by Julian Sher
Like the problematic scratches on the killer’s face and arms, any reference to the 9:00 p.m. time of death vanished from the police case history once they arrested Steve. And at trial, the Crown made sure the defence and the jurors never saw Graham’s General Information Broadcast.
Graham would later claim that the police got an accurate fix on Lynne’s time of death when doctors performed an autopsy Thursday evening. In fact, the autopsy created more mysteries than it solved.
The room in the Ball and Mutch funeral home in Clinton was hardly ideal for a procedure of such importance. It was small and cramped, measuring only thirteen by eight feet. “Facilities for laying out instruments and equipment for collecting specimens were inadequate,” pathologist John Penistan later admitted. “Light, from an overhead bulb, was inadequate and was supplemented by a standard lamp which was brought in on request.”
Indeed, Penistan would have preferred to have the body transferred to his well-equipped autopsy room in Stratford, but there were concerns over the cost of transport, and the police were eager to get the results. “It seemed desirable to proceed as soon as possible in order to provide guidance for the police on the time of death,” Penistan recounted.
The pathologist from Stratford had a commanding, some would say cocky, confidence that he could get the job done. “He knew it all. Whatever he said was gospel,” said one police officer who admired the doctor, even if he found him to be arrogant. “You didn’t argue with him. If he said it was so, it was so.” By his side to assist him stood the air force base’s chief medical officer, Dr. David Hall Brooks, another medical man no one ever accused of underestimating his own talents. (He signed his police statements with six different abbreviations for various degrees.) The men began their work at 7:30 p.m. and finished in just over two hours. More than anything else, what they would have to say helped convict Steven Truscott.
In his official autopsy report, Penistan was blunt and concise about the cause of death: “strangulation by ligature.” Lynne’s murderer strangled her with her own blouse; her thyroid cartilage was fractured at its base.
There were no other serious wounds on her body. Penistan found “no evident fracture” of her skull, spine or major bones; her scalp showed “no evident injury.” There was a non-fatal “ragged laceration” of unexplained origin on the back of the left shoulder, the wound that created the small pool of blood found under her body in the bush.
Lynne’s arms and feet were covered with “scratch marks” of various lengths, many of which Penistan would later attribute to her assailant carrying her body over a barbed wire fence. There were scratches around her ankles, calves and thighs; more marks on the upper part of her left and right forearm and the back of her right hand; and a circular lesion on her right elbow. On her left leg, Penistan noted a long scratch starting from the front of the thigh a few inches above the kneecap, running down the front of the lower leg to the top of her foot; there was dried blood on the scratch, suggesting to Penistan it occurred before death.
The position of Lynne’s body in the bush and the fact that she was nearly naked certainly suggested some form of sexual assault, but what was the extent of the attack? Dr. Penistan called it a “blind, violent” rape; Dr. Brooks would later horrify jurors with his description of a “grossly bruised” genital area. Yet for a murder where rape presumably played such a central role, the autopsy details were sparse and confusing.
“Vagina, hymen destroyed,” Penistan began, not specifying if decomposition or rape could have accounted for the absence of the hymen, or, indeed, if it was present before the attack took place. Penistan reported the “lower vagina contused.” Contusion, commonly known as bruising, is defined medically as an injury without tearing of the skin and therefore no obvious bleeding. Penistan also noted “abrasion of the right labium majus posteriorly,” or a scraping of the surface layer of cells or tissue from the rounded fold of the outer right side of her vaginal opening. Normally, abrasions cause oozing and perhaps minor bleeding. But in a later section of his report, Penistan revealed that the section of the lower vaginal wall he examined under the microscope “shows intense congestion of blood vessels, but no actual hemorrhage.” In other words, no bleeding. It was a contradiction Penistan would have to resolve before the trial.
