Truscott's acquittal a great relief to author inspired by his case

JAMES ADAMS
Globe and Mail

August 30, 2007

"I don't ever remember a time not knowing about it."

Ann-Marie MacDonald is on her cellphone from rural New Brunswick, where she's on a fishing holiday from her home in Toronto. The award-winning novelist and playwright is talking about the 1959 murder in Southern Ontario of 12-year-old Lynne Harper and the conviction of a schoolmate, 14-year-old Steven Truscott, for the crime.

Mr. Truscott, now 62, was acquitted of the murder earlier this week in a unanimous decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, a great relief to Ms. MacDonald who, at 48, has long believed in - and fought for - Mr. Truscott's innocence, even placing the murder and his infamous trial at the centre of her last novel, The Way the Crow Flies, nominated in 2003 for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Some authors play down or disavow the historic or autobiographical wellsprings of their fiction. Not Ms. MacDonald.

"I was very consciously inspired by the Truscott case, and I knew I needed to write about it," she confessed yesterday.

For decades, thousands have deemed Mr. Truscott's conviction a miscarriage of justice. But for Ms. MacDonald, it's been personal.

She was just a newborn in 1959, a Royal Canadian Air Force brat living on a NATO base in Germany. But three years later, her father was transferred to RCAF Station Centralia, "five minutes down the road from Clinton, Ont.," where Lynne was murdered and the Truscott and Harper families lived.

In fact, Ms. MacDonald's father, Malcolm, knew Steven's father when both were stationed at a base in Alberta.

"No one's a complete stranger in the air force," Ms. MacDonald observed yesterday. "It's a pretty small community."

After Steven was sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment), her father said, "Well, that was a travesty," she recalled. Later, the MacDonalds moved to Kingston and "I knew he [Truscott] was in prison there."

There was "always this haunting," she said.

Ms. MacDonald had wanted to use the Truscott case years before she began to write what became The Way the Crow Flies, a coming-of-age story about Madeleine, the tomboy daughter of a military family, and her career as a lesbian comic. Ms. MacDonald started the novel around 1999, perusing the Truscott trial transcripts and researching the Canada of the early 1960s when John Diefenbaker was prime minister, John F. Kennedy was in the White House and the Cold War was turning hot.

Then, in late 2001, Mr. Truscott announced he was applying for a judicial review of his conviction, and investigative reporter Julian Sher published Until You Are Dead, an evisceration of the 1959 murder trial.

For Ms. MacDonald, "this was a sign ... This is the right time to be writing this book."

Ms. MacDonald chose not to meet with Mr. Truscott, his wife Marlene or their children as she wrote. But in the fall of 2003, she sent a typed proof of the finished manuscript to the Truscotts, along with a letter. "I knew the book is not his story nor the story of Lynne Harper, but it does follow the case closely," she explained, even to the point of "liberally sprinkling" citations from the 1959 trial transcripts into the narrative. "I felt I owed it to them to alert them that this novel was coming out."

Since then, the author has met Mr. Truscott twice. In late 2003, Mr. Truscott and his wife attended a reading by Ms. MacDonald of the book in Guelph, their hometown.

"I think my brother probably said it best. He said, 'It's like meeting a unicorn,' " she laughed.

She described the man who had been a far-off, mythic part of her life for so long as "this very mild, nice guy, soft-spoken, good-looking, quiet ... with something about him that was soothing and calm, not bitter."

Ms. MacDonald plans to send the Truscotts a card and a gift when she returns to Toronto. "You can't really send a salmon from New Brunswick," she laughed. And while she's pleased former chief justice Roy McMurtry chose to end his career on the Court of Appeal in "this really wise, appropriate and excellent way," she remains keenly aware of the 48 years of pain and suffering that preceded it.

"A horrible crime was committed and the wrong person was punished. In fact, the person who committed the murder is probably long dead. And he probably died in his sleep."