Until You Are Dead (updated)

by Julian Sher

  Graham’s interview with Steven lasted twenty minutes. Graham ended his morning encounter with Steven by informing him the police would type his statement “and that he would be given an opportunity to examine the transcription.”

  That opportunity came less than nine hours later—and when it came Steve would be in police custody.

  The next few hours would be decisive in the building of the police case against him. What Harold Graham did on that Friday afternoon—whom he talked to, which child he chose to believe and not believe, how he decided to interpret the medical reports—would set in motion a chain of events that put Steven on death row and left the country forever debating that rush to judgment.

  “It was chaotic,” OPP Cpl. Hank Sayeau remembers. “A child murder is always taken more seriously than the average [murder]. Time is such an element—so much hinges on seeing everything and hoping you move on the right track.”

  Graham and his officers interviewed about a dozen other students that day besides Steven. In the police files, on a single sheet of paper from a notebook, are Graham’s handwritten accounts of the questioning of three of the most important—Dougie, Butch and Jocelyne. There is no date or time for the interviews, but they almost certainly took place that Friday afternoon.

  Dougie, the boy hunting for turtles, told the OPP inspector something Graham certainly would not have wanted to hear if he thought Steve was the murderer. Dougie said unequivocally that he saw Steve and Lynne cross the bridge: “Lynne was on [the] crossbar. I left [the] bridge about ten minutes after Steve and Lynne went north [toward the highway.]” Graham knew Dougie was the second important witness to come forward in as many days who verified Steve’s story. The day before, on Thursday, Gord Logan had made an equally clear statement that he also had spotted Steve cross the bridge with Lynne.

  To arrest Steve, Graham somehow had to convince himself that these “chums of the accused,” as he called them, were simply lying. It was a curious logic. For one thing, at eleven years old, Dougie was too young to be anything more than an aquaintance of Steve’s, hardly a close enough friend to be willing to lie and cover up a murder. For another, Graham must have relied on gut instinct to ferret out the liars among the children because at this early stage in the investigation, on Friday, June 12, he and his men had not yet made any effort to disprove the two crucial eyewitness accounts from Dougie and Gord. The police did not re-interview the boys or conduct visual tests to try to punch holes in their stories before arresting Steven.

  Graham was also selective in which “chums of the accused” he chose to believe, putting much more faith in Butch’s truth-telling abilities. The police interview with Butch on Friday, June 12, would later take on almost mythic proportions in the police chronicle of the case. Faced with the horror of a brutal slaying, Butch came clean. “Arnold George, Steve’s Indian chum … lied to the police … to protect Steven,” Graham wrote in one report on the case “but when the body was found, he told the truth.” It had all the makings of a great crime drama. A close buddy fibs to the cops on Thursday about seeing his pal by the river but fesses up by Friday when the evil murder is exposed. Except the drama did not match the reality.

  Graham’s notes, from the June 12 interview of Butch, read as follows: “Had supper, cut lawn, went to swimming hole about 7:00 p.m. Was there about fifteen minutes when Steve and Lynne biked north.”

  This interview on Friday—twenty-four hours after searchers discovered Lynne dead—was Butch’s big chance to spill the beans, and he did not. Graham’s own notes show that Butch had not changed the story that he had seen his friend go over the bridge with Lynne toward the highway. Contrary to the police myth about Steve’s pal cracking “when the body was found,” Butch did not change his tale until at least Monday, June 15—four days after the grisly details of Lynne’s death emerged.

  By late Friday afternoon, Graham was just a couple of hours away from having Steven Truscott picked up. The OPP inspector has always maintained that two decisive pieces of information tipped the scales against the boy: Jocelyne’s tale of a secret rendezvous with Steve in the bush and the analysis of the stomach contents from the attorney general’s laboratory. “It was not until I heard the evidence of Jocelyne Gaudet and the report from the laboratory that he became a strong suspect,” Graham later said.

