Furciferous Quaintrelle’s Reviews > Death By Unknown Event > Status Update

FOR SOME REASON, I'M NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE A REVIEW FOR THIS AUDIBLE TITLE, SO NOW THAT I'VE FINISHED IT, I'M JUST GOING TO TRY TO PUT IT HERE INSTEAD. FINGERS CROSSED!

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Bit of an odd one this.

I started listening to it today because it's one of a handful of Audible titles that I decided I wanted to listen to after finishing the other couple I read at the end of last year, and I wanted to just get them out of the way, over and done with, before moving on to fresh stuff for 2025. (Especially with us still sort of being in that weird kind of limbo time that happens around Christmas and New Year: it'll take a few more days before things feel truly back to normal. Listening to these now is perfect, because I don't have to think too much and if I really want to, I can listen while doing other stuff too. I will get through all the laundry by the end of this week!)

At 12 episodes long, I'm not sure how long the whole thing is supposed to take, because I start off listening at 1.3x speed, then up to 1.4x, 1.5x, 1.6x and then 1.7x as my brain gradually gets used to the faster playing time. (I do a similar thing with some YouTube videos too; if you incrementally increase the speed, it's far easier to then get to a faster top-speed, whilst still processing everything well enough to take it all in.) I listened to it mostly in one sitting - although I did also stop it here and there to get up and cook dinner, put a load of washing on, and buy some more stuff from Amazon. But the way that it was narrated meant that I felt immediately drawn back to keep on listening...because I really wanted to find out what happened to Cindy. The woman narrating the story also did a very good job of imbuing her own words with the right amount of emotion and gravitas, so kudos to her for that.

Cindy's story is pretty bizarre. Okay, it's seriously bizarre. And none of the explanations make sufficient sense for the listener to figure out what's going on for a long time. Just when you think another scenario is looking the most likely, along comes a contradictory fact or something that just outright disproves the possibility of it having happened at all, and you're back to square one again. And the more of these potential scenarios that crop up, the more weird Cindy's life seems to have been for quite a long time. How she behaved and reacted to everything in her adult life, was really exacerbated because of stuff that had occurred earlier on. She didn't make it easy for herself or those trying to help her, because she would react in ways that weren't just a little bit odd, she looked batcrap insane. And people who are the product of suffering or trauma, often don't make the best advocates for their own best interests: be they health related, relationship oriented, or even in the legal sense.

We start off back in the 80s, where we were all slightly less invested in therapy-culture, and it was much more acceptable to write off certain things as neurotic or crazy. We also didn't have DNA to help to solve criminal investigations, so when Cindy calls the police to try to find out who is doing this to her, the perpetrator is smart enough to not leave any fingerprints, and in the one incidence where some stray foreign hairs are found, there's nobody to match them to. It's frustrating to anyone who has become accustomed to the forensic capabilities of today's criminal investigations (especially when you start to think about the number of people who were incorrectly convicted and imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit...crimes that some have since been posthumously exonerated for in the wake of reopened cases having access to DNA and other technologies).

That the case ends up having to go to an inquest court to try to establish whether Cindy's death was homicide or not, just adds to the confusion. How is anyone supposed to make sense of a story like this? Our cast of characters are all a bit strange, whether it's Cindy's family, her colleagues, her ex-husband, the police investigating her attacks, the PI guy, and even Cindy herself. There are so many possible avenues for inquiry, I'm not surprised that things ended up the way they did.

There was a lot of laughing and giggling from so many of the people who were supposed to be super close to Cindy, whilst they were talking about some really bloody awful stuff. I *get* that people can be nervous when being interviewed (especially if it's being recorded to then be broadcast to the world) and we can all react differently to tragic situations, or truly horrendous acts of violence and depravity. But if you're conducting an investigation, and you've got the ability to edit some of this stuff out, maybe think a little bit about what you're going to keep in, because a lot of the ways that some people were chatting during this story, were so at odds with the subject matter, it was kind of jarring.

I'm putting the next bit in a spoiler because it gives away the entire conclusion to this decades long investigation:

(view spoiler)[I'm still not entirely convinced that the conclusion that the people who did this investigation for the podcast came to, is 100% definitely right. So much has been lost to the passage of time - and there was definitely some evidence that seemed like it couldn't have been faked by Cindy - but it wasn't explained away sufficiently by the end. That answering machine message from her ex-husband? Unless I drifted off at some point and didn't hear any exculpatory explanation for it, that was pretty suss.

