Upper Arrow Lake, British Columbia, where Laura Letts drowned. Photo / Supplied
Upper Arrow Lake, British Columbia, where Laura Letts drowned. Photo / Supplied
New Zealander Peter Beckett stands accused of drowning his wife, Laura Letts, in a Canadian lake. One witness claims the former Napier city councillor even told his wife beforehand: 'This is how you’re going to die'. Interviewed in jail by local reporter Tim Petruk, Beckett vigorously denies the claims and says he’s been set up.
When Virginia Lyons-Friesen heard her close friend and cousin had drowned while on holiday in British Columbia, she hung up the phone with a morbid sense of dread.
"He did it," she said, according to a Canadian police affidavit obtained by local newspaper Kamloops This Week (KTW) and seen bythe Weekend Herald.
"She told me, he told her he was going to do it. She told me."
Lyons-Friesen was referring to a conversation she claims to have had with Laura Letts three years earlier.
Letts and her New Zealand husband, former Napier city councillor Peter Beckett, were in Calgary with Lyons-Friesen, the affidavit states, when the married couple became involved in a heated argument.
Lyons-Friesen told police a shaking Letts asked her for help after the dust settled. "Don't leave me here," Letts said, according to the affidavit. "I'm scared."
Lyons-Friesen told police that Letts then confided in her about a prediction Beckett made while on a previous boating trip.
"He said to her, 'This is how you're going to die'," Lyons-Friesen said.
"'You're going to drown. You won't know when, where it's going to happen, you won't know when it's going to happen, but you're going to know how it's going to happen. That's how it's going to happen',"
Letts, a 40-year-old primary school teacher from a strongly religious family, drowned in Upper Arrow Lake, near Revelstoke in the Canadian Rockies on August 18, 2010. Her death was initially believed to be an accident.
That changed four days later, when Lyons-Friesen emailed a Mountie to ask to make a statement.
On August 26 she told police about Letts' fears, according to the affidavit, including the drowning predictions Beckett is alleged to have made prior to 2007.
Her statement was part of what launched the murder investigation into Letts' death.
Peter Beckett
In 1995, reeling after a break-up, 35-year-old Laura Letts took a one-year leave of absence from her teaching job in rural Alberta to go travelling.
She spent half that year in Australia and New Zealand, where she crossed paths with the Kiwi man who would become her husband and who is now in a Canadian jail cell charged with her murder.
Beckett was operating one of the North Island's must-see tourist attractions. He'd bought a pair of surplus Unimog off-road trucks from the New Zealand Army and converted them into four-wheel-drive tour buses he'd drive up and down the 8km stretch of coastline between Napier and Cape Kidnappers, offering commentary, pointing out wildlife and explaining the history of the area.
Recently separated from his wife, Beckett was focusing on his work - and business, at least during the seven-month tourist season, was good.
On November 30, 1995, Letts bought a ticket for Unimog Adventure Tours.
Beckett said the job kept him busy enough that it was rare he'd actually have individual conversations with any of his patrons.
Letts, however, caught his attention. "She brought me a banana skin," Beckett, now 59, told KTW in an interview in Kamloops jail.
"She asked me, 'Where's your garbage?' I just kind of looked at her. In New Zealand, we say 'rubbish'."
Eventually, Beckett said, Letts made her request clear and the banana peel was disposed of.
They hit it off. After further discussions - during a conversation about the taste of paua - Beckett said he took a leap of faith.
"We were just talking and I said, straight out of my mouth, 'Would you like to come home and try some?'" he said. "And, I thought, 'What have you just done?'"
"We went back to the car yard, went to buy some salad stuff, and then right back to my house," Beckett said. "I had some wine and whipped up some paua fritters on the barbie. We visited until 2.30 in the morning."
Beckett and Letts spent the next two weeks together.
He took 10 days off work to travel with her to the South Island.
"We just clicked," he said. "It wasn't a love-at-first-sight thing; it was more a meeting of the minds.
"I hate to use cliches, but it was soulmate stuff. I'd been married before, I'd had break-ups before, I'd fallen in love before - but this was different.
Afterwards the two parted ways and Letts returned to Canada.
Beckett eventually got back together with his wife, only to break up for good a few years later.
On Christmas Day in 2000, Beckett flew from New Zealand to Edmonton and drove north for an hour to Westlock, Alberta, the small town of 5000 people Letts called home.
That visit turned into regular flights overseas for Beckett and Letts, whenever their work schedules would allow.
In 2002, fresh off a three-year term on Napier's city council, Beckett sold everything and moved to Westlock, joining Letts in her half-duplex home on the northern edge of town.
John Latimer, who lived next door to Letts prior to Beckett's arrival and for the duration of his stay in Westlock, said he thought highly of the relationship.
"I thought they were a very nice couple," the retired police officer said.
"We visited with them, went out for suppers. We had a hell of a good relationship and I never ever heard a bad word between them."
But, Latimer said, there were marital bumps.
Laura Letts
In 2007, Letts went to Westlock police alleging Beckett had been abusive but no charges were laid. They separated and she filed for divorce. The couple reconciled within months and things appeared to get back to normal.
Letts taught second-graders at Dapp School, 25 minutes north of Westlock, and Beckett worked as a driver; sometimes long-haul truck routes, other times fill-in jobs behind the wheel of a school bus.
Beckett and Letts loved to get away in their 42ft [12.8m] motorhome - often weekend trips to Alberta lakes, with longer holidays in British Columbia during summer holidays.
