by Julian Sher
The local Clinton coroner, Dr. Fred Thompson, arrived by 2:35 p.m., but was instructed not to do anything until the regional pathologist arrived from nearby Stratford. A second doctor on the scene, Dr. David Hall Brooks, formally identified Lynne’s body. Brooks was the senior medical officer at the base and lived across the street from the Harpers. Lynne was his daughter’s Girl Guide patrol leader.
The authorities promptly notified Lynne’s parents. For almost two days they had hoped that their sometimes brash, determined little girl was perhaps just acting out, running away, or at worst, simply lost. Now Leslie and Shirley Harper realized their only daughter would never blow out the candles on her thirteenth birthday cake. The chaplain from the base remained with the parents most of the afternoon and evening. According to newspaper accounts, doctors placed both parents under sedation.
While the Harpers grieved, the police began examining the crime scene. The person in charge of cataloguing the information was Cpl. John Erskine, the district identification officer for the OPP. A tall, thin man with a youthful grin, Erskine approached his job with something of a passion. “He was a perfectionist in everything he did,” says his widow, Dee Harris. “It had to be done right or it wouldn’t be done at all.” A fellow identification officer in the nearby London district, Cpl. Dennis Alsop, agreed. He describes his colleague Erskine as “a meticulous man.”
Erskine began snapping pictures of the body, the clothes and the surrounding woods. He measured precisely where everything was and took notes of any marks or indentations he found near Lynne. Her turquoise shorts lay right next to her elbow, her shoes about a foot away. Fifteen inches above her head was a cluster with two white socks and a red hairband. Her underpants, curiously, were much farther away: thirty-three feet, eight inches, northeast of the body.
Police also found a black comb seventy-eight feet away, and, in the field near the bush, three pieces of Kleenex and two Coke bottles, one empty and one full, and part of an uneaten hotdog from “what appeared to be where someone had eaten a picnic.”
What was surprising was the neat, almost ceremonial appearance of the scene. The leaves and earth around Lynne’s body were undisturbed—no piles of dirt, scraped earth or broken branches to suggest a violent struggle. Her shoes and socks lay “in a fairly orderly manner,” the police noted, the white sockettes carefully rolled up. Her underwear had no rips or tears. Her shorts were zipped up, no tears or cuts, just a slight rent in the seam near the crotch.
There were no apparent wounds to her body, except for a gash in her left shoulder and the strangulation marks on her neck. Her assailant had not broken her neck or bloodied and bludgeoned her head. The police found no apparent weapons of any kind.
Two of the branches that lay across her body crisscrossed over her chest and extended up alongside her cheeks, framing her face in a sort of “V.” At trial, the prosecution would paint the branches as a primitive attempt by a frightened boy to cover up his foul deed. Given the tidy death scene, the branches could also be interpreted as a twisted tribute or reverential covering of the victim by her disturbed assailant.
The police found no fingerprints on her body, her clothes or the tree branches, but they had no technology to spot those prints, at any rate. Today, lasers can identify prints on skin and clothes. In 1959, the only hope the police had were Lynne’s shoes, because certain types of leather could reveal prints.
Corporal Erskine did not find any footprints either—at least, none he was able to distinguish. At 4:48 p.m., Erskine took pictures of marks just below Lynne Harper’s feet: one ten inches long, the other eleven inches, both of them about one-eighth to one-quarter inches deep. He later described them as “scuff marks,” so indistinct that he could not get a proper measurement on them. None of the police reports on file mentioned footprints found near the body.
Strangely, though, three months later at the trial, Flying Officer Glen Sage, supervising the air force men at the site, said that he spotted a print about two or three inches from Lynne’s left heel. “You could see the heel, wavy lines, as if from a crepe shoe,” he recalls. “I thought at the time, ‘There is a footprint that probably is from the person that killed this girl.’” Sage said he even stopped a policeman from inadvertently trampling over the evidence.
“Lookit! Be careful where you’re stepping because there’s that footprint,” he insists he called out. “I was waiting for the police to take a plaster cast of it—and they never did. I was a little disillusioned with the police at that point.”
