VIKING
an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
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First published 2020
Copyright © 2020 Jeff Blackstock and Roy MacSkimming
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Murder in the family / Jeff Blackstock.
Names: Blackstock, Jeff, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200179004 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200179039 | ISBN 9780735236615 (softcover) | ISBN 9780735236622 (HTML)
Subjects: LCSH: Blackstock, Jeff—Family. | LCSH: Murder—Case studies. | LCGFT: Case studies.
Classification: LCC HV6515 .B63 2020 | DDC 364.152/3—dc23
Cover and book design by Kate Sinclair
Cover photos: courtesy of the author; (frames) alubalish / Getty Images
Interior photos: courtesy of the author
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Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
JOHN STUART MILL, 1867
To Carol Janice Gray Blackstock
CONTENTS
Copyright
Epigraph
Dedication
Prologue
1 To Buenos Aires
2 Beginnings
3 Family Years
4 Argentina: A Whole New World
5 Carol’s Strange Sickness
6 The Last Goodbye
7 Death in Montreal
8 Burial
9 Life Without Mom
10 Uprooting
11 Terror in New Orleans
12 Pandora’s Box
13 My English Summer
14 Julie’s Discovery
15 Investigation
16 Confrontation
17 Mind Games
18 Deterioration
19 Death and Revelation
Epilogue: Reflections on a “Perfect” Crime
Photo Insert
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
I THINK THAT my father murdered my mother. My sister, Julia Blackstock, and I came to that conclusion after uncovering a disturbing trail of evidence and pursuing it to the end.
Our father, the late George Blackstock, was a career diplomat in Canada’s foreign service. He was never convicted of Carol Blackstock’s murder. He was never even charged. Through calculated deception on his part, an apparent cover-up by the Canadian government, dereliction of duty by medical and police authorities on two continents, and sheer luck, our father literally got away with murder.
I cannot take credit for uncovering what happened to our mother. It was our maternal grandfather, Howard Gray, who first set out to find the truth and ultimately discovered the cause of his daughter’s death. He offered to share his discoveries with me, but I was a teenager at the time, with conflicting loyalties between the two most important men in my life, my father and my grandfather. I was unwilling to hear the truth.
After our grandfather died, it was Julia who found his papers. They left no doubt about the shocking way our mother had died and immediately cast suspicion on our father. And yet, when he protested his innocence, I still wanted to believe him. I felt deeply reluctant to accept that Dad could have committed such a horrible crime.
But I continued to think about it. I was nagged by inconsistencies in our father’s account, and by common sense. New evidence Julia and I discovered led in only one direction. Even so, it took time, and repeated testing of our father’s self-proclaimed innocence, before I could move from doubt to reluctant suspicion to hard, bitter certainty. It also took the example of my sister’s perseverance and courage. In the end, I realized that Julie was right: it was impossible to live in denial, and the only way forward was to know the truth.
This is a true story, and unlike a mystery novel, real life is messy. There will be no neat resolution tying up the loose ends, no smoking gun, no confession, and no ghost pointing an accusing finger. Instead, our mother’s case turned on deception, deceit, and out-and-out lies, which left a messy picture indeed, like pieces of a puzzle scattered on a table. Two things were clear, however: the horror of our mother’s murder, and our father’s lying about it. Once we confronted those realities, there was no turning back. Our loyalty to our mother, our sense of justice, and our outrage with our father demanded it.
Telling our mother’s story is a challenge. It’s one thing to have lived through the emotional turmoil surrounding her death, quite another to reassemble fragments, deliberately sundered and clouded, to expose what really happened and put it down on paper, so that others can see it too. This has been a voyage of discovery—a lifelong journey ranging far beyond our mother’s short lifespan—revealing how much she suffered, the pain and anguish of our grandparents, the treachery of our father and those who enabled him, the unravelling of their subterfuge, and, finally, the lasting effect on my sister, my brother, Douglas, and me. While this is Carol Blackstock’s story, it’s ours too.
I was eight years old when our mother died, the oldest of her three children. Though I remember her clearly, telling her story means portraying her and our father as they were before I was born and when I was too young to retain more than blurry fragments of memory. Fortunately, I’ve been able to turn to relatives and family friends for knowledge of our parents’ childhoods, brief courtship, and early married life. Many letters that they wrote to each other and their families have survived. Letters and photographs have the power to bring our parents alive as they were in the 1950s, and I use both to tell the story. Other documents that have come into my possession—official correspondence, diplomatic cables, medical records, journals—have been invaluable in untangling and substantiating the web of events around our mother’s death.
Our mother was a more prolific correspondent than our father, especially during her last year of life, when our family was living on diplomatic posting in Buenos Aires. Between raising three kids and meeting the demands of a daunting social schedule as a diplomat’s wife—attending receptions and cocktail parties, hosting dinners for distinguished visitors—she frequently made time to write to her parents in Toronto. Reflecting her high spirits, intelligence, and loving nature, her letters convey the flavour of the local culture and provide clear-eyed insights into embassy politics and the demands of diplomatic life.
