In 1974 a little girl is snatched and a manhunt ensues

See her in glimpses: Tartan dress, white socks and sneakers; a newborn in the arms of her beaming older sister.

Do not let the eye linger on the pictures.

Shield the heart, do not dwell on life dangling by a thread, on darkness that violates understanding and casts a shadow on a community.

Pigtails; hugging a teddy bear.

It’s been a long time since the photo albums were opened here, in this house, which sits on a slip of land surrounded by cold grey water.

Dissolve to black and white; in her pyjamas, bare feet; a Christmas tree.

Cindy liked to climb. She liked popcorn and playing with friends. She didn’t like hearing the word no.

“When will you start to behave and be good?”

“Someday, Daddy.”

A protective sheet in the photo album is peeled back, the cellophane crackling. Exposed once again to the air, the edges of the pictures curl as though the past recoils like a warning.

The killer tried to make Cindy go away.

Today she would be 46 years old.

***

“All I have is the will to remember.”

James Ellroy

***

Events collide, fate unfolds.

What are the chances Cindy Williams existed at all?

Her family is from an island in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy called Guernsey.

Most of its residents moved away at the start of the Second World War before the Nazis occupied it and deported 1,200 from the Channel Islands to prisons and labour camps.

Ronald Williams made it to England. He married Gwendolyn. They had a son, Jeff.

After the war, they returned to Guernsey, now infested with barbed wire and mines left by the Germans. They had a second child, a daughter: Diane.

In 1951, the family moved to Canada and settled in Hamilton, first on the harbour on Guise Street, later on the Mountain.

They had two more children: Shelley and Kathy.

Ron Williams’ brother drove a milk truck in the city. One morning on his route, he hit an icy patch, the vehicle flipped over and killed him.

Perhaps it was that trauma, or something else, but Ron and Gwen found religion. They became Jehovah’s Witnesses and were deeply committed to its strict orthodoxies.

Diane, growing up in the early 1960s: strong-willed, feeling choked by the family’s new rules.

When she was about 12 or 13, she wore respectable shoes walking to Franklin Junior Public School from their home on East 38th Street. She hid the high heels in her bag and stopped at her friend Cynthia Shepherd’s on East 35th Street en route to switch.

One day, she smoked on her way to school and left the smouldering cigarette in a coat pocket in her locker for later.

P.A. announcement: “Diane Williams, please come to the office.”

Smoke wafted from her locker. She got the strap until her wrists bled.

At 17, she secretly dated her friend Cynthia’s brother, Alex, who was 22, worked at Dofasco, and drove a blue 1964 MGB convertible.

He gave her rides to Barton Secondary School, with the top down, the way she liked it.

Alex nicknamed her “the tough chick” after a song lyric. She approved.

He saw her change at any moment, from high-spirited to depressed. He knew it was family issues and felt she was trying to find her identity.

At 20, in 1966, Diane was pregnant. She never saw the father, Hugh, again and didn’t want to. He had been a mistake. She raised the baby on her own: Michelle.

She was ostracized over the pregnancy, “disfellowshipped” from the Jehovah’s Witness congregation. Her parents would not talk to or even look at her, and they urged her siblings to follow suit. It was a position her mother stuck to for 40 years.

On Jan. 20, 1970, Diane had a second daughter. The father, a guy named Roger, headed out east and never knew the child.

Diane named the baby Cindy, after her friend from East 35th Street.

***

Young Johnny Cherwaty started hustling in the early 1950s when he was 13, running crap games at the YMCA on Ottawa Street North.

He was a player, handsome and cocky, and already gravitating to the other side of the law. And he always had multiple girlfriends, usually at the same time.

He never knew his father, who was killed in the Second World War. He was raised by his mother and stepfather, who ran a dollar store and was a bookie.

In 1957, Johnny married a girl named Erla. They were 18. In the wedding picture, Johnny has a crew cut and the ever-present mischievous grin that made Erla’s parents cringe, well aware of his reputation as a rogue.

They lived on Stirton Street but he wasn’t home much, popping in and out of his family’s life just often enough, it seemed, to get Erla pregnant. They had five kids: Debbie, Teresa, David, Michael, Lori.

But he was home the day the cops took him away for “fencing” — obtaining stolen goods to resell.

“Leave him alone!” screamed nine-year-old daughter Debbie at the police.

