by Julian Sher
At the other of the end of the PMQs, past the wide homes and tall trees on Victoria Boulevard, down Regina Road and across Toronto Boulevard, along Quebec Road’s simpler houses, lived another rowdy family, the Truscotts. Just up the way from the convenience store, their plain clapboard house had a small wooden porch, inevitably hidden by bikes, baseball bats and hockey sticks. The aluminum screen door was always banging as the Truscott boys scampered in and out. Steve shared a house with his older brother, Ken, sixteen, and two younger siblings, Bill and Barbara. His mother, Doris, was a petite bundle of nerves and energy. She cooked, cleaned and did laundry for her boisterous family.
The air force may have imposed its rules and regulations on the base, but inside the four walls of 2 Quebec Road, Doris was the supreme commander—and she brooked no slacking or insubordination within her ranks. “We were not overly strict,” she insists, “but the children knew when they were told something, that was the way it was going to be.” Steve’s father, Dan, was a warrant officer, not a prominent rank, but Dan made up in exuberance what he lacked in stature. A jovial, slightly portly figure always willing to help organize events and play with the children, he was elected Man of the Year for doing the most for the welfare of young people at the base. “He was a prince of a man,” says Margaret Coombs, the switchboard operator who was plugged in to the community in more ways than one. “He did more for the kids on the base than any other officer.”
If you want to know what children are like, ask the man behind the candy counter. Back in the 1950s, Maynard Cory ran the Red and White, the convenience store on the Clinton air force base that was a favourite hangout for the children. Pop went for seven cents, a chocolate bar for a dime.
Lynne was a “tiny little thing” according to Cory. “I guess you notice people who wanted to be noticed, and she wanted to be noticed. She was pretty in a plain way. Kind of coquettish. You couldn’t help but like her.”
Steven, for his part, stood out because of his height—and his charm. “He was bigger for his age; he was also a better-looking chap,” says Cory. “He’d be over by the pop counter and all the kids would be around him. He was never a bully, always a polite kid.” Steve cherishes his memories of the candy counter. “You’d go in with maybe a quarter. Get nickel worth of this, nickel worth of that,” he says. “You’d get a whole bag of goodies, Dubble Bubble gum with those comics, and blackballs—hard candy, about the size of a marble that you sucked on and watched as it changed colours.”
If Steve was not hanging around the Red and White, there was always a good chance his friends would find him right across the street from the school at the sprawling, 150-acre farm owned by Bob Lawson. A rake-thin man with light blue eyes and a perpetual grin, Lawson, at twenty-two, was only a few years older than Steven and some of the teenagers, but his commanding height (well over six feet) and hardworking, no-nonsense approach to life made him seem much more senior to the children. Like all respected authority figures, Bob Lawson seemed to have lost his first name as far as the children were concerned; they simply referred to him as “Farmer Lawson.” The children were always dropping by to play with the animals or watch him do chores. “Keeping them off was like keeping away the flies,” Lawson says with a laugh. He sometimes feigned annoyance with the children, but in truth, he enjoyed their company.
“When I look back at it now, Bob Lawson must have had so much patience to put up with all of us kids,” recalls Catherine O’Dell. “Everybody went over to Lawson’s farm. Everybody. We’d hang over the fence and poke our heads in the barn. He was so good to us.”
Steve was a more frequent visitor to the farm than most children, in part because of his curiosity and in part because Bob Lawson liked him so much. Steve loved to help with the chores: picking up rocks from the fields, pulling out stumps, repairing the machinery. A whiz at mechanics and always eager to lend a hand, the strapping young boy struck Lawson as being a little more mature than the other kids. Steve was the only child Lawson ever let ride on his new Ferguson tractor. The boy and the farmer even cobbled together some discarded transmissions and other auto parts with the remnants of an old army truck and came up with a decent front-end loader. Steve spent hours working with Lawson on the farmer’s classic 1929 Model A Ford.