The reasoning behind her being wackadoodle enough to have done all that herself, hinges on the fact that her dad was an authoritarian who drank too much and sometimes made the kids eat their supper in the basement? I mean, sure, he sounds like a bit of a dick, but not so much as to drive one kid to end up being so crazy that she repeatedly injured herself to the point of almost dying on many occasions, made up stories about her ex-husband that would have been clear-cut defamation if he'd wanted to pursue litigation himself (especially as he was working in the field of mental health and occupational health himself) and then eventually go on to carry out the most weirdly elaborate suicide one could feasibly enact, what with all the potential for discovery, the drugs all working in just the right combination, and within the expected time-frame, whilst she went about hog-tying herself with nylon stockings before succumbing to the drugs and dying.

I have so many questions:

- Why was that location chosen to be her final resting place? Did she truly just want to not be found this time? Why had she not gone to greater lengths to ensure that she wasn't discovered in her previous attempts to kill herself? Were all of those supposed to be some kind of evidentiary plan to build up sufficient concern for her wellbeing, or distrust in her ex-husband, to be discovered on a few prior "attempts", before ramping up the hypodermic needle to 11 for her swan song?
- Assuming she did do this, we are still no further along in figuring out how she managed to obtain so many pharmaceuticals (that had to be obtained from a hospital: a hospital with a very strict practices in place for the signing out of said drugs, with a second witness present required at every occasion of dispense...and with the hospital having no record of any shortfall in their stocks of said medicines). Yes she was prescribed a bunch of other medications over the years, but when her house was searched on the day she was declared missing, most of these medications seemed as though Cindy had stopped taking them over time - probably tapering herself off them safely as she was someone who worked in psychiatric facilities and would have been aware of the danger of just stopping taking them. The point being, that she had a lot of benzos included in her large stash of unused medications. She had the perfect "exit strategy" right there at home, any time she wanted to kill herself. (I will however concede, that the mixture she ended up taking, did look as though it has the mark of a medical professional involved in it at some point. The inclusion of aspirin would have made more sense if she was wanting to thin her blood and bleed out, but there were no wounds inflicted, so maybe she just ran out of time, or was so used to including it in her previous cocktails that she didn't think to omit it this time? The inclusion of an antihistamine also suggests enough medical knowledge to understand that opiates, benzos & the other fun stuff found in her bloodstream, can actually make you throw up, so including a couple of tablets of cinnarizine, cyclizine, promethazine, and even a bog standard Benadryl, can help to prevent vomiting up your "last meal", so to speak. (hide spoiler)]

...CONTINUED FROM ABOVE:

- The use of nylons at every single attack on Cindy would have had me - if I were a detective on this case - putting a tale on her to see where she was going when out shopping. She must have purchased quite a few packs of these stockings if she was the one using them to keep trussing her up like a Christmas turkey. We know she had cops trailing her for other reasons around this time so why not go follow her around when she's out buying her shopping too? And if that doesn't pan out, then maybe get some gumshoe to traipse around to every store in the town that sells them to find out if she had bulk bought a load of them in the past, or if she came in at all to buy them on the regular.
- A lot was made about how loose the bonds were on her body when it was discovered, saying that this was indicative of her having tied them herself. Now, I'm neither agreeing that she did, nor claiming that she didn't, but considering we're told from quite early on in this story that she was really badly decomposed when discovered, so much so that her corpse was barely detectable as it was carried away into the ambulance. Yes, nylons are stretchy so they aren't perfect for detecting how tight something is tied to begin with, but when you're dead and you're decomposed to the point of turning black (with a lot of body fluids having seeped into the surrounding area, post mortem) any bonds you have initially tied around yourself, will inevitably appear loose. Not because the knots were insufficient, but because the body itself is leaking out until it then starts to dry, and as a result, it shrinks inside said bonds. Again this isn't proving anything one way or another, I'm merely pointing out something that when I heard it, sounded like a really stupid thing for a seasoned investigator and expert witness to come out with.
- This part is the one that infuriates me the most. Cindy had a little dog, who she treated/regarded as her fur-baby and best-friend. The fact that she carried out this elaborate suicide with no regard for where he dog was, turned up to be the main reason she was deemed to have simply not been able to kill herself: her neighbour was the first to alert everyone to Cindy's disappearance, insisting that she must have been taken against her will, because she would never leave her little dog without someone to take care of it. Which definitely sounded legit at first. But then once you learn a little more, you realise that not only did she just leave her dog during that final exit, she'd also repeatedly left it to its own devices when she'd conduct one of her outside "attacks". And even worse, if she was responsible for all this, that means she cut and beat her own dog, then tied her to the table in her kitchen with a rope around her neck. That dog was found quivering under the table in its own faeces, yet when reunited with Cindy, doggo ran straight into her arms, her relief palpable. This is the part of the story where I lose any previous sympathy for Cindy. She assaulted her own dog to have her own little fake attack taken more seriously. I don't care how mentally ill she was, anyone who does anything like that to an innocent and incredibly loyal dog, can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. She is scum. And if she's responsible for all of this BS, well she was the one who killed all those neighbourhood cats too, before then stringing them up around the place to make people think she was being stalked by a complete psycho. I will never forgive her for that.