He sent her a letter from jail where he served a sentence of one year less a day. You’re the oldest, he wrote, you need to take responsibility. She hid it under the mattress and cried herself to sleep.

After he got out, he could be found chatting up women at Duffy’s Tavern or the Golden Rail.

One night he met Diane Williams. This was around 1970, when he was 30 and she was 23.

He claimed he was divorced. They dated, she later caught him in his lie, and they broke up.

After he was in fact divorced, Johnny and Diane got back together and lived on Fennell Avenue East, near Upper Ottawa, raising Michelle and Cindy.

Diane could never trust him, but also preferred to see the best. He was a doting father to the girls, the only one they ever knew. In fact, he was a better father to Michelle and Cindy than to his own five children.

They agreed to eventually get married and start the process for Johnny to adopt.

He loved Diane, and while he never kicked his infidelity habit, stayed with her. That made him a rock compared to her parents, who shunned Diane the rest of her life.

It got to the point where, if her parents wanted to spend time with Michelle and Cindy, Diane’s mother would phone and ask to speak to Johnny to make arrangements, refusing to speak to her.

Johnny ran illegal high-stakes floating poker games, sometimes hosting players from Hamilton’s underworld and, he said, a few local cops.

Some guys brought weapons. He had a couple of large friends who doubled as bodyguards.

Bitter thugs, betrayed women: there were people in town who would not shed a tear if harm came his way.

But his two closest calls were the time a train struck his Monte Carlo, and a crash on a winter’s night that killed his best friend, Donnie Price, who was driving them home from a poker game.

“Cherwaty,” a cop told him, “You must have nine lives.”

***

Michelle was the good daughter, always well-behaved and quiet.

Cindy was the troublemaker, the monkey, a ball of energy, breaking rules while charming everyone she met.

When they lived at the Driftwood apartments on Fennell Avenue East, the superintendent, a guy named Georgie, loved Cindy so much that he wept when the family moved just down the street.

Cindy hated going to bed. One night, she kept coming out of her room. Diane spanked her.

The next night, Cindy, recognizing the pattern, looked at her parents with those hazel eyes and said, “Can you just spank me now and then I can stay?”

Perhaps more than anyone, Johnny Cherwaty, her adoptive father, appreciated her rascal streak. It just made him love her more.

One rule was strictly enforced: crossing the street outside their apartment at 1165 Fennell Ave. E. Cindy broke that rule once and got a big spanking.

The summer of 1974: Cindy was four and a half, and Michelle was seven. They played by the water at Hamilton beach, and the playground and pool outside the apartment.

Everyone knew most everyone else in the building. Cindy had several friends. One of them, Charmane, lived in the unit above, on the fifth floor.

Cindy was allowed to take the elevator by herself to visit friends, but only one floor up or one floor down.

Friday, July 26, broke with rain and the rest of the afternoon was grey and muggy, drizzling on and off.

Johnny’s teenage daughter, Teresa, and her friend, Robyn, had slept over the night before, babysitting when Johnny and Diane went out.

In the morning, Cindy dressed in a navy blue tank top, blue shorts and white sneakers.

After lunch, Cindy asked Teresa and Robyn if she could go to Charmane’s. They told her to ask her mother.

Diane said yes, but only if the kids stayed indoors, because Cindy had earlier complained of an earache.

Diane and Johnny’s unit, number 402, was at the end of the hall, next to the interior stairs. Cindy went out the door. The elevator was down to the left.

After a couple of hours, Cindy had not returned. An early dinner was nearly ready.

Johnny arrived home from work. He finally had a regular job, had been working at Burlington Steel five months.

Diane sent Michelle upstairs to get Cindy from Charmane’s. No one was home; they had been out all afternoon.

They started knocking on doors. By 5 p.m. Diane had called police.

Johnny told his truck-driving buddies to spread the word on their CB radios to look for her.

He visited Diane’s parents on East 45th Street. Diane’s youngest sister, Kathy, answered the door.

“Go get your father,“ he said.

She listened in when he told them: “Someone has taken Cindy.” And then he broke down.

“Hundreds comb Mountain for child missing all night” read the headline in the next afternoon’s Hamilton Spectator. The article continued: “More than 100 searchers were up at dawn today looking for a pretty four-year-old girl missing since yesterday near the precipitous edge of Hamilton’s eastern Mountain Brow.”

