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The ordeal that still won't go away
'Justice hasn't been done . . . Not to the Harper family and not
to my family. It's all I want. After 40 years I don't think that's
much to ask'
Friday, October 29, 2004
JULIAN SHER
Special to The Globe and Mail
From his farmhouse in Clinton, Ont., Bob Lawson can still see
the bush on his land where Lynne Harper's body was found 45 years
ago.
Even today he scratches his head in disbelief that the boy he
liked the most among the local children would be fingered as her
killer.
"I thought this was utterly ridiculous: how could he have
done it?" said Mr. Lawson, whose farm was a favourite hangout
for many of the children on the sprawling RCAF base in Clinton.
He had a special fondness for the soft-spoken, lanky Truscott
boy who was always eager to lend a hand with chores.
But in 1959, television was still in black and white and so were
public attitudes about the justice system. Few people questioned
the actions of police, prosecutors or judges.
"In those days if someone is arrested, it was pretty well
assumed they must be guilty. People took it for granted that justice
will be done," Mr. Lawson said.
The lives of many of the children of Clinton were changed on June
12, 1959, when police arrested Steven Truscott, barely 24 hours
after the body of Lynne Harper was found. A popular student and
athletic star, 14-year-old Steven was the last person reported
seen with the 12-year-old girl before her disappearance three
days earlier.
Steven gave Lynne a ride on his bike down a busy county road on
the evening of June 9. He insists he dropped her off at an intersection
with a major highway, where she hitchhiked away. To get to the
highway, he said he crossed a bridge over a small river that served
as a local swimming hole, and then returned over the bridge alone
after dropping Lynne off. At least two child eye witnesses near
the river confirmed his story.
But police and the prosecutor maintained that Steven never got
to the highway, that he had instead turned off the busy county
road hundreds of metres before reaching the bridge, carried his
bike and Lynne into a nearby bush, raped and strangled her, and
then returned to the schoolyard at the base -- unseen by anyone
and without a scratch or trace of blood on his body.
Douglas Oates was a curious 11-year-old, hunting for turtles that
fateful day near the river. At Steven's trial, he testified he
was inches away as Steven and Lynne crossed the bridge toward
the highway, directly contradicting the prosecution's scenario
of Steven never making it that far. Despite a withering cross-examination
by a prosecutor who branded him a liar, the Oates boy stood his
ground then, and to this day.
"I've honestly told them what I saw," said Mr. Oates
from Edmonton, where he recently retired as an electronic technologist
with Nav Canada. "What it's done to my life is that I don't
trust the justice system."
The prosecution withheld key evidence from the defence, including
the sworn statement of another child witness who could have corroborated
much of the Oates boy's story.
The Crown also relied on dubious medical testimony that pinpointed
the time of Lynne's death to within 30 minutes of the time she
was seen with Steven, based largely on the contents of her stomach
-- a practice disputed even then, and thoroughly discredited in
scientific circles today.
But the pathologist's testimony on time of death swayed the jury.
So did evidence that Steven had sores on his penis. And the Crown
also produced two other child witnesses who said they had been
looking for Steven that evening on the county road and did not
see him.
The jurors voted unanimously for a guilty verdict "with a
plea for mercy." But the judge immediately imposed the death
penalty, telling the pale 14-year-old in the prisoner's box that
he would "be taken to the place of execution and that you
there [will] be hanged by the neck until you are dead."
Even some of the jurors were shocked by the death sentence. "It
brought tears to our eyes," one said.
Steven spent the next four months on death row in a small cell
in an aging jailhouse in Goderich, Ont. -- so frightened he once
mistook the clanging on a construction site outside his window
for the building of his gallows.
When the cold snows of December arrived, Steven spent the first
of what would be many holidays alone.
"You know your whole family is having Christmas, but you're
not there and you know it's not going to be the same for them,"
he once recalled.
"It's just too much for your mind to comprehend."
The cabinet of then prime minister John Diefenbaker eventually
commuted the sentence to life imprisonment -- not because they
doubted the fairness of the trial but, according to cabinet notes,
because the hanging of a teenage boy "would undoubtedly reflect
badly on Canada."
The case was especially traumatic for the children of the Clinton
air force base, who suddenly had lost one friend to homicide and
saw another jailed for her death.
