by Julian Sher
“How did you do that?” she asked, dismayed.
“On Bill’s bike,” Steve said sheepishly, trying to shift the blame to his brother’s bicycle. “I also scratched myself.”
“Oh, I think you’ll live,” his mother remembers saying. “Your pants will do; go on out and play for a few minutes until supper is ready.”
Steve wolfed down his meal and darted out of the house as soon as he could. He knew he had to be home by 8:30 at the latest. He and his older brother, Ken, rotated babysitting duties; his parents were going out and it was Steve’s turn to take care of his younger sister and brother. So his free time was cut short for the evening.
At about the same time Lynne was leaving her home, Steven was roaming around the base on his bike. A flashy green racer with foot-long streamers attached to the handlebars, it was a teenage boy’s prized possession.
Gord Logan, a good friend, spotted Steven near the school and came up beside him. He asked Steve if he was going to go swimming.
“No, I don’t think so,” Steve replied. “I might be down later.”
The county road was beginning to fill up with the usual after-dinner bustle of cars, bikes and strollers. Several people saw Steven around 6:30, biking up and down the road between the school and the bridge. Beatrice Geiger had borrowed her son’s bike and, with her young daughter perched on the crossbar, bicycled down to the river. “I was riding slowly and Steven Truscott passed me, riding his bicycle,” the air force mother said. “Steven went onto the bridge and then turned around and came back.” Beatrice’s son, Ken, was walking down to the river when his friend Robb Harrington picked him up on his bike and they both headed down to the river. Near Lawson’s bush, they spotted Steven just sitting on his bike on the road.
“Your mother is down by the river,” Steve yelled to Ken.
“I know, we’re going there to swim,” the youngster shouted back.
Another boy, Paul Desjardine, aged fourteen, was also heading to the river to go fishing, and remembered seeing Steve “just circling on his bicycle” on the county road near the bush. At the time, nobody thought anything of these sightings. Steve’s actions appeared to be the aimless wanderings of a teenage boy on a lazy summer evening. But later, in the eyes of the police and the prosecution, Steven’s journeys to the bridge and near the bush would become proof of a murderer on the prowl, plotting his crime.
For the children of Clinton, it was just another ordinary evening in an ordinary summer. Butch George was mowing Mrs. McDougall’s lawn. Jocelyne Gaudet was washing the supper dishes. At the schoolyard, Bill MacKay, Stuart Westie and Warren Heatherall were throwing a baseball around. Down by the river, Richard Gellatly was thinking of biking home to change into his swimming trunks. Gord Logan was getting ready to fish, while Dougie Oates was busy hunting for turtles with Karen Daum. A ten-year-old named Philip Burns took his last dive in the river and was about to start his long hike home. Few of the children wore watches on their small wrists. None of them had any particular reason to remember specific events or exact times. “That night was nothing special,” Steve recalls. “Nothing spectacular was going on. People are swimming. People are riding up and down the road. Nobody really has any reason to pay particular attention.”
At 6:15 p.m., Lynne began making her way to the playground near the school. She ambled along Victoria and then onto Winnipeg Road, where she passed Genevieve Oates, on her lawn chatting with a neighbour. Lynne gave them a quick “Hello” and headed toward the end of the street. Oddly, instead of turning right and taking a direct path to the school playground, Lynne went through a small grove of trees and emerged on the other side where Winnipeg Road continued. Another resident who lived on the corner, Audrey Jackson, spotted her walking by her house.
Lynne did not arrive at the playground for twenty minutes, although it was a five-minute stroll from her house. The police and the prosecution, soon to be so meticulous in their timing of other children’s activities, never seemed curious to fill these fifteen minutes of unaccounted time in Lynne’s afternoon, a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. Jocelyne Gaudet, one of Lynne’s friends and classmates, lived two doors down from Mrs. Jackson, and left her house around the same time, but it is not known if—by chance or by planning—Lynne bumped into her that evening.
When Lynne arrived at the school grounds around 6:35, Anne Nickerson, thirty-two, the Brown Owl for the 3rd Clinton Brownie pack, had her hands full preparing a scavenger hunt for an eager group of young girls. Lynne leapt at the chance to play big sister.
