecca that she even had a stalker in the city of Los Angeles. Now, I guess I should say we were just saying that Bardo turned away at the slightest sign that something would be difficult. In this case, unfortunately, he did not. Bardo obtained Rebecca's home address via a detective agency, which in turn had tracked her address down through the California Department of Motor Vehicles. And on July 18, 1989, Bardo confronted Schaeffer at her home, angry that she had appeared in a sex scene in the film Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.

Wow, that's the name of the movie or a TV show?

That was a movie that she was in.

That's a fucking enormous title.

In his eyes, she had lost her innocence 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. Bardo said, I forgot to give you something and shot her in the chest. And she died.

Wow. That guy sucks. But also, how does anyone know his last words?

He's spoken about this in court interviews.

He came up with that after the fact. This guy's a pussy. There's no way he had a cool line. He just did it, then cried in the bushes for a while. Then later when he got caught, he had some time to think. He's like, oh, so I did it cool. I did it cool.

Yeah. I winked.

Yeah, I winked.

So he fled LA after he shot her and wasn't caught until he was spotted in Tucson wandering around aimlessly in traffic. He was arrested, found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. And the case was so big at the time that it actually helped to lead a change in laws that made stalking a crime because until 1990, it wasn't. California was the first state in the union to pass an anti-stalking law.

That tracks.

And eventually the rest of the country followed suit.

We have a friend, a mutual friend, who dealt with a stalker, and they're a celebrity. I'm not going to name any names. But there is a specific kind of unit of the 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, a known celebrity, they give you to your own section of the LAPD or whatever. Which is pretty nuts.

Well, they certainly had that for celebrities in 1990. I don't think they had it for stalking in the 1990s because it wasn't a crime yet.

No, what I'm saying is it's like, what place better than California would be better equipped to be like, you know what we're seeing a lot of and should probably make a law against it, is people coming from other places to be like, I saw you on the fucking boob tube and I think you're a whore now. It's like, okay, well, after 50 of these, we should probably see that this is not going to stop.

Well, and get this, the Screen Actors Guild got involved in lobbying the state to strengthen privacy protections. And the state subsequently restricted the accessibility of personal information, such as your home address, from the DMV.

It's funny when I dealt with some people in a legal matter on the East Coast that I was helping with, I just kept running into stuff where I was like, fuck, if we were in California, this would be illegal. If we were in California, this would be XYZ, because I would call my friends who live here, who are lawyers, to be like, hey, this is what's happening, here's what's going on, blah, blah, blah. And they're 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 and crap like that. So yeah, it really is like a California thing. They really have that shit locked down because of probably the stories you're relaying tonight.

Yeah, but part of the reason I bring up this Robert John Bardo case is if you're at all conspiratorial, there is a very interesting footnote to this case that is, I think, almost more interesting than the case itself. So Ed, if you're up for it, can we take a very strange detour?

Yeah, I'm always interested in people who potentially stalked Oswald.

So when Bardo murdered Schaeffer in 1989, he was carrying a red paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

Oh, just like the dude who killed-

Lenin.

The guy who killed Lenin, yeah.

Yes. Now, if assassins carrying The Catcher in the Rye sounds familiar to you, that's because, as you said, Mark David Chapman was carrying a copy of the exact same book when he shot John Lenin nine years earlier in 1980. Now, there's all kinds of conspiratorial lore around the killing of John Lenin, 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 off to finally go complete his mission.

Like a Manchurian candidate situation?

Like a Manchurian candidate kind of thing. Now, Bardo claimed that his carrying of Catcher in the Rye had nothing to do with Mark David Chapman, but Mark David Chapman later claimed in interviews that Bardo had written him letters in prison before Bardo murdered Schaeffer, in which Bardo was inquiring about what life in prison was like. So, he was in touch.

Hey man, before I go do some shit that will totally put me in prison, does it suck there or is it kind of a vibe?

Yeah, but here's the thing. I wonder if Bardo wrote those letters. Now, I don't know the content of the letters, so I can't say for sure.

I think I just basically gave you one verbatim.

I'm curious if Bardo wrote those letters because he was planning to do something that was going to put him in prison, or if Bardo 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' conspiracy corner.

Here's why I say this, and here's why it's weird. I could believe that the CIA programmed Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon. I don't know that they would have had the same desire to eliminate a relatively unknown actress like Rebecca Schaeffer. No offense, Rebecca Schaeffer, RIP, and God bless.

RIP, God bless.

However, here is where things get weird. Remember how I said Bardo's first obsession was a girl named Samantha Smith?

Yes, the Greta Thunberg.

Have you ever heard of her? Do you know anything about her?

I know Sam Smith.

Different person.

No, I don't know her at all, no.

Samantha Smith is forgotten now, but she was basically the Greta Thunberg of the Cold War. Very long story short, when she was 10 years old in 1982, Sam Smith wrote a letter.

Just definitely call her Samantha Smith.

Samantha Smith. When she was 10 years old, Samantha Smith wrote a letter to the leader of the Soviet Union, who at the time was this guy Yuri Andropov. He was only the leader, I think, for like two years. He came after Buck, who was the...

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 name was Igor Russia.

Samantha America wrote a letter to Igor Russia in 1982 to ask why relations between our countries were so tense. Her letter was published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda, and Andropov actually wrote her back and published that letter as well. His reply ended with an invitation. I invite you, if your parents will let you, to come to our country, the best time being this summer. You will find out about our country, meet with your contemporaries, visit an international children's camp on the sea, and see for yourself in the Soviet Union, everyone is for peace and friendship among peoples. So Samantha gets this reply, goes over to the Soviet Union to visit, and becomes an instant international celebrity. She's a symbol for peace between these two world powers who are at war. She's interviewed on all the late night shows, and in 1984, she even interviewed presidential candidates for Disney. But she's also got a bunch of critics.

No wonder this guy only lasted two years there.

People in the State Department feel that she is being used as a tool to spread Soviet propaganda in America. At worst, people are listening to her.

So she's the original Greta Thunberg and the original TikTok.

And it worked.

Just like the arguments about Greta Thunberg and TikTok.

People were really starting to question, who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Why were we in this Cold War? What was the point of it? And from what I could tell, most of the reason that the State Department hated her was because she didn't want nuclear war. Literally the most controversial thing she said that got people really pissed off was that Soviet and American leaders should exchange granddaughters for two weeks every year because a president, quote, wouldn't want to send a bomb to a country his granddaughter would be visiting.

There's still 50 weeks you can do it.

Sure, but it's the idea, Ed. It's the idea of the social contract. I want to try the social contract. So get this. 1984, the same year Samantha Smith is on TV interviewing presidential candidates, making all this noise about peace, saying Russia is not really so bad, is the same year that Robert John Bardo suddenly gets obsessed with her and heads to Maine to, quote, meet her. Now, we never found out what he wanted to do after they met because Bardo, this is where I was saying he backed off so easily, he bailed on this plan to meet her after he's pulled over by cops in a speeding incident and got really paranoid that people were on to him. So he backed off.

