Now the doctor was being very careful. But we didn’t have to ask him who that one suspect was. It was perfectly obvious.
“What did they find?”
“We don’t know. Once a case is in the hands of the police, we leave them to do their work.”
I asked how long it had taken for the toxicology work to be completed.
“The autopsy was done right away. The toxicology would have taken more time, but I couldn’t say exactly how long. I wasn’t involved with that end of things.”
“Do you know whether anyone ever communicated the cause of death to our father?” Julie asked.
“I don’t know about that. Your grandfather inquired some time later and was informed.”
“May we look at that file you have with you?” Julie asked him. I admired her boldness.
Dr. Graham paused. “Since it’s not a hospital file, I suppose you could.” He paused again before finishing his thought. “I’ll just step out for a few minutes.”
Not a hospital file? So evidently Dr. Graham had been holding on to his own personal file on Carol Blackstock for the past twenty-five years. That’s a long time—and I doubted the doctor normally opened private files on his patients.
Initially, I’d been surprised that he’d agreed so readily to see us. Now I understood that, since he’d kept his file for so long, refusing to meet with us might have made saving it pointless.
He’d been careful to check all our questions before answering the first one—yet now he was willing to have us look through his file unsupervised. Why all the cloak-and-dagger? I wondered.
Left alone in the room, Julie and I pored over the file. Our eyes were drawn at once to one letter in particular. It was from Assistant Deputy Minister Leslie Brown of the Department of Trade and Commerce. Brown was writing in reply to a communication sent by hospital authorities immediately after Carol’s death, telling them he’d be arriving right away to deal personally with the matter.
So Dr. Graham’s purpose in showing us the file—and presumably the purpose of the MNI, since it was unlikely he was acting alone—was to let us know about the involvement of Dad’s employer, the Government of Canada. The Department of Trade and Commerce had been informed of Mom’s death immediately. Brown had responded not merely with a conventional note of acknowledgment expressing official sympathy for the family, but with a message of unmistakable urgency. The department had considered Carol Blackstock’s death serious enough—from the government’s own point of view—to dispatch a senior bureaucrat to the scene.
The file contained nothing else of equal importance. From Dr. Graham’s earlier remark that the police had taken control of the case, Julie and I were left to conclude that the MNI had let the matter remain entirely in the hands of the police and the Department of Trade and Commerce.
After ten minutes, Dr. Graham re-entered the room and sat down.
“I’m not sure there’s anything more I can tell you,” he said, taking his file back. Then he sighed and remarked, in a resigned tone, “I hope this isn’t going to turn into a Hatfields and McCoys family feud.”
It was a peculiar and tasteless remark, seeming to trivialize a death that the doctor had once considered important. It angered Julie and me, but we said nothing. It revealed that Dr. Graham was well aware the object of our suspicions could be none other than our father.
If I can paraphrase the good doctor’s advice, he was saying, “Let bygones be bygones.” But if so, he was being unrealistic. How could he expect that, once this was out of the bag, Julie and I would let it go? This was no ordinary bygone.
Was Dr. Graham trying to help us? Or was he an instrument of a self-serving institution? I think probably both.
* * *
—
“THAT WHOLE PLACE gave me the creeps,” I told Julie, as we pulled out of the parking lot.
“Me too,” she said. “To think Mom died in that cold, barren mausoleum, knowing nobody. She couldn’t have found much comfort there.”
“I certainly didn’t.”
“And I didn’t hear an ounce of sympathy from Dr. Graham. Not even one of the old clichés: ‘We did everything we could,’ ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ etcetera. Or, ‘At least she didn’t suffer—much.’ ”
“He didn’t want to go anywhere near the most damning question: Why couldn’t they diagnose arsenic poisoning before she died? Perhaps they could have saved her,” I said.
“And what was all that hocus-pocus about letting us view the file while he stepped out?” Julie said.
“It was weird, all right. Maybe he was trying to help but felt constrained about how much he could actually say.”
“Or maybe it really wasn’t his file at all, just something the MNI put together. They obviously wanted us to see that letter from Leslie Brown.”
“What did you think of his ‘family feud’ comment?” I asked.
“Like we should just forget about it? That was presumptuous. It wasn’t his mother who was poisoned. Maybe he’s under pressure to get us to drop it.”
“Then why rule out the possibility of suicide?”
“They obviously had no basis for calling it a suicide. So if they promoted that idea, it would look like they had something to hide.”
Julie had a point. I paused for a minute, running the meeting through my head. There was one particular revelation of Dr. Graham’s that struck me. “He didn’t have to tell us about the police having only one suspect—and wanting to wait and see what that person would do,” I said.
“So maybe he was being helpful. But as far as waiting to see what their suspect would do, maybe that explains why they never made an arrest. I don’t know. I feel more disgusted than anything.”
Julie was bitter. I could hardly blame her. So was I.
* * *
—
WE PAID ANOTHER call before leaving Montreal, and ultimately it would prove even more revealing than our meeting with Dr. Graham. We went to the office of Dr. J.P. Valcourt, the pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Carol for the coroner’s office.
