Former Napier city councillor Peter Beckett was found in a lawyer's offices searching files for his wife's will a few months after she died, a murder trial has been told in Canada.
The evidence was given yesterday as Beckett, 60, went on trial for a second time charged with murdering second-wife and Canadian schoolteacher Laura Letts-Beckett, who died in what was initially reported as a drowning in Upper Arrow Lake near Revelstoke BC on August 18, 2010.
A jury was unable to reach a verdict in a three-month trial early last year in the British Columbia Supreme Court in Kamloops. A second and expected much-shorter trial is being held 200km to the south in Kelowna, a city of about 128,000 people about 390km east of Vancouver and which was in the midst of the eclipse of the sun as the trial opened yesterday.
Arrested a year after the death and in jail ever since, Beckett denies the charge of first-degree murder at the trial before Madam Justice Alison Beames and a jury of seven men and five women.
Calgary lawyer Raymond Bruce Barlow testified Beckett came to his office seeking copies of his wife Laura Letts-Beckett's will within months of her death.
"He wanted a copy of her will, the 2007 will, but he also asked for a copy of her 1995 will," the lawyer said.
"I didn't see why he shouldn't have it but I didn't have it with me."
Mr Barlow said he left the office to find the will and returned to find Beckett leafing through a file folder belonging to his wife's parents, who are successful cattle ranchers in Alberta.
"I kicked him out of my office," he said.
"I told him to leave and only deal with me through a lawyer."
Mr Barlow described Beckett's demeanor as belligerent, very unhappy and "looking to start a confrontation or an argument".
The only other contact they had was the next spring when Beckett called his office.
Mr Barlow said: "It was difficult to follow. It was a rambling conversation. In my opinion, he was drunk."
Mr Barlow said Beckett threatened to destroy his practice by reporting him to the Law Society of BC but he didn't know why.
"His words were so slurred," Mr Barlow said.
"It was just a general complaint about me and what I was doing or not doing."
Defence lawyer Marilyn Sandford called it a "a drunken conversation of which my client remembers very little".
Jurors were also told the victim's parents were wealthy but lived a conservative lifestyle, that Letts-Beckett owned only a vehicle and a condo, and that according to her will, only the condo would pass to her husband upon her death.
Her parents were listed as beneficiaries in both the 1995 and 2007 will prepared by Mr Barlow.
The Crown, which alleges the death was not the accident Beckett claimed, plans to call 19 witnesses over the next week and a half.
Beckett, who grew up in Hastings, was elected to Napier City Council in 1998 promising a shakeup and exposure of corruption, but in 2001 did not seek a second term and departed for Canada, having met the then Laura Betts when she was in Hawke's Bay on holiday.