MONTREAL -- RCMP security service officers sought to discourage removal to a morgue of the body of a former Canadian diplomat after he died under questioning in 1964, a coroner's inquest has been told.
Ville St. Laurent police Sgt. Remy Martin, one of two city police officers to arrive at a suburban hotel room shortly after the death of former ambassador to the Soviet Union John Watkins, made the allegation during testimony Monday.
He said he got the impression from a telephone call made by his partner, Pierre Lemire, that RCMP officers Leslie James Bennett and Henry Brandes 'did not want the St. Laurent police department to do anything with Watkins' body.
'However it was taken to the morgue despite their objections,' Martin said.
The phone call was cast into doubt by later testimony from Lemire, however, who said he did not recall making any calls from the hotel room except to check the identity of the two RCMP officers.
Other evidence showed the St. Laurent officer to whom the call appeared to have been made had not been on duty the night of the incident.
Watkins died 17 years ago after 48 hours of questioning by RCMP officers. Brandes and Bennett were investigating a Soviet defector's allegation that the Mosow ambassador of the mid-1950s was blackmailed by the Soviets over homosexual activities.
The provincially-ordered inquest which opened Monday is the first ever held into Watkins' death. Then-coroner Marcel Trahan ruled at the time of the death that Watkins had died of a heart attack and listed it as an 'unforeseeable' natural death.
There were other discrepencies between the recollections of the two St. Laurent officers.
Martin told the inquest there were two RCMP officers in the ground-floor hotel room with Watkins when he and his partner arrived at the scene but Lemire recalled there had been three men including an official of the external affairs department.
Lemire also cast doubt on Martin's testimony that one of the men in the room had said Watkins, who was unconscious and propped in a chair with his head rolled back and his legs spread apart when the police officers entered, had choked to death while eating peanuts.
Lemire made no mention of peanuts and said that as the senior officer he and not Martin had done the physical examination of Watkins, including pulse and eye tests and a check of the dead man's mouth for obstructions. He said he found nothing in Watkins' mouth.
Written testimony from Hugh J. Clark and his wife Phoebe, the only known relatives of Watkins, was also presented. They said they had visited their first cousin in Paris about six months before he died and reported he had been healthy and apparently happy.
At another visit to Watkins north of Toronto shortly before his death, they said, the former ambassador 'didn't seem to have any get up and go.' They said he was short of breath, took a medicine regularly and complained of pains in his arms.