Sure.

He never got the chance to try to meet Samantha Smith again because a few months later in 1985, Samantha and her father die in a really weird plane crash on their way back to Maine.

From where?

They were flying, they weren't flying back from Russia, they were flying from somewhere in the United States, Florida or something.

Okay.

I think they may have been flying back from Disney, but according to Wikipedia, their commuter plane struck some trees about 4,000 feet short of the runway, killing all six passengers and the two crew members on board. Now, interestingly, in the Soviet Union, immediately everybody goes, this is murder, this was foul play, they killed this girl.

Fucking front page of Pravda, murder in Maine.

In the United States, they undertake an investigation.

They arrested 15 trees for their involvement.

The official report did not suggest evidence of foul play, and it was made public. It concluded that, the relatively steep flight path, angle, and speed of the airplane at ground impact precluded the occupants from surviving the accident.

That's not a diagnosis though.

To me, that sounds a lot like a lot of words to say, the plane got flown directly to the ground.

Well, yeah, I mean, usually, you're not gonna run into the trees fucking 50 yards before the runway.

Yeah.

Unless there was a problem with the plane.

It's a little weird. It's a little weird. It was raining that night. The report claims the pilots were inexperienced and that there was an accidental but quote, not uncommon ground radar failure that occurred that night.

There's a lot of shit that could go wrong, did go wrong with arguably one of the most known faces on the planet Earth at that time.

Yes.

I don't know if he was activated necessarily because of any political motivation or if it was just like this guy sees girls on CBS every week or if he sees her face in every newspaper.

No, but what I am saying is if you wanted to look at this through a conspiracy lens, which I do at the moment, I think the CIA wanted her dead. I think they wanted Samantha dead the same way they wanted John Lennon dead 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 want to 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 from one of those programs, sent to kill Samantha, and after he failed, he just sort of wandered around the country, indulging his fucked up brain elsewhere, while the CIA pivoted to a very effective plane crash to deal with Samantha.

I like that theory. I like that theory. The theory works for me in terms of writing a movie about it. I'm looking at the acts, and that all works for me. I should probably say that the thoughts, views and opinions are solely those of Chris Cullari, and not that of the producers of Scared All The Time.

Bardo's dad was also an Air Force officer at Edwards Air Force Base, and a lot of the MKUltra shenanigans are also, I don't know about Edwards Air Force Base specifically, but a lot of MKUltra shenanigans revolve around secret divisions of the Air Force and officers within the Air Force. 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 with 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, who then that person died in another mysterious way. Because if he had succeeded, it would have just been, you know, random guy shoots 10-year-old girl. He's crazy. Just like Mark David Chapman. So, I don't know. Maybe his case just falls under the banner of one of the motivations we cover, delusional belief in romantic destiny. We'll never know because Bardo died in 2007 when he was stabbed 11 times on his way to breakfast in a maximum security prison.

Didn't make any friends there, I guess.

He did not.

I wonder if that's in Mark David Chapman's letter back, which is like, listen, it's not bad, but there are days when you think, you know, you might get stabbed 75,000 times on your way to breakfast. Just, you know, we call that a remote possibility, but I feel like I should mention it in my letter to you because you took time to write me. I'm going to take time to give an honest answer. And yeah, you might end up getting stabbed. The shit's on, on the way to breakfast.

He should have listened. He should have listened.

He should have listened, and that should have been a deterrent, just like the nukes that Samantha Smith 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 episode is a little bit lighter, a little bit shorter. So this is a little, what's it called when you have a little snack between courses?

Apertif.

This is a little aperitif before we dive into a crazy long and very weird story to wrap up this episode. So there have been female stalkers too. They are rare and they almost exclusively fall into the delusional belief in romantic destiny category. I found the story of Jacqueline Aides 33.

I'm sorry.

Jacqueline Aides.

Okay. Just wanted to confirm what I heard.

A-D-E-S.

That could be 80s. 80s.

Jacqueline 80s. We're going to call her Jackie Aides.

Old Jackie Aides.

Old Jackie Aides. She was 33.

She's dead?

No, she's not dead.

Okay. Well, I don't want to be like, you know, shitting on a victim, but since she's a perpetrator, I'll call her Jackie Aides.

She's the perpetrator. This is a female. I wanted to cover at least one female stalker.

No, I understood. Yeah. And there's got to be more than one.

Oh, there's definitely more than one, but this is a wild one. So she went on a date with a millionaire CEO.

Ed Voccola. 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 Voccola is CEO of Scared All The Time Enterprises, and we are worth $40 million each.

Yeah, you hear that, universe? I can't wait to quit my job at Broke All The Time Incorporated.

Well, listen, here's the thing. The fact that you aren't a millionaire is actually good because that means you won't get on what sounds like the worst app in the world, Luxi, which is Tinder for the ultra wealthy.

Wait, hold on. Isn't that just Raya or whatever?

I don't know the difference.

Which one's Tinder for having been on Epstein's plane?

Raya. No, Raya I think is more like very LA and New York focused and very much kind of like celebrities, socialites.

Either one. Yeah, our applications aren't getting fucking seen there anyway. So yeah, we don't know.

So yeah, this isn't a joke. This is actually a real app. This happened in 2017, so 2017, 2018. So this relatively just happened. It's a real app. Jackie Aides went on a date with a millionaire CEO from Luxi. Their date ends according to her without even a kiss. Well, actually, I guess according to both of them, without a kiss. And Aides becomes obsessed with this CEO. Over the course of a year, she sends... Ed, do you want to 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.

You were way off. Sometimes she would send him more than 500 messages in one day. And it's really the texts that make this case notable and kind of hilarious. Many, many, many of these texts were just her repeating, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. Never spelled Y-O-U, always just the letter U. This guy never responded to those messages.

A, never respond, it's just great advice for everybody. B, do you not change your number so that you can get as big a receipt for all these actions as you can? Because part of me is like, after the first 100,000 texts, I'd be like, hey, app, can I change my username? Hey, T-Mobile, I would like a new number or block it, block that shit.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know why the guy never changed his number because I don't think he was getting these messages on the app. I think she had his actual phone number. I don't know. Maybe he at some point 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 and 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 I'd make sushi out of your kidneys and chopsticks out of your hand bones.

That's some Arnie fucking Army Hammer shit.

Which is an objectively hilarious text to send anyone, never mind a guy who is ignoring you for a year.

But also it's like if someone sent me 75 I love yous and then they told me, listen, I leaned on the fucking copy and paste button or whatever. Like, okay, sure. Like that's unlikely, but sure. But yeah, to give you these word jumbles that you definitely can't rely on, a technical glitch did this. Yeah, that's a mistake.

