The Only Witness: Laura Letts-Beckett

In 1995, a Canadian schoolteacher took the trip of a lifetime to New Zealand. Her tour guide was a six foot seven, four hundred pound former city councillor who had spent his entire life on the water.

Fifteen years later, one of them drowned in a mountain lake in British Columbia. The other one was the only person on earth who saw it happen.

What followed was one of the strangest homicide cases in Canadian history. A rock. A fishing rod. An accidental death policy pulled out of a stack of bank flyers. A jailhouse informant with a list of five names. A four month trial where the accused defended himself and performed a haka in the courtroom. A hung jury. A first degree murder conviction. And then an appeal court that took the whole thing apart and wrote five words that ended it: the Crown's case was not strong.

Sixteen years on, there is still no answer.

This episode is about the case. But it is also about a woman who taught grade three in a hamlet called Dapp, Alberta, and the town that still remembers her.

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