Jeff Blackstock - Murder in the Family: How the Search for My Mothers Killer Led to My Father

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 Canadas foreign service. He was never convicted of Carol Blackstocks 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 daughters 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 fathers 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 fathers self-proclaimed innocence, before I could move from doubt to reluctant suspicion to hard, bitter certainty. It also took the example of my sisters 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 mothers 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 mothers murder, and our fathers 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 mothers story is a challenge. Its 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 discoverya lifelong journey ranging far beyond our mothers short lifespanrevealing 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 Blackstocks story, its 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, Ive 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 possessionofficial correspondence, diplomatic cables, medical records, journalshave been invaluable in untangling and substantiating the web of events around our mothers 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 diplomats wifeattending receptions and cocktail parties, hosting dinners for distinguished visitorsshe 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 mothers 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 shed ever visited outside North America, and clearly savouring the novelty of it all. And yet this vibrant, radiant, resilient young woman didnt live to see her twenty-fifth birthday.

No doubt others in my family would tell the story differently. But they didnt know our mother as Julie and Doug and I didor care so deeply about what happened to her. They didnt hire investigators or seek out and read all the documents that came into our possession, both before and after our fathers death. They didnt 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 didnt question our father face to face, as we did, or witness his revealing reactions to the evidence wed uncovered. They didnt fit pieces of the puzzle together until they formed an unmistakable pattern.