In August 2010 they went to Arrow Lakes Provincial Park in the Rockies and headed for Shelter Bay, a 40-minute drive south of the popular mountain resort of Revelstoke. It was a trip that would leave Letts dead and Beckett behind bars.
As Latimer remembers it, Beckett said he and Letts had been out on an inflatable fishing boat. "It was a hot day and they were sitting in the Zodiac. She was complaining about the heat and reading the Bible.
"He said, 'Take your life preserver off.'
"He said she was sitting there reading, then he turned around and she was gone. That's what he told me. I have no reason to disbelieve him."
Beckett's basic version of the events is this: While he fished at one end of the Zodiac, Letts was reading in the other, with an umbrella to provide shade. At some point, presumably when she stood up, a gust of wind caught Letts' umbrella and caused her to fall overboard.
Beckett said he tried to dive to her rescue but, due to his weight, was not able to submerge more than a few feet into the lake. He said he retrieved a rock from shore, returned to the area where Letts had gone under and dived down again, retrieving her near-lifeless body.
According to Beckett, he then unsuccessfully attempted CPR on shore.
He described Lyons-Friesen's claim to the police that he had previously taken his wife out on a boat and said 'This is how you're going to die,' as "a fabrication".
"Laura and I used to boat every weekend. Laura loved boating."
In Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police - known to the rest of the world as the Mounties but to Canadians as the RCMP - is the national police force, supported by local police at district level. A copy of the RCMP's investigative conclusions regarding Letts' drowning, obtained by KTW, outlines the case against Beckett. It includes a statement from another friend of Letts, claiming she believed she would drown in British Columbia.
According to the document, Beckett stood to gain a significant amount of money in the event of Letts' death - more than $3400 monthly in pension payouts as well as nearly $850,000 in life insurance.
Investigators also found another $300,000 life-insurance application Beckett made for the couple in June 2010, two months before Letts died. It was declined because of a health issue with Beckett.
Also in June 2010, the document states, Beckett transferred $50,000 from the couple's joint cheque account into five-year Guaranteed Interest Certificates, in his name only.
According to the document, friends of Letts told investigators that her lifestyle changed when Beckett moved to Canada from New Zealand in 2002.
The schoolteacher was previously described as a frugal second-hand-store shopper who owned not much more than a 1999 GMC Jimmy (an SUV-style Chevrolet) and a half-duplex home.
"Since arriving in Canada, Peter has accrued a 2007 Revolution LE 42ft motorhome, a 1998 Ford Explorer, a 1999 GMC Jimmy, a 1999 Jaguar XK8, a 2002 BMW X5 and a 2001 20ft Yamaha LS 2000 boat," the document states, noting Beckett had occasional employment as a truck and bus driver.
Beckett sold all of his belongings prior to moving to Canada. He arrived in Westlock with two suitcases and $50,000 in cash.
The document also points out more than a dozen alleged inconsistencies in Beckett's version of the events of August 18, 2010, and issues with physical evidence found by police at the bottom of Upper Arrow Lake.
When Letts went overboard, Beckett told police, he was fishing at the back of his Zodiac while she was reading under an umbrella at the front of the boat.
During an underwater search of the lake in June 2011, investigators found Beckett's fishing rod and Letts' umbrella, but police say their locations in proximity to one another did not match Beckett's story, nor the direction he said the boat was going.
Upper Arrow Lake. Photo / Supplied
Beckett was arrested on August 12, 2011, and charged with one count of first-degree murder.
Police allege that while behind bars he conspired with an RCMP informant to have five people - Letts' parents, Lyons-Friesen, a Westlock lawyer and the lead police investigator - murdered. Police allege Beckett tried to arrange for the murders through his cellmate, who became a paid RCMP agent.
Beckett was charged with five counts of conspiracy to commit murder on December 10, 2012. In an affidavit filed in court last December, both Lyons-Friesen and Letts' mother say they are still impacted by the alleged jailhouse murder plot.
Beckett said he soon realised his cellmate was an RCMP agent. (The agent cannot be identified under Canadian law, except by his initials, R.A.)
"This guy started asking me questions," Beckett said. "He starts trying to sell me on the idea that he's this big-wig.
"Within half an hour I knew something was crooked, so I just played along. I told him exactly what I told everyone else about my understanding of my case. I was always brought up that the truth is never wrong. If you've got nothing to hide, why not communicate with people?
"I distanced myself from [R.A.] but, in September, he started to get really pushy with me."
Beckett said he was offered the use of a private investigator on the outside.
"So, [R.A.] was to be released in, I think, October, so he was pushing to help me by having his private investigator help to offset the deviousness of the RCMP by working for me as a private investigator, by going to these people who were in the chronology and investigating," he said.
According to Beckett, he and R.A. worked out code names for each of the five people he's now alleged to have conspired to have killed - both of Letts' parents, the friend who went to police with the story about Beckett's alleged boat threat, the lead RCMP investigator and a Westlock lawyer.
Beckett said he only asked for investigative help, never murder. He said R.A. lied in telling police he wanted the witnesses killed.
"Why would I want any of these five people murdered?" he said.
"I needed them. I still need them. I need them as defence witnesses. They're vital to my defence."
Beckett said he's not opposed to police in general, but he believes he's being wrongfully imprisoned.
"I've always been an avid supporter of the police. I trusted the police. It's only in the last four or five years I've realised how sinister they can be.
"I'm not anti-RCMP, anti-police, anti-the justice system. But, my God, when a person loses everything in his life tragically, like I did, you fast learn to watch what's going on and take notice."
