by Julian Sher
“I didn’t,” Steve shot back.
“Arnold said you did,” Paul told Steve.
Steve leaned over the bridge railing to Butch, standing below on the riverbank. “Did you say I took Lynne Harper in the woods?” he asked his friend.
“No,” answered Butch (a lie, since he was the one who started the bush story at the Custard Cup the night before).
The police would later make much of what happened next, but the evidence from the boys is confused. Two issues were in dispute: if Steve talked about going into the woods to look for calves, and if Steve ever threatened Butch.
Two of the boys—Bryan and Tom—later reported that Steve said he thought he heard a calf in the woods while riding with Lynne and went to see if he could find it. Paul heard the same story but thought Steve might have heard the calf at another time since Steve “didn’t say when he was looking.” Butch, for his part, insisted it was he—not Steve—who brought up the calf story: “You had her at the side of the bush looking for the cow and the calf,” Butch told Steve. It was a patchwork of snippets of conversations and memories. But the police saw in the calf story an attempt by a teenage murderer to dissemble and lie.
Only one of boys, Tom Gillette, claimed Steve “sounded as if he was threatening Butch” when he insisted he had not gone into the bush with Lynne. None of the other boys—including Butch, the supposed target of this threat—remarked on anything menacing in Steve’s tone or actions. Still, the police chose to believe Tom’s interpretation of Steve’s “threatening manner” as proof of a guilty conscience.
A simpler interpretation was that the whole conversation was just teenage boys having fun. “It was more or less a joke” is how Steve remembers that evening. “Young kids saying, ‘I saw you with a girl.’ But what started off to be a joke all of a sudden when the police got hold of it, then it was no longer a joke. Then it was no longer teasing.”
Bryan Glover agrees. “We were joking, teasing him. It wasn’t as if someone was really trying to find out what had happened or accusing him of anything.”
Steve’s encounters with the police were not over for that day. Around 8:00 p.m., Sgt. Charles Anderson, the senior officer at the Goderich OPP detachment, dropped by the Truscott home. He asked Doris if Steve could show him the route he had biked on Tuesday night. Steve’s mother agreed.
Steve took the officer to the school and showed him the path he had taken with Lynne to the county road. Steve added more details about his conversation with Lynne during their bike ride. He told the officer Lynne had asked if he knew the man who lived in the white house with the ponies. She also asked Steve where he went fishing. Anderson asked Steve if he did not think it peculiar that a young girl would be hitchhiking. Steven replied, accurately, that many children thumbed rides.
Anderson asked Steven if he should have told Lynne’s parents.
“I didn’t think much about it at the time,” Steve answered, “but now I think I should have told them.”
Was he ever on a date with Lynne, Anderson asked.
“No,” Steve replied.
Ever given her a ride on his bike before? “No.”
Anderson gave the boy a lift back home and Steve went to bed.
There was little rest, though, for the police or the Harper family. It had been twenty-four hours since anyone had reported seeing Lynne alive. That evening, the air force police organized several small search parties. They looked in abandoned homes in the region and in various swimming areas. Several OPP officers joined the RCAF men to check either side of the county road near the bridge up to the Number 8 Highway.
Nothing. No sign of the little girl.
As classes started on Thursday morning at RCAF Station Clinton, Steve faced his fifth police interview in the space of twenty-four hours. OPP Constable Hobbs, the first officer to question Steven on Wednesday morning, came to the school, this time accompanied by Sgt. John Wheelhouse of the air force police. For the normally even-keeled boy, it was unsettling. “It’s something that you can’t even imagine,” Steve says now of the repeated questioning. “All of a sudden a cop pulls you out of your classroom in school. ‘Where were you? What did you do? This one said you did this. You were here?’ It’s mind-boggling.”
The officers set up shop in the teachers’ room at the school as the principal, Clarence Trott, dutifully shepherded in one student after another. Trott stayed in the room as the police questioned his young pupils.
