LETHBRIDGE, ALTA. - Lethbridge councillor Dar Heatherington received threatening letters and phone calls from her own husband, not herself, a defence lawyer told her trial Monday.
The allegation came during closing arguments in Heatherington's trial on mischief charges.
Lethbridge police charged the councillor after investigating her claim that she had received threatening phone calls and letters from an unknown person. Investigators concluded that she had written the letters herself.
Heatherington made international headlines in May 2003 when she disappeared on a business trip to Montana. She showed up in Las Vegas three days later, claiming to have been drugged, kidnapped and sexually assaulted.
Heatherington later admitted that she'd made up the kidnapping story.
In the final day of her trial, her lawyer told the court that Dave Heatherington had "fallen from the pinnacle of his career" as an acting deputy fire chief just as his wife had been elected to city council.
That shift in fortunes made Dave Heatherington jealous of his wife, Tracy Hembroff said. As such, "Mr. Heatherington has a motive, a much more identifiable one, for the harassment and stalking of my client."
The Crown has argued that Heatherington wrote and sent a series of sexually explicit letters to herself.
Crown attorney Photini Papadatou pointed out that Heatherington also told police she had received harassing phone messages on her office voice mail from an unknown man.
However, Heatherington didn't save any of the messages, and "she did not tell police it was the voice of her husband," Papadatou noted.
Provincial court Judge Peter Caffaro reserved his decision in the case to June 30.
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