Reading our mother’s words as she wrote them has helped me revive and relive my own memories of her. To my brother and sister and me, she was a devoted, often demanding mother who wanted the best for us and from us. Her witty and keenly observant letters, handed down to my siblings and me by our maternal grandparents, reveal her in ways I was too young to appreciate at the time: living a sometimes glamorous, often exhausting life in exotic Argentina, the only country she’d ever visited outside North America, and clearly savouring the novelty of it all. And yet this vibrant, radiant, resilient young woman didn’t live to see her twenty-fifth birthday.
No doubt others in my family would tell the story differently. But they didn’t know our mother as Julie and Doug and I d
id—or care so deeply about what happened to her. They didn’t hire investigators or seek out and read all the documents that came into our possession, both before and after our father’s death. They didn’t track down and interview physicians, lawyers, former household staff in Argentina, relatives, family friends, and scores of others who might have knowledge of what befell our mother. They didn’t question our father face to face, as we did, or witness his revealing reactions to the evidence we’d uncovered. They didn’t fit pieces of the puzzle together until they formed an unmistakable pattern.
This is the story told by that evidence.
Since the story is a true one, I’ve used the real names of the people involved, except where otherwise indicated. In making every reasonable effort to protect those who are collateral to the main story, I have changed or omitted some names, and in some cases have changed other identifying details.
1
TO BUENOS AIRES
IT WAS MARCH 1958. I was seven years old and standing on the passenger deck of the SS Argentina. The enormous ship was berthed in the Hudson River, at a terminal on the west side of Manhattan, awaiting departure to Buenos Aires.
I’d never been on an ocean liner before. Everything was new to me: seagulls screaming in the chilly grey sky, the smell of sea air, the frenzied whistles and shouting on the dock below. Policemen moved people away from the dock’s edge. Stevedores stood by to remove the gangplank. From the terminal’s observation deck, people were calling and waving farewell to the passengers around us.
I could barely hear Mom’s voice through all the noise.
“Jeff, hang on to my belt with one hand and the rail with the other. You too, Doug,” she told my five-year-old brother.
She was wearing a new belted coat. In her arms she held my two-year-old sister, Julia, whom we mostly called Julie.
From what I’d heard her say to Dad, I knew she worried about letting us kids up on deck. With all the passengers jostling around us, she feared we might be pushed into the water. She too had never been on an ocean liner before. Dad just laughed and told her not to fuss.
The previous evening, Mom and Dad had left us with a babysitter in our Manhattan hotel room to go nightclubbing. This morning had been a scramble: last-minute checkout, a taxi ride to the wharf through sluggish traffic that Dad cursed under his breath, checking in at the Moore-McCormack Lines wicket. We found our cabins, one for Mom and Dad and Julie, one for Doug and me, and porters wheeled in our steamer trunks. I was glad Mom had agreed we could go up on deck, even if there was no one to wave us goodbye.
Doug and I jumped when a deafening blast erupted from the horn on the ship’s funnel, like a gigantic tuba, shaking the entire ship. Mom assured us this just meant we were leaving. The ship began to move slowly away from the dock. Passengers and well-wishers ashore waved even more frantically, as if they were never going to see one another again. I watched spellbound as tugboats moved us farther into the river.
Mom was silent, lost in her own thoughts, reflecting, perhaps, on what she’d gone through to reach this point in her life. Here she was at twenty-three, with three children, sailing to Buenos Aires, where her husband would take up his first diplomatic post. She was excited about the adventure, yet wistful about leaving home. She was an only child, and her immediate family in Toronto was just her parents, now well into middle age. She worried they’d miss her too much. She felt apprehensive not knowing what lay ahead in Argentina. And what about the kids? How would they fare in this strange new life?
Leaving Ottawa, where we’d lived for the past four years, had been a blur of packing, our mother shopping for us as well as herself and Dad, sorting things out with schools, attending goodbye parties, dealing with the never-ending inventory lists required by the government from foreign service officers. A stopover in Toronto had been less work but more difficult emotionally, because of saying goodbye to her parents.
I’d overheard Mom and Dad quarrelling about where to stay in Toronto: at her parents’ modest apartment or with Granny Blackstock, Dad’s widowed mother, who had a six-bedroom house. I know Mom believed it was her parents themselves whom Dad wanted to avoid. That was what really bothered her, and not being able to spend as much time with her parents as she’d like before a three-year absence far from home. After all, Granny Blackstock could afford to visit us in Buenos Aires. But Mom’s parents couldn’t, so it only seemed fair to stay with them.
