Murder in the Family

by Jeff Blackstock

  After living around the world with George for twenty-five years, often in places she didn’t particularly like, only to wind up in Ottawa, Ingrid felt entitled to live somewhere that suited her. She’d always wanted a posting in Germany—a homecoming dream for her—and she reminded him about this. After a couple of years at headquarters, he’d be on track for another overseas assignment. It would probably be his last, in light of which he’d normally be shown some consideration regarding the choice of country.

  For years, George had been holding out for an ambassadorship. This probably would have eliminated Germany as a posting, since the top position in Bonn would have been too senior for him. When once again he failed to make the list of ambassadorial assignments, he was crushed about being passed over.

  “He was like a hurt animal,” Bob Borden told Ingrid. Nevertheless, another post in Germany became a possibility. When an opening as consul general in Munich was offered, she told George this was exactly what she wanted, and he really couldn’t refuse.

  After this stroke of good fortune, imagine Ingrid’s despair when she began suspecting George had another woman in his life. She recognized the telltale signs: late nights at the office when he was supposed to be working but her phone messages went unanswered; a mysterious trip to Montreal on which George failed to show up at his overnight destination, cousin Mary’s home, where, it turned out, he wasn’t even expected. Ingrid put these clues together with other developments: twin beds on the occasional road trips they took together, a husband who didn’t want to talk about anything, unidentified callers on the home phone.

  She became increasingly upset, and finally anger took over. After finding the keys to his desk at home, she rummaged through the drawers. There she discovered some correspondence between George and a woman I’ll call Helen, an English fashion designer he’d met on a trip to London. The letters confirmed that they were more than just friends. Apart from the betrayal, Ingrid was particularly stung by George’s avowal to Helen that he felt proud of her, something that Ingrid had been longing to hear from her husband for years but never had.

  In a rage, Ingrid confronted George with the evidence of his affair. She made it clear he was to get rid of this tramp at once, but he brushed off her allegations and insisted there was nothing serious going on.

  Temporarily mollified, Ingrid began making arrangements for their move to Munich. But she was still suspicious, and she monitored his behaviour for more signs. When he declined to participate in the moving preparations, then refused to discuss plans for travelling together to Germany, despite her entreaties, she pushed him: “How can I make all the arrangements for Munich if I don’t know when I will be going?”

  George allowed that he needed to proceed to Munich on his own initially—something about overseeing repairs to the official residence. She could follow once he had settled in. Ingrid thought this story had a hollow ring to it and was likely a ruse. She called me to enlist my help.

  At first, I provided mainly a sympathetic ear. I was at their house just after Dad moved out on a trial separation basis. Ingrid was in tears, curled up on the sofa in the study under an afghan and protected by her beloved golden retriever. A more hard-nosed observer might have told her, “Good riddance.” But when she whimpered, “I still love the guy,” it didn’t seem the right thing to say. I felt sorry for her.

  Although Doug and Julie had kept their distance from Ingrid for the last several years, they too were drawn in as sympathetic listeners. Doug found himself unable to refuse and for a while was getting calls from her every other day. Julie was disinclined to hear from Ingrid, but an acknowledgment and apology from her about the childhood abuse brought Julie around as well.

  I too heard a litany of complaints. Listening to Ingrid spill out her grievances against my father, and hearing similar reports from my siblings, I realized they went far beyond his obsessive tightness with money and even his philandering. Ingrid recalled that, on more than one occasion, he’d struck her, one time so hard he knocked her down. Apparently, George’s violent outbursts were triggered when Ingrid talked back to him.

  I began to see a pattern forming. Julie had suffered violence at his hands under similar circumstances. She’d told me that during a skiing holiday in Switzerland, when she was nineteen, she’d talked back to Dad in a sarcastic tone and he’d struck her with a backhand to the head. He hit her so hard, she could have fallen down the stairs where she was standing. Later, he apologized, seeming to realize he’d crossed the line. But the apology didn’t stop Julie from feeling afraid of what he might do.

  As it became clear that the separation was looking more and more like it might end in divorce, I introduced Ingrid to a lawyer friend, whom I’ll call Janet, to represent her interests. Ingrid had resisted the idea of getting a lawyer, unwilling to accept that it was necessary or desirable. Perhaps she still hoped she could coax George into a reconciliation. I offered her another viewpoint: once he received the cold shower of hearing from a lawyer how much a separation and divorce would cost him, he’d be back.

  It turned out I was right. Ingrid persuaded George, who was anxious not to antagonize her, to meet her lawyer. She hoped Janet would sweet-talk him into coming back to her. Instead, the meeting was all business.

  “Mr. Blackstock,” Janet asked, “is Mrs. Blackstock free to accompany you to Germany?”

  “No,” George replied.

  “Then the situation we have between you and Mrs. Blackstock is what we call a separation, and it needs to have a legal basis to ensure that her rights are protected.”

  With Ingrid’s permission, I talked to Janet about the meeting afterwards.

  “How did my father seem during the discussion?”