“Can I stay?” she asked.
Nickerson gladly accepted the offer. Lynne helped her organize the girls, five to a team. As the young scavengers headed out, Nickerson and Lynne talked under a tree for twenty minutes. “She just stood beside me and we chatted away,” Nickerson later recounted. The girl seemed a little troubled. “She said she didn’t want to go home, her mother was cross with her,” Nickerson said, “but she seemed very joking about it.”
“It wasn’t too much longer until a young boy came by on his bike,” Nickerson said. That young boy was Steven Truscott. Steve was wearing scruffy brown shoes with rubber soles, red jeans and a white shirt with a few holes near the neck for laces. The laces were missing, though; the shirt was a hand-me-down from a neighbour. “He sailed by on his bike,” Dorothy Bohonus, another mother working with the Brownies, remembered. “And almost immediately Lynne went over and sat on the front wheel of his bike.”
By all accounts it was Lynne who approached Steven and did most of the talking. The two Brownie mothers could not hear what they said and they paid no more attention to them. It had been just four days since Lynne had eagerly tried to dance with Steve at the house party; just twenty-four hours since she had quarrelled with her friends about her affection for the star athlete. Now Lynne had a chance to speak directly to the boy.
“What are you doing, Steve?” Lynne began, according to Steve’s memory of their conversation.
“Well, I was going down to the river to see if any of the kids were there.”
“Can I have a ride down to the highway?” she asked.
“Well, I’m going that way anyhow,” came the simple reply.
An innocent moment, a fleeting exchange between two young people in a noisy school playground filled with Brownies and other excited children. “A tiny little moment that kind of changed everybody’s life,” Steven Truscott reflected forty years later.
Lynne and Steve set off for what was to become the most famous bike ride in Canadian legal history.
Their exact time of departure would be the subject of much dispute in the months and even in the years to come. The two adults supervising the Brownies, Nickerson and Bohonus, said they last saw Lynne and Steve sometime between 7:00 and 7:10. Only one of the women had a watch, and she had not looked at it for some time. Once they left the Brownie pack, Lynne and Steve still had to walk around the school to get onto the county road. At the far end of the building, the kindergarten classroom jutted out from the rest of the school. Steve says he glanced inside through the wide windows and caught sight of the clock on the wall. It was around 7:25 p.m., he remembers.
As Lynne and Steve circled the school, they passed several boys playing baseball. “Steve was pushing his bicycle and Lynne was walking up alongside him,” said Warren Heatherall, who thought it was “around seven o’clock,” but could not be sure. One of the other ballplayers, Stuart Westie, felt it was closer to 7:30, but also admitted he wasn’t certain. Two younger boys playing in the same area gave later time estimates. One thought it was “between 7:15 and 7:30.” The other put it at “about 7:25 p.m.”
Once on the pavement of the county road, Lynne hopped on the crossbar of Steve’s green racer. It was a slow but steady downhill ride north to the river and it did not take them much time to pick up speed. The wind swept across their faces, a refreshing relief from the day’s oppressive heat. Lynne was laughing and smiling, turning her head frequently to talk to Steve.
Steve would later tell police that Lynne told him she was upset her parents would not let her go swimming. She asked if he knew the person in a little white house not far from the highway, and said she might go down to see the ponies there.
On their right, they passed the golden fields of Lawson’s farm. To their left, they approached a small farmhouse owned by the O’Brien family. They had only biked a few hundred feet when they passed Richard Gellatly, a classmate, heading south back toward the base. “I was down at the creek and I wanted to go swimming. So I had to go home to get my trunks and ask my parents if I could go back,” Richard says. “That’s when I came across Steven and Lynne.” He put the time at about 7:25. It would have taken Richard only a couple of minutes to get to his house after seeing Steven, and his father later confirmed to police his son was home at about that time.
Steve and Lynne met Richard somewhere between the O’Brien farm and Lawson’s bush, which ran for about nine hundred feet along the highway. At the end of the bush, Steve and Lynne came to the small tractor trail. No more than three or four minutes had elapsed since they left the school. They had travelled about 3,300 feet, three-fifths of a mile.