At first, we were told by the receptionist that Dr. Valcourt wasn’t available. It was only after I made a loud fuss about how far we had come, and how serious this case was, that the doctor himself emerged from his office. He seemed ready to throw us, or at least me, out of the building. But when he heard who we were, his attitude changed completely. He apologized, explaining he couldn’t see us right then, but if we made an appointment he’d meet with us at the earliest opportunity.
A week later, Julie returned to Montreal by herself. After my first encounter with Dr. Valcourt, I thought it best if she met with him on her own.
It turned out to be the right decision. Julie was able to spend two hours with him, and she handled the interview magnificently. Dr. Valcourt even agreed to let her tape their conversation, and his words below are from that recording.
Dr. Valcourt told Julie that ever since our mother had died, he had been waiting for someone from our family to contact him.
“Would you say, looking at the amount of arsenic, that it was murder?” she asked.
He began by responding, “Oh, yes,” but, perhaps remembering the limits of his professional competence and authority, abruptly changed this to, “Ah, no, I can’t say murder…. Our job is to say medically. Medically, it’s an acute intoxication. That is all we can say…. With probably previous chronical intoxication.
“The last amount could have been more substantive, in our opinion,” he continued. “That is all we can say. The last amount taken of arsenic was more in quantity than the previous one. That is all we know. Who, how, when it was taken, we don’t know.” But, he concluded, “In our opinion, there was no, no doubt as to the cause of death.”
“Have you ever come across a case where someone committed suicide that way?” Julie asked.
�
�No,” Dr. Valcourt replied, “because it is not a good way to suicide…. It takes too much time. And it is too painful…. I wouldn’t say it is impossible, but I wouldn’t say it is probable…. [People who attempt suicide] take usually a more rapid and quick method.”
Dr. Valcourt had heard that Dad and his cousin Mary’s husband, Dr. Sam (as we called him in the family), felt “quite hard done by” because of the delay caused by the autopsy. They were pressing for the earliest possible release of the body.
After the autopsy, Dr. Valcourt recalled, he and his colleagues in the coroner’s office began preparing their medical findings, including the final autopsy and toxicology results, as evidence for a criminal trial. It was to be a “big show,” as he put it, involving expert witnesses. But then, all of a sudden, it “fell down”—dropped from sight, vanished.
In the end, of course, there was no trial, indeed no public inquiry of any kind. But it was such an unusual case that Dr. Valcourt and his colleagues decided some four years later to present it at the September 1963 annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science, in Quebec City.
They identified the subject only as “Mrs. C.B.,” “looking some 25 years of age,” who had died of acute arsenic intoxication. They provided the date of the autopsy (July 27, 1959) from which the date of death could be approximated (July 25, 1959). The following year, the society published the presentation in the proceedings of its annual meeting. According to Dr. Valcourt, “Dr. Camp” (probably Dr. Francis Edward Camps), one of the world’s most renowned forensic pathologists, came all the way from England to attend the meeting.
Julie asked Dr. Valcourt about the risk that Canadian foreign service officials had taken in allowing a potential murderer to stay in our house, even after they knew the cause of Carol’s death was arsenic poisoning. Dad had stayed in Canada for almost two months after Mom died. During that time, although surely suspecting she’d been murdered, the Canadian authorities did nothing to ensure the safety of her three children back in Buenos Aires. From the timing of Carol’s death, only fifty-five hours after her arrival in Montreal, they’d have presumed she’d almost certainly been poisoned in Argentina. In fact, Dr. J.B.R. Cosgrove, the head of her MNI medical team, wrote an undated letter “To Whom It May Concern,” stating that, “from a clinical point of view, it seems highly probable that this illness was related to her domicile in Argentina.”
Julie underlined for Dr. Valcourt that the domicile, where Carol spent her last days in Buenos Aires, was our home.
JULIE: Someone decided that, even though someone had been murdered, possibly by someone living in the home, there was no danger to us children, because no one was fired from our house after this, and the same person cooked for us, and…the same people were looking after us. And yet someone had been murdered….
DR. VALCOURT: I understand your point of view.
JULIE:…And the foreign service knew this and they took a huge risk by doing nothing. They must have known something in order to take that kind of risk.
DR. VALCOURT: If you take it as an accidental case, it would have been very dangerous for you…. But if it’s an intentional…murdering of some people, there was no danger to you.
JULIE: No, but you have a murderer on the loose.
DR. VALCOURT: If you are [unintelligible] some [his emphasis] people in particularly [sic], you don’t want to kill all the family?
Despite Dr. Valcourt’s imperfect English and heavy French-Canadian accent, what he was saying was clear enough: the authorities reckoned that Carol’s poisoning was intentional and that she was the only intended victim. Thus, there was no danger to us children, and no reason to believe the murderer would want to kill the whole family. Conceivably, however, a deranged maid or cook might have killed the woman of the house and still be present in the home. Who was to say that person might not want to wipe out the family?