  Graham claimed that in her talk with police on Friday, what Jocelyne gave him was motive. “That afternoon … she said that Steven had asked her to go into the bush with him to see some newborn calves and to tell no one,” the inspector wrote. In the eyes of the police, Steve was a lustful teenager on the prowl who had tried to lure one girl into a bush; apparently Lynne was just an unfortunate substitute.

  There were several confusing elements in the early renderings of Jocelyne’s tale. She gave at least three different statements to police in the twenty-four hours from Friday afternoon to Saturday, each more elaborate than the previous one. A week after she signed her official police statement, she added a fourth declaration.

  Her first story came in this quick, twenty-word note scribbled in Graham’s handwriting sometime on Friday: “Jocelyne Gaudette [sic]—said she was looking for Lynne—came out of bush, said she was where Lynne was found (later).”

  Significantly, there was no mention at all of Steve, let alone of a secret date with him. Jocelyne simply told the police she was at the bush in a quest to find her friend Lynne, not to meet a boy. This note, like so many other early police records that contradicted witness testimony on the stand, never saw the light of day at Steven’s trial.

  Jocelyne also had a longer chat with Const. Donald Trumbley. A statement in his handwriting begins “Jocelyne Gaudet, age 13. I am in grade 7.” It is undated but almost certainly Trumbley took it from Jocelyne on Friday afternoon. Her statement goes on for sixteen more short sentences.

  “I went up the county road at about 6:30 p.m. to meet Steve,” she said. Jocelyne told the police their meeting place was to be at the southern tip of Lawson’s bush closest to the school, on the right-hand side of the road—presumably in plain view of everyone who would be passing by. “Steve didn’t show up, so I walked along the county road with my bicycle,” she said. She travelled another nine hundred feet to the northern end of the bush and then turned down the laneway that led into the bush, passing the spot where Lynne’s body eventually would be found. “I didn’t see any bicycle or hear any noises but I had a funny feeling,” she said.

  Her “funny feeling” has the whiff of fantasy, as if the young girl was trying a little too hard to be helpful to police. Along the laneway, Jocelyne was more than three football-field lengths away from where she said she was supposed to have met Steve for their rendezvous. She would have no reason even to imagine Steve was in the bush at the location she found herself, much less sense any “funny feeling.” Perhaps it was another example of what her classmates described as Jocelyne’s “irritating” tendency “to let on she knew things.”

  What is striking is the complete absence in this account of any notion of a clandestine meeting with Steve. If Jocelyne did tell the police about a secret date before they arrested Steve, as Graham claimed, it did not show up in their notes. Only after Steve was in jail did Jocelyne’s tale include details about whispers in school, a visit to her home and hush-hush arrangements for an adventure in the woods, according to police notes.

  Equally puzzling is that Graham appeared to take Jocelyne’s story at face value. Before arresting Steven, the police took no statements from any adults who could corroborate—or challenge—her story.

  If Jocelyne gave the police a motive, what they still needed was opportunity. Graham had to get medical proof that Lynne must have died in the brief time she had been with Steve on that Tuesday night.

  At 12:12 p.m. on Friday, June 12, Cpl. Hank Sayeau arrived at the attorney general’s laboratory in Toronto, with a glass jar bearing seal number 2201. The jar held Lynne’s stomach contents. A biologist named John Funk did a quick analysis and h
anded over the jar to his medical director, Dr. Noble Sharpe, for more examination that afternoon.

  By the end of the afternoon, Sayeau telephoned the OPP in Goderich with the results. Graham would always maintain it was this oral report from the lab experts on the time of death that gave him the scientific proof he needed to pick up Steven that evening as the suspected murderer. “It was their opinion that the meal had been ingested not more than two hours prior to her death,” Graham said in a speech he gave in 1967.

  In the OPP’s sanitized version of events, the lab results were another turning point in the investigation. Graham called them his “first break” in the case. Only later would internal prosecution and medical documents reveal that the official written report from the laboratory—unlike the brief phone report Sayeau gave Graham—said nothing about a two-hour time limit on Lynne’s death.