Still, the last thing Mom wanted was more fighting with Dad on the eve of departure. In the end, she’d acquiesced for the sake of family peace.
I was too swept up in the excitement of our adventure to be missing anyone. Just the day before, we’d gone all the way to the top of the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world at 102 storeys. We’d explored Times Square and the crowded canyons of Manhattan. Big, bustling New York made Ottawa seem like a sleepy village.
As the SS Argentina began leaving Manhattan behind, Mom said to Doug and me, “That’s the Statue of Liberty, boys. And look at that skyline!”
Dad looked over at the Statue of Liberty, then at Mom and us kids against the collage of skyscrapers. His gaze returned to the mouth of New York Harbor and the open Atlantic beyond. From my time in the foreign service much later, I can appreciate what he must have felt: a sense of pride and achievement as he embarked on his first posting. If someone had told him a few years earlier that today he’d be sailing to Buenos Aires, a freshly minted diplomat, third secretary at the Canadian embassy, with a wife and three children and enormous responsibilities at age twenty-four, he wouldn’t have believed it. One thing had just led on to another, and now this. It was as though some invisible guiding hand had kept the out-of-control train of events on some hidden track.
We were now in the open sea, Manhattan only a few hazy bumps on the horizon. “Time to go to the cabin and get dressed for dinner,” Mom said.
I was ready to go below. Julie was fast asleep bundled up in Mom’s embrace, but Doug and I were shivering from the cold wind picking up on the water.
“I’ll go check on our dinner seating,” Dad said. “I’ll meet you in the cabin.”
* * *
—
ROUGH WEATHER AND heaving decks soon had me feeling seasick and bumping into walls in our stateroom. Mom wouldn’t let us go out on deck unless she was holding on to us. She took us with her when she had her hair done in the beauty salon or went exploring the shops selling fancy watches and duty-free liquor. We all liked the lounges with picture windows, where we could watch huge white-capped rollers chasing the ship. Doug, Julie, and I had temporarily lost our appetites, but Mom and Dad enjoyed the elaborate meals served on crisp white linen in the big dining room. Our pet collie, Lassie, whom we visited every day in the ship’s kennel, had never eaten so well in her life.
Even if she didn’t say it, my mother would have had very mixed feelings about leaving Canada just when her own mother was going into hospital. Carol wrote her first letter home to her parents on airmail stationery stamped with the Moore-McCormack Lines logo and “On Board S.S. Argentina.”
March 24, 1958
Dear Mom and Dad,
You were absolutely right when you predicted the lack of sleep we’d get aboard. There is never a dull moment….
For three days out of N.Y, the weather was the roughest they had had in years. Everyone was sick, but we (George and I) didn’t miss a meal. The kids all were sick but recovered very quickly. Lassie is on the boat deck being fed steak and doing very well.
The days warmed up, the sea calmed down, and I started really enjoying myself. Doug and I went into the pool a lot, supervised by the swim instructor. We didn’t see much of Dad. He was probably in a deck chair, lost in a book by one of his favourite authors—Agatha Christie or P.G. Wodehouse, or perhaps a paperback about the Second World War. Mom told her parents that she and George were out almost every night after dinner.
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We are well into the tropics now and it is so humid that none of our clothes will dry. Last night we had a Sadie Hawkins dance and it was a lot of fun. The food is absolutely wonderful, never had anything like it in all my life. Seven course meals all the time….
Jeffrey is doing very well in his swimming. He can go half way down the pool. Douglas still has his tube. I was told so many times…about what a lot of trouble I’d have with Julia’s training. She has been an angel. Never puddles and eats like her Dad.
There is dancing every night and we always have a swim before going to bed…. Tomorrow night is the masquerade party and it should be lots of fun.
Always sociable, Carol enjoyed getting to know the passengers and crew. Observing the cast of cruise ship characters made her wish she were a writer.
The people at our table are very amusing. One older couple going to Rio are with Ford and look very much like Aunt Marion and Uncle Phil. Both of them. Another woman from NY reminds me of Aunt Teddy but she’s not as nice. A girl of about thirty travelling alone for the cruise and a Southern widow who is a scream. The Chief Engineer is the officer at our table. We are always the last table to leave….
I am sure you have seen movies or read about these cruise ships. They are absolutely dead right. I wish I was a writer as I am sure I could make a fortune. There is the deck walker and the girl who missed the boat on her man and is still looking, and the rich bleached widows and the nouveau riche. They are all here. The ship’s comedian and the handsome typical blond brush-cut, clean-cut American diplomat. They haven’t missed a thing even to the romantic music and the soft sea breezes. I must be getting old and cynical – even the muscle-bound gym instructor doesn’t impress me.
For Carol Gray, who had never travelled beyond Buffalo, just over the border from Toronto, it was—in spite of her tongue-in-cheek cynicism—like entering a fascinating new world.
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