by Julian Sher
PRAISE FOR “UNTIL YOU ARE DEAD”
“Before there was Donald Marshall, David Milgaard, Guy Paul Morin, Gregory Parsons or Thomas Sophonow, there was Stephen Truscott.… Julian Sher … has uncovered new evidence and written a compelling story detailing how Truscott’s 1959 murder trial was horribly flawed, his conviction gravely tainted and his Supreme Court of Canada appeal compromised.”
—Vancouver Sun
“Written with admirable clarity. Sher’s book [reveals] that Truscott received a raw deal in 1959—that, under current law, Truscott would almost certainly have been acquitted.”
—Toronto Star
“Sher writes with a finely measured sense of disbelief.… An important book. One that ought to serve as a warning to those who administer justice against arrogance.”
—Kingston Whig-Standard
“Passionate, thorough and highly readable, it is also a weighty indictment of our criminal system, and the terrible results when it goes wrong.”
—The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)
“A chilling search for truth. Sher’s swiftly paced book follows Truscott from his arrest and trial through his darkest hours as Canada’s youngest death-row prisoner.”
—Hamilton Spectator
“Sher makes a painstakingly detailed case that Truscott didn’t receive a fair trial … It is important.… Sher has done fine work.”
—Christie Blatchford in the Ottawa Citizen
ALSO BY JULIAN SHER
One Child at a Time: Inside the Police Hunt to
Rescue Children from Online Predators
The Road to Hell: How the Biker Gangs are Conquering
Canada (co-author, with William Marsden)
Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers’ Empire of Crime
(co-author, with William Marsden)
To Myriam and Daniel
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All italics in quoted material are mine, unless otherwise attributed; minor grammatical and spelling mistakes in some quotations have been corrected. Imperial, rather than metric, terms of measurement are used since many of the original police and court files refer to feet, miles and pounds. A map is provided on the next two pages for ease of reference.
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
PART ONE:
The Battle in the Courtroom: 1959
JUNE: Murder and Arrest
1 Crime Scene
2 Weekend Fun
3 A Bike Ride into History
4 A Girl Goes Missing
5 The Questions Begin
6 The Inspector Arrives
7 Wanted—“Dead or Alive”
8 Trapped
9 “Lightning Speed”
10 “The Rose beyond the Wall”
SUMMER: The Scramble to Make a Case
11 Trouble with Witnesses
12 “Look What I Found, Mommy”
13 For the Good of the Child
14 The Hanging Tree
SEPTEMBER: The Trial
15 The Queen versus Steven Truscott
16 The Children Take the Stand
17 Duel with the Doctors
18 The Police Story
19 Witnesses for the Defence
20 The Boys at the River
21 The Defence Sums Up
22 The Prosecution Makes Its Case
23 The Judge’s Charge
24 The Verdict
AFTERMATH
25 The Trouble with Time
26 The Missing Witness
27 Doctoring the Medical Evidence
28 “Burn the Pictures”
PART TWO:
The Battle behind Bars: 1960–1966
29 Ghosts of the Gallows
30 Lessons of Reform School
31 Number 6730
PART THREE:
The Public Battle: 1966–1967
32 A National Debate
33 An “Agonizing Reappraisal”
34 His Day in Court
35 A Battle of Science and Egos
36 The Lawyers Square Off
37 The Decision
PART FOUR:
The Private Battle: 1967–1997
38 Release
39 Starting Over
40 What to Tell the Children
PART FIVE:
The Final Battle
41 Out of the Shadows
42 A New Hope
43 Lessons Learned
44 Return to Clinton
45 The Final Chapter
PHOTO INSERT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
The tall, broad-shouldered man who greeted me at his door had lines of grey running through his hair and wrinkles etched on his face. For a fifty-five-year-old, he stood remarkably fit and trim. Only the smile in his eyes betrayed a hint of the boy he had once been, in that fateful summer of 1959.
We shook hands. His grip was firm and I thought about those hands, which had built model airplanes out of balsa wood on air force bases in the ′50s; hands that had grown tough and callused in machine shops as the teenage boy grew to manhood behind prison walls; hands that, once out of jail, laboured for thirty years in factories in Guelph; hands that caressed three children, and later, three grandchildren.
They were the hands of Steven Truscott, Canada’s most famous convicted murderer. As he and I sat down to talk in 1997 neither of us imagined that it would be ten more years before his name would be cleared. This is the story of that struggle—an epic battle that began four decades earlier and changed the way many Canadians look at the country’s justice system.
In a case that made national and world headlines, Truscott was sentenced to hang in 1959 at the age of fourteen for the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old classmate, Lynne Harper. After the federal cabinet commuted his death sentence, he spent ten years in prison, and once paroled, he spent three decades living under an assumed name in the relative obscurity of small-town Ontario.
Like many of my generation, I remember the photograph on the cover of the Star Weekly, a smiling boy my age standing by his racing bike. A boy who would grow up in prison for a crime he would always claim he did not commit.