What next happened—or did not happen—is the crux of the entire Steven Truscott case. The events and consequences of the next few seconds would impassion and arouse the emotions and opinions of citizens, journalists, Supreme Court justices, politicians and prime ministers for the next four decades.
In the minds of the police, the prosecution and, eventually, a jury, Steven at this point made a sharp right turn, off the county road, and took Lynne—willingly or unwillingly—into the bush. There, he raped and strangled her.
According to Steven and his supporters, the teenage boy never veered off the county road at all. Instead, he continued to ride with Lynne past the bush and down toward the bridge and the river.
It was one or the other. Guilt or innocence. A teenage murderer or a helpless boy trapped on death row. The choices were stark. The evidence, either way, was not so clear.
According to Steve, he continued to bike with Lynne well past Lawson’s bush, picking up speed as the road pitched down toward the river. After about fifteen hundred feet, they crossed the CNR tracks, and five hundred feet later they approached the small concrete bridge that spanned the Bayfield River.
The strongest support for Steve’s account came from an eleven-year-old boy standing on that bridge. Dougie Oates had only one thing on his mind that evening, as he did most evenings: turtles. “At that time in my life I was heavy into nature. I’d go out, catch turtles and bring them home as pets for a while,” he says. His memories are very precise, fixed in his mind because police questioned him within two days of the events. Dougie had left home around 6:00 p.m., but took his time getting to the river. He stopped for a few minutes along the road to observe two female cardinals. Once at the river, he watched as a friend snagged a turtle by the leg with his fishing line. Dougie then spotted a smaller turtle and went down under the bridge to grab it. He traded his small catch for the larger one. Pleased with his enterprise so far, the nature lover continued his hunt from the bridge when he caught sight of two people on a bike.
“To this day the one thing that still stands out for me is seeing both Steven and Lynne riding double across the bridge. They passed within feet of me. Couldn’t see one of them without the other,” he says now. “A boy and a girl riding double on a bike, you sat up and took notice.” The turtle hunter said “Hi” and waved to the teenagers. Lynne smiled at him; Steve kept pedalling toward the highway. “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind I saw both of them,” Doug says determinedly. “It’s etched in my memory.”
Dougie was not the only person who was certain he saw Steve and Lynne cross the bridge at that moment. The river was filled with children, most of them too busy horsing around to pay much attention to the traffic on the bridge. But one boy in the water did notice. Gord Logan, the boy who had asked Steve earlier at the school about his swimming plans, was at the swimming hole, about six hundred feet from the bridge. “I was standing by the river,” Gord would later tell police. “I think it must have been nearly 7:30 when I saw her and Steve. I am sure it was her. She was wearing shorts, I think.”
A third boy, Butch George, originally told police that as he swam in the river he also saw that “Steve and Lynne biked north.” But he later recanted that statement. Steve told the police that down at the bridge he saw his friend Butch in the river. “He waved to me and I waved back,” the police say Steven told them.
Once past the bridge, Steve says he rode Lynne along the final thirteen hundred feet to the highway and dropped her off at the intersection. Cars were whizzing by, going eastbound toward Seaforth and Stratford or westbound into Clinton and Goderich. A quick goodbye and the children separated. Lynne did not say anything more about where she was going. Steve turned back, heading south along the county road toward the river. Gord confirmed he saw Steve return to the bridge, this time alone, “about five minutes” after he first saw Steve cross the bridge with Lynne.
As Steve approached the bridge on his return trip, he was on the west side of the county road. He says he stopped and looked back to see if it was safe to cross the road to watch his friends in the swimming hole. As he glanced back, he says he saw what looked like a grey, 1959 Chevrolet car travelling eastbound on the highway. The car turned in slightly onto the county road, then traversed the road and stopped on the corner where Lynne was standing. The car was now parked on the county road, slightly at an angle, its rear bumper facing Steve.
He was fairly certain the car was a ′59 Chevrolet because he had a teenage boy’s fascination with cars. “That was the first year Chev changed the style of their car, and they had large fins going out like wings, and the tail lights looked like cat’s eyes. And there was no other car around like that.” (In fact, several models, such as the Ford ′58 Fairlane, the ′56 Victoria and the ′57 T-Bird, all had prominent rear fins, but the ′59 Chev was rather distinctive.)