And the way it ended was a confusing sudden 'light bulb' moment for all involved, who just suddenly decided that yes, Cindy was cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs, always had be, and they could see exactly why she'd been on this mission to enact violence upon herself, try to blame it on someone else, wage a war against her ex-husband (who, either way was fucking weirdo himself, but...whatever). Everyone in her family suddenly got all shiny-eyed and oddly philosophical about the whole thing. Like, okay, this was obviously really traumatic for the family to endure, and I'm sure they all just wanted some form of closure, so relief and finally getting to exhale the breath you've been holding whilst you wait for the truth to come out, is entirely understandable. But everyone at the end of this just sounded like they'd just come out of a Brené Brown TedX Talk or something. It just felt weird and not real or something.

There was a lot more unexplained stuff that just ended up being a loose end, but I'll accept that for the most part, it was a combination of the situation itself being weird, nobody really even being prepared to deal with it, but there were too many niggling bits that made me just want to get this over with as soon as possible. I never felt as though anyone involved in the investigation knew what they were doing, nor did I trust any of the people who were involved. So that's caused me to give this the 3-star review. It's more of a 2.5-star rating, but I felt it fairer to round up and down, purely based on the amount of investigation that was conducted, the decent pacing, and the well edited final product. It wasn't their fault that this whole mishegoss was such an unrelenting shit-show from beginning to end.

So, yeah, there you have it. That was my immediate response to having finished this Audible Original. I came out of it feeling confused, not entirely convinced, and maybe even a little short-changed. It's now coming up on 9.45am on a Sunday morning and I haven't been to bed yet. I sat up listening to the entire thing for frick-knows how long, only to come away from it feeling unsatisfied. Make of this what you will folks. In some ways it's worth listening to for a glimpse into how different police forces investigate certain crimes, and it's well narrated and filled with yaw-droppingly bizarre moments.

And with that folks, it really is time for bed. I've sipped a mug of 'Sugar-Free Ribena Christmas Spice' (this stuff is gorgeous by the way. I've been ordering bottles of it off of Amazon, because when you make it up with hot water it has a lovely festive mulled-wine vibe to it, so it's perfect to take with your sleeping tablets. I'm sufficiently drowsy now, to know I'll fall asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, and hopefully, when I wake up tomorrow I'll have stopped trying to wrack my bring over what really happened to Cindy James. Or whatever her surname turned out to be. I'm so past caring right now. Not the best vibe to feel at the end of a twelve episode tale...but as the kids are often wont to say these days: it is what it is.

3-stars, begrudgingly bestowed by muggins here, who just hopes her next foray into that back-log of Audible titles. hits on another winner this time, because this was mad as a sack of badgers, and nowhere near as cute or funny.

(Yes I will probably come back and edit this review at some point tomorrow, because it's almost definitely full of errors, but this was my first, slightly tranquillised, attempt. So please no boollee meee!? Lol.

I THINK I'M GOING TO TRY TO FIND THE BOOK THAT THIS WAS BASED ON AND GO LEAVE THE REVIEW THERE TOO.