  But for whatever reason, on Friday afternoon, June 11, Graham became convinced that Lynne died “not more than two hours” after eating supper at 5:45—in other words, during the time she was with Steven. “It began to shape up that Steven was a suspect,” Graham said.

  All that remained was to arrest the boy.

  8

  TRAPPED

  By Friday evening, a tumultuous week was coming to an end in Clinton. As much as they could, the children and adults in the PMQs around the air force station tried to follow life’s normal pursuits. Steve was looking forward to some fun and adventure over the weekend. Some fishing, some baseball, maybe another trip into the woods to work on the tree house. As the sun dipped in the horizon, Steve headed over to one of his favourite places around the base, Lawson’s farm—unaware that he was about to spend his last hour of liberty for the next ten years.

  It looked like rain, Bob Lawson thought as he rushed to finish the evening chores—a godsend after the crop-scorching heat all week. Lawson was eager to get a little haying done. “If you start the lawn mower, I can cut the grass,” suggested his mother, Alice Lawson.

  Bob was in the barn with the cows when he heard a loud, clanging racket. A fifteen-foot metal chain attached to the farm dog had somehow got tangled up in the mower and was slowly dragging the terrified mutt toward the sharp, spinning rotors. Lawson knew he was too far away to get to the mower in time. He caught sight of Steve rushing up the driveway to the farm. Fortunately, the mower stalled, and the chain stopped only a few feet before the dog would have had an unappetizing encounter with the rotors.

  Laughing, the boy began to untangle the chain from the lawn mower. Still, the Lawsons felt that Steve was more reserved than usual. “Steve seems a little quiet this evening,” Alice Lawson told her son. Perhaps Lynne’s death had shaken the boy, Bob thought. The day before, Steve had dropped by the barn and appeared to be bewildered by events: “I heard they found Lynne in the bush,” Lawson remembers Steve telling him. “How did she get there?”

  With the Lawsons’ dog safe from the marauding mower, Steve hopped on Lawson’s new Ferguson 35 tractor. “He loved being on that tractor,” Lawson recalls. “I would often let him ride on it. Steve was good with machines.” The lanky boy stood on the tractor’s floorboard, leaning against the fender, while the farmer rode across his land. When they got to the edge of the crops, Steve jumped off and perched himself on a large rock. For safety reasons, Lawson never let Steve stay on the tractor when he hooked it up to the harvester. As Lawson began haying, Steve rested on the rock, gazing out at the paths and trails where the children played hide-and-seek and picked berries. He saw the thick expanse of Lawson’s bush where only a few weeks earlier he and his friend Leslie had built a tree house.

  “He was sitting on that stone, but next time, when I turned the tractor around and came back, he was gone,” Lawson recalls. “I guessed he had walked back to the barn.”

  Bored, or perhaps anxious to get home for a bite to eat, Steve headed back down to the county road.

  He never made it home.

  At the Goderich OPP station, Inspector Harold Graham had made up his mind. Jocelyne’s story about a date and the phone call with the results from the laboratory analysis of Lynne’s stomach contents pointed the finger at the Truscott boy. “At ten minutes to seven, I had him picked up,” Graham said. He sent out Const. Donald Trumbley to bring in the boy—preferably without his parents’ knowledge. “I asked the constable to try and get him away from home.” The OPP cruiser pulled up to the gateway at the Lawson farm.

  “Would you get into the car and come with me? We want you to read over your statement,” Trumbley explained, referring to Steve’s interview with Graham that morning.

  “Yes,” said the teenager, without a moment’s hesitation. Looking back forty years later at that fateful moment, Steven explains that in 1959 young people had an abiding respect and trust in authority. “Back then when you’re fourteen years old, you looked up to the police. When they told you to get in the car, you got in the car,” he says. Steve never thought to question where Trumbley was taking him, much less to ask about his legal rights.

