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.