by Julian Sher
“And so it was the end of anything that could’ve been called childhood,” Kevin recalls. “The adults had gone mad, wild in fear and deception; the children, wrenched from their innocence. A horror show beyond belief.”
5
THE QUESTIONS BEGIN
From their upstairs window, Lynne’s parents could gaze eastward as the sun rose over the crop fields of Lawson’s farm across the county road. The old barn caught the early rays; in the distance the cows were out in the pasture. Farther to the north, down toward the river, they could see the deep, thick bushes where their daughter’s body would soon be discovered.
It did not take long on Wednesday, June 10, for the blazing sun to burn off the morning dew from the neatly trimmed lawns at RCAF Station Clinton. Alarm clocks clamoured, coffee pots simmered and the mercury in the thermometers inched steadily upward; it would not stop until it hit ninety degrees. In homes across the PMQs, youngsters were getting their morning fix of Captain Kangaroo. As the older children stumbled out of bed, they realized with relief and excitement that today they only had to sit through half a day of classes—school would end at noon because of a local fair. It had all the makings of a beautiful summer day.
But at the Harper home, there was a growing sense of dread. There was still no sign of their little girl. At 7:30 a.m., Leslie Harper went to see the father of Gary Hoyer, one of Lynne’s friends. Harper learned that it was possible one of the Truscott boys had seen his daughter, so he headed to their home. On the way, he bumped into Steve’s father.
“Lynne has been missing all night and I have been asking children if they saw her,” he said, according to Dan Truscott. “Do you mind if I go and ask your boys if they saw Lynne last night?”
“Go right ahead,” Dan replied.
On the second floor of their small house, the Truscott children were scrambling to get ready for school. “Change your clothes because I’m going to wash,” Doris Truscott told her clan. She laid out fresh clothes for her two youngest, Barbara and Bill. Steve gave her the dirty red jeans he had worn the day before and put on a clean pair. In the kitchen, Doris made toast for the children; they would get their own cereal. But before Steven could sit down to eat, there was someone at the door.
Lynne’s father stood outside the side door and heard footsteps on a flight of stairs. When the door opened, Mrs. Truscott was standing in the entranceway. Ken was on the basement stairs shining his shoes; Steve was in the kitchen looking down into the stairwell.
“I was wondering if your boys had seen Lynne?” Harper asked.
“Lynne who?” Doris asked. The Harpers were an officer’s family and she did not know them or their children very well.
“Lynne Harper,” said her father. Doris turned to Ken and asked him.
“No,” he said. Doris looked up inquiringly at her younger son.
“Yes,” said Steve, “I took her to the corner on my bicycle and she hitched a ride on Number 8 Highway.”
“Come here, down to the step,” his mother said, so Steve could be closer to the visitor in the doorway.
“Are you sure, Steven?” asked the worried father.
“Yes.”
“‘Oh my God!’” Doris Truscott remembers Lynne’s father exclaiming. The information seemed to confirm his fear that his impetuous daughter had taken flight to her grandmother’s house. For the moment, it was the only explanation the Harpers had for Lynne’s sudden disappearance. Her older brother, Barry, told a friend that morning his sister “had taken off.” She was angry, he said, and might have tried to hitchhike to visit her grandparents.
For the military and police authorities, there was still no need to panic. An official air force log for that day records that “a search was not deemed necessary at that particular time,” in part because the majority of the air force personnel “were busy on other important matters and were not available for a search.” At the OPP station in Goderich, Lynne’s absence was filed under the dry police title of “General Occurrence #250-59.” Constable Donald Hobbs read about the missing girl when he reported for duty that morning at eight and drove out to the air base to see if there was any news. A worried Leslie Harper told Hobbs “that his daughter was of a jealous and high-strung nature,” according to the officer’s report. Harper gave the constable a description of Lynne and informed him that he had learned that a young boy on the base gave his girl a ride to the highway the night before. “I then decided I would have a chat with Steven Truscott,” Hobbs said.