Occasionally, some children would play in a heavily wooded area at the northern edge of the farm, commonly known as Lawson’s bush. Later, when Lynne’s body turned up there, the police built up a mythology about the woods as a sort of rural den of iniquity. “The bush was known as a real hangout, like the malls are now,” says Dennis Alsop, one of the OPP officers who worked on the case. “Girls were being taken to the bush by the fellows in the town—that was well known.” The reality was a bit more down to earth. The thick undergrowth and incessant mosquitoes made the woods fairly inhospitable for extended periods in the hot summer months. The ash, maple and elm trees, along with the small ditches, rocks and stumps, made the woods fun to explore, but it was hardly the lovers’ lane of Clinton.
In terms of mating games, the closest thing the woods and the farm had to offer was the sighting of newborn calves. Lawson had forty head of cattle that year and finding a helpless young calf was always a treat for the children. Cows about to give birth often looked for an isolated corner for some privacy and protection. In late May, Steve and his friend Leslie Spillsbury found a young calf at the far end of Lawson’s land, about a quarter of a mile from the road. The boys ran to show the farmer their discovery. “They were so proud,” Bob Lawson remembers.
The bush was also a place of adventure. Steve and Leslie took their bikes to the edge of the bush and built a tree house in the woods. Lynne and her girlfriends were no strangers to the woods, either. “We were very familiar with all the farmers’ fields around there,” Yvonne Danberger explains. “We did a lot of hiking because we were in Girl Guides together. We’d cut down saplings and make them into tents. We’d light a fire and heat up a can of beans and talk.”
On the weekend of June 6 and 7, Steve quickly finished his farm chores and then had the rest of the time to fool around: baseball, fishing—and a Saturday matinee. Every week, the children crowded into the theatre on the base, where a triple bill was ten cents. First, a weekly cliffhanger serial, which inevitably ended with the intrepid hero caught in a burning building or falling off a mountain peak, only to re-emerge unscathed the next week. Next, a cartoon or comedy from Our Gang or the Three Stooges. Then, to top it off, some wholesome family entertainment from Hollywood, feature films such as The Shaggy Dog, The Ghost of Zorro or Gidget.
In such glorious summer weather, however, most of the weekend fun was to be had outside. The school had wide play areas on all sides of the building, with a playground, swing sets, a football field and a baseball diamond. The school was the natural meeting point; every adventure or excursion to the farm or to the river seemed to start and end there.
Between Lawson’s farm and the school lay a narrow, two-lane, paved rural route known by all as the county road. The road was the main artery that linked the school play area with the swimming hole in the Bayfield River, about one mile north. On any given summer afternoon, the county road would be crowded with bicycles, cars and pedestrians. Children were constantly walking or cycling up and down the road, carrying fishing poles, swimming trunks and towels. From the school, it was a pleasant, mainly downhill ride to the river; a bike could pick up a lot of speed as you coasted down the road. About a half mile on your journey, on the right-hand side of the road, there was a small laneway, a tractor trail where you could turn off and head into Farmer Lawson’s bush. If you continued past the laneway, in a few moments you crossed the railway tracks and then the small concrete bridge that spanned the Bayfield River. From the bridge, it was only a few hundred yards to the busy Highway 8, a major provincial roadway.
The bridge was a small, cement structure with a short, forty-inch wall on either side. Bikes, baseball mitts and fishing gear would often be scattered by the railing. There wer
e wide, rectangular holes at regular intervals all along the bridge wall, making it easy to stick a fishing rod through or watch for turtles in the water below. About six hundred feet east of the bridge, the river curved slightly and its waters deepened, forming a swimming hole where children splashed and frolicked for hours on end. It was a magical time, before pollution muddied the creeks and before holes in the ozone layer threatened the unprotected skin of youngsters. “We hung out down at the river quite a bit,” recalls Douglas Oates, who was eleven at the time. “You could go down just about any time and you’d find somebody by the river.”
The more adventurous children ventured past the river, down to the intersection and up the busy highway to a tiny white house where an old recluse named Edgar Hodges kept a few ponies. Hodges’ quirky nature only added to the mystery and fun. “He had cysts all over his face, and his house was so tiny it was just like a dollhouse,” remembers Meryann Glover, who visited the white house often with her friend Lynne. “We went over about once every two weeks or so. We couldn’t ride the ponies, but we’d pat them or feed them apples.”
