Murder in the Family

by Jeff Blackstock

  “Yes, they were involved. But it was just routine—a police clerk in an office ticking off boxes on a form. When someone dies shortly after arriving in the country, some formalities are required.”

  I was trying to get my head around Dad’s portrayal of our mother’s death as just a matter of “routine” and “formalities.” I’d have felt less bewildered if he’d exploded with outrage, as I’d imagined he might, demanding, “How dare you ask me these questions!” Any show of emotion at all would have been welcome, instead of this hollow, unreal version of events.

  I persisted. “I understand you told my grandparents about Mom’s death by phoning them from Montreal.”

  “Yes. It was important they hear it directly from me instead of indirectly from someone else. You know, it was your mother’s idea to go to Montreal. She didn’t want to worry her parents. She was planning to let them know once she got better. We both thought this would be best—not only for your mother’s recovery, but to spare her parents unnecessary worry. Your grandmother was a person who would fret and fret over things. The last thing your mother needed right then was to be dealing with her mother.”

  Dad said this in an eminently practical, sensible tone, looking thoughtfully aside.

  “You’ve always told me Mom’s doctors never discovered what it was.” This was a loaded question. We both now knew for a fact that the cause of death had been established for years when Dad first told me that.

  “Well, that’s right. As far as I knew, they never did. I was staying with my cousin Mary in Montreal, and her husband was a doctor quite familiar with the hospital. I was sure he’d have heard if there had been anything to report.”

  My gut instinct was not to get into an argument over what he knew and when. He’d only have reduced it to a debate about semantics. And I realized a discussion of what Grandpa said about Dad’s red herring of a tropical disease wouldn’t be productive either. It was clear we’d reached the limits of Dad’s willingness to discuss Mom’s death.

  He was, however, quite miffed that he’d had to spend $200 on my plane tickets. He took my questions about arsenic poisoning without blinking but got upset about the money I’d cost him.

  I wanted to shout, “Come on, Dad! This is my mother—your wife—we’re talking about!”

  But I was beginning to doubt my ability to hold my own against him. Did he have ice water in his veins? Or was he just wiser and more mature than me? He sounded so reasonable, so confident, so sure of his facts, and I had no concrete proof he’d been officially notified of Mom’s cause of death.

  I was dealing with a situation beyond my comprehension or acceptance. There had to be a rational explanation, but I couldn’t see it yet. I was stunned, uncomprehending, and fearful all at once.

  Even so, my filial loyalty had been violently shaken. I wanted to believe my father. But what he’d told me made no sense at all.

  When I returned from Minneapolis, the family friend I’d confided in earlier said she’d never seen me so disappointed and downcast.

  15

  INVESTIGATION

  I DON’T REMEMBER exactly when I stopped believing my father. Even at first, I didn’t really believe his story itself—it simply didn’t add up. And yet I reserved judgment on him. I was hoping against hope there was something he wasn’t telling us, perhaps couldn’t tell us, which would finally emerge and explain everything—even why he’d had to concoct a false version of what had happened.

  It wasn’t until January that I’d been able to visit Dad in Minneapolis, two months after Julie revealed her discovery of the autopsy report. Dad had asked me who else knew what Julie had discovered. I just told him we had spoken to Doug before Christmas, at which point Dad would have realized that Doug had known about it during a skiing holiday with him shortly thereafter. Yet it would be three more months before Dad reached out to Julie about it, and five whole years before he discussed it with Doug.

  Dad finally went to see Julie while in Canada on business. They met at her apartment. He must have rehearsed for the occasion as thoroughly as he would for a play, and his conversation with her was very different from his discussion with me.

  Dad’s story was basically the same: the doctors in Montreal had never told him, and he hadn’t followed up with them because, after all, “What good would it do?” He claimed he’d thought about it but had dismissed the idea as fruitless: “It wouldn’t bring her back,” he lamented.

  Julie noted that he seemed sincere, leaning back on her hide-a-bed sofa speaking about Mom’s death. He said he felt remorseful that he hadn’t done more to save her when she became ill. He was especially sorry he hadn’t obtained a second medical opinion, remembering, with apparent regret, how his embassy colleague Dwight Fulford had urged him to consult another doctor in Buenos Aires and told him, “For God’s sake, George, it’s your wife’s life we’re talking about!”

  Julie admitted she couldn’t detect any evidence of duplicity or lying. I was very surprised to hear her say that. Equally astonishing, Dad admitted to Julie that it was now undeniably clear Mom had been murdered, based on the information Julie had found at Grandma’s. He didn’t even question that interpretation of the autopsy results. He told Julie he didn’t believe that Mom had committed suicide, or that her death could have been the result of some accident. Perhaps he calculated that, by agreeing it was murder, he would make himself appear more credible. In any case, it was a huge admission for him to make, given his previous know-nothing stance, and the fact that suicide would have been such a convenient “explanation” by absolving him.