  Trumbley pulled into the Goderich police post with his teenage passenger and took the boy into a small room at the back of the station. Steve had no reason to believe he was doing anything but signing a witness statement. The police did not tell him he was no longer simply a witness, that he had instead become their chief suspect. They did not tell him this trip to the station was, to all intents and purposes, an arrest. Certainly, they wanted his signature—but not just on a statement. What the OPP wanted from Steven was a confession and they were going to do everything they could to get one, even if that meant bending a few rules to the breaking point.

  When Steven walked into that police station Friday, he was walking into what, in hindsight, can only be described as a trap, carefully planned and well executed by Harold Graham. Twenty minutes before dispatching Trumbley to pick up Steve, Graham had another officer, Sgt. Charles Anderson, obtain a search warrant for the Truscott home. Anderson then contacted Dr. David Hall Brooks, the chief medical officer on the base “and advised him of what we had planned to do.”

  Graham had a very specific objective in mind—get Steven alone, without any interference from his parents. Years later, at a police convention, he boasted about his well-planned strategy: “I was well aware of the judge’s guidelines that it is preferable to have a parent or social worker present when you are questioning a juvenile,” he explained to his appreciative audience. “I was also well aware that it would be an exercise in futility, so I chose to disregard those guides.”

  Graham’s was a bold admission of how far the police were willing to go to get their man, even if their man happened to be a fourteen-year-old boy. “Judges can always set their own guides for prisoners, they are not laws,” Graham said defiantly. And he was right. The Juvenile Delinquents Act in 1959 did not require the police to ensure a youth’s parent or guardian was present; today it is the law. Still, while Graham had not strictly violated any laws, he seemed to forget that the police had not told Steven he was a “prisoner” or even officially a suspect. At the boy’s murder trial three months later, the judge was unsparing in his criticism of the police’s tactics that night: “The ordinary safeguard should have been taken and he should have been warned. He was undoubtedly under arrest. It was clear he would never have been allowed to go.”

  “Will you read this aloud,” the inspector told the boy as he handed him a typed statement based on Steve’s interview earlier that day. Steve read the text out loud and, according to Graham’s account, asked for only one minor change. He said his return to the school was not at 8:00 p.m., but closer to 7:50 or 7:55 p.m. “That was crossed out … and changed, and he said then it was correct, and I asked him to sign it and he did,” Graham said. Steven signed the statement at eight o’clock, ten minutes after their meeting began.

  The inspector from the Criminal Investigations Bureau, a veteran of a decade’s worth of homicide cases, now had the boy exactly where he wanted him: alone in a room in a police station. Ever
y police officer hopes they can crack a murder case with a confession, thereby saving the courts time and trouble. For the next hour and a half, Graham, assisted by Constable Trumbley, probed and prodded Steven.

  Graham began by questioning his story of seeing a car at the highway. “I told him it was difficult to understand that because the distance was so great and I asked him if he was sure,” the inspector later recounted.

  Yes, Steve said, he was sure.

  Was he sure that he had seen Lynne with her thumb out at the highway?

  Well, the boy said, he had not actually seen her thumb; he had seen her arm out.

  Graham noticed a crescent-shaped scratch on Steven’s left arm. How did he injure himself, the police officer asked.

  On a tractor in Lawson’s barn, came the reply.

  Then Graham moved to the guts of the interrogation: “Have you ever taken a girl into Lawson’s bush?” he asked.

  “No,” Steve said.

  “Have you ever made a date to take a girl into Lawson’s bush?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever spoken to Jocelyne Gaudet about going into Lawson’s bush?”

  “No.”

  “Were you at Jocelyne Gaudet’s house on Tuesday night?”

  “No, I haven’t been to Jocelyne Gaudet’s home since last winter,” Steve answered, according to Graham’s account.

  “Have you ever phoned Jocelyne Gaudet?”

  “No, I have never telephoned Jocelyne Gaudet.” Steve said. “The only conversation I have had with her is in school.” It was a strange question. Had Jocelyne told the police about a phone call to arrange the alleged secret date? If so, the police apparently considered it an unreliable claim, for the police would never again mention a phone call to Jocelyne.