Try as he could, Penistan could find no traces of semen. “No spermatozoa could be identified with certainty despite careful search,” he wrote. The best he could come up with was “a considerable number of ill-defined, diffusely stained bodies” that were “comparable” in size and shape with degenerating sperm heads. Penistan did find what he called “large amounts” of acid phosphatase, “a constituent of semen and not naturally found in the female.” That was the common medical belief in the 1950s; nowadays, doctors accept that women do naturally produce small levels of acid phosphatase. Still, high amounts were, in Penistan’s words, “very strong presumptive evidence of the presence of sperm in the vagina.”
For a “blind, violent” rape, Penistan’s autopsy produced disappointingly vague evidence.
“Stomach unremarkable.”
Those two words opened what would become the most controversial part of Penistan’s autopsy. Penistan’s analysis of the contents of Lynne’s stomach was the centrepiece for his exact determination of the time of her death, and his testimony about that time of death was crucial in condemning Steven Truscott.
Yet for all its importance, Penistan paid scant attention to the stomach in his autopsy report, devoting only two lines to it: “Content of approximately 1 pint of poorly masticated, only slightly digested food, including peas, onion, corn.” Even more surprising is how Penistan determined this list of contents.
According to Dr. Brooks, he and Penistan poured the contents into a jar and then studied it by “holding the jar up to the light to see what we could see.” It was not the most rigorous of scientific tests, but Brooks insisted it worked just fine.
“I must confess that I don’t think we did all that bad a job on what we were doing,” he says four decades later. “You either see things or you don’t.”
Penistan—with the help of an able Crown prosecutor—would easily convince jurors that, as he stood over the corpse of Lynne Harper in that autopsy room on Thursday evening and examined her stomach contents, he deduced her time of death purely on the basis of objective science. A quick visual examination supposedly was enough to give Penistan the confidence to pinpoint an eerily precise time of death, based largely on stomach contents: “This opinion,” he later wrote, “would place the time of death between 7:15 and 7:45 p.m. on 9th June, 1959.”
At trial, the prosecution would claim that if there was a turning point in the police investigation into Lynne’s murder, this was it. Only one person was known to be with Lynne in that time period: Steven Truscott. No single piece of evidence would be more instrumental in proving his guilt—at least in the eyes of the police, the prosecution and ultimately a jury. Penistan cited two other “observations and assumptions” to support his theory about the time of death: “the extent of decomposition” of Lynne’s body and the fact that rigor mortis “had almost passed off.” But it was his analysis of stomach contents that was paramount.
While many people imagine pathologists are the timekeepers of crime fighting, pathology is, in fact, the science of why someone dies (the medical causes) and how (murder, suicide or accident)—but not when. A good pathologist can tell you the circumstances of death; the time can sometimes be inferred but rarely pinpointed. In the best of conditions, pathologists can only provide ballpark figures. That’s because there are too many variables from one person to the next and in the environment where a death occurs.
Those variables especially come into play with stomach contents. From everyday experience, people know that two individuals can eat an identical meal but digest it at quite different speeds. The same person can eat identical food on different days and take more or less time to digest it. Moods, such as fear and anger, play a big
role in how the stomach reacts.
Yet despite all these variables, Dr. John Penistan managed to pinpoint a time of death with astonishing precision. It strains credulity to believe that a doctor, holding a jar of stomach contents to a light bulb, would pick—almost to the minute—the narrow window that matched the only possible time Steven Truscott would have had to kill Lynne.
Science is good, but it is not magic. The documentary evidence would later indicate that Dr. Penistan, in coming to such impressively exact conclusions about the time of death, might very well have been overeager to help the police and prosecution.
7
WANTED—“DEAD OR ALIVE”
“$10,000—DEAD OR ALIVE”
The banner headline screamed the reward offer across the front page of the Toronto Telegram on Friday morning, June 12. Less than twenty-four hours after Lynne Harper’s body was found, Ontario Attorney General Kelso Roberts put up a $10,000 bounty for her killer, “dead or alive.” It was the highest reward in the province’s history.