  With hindsight, it’s obvious Dad’s position was contradictory, even preposterous. He now realized Mom had been murdered yet, unaccountably, the police hadn’t considered it necessary to inform him of the arsenic poisoning, or even to conduct a criminal investigation. At the time, our grasp of this contradiction was overwhelmed by Dad’s apparent sincerity and the power of his continuing authority in our lives. We wanted to believe he was innocent. And it was possible to cling to that belief, because we didn’t yet know things we would discover later.

  Dad also told Julie that, after returning to Buenos Aires following Mom’s death, he became suspicious of our cook, Alejandra. He’d heard that the wife of the former owner of our house, Juan Perón’s crony Jorge Antonio, had died mysteriously when Alejandra worked for them. He added that Alejandra had apparently adored him, George. But when he could find nothing to confirm his suspicions about her, he dropped the matter. He acknowledged that he kept Alejandra on as our cook for many months afterwards.

  (Recently, however, a son of Jorge Antonio revealed that there never was a cook in the Antonio household, since his mother, Esmeralda Rubin, did all the cooking; that she did not die until 1987, when she was living in Spain; and that he didn’t remember Alejandra being in the house at all. In addition, María’s daughter Cristina told me that, in fact, Alejandra had a boyfriend at the time.)

  Dad recounted what he’d done when Grandpa had accused him of poisoning Mom and later pressed for custody of Julie. He engaged the family lawyers, who told him to write a detailed account of his actions during and after Carol’s illness. He did so, he claimed, and on the basis of his version of events, they opined there were no grounds for Grandpa’s allegations. This was the first we’d heard of Dad committing any such testament to paper. Julie never saw it, and never would.

  Julie asked whether he’d been interested in following up on the autopsy from a medical point of view, in case it revealed the possibility of a hereditary disease that could affect us kids.

  Dad was less than convincing on this point. As Julie would observe later, “For someone who hadn’t bothered to ask [the MNI doctors] for the autopsy report, he seemed very certain there was no potential value in knowing the results.”

  And yet after their conversation, Julie didn’t believe that he had lied to her. To her own surprise, she felt as
I had after my visit to Minneapolis: prepared to accept what he had told us.

  True, Dad’s story was jarring and bizarre, and left a number of loose ends dangling. We were both troubled by details that didn’t quite fit, questions that remained unanswered. But we really had no solid proof that his account was untrue. Denial is a powerful thing.

  * * *

  —

  JULIE AND I both needed to get on with our lives. The demands of law school didn’t permit breaks in concentration for long, and I was soon back at the books. When not immersed in my studies, I was in New York City with Marie.

  While staying at Marie’s Upper West Side apartment over the March break, I asked her to marry me. Living in different cities had made us realize how much we missed each other, how much a part of each other’s lives we’d become. We went to a jewellery store and picked out a ring—not a big diamond, but a pretty aquamarine ring with little diamonds on the side—which I put on my credit card since I didn’t have the cash.

  In early May, after writing my exams, I returned in my yellow Volkswagen Beetle to glorious spring weather in Manhattan. Marie and I decided that we didn’t want, and couldn’t afford, the expense of a big wedding. We were happy with a quiet civil ceremony at City Hall in New York, away from all the complications of family back home. I certainly didn’t want my father taking over and stage-managing our wedding, as he’d done with Julie’s.

  Meanwhile, Julie was working at a shelter for battered women in Kingston and trying to focus on her marriage, which she feared was starting to slip away from her. She found she was constantly reminded of our mother and assailed by disturbing thoughts of how horribly she’d died.

  Grandma needed Julie’s help and attention more and more as her mental faculties deteriorated. Grandma went away for a bridge weekend with some old female friends—“I call them ‘the girls,’ ” she’d say, “even though they’re my age, of course”—and they were shocked by the extent and rapidity of her decline.

  Finally, Julie had no choice but to take on responsibility for Grandma’s affairs. She arranged to place her in a special-care facility, which entailed moving her from her beloved Toronto to Kingston.

  While visiting Grandma, Julie reread the letters Mom had written to her parents from Ottawa and Argentina. They saddened yet fascinated her; they were so alive with Mom’s zest for life, her compassion, her sense of humour. Why would anyone have wanted to kill such a beautiful and spirited young woman?

  On a visit to our Scottish cousins at the sheep farm where I’d once stayed, Julie asked what they knew about Carol’s death. She learned about rumours making the rounds at the Gooderham family reunion in Toronto in summer 1963, a gathering of some three hundred relatives, which we had attended as kids. There was talk among the adults that Carol had died of arsenic poisoning, and that our cook was suspected. In that case, Dad surely had heard it, notwithstanding his later claim of ignorance. And besides, who had floated the story about the cook? It could only have come from one person.

  After Marie and I were married, Julie and I continued to talk on the phone from time to time. Our conversations always revolved around what had happened to our mother. Neither of us could get free of our anxieties around it, and we knew they weren’t going away.

  Meanwhile, Julie’s life was starting to come apart. As she later wrote,

  Mostly my mind seemed to alternate between going on with my daily life, watching my marriage fall apart in front of my eyes, and falling in love with my co-worker…. I would be in the middle of doing something mundane, such as cutting up vegetables, and I would suddenly “remember” with a slight shock that my mother had been murdered. I couldn’t believe it and, at the same time, I felt that I had always known it.