But instead of entertaining such a scenario, the Canadian authorities must have concluded there was no danger to us from the household staff in Buenos Aires while my father was in Canada. We don’t see any other way of reading Dr. Valcourt’s words. As if to reinforce that point, the doctor added, “We were always suspecting someone in the family.”
Dr. Valcourt expressed surprise at Dad’s evident lack of interest in learning his wife’s cause of death.
“Has he tried to enquire?” he asked Julie.
“No. He said he never tried to get the autopsy report.”
“He never tried it?…He was not interested at all?”
On the recording, the incredulity in the doctor’s voice is unmistakable.
Julie asked Dr. Valcourt if our father had ever approached him about the results of the autopsy.
No, he replied. And yet, in these kinds of cases, he said pointedly, someone from the family would usually pressure him for the results.
* * *
—
JULIE ALSO HAD a session at the Montreal Neurological Institute with Dr. Cosgrove. The physician who had headed Carol’s medical team was cold and guarded, saying he was constrained in speaking about the case by doctor–patient confidentiality. Julie was taken aback. Hadn’t Carol been the patient, not George? Wouldn’t she have wanted her adult children to know what had happened to her?
Julie asked Dr. Cosgrove point-blank if Dad had been told the cause of death. Dr. Cosgrove wouldn’t answer the question. But he did show her an index card recording the fact that George Blackstock had visited Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital (the MNI was a part of that same medical complex) back in 1970, requesting information about his late wife’s cause of death.
When Julie visited Marcel Monastesse, the official at the Coroner’s Court of Montreal with whom Grandpa had corresponded in 1964, he couldn’t find her file at all. Monastesse showed her the coroner’s journal entries for July 1959, written in longhand and listing deceased persons who had been examined. In one journal, the deceased were listed by date, and in the other alphabetically by name. Carol Blackstock’s name didn’t appear in either journal. Monastesse acknowledged that she had definitely been there, since her body had been transferred to the coroner’s office from the MNI for autopsy. Since we already had the autopsy report, this told us nothing new—except that there was something very wrong with the coroner’s record-keeping.
Monastesse was nonetheless familiar with the case. He told Julie that Dad was suspected from the start—and remembered four-hour interrogations of him. Julie asked him outright if Dad was told the cause of death. Monastesse would only say that it was normal practice to inform a suspect of the cause of death when murder was indicated, and it was inconceivable he’d have failed to realize he was being questioned as a murder suspect. Monastesse wouldn’t answer Julie’s question directly, however. He remembered Dad being instructed to remain available pending further investigation.
Julie and I simply wanted someone in authority to tell us definitively whether Dad had been informed of our mother’s cause of death. But we realized we weren’t going to get a straight answer from the medical authorities in Montreal. They would dance around the question and tell us things that pointed in one direction only—to our father—but they weren’t going to tell us that he had been informed of the cause of death, perhaps fearing legal consequences. Dr. Valcourt was the most honest and forthcoming of a sorry lot, and we will be forever grateful to him.
* * *
—
I DECIDED TO try another angle by phoning Mary, Dad’s cousin in Montreal with whom he was staying when Carol died. I was a little reluctant to call her; because she was family, she’d likely be guarded in response to my questions. And I didn’t want to go too far in alerting others in the family about what Julie and I were doing, because the walls would go up. But Mary was in a position to know things we needed to know. It was too good a chance to pass up.
I’d met Mary only a handful of times in my life. I reme
mbered her from the Gooderham family reunion in Toronto. We’d also visited her on trips to Montreal with Dad in the 1960s. She was tall, with dark hair tied back in a no-nonsense bun, Virginia Woolf–style. Most Blackstock women seemed to be married to men in the professions—doctors, lawyers, architects—and had a preference for large Victorian houses with English gardens. Mary was no exception.
“Hi, Mary. It’s Jeff Blackstock. You remember me?”
“Of course, Jeff. How could I forget? How are you? It’s been a few years since we’ve seen each other. How is your father and the family?”
“I’m fine, and so are they. How are you?”
“Fine, thank you.”
With the niceties out of the way, I dove into dangerous territory. “My sister, Julie, and I have been looking into the cause of our mother’s death. You were with my dad in Montreal when she died.”
“Yes, your dad stayed with us.”
“Could I talk to you about what happened?”
“It was a long time ago. But I’m happy to tell you what I can, if that will help.”
“Well, we’ve discovered that Mom died of arsenic poisoning. I don’t know if you were aware of that.”
“Yes, I have heard that.”
“We also understand the police were involved. Can you tell me anything further?”
“Why, yes. I was with your father when he was questioned.”
“What did they want to know?”
“They wanted to know whether he had killed her!”
“So was this just…routine questioning?”
“Oh, no. The police were quite aggressive.”
“What came of it?”
“I don’t know. I guess they didn’t come up with anything.”
“What did my dad say about it?”
There was a long pause.
“Mary?” I said.
Murder in the Family Page 23