Now, for the first time in forty years, Steven Truscott was willing to tell his story in his own words, revealing a face he had for the most part kept hidden from the public. There had been three books, one fictional movie, a TV courtroom re-enactment and a radio interview. But few people had seen the man the boy had become.
For the first time, too, boxes of police files and military records had been uncovered that had remained hidden or buried in government vaults for decades. There were disturbing clues—many of them revealed in this book for the first time—about an investigation and a trial the authorities had always claimed was beyond reproach.
Steven and his wife, Marlene, had chosen to speak out on the fifth estate, the flagship investigative documentary program of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
There were no deals, no commitments and no promises. If the fifth estate was going to investigate one of Canada’s most controversial murder cases, we had to have unfettered access.
“If you want to prove yourself innocent, hire a defence lawyer,” I told Steven. “Our job is not to prove people innocent, but to find out the truth and go down any alleys, no matter where they lead.”
“That’s fine,” Steve replied quickly. “I’m not afraid. Talk to anyone you find, investigate wherever things lead you. I know I’m innocent and I’m not afraid of what you’ll turn up.”
It was an important moment. A healthy dose of skepticism, if not outright cynicism, is almost a badge of courage for journalists. Over the years, I had interviewed convicted murderers and d
rug dealers in maximum-security Canadian prisons, con men on the run in Latin America and war criminals from Africa. All protested their innocence or blamed someone else for their misfortunes. Steven Truscott’s claim of innocence was nothing new. But his willingness to let journalists probe into the deepest corners of his life was.
When Steven Truscott went on trial for the rape and murder of Lynne Harper, Canada was a much more innocent country. It was three decades before we heard about Clifford Olson or Paul Bernardo, before sex crimes became highly publicized. Yet it would also be decades before many Canadians came to realize that the police and the courts all too often put innocent people behind bars.
Few cases in Canadian legal history have spanned so many political generations. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker wrestled with and commuted Truscott’s death sentence in 1959; a young justice minister named Pierre Trudeau confronted the Truscott controversy in 1967 and, as prime minister, abolished the death penalty nine years later; and then, in the 21st century—in the wake of revelations by the fifth estate and new information in this book—successive Liberal and Conservative governments had to grapple with a new and final appeal for justice from Steven Truscott and his lawyers.
Steven Truscott was convicted in the final year of the conservative 1950s, a decade when concerned parents watched their teenagers flock to the movies of James Dean and sway to the music of Elvis Presley. The presiding magistrate at Truscott’s trial, Justice R. I. Ferguson, warned the jurors they were “the screws that hold the lid down” on anything that threatened society’s respectability.
There was nothing respectable about what happened in that courtroom, but it would take five decades for the justice system to admit it. Truscott was finally acquitted of the murder of Lynne Harper on August 28, 2007. It would be one month shy of the forty-eighth anniversary of the day Judge Ferguson had sentenced Steven to hang “until you are dead.” In one of the most stunning reversals in Canadian legal history, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that Truscott “has lived his entire adult life in the shadow of a conviction that we have concluded must be quashed as a miscarriage of justice.”
That conviction cast many shadows across an entire country. The story of Steven Truscott is the story of Canada growing up, shedding illusions about the justice system and learning to live with doubt, fear and judicial uncertainty. It is the story of a boy growing up behind bars, first in the shadow of the hangman’s noose, then in the confines of a reform school for “juvenile delinquents,” and finally behind the walls of a penitentiary. And it is the story of girl who never got a chance to grow up, a bright, lively child who never saw her thirteenth birthday.
PART ONE
THE BATTLE IN THE COURTROOM: 1959
“It is with confidence that I leave
the fate of this boy in your hands.”
—Defence lawyer Frank Donnelly, to the jurors
JUNE: MURDER AND ARREST
1
CRIME SCENE
Nine-year-old Karen Daum was uneasy. “Be very quiet,” she remembers Miss Beacom warning the grade Four pupils as they pointed to the air force men and whispered nervously. “One of the girls from school is missing and they are trying to find her.”
It was a sweltering afternoon on Thursday, June 11, 1959, so hot that Edith Beacom allowed Karen and the other children to do their lessons outside on the school field. Suddenly, along the county road, they saw rows and rows of men from the Clinton air force base marching in formation. Around lunchtime, about 250 officers and airmen had rallied in the parade square on the base. They formed three search parties: one to look down by the river, one along the highway and a third group in the nearby woods.
Inside the school, the older students in Maitland Edgar’s grades Seven/Eight classroom also spotted the search parties. Edgar remembers that the tall boy sitting at the back of the row of desks closest to the windows did not react differently than his classmates. Like all of his friends, Steven Truscott stared at the strange sight of dozens of men looking for a girl.