  Anyone who has experienced something even remotely similar will understand. Although I didn’t grasp it until later, I think the horror I’d felt when Julie first told me the news had come from that same strange place of déjà vu that she described—a sickening awareness deep down that I already knew Dad was responsible.

  Within a year, Julie would file for divorce. Shortly after that, a realization came to her: “One day…I was going about my business and I realized that somewhere along the way, I had stopped believing Dad.”

  I too was having doubts. But as troubled as I remained by the knowledge of Mom’s death, and by Dad’s initial response to it, and though the gaps in his story continued to haunt me, I still hadn’t given up on him completely—not as completely as Julie had.

  * * *

  —

  BY FALL 1984, I’d completed my bar exams. Marie and I were back living in Ottawa. She’d returned to an earlier job as a curator of Inuit art at the federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. I was looking for full-time work.

  From my conversations with Julie, I knew how thoroughly she’d changed her mind about Dad. She felt quite alone in her renewed conviction that he’d been lying to us. Doug, disturbed as he’d been after we told him about the autopsy results, admitted he didn’t know what to think. Of the three of us, he most wanted and needed our father’s approval.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what I believed, but before long I came to the same conclusion as Julie had. “The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced you were right and I was wrong,” I told her.

  Ultimately, Dad’s claim that he’d known nothing about the arsenic didn’t make any sense to me either. As Julie put it, “It was an explanation that required no explanation.”

  She and I were now in agreement: there were so many signs pointing to Dad’s culpability that we simply had to take action. We decided to take time out of our lives to investigate for ourselves.

  * * *

  —

  THE OBVIOUS PLACE to start was the Montreal Neurological Institute. I telephoned the MNI to request information about my mother’s death twenty-five years earlier. After being transferred from one official to another, I wound up speaking to Dr. Graham, the institute’s registrar and one of the physicians who had treated Mom. He understood immediately who I was and agreed to a meeting with Julie and me whenever we would like.

  A week later, we made the three-hour drive from Kingston to Montreal. Located near the base of Mount Royal, on the McGill University campus, the Montreal Neurological Institute looked like a drab Soviet politburo building. The office where we met Dr. Graham provided the same impression: grey walls, a government-issue wooden table, and four nondescript chairs. Dr. Graham himself was grey and unremarkable—a balding middle-aged man carrying a slim file.

  Yet there was no mistaking the doctor’s sharp intellect. He was guarded and forthcoming at the same time. He knew he was dealing with a very tricky situation. Though he’d offered to help us, he was no doubt conflicted by the need to protect the MNI’s reputation—and his own.

  “Thank you for seeing us, Dr. Graham,” Julie said pleasantly.

  “I’m happy to help, if I can. What may I do for you?”

  “After discovering the autopsy report on our mother’s death,” I said, “we’d like to follow up with some questions.” In my hand I held a pen and our list of questions, typewritten on a sheet of paper.

  Dr. Graham thought about this for a few seconds. “I’d like to take a look at all the questions first,” he replied.

  Julie and I were in no position to say, “No thank you. We’d prefer just to ask our questions, if you don’t mind.” Dr. Graham could shut down the interview at any time and slam the door on any further access to information at the MNI. I handed him the paper.

  Dr. Graham read the list without expression and handed it back to me, saying nothing.

  “All right,” I began. “Could our mother’s poisoning have been the result of suicide?”

  “No,” Dr. Graham replied flatly. “That’s not the way people commit suicide. Even if she’d tried, she’d have been highly unlikely to succeed. A massive dose was f
ound in her digestive tract. The arsenic would have been administered by someone who had access to her food.”

  On that issue, he was quite unequivocal. The possibility of suicide would have provided a very convenient way out for Dr. Graham, I thought. It would have left the door open to clear everyone of blame: the hospital, the police, the Department of Trade and Commerce, George Blackstock. But even Dad had never suggested suicide as a possibility.

  “What led you to look for arsenic?” Julie asked.

  “To tell you the truth, we didn’t know what it was at first. So we put a team together and talked around a table. This is a teaching hospital, and we do that sort of thing. After a while, someone said, ‘You know, this is the kind of thing that happens with heavy-metal poisoning.’ There was a physical autopsy of the body. [During the autopsy, tissue samples were taken for microscopic examination, and for toxicological testing afterwards.] A new technology had recently been introduced, gas spectrometry, and it was used to test for the presence of heavy metals in the toxicology work. Arsenic was found throughout her body, including a very large amount in the intestine and smaller quantities in the hair. This indicated that it was not only substantial but had been ingested over an extended period of time.”

  Dr. Graham sounded more in his element now. What he didn’t mention, however, was this statement from the toxicological report: “The spectrograph has been used to determine that we were dealing with arsenic and nothing else.” The toxicologists knew what they were looking for. They’d been directed by the doctors who had conducted the physical autopsy, and who believed, on the basis of microscopic and other examinations they had made, that they were dealing with arsenic.

  I asked if the Montreal police had been involved.

  “Yes, they were notified. They had only one suspect, and they wanted to observe what that person would do.”