I was reminded today of one of the greatest Canadian true crime dramas - of Keith Latta, the Queen's law professor turned murderer.

It's a story worth sharing.

I first heard about it from Don Stuart at Queen's. It happened just a few years before he started there - the drama unfolded in 1971.

In the years since I heard the anecdote, older records have popped up on the internet, making much of it more easily verified.

The way Stuart told it, Latta was an evidence professor, who murdered his ex-business partner and tried to frame it as a mafia hit job, but was done in by evolving fingerprint techniques, allowing them to lift prints from the Italian newspaper he planted.

That's all consistent with what's on the public record. I can't find verification of (a) him teaching evidence or (b) the incriminating fingerprints coming from newspaper clippings, and it's plausible that these were embellishment for delicious irony.

Or it might be true.

Latta was from Edmonton. In the 60s, he practiced law here, and also got involved in other ventures, including a co-owned travel agency and 'computer accounting services'. He became interested in the idea of a computerized legal research database, and started developing a system.

He then received a phone call from his old UofA classmate, Queen's Professor Hugh Lawford, who was working on a similar concept. Latta moved to Kingston, received a full professorship at Queen's, and worked with Lawford and Professor Richard von Briesen on the system.

They called the project the "Queen's University Institute for Computing and Law" - or "QUIC/LAW" for short.

Yes, this is the origin story for Quicklaw. QL was incorporated in the early 70s by Lawford and von Briesen, by which time Latta was...otherwise engaged.

Presumably in relation to his departure from Edmonton, Latta divested himself of his interest in "World Travel", and the business became wholly owned by his partner Bob Neville.

However, they did not terminate the life insurance policies they held in respect of each other.

In 1971, Edmonton police found Neville dead in his office in the Corona Hotel, with three gunshot wounds. In what is now an overdone mystery trope, the police found a locker key in the office, with a city map that had an arrow pointing to a bus depot.

So police followed the clues to a locker that contained several items, including an Italian airline map, an Italian-English dictionary, newspaper clippings with Neville circled, and other items.

This is where they found Latta's prints.

Latta, in the mean time, arrives in Kingston and calls Edmonton with important information for the investigation: He just heard about the murder, but wants to let them know that he heard that Neville had received extortion threats.

The theory of the crime was and is that Latta planted evidence of an 'Italian mafia hit' to mislead investigators.

It bears noting that Latta - who died several years ago - always claimed to be innocent, and in one of his appeals argued that a new witness would corroborate that Neville had been expecting trouble resulting from gambling debts he incurred in Vegas.

Oh, also, the 'new witness' was both Neville's ex-girlfriend and, by the time of this appeal, the wife of the jury foreman from Latta's trial.

You really can't make this stuff up.

Latta was convicted, and paroled after ten years, and appears to have lived the rest of his life quietly afterward.

But he surfaced on the internet in 2007, to comment on a Slaw article about the origin of Quicklaw.

His account is interesting for other reasons, but it's weird (and, under the circumstances, kind of creepy) that when explaining how Lawford invited him to Kingston, he throws in a gratuitous Godfather reference:

"As the Mafia would say, I was made an offer I could not refuse."