Murder in the Family

by Jeff Blackstock

  “But then, what good would it do?” he said, backtracking. “Would it bring her back? No. So what would be the point?”

  “Exactly.”

  After a short pause, he asked, “When am I going to see these documents you keep talking about?” He said this with a sense of entitlement.

  “Here they are. Feast your eyes. They’re photocopies.”

  He opened the manila envelope I’d brought and quickly perused the papers inside, which included only the autopsy and toxicology reports. I wasn’t going to show him the rest of our evidence.

  “It’s horrible,” he said, returning them to me at once. He sounded as if he were reciting a line from a script. If he wasn’t interested in reading the reports, he must have already known their contents.

  “Meanwhile, Julie and I will continue our investigations.”

  “Will that involve the police?”

  “It might.”

  We drove in silence back to Rockcliffe Park.

  As we approached his house, he offered, “If you and Julie ever want to talk about this some more, we can do that.”

  “Sure.”

  “I love you, Jeff.”

  Where the hell did that come from? It was the first time I could remember hearing those words from my father. How I had longed to hear him say that during my childhood. Now it only sounded hollow.

  “Goodbye, Dad.”

  I felt a sudden flush of sorrow as he walked away from the car and up the front steps to his house. It was the last time I would feel that sorrow, which would soon turn to contempt.

  17

  MIND GAMES

  DAD RESPONDED TO rejection by Julie and me in the only way he knew how: he counterattacked.

  Several weeks passed after our tough one-to-one conversation in my car. There had been no further contact between us. Ingrid called me attempting to make plans for a family Christmas; I put her off. Dad phoned Julie proposing to meet separately with her, without me; she turned him down.

  In mid-December, Dad phoned me. He wanted me to go over to his house and discuss what had happened. I told him I wouldn’t, unless he had something new to tell me. He assured me he did, so I felt I had to hear him out.

  It was cold as hell in Ottawa. When I arrived at the house in Rockcliffe Park, I peeled off my heavy parka, winter boots, gloves, and toque, and left them in the front hall. Dad showed me into the kitchen.

  We sat down at the kitchen table, he and Ingrid on one side, me on the other, Inquisition style.

  Ingrid seemed to be there mainly for show. Perhaps Dad felt better having an ally at his side. He did all the talking, leaning toward me over the table, hands clasped firmly together like a school principal.

  “We called you here tonight, Jeff, because we want to get to the bottom of this business about your mother once and for all. We need to put this behind us so we can spend Christmas together like a normal family.”

  “Fine. Tell us the truth about what happened.”

  “As we’ve already discussed, I’ve told you everything I know about—”

  I cut him off. “Not from our point of view.”

  “We all have our points of view in life. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to live with the facts. Now tell me this: What proof do you have that I haven’t been completely honest with you? That I haven’t told you everything I can? None. I think we have to agree on that.”

  “No, we don’t. You’re omitting the autopsy report I showed you. You’re forgetting you lied about the police interview, and how they grilled you. You lied about the cook, trying to deflect suspicion from yourself. And you lied about how no one ever found the cause of our mother’s death. Among other things.” The summary was for Ingrid’s benefit.

  “Well, we may disagree on your interpretation of those things. And we can talk about that. Nevertheless, I think you’d have to agree you have no proof of anything. Until you can provide proof, we need to put all this aside and get on with life as a family.”

  The old shifting-the-burden-of-proof tactic.

  “There’s plenty of proof as far as we’re concerned,” I told him.

  “Really? Where? When do I get to see it?”

  “The proof is in what you’ve already said and done, Dad. And in the documents we have. Let’s not go through all that again.”

  “So when do I get to see those documents? I ought to be entitled to see them, don’t you think?”

  “I’ve already shown you the autopsy and toxicology reports. You looked at them in the car and returned them. The rest stays with us until we hear the truth from you. Why all this new-found interest?”

  “How can I meet your demands if I don’t know what’s in those documents? How can I be expected to prove a negative?”

  Prove a negative. Slick.

  Ingrid, who had been watching Dad intently while we spoke, looked off into the distance. Some of this was way over her head, but her instincts were telling her the conversation wasn’t going well.

  “Tell you what, Dad,” I offered. “You write down everything that happened, and we’ll look at it.”

  “ ‘We’ll look at it?’ Be reasonable. How in the world can I be expected to write down everything? How can I know what would be relevant if I don’t know what you consider proof, and if I don’t know what’s in those documents?”

  “If you have doubts about the relevance of something, just include it. Julie and I can ask you follow-up questions if we need to know more.”

  “You’re being completely unreasonable and grossly unfair. What you’re proposing would lead to a wild goose chase. If we just looked at those documents together, we could narrow down what’s bothering you and sort it all out.”

  And if we give you a chance to study the documents, you’ll figure out how to whitewash everything and absolve yourself of responsibility.

  “You say you want to continue seeing Julie and me,” I told him. “Yet when we ask you to write down what happened, you refuse. You also said you had something new to tell us. I’m listening, but all I’m hearing is the same old line.”