It was a carefree time when children thought nothing of wandering a few miles from their home and sharing in the generosity of strangers. “I don’t know how often me and a buddy just rode up some farm’s driveway and said ‘Hi’ and suddenly found ourselves making new friends,” remembers Mike Fisher, a nine-year-old back then, whom Lynne sometimes babysat. Lynne and her friends occasionally would make the short trip to the town of Clinton, just a two-mile walk down the highway from the base. Catherine O’Dell remembers hitchhiking into town with Lynne to go shopping or, in winter, thumbing a ride to go skating at the local rink. “Usually we’d just start walking, and then if a car went by, we’d just stick out our thumb,” O’Dell says. “Everyone hitchhiked then. We weren’t afraid. We never gave it a thought.”
On Monday, June 8, the evening before she vanished, Lynne went to one of her favourite activities—the Girl Guides. “She was a good organizer and liked being in the public eye,” recalled Isabelle White, one of the Guide leaders. “She was very intelligent and learned very quickly. Because of her strong will, she wasn’t too popular with the other girls.”
Lynne certainly had her run-ins with her friends. On that Monday, three days after the dance party at Lorraine Wood’s house, Lynne got into an argument with her friends over her affection for Steve. One of her friends, Andrea Buck, had told another girl that Lynne had said she liked Steve.
Lynne confronted the girl. “Did Andrea tell you I liked Steven?”
“No, she didn’t,” came the meek reply.
Perhaps Lynne didn’t believe her. At the Girl Guides meeting that Monday evening, Lynne got to hand out some prizes. Andrea wanted a red hairband but Lynne kept it and gave Andrea a scribbler instead.
When Lynne woke up the next morning, she must have placed the same band in her hair before setting off for school. Later, the police would find a red hairband just inches from her dead body.
3
A BIKE RIDE INTO HISTORY
On Tuesday, June 9, the morning sunshine streamed through the classroom windows at A.V.M. Hugh Campbell School on the Clinton air base. The cool waters of the swimming hole beckoned and the excitement over the next day’s county fair filled the air. Maitland Edgar could barely keep his students’ minds on their work, much less their eyes focused on his blackboard. Teaching a combined class of grades Seven and Eight was hard enough at the best of times; it was next to impossible on a hot summer day. With less than three weeks left until the summer holidays, the children in Edgar’s class were counting down their days to freedom.
Edgar had been vice-principal since 1951, but in a small twelve-room country school, administrative titles did not get you very far. He also had to teach history, geography, English and physical education to the military’s offspring, even if he could not always impose military discipline on his rambunctious pupils.
Right by his desk, in the first seat of the middle row, sat Lynne Harper. The teacher put the twelve-year-old there for a reason. “She was a live wire, that one, a real chatterbox,” Edgar says. “She was where you could keep her under control. But she never misbehaved or anything like that. I liked her a lot.”
Her fellow students did not always agree. “She was pretty mouthy,” says Meryann Glover, one of Lynne’s few close friends. “One of those kids that always has their hand in the air—‘Oh pick me, pick me, I know the answer!’”
In the last seat at the back of the classroom, at the end row right next to the windows, sat another of Maitland Edgar’s favourite students, Steven Truscott. Edgar found him easygoing and responsible. “Steve wasn’t strong academically, but he was average,” Edgar says. “Sports were his passion, not studies.”
Sitting near Steven was a more troublesome student, his friend Arnold “Butch” George. A strong, stocky boy, Butch had a well-earned reputation as a sometime brawler and a frequent fibber. Butch’s aggressive push to be at the centre of attention came in part from the two obstacles that made him an outsider: he was a Native boy, and his father was an army man in an air force community.
Three seats away from Steve sat another outsider, desperate to be part of the crowd. Tall and thin, her face pockmarked with acne and her hair kept in dark Shirley Temple-like ringlets, Jocelyne Gaudet was teased by the older girls.