Steve also caught a glimpse of something yellow or orange on the back bumper. The sun, slowly sinking in the western sky, was shining right on the fender and it could have been only a glare. “I couldn’t tell whether it was a licence plate or a sticker or whatever,” Steve says, another detail that would soon get hopelessly confused in the police records. (In 1959, Quebec plates had black numbers on a yellow background. Nova Scotia had light yellow plates; Manitoba had yellow on black. Nine American states—three of them on the border—had some kind of yellow on their plates.)
As he made his way over to the railing on the eastern side of the bridge, Steve thought nothing more about the car or Lynne. He saw several of his friends playing in the water, but he did not talk to anyone. Allan Oates, Dougie’s sixteen-year-old brother, claimed he spotted Steve standing alone on the bridge around 7:45 p.m. Allan had been home watching his favourite television news program, Panorama, until 7:00 p.m., then wandered around the base until he found himself near the railway tracks, about eight hundred feet away from the bridge. “I remember seeing Steven. I could recognize him,” Allan insists. “If you don’t recognize someone you go to school with from that distance, there’s something wrong with you.” Steve says he lingered at the river for five to ten minutes, before heading back to the air force base where babysitting duties awaited.
Two boys, Dougie Oates and Gord Logan saw Lynne and Steve cross the bridge; two boys, Gord and Dougie’s brother, Allan, saw Steve alone on the bridge a few minutes later. Over the next weeks and months, in various police grillings, courtroom testimonies and cross-examinations, the boys would never alter the details of what they saw. They would be called liars, conspirators or foolish lads with bad memories.
But they never budged.
If Gord Logan and Dougie and Allan Oates were certain they saw Steve and Lynne, or Steve alone, down by the bridge around 7:30 p.m., two other children would insist they had no luck finding Steve or Lynne that evening, despite their best efforts
to track them down. But unlike the consistent and clear accounts by the Oates brothers and Gord Logan, the stories by Butch George and Jocelyne Gaudet were confusing, conflicting and constantly changing.
After he finished mowing the neighbour’s lawn around 6:30, Butch George says he rode his bike to Steve’s house. “Is Steve home?” he yelled from the front yard, and someone—he says he thinks it was Steve’s mother—answered back, “He isn’t home.”
Butch rode his bike down the county road toward the river and by the time he reached Lawson’s bush, he saw a young boy named Philip Burns walking up toward the air force base. “He got off his bike as he came up to me and asked me if I saw Steve or Lynne,” Philip later recalled. “I said I never saw them.” Philip, ten, did tell Butch that he’d just met Jocelyne Gaudet near the laneway into the bush. She had also asked him, Philip later told police, “if I saw Steve and Lynne, but I hadn’t.”
Butch soon caught up with Jocelyne just as she was coming out of the laneway. Jocelyne claimed she had walked about two hundred feet down the tractor trail—very close to where Lynne’s body was eventually found—looking for Steve. She had a date with the boy to go looking for calves in the bush, she later told police. “I didn’t tell anyone about this plan to meet because Steven told me not to tell anyone,” she said.
Jocelyne and Butch agreed they met near the laneway, but they agreed on little else. In Butch’s version, their brief exchange went like this:
“Have you seen Steven?” he asked her.
“No,” Jocelyne said. “Have you seen Lynne?”
“No,” Butch replied. “If I see Lynne I’ll tell you.”
“Okay,” said the girl.
According to Jocelyne, she was the one who asked Butch if he had seen Steven, not Lynne, and Butch said no. “I … told him if he saw Steven to give me a whistle.” By Jocelyne’s account, her encounter with Butch took place shortly after 6:30; by Butch’s account, it was well after 7:00. Both of them said they then proceeded—separately—down to the river. Butch says when he was by a rock pile at the river, he saw Jocelyne near the bridge, and she asked him again if he had seen Lynne and he said no. Jocelyne says that she saw Butch at the river, but did not talk with him; she only asked another boy about the fishing. Jocelyne said she was only at the bridge “for about ten minutes” before heading back toward the base—no one besides Butch would ever corroborate her claim to be at the bridge that night.