  “Well, of course I want to see you and Julie. That’s why I’d like to work with you.”

  “The trouble is, we think you were implicated in our mother’s death. So the best way to prove us wrong would be to write everything down.”

  “Implicated? You can’t mean that,” he said, as though referring to some wild-eyed, fantastic theory.

  “We do.”

  “So you’re not going to give me a chance to know the basis of your thinking.”

  “I think we’ve made ourselves clear. I’ll see myself out.”

  * * *

  —

  A MONTH LATER, in January 1985, Ingrid asked me to come and see her at their house while Dad was away. She said it was important.

  I was mildly intrigued. I was ready for anything, including some surprise planted by Dad, so I went prepared.

  We sat down in the TV room. Ingrid quickly got to the point: “You are not coming around to see us anymore, and it bothers me. I know you have problems with your father about your mother’s death. I just want to tell you it has nothing to do with me.”

  This was quite a statement. I decided to venture a little farther. “I’m sure you can understand why we have problems with Dad’s version of events,” I said. “Just to show you our concerns are genuine, I brought along our file with the documents. We don’t want anyone to ever tell you we made this up. Here’s a copy of the autopsy report.”

  As I opened the file, Ingrid recoiled. “Oh, no! I don’t want to see that!” She turned aside, raising her hand to shield her face as if protecting herself from a blow.

  I closed the file, and she was visibly relieved.

  “I just don’t want you to push me away because of your problems with your father,” she said softly.


  I got out of the chair and gave her a hug.

  In hindsight, my impulse to show her some compassion was a measure of how badly I wanted to believe someone was innocent in this whole awful business. Naively, perhaps, I was willing to take Ingrid at her word. I believed her because I wanted to believe her.

  Later, after more detached analysis, I wondered if I should have tried harder to engage her in a conversation about what she really knew. I might have received answers to questions that still trouble me.

  How, for instance, does a woman feel when she learns that her husband’s first wife died of arsenic poisoning? How does she respond when offered evidence that it was murder, suggesting her husband was implicated?

  In Ingrid’s case, she betrayed no shock, no fear, not even curiosity. She made no attempt at denial. Significantly, she didn’t even try to defend George.

  Nor did she betray the slightest hint of horror over the possibility that the man she’d married, whose children she’d borne, and with whom she’d lived for the past twenty-five years, might be a murderer. She showed no fear that she herself could be his next victim. She expressed no confusion about the contradiction he presented to the world: a respected professional man, a well-bred diplomat representing his country abroad, whose eldest son and daughter were convinced he had poisoned his late wife.

  Ingrid didn’t try to dismiss our narrative by saying it was far-fetched, or insisting there must be some logical, innocent explanation. All she was concerned about, to take her words at face value, was that her ties with us, her stepchildren, shouldn’t suffer the same fate as her husband’s relationship with us. Perhaps most importantly to her, she wanted us to believe that our accusation against our father had nothing to do with her.

  Yet when I had the opportunity, I didn’t press Ingrid on any of these questions. Somehow, I knew there was a limit to how far I could risk foraging into the past with her about my mother’s death.

  * * *

  —

  ABOUT A MONTH later, I received a phone call completely out of the blue from the Krapfs, our parents’ old friends from Buenos Aires. I remembered them only vaguely. But Carol had mentioned Louise and Rolf Krapf frequently in her correspondence with her parents, which Grandma had shared with us, so I knew them by name right away.

  The timing, and the subject they wanted to discuss, suggested strongly that Dad had orchestrated the call.

  Louise Krapf, sounding very cordial, explained that she and her husband, Rolf, had retired to the Gatineau Hills, in Quebec, just across the river from Ottawa, her hometown. Yes, I did remember them from Buenos Aires, I told Louise, and she invited me for a drink at their home.

  When I arrived at their front door, it was evident the Krapfs were comfortably well off. They lived in a big, newish bungalow on a large lot a short drive from the Gatineau River, now frozen solid and covered with snow. Very nice, I thought—and completely unlike the boulevards of Buenos Aires. But as beautiful as the place was, it might as well have been on the moon.

  “It’s so nice to see you after all these years,” Louise said warmly across the antique pine coffee table. She was an attractive woman of about sixty, smartly dressed and wearing silver earrings—slightly more formal than you’d expect in that rustic setting. “We heard you were living in Ottawa and wanted to find out how you were.”

  Rolf, grey and balding, smiled amiably from his easy chair under a lamp in the corner.

  “It’s nice to see you too,” I said. “Thank you for calling. What a surprise after all this time.”

  “You may not remember us very well,” Louise said, “but we loved your mother. We were very sorry when she passed away.”

  This confirmed the agenda for the meeting and gave me my cue.

  “What a coincidence that you’d mention our mother. My sister, Julie, and I have discovered she died of arsenic poisoning. We have a copy of the autopsy report from Montreal. We’ve been trying ever since to find out what happened. Perhaps you can help us?”

  The conversation was unfolding as though we were all reading from a script.