“I started off asking Steven if there was anything more he had to tell me regarding Lynne Harper,” Hobbs later reported.
“One thing,” the boy answered, according to Hobbs. “She had a gold chain necklace. It was a heart with the RCAF crest on it.” It was the first time anyone had mentioned Lynne’s locket—a piece of jewellery that would assume more importance as the summer wore on.
“While you were cycling down the road, did you see anyone else?” the OPP officer asked.
Steve said he passed Richard Gellatly on the road and then at the river he spotted Butch George and waved to him. This was the first time, according to police records, that Steve told the police he saw his friend Butch. He made this statement only on Thursday morning—not, as Butch had implied, the day before.
Steve also told police that when he was near the bridge, an old grey Plymouth or Dodge had passed right by him on the county road—not the same car he had seen from a distance at the highway.
“Can you remember the people in the car, Steven?” Hobbs asked.
“There was a man and a lady in it.” Steve added that he remembered the licence plate number: 981-666.
Hobbs then asked him to identify “any of the children he saw playing down there,” presumably meaning the river, although in his account Wheelhouse remembers a vaguer question about “children he had seen in the area.”
Steve rattled off some names: Doug Oates, Darrell Gilks, Allan Durnin’s brother Gerry and Gord Logan.
“Did you see anyone else during that period?” one of the officers asked.
“Yes, I saw Stuart Westie and Warren Heatherall,” Steve said, accurately identifying the young baseball players at the school.
“Approximately what time was it, Steven, when you left with Lynne?” the officers asked.
“Seven o’clock or shortly after” was the answer they recorded, although the day before, the police said Steven told them his departure was closer to 7:25 p.m.
How long did it take to get down to the river?
“About ten minutes.” (This timing was later matched in tests done by police.)
How long did it take to get from the bridge to the highway?
“A further ten minutes,” Steve answered according to the police notes. If that was his reply, it was either a poor estimate or a bad lie; the highway was only a few minutes away from the bridge.
How long to get back from the highway to the bridge?
“About five minutes.” Police did not apparently ask Steven why it would take him half the time to return to the bridge.
Still, the officers seemed satisfied with the boy’s demeanour and forthrightness. Wheelhouse later said Steven was open and intelligent: “He gave me the impression he wanted to be helpful and showed no signs of nervousness,” Wheelhouse remarked. The principal, as well, noted that Steven was co-operative: “He gave his story the same as the other children did.”
Constable Hobbs questioned several other children that day. His brief notes of the encounters are important because they are the first recorded accounts by any other witnesses of what occurred that Tuesday evening. Presumably, they reflect the students’ best memories of the events that took place.
The most intriguing testimony came from Gord Logan, the twelve-year-old fishing at the swimming hole. He told Constable Hobbs he “saw both [Lynne and Steve] on a cycle going toward the highway and Truscott return and linger at the bridge.” If true, it was an eyewitness account of great significance, for if Steve crossed the river with Lynne then clearly he was not in th
e bush murdering her.
But Gord’s eyewitness account, corroborating Steven’s story, was significant not only because of what he said, but when he said it. It was still only Thursday morning; searchers had not yet stumbled upon Lynne’s body in the bush. As his mother, Frances Logan, later pointed out: “This was before the body was found, and that is why I have always thought for sure that there would not be much point in him making up a story or lying, when at the time no one knew there was anything so terribly wrong.”
Later, when Gord’s statement became central to Steve’s defence, the prosecution would try to suggest he made up his story to protect Steven, conveniently forgetting Gord first made his statement before such a conspiracy was necessary.
Two other students also said they had seen Steve and Lynne that evening. Richard Gellatly informed the police he passed them on his bike near the school about 7:30, roughly the same time he would stick to in all his statements, but a time which the police and later the prosecution would find quite inconvenient for their case against Steve.