News of the young girl’s disappearance had spread beyond the confines of the Clinton air force base to the surrounding towns and throughout southern Ontario. “Twelve-year-old Lynne Harper Missing Since Tuesday,” read the headline in Clinton’s small weekly paper, the News-Record, in a small article on Thursday’s front page. “She was apparently last seen on the highway where she had ridden with another youngster.” The story was dramatic enough to make the news in Toronto and nearby London.
Still, the paper in Clinton devoted more space to the news that the town had finally finished putting up street numbers on all the homes. In many ways, Clinton was still the small rural enclave it had been since the late nineteenth century. Except for a brief wartime boom, the town had never had more than 2,600 residents. Up until the late 1940s, horse-drawn ploughs cleared the snow from sidewalks. Clinton was also a deeply religious place; the first log school built one hundred years earlier had doubled as a house of worship, and Sunday church attendance remained strong. The Temperance Act was still in force—Clinton was a dry town. Order and discipline were ingrained both in the community and in the nearby air force base.
It was her shoes he saw first. Small, brown loafers.
“They were kind of lined up even. One was turned on its side and they were just lying perfectly side by side,” George Edens recalls.
At 1:50 p.m., the sun was high overhead, unrelenting in the week-long heat wave it had inflicted upon southern Ontario. Shafts of sunlight shot through the leaves on the towering maple and ash trees as Cpl. George Edens and his fellow airmen pushed away branches and bushes, hoping they would not find what their search party had been sent out to look for: a body.
Like many on the base, Edens knew of the rumours that perhaps twelve-year-old Lynne was a runaway. “I had heard that she was hitchhiking … to be with her grandmother because she had a tiff at home,” he remembers.
Edens was in the group assigned to search the heavily wooded area known as Lawson’s bush, on a farm next to the base. The men walked in a straight line, twenty feet apart, sweating under the sun and swatting at the mosquitoes.
For thirty minutes, the air force men slowly beat their way through the bush. Then, pushing some branches and undergrowth away, Edens spotted the shoes and, moments later, the clump of clothes lying in a little depression of earth: “They were lying there, rather neatly. And I thought: ‘Why would a little girl be out here without any clothes on?’” He turned and saw the body. “I thought: ‘Oh my heavens, no!’ I knew then that she was dead.” Edens froze, too stunned to even cry out. His companion, Lieut. Joseph Leger, came up behind him and his yell pulled Edens out of his stupor. “Here she is!” came the shout, and with a sickening certainty everyone now knew that the little girl was not at her grandmother’s or in the safe refuge of any home. She had been murdered and it appeared she had been sexually assaulted.
Her corpse lay in a small hollow about six feet long and fifteen inches deep, behind a group of five trees growing out of a single stump. Around the stump there were about a dozen other smaller trees or saplings. Three branches from an ash tree lay across her body. Six to eight feet away, the searchers spotted three freshly broken limbs from small ash trees. South of the body was another broken branch, not entirely severed from a maple sapling. Her body was about eighty-three feet from a tractor trail and 280 feet from a busy county road.
She was lying on her back, her right leg slightly turned, bent at the knee; her left leg was straight. Her left arm lay across her chest; the right arm was bent at the elbow, palm up, next to her head. The only clothing covering the little girl was her blood-smeared undershirt, pulled up on her chest. The sleeveless white blouse she had been wearing had been ripped and yanked off; a couple of buttons were missing. Her right arm was still caught in the armhole. The ends of the blouse were rolled up and tied tightly around the girl’s neck, with a knot under the left side of her jaw. A small pool of blood, just enough to fill a tablespoon,
coagulated underneath her left shoulder.
The discovery of a twelve-year-old’s nearly naked body was too gruesome for even some of the seasoned men in Canada’s armed forces to stomach. Her face and body were swollen, and maggots and insects oozed out of the nose, mouth and genitals. In shock and horror, the searchers covered the body with their shirts and jackets. “Nobody knew what to do,” Edens remembers. “You never run into this. You are in a quandary about what to do.”
The well-meaning airmen wanted to protect the young victim’s dignity. But in doing so, they compromised the crime scene and destroyed potential evidence. From the start, the investigation into the murder of Lynne Harper was a botched affair.
It did not take long for the Ontario Provincial Police to arrive. By 2:08 p.m., Cpl. Harry “Hank” Sayeau was on the scene, joined seven minutes later by Const. Donald Trumbley. Even for the police, the slaying of a young girl was a shock. Sayeau, a careful and considerate officer who prided himself on being “a fact finder,” had seen only two murders—both domestic disputes—since he had been first stationed in Huron County in 1953. “When they told me they found her, I went into a little body shake. I was hoping against hope that she had run away,” he recalls. “Up there, you didn’t have much violence. It was an emotional thing—something that I had never encountered and that the community had never encountered.”
Still, the officers carried out their work diligently, and they were all the more determined to catch the culprit who could commit so brutal a crime. “Police clamped down a heavy wall of secrecy as soon as the body was found,” the local papers reported. “Airmen from the searching party were stationed around the outside perimeter of the woodlot to keep curious spectators out. Newsmen, too, were barred from the scene.”