Yeah. In another exchange, she said, and I want you as I read this, I want you to remember that every your is just you are and every and is just the capital letter N. And each of these is its own text message. So here we go. I wish you could see this because it's so much funnier when you could like see it out as text. I'll see if I can find the exchange 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, in your muscles from the fat and organs, new text, and then removed your circulatory system, ahahaha, man, I could have you everywhere, hahahaha, and you'd be so nice to me, new text, it would be so different than this, new text, I'd wear your fascia in the top of your skull, in your hands, in your feet, and you'd be watching me in a taxidermy suit.

Wait, hold on, so the eyes are still his, he keeps those, he has to watch her, but also multiple, I'll remove your circulatory system, am I crazy, I feel like I heard that twice?

Oh, you know what, this may, I may, I might have copy pasted this wrong, I think I might have copy pasted that twice, but she describes in detail removing this man's skin, muscle, fat, organs, circulatory system, and then wearing his skin suit and making him watch.

Yeah, that's fucking crazy, I feel like right there, I'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 Aides was saying exactly what she meant.

She doesn't beat around the bush.

She doesn't beat around the bush in a way that's kind of nice, you know, you don't have to guess, she's not waiting three days to text you as part of a mind game, you go on one date and the next morning you wake up and she's like, I want to turn your butt inside out and wear it as a hat.

Yeah, holy shit, dude, you can make a couple of hats out of my butt, but Jackie Aides doesn't beat around the bush. Jackie Aides tells you, listen, I'm going to trim this bush, I'm going to pull every leaf off, I'm going to strip it of its fucking chloroform.

I'm going to trim this bush?

Only, oh, you heard what you wanted to hear, I am showing that she brings the same level of commitment to her insane texts, like an arborist's fucking whatever. Well, I wish I hadn't said trim bush now, because now it derailed the whole bit.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it was too good.

Everything I do on this show is off the top of the dome, so it's easy to be derailed. That said, is she still around and can I date her?

Well, here's what happened. In April 2018, she broke into the CEO's house. She brought her two dogs with her, as well as 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 her skin suit. Instead, she took a bath and was still relaxing in it when the CEO saw her on his security cameras and called the police. She was arrested on charges of threatening, stalking, and harassment, but still insisted that she had found her true love. In 2020, her charges were dropped due to being ruled mentally incompetent and non-restorable.

What is this? She's not a hard drive.

I know. I assume it means they couldn't help her. They felt like they couldn't fix her mind.

Sure, yeah, like therapy is not gonna make her a productive member of society or make that person any safer, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for better or for worse, I couldn't find exactly what happened to her after the charges were dropped. The last information I found was that she is living with her parents and receiving treatment in Florida, which honestly seems like the perfect state for her to go to.

It's the perfect place for her.

They're just like, sentenced to Florida.

God, I hope a gator gets her. But yeah, so that was good. Those are really fun texts. I almost wonder if, I'm sure there were more, I mean, it's 150,000 more texts where those came from.

Well, yeah, those are just the ones that I found screenshots of. So I'm sure there were, I mean, they are probably the highlights. So, Ed, we are now halfway through this episode.

That's so fucking crazy.

Because I want to end this episode with a stalker story that genuinely creeps me the fuck out. I am a huge fan of the original Unsolved Mysteries television show. I think it's one of the most perfect television shows ever made. And that's where I first saw this case. Although as I researched it, I learned that the Unsolved Mysteries episode really just scratched the surface of how bizarre it got. But this case has always stuck with me both for how strange it is and just how absolutely nightmarish it is. So I want to start with two warnings up front. First, there's one or two really intense claims of sexual violence in this story. We won't dwell on the details, but it's kind of tough to get around mentioning some of them. So if that's a trigger for you, please proceed with caution. Before I actually say any of it later in the story, I will throw up another warning again. 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, a preschool for children with behavioral and emotional issues. She had no children of her own. And in 1982, she and her husband of 16 years, a guy with the for real name of Roy Makepeace separated.

Oh my God, so he couldn't make peace.

The names in this story, there's a bunch of them. We'll hit them later, but my God, the names in this story sound made up. Four months after Cindy and Roy Makepeace separate, Cindy's life begins a long, slow descent into absolute madness. At first, the stalking that she experiences takes the shape of threatening phone calls at her home. On October 11th, Cindy receives a phone call just consisting of loud breathing noises. That's it. Creepy, whatever. The following day, she gets another call, and in a menacing whisper, someone says, I'll get you one night, Cindy. At this point, she reports the stalker's calls to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

This is pre-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.

I doubt it.

I doubt it, because it seems like she would have done that as we get deeper into this story. So at this point, she reports the stalker's calls to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who visit Cindy's home and suggest that she keeps a list of each call and its contents, as well as get an unlisted number. Now, she definitely doesn't get an unlisted number, because this continues. Really, as soon as the RCMP officers leave, Cindy gets a call in which a male voice says, you fucking bitch, I'll get you. The next day, phone rings again, a mysterious caller says, so you think calling the police will keep you safe? You wait, I've got my zipper open. I'm talking to my throbbing. Cindy never heard the rest, because she hung up terrified. Ed, do you want to guess what the end of that sentence might have been?

I don't, I don't, it's not worth it.

Golden Retriever, probably. So the constable investigating Cindy's case, a guy named Patrick McBride, one of the very few normally named people in this story.

He was just named after a wee small bride.

He believed that it was her ex, Mr. Roy Makepeace, responsible for the stalking. Cindy wasn't so sure. She told some people that Roy wasn't capable of doing something this extreme, but at other times throughout this case, did tell people that he was violently abusive during their marriage. So the truth of that is a little hazy.

Roy Makepiace? Do something like that?

Roy Makepiace?

He would never.

Never touch me. On October 20th, so about 10 days after all this started, two tenants who were renting the basement of Cindy's home, she apparently had like a basement apartment, reported to Patrick McBride, the constable, that they heard strange noises upstairs on the main floor after Cindy had left for work. Now, I couldn't find much about the people living in her basement, and if they were ever questioned about any of this, but they don't come up much after this, so I assume they were cleared.

Okay, yeah, no, sure. I mean, it wasn't like one set of froggers heard another set of froggers.

Right, no, there was no frogging going on, I don't think. Around the same time, a next door neighbor told Constable McBride that she had witnessed a man standing outside Cindy's house on at least three different occasions, and at one point, this man entered the gate of the front yard. Now, this neighbor also had lived next door to Cindy for years and insisted that whoever this man was, it was not Roy Makepeace.

Oh, geez.

Here's twist number one. Constable McBride had recently separated from his own wife and moved into Cindy's house on Halloween night, 1982.

Wait, hold on, in the basement?

Or where?

How many rooms she got?

No, he moved in with her. Cindy told her friends that Constable McBride had offered to stay for two weeks to help in case this perp shows up, but in reality, they were banging.

Oh, no. That's gotta be a conflict of interest or the best possible scenario, I don't know.

This is four months, basically, four or five months after she separates from her husband, she's getting a stalker and the police officer investigating the stalker is now banging her and living with her.

That's 24-hour service, 24-hour security service now. Yeah.