Michelle kept thinking about what she had recently told her little sister, when Cindy had broken a record album of hers, one that Michelle had told her not to touch. Michelle retaliated by breaking Cindy’s Etch A Sketch and got in trouble for it; she was supposed to be the responsible one.

“I hate you,” she told Cindy.

And now Cindy was missing and Michelle brooded upon a lesson her parents had taught them: never say I hate you, because if you do, you are wishing the other person dies.

***

Reward poster, July 1974: “Missing girl/Cindy Williams/Female, white, 3 feet 8 inches tall, blond hair in a short shag cut, dark tan, wart on the third toe of the left foot.”

Hamilton Spectator headline: “Police draw blank in search for Cindy.”

Fifty officers searched: house to house, up and down the escarpment, in storm sewers. Police announced her disappearance over megaphone speakers atop their cruisers.

A Hamilton police officer named Mervyn Black was assigned to the case. He never went by that name, though; he was Bud. Bud Black.

Bud had been an accountant who changed gears and became a cop. He had married and divorced young and never had kids. He grabbed hold of the Cindy Williams missing child case and did not let go, to the point his supervisor thought he would burn out. He was at Diane and Johnny’s apartment every day.

Had Cindy been snatched inside the building, been lured by someone she knew and trusted? She was more carefree than even the average kid, she would never question anyone’s motives.

A boy said he saw Cindy walking hand-in-hand with a man in a black coat and dark hat west on Fennell toward Upper Ottawa Street. Police spoke to the boy several times and his story remained consistent.

Mom said ‘some day I will send you a message when I find out who did this to Cindy’

Article was updated Sep 3, 2023
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Spectator headline: “Cindy is reported seen in the north.”

The rest of the summer and into the fall, Cindy’s case became a dark part of life for families on the Mountain, a violation of the way things were. Kids had always played outside without supervision.

For some it brought back memories of the unsolved case of 10-year-old Marianne Schuett, snatched in 1967 during a five-minute walk from her school in Kilbride north of Burlington.

Johnny returned to work and got a cash advance so he could put up $1,500 of his own money for a reward.

Diane took sedation medication and chain-smoked. She still washed Cindy’s clothes in the laundry room, folding them neatly, as though she would return any moment.

The apartment was a revolving door: reporters, police officers, friends, volunteers bringing food.

“If whoever has Cindy would phone and say ‘I have your girl’ and tell me what I have to do to get her back, that’s all I want,“ Diane said. “Whoever has her, just call anyone in the phone book and tell them where you will be leaving Cindy, and we will come and pick her up.”

The search went nationwide.

A psychologist suggested Johnny and Diane get married. The timing seemed odd, but they agreed. Maybe it would help bring them together. And Diane had long wanted to get that kind of commitment from Johnny.

They married Nov. 8, 1974 at St. John United Church. Diane’s youngest sister, Kathy, who was 13, was forbidden from attending the wedding by their mother because of Diane’s disfellowshipped status.

Diane’s daughter, Michelle, who had just turned eight, was there. She had gone into a shell, erecting a wall in her mind to what had happened to her sister. She wrote a story for a teacher that said Cindy was in Hawaii. Her parents took her for grief counselling.

In the fall, Diane saw a renowned psychic named Vera McNichol in a village north of Kitchener. She cried when the psychic said she believed Cindy was dead.

“I don’t think he took her west. I think he went west afterwards,” the psychic told her. “He didn’t travel a long distance. He’s sly.”

***

Glover Road runs south off Rymal Road on the Mountain, named after a farmer who once owned the land. Several families built small homes along the gravel road, that in the 1970s was not part of Hamilton but rather Glanbrook Township.

One of the families who lived along the road was named Posonski. One of the boys, Kim, played on a football scholarship at Eastern Michigan and was drafted by the Ticats, but didn’t make the team and played for the Hamilton Hurricanes.

On April 30, 1975, Kim, his wife Connie, and their daughters, who were three and four years old, were visiting his parents on Glover Road.

Connie had wanted Kim to make her a terrarium, so he placed his shovel and axe in the trunk of his car and drove the girls south on Glover a few hundred metres, just past Twenty Road, to dig up some peat moss and plants.

It was an area where some people dumped trash, and teenagers went to park and drink.

The morning had been foggy, and the air was still cool and moist.

He stuck his shovel in the ground about 100 feet west of Glover. The soil was rocky, difficult to dig a hole in. He spotted what looked like an inverted bowl sticking through the dirt.