Sage’s story would play a crucial part in the trial and subsequent conviction of Steven Truscott. In the minds of several of the jurors, it was the one piece of solid physical evidence that put the teenage boy at the scene of the crime.
At about 4:45 p.m., as Erskine was taking his pictures, Dr. John Llewellyn Penistan from Stratford, the district pathologist, made his entrance. Penistan had the distinguished grey hair, handsome face and deep eyes that reinforced his friendly image. The pipe he held constantly in his hand seemed to add to his aura of dignity. A graduate from the University of London, in England, with a degree in medicine and surgery, he had been the region’s pathologist for the attorney general’s department since 1949.
Penistan found the girl’s nose and mouth covered with “innumerable maggots.” Her undershirt was soiled with bloodstains. There was a small circle of blood on the front seam of her shorts, another stain on her underpants and a spot on her left shoe. “There was a pool of blood, still wet, approximately a tablespoonful, beneath the left shoulder,” Penistan noted. When the body was moved, Penistan spotted some dandelion leaves with blood spatters and a twig “ringed with blood over an area approximately one inch in length” that had been just below Harper’s crotch. Penistan did not examine the corpse at the scene for any foreign hairs or fibres.
The pathologist spent an hour collecting his evidence. He completed his work by 5:45 and waited for a vehicle to arrive to take the young girl’s body away to a local funeral home for examination.
The men who had surrounded the lifeless body of Lynne Harper for more than four hours slowly began making their way out of the woods toward the county road. Along the dirt tractor trail that ran along the bush, the police and air force officers found two different kinds of tracks: a set of fresh tire skid marks and some old bicycle tracks.
How the police handled this evidence says a good deal about the tunnel vision that quickly enveloped the investigation. On the one hand, bicycle tire marks that by all accounts were at least a week old would become, in the eyes of the police and prosecution, incriminating evidence against Steven. On the other hand, they ignored—and kept hidden from the defence—testimony about fresh skid marks that possibly pointed to an adult killer in a vehicle.
The earth along the laneway leading to the bush was dry and cracked. With no significant rainfall since the previous month, the ground was parched. So it was hardly surprising that, at the outset, the police were not very excited about bike tire marks they found about 122 feet away from the body in the laneway. “These marks appeared to have been made quite sometime previous, when the earth was wet,” the officer in charge, Corporal Sayeau, noted bluntly.
Meanwhile, as George Edens, the airman who had first found Lynne’s body, walked out of the bush along the tractor trail, he caught sight of a much fresher set of tracks where the dirt trail met the pavement of the county road. “There were skid marks, maybe three or four feet long. Someone definitely spun their tires there,” he said.
Two other airmen saw the same thing. Joseph Leger told police he saw a foot-long mark “which appeared to have been made by a car spinning.” Corporal Harold Pudden described them as “quite deep and wide … as if someone got their front wheels up on the pavement and gunned it and the rear tires had spun and dug in.”
No police cars had entered the laneway. The ambulance had not yet arrived. It sounded like a promising lead. Certainly, the newspapers thought so. “[George] Edens said the murderer then backed his car
out of a field and his skidding tires dug holes in the laneway in a hasty flight upgrade to the road,” one of the local papers reported.
That was the last public mention of the mysterious tire tracks, except for a brief reference to them by Edens at the trial. There is no indication the police ever pursued that lead. The tire tracks spotted by Edens and his fellow airmen—like much other evidence—quickly fell by the wayside as the police began their single-minded pursuit of their only suspect: the last person seen with Lynne—Steven Truscott.
2
WEEKEND FUN
Six days before they found her body, Lynne was dancing with the boy police soon fingered as her murderer. The party at Lorraine Wood’s house on Friday, June 5, was a lot of fun. Lorraine’s parents had a reputation for being unusually liberal. The cute boys were there, and the music made romantic dancing easy. Connie Francis’s “Lipstick on Your Collar” and Frankie Avalon’s “Bobbie Sox to Stockings” had just entered the Top 40 charts; “Lonely Boy” by Canada’s own Paul Anka was soon to become Number 1.