  “On stage, Jeff. Very controlling.”

  “What do you think he’ll do?”

  Janet replied that we might not be able to stop George from leaving, but he was certainly going to realize the cost involved.

  George’s reaction to Janet was to complain about her. “Keep that lawyer out of this,” he told Ingrid, completely missing the point of why she’d engaged a lawyer in the first place.

  Janet set Ingrid up with a family psychologist. To my amazement, Ingrid actually convinced Dad to attend a session with him. If there was anyone who doubted the value of psychologists, it was my father. As far as he was concerned, psychologists and psychiatrists were crutches for the weak and the sick.

  Part of the psychologist’s approach was to see other family members too, so that he could “get the full picture”—which, of course, was impossible with our fractured family. I had a session with him and received a report on his meeting with George and Ingrid. The psychologist viewed my father as a challenge, but felt he was up to it. I got the impression he regarded their interaction as a competition of wills.

  The psychologist had told Dad, “You know, yours is not the first foreign service matrimonial case I’ve had.”

  “Really?” he replied, apparently surprised. This seemed to make an impression on Dad, if nothing else did.

  “None of your kids are taking your side on this,” the psychologist told him.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said.

  “But they’re supporting your wife.”

  “I think they would probably prefer to stay out of it. I didn’t want to drag them into this.”

  The psychologist shared with me some observations of my father, who seemed to intrigue him.

  “He uses money to control people around him, to the point where it has become an obsession,” the psychologist told me. This wasn’t exactly news. “He has no true sense of humour,” he added. I hadn’t thought of that before, but it struck me as spot-on.

  To the psychologist, George was living in a fantasy world in which he could walk out on his wife and move to Germany without any obligations to her and live happily ever after with his girlfriend.

 
To buy time, George let Ingrid keep her hope of a reconciliation alive. It was a cynical move, since he appeared to have no desire to remain in the marriage. What followed was the oddest resolution, if it could be called that, of the situation.

  George left for Munich alone, and Ingrid was to follow shortly afterwards. As I would discover, Helen was all set to move to Germany, where George would be waiting for her. Years later, I would speak with Helen, and she’d tell me George had invited her to live with him in Munich, and she’d agreed. As he knew, this would require her not only to quit her job but to pack up and move to a new country where she didn’t speak the language. How did he think he was going to get away with this fantasy?

  Naturally, Ingrid had different ideas. She’d intercepted messages between Helen and George. She’d poked through his agenda books, credit card receipts, and Swiss bank account statements. When she arrived in Munich, she had a pretty good idea of what was going on. And by the time Ingrid set her feet on the ground of the consul general’s residence, she had made up her mind that she wasn’t leaving.

  The next time Helen tried to secretly phone George, she got a shock: it was Ingrid who answered. Ingrid knew exactly who was calling. She told Helen that she was never, ever to call again.

  A conversation then ensued between Ingrid and George. Exactly what Ingrid said, I don’t know. But it must have been very convincing, because George called Helen back within a few minutes.

  “Hello, Helen.”

  “George! What’s going on?” she said, alarmed.

  “Helen, darling, it’s over,” he replied, and hung up.

  According to Helen, those were the last words he ever spoke to her. She attempted to call him several times afterwards and never got through.

  Later, Helen would tell me that she was left emotionally shattered, her life in a mess. Eventually, she found happiness back in London, restarting her career, marrying, and having kids. She never did learn whatever it was Ingrid told George that brought their relationship to such an abrupt and crushing end.

  * * *

  —

  WHILE GEORGE’S MID-LIFE melodrama was playing itself out, Julie and I were arriving at a difficult decision: we agreed to explore the possibility of a criminal prosecution, charging Dad with our mother’s murder.

  We knew the chances of a prosecutor agreeing to take on the case were slim. But if there was even the slightest chance of obtaining a measure of justice for Carol through the courts, some public recognition of what had happened to her, and some degree of retribution—even though it would be against our own father—we needed to try. This may seem like an extreme step. If so, perhaps only someone who has lived through a situation comparable to ours can fully understand how much finding justice for our mother meant to us.

  After doing some legal research on my own, I spoke with an experienced Crown attorney in Ottawa who was introduced to me by a lawyer friend. The Crown attorney confirmed that any attempt to prosecute such a difficult case some twenty-five years after the fact would run up against serious obstacles.

  From the outset, we faced a major jurisdictional barrier. The crime had apparently been committed, according to Carol’s doctors at the Montreal Neurological Institute, in Argentina, not Canada. The medical evidence pointed to the arsenic having been administered in Buenos Aires. That meant an Argentine court would have had to try our father.

  This was not possible. As a Canadian diplomat serving his country in Argentina, George enjoyed immunity from prosecution there, and even from full investigation by local police authorities. The time-honoured conventions of diplomatic immunity protected him, unless the Government of Canada waived that immunity—something that most governments, including Canada’s, never do; it would expose their diplomatic personnel to threats abroad, especially in unfriendly countries with dubious judicial systems. A Canadian diplomat might be arrested by a hostile or corrupt government on trumped-up charges, convicted in a kangaroo court, and thrown in jail as part of a shakedown designed to extort secrets, payoffs, or political concessions. As the Crown prosecutor pointed out, the diplomatic immunity issue meant we might not even be able to get to court.