Several days after McBride moves in, he finds Roy Makepeace sitting in his parked car in an alleyway behind the house. When questioned, Roy claimed he was trying to catch Cindy's alleged intruder, quote, in the act, and only left after McBride kind of big dogged him and told Roy that he had moved in with his ex-wife.

Oh, shit. So he was like, listen, your wife's to get out of here before I fuck two people with a long dick 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. So it's still 1982, mid-November, 1982. McBride later stated he received a mysterious phone call at the house while Cindy was present, but that the caller on the other end spoke no words. He initially suspected the call might have been made from an airport terminal because he could hear a woman's voice in the background over a public address system. But the call was eventually traced, and I don't know exactly how, but it was eventually traced to an exchange in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, which is where they were living. So it seems like this call was coming from somewhere nearby. Later in November, Cindy found a note pinned to her car windshield that was just a picture of a corpse lying underneath a medical sheet.

Oh.

So pretty frightening.

And this is 82?

This is 82, yeah.

So this is like a Polaroid then. It's not a fucking, it's not like it's not printed on a dot matrix printer. Like this guy had a picture of a corpse.

Well, yeah, or yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, you know, found one somewhere.

Yeah, he didn't leave a floppy disk being like, hey, look at this.

No, on November 28th, McBride, the constable, observed that 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 McPiache despite their breakup, would invite him over with McBride present because both men were fascinated with what was happening to her. And, well, fascinated is maybe the wrong word, but they were both concerned about what was happening and they wanted to figure out who this guy was and they would often discuss the case together.

Well, McPiache must be included in some capacity if he was behind her house in an alleyway and the first thing wasn't like, how do you even know she has a stalker?

Well, it does sound like she was definitely friendly with him and in touch with him. So it doesn't surprise me that she probably said something to him.

Okay, yeah, that's what I'm thinking too. It's weird that fucking Big Dog McGraw, whatever the fuck his name was, Big Dog McSundry, what was his name?

Patrick McBride.

Yeah, Big Dog McBride. It's weird that he wants this dude around in any capacity, I guess.

Yeah, that's a little weird and as we discussed in our Satanic Panic episode about Michelle Remembers, my red flags go up when you have a woman getting into a romantic relationship with a professional.

Who claims 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 on December 1st, 1982. They didn't break it off completely. They continued to date casually and get dinners to talk about the case for years. But I don't think they fell into the same pattern of codependency and fiction writing that Michelle and her psychiatrist did in the Michelle remembers case.

Sure.

So the week of Christmas, 1982, Cindy gets a note outside her house that just says, Merry Christmas, attached to a photo of a woman with her throat slashed.

Where are these photos fucking? Because it's not drawings.

No.

And it's not, again, a dot matrix printer. Like, you didn't get print shop and horrific images from Microsoft.

I would say, now look, we're gonna go a lot of places with this case, but one pin that I would put up there is that a person who might have access to these kinds of graphic photos might be a police officer.

It's a fucking cop, dude.

Fucking cop. So, January 1983, things get weirder.

I mean, we're getting pretty close to Return of the Jedi coming out.

Yeah, there's a vibe in the air. We're gonna find out what happened to Luke Skywalker. In January 1983, one of Cindy's work friends from the Blineheim house, this woman, here we go with the names, Agnes Woodcock.

That doesn't sound as bad as, that's not bad. That sounds like a real name.

Yes.

Sounds like a real name more than Makepeace.

Well, if it's Makepriate and Woodcock, maybe it's, we gotta play with the pronunciations a little here. But she pays a visit to Cindy's house and finds Cindy unconscious in her backyard with a nylon stocking wrapped around her neck. When Cindy regains consciousness, she tells Agnes Woodcock that she'd been walking to her exterior garage when she was attacked from behind by an unseen assailant. She said this person brought her into the garage where another male waited and the two strangled her together. Now here's where I'm gonna throw up the sexual violence warning. Maybe skip forward a minute if you don't wanna hear any of this. But Cindy said the men inserted a knife into her vagina and threatened to kill her younger sister Melanie if she reported the attack to authorities. The reason I bring this detail up is that one of the things that makes this case 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. Less than a week after moving into this new house, she gets a letter that reads, run rabbit run, I'll show you how fucking good I am. Soon, bang bang, you're dead. So whoever is watching her knows that she moved and knows quickly.

There's a letter?

That was a letter, yes.

I assume unsigned letter.

Yeah, no, I don't think it said Roy Makepeace. More obscene calls, Cindy moves again in April and goes to visit her brother in Indonesia that summer. When she comes back to her house, again, her third house in one year, she almost immediately receives another note on August 22nd. It reads, welcome back, death, blood, hate, et cetera.

Holy shit.

Which I have to say is a threat, terrifying, as a writer, lazy. It's sufficiently scary without the et cetera. It's like ending the threat with like a big shrug and like a, hey, whatever. Welcome back, death, blood, hate, 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 of 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? Like that's what's crazy. It's like she was into fucking Nesia.

Yeah. So at this point, Cindy's freaked out enough. She's moved three times. She paints her car a different color and hires a private investigator named Ozzie Caban to help investigate her stalker. Caban has always stated that he was convinced of Cindy's terror and that she went to extensive lengths to protect herself, going so far as to wear a portable panic button and having oil and pepper spray on her at all times. Then in October, November, 1983, Cindy finds three strangled cats in her garden, each one bound with rope. She continues to get more phone calls at her house and at work, some of which were answered by her coworkers at the Blenheim house, who told authorities that when they answered the phone, the caller didn't speak. So this is where I want to take a second to pause and recap a little bit, because there's a lot, I know I throw a lot at you and there's gonna be a lot more 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, the only time the caller ever spoke was to Cindy. And we only know what was said because of what she said was said. So it seems like, in that sense, it's at least possible that Cindy is, for some reason, acting as her own stalker. But we also know that at least one neighbor saw a strange man who doesn't resemble Cindy's ex skulking around her house on three different occasions. And we know that according to Patrick McBride, Cindy was in the house with him when he answered a strange phone call. And Cindy is found unconscious in her backyard, strangled by pantyhose that are still around her neck. But no sign of the culprit or physical evidence of the violent assault that she says she experienced in the garage. So I don't know what the fuck is going on here. And it gets so much crazier. 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? Did 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, Ozzy Caban, the private eye Cindy hired, overheard some weird noises on a two-way radio that he'd given Cindy, specifically for, you know, call me if you need help. So he hears these noises and gets super freaked out, races over to her house, finds Cindy lying unconscious on her living room floor with a knife stabbed through her hand and a note pinned through with the knife. It was crafted with letters that were cut and pasted from a magazine, like a, you know, like a-

Traditional ransom letter, yeah.

Yeah, and it said, now you must die, cunt.

I mean, okay, bud, you had every opportunity, so it's not really now. It should read, soon you must die.

