TORONTO -- Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino
is not ruling out a renewed search for Lynne Harper's real killer,
but he admits his officers would face "major hurdles"
in trying to solve the murder for which Steven Truscott was wrongly
convicted in 1959.
"There's challenges here to try and go back to a case that's
some 40-odd years old," Fantino said during an interview
Wednesday. "We'll address all of that. We'll do what needs
to be done and ensure that we fulfil our responsibility to the
extent that we can with whatever evidence is available."
Fantino said the OPP plans to meet soon with the attorney general's
office to review Tuesday's appeal court ruling acquitting Truscott,
and to discuss whether the force should commit fresh resources
to solving Lynne's murder.
While the commissioner said he respects the appeal court's finding,
he was quick to defend OPP officers in Goderich, Ont., who arrested
the wrong boy more than 48 years ago.
"Those [officers] were honourable in what they did and I
believe they tried to do the honest, right thing," Fantino
said.
The Ontario Court of Appeal's decision to clear Truscott, 62,
raises an obvious question: If he did not rape and kill his 12-year-old
school mate, who did?
For decades, rumours about alternative suspects in Harper's murder
have swirled in and around Clinton, Ont., the town closest to
the radar training base where Truscott, then 14, and Lynne lived
in June of 1959.
In researching a CBC-TV documentary and later a book on the case,
journalist Julian Sher investigated some of those other suspects.
He and his colleagues dug up yellowed military files on a known
pedophile named Alexander Kalichuk, an RCAF sergeant, who had
a home in nearby Seaforth.
Kalichuk tried to lure a 10-year-old girl into his car shortly
before Harper vanished.
Sher also looked at an electrician with a rape conviction who
worked at the base and once fixed a dryer at the Harper home.
Other suspects who have come to light over the years include
a minister accused of sexual assault by his adult daughters and
a convicted pedophile who lived on the Clinton base in 1959. The
OPP later discovered a transcript of the Supreme Court of Canada's
1966-67 review of Truscott's case in the man's house.
However, neither Sher, nor anyone else, has found hard evidence
to tie any of these men to Lynne's murder.
"The trail has gone cold," Sher said. "A lot of
these people are dead. I think that unlike the cold cases on TV,
this case is going to stay cold because there was never a serious
investigation back in 1959."
Truscott's legal team also researched other suspects and raised
a few at the judicial review, although not by name because none
were ever charged in Lynne's death.
The lawyers' goal was not to find the real killer, but to demonstrate
to the court that the OPP rushed to judgment in arresting Truscott
without seriously investigating suspects more obvious than a seventh
grader.
The court wrote in its judgment Tuesday that, "there is
really nothing ... that links any of these people to the homicide."
Still, Philip Campbell, one of Truscott's lawyers, said he has
always been particularly suspicious of the man with the court
transcript.
"The guy had a history of pedophilia, photographs of young
children in his house, a copy of the trial transcript of Truscott
and an alibi that is almost sort of too detailed to really be
credible and he has no confirmation for it," Campbell said.
