'It's my name' - and now he has it back
Truscott battled the justice system with a quiet strength that
bolstered him on his path to a long-awaited victory
JULIAN SHER
Wednesday August 29, 2007
How does a man reclaim what is most dear to him - his name?
Steven Truscott got his name back yesterday. A name that until
then was still on the books as a convicted murderer.
And he did it with a quiet poise and strength that was all the
more remarkable considering what Canada and its justice system
has put him and his family through for five decades.
I have seen Steven Truscott cradle his newborn granddaughter
in his arms. I watched him console his family when there were
legal setbacks on the long road to clear his name. And I saw him
hug former prison guards who came out to community meetings to
support the man they had known as a frightened teenager in jail.
But I have never seen him cry.
"I just wasn't brought up that way," he once told me.
"It's not the air force way."
Growing up on a military base in Southern Ontario, he did not
shed a tear back in 1959 when he was first arrested as a 14-year-old
for the murder of a classmate.
Even after a botched police investigation and a rushed trial,
when the judge ordered the boy to be "taken to the place
of execution and hanged by the neck until you are dead,"
he never broke down - at least in public.
But on that first night after the guilty verdict, in the cold
solitude of his death cell in Goderich, the terrified child finally
sobbed in private. "At nighttime you lie there and cry,"
he said.
"But it doesn't really accomplish that much. You kind of
harden yourself up for what's to come."
What was to come - after the death sentence was commuted - was
a decade behind bars where he was subjected to LSD treatment and
truth-serum injections by prison psychologists determined to make
a youth confess to a crime he insisted he did not commit. What
was to come was 30 years of anonymity in Guelph as he tried to
build a family and give his three children the childhood that
was stolen from him.
And what was to come was the gruelling battle in the public spotlight
to clear his name. That began back in 1997, when he shook my hand
and told me to "investigate wherever things lead you, I know
I'm innocent and I'm not afraid of what you'll turn up."
People always ask me: How come Steven Truscott is not angry?
After all, that's what you would expect from someone who - once
he escaped the shadow of the hangman's noose - had to live under
the shadow of being Canada's most famous convicted murderer for
close to 50 years.
"I don't think you can be bitter and raise a family,"
Mr. Truscott said.
"I've moved on, I have a pretty good life. I'm not really
wanting for anything except to have my name cleared."
Like many wrongly convicted people, he sensed that if he let
bitterness against the injustice he suffered get hold of him,
it would eat him up and destroy him just as much as the gallows
or the prison bars.
Mr. Truscott saved his bitterness and anger for a justice system
that refused to own up to a mistake. "What they did was wrong.
And that's all I want them to do. Say that they were wrong,"
Mr. Truscott would often say.
At the Canada Day celebrations the Truscotts are fond of holding
at their home -where it is not uncommon for more than 100 well-wishers
and supporters to turn up - people wear T-shirts sporting the
slogan: "My Canada rights its wrongs."
Indeed, it has always struck me that Mr. Truscott's story is
not just the story of an innocent young boy growing up behind
bars but of a country and its justice system growing up to be
mature enough to admit its mistakes.
That's why the Truscott saga crosses political lines. Defence
Minister Peter MacKay took up the case several years ago when
he was the Conservative Party's justice critic, saying: "We
have an opportunity to undo a historic wrong that continues to
be a black mark on our country's judicial history."
Liberal Senator Laurier LaPierre, who as a famed broadcaster
in the 1960s highlighted the Truscott injustice, said the story
is "seared in our memories, because we almost hung a 14-year-old
boy."
That boy now has a teenage grandson who has acted in a play about
his grandfather's case which has been performed across the country.
Schoolchildren have re-enacted the trial in their classes. Thousands
have sent petitions to Parliament. Mr. Truscott became a hometown
hero in Guelph: A local newspaper had named him Newsmaker of the
Year and the city council voted a resolution of support.
But in the end, it comes down to one man and one family. If you
want to know what victory means for Steven Truscott, you have
to go back to a Christmas morning in 2005. Mr. Truscott tore open
a carefully gift-wrapped pizza box. Inside were the documents
that his youngest son, Devon, then 25, had filled out to legally
adopt his father's surname - Truscott.
To shield his children from the glare of publicity, Mr. Truscott
had raised his family under an assumed name, but he was always
hurt - in that air force way of stalwart pride - by that compromise.
His eldest son Ryan had taken his father's name proudly three
years ago; now Devon was completing the circle.
"That's the name I was born with," Mr. Truscott said.
"It's my name."
And now it's a name that has been cleared.