True, true, Ed, you're always thinking. So, Cindy goes to the hospital after this because her hand has been stabbed. And it's there that she finally confides to detectives that she thinks that it might be her ex-husband who is doing this to her. I couldn't find what exactly prompted her change of heart, but the cops interview Roy and he says he's completely innocent. But here's the thing that now makes me feel like maybe he's hiding something.

Is it every magazine in his apartment had letters cut out of it?

No, although Patrick McBride or somebody should have looked into that. But here's what's so funky about Roy Makepeace. His theory is that Cindy's attackers are part of the mafia and connected to the fact that she's employed at Blenheim House, which often treated children who were wards of the court. So in other words, Makepeace's theory is that angry Canadian mobsters whose children have been taken by the state are attacking the administrator of the home where they are cared for. And he was so convinced of this that he sent a six page letter to Cindy's dad, Otto, outlining this theory and asking Otto to pressure police to investigate this angle.

I don't even know how he came to that conclusion. Are the mob leaving a bunch of wards of the state? Because they're mob murdering and then the kids have no parents now?

That's, yeah.

And then the kids go to the school and then the kids are like, man, I really hate the school. I better stab my teacher.

No, no, no, not that the kids are doing it, but that theoretically in Roy Makepeace'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 Blenheim House. And then somebody, as some weird revenge for this, is attacking Cindy. And that to me is what smells like big guilty guy behavior here, because it's such a weak theory. And writing a letter to her dad being like, you gotta investigate the mafia.

And it's basically, he's saying, hey, take this insane story, and then sign the bottom from a credible source, which is the father of the victim. And so people will take credence in that, because it comes from the dad. But it also, by virtue of writing that letter says, here's the prevailing thought on what's happening to my daughter. And you may notice that in nowhere in these six pages, as it mentioned, her ex-husband, fucking Ricky McPease.

Yeah, exactly.

And so that's what it is. It's like, oh man, we see it all the time when it's like, oh, just give me a bigger news story that's insane. And you'll forget that I just did that weird thing in politics.

It's very look over here.

Yeah, which is to say, don't look over here.

Yeah. So it's now the summer of 1984, almost two years into this stalker nightmare. And Cindy 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 night, Tilly wakes up to Cindy's dog, Heidi, barking. And she goes downstairs and finds Cindy checking windows and doors because she heard somebody down there and she's checking to make sure they're locked. And then moments later, they both heard the doorbell ring and found a window near the front porch, which had been cracked in several areas. So it seems like somebody was trying to get in that house.

And also another witness who is to say that like, I didn't see her do it and we both witnessed the doorbell ring. So it can't just be my daughter who's making all this up.

Right, right. Two weeks later, Cindy's found dazed, attempting to enter the home of a neighbor with another stocking tied around her neck. She's taken to a nearby hospital, the University of British Columbia Health and Science, where she claims she'd been walking her dog in a park around 8.30 at night when she was assaulted by a bearded man driving a green van with a female passenger. And of course, there's no witnesses to any of this. But as everything in this case, the second it looks like Cindy's making this up or harming herself, there's a detail that doesn't make sense. And this time, it's that while she is in the hospital being treated for the near-strangulation, a hospital receptionist told authorities that a man with an accent had called the front desk inquiring about the hospital's security policies. Oh no. When police played her audio of Roy Makepeace's voice, the receptionist felt there was a quote, strong possibility that it was the same person. And I should note here that Roy Makepeace was South African. So-

He sounded like Blood Diamond.

Yeah, the accent would be pretty recognizable.

You'd think he'd just be like, hey, what room is so-and-so in? And not like, what's your security situation? Do you have guards? Do you have cameras? Like, sir, that's super fucking, like you sound like someone who's up to no good. Just call and be like, what room is Cindy Makepeace in?

Yeah. Well, whoever it was calling, they kept calling Cindy's house. And at this point, the cop started tapping her phones to trace the calls, but none of the calls lasted long enough to be fruitful. Now, I would like to know, and I couldn't find this, I would like to know if they heard anyone's voices on those calls or if the calls came through and they were always just silent 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. She starts recounting repressed memories of witnessing a double murder. And it takes six months for her to divulge the details.

It was at a pantyhose factory.

And when she does, she tells police that she witnessed Roy Makepeace murder a man and a woman, then dismember their bodies with an ax while she and Roy were vacationing at a cabin in the Gulf Islands in July 1981. According to Cindy, Roy Makepeace even smeared blood from one of the victim's severed limbs across her face after he dismembered them.

This is getting pretty fucking Michelle remembers.

I was gonna say, throw it back to the satanic panic. How often does hypnotic regression result in wild stories all the time?

Yeah, seems like it.

So, unlikely that this ever happened.

Yeah, no memory regressed, whatever this is called, has ever ended with like, after six months of working with her, we found out she ate a bagel one time. Like that's never once happened. Every one of these are so crazy, the stories that they bring forth from 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 of anything out of the ordinary happening at all.

Or, not to play devil's advocate, my least favorite term in fucking English language, this is the same sister who they were like, hey, I'm gonna kill your sister if you fucking say anything.

True.

So, maybe she did see something and they thought she might have talked about it or something.

True, that's a good point. I will say, authorities did investigate, they never found any evidence of murders or missing people from the Gulf Islands at the time that this was supposed to have happened.

They didn't start reporting those until like, 98, so.

Yeah, there was no-

Gulf Islands in the 80s? Come on, it was a fucking Wild West.

And Roy Makepeace's attorney said that the accusation led authorities on a wild goose chase to find the cabin where this all supposedly happened and they were unable to find the cabin.

Which by the way, you know, there's better today if you book a vacation, you got emails, there's plenty of digital evidence of what you did. But I would 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. And then like getting a credit card that was, you know, big machine. It's like chachonk, chachonk. You had to get cashiers checks to use when you're fucking at the new location. So I feel like there would be evidence in 1981 of like, oh, you went on a trip? You must have had to go through 50 fucking people to make that happen.

Well, to be fair, this wasn't a family going to Disney. This was two or three people taking a drive to the islands of British Columbia. So it was maybe a little bit less, a little bit more cash oriented.

If I'm being honest, I just assumed anything with islands. I thought it was like the Caribbean or something.

No, no, no, no, no. This was local islands.

This is just some fucking dirty bridge island?

I think so.

Okay, yeah, I guess that's pretty easy to do incognito.

I think this was a dirty bridge island. So in the summer of 1985, the fires started.

Is that a euphemism or is it a real fire?

No, no, no, no. 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. Now, Cindy claims she had taken her dog out for a walk at 3.15 in the morning and returned home and found her house on fire.

You're taking your dog out on the witching hour, dude?