Even more inconvenient was what Butch George told Hobbs on Thursday morning. He said that when he was down at the river “he saw Lynne and Steven on the cycle going toward the highway.” Butch’s first statement to the police was one he was going to have to retract once he became a star witness for the prosecution.
As the children’s concern for their missing classmate grew, the teasing directed at Steven increased. By now, many of the students had heard of Butch’s tale that Steve had taken Lynne into the bush. At recess, tempers snapped.
In the boys’ washroom, Allan Durnin told Steve he did not believe he had given Lynne a ride to the highway. Not because he thought Steve was a liar. Like the boys at the Custard Cup who had first heard Butch’s tale on Tuesday evening, Allan did not believe a school sports hero like Steve would be caught giving a lift to a simple girl like Lynne. “He didn’t like her that much to do her any favours,” he recalls thinking.
According to three witnesses, Steve did not take kindly to the taunts. “He grabbed me and pushed me up against the wall in the washroom, and his face got all red,” Allan recounted. George Archibald told the story with more dramatic flourish. “I saw Steve going right in after Allan, as if he were chasing him, and mad.” In George’s version, a teacher arrived just in time before anything serious happened. Allan’s account was less exciting: “I didn’t say anything else and I walked out of the washroom.”
For those who would later believe in Steve’s guilt, these incidents were proof of a killer’s rage. On the other hand, they could simply reflect the typical embarrassment and anger of a teenager at being teased. “I was just basically kidding with him,” Allan had always insisted.
By the end of school that Thursday, the time for kidding was over. The searchers had found the body of Lynne Harper. And an OPP inspector arrived in Clinton and moved with breathtaking speed to arrest the boy he was convinced was her murderer.
6
THE INSPECTOR ARRIVES
Lynne’s body was discovered on the very same day the provincial Progressive Conservatives were elected back into power. It was not a government that would tolerate any blow to Tory Ontario’s image of order and decency, and the OPP knew they would be expected to act fast. They called in Harold Graham to crack the case.
Graham, like his fellow homicide inspectors, worked out of the Criminal Investigations Branch (CIB). He was a tall, heavy-set man of imposing stature with an equally imposing record. He started as a lowly constable in London and then in Sarnia, but in 1949, after solving several major crimes and murders, Graham, at thirty-three, became the youngest inspector with the CIB at Toronto headquarters. He was a fast-rising star in the police ranks, and the celebrity he would gain on the Truscott case would help propel him all the way to the top. By 1973, the man who jailed Steven Truscott as Lynne Harper’s murderer would become commissioner of the provincial police, Ontario’s top cop.
“He was a very smart investigator,” says Dennis Alsop, who worked under Graham as a corporal in the latter part of the Clinton murder. Graham earned the undying respect of Alsop and the other men on the force for being the stereotype of the cop’s cop: gruff and determined. “He worked hard, there’s no two ways about it,” recalls Hank Sayeau, who did most of the work on Truscott case alongside Graham. “He knew what he wanted; he knew the ingredients to make a case and he worked accordingly.”
Graham’s superiors praised him as an “outstanding investigator” who had cracked dozens of murder cases. He had the slow, steady patience that is the hallmark of good police work. In 1952, Graham confronted what he called his “most brutal case.” When Arthur Kendall’s wife disappeared that year near Stratford, police found some of the woman’s clothes but had little else to go on and no testimony from the woman’s children. Kendall claimed his wife ran away. Graham persevered for nine years, waiting until Kendall’s frightened children were old enough to come forward with accounts of seeing their father stab their mother to death. At the time, it was one of only three cases in Canadian legal history where authorities secured a murder conviction without ever producing the body of the victim.
When Graham started on the force, stricter rules regarding confessions came into effect. Some of his colleagues complained, but not Graham. “It was not a great problem,” he later told a newspaper. “We still got confessions and statements.” As events in Clinton would soon show, the no-nonsense investigator from the CIB was determined to get those statements. And instead of waiting nine years to solve this crime, he would wrap up the Harper murder mystery in less than twenty-four hours.