  “Have you spoken to your dad about it?” Louise asked. She looked sympathetic and concerned, but not surprised. Clearly, she’d known about the arsenic.

  “Yes, we’ve spoken with him a great deal. We naturally thought he’d be able to explain it to us.”

  “It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with him,” Louise ventured.

  I let this pass. “It was a shocking discovery. We wanted to know if he could shed light on it.”

  “Of course.”

  From the other side of the room, Rolf piped up. “There was a serious problem with the cook, I understand.”

  I turned toward him. “We’ve considered that story. There are too many things about it that just don’t add up. She remained in the house cooking for us for months after our mother died. Dad’s department knew Mom had died of arsenic poisoning. If they suspected the cook, why would they take the risk of leaving her in the house?”

  “Maybe your father was trying to catch her in the act,” Louise suggested.

  “Actually, my dad said he never discovered why Carol died until we found the autopsy report twenty years later.”

  “Is that so?” Rolf said.

  “How is that possible?” I asked them, looking from one to the other. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  There was a long pause.

  “No. No, I don’t think that’s possible,” Louise replied quietly.

  We chatted about other subjects, and after finishing my drink I thanked them and made my way home.

  Julie’s turn came a while later, when she too was invited to visit the Krapfs at the house in Gatineau. They may have been reflecting on what I’d told them; Julie learned some surprising new things.

  Again, Louise said she’d been very fond of Carol, describing her as a delightful young woman, the life of the party, while George was a bit of a cold fish. On his return to Buenos Aires after Carol died, George had shocked Louise and Rolf by regaling them with stories of his outings in New York and the marvels of Mexico City, displaying no sorrow at all over Carol’s death.

  Not long after that, Louise had offered to adopt Julie. George declined. Louise told Julie she’d always suspected Carol had been poisoned. She spent several months after Carol’s death mustering the nerve to do something about it. Finally, she went to Ambassador Richard Bower and shared her suspicions with him. He listened to her politely and sent her on her way.

  Wow—that was quite a revelation. Not only our grandparents but the Krapfs had offered to adopt Julie after Carol’s death. What did Louise know that motivated her to make such an extraordinary offer? And her suspicion of poison: Was it based on anything more than a hunch? She must have had a reason to take the bold step of sharing this with Ambassador Bower.

  I wondered how Bower had really taken her allegation. Louise didn’t say he’d been surprised. As Carol had written in one of her letters, the ambassador was no fool. It’s likely Bower would have been troubled, despite his dismissive response. In Louise’s eyes, George was a murder suspect, and he may have been suspect in the eyes of the expat community. Bower had once supported George’s appeal for the completion of his posting; now he probably felt the sooner George was gone, the better.

  Julie and I were sure Dad had engineered these encounters with the Krapfs. What we didn’t understand at the time was why they had agreed to approach me. It was clear from what they’d told Julie that they didn’t like or trust George. Perhaps they’d hoped to learn more from us about what really happened to Carol. If so, they learned more than they’d bargained for. We concluded that they now realized George’s story about the cook was a sham, and he had been trying to use them to influence us in his favour.

  Once the Krapfs learned that we believed the criminal had been George himself, they disappeared from our lives. A
lthough Louise had spoken of getting together with us once more, they didn’t return phone calls from Julie and me, and we never heard from them again. In that respect, they were like so many other bystanders in this story: they preferred not to get involved any further.

  Still, Julie and I remain grateful for Louise’s attempt to pursue the truth about our mother’s death, and for the enlightenment she provided.

  * * *

  —

  GEORGE AND INGRID’S marriage had been rocky for the past several years. They’d already been experiencing problems when I visited them in England. The rather long-awaited birth of their son had apparently offered a welcome hope of renewal, at least in Ingrid’s mind. But it was followed by trouble over allegations of unwanted advances to a locally-engaged staffer at the embassy in Stockholm. Nothing was ever concluded legally, but their posting to Sweden was significantly foreshortened, followed by an early departure to New York.

  Manhattan was exactly the kind of huge, congested metropolis that made Ingrid uncomfortable. She and George and their three children lived in a five-bedroom, six-bathroom, two-storey penthouse on East 86th Street. The apartment would have seemed like luxury to most people, but she considered it cavernous and cold. Her customary quiet afternoon naps were disrupted by the doorman hailing cabs with a whistle on the sidewalk below. When she was out walking the dog, she disliked having to dodge the constant flow of delivery trucks, yellow Marathon cabs, joggers, strollers, and street people in Carl Schurz Park. The whine of sirens was a frequent reminder of the city’s serious crime problem in the late 1970s.

  After two years in New York came the move in 1979 to Minneapolis, where I visited them in their suburban home on Cedar Lake. This wasn’t Ingrid’s cup of tea either. In 1984, they returned to Ottawa between postings—a city she hardly knew, having lived there for only two years in the mid-1970s. Returning to Ottawa after years on posting abroad is a shock to the system of any foreign service family member, as I can attest. All of a sudden, you’re a nobody again. No perks and privileges, just frigid winters, slushy streets, and, in Ingrid’s case, practically no friends.