Yeah, dude. I don't know. I don't know. Coincidence, convenient that she just happened to leave the house at three in the morning if she left the house at all. Now, this was investigated. The window of the bathroom was found partially ajar, but the soot and dust on the window sill showed no markings that anyone had entered or exited through it. And a detective who investigated the fire later testified that he did believe Cindy had started the blaze herself. December 1st, 1985, Cindy moves for the fourth time. Now back to Richmond, but a different house. 10 days later, on December 11th, at around 6 p.m. Cindy is found by motorists, semi-conscious, in a ditch four miles 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, it was suspected she'd been injected with some sort of tranquilizer. Cindy couldn't remember how she got to the ditch where she was found. Her last memory was going to get some lunch, and then she stopped at a pharmacy. Now it's 1986. Cindy finally changes her last name from Makepeace to the more anonymous James. Agnes Woodcock and her husband Tom start staying over at Cindy's to help her feel safer, but the fires continue. On April 16th, 1986, Cindy wakes the couple up to say she heard someone in the house, and wouldn't you know it, they find a fire in the basement. Tom tries to call the fire department, Agnes' husband who's staying there, but the phone is dead, so he runs across the street to use the neighbor's phone, and when he goes outside, he claims to have witnessed a man standing on the street outside of Cindy's home. When Tom approached him, the guy took off running. So Cindy's mental health takes a huge nosedive after this. She starts expressing suicidal thoughts, and the psychiatrist who'd been treating her for the past three years committed her to a psych ward at a nearby hospital. 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. On the second date, her mood was considerably elevated. She'd completed the other tests herself and was willing to talk. She seemed apprehensive as to how the tests could be used. She maintained good eye contact, except when discussing the terrorizing incidents, she then would look down or cover her eyes and speak haltingly. She expressed upset and cried a great deal when relating these incidents. Patient kept asking if her responses to the items indicated she was crazy. Her IQ is well above average. This type of individual can be characterized as negativistic and conforming. They have unpredictable moods, pessimism, sullenness, vacillating with social agreement and friendliness. They tend to anticipate and precipitate disappointments through their obstructive and negative behavior. This type of person tends to be vulnerable to fears. After a 10 week hospital stay, Cindy gets out and tells her father that she knows the identity of her stalker but refuses to name him. 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. Like what do you gain from holding on to this information?

Well, no one knows. On October 11th, 1988, Roy Makepeace gets two messages on his home answering machine. One of the messages contained a hoarse voice speaking the phrase, Cindy, dead meat soon. While the other message said, more smack, more downers, another grand after we waste the cunt, no more deal. 15 days later, Cindy is again found unconscious in her garage. She'd been hog tied, nude from the waist down and had a black nylon stocking tied around her neck. The Royal Canadian Mountain Police hire a mountain climber, a knot expert named Robert Chisnail to analyze the knots on the nylon stockings that she had frequently been found tied up with. And Chisnail concluded that it was quote, 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 know, be a 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, we'd do something to question here. But like, I don't know how you tie yourself up.

I don't either.

Is it good for the brain to pretty constantly be passed out?

Well, that's the other thing I'd like to note. It is reported multiple times that she's found unconscious. But I don't know how many of those times she was found by somebody who would know the difference between her actually being unconscious and her pretending to be unconscious.

Yeah, I guess.

You know what I mean?

Well, you know what my mom used to do to see if I was unconscious?

How often was your mom checking your consciousness?

That part was a joke, but for real, my mom, if I was faking sleeping, she would always just kind of get real close, lean in and she'd say, smile if you're faking it. And then me and my brothers without fail would crack. Like we'd smile. It worked every fucking time. So I don't know if she had anyone in her life who was doing that to make sure she was actually unconscious.

Cindy does not seem to be a person who had a smile monster in her life, I think.

I gotta say like a friend like Cindy is a tough friend to have. That's, you know, it's like, fuck, it's Cindy again.

Well, every time you go over to her house, you're either gonna find her unconscious or you're gonna find a fire in her basement.

Yeah, or you're gonna hear an earful about a, you know, perpetrator of crimes that she refuses to name.

Yeah.

Which has gotta get annoying fast if you're a good bud.

Well, check this out. In January, 1989, again, remember, this started in 1982.

No, I mean, the bands have formed and broken up in the amount of time that she's been dealing with this.

The entire discography of The Scorpions was formed in this period. So in January, 89, she makes what anyone who has ever seen a film noir movie would probably call a huge mistake. She buys a life insurance policy from a guy named Richard Johnston and let's Richard Johnston move into her basement rental. She claims that she'll feel safer with someone living with her.

Yeah, let me get the first guy who sold me a fucking life insurance policy.

I mean, yeah, at that point, you're essentially taking a hit out on yourself. Like have the guy who wrote your life insurance policy live in your basement while you're suffering eight straight years of being harassed by an invisible man.

Is the term for that an underwriter?

I think so, yeah.

So they have an underwriter living under her. I don't know what that buys us, that level of wordplay, but just came in my head.

We're so deep at this point.

Yeah, we're seven years into this woman's torture.

On April 8th, a security guard at Richmond General Hospital where Cindy was now employed, she'd left Blenheim House a few years prior. He discovers a note with the cut and paste letters, which read, Soon Cindy. He also found the phrase, Sleep well, written in the dew on her windshield.

Oh wow, I don't believe for a second they believe that. I think they want her to sleep unwell.

True, they didn't want her to sleep at all or they wouldn't have kept setting fires in her house.

Geez Louise.

Then there were a couple of attempted break-ins. The Canadian police used scent hounds to try to track the intruders. The dogs never caught a scent until May 10th, 1989. They did track a scent of someone, an unknown individual, that led over the backyard fence of Cindy's home. And then, in a weird way, finally, around eight at night on May 25th, 1989, Cindy disappeared. She had planned for her friends, Agnes and Tom the Woodcocks, to come play bridge and spend the night, but they didn't hear from her. So they go over to 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.

The Citation was a compact car offered by Chevy for about five years, and was the first Chevrolet sold with front wheel drive. It was awarded Motor Trend Car of the Year for 1980, a decision that would later be criticized by Car & Driver, who cited its poor build quality and mechanical reliability as undeserving of such an award. Also Ed thinks it is ugly.

They found her Chevy missing. They briefly and apparently somewhat unsuspiciously spoke with the life insurance salesman living in her basement who told them Cindy said she was gonna go shopping. They knew where she liked to shop, so they went over there. They found her car in the lot abandoned. And at this point, even though she'd only been missing a few hours, given the past seven or eight years of nonstop horror, they reported Cindy missing immediately. The cops come, they examine the vehicle, they find blood inside the car on the driver's side door, as well as groceries and a wrapped birthday gift for her friend's kid. Contents from Cindy's wallet are found underneath the vehicle, and when the cops check her house, they find it 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.

This is auto, potentially auto-called.

Potentially auto-called. When the authorities questioned Cindy's father, he denied ever making the phone call.

So this is a person who called the insurance company to ask questions about the specifics of her policy, to be like, well, if they just find blood, if the person's missing, when can I cash it in? Is it like six years, eight years? When do they declare you dead?

That's what it seems like, yeah.

Okay.