Unfortunately, Jocelyne’s personality did not help her overcome her physical traits. “She was irritating. She was too loud,” Meryann Glover recalls. “She was kind of forward—always pushing herself on people. She liked to let on she knew things.” Yvonne Danberger, looking back with the perspective of an adult, wonders if Jocelyne’s penchant for exaggerating or embellishing her importance came from her family. “She had a very dominant mother,” Yvonne says. “A very matriarchal family with a mother who really did try to control her kids. Jocelyne always seemed to be trying to break free of something, but I didn’t know what.”
Vice-principal Edgar had more serious difficulties with both Jocelyne and Butch: “I recall with both of them there was just generally a problem of untruthfulness.” No specific instances of misbehaviour stand out, he says, just a general tendency of untrustworthiness. A few small lies or exaggerations in school were just an annoyance; in a murder investigation, they could prove deadly.
When the school bell rang that afternoon, Lynne and Steve both dashed off to play separate games of baseball. Neither knew they would soon meet up again, back at the school. Neither of them could know that one’s life would end violently and brutally, while the other’s would be irrevocably shattered by what would transpire in the next few hours.
An eager substitute player on the baseball team, Lynne played only one inning that day when her team took on the challengers from the nearby town of Goderich. She was thrilled just the same. “Our team won and Lynne was very pleased,” Helen Blair, a fourth-grade teacher who coached the team, later reported. Blair drove Lynne home. The girl talked eagerly with the teacher about her favourite sport, swimming. When Lynne came through her front door, her mother, Shirley Harper, glanced at the electric clock in the kitchen. It was 5:30 p.m.
The rest of the family had almost finished supper. “I was just getting my dessert when Lynne came in and sat down in her accustomed place,” her father recalled. “I served her brown skin from the breastbone of the turkey and a four-inch slice of meat. Her mother had put just a bit of warm dressing on her plate because Lynne wasn’t very fond of it, along with peas and potatoes.” If Lynne wanted, there was bologna and ham in the fridge. And for dessert, her mother had on hand pineapple upside-down cake, and two other kinds of cake: chocolate with coconut icing and orange chiffon.
Her parents did not watch Lynne eat; they took their tea and coffee in the living room. Lynne bolted her meal in under fifteen minutes. It was 5:45 p.m. She desperately wanted to go swimming, not at the swimming hole where many of the children were gathering, but at the pool on the base. A neighbour was taking her younge
r brother, Jeffrey, to the pool, but her mother refused to ask the neighbour to take care of Lynne as well. “I couldn’t ask him to take all my family,” she told her daughter. Shirley Harper suggested Lynne get a pass to swim alone at the pool on the base. Lynne dashed out on her bike to try to secure the required permission from a base official, but she returned home within ten minutes, empty handed.
“She was a bit annoyed because I wouldn’t let her go swimming,” her mother later recounted, “but she didn’t put up any fuss.” Her father remembers that “she seemed resigned” to not being able to go to the pool.
Lynne promptly set about washing the supper dishes. “It must have taken about twenty minutes,” Mrs. Harper estimated. Once done, Lynne walked to the back door without saying goodbye to her father, who was still sitting in the living room. Her mother was chatting with a neighbour, Betty McDougall, in the backyard. Lynne stopped for a moment to fondle Mrs. McDougall’s newborn baby and then strolled off. Her mother didn’t ask Lynne where she was going and Lynne never said.
By now, it was 6:15 p.m. Shirley Harper’s daughter headed down the road, wearing her turquoise shorts, a sleeveless white blouse and brown shoes. Around her neck, she proudly wore a locket sent to her by an aunt three weeks earlier. It had an RCAF crest in a heart made of Plexiglas. A gold chain looped through a hole at the top of the heart.
It was the last time her parents would ever see their daughter alive.
Like Lynne, Steve also spent the afternoon on a baseball diamond. He got home at about 5:15 and fooled around in his front yard. At about 5:50, his mother realized there was no more coffee and asked her son to go on a quick errand. “You’ll have to hurry because the store closes in a few minutes,” she called out. Steve returned promptly with the coffee in hand and a rip in the seat of his jeans at the top of his right leg, his mother remembers.