Harold Graham arrived in Clinton on Thursday, June 11, at 7:45 p.m. He immediately conferred with the policemen who had been handling the case so far: Corporal Sayeau, Constable Trumbley and Sgt. Charles Anderson.
“Steven Truscott was not a strong suspect originally because of the conflicting stories we had obtained in our early attempts to find Lynne Harper,” Graham said later. “A heinous crime was uncovered in the bush that day near Clinton, Ontario. It was not the type of crime an investigator would automatically attribute to a fourteen-year-old boy. But whether the person is fourteen or forty-nine, the investigator has the right and in fact the responsibility to talk to anyone who he feels may be able to assist him in determining the truth.”
Sometime during that evening of June 11, the OPP issued a General Information Broadcast to alert police across the province about Lynne’s assailant. The only copy of that bulletin in the police files is in Graham’s handwriting:
Re: Lynne Harper—raped and strangled body found in bush near RCAF Station Clinton—believed to have taken place about 9:00 p.m., Tues. June 10. One witness reports Lynne was given a ride in solid grey or white ′59 Chev with yellow plates on Highway 8, going east toward Seaforth. Only the driver in the car.… At your discretion please check white cars with yellow plates and observe occupants especially for scratches on face, neck, hands and arms.
This document, which remained hidden in police files for four decades until it was unearthed in the late 1990s, was a revealing snapshot of how Graham and the police initially saw Lynne’s murder. It was the first bulletin the police issued after discovering the body, their first attempt to enlist province-wide support to capture Lynne’s killer, so it presumably summarized their best, most accurate intelligence as of late Thursday evening. The police statement contained three noteworthy curiosities.
The first was the generic description of the car, a 1959 Chevrolet, and not specifically a Bel Air, the model that the police would later maintain Steve had narrowed down. The colour was also appropriately vague: “grey or white.” Only the “yellow plates” were precise; Steve’s sighting of some sort of a yellow or orange marker on the rear of the car had now been fixed in the police’s minds as plates. Provincial police immediately began stopping similar vehicles. “Deluged with calls from citizens telling of cars answering the description of the one seen by the Truscott boy, London provinci
al police checked out thirty vehicles,” the London Free Press reported. “All were allowed to proceed.”
The second curious reference in Graham’s bulletin was the police’s apparent belief that Lynne’s killer had scratches on his “face, neck, hands and arms.” They passed these suspicions on to the media: “Face of Killer Scratched,” ran the headline on June 12 in the Globe and Mail. “Police found evidence of a violent struggle between the schoolgirl and her attacker,” another Toronto paper reported. The London Free Press added: “Police said the lone occupant in the car might have scratches on his face, neck, arms and hands, indicating the young victim put up a struggle.”
Were the police simply assuming a desperate Lynne had scratched her assailant? Or, considering this official description was their first serious attempt to find her killer, was the reference to scratches based on something more tangible? After all, the police had spent hours next to her body in the woods and later attended the autopsy. The pathologist took fingernail scrapings. As it happened, the emphasis on scratches to the killer’s face and neck would suddenly disappear once police arrested an unblemished fourteen-year-old.
The third baffling item in Graham’s bulletin was the most important: the time of death he selected. Time of death is a vital clue in the early stages of a murder investigation because it helps police narrow the hunt for potential suspects. Graham was explicit that Lynne’s murder was “believed to have taken place around 9:00 p.m., Tues. June 10.”
Graham must have got his dates confused because Tuesday was the 9th of June, not the 10th. But selecting 9:00 p.m. as a possible time of death was going to create a big problem for the inspector. His chief suspect—the boy he was soon to arrest—was safe at home babysitting at the time when, according to Graham’s bulletin, Lynne’s assailant was murdering her. Once Graham jailed Steven, no further references to that 9:00 p.m. time of death were made.