And he says it was Otto. Otto says he never made the call. On June 8th, 1989, a guy named Gordon Starchuck, which at this point, you know what would be merch? We need a shirt that says, like the shirts that have the names and the ands. We need like Makepeace and Woodcock and Starchuck and Blood Death, et cetera.

I love that, but I also don't think we should try and sell.

It would be in very poor taste.

It would be an in poor taste shirt for no one.

For no one, but the names and the story.

The names are pretty wild, yes.

Starchuck had the unfortunate fate of discovering Cindy's body in the backyard of an abandoned house in Richmond.

She's no longer with us.

She's no longer with us. As she'd been found multiple times before, her body was hogtied with a rope in a fetal position and a black nylon stocking was bound tightly around her neck.

I'm gonna go ahead and just say she didn't do this one herself. I mean, she lived through all the others.

She did. So here's how this all sort of starts to wrap up. The pathologist who examined Cindy's body at the scene noted that her hands had been bound so tightly that one finger had scratched another down to the bone. A pinprick, consistent with a hypodermic needle, was found on her inner right elbow. And based on insect and larva activity on the remains, the forensic entomologist concluded the body had begun decomposition at the site where it was found as early as June 2nd. So the body had been there at least six days. Now, interestingly, an autopsy determined that Cindy didn't die of strangulation. She died of multiple drug intoxication from substantial amounts of morphine, diazepam and florazepam. 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 hyponermic needle, that they don't think that's where it was administered. But apparently, they could not figure out how it had been administered.

Well, however it was administered, I've never done heroin, but it does seem like in its portrayal on movies and television that you get pretty fucking tired.

Yeah.

And, you know, like, I don't know how you do that first, then go about tying yourself up and doing all of their shit. And once you're tied up, you can't inject it anymore.

Right. So they examined Cindy's stomach contents, and the toxicologist reported that Cindy had orally ingested approximately 20, 30-milligram tablets of Flurazepam in addition to numerous tablets of Diazepam, a combination that itself, outside of the 10 times more than lethal morphine, was also lethal. And it was ultimately concluded by authorities that the overdose that she took was so large that there was no reliable estimate of 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 with the longest and most expensive in history situation.

On the stand, a lot of weird shit comes out. Roy Makepeace levels accusations against Cindy's family, saying that her father had physically abused her as a kid and that one of her brothers had molested her. He also accused the police of trying to frame him, which at this point, it doesn't seem like they were trying to do.

If anything, if I'm the police, and this is not trying to fucking be rude or anything, she has to be the one number at the police station. They're like, let's fucking not answer. I mean, not to say that we should neglect this person, but fucking seven years of calling the police, it sounds like a bunch of times every year, and really getting nowhere, and then her saying, I know who's doing this to me, and I won't fucking tell you, can't go over well with law enforcement.

No, although I don't know, that was something that she supposedly said to her father, and I don't know exactly where in the timeline her father said that she said that.

Either way, what I'm getting at, if it was the police, and they were just tired of her fucking shit, then she'd be found in a car crash, and it would look like, oh, she drove off a bridge or whatever. I don't think the cops are hog tying her and leaving her in a yard somewhere.

Right, so it also came out that when she was younger, before she met Roy, Cindy had written letters to her family that she was engaged to someone, but that this person that she was engaged to discovered he had terminal cancer and killed himself on a ski trip that they took. None of her parents or siblings ever met the guy and Cindy never named him. So it appears that she has at least some history of potentially making up a pretty intense story.

Well, I mean, that's we don't know. I mean, she said that happened and then they're like, we never met. It's kind of funny to be a reverse because in America, it's like if you don't really have a girlfriend, you're like, she lives in Canada. So in Canada, what do they say, America, I guess?

I don't know.

But all we know is that she had a boyfriend who got sick and decided to die on a ski trip. But that does seem like something you can pretty much look up. Like, hey, was a guy die on a fucking mountain whose name isn't Sonny Bono? They could have confirmed that story is all I'm getting at.

Well, if she would ever have named him, but she never did.

Oh, yeah, she didn't name him.

She didn't name him. So shortly after her death, Cindy's parents uncovered a hoard of various medications in her home, including sedatives and antipsychotic drugs. They were all prescribed by her psychiatrist, but for whatever reason, Cindy's parents decided to flush all these medications down the toilet. Melanie, the younger sister, also found a glass cutter in Cindy's purse, along with a medical syringe kit, a urinary catheter and saline solution. So it does seem that she had the means to drug herself to death.

But how do you hog tie your hands so tight that it's like skinning fingers to the bone, especially after you just ingested an insane amount of drugs?

Well, they tried to figure that out too. The attempts to discern whether or not Cindy could have done this to herself in the state that she was discovered, were investigated by not expert Robert Schisnell. The court gave him the same length of nylon that they found binding Cindy's body, and Schisnell demonstrated in court how she could have bound herself within a three-minute time frame before the effects of the narcotics in her system would have taken effect. And the inquest concluded on May 25, 1990, exactly one year after Cindy had disappeared. And after all this, the jury was unable to determine whether her cause of death was suicide, homicide or accidental, and the official ruling was ultimately that Cindy had died of what they called a quote, unknown event, and the case was formally closed. Huh.

Well, I mean, I guess that guy's life now is, you know, I went to court and I showed people that you could probably tie this yourself. And now that family has no closure. Like that guy is the villain of this story in a lot of ways. And I also kept hearing it in my head as you saying not expert like he's not an expert and not not expert like he's an expert in knots.

Yeah.

I kept you being like, Oh yeah, famous not expert.

The cannot expert.

So that guy's the villain in this story a little bit for me.

I don't know what to make of it.

You know what though? I guess that's the best possible outcome. Because if it's, if you say it's definitely a homicide, you have even after her death, the cops dealing with her and having to figure this out and do all that shit. And then if you rule it suicide, then you're going to 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 from some sort of like Munchausen syndrome, but instead of faking an illness, she was faking a stalker. Because for me, it's the fires, I think. The fires to me feel almost like Munchausen improv or something.

Because they don't fit in anywhere else in the narrative. The nylon shows up a bunch, calls show up a bunch, letters show up a bunch. The fires is like this weird thing that happened for three days.

Yeah. And always with her out at weird times of the night, and it feels like this weird sort of, okay, it's been a few years of this, and what else can this stalker do to me that won't kill me, that will get people's attention? And it's always these weird little newspaper fires. They always found burned up newspapers in the room.

I mean, it could be the newspapers that they cut the letters out of for the ransom, even if it's her writing her own lansom 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 when you can start a fire for spectacle?

I also, I go back and forth on whether or not someone was in on this with her, because I feel like, and obviously I'm presenting all this to you, and I'm presenting all this to the listener. I've been thinking about it a lot more, so there's a lot to keep track of. But I would say that most of the things that indicate someone else being involved could be coincidence. Like, the guys outside, it could be a neighbor came out in the street because they saw a fire in someone's house. And when a guy ran out of the house saying, hey, hey, who are you? You know, they took off, because they were like, what the fuck? I don't know that it necessarily indicates that there was somebody doing this. Or a lot of the phone calls that was just breathing, like they could be wrong numbers that just came at bad times. You know, it's a stretch.