Despite the sad look on her face, the small girl with the dark hair and dark eyes was thrilled to be invited to the party. At five foot three and 100 pounds, Lynne Harper was just two months shy of her thirteenth birthday. She was in a combined grade Seven and Eight group, which meant many of her classmates were more mature thirteen- or even fourteen-year-olds.
“Lynne really wanted to be in that crowd [of older teenagers],” recalls one of her closest friends and neighbours, Yvonne Danberger. “We were starting to get interested in boys.”
The chaplain at the military base saw Lynne as a sweet girl who attended Sunday school and youth Bible class. Her Girl Guide leaders saw her as an ambitious organizer. But her friends saw another side. “She was a lonely person, kind of on the fringes,” says Catherine O’Dell, who lived just a few houses down the street from Lynne. “She was kind of self-conscious about a scar on her face.”
As a child, Lynne had cut her lip. Her friends heard different stories for the injury—either falling on a bottle of shampoo or falling through a window. “I didn’t think it was that noticeable but a lot of people thought she had a harelip,” recalls O’Dell. “It made her very self-conscious and she thought that people didn’t like her because of that. You know what kids are like at that age.”
Meryann Glover had moved onto the same street as Lynne a year before and was surprised when the spunky girl walked up to her door on her first day in the neighbourhood. “I remember her telling me that she didn’t have too many friends and she asked if she could be friends with me,” Meryann recalls. “She said she wasn’t too popular. But she wanted to fit in—she really did.”
Lynne was trying desperately to fit in on the night of the June 5 party, according to the teenage hostess, Lorraine Wood. “Lynne didn’t have a special boyfriend and she kept asking the other boys to dance,” Lorraine recounted. Lynne was particularly disappointed because her sometime companion, George Archibald, was not paying much attention to her that evening. “I took her out two or three times,” explained George. “We went to the house parties and dances at the kids’ houses.” But he did not dance with her that night.
So Lynne turned her eyes to one of George’s pals, a lanky athlete who never had to worry about being a “Lonely Boy.” On the dance floor or on the football field, he was often the centre of attention. If Lynne was eager to be part of the “in” crowd, there was no boy more “in” than Steven Truscott.
“Steven was the kind of fellow who would stand out,” remembers classmate Richard Gellatly. “He was the best at everything.” Steven had light brown hair, hazel eyes and an almost impish grin that stretched from one ear to the other. He literally stood head and shoulders over most of his schoolmates in school photos: at five feet eight and a half inches, he was a towering, wiry figure who rapidly earned a reputation as an athlete of some skill. When the school’s Ticat football team took home the Little Grey Cup in late November, the local paper ran a picture of the proud players. No one’s smile was bigger than that of the tallest boy in the back row—Steven Truscott, identified as “the star of the team.” The smaller children liked Steve for his kindliness and tomfoolery. “He was nice, even though he was older,” recalls Bill MacKay, who was just ten at the time. “In winter, when he had his toboggan, he’d throw me on the back of it and take me for a ride.” The girls on the base saw Steven as a friendly boy, someone you felt safe around. “There was never any talk among the girls that he was a guy you had to watch out for,” remembers a fellow pupil, Gail Coombs. Karen Daum remembers him as “the jock of the school; he was good-looking, good in sports and the girls liked him.”
They did indeed. Karen Allen was the lucky one who called herself Steve’s girlfriend, but back in 1959 small-town Ontario that didn’t count for very much. “Boyfriend and girlfriend back then was just somebody you had a crush on,” Karen says today. “I kind of liked him and he was a nice guy, so we’d play outside sometimes or talk through lunch hour.”
Karen lived in a small village near Clinton and took a bus in every day to the school on the base. “Steve biked out to my village once,” she remembers fondly. “Then we sat outside and talked for about fifteen minutes.” Steven even sent her a Christmas card one year but was so shy he added a good friend’s name beneath his own to make it look less intimate. A black-and-white photograph of the time shows Steve, sporting a crewcut and a beaming smile, sitting on a swing in the middle of winter with a long-haired, rosy-cheeked Karen.