  In my view, it was possible that back in 1959 a Canadian court could have asserted jurisdiction over an alleged crime committed in another country, provided it was reasonably soon after the crime took place. Certain conditions would have been required: strong ties to Canada on the part of the main protagonists, for example, as well as compelling reasons to prosecute. This would explain why Dr. Valcourt was preparing evidence for a criminal case following the autopsy.

  In this case, both victim and accused were Canadian citizens on Canadian government service. Moreover, the victim died in Canada, where medical and oral evidence of a possible crime had been gathered. No permission from Argentine authorities would have been required for Canadian police to search and investigate our diplomatic residence, since it was considered Canadian territory. Permission from the Argentine authorities might have been obtained for Canadian police officers to investigate in Buenos Aires, and witnesses from Argentina might have been summoned or interviewed for purposes of a prosecution in Canada. A tall order, but not impossible, if the interests of justice were to be served—and if the Canadian authorities had been sufficiently interested in justice.

  But for a Canadian court to assert jurisdiction twenty-five years after a crime was committed in Argentina, the prosecutor acknowledged, it would be necessary to have very strong evidence and very compelling reasons indeed.

  On the one hand, there was the testimony of Julie and me. This might have supported a guilty verdict by establishing that our father had lied to us about our mother’s death in a most material way. Sometimes, his lies had been claims of ignorance about matters he knew perfectly well; at other times, he simply provided non-answers to our questions. You had to have been there to appreciate how cold and expressionless his silences could be.

  On the other hand, in the mid-1980s we didn’t have the powerful documentary evidence that would come into our possession after our father’s death in 2007. Moreover, key witnesses, such as our maternal grandparents, were dead, incapacitated, or unavailable, and material evidence in Argentina had long since disappeared.

  I was quite aware of the legal challenges. I was also aware that we weren’t dealing with a high-profile Nazi war criminal and thousands of victims; we were talking about Carol Blackstock, a little-known wife and mother from North Toronto, as the victim, and her well-connected husband and the Government of Canada, who would have to answer regarding her death.

  Our father might have looked as guilty as hell, but I doubted very much we had enough evidence for the technical requirements of a conviction. Unfortunately, the Crown attorney shared that assessment.

  For Julie and me, it might still have been worthwhile to take Dad to court anyway, if only to expose the truth about our mother’s death and his role in it. But if we did so, we weren’t going to get the support of the criminal justice system. Bringing a civil suit against our father might have had a better chance of success, except that the statute of limitations on a wrongful-death action had expired long before 1979, the year when we’d learned how Mom died.

  We also realized it could be counterproductive for us to go to court. If we didn’t win, Dad would claim he’d been proven innocent. That wouldn’t be true; just because someone isn’t convicted on a criminal charge doesn’t necessarily mean they’re innocent or might not be convicted later on the basis of new evidence. But if our efforts had resulted in an acquittal, that would have been the legacy of Dad’s crime against our mother—an impossibly bitter pill for us to swallow.

  No doubt Dad himself had already figured all this out. And we felt sure that as soon as we took legal action against him, he’d destroy any incriminating documents in his possession.

  We had to settle for exerting whatever pressure we could by leaving open our threat of
involving the police, and by treating our father as an outcast, in the hope he might feel compelled to give up something. Our shunning him was also in retribution for what he’d done, considering that he placed such a high value on family appearances—perhaps the only retribution he was ever going to suffer. The niceties of the justice system would be of no help to us in this savage business.

  Still, I will forever feel guilt for not having had our father prosecuted. I know this isn’t rational, and he, not I, was the guilty one. I can’t explain it, but there it is.

  18

  DETERIORATION

  JULIE AND I had tried everything we could to obtain justice for our mother. We felt bad that we hadn’t succeeded, but for the time being we would get on with our lives, knowing that was what she’d have wanted us to do.

  Mom had been a very young woman when she died, just twenty-four. Julie and I had long since grown beyond that age. Still, she remained timeless for us. No matter how long we lived, we would always feel younger than her.

  And yet her story was far from over. Life had more surprises in store.

  * * *

  —

  IN 1990, GEORGE AND INGRID returned to Ottawa when their Munich posting ended. By then, Marie and I had a two-year-old daughter, Jill, whom they didn’t know. I was working at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, which, having absorbed the foreign branch of my father’s old department, was also where Dad worked. An opportunity had come up through a connection of Marie’s in the department who was looking for lawyers, and, with her encouragement, I grabbed it.

  The posting in Germany had turned out differently from the happy homecoming Ingrid had expected. Her childhood friends were now middle-aged professionals with busy lives and little time for someone they’d known long ago. The old-world charm of the Europe she remembered was gone. The return to Canada didn’t offer much consolation either.