I think that that's a little bit more of a stretch. I mean, if they had a partner in this, an accomplice in this, then that would make the phone calls a little easier for me to understand. That would make the doorbell a little easier for me to understand.

The doorbell is a tough one. Could be coincidence.

I have less faith in a coincidence than I do in faith that they had a partner in this. I don't know what... I guess ultimately what we don't know is who's the beneficiary of that life insurance.

True.

If we knew that, that would inform a lot more than if it was fucking Dick Underwriter or whatever his name was. He... And then it's like, okay, well, he was in on it then. And then he finally got paid because I don't know. And then also if it was a sexual thing with two consenting adults in some sort of weird nylon hogtied fantasy shit, you know, in the way that people end up accidentally dying from auto erotic asphyxiation. But even that, you know, it's like what weird fucking kinky Bonnie and Clyde would this have to be?

I also wonder though, if here's a clue to either who this other person could have been, the messages that Roy received on his answering machine, Cindy dead meat soon, and the other one, more smack, more downers, another grand after we waste the cunt. No more deal. The fact that she died.

With smack and downers.

Yeah. Makes me wonder, was there some sort of, you know, kind of like a, either a partner who is doing drugs and doing sexual stuff with her that involved all these knots and ropes, or was she having some sort of mental break? Like I know 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 as some sort of weird, you know, punishment, or I don't know, but those messages on his machine are kind of weird.

And it was a man's voice.

They were both horse voices, but not specifically male voices.

Sure.

And I don't know if those got played in court or not. What I'd really like to know, honestly, one of the big questions here is even if she could do this all to herself, why was her car found in a parking lot and if she was found, I don't know how far, but some significant distance away from that, I guess she could have just left the car and done this all to herself in an abandoned lot in the middle of nowhere, but that seems weird.

I mean, you can set up the car, you can put blood in the car, you can leave the door open, you can tell your neighbor where to find the car essentially by saying, I'm going to the supermarket, but she would still need a ride from a friend or from public transit to wherever the second or third location was where she did the tying up and took all the drugs.

She could have walked.

Well, you said it was significant distance.

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 and then decided, this is where I'm going to inject myself with 10 times the survivable amount of morphine, take 30 times the survivable amount of-

Whatever those drugs are, yeah.

And then in record time, only accomplishable by a professional knot-tire, hog-tie myself, and tie this stocking around my neck and lay down a die in an abandoned lot. It is very weird.

Yeah, it's like beyond dramatic. And the thing that's interesting about it is, if there was a part of this narrative, and I don't know maybe there was, but if there was some part of this narrative that was like, people just don't believe me.

Right.

If that was the case, then I can see someone going so far as to setting up their suicide to be found in such a way where it's like, oh, well now they'll see, and they'll pay for their distrust, which is of course ridiculous, because by virtue of her doing it herself, then they were right to not trust her. But I can see that, but it doesn't seem like that's a through line in the narrative of people constantly not believing her.

Right. Or, I guess the other 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, or she was always doing it when she was high, and this time she hadn't meant to kill herself, she just meant to escalate it to, oh, now someone kidnapped me from my car, left me in a lot somewhere, but she was taking such high doses of drugs at this point that her body just couldn't sustain it anymore, and she died instead of...

And she potentially had to keep upping it because her body is a tolerance level during all this.

Yeah, because they found hypodermic needle pricks in previous times that she'd been discovered.

And she had the kit at her house and stuff, which I guess could have been planted. The phone call is still kind of insane. The one that you had mentioned earlier are left on the ex-husband's phone. Because you can read it two ways. It's like, because they've mentioned smack and uppers and or uppers and downers. Whatever the fuck it was.

Smack and downers, yeah.

Yeah, all things that were found at the crime scene, essentially, in her body. But then there's the thing about like a thousand bones. And then it says no deal. So you can look at it as like they wanted to do something like this sooner, whoever the bad guys were. Or you can look at it as the deal is with the ex-husband and she's 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 whatever the deal was isn't going through.

Yeah, I don't know what to make of the deal.

Yeah, because the no deal thing is weird. And you know what though, it also kind of feels like that could be very planted where it's like, hey, just make it seem like there's a group of people who are out to hurt me. And it's premeditated, they have deals, they have what have you. So I can see that, but this is a fucking crazy story, man. This is very Michelle remembers. It's very, it's got a lot of the same characteristics of that stuff, but unlike Michelle remembers, I don't remember, I guess, but it did seem like she had a support group of people who cared whether she lived or died, which I do find surprising for someone who sounds like a real difficult hang, but as much fun as it's been to play Armchair Detective on that one, like this is the stalkers episode, not the made up stalkers episode. So maybe we'd be remiss in not circling back to say that there's also a just as likely reality that this woman did in fact, like actually have a stalker or stalkers, and it just, you know, unfortunately ended poorly.

Yeah, I mean, 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 where she did have a real stalker or stalkers, and it's chilling to think that maybe it ended that day in an abandoned lot because she couldn't get anyone to believe her or help her. So, you know, we may never know the truth about what happened, but we've talked this long, let's hit the fear tier. Ed, where would you place our first fear of 2024 getting stalked on the fear tier?

I mean, fucking high, I've dealt with it in first-hand and second-hand accounts, it's out there. People are not signing the social contract when it comes to being lunatics.

Yeah, they're tearing the social contract in half.

When it comes to the social contract, they are lighting it ablaze like that woman's newspapers at her house.

And leaving it in her basement in Cindy James' basement.

Leaving in her basement, social contracts are strewn about this woman's home, it's high. I mean, they would be top one, two, three for me in terms of the plausible 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. That's kind of how it works. I don't believe anyone leaves a significant stalking event or harassment event really ever feeling normal again. So I think you'd be in the majority camp. But I will also say this, don't you fucking dare listener of this show, try and stalk us.

Ed and I, for the listeners out there who are thinking of stalking us, you should know Ed and I are getting ripped in 2024. That's our goal.

Yeah, so maybe check in on that, you know, try and keep us honest because we don't like working out at all. And anything beyond friendly checking on that, then we will consider you a stalker. So don't you even, don't you even. And please don't let our current lack of strength and general demeanor fool you because we are not people to be trifled with.

No, we are not. We are Italian, we know people.

Dude, we are so Italian, you'd think we were raised as wards of the state.

And are getting and need our relatives to attack the poor woman who's in charge of us.

Exactly correct. So yeah, super high in the fear tier. This topic hits close to home in a lot of ways, which maybe we'll get into in future episodes, but yeah, super fucking high.

What a way to start the year. I'm excited, we're back motherfuckers. This is Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And we'll see you next time.

But we better not see you outside our fucking window, so help me. Scared All The Time is co-produced and written by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity, Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission.

Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions.

Good night.

We are in this together.

Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===