On the last Friday night of her life, Lynne walked up to Steve and asked him to dance. Ever polite, the boy consented—but only danced with her briefly. He then partnered up with Lorraine, the party organizer, as a convenient escape.
“He just asked me if I would mind dancing with him as he didn’t feel like dancing with Lynne any more,” Lorraine later remembered. “She seemed to be following him around and he didn’t specially care for her.”
Lynne and Steve found themselves awkwardly dancing together in June of 1959 because of an accident of geography and history. They belonged to that special category of children that would eventually become known as “military brats”: girls and boys who were bounced around the country, changing schools and friends every few years as their families followed their fathers’ endless transfers to various bases across Canada and around the world. You made friends fast because you knew you were going to lose them quickly.
Clinton is nestled in the flat farmlands of southern Ontario, a three-hour drive west of Toronto. Just fifteen miles from town, the waves of Lake Huron cascade against the high cliffs that line the shore. In 1940, with war raging across the Atlantic, those cliffs held a special attraction to wartime planners because they resembled the white cliffs of Dover, where Britain was waging—and at the time, losing—a deadly air battle with the German Luftwaffe. The cliffs made Clinton an ideal location to build a secret air base to train airmen in a new technology known as radar.
After the war, as Cold War fever fuelled the need for more communications technology, RCAF Station Clinton became the largest radar and telecommunications training centre in the country. At one time, more than three thousand people lived and worked at the base, most of them unmarried, enlisted men holed up in the base barracks. To accommodate the growing number of airmen with families—this was, after all, the decade of the baby boomers—the air force built a small bedroom community next to the base, known as the Permanent Married Quarters (PMQs).
Most of the streets in the tiny community were named for Canada’s provincial capitals. On his bike, Steven could circle the entire neighbourhood from Halifax Road to Winnipeg Road to Victoria Boulevard and Quebec Road in less than five minutes. The streets, never too busy with traffic, were filled with tricycles and scooters, plastic Hula Hoops and metal roller skates. But the clutter of childhood was the only disorder tolerated. Residents had to keep their lawns trimmed and neat according to military regulations; the station warrant officer could enforce this e
dict through the National Defence Act. Not surprisingly, the air force never had to mete out punishment for an unruly rose bush or chaotic marigolds; in the strict law-and-order atmosphere of the times, even the flowers and the blades of grass in Clinton seemed to stand at attention.
Where you lived depended, quite simply, on what insignia your father wore on his uniform. Officers and their families lived in a separate neighbourhood, segregated, in a manner of speaking, from the families of the lower ranks. While the children largely ignored the military hierarchy when it came to dances or sports, the caste system left its mark on daily life. “We didn’t really hang around with the officers’ kids much,” recalls Karen Daum, whose father was a butcher on the base. “They seemed to be better off. They always had the best clothes; they always had money to buy stuff.”
The Harpers were one of the more privileged families, their status confirmed by their proximity, on Victoria Boulevard, to the home of the base commanding officer. Flowered verandahs and large lawns were the perks of higher rank. Tall trees in front and back of the two-storey house offered Lynne’s family shade in the hot summer months. Lynne’s father, Leslie, at forty-two, was a successful flying officer. He had been a teacher before joining the air force in January 1940.
He and his wife, Shirley, had three children before they moved to Clinton in July 1957: Cheryl Lynne, born in New Brunswick on August 31, 1946; her older brother, Barry, sixteen by 1959; and five-year-old Jeffrey.
A dutiful daughter, Lynne always impressed her friends by spending time helping her mother, whose rheumatic hands made housework difficult. Still, Lynne sometimes yearned to break free of the confines of home. “Her home was always orderly and quiet. She loved to hang out at our house,” her neighbour Yvonne recalls. The Danberger residence was the bustling beehive typical of a large family; Lynne was enthralled in particular by Yvonne’s mother’s talent for cooking restaurant food on the stove. “My mom made french fries quite a bit and Lynne thought that was quite neat,” says Yvonne. “She wanted to spend time in our rowdy family. She used to enjoy the busyness of the house.”