"It was shocking and it snowballed and it just kept getting
worse," said Karen Allen, a girlfriend of Steven's at the
time, who still lives in the Clinton area. "You couldn't
believe what was happening."
"After the trial, nobody wanted to talk about it any more
and you tried to put it away," she said. "But it wouldn't
go away."
Certainly the ordeal never went away for Steven Truscott.
He began serving his life sentence behind bars at a reform school
for boys in Guelph, and was transferred to Collins Bay Penitentiary
in Kingston when he turned 18. Though technically a medium-security
institution, its 10-metre-high walls and tough population made
it what the authorities called a "high-medium" prison.
Some of its occupants called it "Gladiator School."
Mr. Truscott was subject to a barrage of LSD injections and truth-serum
tests by prison staff psychiatrists in an effort to get him to
confess, a not-uncommon practice at the time.
"They tried to play detective," said Malcolm Stienburg,
the prison chaplain who later became Mr. Truscott's parole officer
and eventually a good friend. "I never had any question of
guilt in his case. Most people would be flying off the edge, in
prison like that. He was always calm and laid back, but you knew
that inside there was turmoil."
Mr. Truscott won the confidence of the warden, who gave him permission
to work unsupervised at a farm outside the prison walls, as well
as most of the guards and even the hardened convicts.
Ted McGuin remembers Mr. Truscott as a star third baseman on the
prison softball team. Now 62, Mr. McGuin lives in Prince Albert,
Sask., and is a foster parent with a clean record since 1970.
Back in the 1960s, he was serving time in Collins Bay for armed
robbery.
"You would be in harm's way if you were known as a rapist,"
Mr. McGuin said, noting that convicts often judged their fellow
inmates more harshly than did the outside world.
"Truscott went to 'our court' -- the prison yard court --
and we found him not guilty. Nobody ever believed he had done
it."
Many Canadians shared those doubts about Mr. Truscott's guilt
after a bestselling book by pioneering journalist Isabel LeBourdais
forced Ottawa to ask the Supreme Court of Canada to review the
case in 1966.
But after hearing 26 witnesses, including Mr. Truscott, the judges
ruled 8-1 to uphold the original guilty verdict.
However, newly discovered archive material indicates that, again,
police and prosecutors withheld vital information from the court,
including a letter from the pathologist who made what he called
an "agonizing reappraisal" of his definitive estimate
of the time of death that had nearly put a noose around Steven
Truscott's neck. The pathologist had widened his estimate to anywhere
from 12 hours to two days.
Mr. Truscott walked out of prison in 1969 on parole, still a convicted
murderer.
Within a year, he met and married Marlene, a young woman who had
been a tireless campaigner for his freedom in the battle leading
up to the Supreme Court hearing. For the next 30 years, they lived
in anonymity in Guelph, raising three children and using his mother's
maiden surname, Bowers, as their family name.
Mr. Truscott works steadily as a millwright at a local factory.
He became a regular fixture on ski trips and other after-school
activities with his children, apparently wanting to experience
the teenage life he never had.
"His family always came first, very much so," Mr. Stienburg
said. "He has been as devoted as any human being can be.
When he stepped through the door, those kids were precious to
him."
It was only after all three of their children were adults that
the Truscotts decided to go public. They contacted CBC-TV's investigative
program, the fifth estate. A documentary in March of 2000 and
a subsequent book raised disturbing new questions about the original
police investigation and trial.
"Justice hasn't been done," Mr. Truscott said at that
time. "Not to the Harper family and not to my family. It's
all I want. After 40 years I don't think that's too much to ask."
His wife Marlene amassed an encyclopedic grasp of the smallest
details and pushed journalists and lawyers to dig deeper. The
Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted took up the challenge,
filing a 700-page brief calling on Ottawa to reopen the case.
The subsequent publicity transformed the once shy Mr. Truscott
into a nationally recognized symbol of justice gone wrong. The
Guelph City Council, two trade unions, numerous schools and several
MPs all rallied to his side.
For years, Mr. Truscott raised his children under an assumed name
to protect them from public attention. But his oldest son, Ryan,
officially changed his surname three years ago to Truscott.
And yesterday, in front of the TV cameras outside the family home
in Guelph, Ryan was defiant: "I am a Truscott. I am proud
of who I am and of what I am," he said. "We will have
our day in court."
. Julian Sher is the author of Until You Are Dead -- Steven Truscott's
Long Ride into History.