With laughter and yells and the usual pushing and shoving, the children made their way into Maitland Edgar’s classroom. Once inside, they quickly noticed something strange: there was one empty chair in the front row. Lynne Harper was not at school. It did not take long for everyone to start whispering about the rumours that their classmate had run away from home the night before.
Initially, the school day began the way it always did: a few announcements over the intercom, the Lord’s Prayer and “God Save the Queen.” But at 9:15, the quiet routine at A.V.M. Hugh Campbell School was disrupted by the appearance of a vehicle the children rarely saw on the school grounds—a police cruiser. On their way to the school, Constable Hobbs, accompanied by Flight Sgt. Frank Johnson of the RCAF police, had picked up Steve’s father at his office on the base. Dan Truscott went in to get his son. “I had Steven come out and he sat in the front seat of the cruiser,” Hobbs later recalled.
According to Constable Hobbs, the following conversation took place:
“Steven, do you know that Lynne Harper is missing?”
“Yes.”
“Did you give Lynne a ride on a motorcycle?” the officer asked.
“I gave her a ride on a bicycle, not a motorcycle,” the boy said.
“Where did you pick Lynne up?”
“Outside the school.”
“What time was it?”
According to Hobbs, Steve answered, “Between 7:00 and 7:30,” (although Johnson remembered Steve saying “at about 7:25 and 7:30.”)
“Did she say anything to you?”
“She said she knew the people in the little white house along the highway—said she might go down to see the ponies. She said she had to be home by 8:00 or 8:30.”
“Where did you drop her off?”
“I took her to the highway and dropped her off, and then I returned to the bridge over the river.”
“Did you see Lynne again?”
Yes, he did, Steve answered. It is worth quoting the constable’s later testimony at length because it is the first official police recording of Steven’s story:
“I asked him if he saw Lynne again and he said he looked back and saw her get into a car. He believed it to be a late model Chev. He mentioned a lot of chrome and it could have been a Bel Air version. He said the car appeared to have a yellow licence. He said, ‘There was no one in the rear; I am not sure how many were in the front.’ At that, our conversation ended.”
It was the morning right after Lynne’s disappearance and presumably Steven’s memory of the events of the previous evening was the freshest it would ever be. His recollection was peppered with “believed” and “could have” and “appeared”—a far cry from the definitive descriptions that the police and prosecution would later try to attribute to him. It would be the first of seven interviews with police over the next seventy-two hours—and every time, Steve told virtually the identical story.
Looking back at his first encounters with the police, Steven Truscott marvels at how quickly a child’s casual comments became fixed and rigid in the eyes of the police. “You tell the police, ‘I think this, I think that’ … I did not know the difference between a Bel Air and the other Chevs. To me, a Chev was a Chev. But if you look at the [police] records, it eventually says a Chev Bel Air.”
The police radio in the car crackled as Hobbs received an urgent message about another case. His short interview with the boy was over and Steve returned to his curious classmates. Meanwhile, the air force police officer
Frank Johnson decided to check out the little white house Steve had mentioned. Not far east along the highway from the corner where Steve said he had left Lynne, Johnson came upon a small shack on the left-hand side of the road. Edgar Hodges, seventy-one, lived alone, doing odd farm jobs from time to time. He kept two Shetland ponies and sometimes children would drop by to pat them. Hodges told the police officer he knew Lynne because she had visited “on previous occasions,” he said, but he had not seen the girl on Tuesday night.
By recess time, the school was abuzz with excitement over Lynne’s disappearance. “We were just kind of puzzled,” remembers Mike Fisher. “Not really afraid for her or anything, just figuring she was in a bunch of trouble for falling asleep somewhere. She’d turn up soon.”