The province’s top lawman said he expected the money would “help solve this revolting and savage crime as soon as possible,” and he made it clear he did not much care if the bounty was paid out for a conviction or a corpse. “If the guilty person was killed and it was proven he was the murderer, the reward would still be given,” one paper reported. Another spelled it out more clearly: “Most rewards state the money will be paid for information leading to the arrest and conviction, but today’s announcement was a radical departure.”
Putting a price on the head of a killer was about the only radical thing the ruling government of Ontario could be accused of. In a conservative country coming to the end of a conservative decade, the government of Premier Leslie Frost was as staid and stalwart as they came. In many ways, Steven and Lynne grew up not just in a different time, but also in a very different country from the Canada of today. In the 1950s, social issues, like television, were black and white. There was little of the fiery passion that coloured the turmoil of the sixties or the shades of grey that have characterized debates in the more cynical decades since. It was Good versus Evil; justice always triumphed and justice was never wrong. Just ask Sergeant Joe Friday in Dragnet or Sheriff Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke.
The sexual overtones of Lynne’s murder made it all the more shocking. This was, after all, a time when parents on TV still slept in separate beds, when the panicky headline on the cover of the first issue of Maclean’s magazine for 1959 asked: “Going Steady: Is It Ruining Our Teenagers?”
So it was little surprise, then, that the Ontario government’s bold announcement of a hunt for Harper’s killer “dead or alive” should touch a popular chord. In an editorial entitled “An Atrocity,” the Toronto Telegram noted that the “unprecedented size of the reward the Ontario government has offered and its urgent call for the capture of the killer ‘dead or alive’ reflects the Province’s shock at the murder of Lynne Harper.”
The paper concluded ominously: “That a child should lose her life in this way is a crime that is too appalling for any consideration of charity toward the criminal.” As public outrage mounted, so did the unprecedented pressure on the police to solve this “most horrible of crimes.”
Most of the students and even the staff at Lynne’s school were understandably in shock over the news. Grade Four teacher Edith Beacom remembers that with police coming and going, everyone was upset and saddened by the “serious business.” It was no less puzzling for the older students. Every Friday morning, Maitland Edgar encouraged the pupils in his combined grade Seven and Eight class to take fifteen minutes out of their school day to discuss current events. Friday, June 12, was no exception, and there was just one topic the children wanted to talk about: Lynne’s murder.
“What are the different degrees of murder?” one student asked. Edgar explained that premeditated murder in the first degree was the most serious. Throughout the discussion, Edgar recalls, Steve was as relaxed and interested as the other students.
Steve, however, did not have much time to ponder an academic discussion of murder. He was called out of class to meet Harold Graham, the new OPP inspector in town.
At 10:45 a.m., the two met for the first time: the boy who had given Lynne a bike ride and the policeman who would become his accuser. It was Steve’s sixth encounter with the police in three days. Dan Truscott accompanied his son.
“I would like a detailed account,” Graham told Steve’s father, “because Steven was the last person known to have seen Lynne Harper.”
Graham made it sound as if Steve was still only a witness. But later at trial, the judge ruled the police knew very well when they were taking Steve’s statement that “he was the person who was going to be charged” and consequently a “warning ought to have been given.” “There was no equality between this fourteen-year-old boy and a group of police officers who were examining him,” the judge stated bluntly, and, consequently, the statement in no way was voluntary.
The OPP did not have their own stenographer; the air force supplied a woman named Dorene Jervis. Her transcription included only two of the questions asked by the police. Truscott’s purported answers to the rest of the unrecorded queries were strung together as a continuous statement. At trial, Graham was later asked about this curious omission:
“Why didn’t you have her [Jervis] take down what you said to him?”
“In the interests of time, and because he was a witness at the time and not a suspect,” he replied.
“You think a shorthand writer can’t take down the notes as fast as they are talking?”