Steve’s friends were intrigued by his talk with the police officers. “We knew he was the last one to see Lynne Harper, so there were quite a few asking him all about it,” said Tom Gillette. A group of children gathered around Steve, but Gillette could not hear what they were saying. As the bell rang, Tom and Steve walked into the school alone. “I turned around and he was beside me,” Gillette would later testify. “He said he heard a calf in the woods and he went in to investigate.” It seemed a curious detour into the bush for a boy who had insisted he gave a girl a ride straight to the highway. It would not be last time that day someone quoted Steve talking about calves in Lawson’s bush.
At lunchtime, as the children left the school for the day, George Archibald said he overheard Steve talking to Butch near the horseshoe pits. Archibald readily admits he was about fifteen feet away from the two boys and only heard snatches of the conversation. To the best of his recollection, this is what was said:
“What were you doing in the woods with Lynne?” Butch asked.
“I wasn’t in the woods with Lynne, was I?” Steve answered.
“No, I guess it was somebody else,” Butch said.
“No, I wasn’t. I was chasing a cow, wasn’t I, Butch?” Steve continued.
“Yes,” said his friend.
An even stranger conversation that afternoon, involving another member of the George family, was reported to police. Mike George was a fifteen-year-old relative of Butch’s who lived with the Georges in their house on Edmonton Road. Karen Daum remembers Butch and Mike would frequently get into scraps and wrestling matches on the front lawn.
“Did you know that Lynne was raped?” Mike George said, according to Joyce Harrington, one of the mothers on the base. The account appears in a brief police note.
If true, it was an eerie remark. Most people still thought Lynne was only an adventurous hitchhiker. Butch had been spreading tales of seeing Steve go into the bush with Lynne, but never suggested any sort of foul play. How would Mike George know the presumed runaway had been raped?
Oddly, police records give no indication they followed up on that disturbing lead. The files show no statements from or interviews with Mike George or Joyce Harrington. Instead, the OPP seemed much more interested in questioning Steven. When Steve went home for a quick lunch, he faced his second police interview in three hours. This time there was a new man on the scene, Const. Donald Trumbley, a methodical officer who would do a lot of the legwork for the OPP on the case. Again sitting in the front seat of a cruiser, Steve repeated his story. According to Trumbley’s notes, Steve insisted the car he saw at the corner was a ′59 Chevrolet. This time, Steve provided more details: he said it had whitewalled tires with “a lot of chrome and with yellow markers.” Trumbley asked the boy how he could tell what make of car it was. “By the shape of the rear of the car,” he said. He described how the car pulled onto the county road from the highway, onto the shoulder, then crossed the road and parked on the right side, with its rear fender facing the bridge. The police officer recorded that Steve referred to seeing “something” yellow at the rear of the car.
With these details in hand, the officers left to continue the hunt for the missing girl. As far as the police were concerned, Lynne Harper was still a runaway. Constable Hobbs took a picture of Lynne to the nearest television station in Wingham and later sent a photo to the larger TV outlet in London.
At 4:00 p.m. Constable Trumbley drove to the bridge over the Bayfield River where Steve told him he had seen Lynne and the car. “I observed traffic proceeding up and down Number 8 Highway. I couldn’t distinguish any licence numbers,” the officer later said. The police would later say this was when they began to have their first doubts about Steve’s story. But Steve had said nothing about reading any specific licence numbers on a car. He had simply told police he saw something yellow on the back of the car, possibly a licence plate. Steve also said he was looking at a car parked on the edge of the county road, not at vehicles speeding along the highway.
Trumbley went back to Steve’s house, but the boy was not home. That afternoon Steve and his friends had gone to another of the children’s favourite swimming holes, the gravel pits near Holmesville, between Clinton and Goderich. Stripped down to their waists in shorts or bathing suits, the boys horsed around and hopped in and out of the water under the scorching sun. No one noticed any scratches, scars or anything else unusual about their friend Steve.