“Just depends on who it is.”
In any event, Jervis’s transcription contained some odd phrases. “I heard no story about an alligator any place,” Steve is quoted inexplicably at one point. In any event, her three-page, seventy-two-line transcription is the only record available of Steve’s alleged statement.
“My name is Steven Truscott. I am fourteen years old,” it began. “Lynne was in [the] same class. I have known her one or two years.” Steven then recounted his ride down to the highway, in much the same way he had over the previous two days. “I was going toward [the] river to see some of the boys who were going fishing. She asked if she could have a ride down to [the] highway.… I took her to the highway and let her off.… She just asked if she could get off and she got off and I went back to the bridge.” Steve said Lynne asked where he went fishing and if he knew the people who lived in the little white house up the highway.
The police and prosecution would later insist Steve had singled out a specific car model and a licence plate. In fact, Steve’s account of the car was strikingly similar to the vague description he first gave to Constable Hobbs on Wednesday morning. “It was a grey ′59 Chev, quite a bit of chrome … something like a Bel Air,” Steve told Graham. “It appeared to be a licence plate. Something yellow at [the] back. Yes, I am certain. I am sure about that.”
Because Graham did not have the questions recorded, it is impossible to say what Steve was certain about. From the transcript, it appears he was sure that there was “something yellow” at the back, not necessarily a plate. The police and prosecution would conveniently forget these nuances at trial.
For the first time, Steve gave the police an explanation for how he estimated the departure time for his bike ride with Lynne: “When I was up at the school, I looked at the clock and it was about twenty-five minutes after seven,” he reportedly told Graham. “There is a clock just inside the school. I let her off at the highway about 7:30.” (The clock Steven would have seen was through the large windows of the kindergarten classroom, a fact that would later prove significant.)
Steve also gave Graham new details about seeing Lynne depart. “She had her thumb out. A car swerved in off [the] edge of [the] road and pulled out,” his statement read. “She got in [the] front seat and the car pulled away going toward Seaforth.”
Steve told the OPP inspector that after returning from the highway he li
ngered at the bridge for “about five minutes” and that on his way back “I waved at Arnold George” at the river. (According to OPP Constable Hobbs, on Thursday Steve had said he had waved to Butch “on the way down with Lynne,” not on the way back.)
Graham asked Steve about his relationship with Lynne. “Are you interested in girls?” he asked.
“Some,” Steve answered.
“Were you ever out with her?”
“No,” Steve is recorded as saying. “There was no one interested in her.… None of them liked her too much. Sort of bossy in school.… She didn’t appeal to boys.”
Steve’s statement contained only a few errors of fact. Steve recounted some of the erroneous gossip he had heard in the previous days, telling the police that “quite a few kids around school” said an adult named Audrey Jackson had spotted Lynne on the base Tuesday evening around 8:30 p.m. (In fact, she spotted her about two hours earlier.)
Steve also said he saw four boys at the river: Butch, Dougie Oates, Gerry Durnin and Gary Gilks. Gary Gilks was not at the river that evening, but his brother Darrell was. The day before, Steve had told police specifically it was Darrell, not Gary, whom he saw by the river. In the typed version of Steve’s statement to Graham, the first names of the boys are in parentheses, possibly because the police added them later. It is conceivable Steve named Darrell, not Gary, and the OPP got the names confused. Steve, however, was definitely wrong about one of the boys, as Gerry Durnin was not at the swimming hole on Tuesday.
In any case, the police took this matter of the names as another sign of the boy’s fabrications: he was never at the river, so he guessed at some likely names and got two wrong. Steve says if he was in error, it was much more casual than calculated. “You say, ‘I think I saw so-and-so,’ and it was nothing special—until afterwards,” Steve says. “Then all of a sudden, it becomes more important, and the police say, ‘Well, you told us you saw this person.’ I said ‘I think.’ But according to them, ‘think’ is definite.”