By 5:00 p.m., when Constable Trumbley returned to the Truscott home, he had more luck. He found Steve there with his mother and convinced them both to accompany him down to the bridge. “I asked Steven where he was standing when he observed the car picking up Lynne Harper, and he walked over to a point ten feet south of the north end of the bridge,” Trumbley later recounted. “I observed traffic going up and down Number 8 Highway. I still couldn’t observe any licence numbers.” It was, as before, a perplexing comment because no one—certainly not Steve, according to the police records—had talked about spotting digits on a plate. As he walked back to the car with Steve and another officer, Trumbley says he repeated the same comment about licence numbers. Doris Truscott, who had remained in the police cruiser, said: “Maybe it wasn’t a yellow licence marker Steven had seen at all. Maybe it was a sticker like we have on our car.” The Truscotts, like many families, had a tourist sticker from one of the local attractions on their rear fender.
According to police notes, Steve said nothing at all.
His mother was beginning to worry about the police’s interest in Steve. “He was just trying to be as helpful as he could,” Doris thought. “Why were they questioning him so much?”
By the time the sun was beginning to cast long shadows on the playgrounds and lawns of the air force community, even the youngest children were gossiping about Steve’s role in Lynne’s mysterious disappearance. Some families were already beginning to form their suspicions. “We knew that she’d last been seen at the school the evening before, riding off with Steven, and that he said she got into a car at the highway,” remembers then-nine-year-old Mike Fisher. “We figured he was probably in a lot of trouble for giving her that ride; he should have known she wasn’t supposed to go down there by herself.… She wanted to go to the pony place—so why did he let her off at the corner instead of taking her all the way? And how was she supposed to get home? And what’s she doing getting into a strange car? I guess maybe it was by the end of that day that I started to think something about his story didn’t make sense.”
Around suppertime that Wednesday, Butch George claims he dropped by his friend Steve’s house. Steve denies that the visit, much less the ensuing conversation, took place. Butch, for his part, was very precise about the details—he just kept changing them. He would later testify at a preliminary hearing the encounter occurred at “about five o’clock.” Five o’clock hardly seemed like a propitious moment for two teen plotters to meet, since the police called on Steven around the same time. At the trial, Butch moved the conspiratorial meeting to a more convenient time of 6:00 p.m.
According to Butch, Steve explained that he had mistakenly told the police he had seen Butch by the river on Tuesday night. In fact, Steve now realized it was Gord Logan he had spotted in the water.
/> “The police would probably come down and question you. Did you see me?” Steve allegedly asked.
“No,” Butch supposedly answered. “I might as well tell them that I saw you,” he added, casually offering to lie to the police.
If true—and the police would certainly believe it to be—it was a damning story. At best, the story indicated that Steve had innocently mistaken a friend at the river and knew Butch was going to mislead the police. At worst, a murderer was plotting with a pal to create an alibi.
But there was a major flaw in Butch’s story. His tale about the hatching of a conspiracy on Wednesday was implausible because—even if the police assumed Steve was the murderer—Steve would not yet have needed anyone to lie for him. The police questioned Steve four times on Wednesday. According to their official records and later testimony, at no point did they ever ask him about any friends he spotted down by the river. In other words, Steve had not yet mentioned Butch or anyone else to the police at all. There was no need to—Lynne was still a runaway girl and Steve was not yet a suspect in any foul play. Apparently, Butch had invented an unnecessary conspiracy.
Whatever Butch imagined, what was undeniably real was the impact of the story he had been spreading since Tuesday about Steve taking Lynne into the bush. The teasing reached a peak Wednesday evening when three other boys—Bryan Glover, Tom Gillette and Paul Desjardine—joined Steve at the bridge. Butch was underneath the bridge, throwing rocks. Even after an afternoon at the gravel pits, the boys were ready for some more fun. Butch dared the boys to try to bicycle across the river. Steve and Paul took him up on the challenge and pedalled through the water. There was much splashing and laughing and joking. Over the next few months, the boys gave varying—and at times contradictory—accounts of what was said on the bridge that night. But there was general agreement the banter began when Paul asked Steve if he had taken Lynne into the woods.